Bran_son

> If trade deals were passed like legislation in a parliament or Congress, with time in committee and lots of room for individual legislators to add their input

You're conflating transparency with the process. The deals could be negotiated same as now, but without the secrecy. Though I have to say I find the idea that transparency would increase corruption rather novel.

But they're not secret from industry trade groups, on either side of the negotiations. They're just secret from the public. That tells you everything.

I thought the users already paid to get that traffic delivered to them. And the tech firms also have to pay for their bandwidth. But I guess 'fair' has nothing to do with it.

UK net migration hits all-time record at 504,000 - https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63743259

That's enough to make the UK ~40% immigrant in one lifetime (80 years). Given how rare it is for countries to change so significantly so fast, it's fair to say that they already have very liberal immigration. The UK population rose from 63 million in 2011, to 68 million in 2023, despite a below-replacement fertility rate of 1.74 [1].

While it's true that most nations in Europe want lower immigration [2,3,4], such sentiments rarely translate into policy, similar to the US.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom

[2] Europeans overwhelmingly against immigration: Poll (2011) - https://www.euractiv.com/section/social-europe-jobs/news/eur...

[3] Europeans Most Negative Toward Immigration (2015) - https://news.gallup.com/poll/186209/europeans-negative-towar...

[4] Poll reveals great unease among Europeans about migration policy (2022) - https://www.brusselsreport.eu/2022/02/01/poll-reveals-great-...

> black-and-white thinking like this

What does "this" refer to? I am not advocating for zero inheritance tax (though it should be low) or zero income tax (current level seems to be in a reasonable range) or zero trust-busting/antitrust regulations (currently woefully underutilized). I assume this is the neo-feudal "king" you refer to - the corporate concentration of capital?

The only thing I objected to was entirely severing the chain of inheritance, to further cutting off parents from children (they are already mostly government educated). Objecting to one extreme proposition is not black and white thinking, unless one claims the opposite extreme is the only alternative.

Odd. You would think the most obvious move would be to imitate what China has done to be so successful.

I.e. make it illegal to rely on anyone but the government to provide for your children. I'm sure unlike the last few times it was tried, this time such centralization of control and severing of parent-child relations will work out wonderfully.

"Stealing" is an action that does not depend on who or what the perpetrator is.

I thought we were talking about relevancy of the style, not how difficult it is to make a living competing with Beethoven. If people still turn up in droves to perform and listen to Beethoven, that seems very "relevant" to me.

By this standard, Beethoven's 9th Symphony is also no longer "relevant".

The first to do something are remembered, those who come after must be significantly better or different to be recognized. If someone wants to see Caravaggio's style, they are likely to simply see Caravaggio - it's just name recognition, nothing to do with the "relevancy" of the style itself, whatever that means (Popularity? Or a self-fulfilling justification for whatever style the art world elite is pushing?)

And there are in fact newer artists with name recognition that painted in a representational style (but not the exact same style), e.g. Dali, Frazetta, Giger, Beksiński.

> Artists of the past were basically human rendering engines

A lie promulgated by modern art as justification for forcing out all prior art styles and aesthetics, but nothing could be further from the truth. Have you ever seen photos like the following?

https://www.wikiart.org/en/zdzislaw-beksinski/untitled-1976

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kajikazawa_in_Kai_Province

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Aivazovsky#/media/File:St...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Swing_(Fragonard)

https://www.bonhams.com/zh-cn/auction/27421/lot/413/kimura-b...

> I read lots of children’s books [..] virtually all of these books were written by people in the New York area.

And virtually all the movies we watch are made in Hollywood. I've always found it sad how impoverished this makes our media - having so much culture be produced by such a small group, we get a fairly narrow set of perspectives represented.

In Ireland, perhaps soon: Irish Citizens Could Soon Be Jailed for ‘Possessing Material Likely to Incite Violence or Hatred’ - https://www.foxnews.com/media/irish-citizens-jailed-possessi...

If you don't trust Fox enough, their article does link to the text of the bill, directly by the Irish government: https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/bills/bill/2022/105/

I'd link to a more trustworthy source, like the New York Times, but they are curiously silent on this bill.

Then they will reveal the real reason they oppose immigration: to reduce competition of their genetic in-group with other groups.

> we can change the reason for the statistical correlation: poverty.

Even within the same income bracket, the black homicide rate is an order of magnitude larger than the white one (and after 1975, the homicide rate of the richest blacks is larger than of the poorest whites):

https://randomcriticalanalysis.com/2015/11/16/racial-differe... , table 6

> And yet, there are no calls from them for a restriction on male immigration.

I'm pretty sure they call for restricting immigration of both sexes. Besides, if you believe violence is partly genetic, then a sex-based immigration restriction is a solution that lasts only one generation.

> You're assuming your family is entitled to keep forever everything that it happens to have received in its economic activities.

That would be ignoring income taxes and VAT. And I'm well aware of the failures of the free market. But they do not make inheritance illegitimate, as this article tries to frame it.

It's that framing that is most offensive, more than a reasonable (i.e. much much less than 25%) inheritance tax: that taxation is not a compromise between property rights and free trade on one hand, and the public good on the other, with both being desirable values that are sometimes in opposition, but that it is a punishment for unearned wealth. With the hate for the wealthy expanded far beyond the 1%, to everyone that bought a house before the housing market explosion.

I'm sure if the target of this hateful rhetoric was some other group, you'd quickly see its danger.

Fine, lose (1 - 0.75^4) = 68% of everything. Plus what is lost to inflation. Thank you for such meaningful criticism.

> A key reason there are such large soon-to-be-inherited sums is the uneven way boomers superbly benefited from price growth in the financial and housing markets.

While their point about financial markets is valid, framing rising house prices as a benefit is incredibly dishonest. Unless one owns multiple houses, one can only realize that "benefit" by going homeless.

In general I find framing the worsening unaffordability of housing/education/healthcare as a "benefit" to those that lived in better times distasteful. It is done to give legitimacy to taking those things away. Not only are things getting worse - if your family managed to protect themselves with sound financial planning, they'll be pulled down back into the crab bucket.

A 25% inheritance tax, i.e. lose everything your family worked for in just four generations. That's ignoring inflation. The logical conclusion of the idea that where you are born is just an "accident", and you have no legitimate link to your ancestors.

> emails of people who have clicked on an ad, or entered their email saying they support A, B, or C and give them permission to post a comment on their behalf

Even supposing they did it this way, and people gave their informed consent (fat chance, but for the sake of the hypothetical), that's still fraud. Unless every single comment had a "written and submitted on behalf of X by firm Y" disclaimer, it's still misrepresenting the comments as coming directly from individuals.

Regardless of what fine print unwary consumers agreed to, the agencies being deceived didn't agree to any of it.

It applies always. But I don't see contractual consent as the highest moral virtue.

The company consented to have its contracts limited by continuing to do business in the EU.

> Do your part and say no.

I'll do my part and vote to make it illegal, and not reduce myself to a mere consumer. Just like companies don't, and lobby for restrictive patent laws. What happens when one side limits itself to just (individual) consumer choices, while the other uses all political and organizational means available to gain an advantage? In other words, if two players play a game, and one of them limits themselves to only a small subset of moves, while the other uses all, which player will win?

> make that illegal.

Oh no, that's just consent between individuals. People collectively place terms you agree to by continuing to conduct business in that country. If you don't like it, take your business elsewhere - they can run their countries how they like. You're not saying organizing into companies is legitimate, but organizing into countries isn't, are you?

> You agreed to it, it doesn’t matter how one sided it was.

The libertarian philosophy in a nutshell. It doesn't matter if society turns into a corporate fiefdom, as long as contracts and property rights are upheld.

Given that it is near impossible to participate in modern society without patronizing contract-abusing corporations, we should ask ourselves:

Do we want to be ruled by laws, or by contracts?

> you entered a contract in which IKEA rented you a house

I love how any interaction with a company means we enter into a one-sided contract with them and own nothing, despite spending money. Don't like it? Just go live in a cave!

If you are making a purely legal argument, then you are on shaky ground, and there are limits to what is considered a valid contract (especially in the EU), and what terms it may contain, but you might persuade a judge.

If you are making a moral argument, it is indefensible.

> The US incarcerates more people than China, despite China having more than four times as many people

Homicide and incarceration rates per 100k people:

         homicide | incarceration | incarceration/homicide
  USA         6.4 |           505 |                     79
  China       0.5 |           119 |                    238
  Norway      0.6 |            55 |                     92

In other words, China incarcerates 3x as many people per homicide as the USA, and the USA homicide rate is 12.8x that of China. Homicide is used instead of/as a proxy for violent crime, because it is largely immune to bias by overpolicing or racism, which are the usual excuses to dismiss statistics. Source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...

A lot of conflating of "hitting on/asking out for a date or coffee" with ogling and stalking and not taking no for an answer. Also:

> I asked in a general thread once, “Okay, when is a good time for me to approach you to try to sell you my Cutco knives? ‘A special deal just for you! Spend $79.95 on our knife starter kit and get a free paring knife!’ Do you want me to approach you in the grocery store? At a gym? At a bar? No, anywhere would be hella annoying, so please leave you alone? You just want to live your life without strangers harassing you? There you go, there’s your answer on where you should be cold-approaching women.”

Basically never approach or talk to women, resign yourself to dying alone.

Unfortunately it does, and nobody likes them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Economic_and_Tra...

They're called investor-state dispute settlements, and they let corporations sue governments for loss of profit from things such as environmental protection and public health laws: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investor%E2%80%93state_dispute...