wfo

When people vote for president, they vote for a bundle of positions on thousands of issues. Every person who has voted for a president has voted against their own policy positions, often hundreds or thousands of their own policy positions. Some issues are never discussed in any debate or media at all and presidents have as far as the public is concerned roughly zero position on them (for example, NN).

It is of course ridiculous to suggest that people voted for Trump hoping he would destroy a free and open Internet; we have clear and incontrovertible evidence that the vast, vast majority of citizens (90%? 80%? I think it depends on which poll you take) hates what he is doing. The president has a good-faith responsibility to represent the citizens and when they come down on an issue like this which was non existent or tangential to his campaign so fervently it's most certainly a betrayal of that consent.

When he tries to build a wall? Sure, he definitely has consent there. On NN? Not a chance. He does have power though.

Every time a monopoly arises, that is the market telling you the most efficient way to produce the good is with a single centrally planned organization, and that competition is not possible or effective.

A monopoly is the market's way of saying an industry/service should be nationalized.

Your points have all been soundly refuted elsewhere in the thread as they should, but

>You don't see anybody trying to legalize murder, do you?

Actually, you do. Many Republican state congresses are trying to make it legal to murder protesters by e.g. ramming them with your car. Net Neutrality is pretty much as cut and dried as this: there are people who oppose it, but that position is indefensible. "People defend it therefore there must be good arguments in favor of it" just isn't always true.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/08/the-charlottesvi...

They cover these issues, yes, but always with a specific purpose and intent. Let's consider a case study, this article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/upshot/bernie-sanders-wen...

They covered a tour Sanders did about healthcare in Canada, and used it as an opportunity to spout ideological tripe slamming universal healthcare and Sanders himself.

Even the first line is a weaselly backhanded attack on Sanders. Then,

>Now he wants to make Americans fall in love with his proposal to make the United States system a lot more like Canada’s.

This is an absurd thing to say if you did your homework and know that a strong majority of Americans already support a single payer system like Canada's. However it is not an absurd thing to say if you want your reader to walk away believing Americans just aren't ready for it.

What follows is an entire section attacking Sanders for being popular because he advocates for popular political positions(how dare he?). Then their description of his bill is right out of a right-wing rag

>His Medicare-for-All bill includes free care as a central feature. If the legislation became law, no American would pay directly for a doctor, dentist or hospital visit, and co-payments for prescription drugs would be limited. (Taxpayers would, of course, finance the system.)

Indeed, you would get all of this stuff for free at taxpayer expense in a snarky parenthetical as if to suggest "you wouldn't really want to pay for others would you?" Ignoring that we already pay more for worse healthcare than any country, and that the bill would save trillions in taxpayer money.

An entire section on waiting times for non-critical procedures a common tactic for attacking universal healthcare -- ignore waiting times in the US, talk about how people have to wait in the other system and write "for non-critical procedures" in the smallest print possible so you're technically not lying. They never ask the actual explicit question: should you be able to jump the line and get your nosejob a week early, kicking a poor person with cancer out of line so they die because you have more money?

Then they cite a study that correctly assess the US healthcare system as the worst among developed countries, but it notes that Canada's is only 9th out of 11th -- doesn't look so bad now does it?! -- ignoring the fact that countries 1-10 (with universal healthcare) were ranked pretty close together, and the distance between the US and the 10th is double the distance between the 1st and 10th.

Then a series of more blatant incorrect claims without evidence about the medicare for all bill in particular.

Then the icing on the cake -- a section about how "Americans don't care about fairness or healthcare", with strong evidence this time! No, wait, their only evidence is that the Republicans control the government. Hmm. Let's look a little deeper:

>In the United States, though, Republicans control the presidency and the Congress, and many candidates last year ran on a promise to roll back government support for health care coverage.

Oh, I see. People only vote based on healthcare now. And not liking a failed overly complicated Obamacare system that forces people to buy bad private insurance is the same is disliking universal healthcare, but the article already stated universal healthcare has strong majority support...

It's almost as if someone has an agenda to portray America as a right-wing country whose people care mostly about the interests of the rich to their readers, who happen to be the rich...

This is just one article. NYT puts out hundreds of these ideological hit pieces with a shallow veneer of objective reporting every week. The amount of human labor put into this propaganda is staggering.

Wapo is even worse. Jeff Bezos did not buy it expecting to make a profit. They have rarely criticized Bezos or Amazon since the purchase. They 'fact-checked' a statement by Sanders where he describes the amount of wealth Bezos has and agree the statement is objectively correct. But it did not fit in with their ideology, so of course they rated it a 'lie'.

If this is what 'coverage' looks like, I'll pass. Reading wapo or nyt as a person on the left is what reading Breitbart feels like to a center-right Democrat or Republican nyt/wapo reading neoliberal.

The public interest is not handwaving, it is the entire purpose of govermnent. Under your definition laws banning slavery for example are "public interest handwaving".

It is a tough place to move. Especially as a tech person.

People there think that the explosion of tech money and tech people from outside is ruining their city and their culture. They are right. By default, as a tech immigrant (or even tech person, really) you are seen as an invading enemy. So if you move there realize that's a terrible reality you are going to have to deal with.

They think that you, as a new arrival and a tech person, are part of the problem. They might be right. You have to try hard to assimilate, and accept that you're moving to a place with an already pre-existing strong culture that is wary of outsiders (Seattle is one of those places where people ask adults where they went to high school). People in Seattle are not particularly warm and welcoming. You have try hard to dig yourself in there. You have to try hard to make friends. If you make music or art or do outdoor stuff, that's great, do that, talk about that. If you just write code, well, you and a couple million others.

Honestly, if Amazon had set up its offices in a quiet suburb outside the city, like Boeing or Microsoft did, this wouldn't be happening. It's Bezos' fault for not understanding or caring about his own city, really.

>it's crazy how enormous the pro-Trump population on HN actually is and how blissfully Silicon Valley pretends they don't exist)

>Yeah it's really fucked up. We need a new discussion forum format, that isn't so easily manipulated like HN and Reddit due to vote manipulation.

Are you sure you aren't just whining because you think more people agree with you than actually do? It's awfully convenient that since people online don't like it that you are dredging up comments from years ago stalking people's accounts and attacking them in support of a horribly unpopular position that is actively destroying things important to tech people, that it's the fault of the format and vote manipulation, and censorship, and mods, and it's all someone else's fault, I'm actually right and everyone is on my side. You conclude it's hard to have a conversation because people don't agree with you, because the conversation isn't going exactly how you want.

It's shocking how people who support him even pick up on his conversational tics; blame anything that you don't like on external enemies, the powers that be, claim everyone actually likes you despite all evidence to the contrary, that your crowd was huge, that it's just the lying liberal elites that control everything out to get you.

>But as far as I can tell, there is nothing about newspapers that makes them a natural monopoly. Why should anyone regulate combinations in that area?

Very, very few regulations are designed with the sole purpose of dealing with natural monopoly. Most are there to prevent some monstrous or dystopian consequence of unfettered capitalism that we as a society have decided is undesirable.

Having a tiny group of wealthy oligarchs own all media, press, acceptable thought in an area is one of those horrifying dystopian consequences that we apply these regulations to prevent.

Be careful any time you see an analysis of media consolidation that ignores the reality on the ground -- the media's unique ability to define and shape public opinion. Such an analysis is either so purely academic as to be not relevant to any actual political or social discussion, hopelessly naive or, worse, willfully ignorant in service of a particular ideology.

>a boss only has power over you so far as you're being paid to act on behalf of the company

This is obviously untrue. You can be fired for any reason, anytime. Whether what you're doing is at work or not. Your boss can see you at a protest and fire you. Your boss can call you at 2am on your personal line and fire you if you don't pick up the phone. Your boss can fire you for not liking the right music or restaurants, or for refusing to go to certain parties (it's just not a good culture fit).

> clearly having employees be able to harness some law and create a kind of capture on the employer wouldn't be ideal

No, it wouldn't be ideal, but it would be very, very good. Asking for something ideal is a little Utopian, so I'll take the massive improvement you are suggesting.

>people end up squatting on a company to get whatever they can regardless of what cost/value impact they are having on the company

You have just described most bosses and corporate owners.

>you now run into the situation of having to provide some reason for firing someone, which is a messy situation, because you shouldn't need to provide proof or reasoning for no longer wanting to work with someone

This is how it works in nearly every developed country in the world, and how it used to work in the US. It works just fine. There is no need to give bosses ultimate complete power over all aspects of their employee's lives. There is no reasonable justification for it I have ever seen except ideological devotion to the unquestioned authority and power of the wealthy.

This is giving in to surveillance: allowing it to define what you are allowed to say and do.

It is also not feasible. Sure, you can stop doing that, but there are millions of other 'tells' that you will give up through your actions online that can predict this information. Machine learning will pick up features you cannot control or even imagine that will accurately predict whether or not you are on the job hunt, no matter what you do to hide it short of just disconnecting from the Internet. Which is likely a tell itself.

The poignant part of the headline here is "sell it to your boss". I think we have already lost the battle over data mining. It is happening, and will continue to happen and it seems to me there is really nothing we can do short of drastically restructuring the entire Internet.

The biggest problem is when you combine intrusive massive surveillance with a ultra-powerful entity that can be capricious, malicious, and often abuses and punishes its underlings. This is why I am far more concerned (as a selfish American, thinking for now only about the concerns of Americans) about the FBI having unlimited surveillance powers than the NSA: the FBI has a history of committing crime, horrifying suppression of speech, dissents, political movements, of destroying the lives of innocents, etc. The FBI can knock on your door with guns and throw in you a cage for decades. It has massive power over us so it is important we do not give it massive information about us at the same time.

The same is true with bosses. One technique to deal with this is to try and firewall the information off away from the powerful. This is what we did to the FBI before parallel construction (bills that say data will be collected "only for terrorism" -- a lie, obviously, as it always is, but one that made the collection palatable). The article focuses on this approach, which is in my view a lost cause, but a lost cause worth fighting for nonetheless.

The other approach is to take away power from bosses. Right now a boss has complete and total power over his employees without labor unions or worker protections (i.e. the current state of affairs in the US). It is this combination with the information that is so disgusting and dystopian. So we could, instead, talk about taking away the power, rather than taking away the information -- which would have the added benefit of solving many other social problems along the way.

Nice discussion, but the central call to action -- challenging technically ignorant authoritarian extremists in the legislature like McConnell and Feinstein to do something horrible, trusting that they truly won't do it at the end of the day because uhhh their "desire to do the right thing?" -- this is naive tech ideology at work. Realistically, the golden key law is totally feasible, politically viable, and should scare all of us. It would not be used to ban all encryption (which is impossible) but rather to target undesirables selectively and to ensure that either every person's every communication is recorded forever by the government so that they can be prosecuted for their speech later at will, or that they are put on a list of criminals for using banned encryption, so that they can be prosecuted later at will.

No tech person should ever breathe a word of support for this, especially not to play a psychotic game of chicken with people who would permanently disable their brakes in an instant if it would fire up their base for a news cycle.

Sure, here is the most regularly referenced study:

http://wws.princeton.edu/faculty-research/research/item/test...

Indeed; I have seen the "you are dumb and I am smart, you are a fourth grader" 'argument' before, though it's never been applied towards me until this point -- consider yourself a pioneer in that regard. I am honored; right wing idiots who have access to the internet and little else to offer have found my post and think that what I am saying threatens their worldview. There isn't a better sign in the universe that I'm doing something right.

>What are our local, state, and federal governments made up of, then - the same organizations that don't close loopholes and set tax code properly to serve the greater interest? Are these organizations not made of people?

Yes, they are. But going out of your way to hire thousands of attorneys to find loopholes is obvious explicit fraud. Writing a tax code and possibly missing something is a natural human error. "Corporate persons" do not exist -- they are a legal fiction invented to shield corporate criminals from liability.

Also, why do you think I have low expectations of my government? I expect them to try their best to prevent fraud just as I expect corporations to do their best to avoid committing it.

>But that is not the freedom of choice I am talking about. That is a fake choice since it is too difficult, requiring you to change your entire life. What I am talking about is the simple choice of free market: choosing who to give your money and for what services.

Sure -- but at the same time, I bought a product at walmart five years ago, then I decided not to buy there anymore. Why hasn't walmart changed its business practices? I think you're right to say my vote means nearly nothing, but you are missing the point that my purchase means even less. Votes are at least distributed one vote one person; if you accept the financial scheme for decision making you are literally just giving all the power to people who are currently wealthy explicitly.

>What I am talking about is the simple choice of free market: choosing who to give your money and for what services.

This is a meaningless choice that only the wealthy can make in the first place.

>I do not intend to give up the government services, I just want to be able to transparently select the provider and not have to buy them in bulk, bundled together.

I'm not sure what you mean here -- you want government services, but you also want to transparently select the provider. For government services, the government is the provider.

2 -- since when is "might makes right" == liberty? I find this position odd especially considering the build and gym habits of most tech Libertarians I have met.

Shouldn't, for it to be true liberty, one of those people own that food by virtue of a piece of paper stating a government granted monopoly over it because his ancestors enslaved the ancestors of the other, and be allowed to call an army of police with guns to take it no matter how small and weak he is? And perhaps, if he sees fit and deems the other person worthy, the owner will rent a fraction of it to the other to plant as a seed and keep the yield for himself, divvying out exactly enough food for the other to barely survive and continue working?

This is exactly liberty, no?

A culture of expectations that businesses behave ethically and do not bribe their governments. Campaign finance reform. Powerful government regulators that actually scare companies. A department of justice, for example, that observes this and decides to nationalize Disney, break it up, or delete it from the universe using existing anti-bribery or anti-trust laws. A state of California that decides to prosecute executives or at least threaten them with jailtime. Maybe send SWAT teams to raid their mansions and shoot their dogs, like they do with suspected poor black pot dealers.

The worst punishment any company receives for bribing, stealing from, defrauding, or poisoning the public is a slap on the wrist that is outweighed by the profit they make committing crimes. We need to be comfortable with devastating corporate punishments (company-destroying fines, mandatory company breakups, nationalization, jailtime for executives, asset seizure) to have any effect at all. What did we learn from Equifax? Don't worry about the security of people's data, there is basically zero real consequence to posting sensitive data on every citizen in plaintext on the Internet. Money spent on security is a waste, an objectively bad business decision. That's what our government and regulatory bodies have told us. And it's what the market has told us as well, but we already expected that -- we expect the market to choose evil when given the choice, every time. That is its function.

Right now, a CEO cannot say to their board "Yes, the cost/benefit analysis and market forces suggest we should bribe the city officials and steal money from the taxpayers, but we'd go to jail so we can't" because it is not true. All they can say is "it is morally wrong" which does nothing except get that uppity CEO fired so somebody who really cares about profits can be brought on.

You have a huge amount of choice in your taxes; you can vote, run for office, and advocate for political positions. You have zero choice in your economic situation (if you are 99% of people) since most financial choices are made for you by large companies that you have zero stake in or control over.

Is there a difference between someone pointing a gun at your head and saying 'your money or your life' and a company that buys all the water in your region and withholds it saying 'your money or your life'? No.

If we decide corporations have no obligation to be moral or decent, they naturally will behave as we expect. If we expect and demand (and punish the absence of) more, we can get more. Corporations are made up of people, and people are fully capable of not committing rampant constant fraud.

Spending thousands of dollars to avoid their moral tax obligations instead of paying is in my view fraud and corruption; the fact that it is possible with an army of accountants and massive resources dedicated to tiny loopholes is really of no importance when we weight the ethical or moral judgements of these actions: if you spend millions on lawyers to devise a clever loophole that lets you murder someone legally you are still a murderer. There's a (bad) argument to be made that for consistency's sake we cannot prosecute you under the current laws, but there's no argument that you're not a monster.

Refusing to pay taxes is stealing from the poor (and the general public) who rely on government services; you are destroying the roads, parks, annihilating schools and universities, preventing people from getting healthcare they need to survive, stealing from children, the homeless, the elderly and the disabled, helping criminals by defunding the police and helping burn people and property by defunding fire departments.

If your job is to find tax loopholes for corporations, you are committing fraud even if our current legal system is written by people who think fraud is okay so long as it's a CPA on behalf of a massive corporation doing it. The fact that some judges have decided this is okay does not mean that it actually is.

On the strong form, certainly and provably not. Studies have been funded to find any correlation between the will of the populace and policy that is enacted. There is zero correlation.

On the semi-weak form, obviously not. Voter suppression is constant and ubiquitous in most states. Gerrymandering has caused international organizations to classify states in the US as non-democracies, and explicitly suppresses the will of the voting population as its stated goal. It is extremely effective. The majority of the population of states vote for one policy position, and the polar opposite party will receive a two-thirds unbeatable veto-proof majority in the legislature. There is incontrovertible evidence that even presidential elections were explicitly and intentionally stolen (Gore) -- we know this happened. There is strong evidence to suggest the subsequent election was stolen as well, with the election in Ohio raising every red flag election monitors know to look for and some they hadn't yet invented because they were so blatant as to be unthinkable (the owner of the company that distributed all voting machines in the state explicitly, publicly promised to deliver the election to the candidate who won). While the system is in principle distributed, in reality it is anything but: a tiny number of very easily hacked, bought, corrupted, and infiltrated swing state electoral systems decide the fate of the entire nation, safe from the scrutiny and security requirements that an actual federal election system would have to undergo.

On the weak form, are you kidding? Nearly every electoral system in any modern democratic state is far superior. Your statements about peaceful change of the guard, separation of powers, and the judiciary (its independence is laughable; judges are explicitly selected partisans who dictate partisan policy positions from the bench instead of voting for it in congress) are all totally irrelevant to the question as it should be formulated in it's weak form: does the American electoral system work better than others? Nothing was asked or stated about the system of governance. You only even answer the question you asked by taking an extreme ideologically charged definition of "work better". The question you implicitly asked (that you answered) is: is the American system of governance effective at preserving a tradition of peaceful transfer of power from oligarch to oligarch? Has the obvious answer, yes. As does the system in North Korea.

>We just don't have a multi century, multigenerational society that has generated as much wealth for as many people while confronting the number of difficult questions the American system has.

We don't have such a society that has generated much wealth for the many; rather, for the few.

The only thing that keeps Americans from publicly admitting these obvious truths about the voting system is a need to believe that the system works; we accept that obviously undemocratic results are democratic because to accept the alternative (which happens to be true) is unthinkable and would cause chaos. It is a group lie we tell ourselves to make society function.

Because freedom has failed them. Or, at least, "freedom" as defined implicitly by the author to mean "only a specifically enumerated list of negative freedoms that primarily benefit the wealthy" and "the ability to cast a vote which fundamentally does not matter" -- remember the adage "if voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal".

Millenials don't feel particularly free to speak when they live in permanent debt, begging the wealthy to gift them with an unpaid internship and praying they don't get sick. When they do speak, their voices are drowned out by billions of dollars in propaganda campaigns. Yet they are told "this is freedom" and you're surprised they value it less?

If you asked them whether they want "freedom" of course they would say yes. But it's ridiculous to say a homeless person is "free" because the cops don't arrest and harass him for speaking his mind. It's ridiculous to say a millenial is "free" when those of them lucky enough to get jobs have to toe the line and obey every command from their employer, watching what they say on social media, accepting the most egregious reaches of corporate power into their personal lives so that they have a prayer at one day paying back their insurmountable debts.

Millenials, unlike the generation before them, recognize that material conditions are of fundamental importance and that any notion of "freedom" that ignores them is not worth much. The "freedom" to buy a news organization or bribe a politician with infinite dark money is just enshrining corporate power. The "freedom" to buy healthcare is meaningless without the means to also afford it. Millenials see through the very shallow veneer of whines about "freedom" that do nothing but obscure blatant attempts to preserve current power structures.

Consider tech contracts: companies write contracts so that they own what you think in your off time. They write contracts so that if you decide to quit, you cannot legally work for years. That is not freedom, it is the opposite. Yet the libertarian screed is "well, in the abstract, you have the freedom to make that contract or not as you see fit"; what consolation to those who need a job to pay rent or buy food.

This attitude shift is mostly definitional semantics and is just a natural result of decades of libertarian/conservative weasel-wording around "freedom" so that it is a meaningless platitude that expresses nothing more than "a principle which benefits those with means".

You are quite right to point this out so explicitly. It is something we all have to deal with -- the way that wealth and power and privilege insulate people from having to care about anything other than their own excess and immunize people against normal human emotions like empathy, kindness, the ability to recognize and appreciate your own luck and consider the misfortune of others, etc.

STEM folks are the most susceptible to this, I think -- working in a technical field tends to isolate you from other people. Being wealthy and working in a technical field is horribly alienating. You literally, over time, lose the capacity to understand others or consider them as people.

>I doubt those views are as popular and supported among the Time's readership as you may think.

Well yes, stating the the Times' readership is far removed from American popular opinion since the Times is by and for elites and elite-hopefuls who benefit from or hope to benefit from the status quo is exactly my point... How many in the US support universal health care? 60%? 70% How many NYT op eds have you seen in favor of it?

Not to mention the fact that the Times readership has been plummeting and continues to do so, so relying on this ever shrinking group as a barometer is questionable.

>Okay, you may be talking about small-c conservatism. As in "they're not in favour of throwing everything away and starting over as a civilisation". I don't know what "range of popularly supported views" you're referring to

I'll quote Greenwald since he doesn't like to mince words:

"If your goal were to wage war on media diversity in all of its forms, and to offer the narrowest range of views possible, it would be hard to top the roster of columnists the paper has assembled: Tom Friedman, David Brooks, Nick Kristof, Paul Krugman, Roger Cohen, Ross Douthat, Maureen Dowd, Frank Bruni, David Leonhardt, Charles Blow, Gail Collins, Bret Stephens, with Bari Weiss as a contributor and editor."

With Bret Stephens as a beautiful cherry on top as their most recent and high profile hire. https://theintercept.com/2017/08/31/nyts-newest-op-ed-hire-b...

>Oh, look! It's their 16-year old mistake

A 16-year old mistake that is a 16-year-old ongoing war responsible for the pointless deaths of hundreds of thousands and the rise of a horrific terror state. When the stakes are that high, you can't just brush off mistakes.

>where they trusted a journalist who mistakenly...

Nope, it wasn't a single endorsement, NYT was beating the drum for war throughout the entire buildup. They were entirely complicit in warming up public opinion to the idea, with article after article after...

It is the closest healthcare system in the developed world to free market capitalism since every other country has socialized medicine; a system much more free-market than ours would create an untenable hellscape for the vast majority of the population that would be voted into oblivion or cause massive riots and death. We sit at the most extreme free-market end of possible healthcare systems that could feasibly exist in reality.

Imagine a true free market healthcare system. Or just one step further than ours: no medicare. Imagine if every middle-aged middle or lower class American had to, as their parents age and require more healthcare than anyone can feasibly afford, choose: bankruptcy and permanent insurmountable debt, or watch your parents die knowing you chose not to stop it. What glorious freedom.

No they are the very definition of free-market capitalism. They are property, and property rights are the entire basis of capitalism. In particular, private ownership over the means of production (which is the definition of capitalism) requires the government grant monopolies to these owners.

Every property right is a government-protected monopoly; without these government monopolies what you have is an end to private property which may be desirable but is certainly not free-market capitalism, it is communism.

Or you can view it as a high-profile step in an ongoing employer power creep.

When you work for a company, how much of your life does that company own? Do you have any rights as a private citizen at all if you have an employer? Can they tell you what to say in your off time? Can they tell you who to vote for? Whether or not to stand when a certain song is being played? Whether or not you can own a gun? Which political organizations to join? How about where to eat? Who to be friends with? What conferences and meetups to attend? Whether or not to smoke and drink alcohol? How much to exercise? When and where to pee and to surrender your bodily fluids (step over here for this mandatory drug test, please)? Can they own the ideas that you think of when you are not working, like they do in tech?

The most fascist governments in all of human history would salivate at the chance to exert this much control over their people. While here if you disobey, you are not sent to jail or killed, instead you lose your livelihood and health care, which for the poor approaches a similar end result.

If you glance at the people who write their op-eds, which range from hyperconservative to moderately conservative, you will see they have no intention of presenting a wide range of popularly supported views and have not for a long time, they are interested primarily in defending the status quo as gatekeepers of what opinions are considered 'intelligent, reasonable' by defining the parameters of acceptable debate.

Not taking official positions allows a veneer of objectivity, and gives weight to them when they do come out (on bipartisan positions clearly in the national interest like supporting the Iraq war, for example!) but really I think what this is about is allowing the NYT corporation to find justification to fire uppity journalists for the sake of 'unbiasedness' who step out of line. This directive essentially says "while you work at NYT you are banned from using the Internet", so expect it to be enforced very selectively.

The moral answer is obviously no, given the context in which we live. That the moral and legal answers are completely opposite of each other is telling.

Imagine a natural disaster happens, and the strong hoard more water and food and shelter and medicine than they could ever use in a million lifetimes and protect it with guns. Then you tell the poor "in an emergency scenario, here are some options to keep you and your children alive a few more days that aren't totally safe but are better than nothing. Your makeshift roof might fall down in a bad storm, your food won't be perfectly clean, but it's better than doing nothing and waiting to die".

This is what is happening in the US. In this analogy, the natural disaster is free market capitalism, the strong are the ultrawealthy owning class, and the guns they use to protect their property are the police and legal system, who provide the violence that is inherently necessary to keep order in a massively unequal society.

I think the pathology of worship of competition and the credentialing system -- insisting you must be the best on a test that you are explicitly told means nothing is a mental disorder developed due to being raised in certain cultural contexts, not a cause of success -- do you really think breaking down in tears at the slightest inconsequential setback is a good recipe for success in the primarily luck-driven market economy we live in? How many times do eventually successful entrepreneurs fail and keep going undiscouraged?