ewmiller

You wouldn’t call a room behind a locked door “obscured.” Even if it’s technically correct in the most stretched definition (which I’m not convinced of), either way it’s not how people actually use the word.

That's fascinating, thanks for the insight.

I work in fintech; we use a mix of Scala and Node. Scala for heavy data processing pipelines, Node for our client API, due to Node’s very fast cold start times in lambda.

There’s obviously much more nuance to our choices in the modern world than “live in a work-till-death society” or “live as primitives in the woods.”

For instance, many other developed nations take twice as much time off (or more) compared to American workers and seem to be doing just fine.

That’s why I don’t trust any of these new trendy banking apps; better to stick with established institutions IMO. Not that they’re great either but at least you won’t be in a situation like this, or at the very least they’ll have better customer support.

One party in the equation is a very powerful, profitable industry, the other is a huge but atomized group of people.

To assume that the only power dynamic at play is consumers making individual choices as fully rational, considerate actors is a vast oversimplification. Your equation isn’t more even, you’ve just flipped the one side, assuming that consumers have all the power and Hollywood is just haplessly following demand.

Yes, lowest common denominator viewers are the biggest purchasing group, and that’s the money that Hollywood is chasing. But that was true before. What changed isn’t the same consumers demanding more Avengers and less art films, but Hollywood setting their sights on the global audience, thus increasing the market for generic movies a hundred fold. Now the incentives are so skewed towards that group that the individual American consumer has next to zero power in influencing Hollywood’s direction with their dollars.

You also ignore the power of advertising and limited choice. Marketing can and does create an audience of consumers that didn’t exist before. It’s not about “here are my products, now you choose the best” it’s “here are my products and I will subtly convince you that you need them.” Consumers are not rational actors in a classical sense of going to a market for a specific need and picking the best product from a wide selection. Marketing is sufficiently advanced that the owner of a supply can also create demand for it.

Finally, Hollywood also controls the selection of choices. So as others have pointed out, people who would prefer smarter films have to forego movies altogether if they really want to “vote with their dollars.” So they might still choose a sub par movie if they like the theater and their friends want to go.

PS: I’m not advocating for a solution, so much as I am pointing out that there’s more to market forces than a simplistic libertarian view of the market can offer. I think in this case it’s inevitable and Hollywood movies are just gonna be like that now. But there’s more at play than “oh well, consumers chose it!”

> an agenda to smear the whole American nation, including its people, and including its current government

I think this speaks to a sensitivity on your part, to which you're overreacting. OP never alleged anything of the sort. You inferred that yourself.

The fact that I'm arguing is that the CIA committed coups against democratically elected leaders in many countries, which was ethically wrong, and you seem to agree with that. Great. Afghanistan and Cuba can be their own different examples for the sake of argument. I'm talking about the countries I listed above.

Moving on from that, I would argue that a nation-state has the ultimate authority to decide what is done with the natural resources it controls. If people fairly elect a government which decides to stop selling its resources to foreign companies and keep the resources for its own people, that trumps previous business agreements made by a different regime. Full stop.

But, for the sake of argument, let's say the above scenario is immoral. Is it so immoral that it deserves a coup and installation of a CIA-friendly dictator? I don't think anyone would argue that. The worst it merits is financial compensation to the affected company which can't extract resources anymore.

Finally, I'll elaborate and say that I don't believe any of those coups were entirely for resources - it was for resource access as well as the broader American geopolitical strategy at the time of toppling any regimes deemed too leftist in favor of right-wing dictators. Similar to the Iron Curtain of the Soviet Union; it was about installing puppet states who are loyal to you so that you can extend your sphere of influence as an empire. Neocolonialism at its finest. But the resources were always part of the picture too.

You don't need to get insurance through your employer anymore. That's what the ACA did. You can buy it on a marketplace and choose from dozens of plans, employed or not. It costs hundreds a month for an individual - thousands for families - for barebones insurance that covers almost nothing.

I'll restate my earlier point. The vast majority of Americans would suffer huge financial setbacks (to put it lightly) from one visit to the emergency room. Health insurance historically being tied to your employer isn't the problem, health insurance itself is the problem. It's a predatory industry which has successfully lobbied to make healthcare immensely lucrative for themselves and financially ruinous for average people.

It's interesting to me that you still think nationalized healthcare is "stupid" even though dozens of countries [1] have successfully implemented it. And yet you can look at the system we have here in the US, and say "oh it's just that it's tied to your employer. Otherwise it'd be fine." Healthcare isn't a commodity and shouldn't be marketed as such. The evidence that nationalized health systems can work well is everywhere. I also refused to see it for a while because of internalized fear of the "socialism" boogeyman, but turns out you can just do it and still have a capitalist market for other things. Go figure.

1. https://www.health.ny.gov/regulations/hcra/univ_hlth_care.ht...

I suppose what I'm saying is that in order for a country to have the resources the US has and the political motivation to pursue empire, they'd have to have been on the path to empire for the last 200 years and come from the same sociopolitical history that has fueled the United States. So it's pretty steep conjecture.

In other words, yes, if China had the resources of the US it would be a global empire... because in order to have the resources the US has, you need to be a global empire.

This is just a pet theory at this point, I'm not an actual historian.

You said a lot of words and strawman arguments without actually addressing any of the events in the article.

Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran, Jacobo Árbenz of Guatemala, several leaders of Laos, Juan Bosch of the Dominican Republic, Joao Goulart of Brazil, and Juan Torres of Bolivia were all democratically elected leaders who got overthrown by CIA-backed coups. And that's not even the complete list.

EDIT: and several of those coups happened immediately after the victim countries attempted to nationalize their natural resources, such as oil and minerals, such that US and British companies could not extract them anymore. After the coups, the right-wing dictators which were installed often allowed those companies back in to continue their extraction. These are just historic facts, and the US government has declassified and acknowledged much of it.

Read OP's article. It's well-cited. I shouldn't have to summarize it for you in the comments.

Not sure Iran is the best example - it is effectively surrounded by nations who want nothing more than to topple its leadership in favor of another West-friendly regime. Look at all the confirmed CIA activities listed in OP's article that have gone on in Iran. I chalk anything they do up to existential self-defense at this point.

Turkey isn't a great example either due to its NATO membership; their geopolitical motivations aren't that easy to pin down.

And yes, China acts very territorial towards Taiwan and the regional oceans. Taiwan and the surrounding ocean is the one exception to my statement; given the opportunity they'd take it without hesitation.

But for all those countries you listed, I really believe they would remain strong regional powers and not try to dominate the world the way the US does. Shocking as it may be to some of us in the British/American sphere of influence, most countries do not have imperial ambitions, and our opinions of places like China are heavily influenced by the military-industrial-media complex seeking to gin up resentment against foreign powers who don't bow to Western economic influence. (Much criticism of China is valid; that's beside this discussion specifically about imperialism).

1. Have you observed that almost every other developed, first-world nation on earth has some kind of nationalized health care service for its citizens, rather than leaving them to fend for themselves?

2. Have you considered that Adam Smith's anecdata from 200 years ago may not be accurate anymore?

Having made progress since 200 years ago is no excuse for piss-poor progress compared to where we could be.

I don't see how you can look at the many coups against democratically elected foreign leaders who sought to nationalize their countries' natural resources being anything other than protecting the interests of American/British companies who wanted those resources for themselves.

> That’s to say were China to emerge as the world power, I don’t think they would take pause and just let things be.

I've heard that a lot, but I actually wonder if that's true or if it's just American paranoia projected onto a different ascendant power.

> certain important things like housing, education, and healthcare have gotten far more expensive

This is what classist "but they have refrigerators" arguments love to obfuscate. Yes, a poorer person might still have a roof over their head and a smartphone. But they're spending a huge chunk of their income on rent. They want to move somewhere cheaper, but there are fewer opportunities, or their pay would go down too. They avoid seeking medical care because of how astronomically expensive it is, which makes future negative outcomes more likely (and more expensive). And seeking higher education amounts to taking on tens of thousands in debt from predatory lenders, with only a few college majors actually amounting to a good ROI.

It's not that poor people now have it worse than poor people in the 50's, it's that we shouldn't set the bar that fucking low in the richest country on earth. Our society could do so much more. That's what all these commenters are missing, willfully or otherwise.

And yet, if they or a family member have to visit the emergency room, they will likely be financially ruined.

I recently visited the ER for some chest pain which amounted to nothing and was charged $4,000 for it. Imagine what that would do to the 60% (!!) of Americans who can't come up with $500 for an emergency (see my top comment about stagnant wages, rising rent, and astronomical health care costs).

Comments like yours are easily and frequently used to distract from very real systemic problems that working class people still face. Access to cheaper smartphones doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, but food and housing security and the ability to get medical treatment without fear of going bankrupt sure do.

I'm not denying that. Of course average standards are better now than they were in the 1950's. But that argument is frequently used as a distraction to avoid talking about very achievable ways that we in America could improve living standards even further, or about very real ways in which lower class people are still suffering even though they might have an Xbox at home. All of the problems I mentioned in my above comment are still valid even though a section 8 apartment is better than a tin shed, yet you didn't address any of them. "There will always be a bottom of the economic ladder" is not an excuse for the wealthiest nation on earth to still allow people to be financially ruined for visiting the ER, for example.

Also, the myth of mobility is not an entirely separate topic, in that it's another distraction frequently employed to place problems on the individual and avoid talking about systemic changes that could take place to benefit people on a broader scale.

Yes, except there has been a concerted effort by monied interests in the upper strata of society to convince those below that organizing to demand better wages is useless at best or un-American at worst. It's an uphill battle.

> Startups were you get equity. Large companies where you can progress to high salaries if you are able to rise. Starting your own business and being competent at it. Working on commissions in an area where the commissions can be large -- true sales, or real estate. Being a professional, e.g. doctor, accountant, lawyer, has traditionally had high wages and you often run your own business.

This is all great if you have an aptitude for participation in the knowledge economy. That's not everyone. There used to be much more high-wage blue-collar work available to those who didn't fit that mold, but that has been ebbing away over time as America's manufacturing economy has been hollowed out.

Stronger unions and collective bargaining in the dwindling blue collar work that still exists is my only idea for how to improve things, but I'm not an expert.

My dad has a friend who owns a bus-sized camper/RV in addition to multiple cars and a beachfront home, but doesn't consider himself rich because he can't afford a large boat.

Point being, I think people are more aware of the unattained wealth above them than the levels they've already surpassed. (Myself included). The comment you replied to strikes me in the same way, though not nearly as blatant!

That's very true. Widespread, high quality public education is a must.

I can't help but read this as a kind of "let them eat cake" argument. Sure, some cars have electric starters now... how does that matter? Plenty of poor, working class people do not own cars. They're getting priced out of the cities they've lived in their whole lives. Working class wages have been stagnant for decades. Healthcare and education costs have risen much faster than inflation. A huge percentage of Americans are one medical emergency away from bankruptcy.

But yes, they do have access to cell phones and refrigerators, so good for them.

> valuing education means people succeed. So why didn't the parents succeed then?

Picture a first-generation immigrant family in America where the parents are older, don't speak English very well, and spend almost all their time working multiple jobs to pay bills and provide food and shelter for their kids. They then push their kids to do well in school because they know it's practically too late for themselves, but that their kids will be much better off than they were if they succeed in school.

Anecdotally, I knew several such families growing up.

Project Veritas is great at getting low-level scoops and inflating their importance for views. Almost like the mainstream news sources they transparently claim to be "above."

During the 2016 presidential race they promised to drop a big discovery about the Hillary campaign's corruption, and it literally turned out that it was something to do with canvassers dressed as ducks who got into some kind of minor altercation. It was the cringiest non-story of all time.

Does anyone have an archive link to the original "avoid news" blog post? Looks like it's a 404 now.

Thousands of years is a VERY optimistic estimate. In the meantime, that's quite a few human generations who will have to live in a relative wasteland (compared to peak biodiversity). And that's IF you're right and we can just industrialize ourselves out of this problem too. Consider me skeptical.

Well you can still empathize with the pain that other feeling, conscious creatures on Earth experience as a direct result of our actions. It's one thing if a meteor strikes the earth and you simply witness a mass extinction, it's another if you ARE the meteor.

We should care about biodiversity because it affects humans AND because it affects other living things which also have emotions and feel pain and will suffer as a result of what we've done. "Mother Earth" as a concept doesn't exist but other animals do. I think that's what people usually mean by that phrase.

Agreed. Why do all electric cars also need software updates and tons of bells and whistles? Just because I want electric doesn't mean I also want a touchscreen console etc.

What if you could work on things you love AND be compensated more fairly for it, through something like... collective bargaining?

There are other creative careers, like acting, that have union representation for exactly this reason. If there were no actors' union, film companies could abuse an endless supply of wide-eyed hopefuls trying to get famous. Collective bargaining makes sure they can earn a real wage while they work on their dream career.

In any case, I'd expect someone named "socialist coder" to be less willing to hand over their power as a worker to their company ;)

That is an excellent example.

Given a situation where labor supply is in excess, one could say "let them work for pennies because they love the craft, i.e. let the company pay them nothing because they're easily replaceable." Or one could say "they should unionize so they can bargain for better salaries, and still do what they love."

I suspect that since game devs still make above the national average for salaries, there's less incentive to unionize and demand wages that actually reflect the value they bring to those multi-billion dollar game publishers. It's like "well 50k-60k is good enough" even though the industry they work for is flush with cash and could easily compensate more if they were made to do so.

It's probably true that media companies tend to report more objectively on the affairs of other countries, because the country they're based in will exert more political influence over them.

The BBC is incredibly biased in terms of British affairs, or so I've heard, but it stands to reason that they'd be more willing to be objective about what's going on in America.