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Japan is going pretty well last I checked. It's one of the few places that is successfully transitioning to a lower birth rate via population shrinkage rather than mass immigration, enabling them to maintain their own culture and people.

That's partially true but I think it's partially a recasting of right-wing thought into a left-wing mould.

The main driving factor is third-world immigration, and in particular the perception that mass immigration from the third world has had deleterious effects on the West, both economically and culturally.

What we're seeing right now is, I think, a preference cascade. For years people have been told that opposition to mass immigration is "racist" and have kept quiet about it, but now it's become more socially acceptable to talk about it.

Hell no, i don't think religions should be allowed to push their agenda on children. If we banned that we could eradicate religion within a generation.

If I had a teenage daughter I'm sure I'd have little control over what she read anyway.

Helping them make up their own minds about the issues? That's a pretty good service. But reprinting propaganda from one side only does not serve that purpose.

Are you sure you think that biased substance is better than nothing? Are you sure it's not just that you happen to agree with the bias in this case? If Teen Vogue were suddenly full of pro-Trump propaganda would you be so enthusiastic? Or would you think that was pretty weird?

Maybe it's too much to expect, but I rather think that any publication which doesn't have an overt and honest political bias ought to be politically neutral.

Anyone being considered for that job will have an impressive CV, obviously.

Semi-intentional maybe?

If you tried to start the Amish now it'd never last, it's too large a leap. But the Amish society evolved slowly over time much like others. If you went back to the early days then the Amish wouldn't be that different to others around them. It's just that there was a bit of a split and our societies have evolved in parallel since then under the influence of different values.

A good book on this theme is Matt Ridley's "The Evolution of Everything", which argues that social institutions are generally a lot more evolved and a lot less designed than people realise, and that we forget this at our peril.

Ten years isn't that long in a car's life though.

I dunno. Go anywhere in the world and look at how billionaires and Presidents get around. Do they catch buses or do they choose to get around in private, possibly chauffeured, vehicles?

(Let me just pre-empt someone's example of some billionaire somewhere who loves catching buses, I'm sure there's one out there somewhere.)

How long before facebook gets sued over a suicide it failed to prevent?

I'd say it matters a great deal what it is -- for instance if your cause is the pro-life movement or the expulsion of illegal aliens then you might have difficulties getting social approval in San Francisco.

I find it a hilarious instance of California insularity that the grandparent post thinks it "doesn't matter what it is" -- I'm guessing that he'd failed to consider the fact that non-left causes even exist.

Yes but that's a bus. Public transport is intrinsically a worse and less convenient experience than having a private driver.

Huge transfer of wealth from low-margin businesses to high-margin businesses.

Supermarkets, for instance, have margins of about 3%. With a revenue tax they'd be completely boned. They could raise their prices, of course. But the bigger supermarket chains would be better off buying out their own supply chain.

While Vox tends to lean pretty strongly anti-Trump I think this article is actually pretty good/neutral.

Right, because of all that obvious evidence of stuff that hasn't happened yet but might.

Well "liberal" in the sense it's used in US politics to mean "left wing" not actually liberal.

What if I'm both deaf and blind? Should Netflix have to cater to me through some kind of touch system?

If I'm blind and I go to an art gallery should there be an audio track to somehow explain what I'm not seeing?

What about a play? Are plays specifically exempted or is it just that nobody has bothered to sue a theatre for a lack of subtitling just yet?

What if I go to a fancy restaurant but have no sense of taste or smell? How will that restaurant compensate me for the experience I'm missing out on?

Or it shows it's a terrible law and total compliance with it results in terrible effects.

OK, but why should they? Prioritising one customer over another isn't good business sense, you're likely to lose the less loved customer.

Like most arguments about "isms" that do not have a single, rigorous definition accepted by everybody, debates about "capitalism" are pretty useless.

Karl Marx means one thing by the word, Ayn Rand means another, most other people in between have other ideas (or vague fuzzy feelings) about it, and yet everybody talks as if their own idea matches someone else's.

If only we had basic income so everybody could be paid to produce content like this.

But flying close to the sun is still really bad. It's just we've never got close enough to the sun for it to be a problem.

Pus, I hope.

By the time you've paid for a drone and someone to fly it in each city, you might as well just pay someone minimum wage to drive around photographing the lots from ground level. It'd probably work out cheaper.

Index funds seem to be emerging as a new religion on the comment sections of the internet. As religions go it's reasonably harmless, but the faith that some folks have in index funds vs sensibly diversified portfolios of decent self-selected stocks is disarming.

A reasonably chosen self-selected buy-and-hold portfolio will, on average, perform just about as well as an index fund. Psychologically it can be better or worse depending on your personality because you get/have to take responsibility for your profit/loss.

When I think of what a globalised world will look like, I think of Singapore Airport. People of all colours and creeds, living peacefully together, with absolutely no history or cultural memory beyond the present moment, and nothing to do except shop for globally marketed luxury brands and aspire towards the ownership of fancier globally marketed luxury brands. A giant, clean, lowest common denominator shopping mall. But the food court is good.

Not at all, it seems to me it's more like whether it's 1 or not 1. Expressing any skepticism gets you branded as a "skeptic" and then a "denier".

Of course what the "not 1" crowd tend to miss is that you don't need 100% certainty about something before you take action on it. If you're in a plane with a 50% chance of fire on board then the procedures are pretty much the same as a plane with a 100% chance of fire on board.

I wouldn't say so. You can still get perfectly alright freestanding houses in the non-ghetto parts of Berkeley for under a million.