scilro

For example, this is from article:

>People are regularly arrested for messages they send in supposedly “private” group chats. In 2017, two people were arrested in Nanjing for separate instances of making satirical comments referring the massacre in the city by the Japanese in 1937.5

But if you read the original source: http://www.sixthtone.com/news/1001901/more-nanjing-massacre-...

>“Nanjing is a pit,” Wang wrote. “We should let the Japanese come slaughter again.” Local police were alerted to the incident after screenshots of Wang’s messages were circulated on social media, and they arrested him two days later.

Clearly, a bit of a different story than what's implied in this article. I can easily see someone being questioned by police in almost any country if screenshots leaked where they joked about repeating a violent historical atrocity, like 9/11 for example.

It's not clear to me why folks tend to advance the notion that Chinese citizens are under constant 1984-style 24/7 surveillance by their government. That's not quite how it works over there, at least, if people who live and work there are to be trusted.

But the question of "where should I send _my_ kids" should be considered separately from "how should education in this country as a whole be structured."

You have to distinguish between the macro and micro. Another example is college. If my nephew asked me whether he should go to college, I'd say, definitely do that, if you can afford it. But on a macro level, college in the US has kind of become scam and we have to do something about it.

>After declining in inflation-adjusted terms from 1998 to 2007, minimum wages rose almost 11% in real terms between 2007 and 2016, Abraham and Kearney estimated. Firms may have outsourced jobs or spent more on automation to offset the higher costs of low-skilled labor.

Is it just me, or is this a shockingly misleading paragraph? That minimum wages rose in real terms tells us nothing. They may have kept in place with inflation, or they may have even continued to fall in inflation-adjusted terms. This is not an apples-to-apples comparison at all.

1. Could you cite one of these studies? This is the first I've hearing of such a phenomenon.

2. That seems insanely counter-intuitive, and even if it's true, it probably hits a wall at some point. To use an extreme example, I for one would rather sit at home collecting an unemployment check than work at a literal sweatshop. If studies are showing people are happier without a living income than with one, then perhaps that says something about society's attitude towards work and how work is glorified as not a means to an end but an end unto itself. I would say that should be pushed back against, and that we should continue enforcing a living wage, and simply giving people money if they can't find a job that pays one.

Please open a book and learn how compounding works. There are no "shenanigans" here, rather, widespread consensus that 2% inflation year on year is quite healthy, in spite of your disingenuous attempt to overdramatize it.

All deficit spending last year consisted of the latter. In bad times, the these payouts naturally/automatically increase. For example, let's take the SNAP (food stamp program) - when the recession hit, more people lost their jobs and had to apply for food stamps. So even if the government didn't change the requirements for applying for SNAP, the SNAP program had to spend more. The narrative that Obama chose to spend more on food stamps because he has an affinity for spending is misleading. If anything, he (and Congress) chose not to cut the SNAP program.

Of course, SNAP is a bad example to begin with, because it doesn't make up that much of the federal budget. Medicare, on the other hand, does, and its costs are rising because health care costs in general are rising. Medicare's costs to the government are rising no faster than private health insurance companies' costs to individuals.

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