therpe1

There's very little evidence that tax cuts stimulate economic growth. If there was meaningful evidence the investigators would receive the Nobel Prize -- every year. And while economists can be relied upon to provide all sorts of elaborate theoretical "evidence" the actual empirical evidence tends to confirm the opposite: significant tax cuts have zero to negative impacts on growth [1].

It will be interesting though to see what tax cuts do in such a low-growth environment. In the end it seems Wall St. will be the big winner. There's plenty of actual evidence that tax cuts (a) eventually make it back to investors once finance takes its cut and (b) tax cuts lead to most firms adopting a much higher risk profile [2]. Ironically we could see lots of mergers and overseas expansion.

[1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/news/business/0915taxesandecono...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-19/u-s-tax-c...

The article has some good points but the whole "crowd" thing was never a serious idea.

Crowds are not intelligent. Democracies are what are intelligent. Having lots of intelligent people who care deeply about something discuss it thoroughly in good faith and then vote will almost always produce optimum outcomes for all involved. This basic principle underlies everything from global capitalism to modern science to even modern military strategy (network-centric warfare).

The problem is that more often than not you don't have lots of people discussing a topic in good faith. In fact this is a might even be a rare and fragile scenario. It's very, very easy for the discussion or the voting system to be corrupted and subverted. The logical conclusion is that the "crowd" is only intelligent and able to reach good conclusions in a well-defined environment. There must be rules, institutions and ultimately reputational accountability to ensure that all actors are actually acting in good faith. Capitalism needs well-regulated markets, science needs its prestigious institutions and even the military needs civilian oversight and international conventions.

I think once people appreciate this it becomes obvious why suggestion boxes is a waste of time and why highly compressed mass referendums are almost certainly disaster.

America needs to embrace "local government." That means devolving budgetary power to the states. The federal model has failed. The current system is broken. The people who pay the most into the system (highly productive cities) are the people who actually have the least voting power. Once people wake up and begin to understand what's really going on this will not last. 'Taxation without representation' tends to rub people the wrong way.

End the Federal Highway/Farm/Energy Acts. Heck, even blow up Medicaid and Obamacare. Cut the military budget by 2/3. All of these enormously expensive federal "programs" are just elaborate means to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from the wealthy and efficient urban counties and distribute them to the relatively poor and inefficient rural counties. None of it is fair and none of it is sustainable.

This is one good thing that will come out of runaway polarization in America. As all trust dissolves and the two (highly geographically correlated) classes move apart this illusion of "one republic" acting in everybody's interests will fall away.

It's weird. This article is so poorly informed and, frankly, straight-up dumb that I'm surprised that the author would put it out there under his real name. But what's more surprising is how every time a startup geek shows up and insists he alone understands an enormous, extremely complicated, century-old distributed market system better than those who have been studying it for decades -- everybody actually stops and takes it seriously. I mean, we're supposed to take hearsay like this:

> Even fifteen years ago at an Ivy League school I did not like to say things too far outside the zeitgeist in section, because it just wasn’t worth the risk of making someone in class angry. And I hear the problem is even worse now.

and a bunch of literally made up numbers (ahem, "subjective assessment") seriously?

So yeah. That's the question. Why does nobody listen to the actual experts on the American education system? The people who've been studying this for decades? And when people aren't willing to do the hard work (that requires expertise)... how do you even talk about solutions in a serious manner?

This is actually a fantasy that has no basis in reality.

You claim that conservatives "(in general)" do believe in global warming but poll after poll after poll demonstrates otherwise[1]. 85% of Republicans don't think humans are to blame and (by extension) there's nothing we could possibly do about it. The Republican President claims quite emphatically that it's a "hoax." How do these observable facts jive at all with your claim that conservatives don't believe in the "solutions" when most don't even acknowledge the problem.

As for your fantastic claim that China won't cut emissions again, I suggest looking at reality. See the Climate Action Tracker for China [2]. China is on track to achieve its peak admissions by 2030 which is what they agreed to under the historic Paris Agreement.

The facts are out there. There's no need for you to make up fantastical claims you just have to have the courage to look at them.

[1] http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-climate-...

[2] http://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china.html

Anecdote: I suspect if you're the parent of a special needs kid and you're not filthy rich and you want to have access to the best specialists and, frankly, access to other special needs kids then it makes sense to move to the East Coast. This may be changing but for a long time East Coast schools were the only place where your kid could spend any quality time with an autism specialist. Part of it, I think, is just the fact that a lot of the research and the teaching colleges happen to be on the East Coast so there's a kind of knowledge community effect at work and this leads to better infrastructure. It's a situation where you need all the help you can get.

It's worth pointing out that:

1) Controlling memory layout is not as big a deal as people think. The JVM is highly optimized (really it's probably the most optimized system ever devised) for allocating and deallocating objects on the heap.

2) It is in fact possible to control memory layout today because Java has access to offheap memory where you can have all the control you want.

This has actually been the case for nearly half a decade but for some reason a lot of people are convinced that "big arrays" can knock over the JVM.

If this was a broad-based phenomenon because the media is incompetent and is constantly hiding conspiracy theories then you wouldn't expect to see such the heavily polarized differences between parties that you do. (That is to say, let's say the media shouldn't be trusted after Iraq, it still doesn't explain why certain populations exhibit virtually zero trust (7%) and other still largely trust (60+%).)

And keep in mind, this is not a exclusively US phenomenon, you will find the same anti-media, anti-science, conspiratorial thinking across right-wing parties in many other countries. Now it's possible that the media in every country really is untrustworthy and the right-wing are especially tuned to this because they are more intelligent and sensitive to propaganda... but it's unlikely. The more plausible explanation is indeed that this distrust of the media is endogenous to the right.

My only point wrt the original article is that this notion of an "information war" is almost certainly incorrect. Putting aside electoral politics, the wild conspiracy theories that proliferate after every terrorist attack or mass-shooting incident aren't coming from foreign agents or even from political agents. Rather what you have are specific populations who have adopted this manner of conspiratorial thinking as a replacement for the establishment media. Highlight these populations on a map[1] and what you see find are stark boundaries that exclude cities. This isn't an accident or a coincidence which is why I think we can exclude base explanations like "people were fooled," "the media failed" or "Russia did it." Really, from an epidemological perspective this is not exactly a world-class mystery.

[1] http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/do...

Trust in the mainstream media has only collapsed among a single group: the right-wing[1]. This is where your "it's just desserts" narrative falls apart. Study after study [2] shows that while the mainstream media is still popular and widespread among the majority, the right-wing have literally gone off and formed their own media-sphere.

And while there's no doubt that the media has engaged in deliberate propaganda -- though Snowden has nothing to do with this, the canonical example is actually Iraq -- it's highly doubtful that people are turning to InfoWars because they no longer trust the New York Times to give them verified, well-sourced, non-partisan reasonable facts and interpreting. That doesn't actually make any sense at all under even cursory analysis.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/as-hyper-conservative-medi...

[2] http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-st...

You're right. The problem was never really fake news it was more that a significant chunk of the population has abandoned consensus reality. This is not a US problem either. I travel a lot and everywhere -- Europe, Japan, Australia, India, and the US -- you see the same exact pattern played over and over. Right-wing partisans lose all trust in the established media[1] after decades of right-wing politicians insisting that journalists can't be trusted. Right-wing partisans deliberately constructing their own parallel knowledge community and this enables right-wing politicians to speak, completely unchallenged, about events that never happened and facts that aren't facts[2]. The end-game, where right-wing voters, having isolated themselves completely, begin to insist on more and more outlandish conspiracies[3] until we're talking about secret pedophilia rings and the Pope conspiring with Hollywood Jews and millions of fake voters voting in the most closely watched election in the history of the planet.

The interesting thing about this process is how deliberate and effective it is -- and I think, if you spend time on these right-wing forums, like yourself, you start to realize that nobody has been "duped," these people aren't fools, they are eager and willing participants in engineering a state of mass delusion. This was very apparent to Deleuze who grasped this very clearly:

  Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their desire into account, an explanation formulated in terms of desire: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point, under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for. (Deleuze and Guattari 1977: 29)

Like the war on drugs it is nonsensical to focus on the supply when the demand is so great. A population addicted to fake news, a population that wants to be propagandized, a population that will gather online in forums and message boards and self-propagandize, is going to find and consume fake news and generate conspiracy theories no matter what.

And I think a liberal society has to let this happen. It's not like China, the State is not going to deploy its own highly-trained, well-paid "media operatives" to find and destroy this alternative media ecosystem while lavishly funding the official media ecosystem. The whole point of liberal society is that desire is allowed to run its course.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/19/as-hyper-conservative-medi...

[2] http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-st...

[3] https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/how-macedonia-became...

It's not just ridiculous... it demonstrates an almost willful disconnect with reality. Just consider:

1. Do these people have any knowledge of history? Both Canada and the USA have sustained far, far, far higher rates of immigration than what we're seeing from Syria and prospered mightily because of it. In the 70s Canada was happily letting in a quarter million people a year. (At the time the US was also practically giving away citizenship.) These immigrants, mostly from Asia, contributed enormously to North America's wealth and stability. And this is not a new pattern. We see the same thing over and over. Which makes you wonder -- has there ever been a case where immigrants "overwhelmed" a nation state?

2. To that end, just consider the numbers, even for a moment. We're talking about thousands in a nation of 35 million. And yet somehow these individuals -- poor, isolated, without knowing the language, and isolated from their own families -- pose a security threat.

3. Most importantly at the end of the day basic common sense indicates that immigration is almost an economic positive for the host country. Even if you suspect that you're not getting the best and the brightest from another country what you are getting are individuals often in their prime earning years where some other country has paid to raise them up until this point. The economics here are pretty clear but nobody likes to talk about it. (For example, take a look at Britain. Brexit or no, Britain will need to import millions of laborers over the next decade or, frankly, it will go broke.)

I always bring this up because the language around immigration is so far-fetched, so disconnected from reality and history, but it also never changes, in fact few things are so predictable.

Why do you keep saying 'the politicians'?

This was a straight party-line vote. There's a single party here working very hard to centralize and corporatize the internet. There's another party working against that.

I have to say I find it a bit hilarious when something like this happens and it's the result of a select, easily identifiable group and Americans then throw their hands up and declare, "The whole system is corrupt!"

I mean come on.

> But painful as the last couple months have been, I still still think Trump was a better outcome for the nation than Clinton. I like and respect Obama, but I don't think you understand how badly much of rural America has been doing under Democratic leadership.

The country hasn't been under Democratic leadership. Obama faced an unprecedented level of obstructionism from Congress combined with an unprecedented deliberately planned and closely coordinated attack from media agents who deliberately sabotaged and delegitimized his administration. Try to remember that 44% of Republicans still don't think Obama was born in the US [1].

The problem with this entire sad logic chain constructed by "thowanem" and yourself is that... you still don't get it. You've learned nothing these past eight years because you don't actually understand what happened over these past eight years. You have this idea that Democrats and the establishment "ignored rural voters" -- but this is a fantasy that has no basis no in reality. The reality is that thanks to Obamacare roughly 20 million people have healthy insurance now that didn't have it before. It's the sort of thing that's very difficult to prove but it would not be unreasonable to suggest that these suicide numbers would be far worse if Democrats hadn't passed comprehensive health insurance and expanded Medicaid.

Anyways, I just want to point out, on some level, this is why thins aren't going to get better any time soon. Too much of the country is caught up in delusion and fantasy and while everybody feels like they understand what's going on... in fact very few people are looking at the facts. Fantasy, the rejection of reality. is a privilege that is not sustainable. Reality always catches up and the truth will come out. But until then I suspect we'll have a lot of nonsense discussions about how immigrants destroyed Sweden and all the problems in this country are supposed to be traced back to some mysterious "establishment."

[1] http://www.mediaite.com/online/new-poll-shows-that-41-of-rep...

> Do city people think that those who are suffering are just losers who deserve their fate? That is simply not true. Many have families who love them, and the potential to have a good life, but heroin is such a strong addiction. They need help, not condemnation. I think the de-criminalizing it is essential to solving the crisis.

It's darkly amusing to read this because drugs have been ravaging the inner cities for decades and "city people" (as you call them) have been saying this for about 50 years. The response from the rest of the country was the War on Drugs. You might've heard of it? See, it was widely believed that black and brown people suffered from problems of "culture" and the only solution was mass incarceration.

Anyways, I don't see this sudden outpouring of sympathy for rural whites accomplishing much of anything. There won't be a "egalitarian awakening" -- political polarization and paralysis is only going to deepen and solidify. At the end of the day Americans don't give a shit about the poor whether they're inner city blacks and latinos or rural whites. The national conversation right now, keep in mind, is about whether Meals on Wheels is "delivering results" and how much to increase the military budget by.

But then even if America wanted to I doubt that America could handle the sort of systemic disaster that is runaway inequality. It's a structural issue; the country simply wasn't built for dealing with such a threat, it's too big, too decentralized, and ultimately too capitalistic. The only thing that stopped the runaway inequality of the 20s was the Depression and World War. In that light, I suppose, one could actually think the GOP's destruction of of the modern regulatory framework and the rabid anti-China rhetoric is a good thing.

It's so striking how people who view the "soft sciences" this way really have no understanding of science at all. It's a very American thing and it really reveals the extent to which science has been socially constructed in America to be some kind of infallible truth machine. The hard-on for infallibility is so striking -- there's something about sociality, uncertainty, nuance, luck, and fallibility that really terrifies these people on a foundational level.