UK is under a parliamentary system; effectively, the only vote is to select your local representative. Everything else (who wins the Government, what issues get passed, etc.) is derived from this single point.
The accountability issue swings both ways. If a sheriff's office has problems with certain enforcement issues (i.e. profiling, not taking domestic violence allegations seriously, etc.) and the electorate is not immediately interested in these issues, there's no other mechanism to encourage behavior changes - elections are fundamentally a binary state for an individual candidate. There's no nuance to the accountability, and the voting public is often ill informed on relevant policy problems and issues - there's been plenty of coverage about poor fiscal accountability, selective enforcement, etc. that illustrate the dangers with solely relying on the electorate as a quality control mechanism.
At the end of the day, this comes down to where you personally fall on the federalization debate.
It's a pretty hot take to suggest that counter-cyclical spending isn't a very strong response to recessions - this is classical economics in a nutshell. Just because the US is too politically paralyzed to spend at the same level doesn't mean that it's an ineffectual tool.
Only in a perfectly competitive market, which, as you'll note, is the problem here - there's too much distortion around student fees (demand) to truly call the college market perfectly competitive.
If you assume rideshare demand remains consistent and that riders just switch over to Lyft (which doesn't seem entirely unreasonable), then presumably the overall supply/demand curve remains fairly consistent. Obviously some fuzzing around the edges will remain, but otherwise the broader conclusion holds?
that's entirely a question of scale - I can imagine that it'll be trivial to scale 'online' voting fraud if you have credential access, whereas doing it in person naturally limits the total number of times you can do it.
Consider an alternative angle - Companies, as rational actors, will eliminate automatable positions. Unless you're suggesting some sort of deliberate intervention to save these jobs, they're gone.
The next question is how do we assist those displaced by automation. There are multiple proposals including UBI and its ilk, but the most palatable bipartisan idea is to find them new jobs.
The idea of finding 'better' jobs with more agency, etc. is not immensely new - it draws from organization research on employee fulfillment and productivity.
Overall, no one is saying that any specifically displaced individual needs to take up <new job> in some sort of imagined totalitarian state - they're perfectly free to choose a new job from the market. The only question is one of skills and motivation.
Let's break this down a bit in more detail. The most common claim against the 77/79 ratio can be summarized as 'if you control for occupation, seniority (interpreted as "time-in-seat" as opposed to some sort of rank gradation) and preference for reasonable hours/schedule, you effectively reduce the 20%+ gender gap to around 7%.'
There are many reasons for this, and the argument is that not all of this can be attributed to direct 'sexist' (bad) practices, but are instead the result of preferences that are more common to women than men (while this is indeed gendered, the accusation of 'discrimination' is more complex - if you somehow convinced all women to share identical preferences to men, these 'preference' differences would effectively disappear)
A reasonable portion of H-1Bs are from students who graduated domestically (within the US) and found jobs in the US. Their degrees might not have the brand name recognition back home, they might not want to go home for various reasons, etc.
I feel like there's a misreading of the premise of the H-1B program here. If you'll refer to the USCIS website here [0], you'll note that the main prerequisites for the H-1B visa are
a) Educated or Licensed
b) Paid on par to American workers
c) Not impacting the pay of American workers
Upon review, it's apparent that the 'visa for people with skills that the American market doesn't have' argument doesn't fly - the requirements only establish that the visa holder be competitive with Americans. You might be thinking of the 'extraordinary ability' category of visas, which are O-series (instead of the H-series of H-1Bs).
I'm also unclear on your criticism of consultancies - there's no criteria for the job to be STEM in nature, and I don't think it's an extraordinary view to hold that other fields may be technical/specialized. Fundamentally, very very few employees are irreplaceable (for good reason) by someone with sufficient motivation/training.
In defense of H-1 visa holders (especially fresh grads), I'd argue that if you outcompete locals (on even salary conditions) through fairly rigorous recruitment processes, overcoming the lack of local network and cultural/language barriers and survive the lottery cull, then the position has been earned. [1].
Finally, your argument about 'having the time to gauge applications' is absurd. Either the process was working before, or it wasn't. If the program was compliant prior, then extending processing times is fundamentally a violation of due process, and effectively re-interpreting existing law.
The argument is that rent control is a poor bandaid over the long-term problem of housing supply, because it reduces political pressure to build more houses. It's not the same longterm fix that changing zoning laws would be, for example.
In the immediate instance, no, WeWork does not recognize anything. But in its first month, rental income should exceed the month's depreciation for the same real estate. The fact that income has not kept up implies that occupancy is low. WeWork is fundamentally a real estate/leasing company, not a tech company.
Generally, the Arcade game maker underwrites (or participates somehow) in the jackpot for their own machines, so they'd be able to track if affiliated individuals (employees, ex-employees, etc.) were winners. Obviously, it gets more complex if the offending engineer were to tell someone else the secret, etc., but that's already getting into organized crime territory.
While insurance is a different industry, the fact that tech companies continue to make decisions that play badly in the media spotlight suggests that 'bad headlines' isn't a huge deterrent in today's world.
Good political move, but that doesn't preclude it from being a smart move - as far as I've read so far, the conditions (weather, airline quality, etc) make this completely unexpected. Is implausible to believe that the FAA may be leaned on to suppress news that may damage Boeing, especially with the current administration, and the current slate of news coming out of Canada's shenanigans with the SNC?
> it's a tempting argument to not fix that which isn't broken, but ultimately a weak one.
I'm going to have to call shenanigans on this one. Sure, it's an alright attitude to have towards non-essential parts of your life/consumer experience, but imagine if mission critical stuff (like, flight consoles) changed on a regular basis - that would be completely insane.
If you commit a crime, and only get caught years later after reforming yourself (off the profits of your crime?), can you truly be a victim? Now, I understand that the analogy does not map precisely, but at what point in this equation did fb face consequences for its initial misdeeds?
Do you mean the Keynesianism that is commonly applied, also known as 'let's increase spending on random shit that will benefit by stakeholders, but will have minimal impact on the overall health of the economy?'. Keynesians haven't been in a position to dictate fiscal policy (as opposed to monetary policy, aka the Fed) for at least the past 3 decades.
Just because you've contributed an infinitesimal amount to a road doesn't necessarily mean you have a right to it, just as how I don't have a right to drive a tank around because my taxes are funding it. Taxes are not the 1:1 transactional relationship that it's commonly conceptualized as - it's part of the whole social contract, and different groups benefit differently.
I think you're mischaracterizing the costs a little. It's certainly true that Company level profit margin is not in the 80s, but operating income is certainly fairly high. The profits come from compensating the Company for the risk that they have taken, and not necessarily straight for costs. There's certainly room to argue that the pharmas are capturing a too-large slice of the pie, and I personally welcome the debate.
I believe the argument being made is more on the user's magnitude of engagement. Users interact with facebook on a very close level - there's a level of emotional intimacy that users have with facebook the platform that they don't have with the corner bakery. To draw an analogy, imagine if a bank suddenly decided to run an experiment to tell people that they had lost all their money and that there was no recourse. Wouldn't that be a pretty fucked up thing for a bank to do?
You don't have to establish a monopoly though - your simple presence in the market (relatively low cost since it's not like drivers are loyal to a particular brand) will give you a cut of the profits that would otherwise go to Uber - why forfeit an entire market when you can participate at low cost?
I don't necessarily agree with your 'simple logic' - there's plenty of stuff that can be done (but not perhaps outright regulated) that can reduce the incidence of fires around electrical equipment. (i.e. maintaining clearances around transmission stations, etc.) That involves probably more cost that the /free market/ would enjoy bearing. This measure can be framed as an attempt to force the externality (i.e. the damages caused by fires) onto the cause - Why shouldn't individual power consumers of California bear additional cost to prevent/reduce the incidence of fires? Your position is one of deliberate helplessness, and entirely assumes that companies should only toe the regulatory line and go no further.
Just go another level deeper - this was tax money that would otherwise go towards city programs that would disproportionately benefit the poor. The end result is a transfer from the poor to Amazon's shareholders (and possibly may result in a net benefit to NYC)
Well, I'm sure that intent has an impact, but the question is one of magnitude. You can't exactly solve extremism by telling them all to stop being mad at the US because the missile that killed their families 'was just a miss whoops my bad'
I take issue with your stance that the burden of evidence lies with the 'let's not shoot missiles crowd', though. While we don't have specific evidence on the specific efficacy of individual drone strikes, I'd argue that the intelligence community's track record (or what's been declassified or widely known) does not inspire the greatest confidence in their ability to make nuanced, apolitical judgment.
I take issue with your seemingly glib dismissal of the transfer of risk to rideshare drivers - Ambulances exist for medical transport, and frankly should be used in most cases, especially in a medical transport setting. The core problem lies with the healthcare system and the pricing of ambulance services, and not necessarily with the decision to use an ambulance per se.
I'd be surprised if you could find enough A players to staff the model at the present payscale. Sure, you can argue that a more successful entity can generate more profits, but there's diminishing returns to that effect. Furthermore, there's going to be a lot of egos in the room if all you have are A players, and that's not necessarily sustainable in the long term, either.