shafoshaf

There is also a lot of impact from immigration that the US has that Europe has not. Immigrants tend not to be at the high end. The US has had a large influx of immigrants (around 14% of the whole population right now) vs just 6% for Europe. (from quick Google checks.) I'm not saying that is good or bad, but if you keep adding at the lowest end of income you increase the inequality if the most wealthy are experiencing gains.

Ths stock market is not considered in GDP. So by that measure it does not directly impact "economic growth." I can see an indirect relation that says that US investors (primarily through pensions and 401Ks) are the primary benefactors of a growing US stock market which then translates to more investment and opportunity of US citizens, but that is a pretty long trail to account for our economic path right now.

I wouldn't consider $5,833 a moderate cost rent. ($70k / 12) 3 bedrooms inside the loop in Houston is ~$2,100 / month. https://www.apartments.com/vintage-at-18th-street-houston-tx...

I actually find the same issue with prequels, especially for the ones that really hit a chord (like the original Star Wars). After knowing what is going to happen in those stories, I just can't get invested in a character who I know either makes it for sure, dies before getting to the "main" story, or doesn't matter because they don't have any connection to my canon of the plot arc. Same-universe spins-offs fit this for me as well.

OTOH, lots of games come with DLC that add new stories with the same mechanics. There might be some additions or changes, but if you really like the mechanics, you can try it with a different plot. Remnant II has sucked a ton of my time because of that.

I think this is a common misconception of the comparison between "capitalism" and other forms of economic distribution. It's not capitalism that equates everything to dollars, it is how the universe works. This was the beauty of Karl Marx's thinking. He postulated that the best way to measure value is in the amount of human labor that goes into the output. However, once you have a medium to equate the value of a new chair into labor then I can come up with an another transformation to equate that labor into some defined quantity of glass beads. It turns out that choosing Labor as the "value" is completely arbitrary, and so dollars (or yen or gold) works just as well as a medium for conversion.

And a second for when your main domain gets banned for spam for innocuous reasons.

I'm pretty sure your economic terms are not what the consensus of professionally trained economists would say.

>>>Locally-owned businesses. That's socialism. There is definitely nothing in the definition of socialism that says everything is locally-owned. Moreover, that can be a way to end up with things like Redlining and other institutional racial issues.

>>>There is no value without labor. The great thing Marx did was show that everything could be converted to a value measured by labor. But, economists afterwards showed that once you have that conversion, you can do it literally with anything. We could have a system based on the number of bumblebees required to build a house. That is a normative judgement that labor is somehow special.

Now, our current implementation of Capitalism is clearly wreaking havoc on our environment. But it has brought the standard of living up across the entire world past a Malthusian cycle of more food means more people, means they eat the food, and we have starvation.

The same can be said for current implementations of Communism all across the globe.

Lastly, cooperatives may be a great solution for a lot of manufacturing and housing challenges. And when you get to the scale of a country, a co-op is just a government, and a capitalistic democracy feels a lot more like a co-op than a dictatorship or authoritarianism even with all its pitfalls. A populous who then really starts to demand through votes that we change to improve the blight of our fellow humans seems an even better place to live, if we can just get there.

In GMail, I just forward the email to myself. That way it stays in the thread in the exact position and doesn't clutter my Drafts folder.

I think I see what you are saying, an I agree that practically speaking, we have to have some common ground to make things work.

So at some point there is also a line that has to be drawn. The Holocaust is one of those lines, and I pray that I would had the strength to stand up to my peers and say, no this isn't right,and go to whatever lengths I thought I could do to make change. In a lot of ways, I think the civil rights movement was a lot of chest beating and I think that actually helped.

It's not really clear to me that "most prosperous happy places on earth tend to have social contracts that look out for groups such as women, homosexuals, etc." Certainly, when you look at economic prosperity and I don't know how you'd measure happiness.

Who or What I voted for should be secret. That I voted should not.

Which could definitely be a problem, but is that worse than being able to harass and bully people with no consequences at all because you don't know who it is?

Of course, there could be a lot of bullying just out in the open too, but anonymity isn't a cure all, just helps with the symptom. IMHO.

>It's still better that they were forced to hide, than a world where they couldn't hide.

Agreed. Just like it was better we had some not great laws protecting abortion than the shit-show we have now. That is the challenge I think, is getting something that is actually in the real world vs. what the ideal is, since none of us seem to be able to agree on that ideal.

I think your version of anonymity is more to what I'd call privacy. There is no reason anyone even needs to know that you have a playlist, much less what is on it.

Anonymity would be you posting your playlist of songs with the theme of Down with Martians (or other group) without anyone knowing it was you. I don't necessarily think we have to have that ability to allow people to do that.

I think that depends on the level of disagreement. I think gay people, women, and people of color should have the same rights as everyone else, which includes how they are treated at work. I'm willing to say that is a mandatory part of my social contract.

Someone liking to dress in a cowboy hat, underwear, and playing a guitar in Times Square? Not my cup of tea, but sure, go for it.

I don't think Anonymity is linked to privacy. Anonymity is the ability to do public things without being identified. For example, writing a death threat online. There is good evidence that anonymity encourages bad behavior. https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/who-is-that-th...

Privacy is what I do without interacting with the public. Playing D&D is a privacy matter. Only my friends and I know we do it.

I feel like anonymity is just a band-aid. Ideally we would have freedom and accountability. If everyone knew that I watched porn but respected by right to do so, that's the ideal. Without anonymity we would know that account is run by a bot or a foreign state. It goes to how homosexuals were forced to be underground for so many years (and still today for many) and if they were out of sight they were out of mind. That isn't equality if you have to have a really good way to hide.

However, the penchant for people to be complete assholes to each other over things that are none of their business is real and a huge problem. So, yes it makes sense to be able to hide but, sadly, it doesn't advance the social contract.

THe low cost of a single song vs. an entire episode I suspect also plays a factor. A lot of artists are one or two song wonders, so once you take out a Taylor Swift, there's no incentive for artists to limit their songs to a single platform, no platform will pay enough for the exclusivity to make the artist think it is worth it.

The other problem is that for every "good" non-mainstream website there are like 4000 that are so much worse than the mainstream. It is a problem with scale. If everyone has a voice, without some metric to say who has authority, how do you pick the gem from the masses?

I've tried really hard to understand the outrage of not having a 3.5 mm headphone jack. I have Bose wired headphones and just use a dongle on the plane with my phone and tablet. My Laptop does have a jack, but it would be no big deal to use a dongle. I guess I'm just not an audiophile, but I doubt that many people are.

+1 to 8 USB-Cs!

There is no such thing as decoupling when there is a cash equivalent. For example, in the US a lot of welfare funds are handed out in the form of food stamps. This has created a secondary market in food stamps where people sell them to get cash. Also, the mere fact of having the food stamps frees up funds for other things where the consumer can spend more on "non-essential" goods carrying the inflation with it.

But I was never able to chase the car with a Pac Man.

The only barrier for higher stakes applications is going to be the frequency of errors. Flying an airplane or running a factory has a lot less margin for error, but humans don't do those things perfectly either (Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Union Carbide-Bhopal disaster). It doesn't have to be perfect, just better than humans. And in fact, I'd argue that by having no deterministic outcomes prevents systemic failure, like having a single point of failure for all those drones in the crappy episodes of Star Wars.

I've heard a lot of argument about the headphone jack. For my iPad, I bought an apple plug (i don't even know what they call it, is it a lighting port?) to 3.5mm phone jack. Can you explain what that solution doesn't work for everyone? The only thing I can think of is that you can't listen and charge at the same time.

Thanks!

“I’m not so much interested in the return ON my money as I am in the return OF my money.” — Will Rogers

I'm not sure we could tell the difference. As Yishan states, the proof of the behavior isn't being made public because of the exposure to creating new issues. Without that, you would never know.

As for specific platforms, aka Reddit, how can one be sure that right wingers on that platform aren't in fact more likely to engage in bad behavior that left wingers? It might be because they are being targeted, but it could also be that that group of people on that platform tend to act more aggressively.

I am NOT saying that I know if Reddit is fair in its moderation, I just don't know.

Yet. As "real" artists start using these generations to leapfrog their projects, at some point, how is this different from someone studying a style and producing something in that style with that addition of actual "art?"

If the US could do one thing for race relations, I feel this would be it.

As someone who took statistics 30 years ago and promptly forgot most of it, I followed everything except "I want to efficiently draw a name from this distribution". What makes a drawing efficient?

It reminds me of "Mel"in 1983 which was in response to "Real Programmers write in FORTRAN."

https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

Obligatory: Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway. –Andrew Tanenbaum, 1981

May finally met its match.