I disagree. It's certainly not the case for me - Instagram has become an app I open out of habit or because I got a notification, remember that it sucks now, and close again. But more generally, this is two things: the tail wagging the dog, because Instagram pushes reels hard you get more engagement there as a creator which pushes people into them; and the fact that low quality engagement is a poor proxy for what people actually want. Instagram can show me videos of women in sheer tops all day, and if I am bored it is mindlessly engaging, but it is never what I want. What I want is to skim over 50 posts from people I care about, and maybe interact with one or two of them. I think am far from alone in what I want, but Instagram does not want what I want, because it is harder to keep me looking once I get to the end of my feed, and harder to put ads in front of me I don't scroll past almost immediately.
This is pervasive in games with simulated markets and economies as well - both the built-in somewhat regressive assumptions as well the tendency to treat them as examples of understanding the real world.
The problem with this is that economic models are (to be kind) incomplete, so playing a game like this is essentially "how to make an economy work if economies worked how we think they work."
This is a strawman argument. The point of regulation is not to prevent all harm, it is to prevent the worst harms. I see no evidence that allowing the possibility of the worst outcomes is necessary to achieve the best outcomes.
For every foodborne illness prevented or permanent disability from an on the job accident avoided, the community saves a couple million dollars.
If you want less friction, then fund the regulators. We slash city budgets and then wonder why health departments rely on fees and inspectors take weeks.
The fact that similar legislation is widespread is not a defense. These laws create monopolies, with the "justification" that not doing so would cause too much competition and thus high prices...
The mechanism is that guns are harder to get, both legally and illegally, if there are strong controls on their purchase and use. Yes, a mass shooter would ignore the legal implications of getting a gun, but they cannot ignore the fact that there are fewer guns to get.
A world in which an Australian regulatory agency should protect Australian consumers by levying a fine which makes it financially untenable to operate in Australia with these deceptive practices.
This is one decent and uncontroversial point: that the system of student loans is not working well, followed by a lot of very bad arguments. Take this, for example;
“Monocultures suck. It's hard to know how many of the stories about ridiculous stuff happening on campuses to believe, but even if a small fraction of them are true, these are clearly no longer places hyperfocused on learning.”
It starts with negative priming. Though he has not and will not do any work to actually suggest colleges are monocultures, he throws it out there. Then he invites you to think of negative stories, and suggests some of them are probably true. In a complete non-sequitur (it must be, because he has not actually defined a premise, just asked his audience to imagine one), he provides a conclusion. But even there, to deflect criticism he moves the goalposts, implying that to be successful, colleges should be “hyperfocused.”
As far as I can see in the definitions, Household Final Consumption does not include public expenditure on behalf of individuals (that would be "Actual Household Final Consumption). US healthcare expenditure per capita is a bit over 10,000, almost exactly accounting for the gap seen in that list between the US and the richer European countries.
I make a lot of pastry, actually. I've even gone to school for it, though I don't do it professionally now. Variable moisture content of flour is a bigger variable. I can't think of a case where someone would be using sticks of butter and 100 grams is not close enough.
It differs a bit based on water content, but is close enough to 100 grams that you can treat it as 100 grams for anything you are likely to use butter for.
Three years ago, 0% of ICU beds were used for COVID patients. Now it is 37%. If ICU admission correlates with risk of death, and those beds would have been empty otherwise, or used for lower risk patients, a 40% increase in deaths seems reasonable. Certainly not a rigorous analysis, but it passes the smell test.
It's not as hard as it might seem. If you are actually held to the contract and you have underbid, you either have a plan to continue the fraud (using substandard materials or illegal labor to save costs) or you will be forced to take a loss or go out of business. If your investors, employees (or their union), or client(s) are unhappy with that, and there is any evidence of intentionally underbidding to be found (and there generally will be, these are decisions made by teams. There are emails. There are notes) those people will have incentive to find it.
I am not sure that is it reasonable or desirable (let alone possible) to treat "like" and "dislike" as signals of the quality of the video in some objective sense. It is certainly not what the everyday English usage of the words means.
It's a good point, and I did consider noting that at one time this was also true for the word christian. But I think we agree that this is not the case now.
There are several considerations that underpin my own thinking on social justice, but perhaps most relevant here is the concept of competing freedoms. It's easy to say that your right to swing your fist ends at my nose, but the debate over hate speech is much more controversial. In the case of personal threats or libel, we do have a history of recognizing that there are potentially competing freedoms at stake when it comes to certain kinds of speech. We can productively disagree on how to balance these freedoms - even at the extremes - but the caricature of wokeness pretends that I don't care about freedom of speech at all, while simultaneously dismissing that there may be competing freedoms worth considering. I personally believe that freedom of speech outweighs the freedom to live unencumbered by impersonal threats and libel - but I also acknowledge the damage that allows, and believe we should consider ways to minimize or compensate for it.
This applies to my example of sexual harassment, but in that case with what I will call "soft freedoms." That is to say, the hypothetical harasser does not have a right to work at that company, and the hypothetical victims do not have a right to not see a particular person. In a perfect world, a reformed harasser could return to work and get a second chance, and those they worked with could feel secure and safe. Given that we do not live in this perfect world, there is a choice in how to balance these soft freedoms. I think we might disagree on where to place this particular line, but probably not by very much. But the "anti-woke" would have you believe that I think that anyone who was accused of the slightest transgression should be fired.
There is a significant difference in that woke, like SJW, is for the most part a derogatory term. It would be as if the word "christian" was a word created by athiests specifically to refer to those who did not practice what they preached. Any discussion of the merits of "wokeness" is approaching the subject in a biased and unproductive way.
I would suggest that those you would describe as woke have, on average, just as much belief in the importance of mercy and grace as you do, and would likely believe they have more. The difference is who is seen as worthy of that grace and mercy. Is it grace to allow someone who has made unwanted sexual advances in the workplace a second chance? Or is it mercy to those who were victimized to remove the problem? Obviously this is a crude and simplified example, as examples often are, but it illustrates the point.
If you are confused as to how the statement "trans women are trans women" could be transphobic, it might help to imagine the question was "do you think black people are people" and the reply was "black people are black people." It's a true statement, and also one that many would call racist as a response to that question. You may not agree that these are equivalent, but that is the position you are arguing against, not morons who don't understand that there are differences.
I don't know where the talk about evil individuals came from - Uber's billing is not the result of a single "potentially evil" individual. Instead it is the result of the company culture and processes. This incident was not an intentional decision to charge drivers to work, but still a predictable outcome of the way they operate, and thus indistinguishable from actual malice from the perspective of the customer, both in terms of result and predictive value.