esja

He will lose in many respects, but even so, Moscow and St. Petersburg are not going to be radioactive craters. All evidence suggests he wants to be remembered as a Russian hero. I think he is intelligent enough to know that bringing nuclear destruction on Russia will not put him in that category. And it's not possible for him to act alone anyway. Worth noting that the two people in human history who have acted to stop a nuclear catastrophe were both Russian soldiers: Stanislav Petrov and Vasili Arkhipov.

With a very broad brush: The old experienced journalists (and editors, and sub-editors, and proofreaders, and fact-checkers) have been fired, and what remains are very young, cheap, inexperienced Twitter addicts, battling for your deteriorating attention against a constantly growing number of low-effort low-signal tabloid-style alternatives.

Exhibit 1,029,267 in "knowing a lot about ethics does not make you more ethical".

That may be true, or it may be propaganda.

But the fact-checkers don’t spend that required time, because it’s too expensive.

That's a different point than what I think the OP was making, and it's not entirely accurate either (except in a relative sense). For it to be completely correct, buying power would have to move identically with prices, and it does not. There have been many periods and places in history where the median income earner can afford a top 20% home (but may not choose to), and many other periods where the median income earner can only afford a bottom 20% home, and may instead choose to rent. What we've seen over the past decades is an acceleration of price ahead of buying power, pushing more people into renting, and leading to an accumulation of multiple properties in the hands of a smaller number of wealthier people (or institutions like Blackstone).

That's only really true if you are talking about specific houses and locations, while keeping everything else unchanged.

In general, houses are just as desirable as they were a few years ago when they were half the price. All that has materially changed is the supply and cost of credit.

The same thing works on the downside: broad price falls are not due to mass desirability changes. They are due to credit becoming harder to get and more expensive to repay on a monthly basis.

Finance 101: asset prices move inverse to the discount rate.

That’s not the case. All the central banks and the BIS understand and use this terminology when discussing the relationship of asset prices to demand, and it’s not at all specific to the USA or even a specific time period or specific market in the USA.

Also, the stimulus checks are a fiscal measure and have absolutely nothing to do with the wealth effect induced by loose monetary policy.

Philosophically it’s the exact same thing.

It is a mathematical certainty that deliberately raising asset prices gives much more money to the rich than to the general public (many of whom get nothing or indeed go backwards by taking on massive debt to keep up).

It’s no different to a massive tax break or any other way of giving wealthy people loads of money in the hope that some of it “trickles down”. And it fails to boost the real economy for the same reason - Bezos can only get so many haircuts, read so many books, eat so many meals.

They’ve said this publicly many, many times.

It’s quite incredible that the Left have not made the connection between the Fed openly aiming to increase wealth inequality (which is what this is) while also keeping a watchful eye out for any wage inflation (which is the only way the common person can keep up).

https://digitalcommons.trinity.edu/econ_faculty/31/

Search for Bernanke wealth effect or any variation you like. The BIS and other central banks talk about it openly as well.

The central banks are the biggest engines of wealth inequality in the world, and it’s all done in the open with barely any pushback.

It’s not a straw man at all. The Fed explicitly justifies QE and the rest of their monetary insanity on the basis of the “wealth effect”. They believe asset price rises will create a feeling of wealth which will generate additional spending. They know that these asset price prices disproportionately benefit a wealthy minority. This is trickle-down economics.

Speculation and money laundering. NFTs are perfect for the latter.

Meanwhile the ECB is expanding the bubble by leaving interest rates too low for too long.

True. I'm in Switzerland. I did find one with sunflower oil but haven't looked into it further.

Good tip, thanks!

I enjoy oat milk but wonder about the production process and how healthy it is long-term. For example the one I drink contains canola oil.

I have long believed the same. I also experience this when taking a long drive to a new destination - it seems to take longer to get there than it does to return home.

These days, anything you have ever done, however long ago, is sufficient grounds for the zealots.

Absolutely!

I often wonder whether the epistemology we are "born with" can actually be improved very much (in a general sense), or whether the best we can do is teach domain-specific techniques to override our defaults on those topics.

That's the main one I was thinking of - thanks!

It is the leading theory though, isn’t it? The alternative (zoonotic transfer with no lab involvement) still has far less evidence to support it.

This one factor explains so many of the niche issues that have exploded into the “mainstream”. Or more accurately: they’ve created an illusion of being mainstream.

This effect is so strong that some of the topics can barely be discussed any more without putting livelihoods and even personal safety at risk.

The stifling seems to be by design, or at the very least it's being considered acceptable collateral damage. Our modern censorship infrastructure does not see minority voices as legitimate.

That infrastructure may not even be capable (as evidenced here) of allowing for minority voices or any form of nuanced dissent, because it has been outsourced to a combination of incompetent "AI" (or dumb algorithms) as well as underpaid, understaffed, undertrained humans.

We are reaping the benefits of tech companies prioritisation of "scale" above all else.

That’s interesting - do you have some examples? I’ve seen quite a few similar memes, including some which explicitly support the scientific method, by contrasting it with what they claim to be politically motivated cherry-picking, “scientism”, etc.

That’s a great explanation.

The word being used nowadays is "equity", and it's everywhere. Almost every large institution is pushing this. It explicitly means equal outcomes, not equal opportunities.

Actually, yes. It's had almost 13 years to prove itself as a store of value, medium of exchange, and/or unit of account. It has failed to do that in any functioning economy because despite all the hype, it's remained worse than what we already have.

The fact that after all this time proponents are celebrating it being made legal tender in a tiny dysfunctional country is a very good sign of how the horizons have narrowed. After 13 years of the web no arguments about "potential" were even needed - the evidence was embedded in all our lives.

I was an early adopter and I don’t recall anyone saying the internet was bad for the environment, or that it couldn’t scale. Quite the opposite actually! And there was very little fraud or criminality - most new applications and ideas were genuinely innovative and immediately and obviously beneficial. Yea the financial hype took over in the late nineties but the fundamentals were always sound and the potential was obvious. And over time that potential grew, it didn’t shrink like it has for cryptocurrency.

“When the facts change, I change my mind - what do you do, sir?” — John Maynard Keynes

Most people have no idea just how massive the biological advantage is. Movies and popular culture have conditioned people to think that females can hold their own against men. Individuals can, in some contexts, where the statistical distribution overlaps. For example a mediocre middle aged man can be beaten in strength or speed sports by an athletic 20-something woman. But at the tails of the distribution, where the competitions occur, the advantages of the Y chromosome and male puberty are insurmountable.

Just look at these female world records compared to 13-15 year old high school boys: https://boysvswomen.com/#/world-record

Hubbard is also 43 years old. There is no precedent for any human female being competitive in this sport at this age, not even the most freakishly talented female weightlifters in history, not even the Soviet drug cheats.

Kuinini Manumua, the Tongan woman who would have been given this place if not for Hubbard, is 21 years old.

Feagaiga Stowers, who placed second behind Hubbard in the Pacific Games in her native Samoa in 2018, is 20 years old.

This problem cannot be solved or even properly discussed without properly acknowledging biological reality.

This disparity is why women fought so hard for sex-based separation in the first place. I cannot understand why we would roll back those protections by considering “gender” equivalent to sex. It can only hurt women.