tchaffee

That's an extremely long time for eye contact. I bet you could get that time down too.

> How do you define rich.

As social animals humans are exceedingly skilled at determining fairness if they decide as a group. They will never get it perfect but they will get close enough. Your argument is a schoolboy argument: if the pie can't be divided exactly then you get most of it because you're bigger.

Progressive taxes don't need the precision you're demanding. It's a strawman argument.

Who here is advocating for Argentina's or Venuzuala's economic system?

If it's 100 degrees in the room and I want it to be cooler that doesn't mean I'm advocating for the room to be 0 degrees. Your need to exaggerate the point of others points to a weakness in your own argument.

All of the system? Including the progressive taxes?

You should also consider that we don't serve the economy. The economy should serve us.

Of that economic output you're so proud of, the vast majority of it ends up in the hands of rich people. Why would the average person want to defend that system?

As opposed to canned beans they aren't sitting in liquid interacting with their packaging. So you can wash the dried beans before you use them.

And I generally buy in bulk at the outdoor market so relatively few beans even come in contact with the packaging.

So how do you suggest "not starting in the first place"? How would you implement that if not prohibition? Keeping in mind that the parent comment made a concrete suggestion on what could replace prohibition.

If prohibition didn't do anything then we should surely drop it. And then?

The ounce of prevention doesn't work. Prohibition has been a huge failure.

Prohibition doesn't work at all at stopping people from starting in the first place. It has over a hundred years of failure.

Switzerland hugely reduced an endemic heroin problem in part by making it a health issue instead of a criminal issue.

And Portugal has shown a lot of success in decriminalization of most drugs.

Illegal drugs are perhaps the 2nd largest business globally, after petroleum. Prohibition is an abject failure at "not starting in the first place".

That does indeed seem to be working in Portugal.

One unpredicted side effect of making it a health issue instead of a criminal issue is that it's no longer so cool to young kids. Breaking the law is a bit of a rebellious thrill. Getting an addiction like Uncle Bob and having to visit the doctor a lot, not so cool.

The parent comment can hardly be credited with the phrase. When Nixon announced his new policies he called it a war on drugs. A catchy phrase that stuck. Far too late now to try to rename it for some sort of pedantic consistency.

Of course do what works best for you. I avoid cans because a family member used to work in a plant making cans. Industrial chemicals are involved.

And then there are the millions of cats with hyperthyroidism that has been connected to canned cat food.

Beans are literally dump some in water overnight and then cook the next day. It must be 5m of labor total.

Nope. I never buy anything without reading ingredients and yes the US is really bad about adding sugar to stuff. Even some meat which is absurd.

But when I say I cook from scratch I mean it. If I want beans I buy a bag of dried beans. I will sometimes buy canned Marzano tomatoes from Italy, ingredients: tomatoes.

Which studies specifically?

I just explained how wealth gaps lead to hedge funds buying up huge amounts of properties and how collusion lead to skyrocketing rents. I even gave a source. Debunk that source instead of continuing to insist you're right.

Here's another source supporting my claim.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/if-you-sell-a-house-these-days-...

There are very few species to befriend that are smart enough to use tools. It's entertaining watching smart animals.

Housing affordability issues are indeed across the whole US if you include local wage rates in the equation. The middle class simply can no longer afford the same housing as they could on a single earner wage as they could when tax rates on the rich were 70%. A lot of the problem is hedge funds grabbing up huge numbers of houses across the country and then jacking up the rents using collusion through software. At a 70٪ tax rate that money to grab up so many properties wouldn't even be there.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/10/company-that-mak...

I have also noticed myself and my partner gain weight when we live in the US. I'll make it a little more concerning: I mostly don't eat processed foods. I buy the raw ingredients and cook myself.

The environment and our food sources have radically changed in the past hundred years. My grandparents ate a mostly organic diet because that's all that was available back then. They didn't eat food made in a factory. They didn't drink water filled with plastic microparticules. Their work was manual labor. I could easily continue with other environmental factors that are different.

What seems absurd to me is to jump to conclusions instead of taking a scientific approach to eliminating factors until we find causation.

Hilarious and sad that he couldn't control his own impulsiveness in typing that comment and yet couldn't make the obvious connection to what he thought he was criticizing in others.

Ask the people who are oppressed by it if it's real.

Agreed that we should be dismantling it, but something has to be real to be dismantled right?

A "housing shortage in desirable metros" is moving the goal posts. The claim was that unaffordable housing can only be attributed to a shortage and has nothing to do with massively increased wealth gaps nor the shrinking middle class.

"Most countries aren't America" is just an excuse. Most European countries aren't Germany. So by that reasoning most European countries can't afford education or healthcare.

Here's what really makes the US different: most countries don't have America's massive wealth gaps. That's the real cause.

Good thing there isn't a housing shortage. And most countries easily manage to pay for education and healthcare.

You're forgetting that increases in productivity used to be partially shared with the middle class who enjoyed a rising standard of life as a result. Around that time it changed with the rich keeping all those profits to themselves. If middle class salaries had kept up, houses and education would be affordable.

The 70s when one earner (even a factory worker) could still afford a house and kids and wealth gaps were way smaller? Better times for sure unless you're very rich.

That's not the biggest thing that can help you learn something complex. Practice is the biggest thing. And there are many variations of what motivates people to practice.

Those studies give a good idea of the effects on body builders. You can't just automagically extend that to the general population.

It's not that more fine-grained classification is useful, it's that race is not a useful biological classification. To build upon your own example, neither skin color nor running ability nor what continent you came from can be used to tell us about other traits.

But I'll let Princeton sociologist Dalton Conely explain to you what you're getting wrong about the science.

https://nautil.us/what-both-the-left-and-right-get-wrong-abo...

Race at a continental level is almost useless for biological purposes. Almost all the best runners in the world come from one Kenyan tribe. And those Kenayans have more in common genetically with an Irish person than they do with a Pygmy from their same continent.

If you want to look at very small populations then you can find useful biological similarities. And small populations are nothing like what anyone calls race.

Race is real. It's just socially constructed instead of being based in biology.

You don't get to invent your own definitions of things. You've lost my interest.