394 karma · joined December 3, 2024
He is also surrounded by Silicon Valley money people who support this. Also tech workers who don't want neocon forever wars.
(I voted not for Trump but for Jill Stein, who agreed with some of Trump's positions on the Ukraine)
How did Victoria Nuland handing out cookies in Maidan Square as a mob overthrew the Ukraine's elected government contribute to peace?
There was the same amount of inequality a century ago in the US, so what happened at that time.
The answer is that it is common sense. A worker created that thing, imparting value onto it, and they deserve to be compensated. Common sense to most people.
Except, I guess this is unknown to most, but this is the exact opposite of the stated theoretical underpinnings of the capitalist economy we live in. Which is that the value of a good is determined by what people will pay for it, as subjective theory of value. The idea that someone worked to put value into a commodity and deserves compensation is actually the foundation of Marxism. Most arguments about why "piracy", to use their PR phrase, is supposed to be wrong are at the bottom of things, Marxist ones.
In Marshall Sahlins's Stone Age Economics, he studies work time of hunter gatherer tribes in Africa, Papua New Guinea, the Amazon etc. They often less work less than 40 hours a week. The hunter gatherer painting in caves in Chauvet seemed to have leisure time. Less hours than some fresh college grad pounding out C++ or C# for Electronic Arts any how.
The past 50 years has seen the hourly wage stay flat while the profit workers create is sucked up by the heirs.
Paying for four years if college to get a CS degree, then studying Leetcode, interning, working cheap as an associate/junior used to be seen as a good path, but obviously since late 2022 this has stagnated for most.
The seventh panzer division was within 29 km of Moscow in November, I am not sure how much or how strategic diverting resources from Moscow's defense could help Leningrad.
I talk with elderly people who do not have smartphones, and they tell me how difficult it is to navigate the modern world without them - doctor offices who want to send a text or MFA or the like. That we have a Google/Apple monopoly (or any nationwide Verizon/AT&T monopoly, with maybe one or two smaller players) is not much of a gotcha. I have more faith in the wisdom of the youth than your neoclassical theories of political economy.
Of course virtually everything is an oligopoly nowadays. UMG, Sony, Warner own at least 65% of global music. Media, accounting, advertising, breakfast cereals, go down the list - most commodities are sold by an oligopoly of four or less companies. A theory of political economy where somehow consumers are "choosing" this system is what is bankruptcy, not the understanding of the working youth who resent this.
Yes, but why are individual crimes easy to prosecute and corporate crimes not. These are not things that just popped into being like a thunderstorm. They are a part of an economic and social system that makes things in such way.
Also - around 50 is when earning power peaks. People in their 20s and 30s make less on average. So this median couple might eventually be able to afford a house, but they may be 50 when that happens.
$357000 house for a couple in their 30s. Both put $35k down - or have to pay PMI on top of principal, ~7% interest (if their credit is good!), taxes, home insurance, and in many places an HOA.
Also this is onerous even with two parents working full-time who may have to figure out how to manage raising 2.1 kids. Decades ago in the US, plenty of people were doing this on one income.
We see a celebration of this kind of thinking here. People want to be kept ignorant of the outside world and to keep others ignorant as well. It's a natural way to think, in the context of the road the US has been heading down for decades.
People here are excited the US will be censoring seditious content just like China does. It reminds me less of China and more of post-1905, pre-1914 Russia and the ministry of internal affairs Bureau of Censorship.
Not that it's the only factor, but I watch the US Congress sanctioning the UN and International Criminal Court for investigating the genocide in Gaza, and how many expressed their unhappiness about how Tiktok was a fissure in the US media bubble regarding that. Now Americans can be in their bubble a little longer, unaware of what the rest of the world thinks.
Turn on Israeli TV and they're showing the IDF raping prisoners in Sde Teiman. Degenerate behavior from the self-described Jewish state. The US taxpayer is paying the bills for all this bloodshed.
It is feasible, but industry wide strikes don't just happened. Companies can move software jobs overseas easier than factories, so international solidarity is important - something US labor has notoriously been poor at.
It can happen, but a lot of work and time and effort and defeats would happen first. It starts on a small scale, with an enormous amount of effort to build up. The momentum of the past 75 years have been things going in the other direction in the US.
Graham has a Hegelian, Panglossian view of things. In "woke" terms he is a very, very wealthy white cishet male born to an upper middle class physicist. As the relations of production and social order were created for and are controlled by his class he defends it.
To use an example - due to government mandates, the number of blacks attending Harvard Law School this year is less than half what it was last year. It does not fit into the narrative of a progressive, forward moving country which is meritocratic (although absurdly the legacies etc. taking their place is called a move to meritocracy). You can't say there is a national oppression of Africans in the US by the US, or that things are not meritocracy, so thinking starts getting very skewed. You can read this skewed thinking in Graham and others.
YC was started by a convicted felon, and it's due to his privileged birth that Graham was not convicted along with his co-founder. Meanwhile black men are killed by police for selling loose cigarettes or handing a clerk a counterfeit bill (something I unknowingly did once) to cheers from corporate media commentators and demagogues. What kind of country you live in even here in the imperial center is very much a question of what class you are in, as well as other things.
The working people and wretched of the earth are tired of being lectured to by the scions of diamond mines, Phillips Exeter graduates and the like. Even if they do know the worst case big O time for quicksort. History goes through twists and turns, and I welcome the challenges to their power we will be seeing this century.
Russia's economy was about the size of Brazil's at the time, and he said socialists would go into a holding action in Russia while the real socialist revolution happened to the west.
From the perspective of its inception, there was no failure in the Soviet Union, the failure was in the revolution in Germany.
Also interest did not come out of nowhere, we're paying interest on past military etc. spending, and have a deficit to overextend current military spending which we will be paying interest on.
So if we narrowly define "defense" spending and hand wave spending on veteran's benefits, interest on past military spending etc. it is shrunk to 14% of spending, but it is not 14% of spending.
I know this is how the government presents its spending numbers but it is done so to hide the true cost of the "defense" budget.
I guess suspects will be a list of people who have been paying into United Health Care insurance who thought they were covered, but got turned down, possibly for a terminal illness, for greater profits.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics/Japan-South-Korea-ties/U.S....