rjkennedy98

This article said something quite plain and obvious: Obama when in office despite his rhetoric was an enabler and propagandizer (willing and not) of expanding middle eastern conflict. That is just objectively true despite how painful that may be for Obama supporters. Trump was not. The only "conspiracy" here is the speculation that it is a reason for the intelligence community disliking him. If you think that is a "pizza place pedo conspiracy" than I don't know what to tell you, except that Glen Greenwald is one of the foremost experts on US Intelligence and has seen tens of thousands of documents that few people have seen.

> I'm not sure whether people understand just how big of a problem this is.

I'm usually the last to defend the construction of the US economy, but I think this is a bit of an overreaction. The stock market is not the economy. Big Tech bubbles are bad, but this isn't 2008 where people lost their houses because of financial engineering.

I think the bigger story (and issue) is just how few people are involved in and benefiting from Tech. These companies have massive market caps because they employ a tiny amount of people relative to how much money they make. For every one tech worker making high six figures there are a 50 people doing low-level healthcare service work. The vast majority of Americans own trivial amounts of stock, so they don't even benefit indirectly from the Tech bubble. All of this is just exacerbating the radical divergence of the haves and have-nots in our economy.

Taxes aren't the issue. It's how people are taxed. Income tax is just one way people are taxed and they aren't the ONLY type of tax on income (despite people using the word tax to mean income tax). We have social security tax, payroll tax, sales tax, capital gains tax, estate tax, property tax, and (maybe possibly a wealth tax in the future). And that's just individual taxes.

People say this all the time and it is false: California is a high tax state. No it isn't. It is a high Income tax state. It is an extremely low property tax state.

To put this in perspective, I live in Boston and my mom lives in California. She owns > $3 million dollars worth of property that she pays 1% tax on when she bought it (for around 500K total) so an effective property tax rate of .16%. In Texas she would be paying 3% property taxes which 1800% percent more. She also gets depreciation on the rental property that is marked up to when some it got transferred to her so she gets depreciation amortized over 18 years at ~2.5 million valuation. She also collects social security, a pension from a previous government job, and rental income. All unearned. Some of the rental income comes from Section 8 and other welfare programs (paid for by young workers). Let alone medicare which she will certainly get way more out than she ever put in.

I on the other hand, make ~190K a year. One year I got lucky with stocks/bitcoin. I've been paying in the 250K income tax bracket for 3/4 years. I've also paid >5% state income taxes every year on that money. I've paid double or triple my mom's taxes every year despite her making total earnings including investments way above me. ON top of that I have high payroll taxes, sales taxes, and no deductions. I live in a crappy apartment (near a bunch of frat houses) that costs 2K a month (a little less than my mom's mortgage on a house worth $1.7 million).

For young people that have no property and income we are in an awful position. All we hear is increase income taxes, but that is the only way we are moving up the socio-economic ladder. We have many types of inequality in the US, but the most extreme is age-related inequality. Older people have almost all the money in America. The largest generation now is the millennials and they hold <10% of US wealth. Millenials are now in their prime working years and income is the primary way they will acquire wealth as they hold almost none of the assets in this country.

Its no wonder that younger and middle class people are flocking to places like Texas where they can afford a house (because property taxes prevent money flooding into real estate), and can actually get ahead because of little to no state income taxes.

It isn’t in all states. Jessie Ventura changed the rules for that when he became governor of Minnesota.

Yeah, Apple doesn't pay taxes, they sure got the last laugh.

The fact that this extremely dismissive comment can be upvoted makes me despair about ever fixing a broken healthcare system. Covid may have killed 250K in the US, but negative interactions with the medical system kill 150K year at the minimum each and every year. https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/news/media/releases/study_su... This makes medical errors (which include negative effects of properly prescribed drugs) the 3rd leading cause of death in the US. More aggressive number such as Peter Gotzche's put that number even higher by including more nuanced side effects. He estimates that psychiatric drugs alone kill 500K people a year in the west. https://vimeo.com/178943789

Doctors as a general rule are very bad at listening to patients and our medical system simply does not track drug efficacy or side effects. You might be in a privilege situation to have never had to experience this, but there are millions of people who have.

We have to go all the way back to 2000 when Bush v Gore happened and Democrats claimed the election was stolen. Actually no, we just have to go back literally to just the last election when Hilary asked for recounts after conceding and then the Democrats used false claims of Russian interference to discredit the election. Heard of the Muller probe? This is a highly unorthodox election due to the high number of mail-in ballots. We have unprecedented censorship of social media by corporations that function as arms of a political party. Trump has a right under law to challenge it. Hillary asked for recounts very late in the process in just the last election with no evidence of corruption. It is not a coup to challenge under law an election process and refuse to concede till then. It’s happened literally multiple times in US history. You are not from the US but you may be surprised to learn the US is not a direct democracy but has a system in place called the electoral college which is there for managing electoral disputes.

> When I'm feeling sad, I tend to be unmotivated and liable to spend more time / all day on my phone.

Switch "on my phone" with "drinking alcohol" and that's literally how all alcoholics think.

That was not convincing at all and had some really glaring errors. Dr Shiva somehow confuses percent of overall voters with percent of Republicans to make it seem like there is a conspiracy going on. He says that margin for Trump should be a flat line so that if there 5% republican all-ballot voters it should be off by the same margin in Trump vote as a precinct with 80%. However if 20% of republicans flip that would mean 1% flipped vs 16% in those examples which is a line with a slope. Literally flipping those graphs would make them look the same for Biden as for Trump. All it shows is basically a kind of regression to the mean. Precincts with high republican or democratic all-ballot voting weren’t as republican or democratic as they seem. There could be many good reasons for that such as that voters that go against the way their communities vote tend to not be all-ballot voters.

Also, Dr. Shiva is not an independent voice. He ran in Massachusetts as a Republican.

> When your political agenda consists of annoying and offending "the other", they need to be present to take offense.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the other". "The other" is an actual concept signifying people who are somehow excluded from society. Rarely do people get banned for going after "the other". Most of these people get banned for going after mainstream journalists and politicians. Many don't get banned for going after anyone at all. And many get shadow banned without any notice or explanation.

Secondly, I don't think people on the right consider what people like Milo (for instance) do to be performative cruelty. They see it as exposing hypocrisy. They see it as exercising their god-given right to free speech.

They said the same thing about NSA surveillance before Snowden

well we can’t just build good public infrastructure - it also has to be a jobs program also /s

Its definitely going to be real world drivers who opt in at their own risk. My understanding is that Tesla views its large number of cars as a test ground to get to level 5 autonomy. It will slowly roll out more and more autonomous functionality and incrementally get there. You simply cannot solve the tail end of issues with test driving alone.

"Sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts" - William S Burroughs

This sounds very rational but it is mostly wrong.

Stock market like many other assets are driven mostly by credit cycles. Bubbles are created by natural credit cycles. The vast majority of money in the USA isn't hard cash, its credit. And low interest rates and other things can rapidly expand the amount of credit. We are in a period of extremely low interest rates and quantitative easing as well as deficit spending by the government.

Hedge funds like Ray Dalio's track credit and do it to a precision that is widely regard as even better than the federal reserve.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHe0bXAIuk0

To be fair, they aren't day traders. Day traders are people who trade on extremely short term basis (ie within the Day) often by doing chart analysis or breaking news. Her parents are buying good companies on hype during a bull market. It's definitely risky but its not the same as day trading or option trading for that matter. They are likely up quite a lot if they had the foresight to buy in when the market fell. They just need the foresight to get out before a correction happens. And its only 15-20% of their assets. Doesn't sound like the worst strategy to me.

Today, in California the percentage of white babies is ~27%. Today.

How on earth can you possibly say that in 2098 that "a huge percentage of white babies ... will be white"? Are there any demographic studies that say this? Where are you getting this info from? Rarely do projections even go that far.

Even US Census predictions have been off by huge margins within a few years because of unexpected declines in longevity, birth rates, ect.

First, I've honestly never hear of "Western" ethnicity, but I get what you are trying to say. Hispanics tend to self-identify as white, especially after a few generations.

I think the rest of your analysis is just wrong. First there was no "English" America. America from the start had European immigrants. New York was a Dutch colony. The early censuses used "white" and it always meant the same it means today.

This idea of a "progressing" whiteness is way way overblown to make people feel like the demographic changes we are facing are not unusual. But they are. Even if a huge percentage of hispanics start to self-identify as white - White people will still likely become a minority when they were around 90% of the population at the turn of the last century. Asians and Blacks are around ~20% of the population and Asians are the fastest growing ethnic group.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

> mostly-shared ethnic background

America at this point has little shared ethnic background. It’s largest states are minority-majority for example and that will be the case everywhere soon as minority babies are already the majority.

Kids get sent to mental hospitals for skipping class (happened to my brother in California) and many other kids. Pretty much the same as incarceration.

Please don’t laugh things away because you think they don’t happen.

That's just one data point. I could go on and on about how people make obviously bad decisions.

Take college major choice. Why do so many people get worthless degrees? They can do a simple google search to see how much people with X major make as salaries. It's not hidden or even a remote mystery. I won't get in to how people finance their education (not even reading the terms of their loans which are invariably awful).

As for career, I lived for a year in Minnesota and was amazed at how many people were incredibly underpaid (like 80K a year for a senior software engineer) and simply did not try to change jobs. Similarly many also refused to even consider moving to a costal city with better pay. I've also had co-workers that stuck around at obviously failing companies (and then were upset when their options were worthless).

And with investments, I've an aunt who inherited 50K about 20 years ago and just kept the money in the bank. Everyone knows you should be investing that money in the stock market or an appreciating asset, yet she is hardly unusual in just not investing the money. My mom invested it and made at least 4x on the money.

There are tons of these kinds of things - which are all simple and obvious, but literally most people don't do them for reasons that are just beyond me. I had a friend who was a semester away from graduating at UCSD and dropped out to take music lessons at community college. I tried to explain to him that was an awful decision, but he was just dead set on it. I've seen this stuff happen over and over.

Obviously, you can say that people don't have this kind literacy because they were poor, ignorant, ect. It doesn't change the fact that mostly getting by and moving up in the world is not rocket science or for special people, it's a matter of just making mostly reasonable decisions: choosing a reasonable career, saving money, showing up for work, taking good opportunities when given to you.

> Lots of hard workers out there.

I disagree with this. Never underestimate how many people just don't show up or try at all.

Look at average screen time for Americans as a data point. It's a ridiculous 12 hours a day of media usage. Just think about that. People are basically staring at their phones/tvs for 12 out of the 16 waking hours.

As I get older I realize more often than not most successful people are not special, but simply were normally people that didn't screw up badly, showed up to work every day, and took better opportunities that were available. They graduated college with reasonable degrees, they didn't stay in bad jobs, or in dead-end cities. Eventually if you do that you will get a break, land at a successful company, get a big promotion, ect.

SSRIs change personality. Its been decently well documented but not well publicized. https://www.health.com/mind-body/antidepressants-change-pers...

Part of it is that Google does a very good job making it FEEL like employees are making a lot of money, plus they have all these perks, which are mostly gimmicks.

The reality is that Google, Facebook, and Apple make at least 2x what they spend on software engineers. Good software engineers are enormously valuable. They are making products used by billions of people.

Yet, most of them are unable to afford a house! This is the most lucrative sector of the economy (like Banking was before, and Chemicals was before that), and the best grads go there. Adjusted they are still making less than bankers did in the 80s.

We know that Apple, Google, and the big monopolistic companies conspired to keep wages down. That kind of thing would never happen in a fair economy. I believe that if these companies were broken up - you would see wages go up rather than down, which may hurt Google stock, but would benefit the whole development community.

The problem with this is that it's only selectively applied. What happens when Pharma companies get caught lying in about effects of drugs? Are they going to be de-platformed? No, because they pay for ads and so they can spread lies all day.

Look at Study 329 by GSK which said that Paxil was effective in children (when in fact the data showed that it doesn't work and causes suicidal behavior in children https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Study_329 ). That published study was a lie and was published and used to put millions of children on drugs. Proven actual harm done to innocent kids.

Yet, GSK and other Pharma companies (which have all been caught doing the same thing) are still allowed to buy ads, to put things on TV, use social media (by the way often with fake grass roots organizations - Astroturfing - which also presumably is against social media policy).

I have no problem with the concept of it, but let's be real, this is not done in a fair way. This is done for specific political reasons. Look what is going on with Dr. Mercola as a real life case study of this.

> I've worked at other companies with the same policy because why would you shoot yourself in the foot?

If you are even slightly historically aware, US labor history is one of the most violent and adversarial in world history. We've had plenty of strikes in this country where the company literally murdered employees. Google itself has been convicted of suppressing engineering wages.

I honestly am so baffled that all these liberal "woke" people suddenly come to the defense of a company (who along with small oligarchy of peers) now own 90 percent of the internet. They think its fine that the company suppress internal and external free speech, especially on the most important items to them.

I find the whole thing just utterly baffling.

Whitey Ford pitched in the low 80s. Wow. That really puts things in perspective. I don't think you could make the major leagues pitching in the low 80s today. By comparison, the starting velocity for the Rays rotation is in 96 mph. Most bullpens now throw out pitcher after pitcher that can touch 95+. It really makes you wonder if most of the currently players would be considered all time greats if they played in the 50s.

This is wrong. My mom hired a professional and made under 4 percent a year during the biggest bull market in history. He got 1% and the mutual funds got 1% so fees were over half her gains. Professional financial advisors are mostly crooks. They sell fake expertise and often put your money in places they would never put it themselves.

Better advise is to read some books on personal finance and invest in low cost index funds.

What technological advancement? Is boring holes through a mountain somehow revolutionary technology?

We have that - its an investment Visa (EB-5).