TomMckenny

True but then none of us would be alive to comment about it.

Shouldn't that be “e e cummings”?

Logically I don't see how a n>2 person marriage would be more likely to be abusive than a two person marriage.

A variation on Poe’s Law essentially

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

We really don't have any direct, past precedent for this type of situation.

Unfortunately we do have precedent. Through all of history almost no one owed their own home. It was by extraordinary government intervention in the 20th century through loan programs, incentives and building, and impediments to speculation, that made it uniquely happen in our era.

As the government steps back from continuous intervention favoring individual home ownership and low to nonprofit housing, the more profitable rental economy will re assert itself: it is always more profitable to own a property to rent out then to live in it and the market will reflect that if left to itself.

Price fluctuations (eg 2008) do not change the fact that land price increases have far outpaced wages for decades. So yes, it is rational to be very concerned.

And note that Zillow is not selling these 7k properties to would be homeowners but to investors.

They may lobby and campaign finance their way to some very inconvenient legislation but to consistently hurt EV they would need to turn it into a political shibboleth in the way the oil industry did with climate change.

Naturally I hope this does not happen but it may not be much harder than gaining the sympathies of a few pundits with strong Nielsen ratings.

Rent seeking kills innovation. Patents as currently legislated, issued and resold are overwhelmingly just tools for rent seeking.

There probably is a theoretical way to do it that encourages innovation but it’s hard to see a society ruled by self serving individuals not wrecking it pretty fast.

This means that raising housing costs, interest rates and debt, taxes, and medical costs reduce his figure for foreign imports as a percentage of spending. That increasing the amount spent on those things is “good news” regarding trade deficits.

Unless he is using these numbers to suggest we need to prioritize driving down land prices and rentier practices etc more than worrying about trade imbalance. But this certainly does not seem like his intent.

At any rate, the numbers 11% and 3% are as fictional as the Taylor Lorenz quote but the amount of skepticism differs greatly. This hints more of ideology based beliefs than fact based.

But if they called it ‘rent’ instead of ‘tax’ there would be far less outrage. Strange value system.

so far it seems like "no", or "not yet"

On the contrary, it does indeed and has been known to do so for many decades [0,1]

Indeed, in Citizens United, SCOTUS in the concurring opinion claimed the founders intent in the 1st amendment was to allow monied interests to own and influence media for political purposes.

The question is not whether distortion exists but how prevalent it is.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Akre

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#News_media_and_pr...

Note it is backwards to think that if a platform _fails_ to carry the regime's message then _the platform_ is impeding freedom rather than noting that it is _the government_ that is applying anti-freedom pressure on a dissenting _non government_ organization.

Youtube is _not_ the government but by reigning in falsehoods, is acting in _opposition_ to the government here. So what Youtube is doing is the very definition of _freedom_ of expression. A government pressuring them to carry pro-government messages is the crime, not the other way around.

You are now having the government and pro-government voices pressure non-government organizations to publish pro-government material while claiming that it "protects" freedom of speech. This the exact _opposite_ of freedom of speech, it is in fact forced propaganda.

So indeed there is no "but" because it is _the government_ that is in the wrong by pressuring publishers in what they must include.

Even if what you described about current American elections was actually the case (it isn't)

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13301372676801863...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13304872462360289...

https://twitter.com/LizRNC/status/1330186217355350020

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13303679886215946...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13305556452134830...

https://twitter.com/TeamTrump

If you were a businessman in Germany during WW2 you would not have been a brave warrior fighting to preserve democracy, you'd just have moved on with your life and kept running your business, as would have (and as did) most people.

Different people have different opinions about right and wrong. A different set behaviors by a large number of people would bring about a different outcome. Left unchecked, the luxury of dissent becomes more and more painful for company and individual.

I'm am guessing you do not live in Hungary, Poland, Brazil or Turkey either.

Everything in the US is political now: face masks, 5G networks, vaccines, mail. Facebook dominates people's lives yet is an endless spam of politics. Google search is facing anti-trust because it is "liberal", while the ISPs and other monopolies are strangely un-molested. Every tech company, apolitical or not, is automatically suspected by half of the country mostly because of their address.

But just for clarity, the major US debate is whether the election was fraudulent or not which is considerably higher stakes than a contest of identity. You can hedge your corporate bets by having no opinion on the mater but necessarily one of those parties is directly subverting the democracy. For anyone ok with that, then silence is undoubtedly a profitable path: why cut your business in half and alienate half of potential customers/employees over mere democracy?

It is indeed as physics is an abstraction of reality. And both are conspicuously accurate far more often than not.

"An adjustment to suffering that requires powerful people to loose some power" means exactly the same thing as "an adjustment to suffering that requires a powerful class to loose some power."

Often attempted adjustments are categorized as blind ideology and, by implication, chaos. For the erudite it's called "abstract ideology", for the less so it's simply labeled "communism". The effect is the same: portray reform as destruction and create comfort for the beneficiaries of society in the status quo.

Conversely, both laissez faire-ism and Ayn Rand's thesis are both very much ideologies but they are not called that by those who approve of them. I know of no possible definition of "ideology" that does not also apply to the both the American and French revolution as well as the motivation of every soldier in every army and indeed to the ethics driving every action that is not self absorbed.

Blindly following some policy like "burn all X" or "policy Y always results in maximum wealth" is disastrous. But I'd say that that differs significantly from an ideology like "all human beings are entitled to X".

Yeah, it's almost as if human beings care about concrete, meaningful changes that affect their lives and not some all-encompassing, abstract class struggle.

The plantation owner worries only about the bottom line and the suburbanite is upset that the homeless are visible not that they exist. When these positions become virtues and problems are dismissed as abstractions, the society dies.

[edit]

I had a lengthy more thoughtful post here but it seems I had mistaken a pronouncement for a discussion. The near instant voting response made me realize that absurdity, especially in light of the fact that I am responding to the second of two posts by the site's governance where college professors are singled out as a threat to freedom even as unmarked vans and secretive police round up the "dreaded" diversity proponents in Portland and other cities.

So I shall leave it to persons devoted to maximizing short term profits from new products and the "freethinking" commentary from persons seeking funding from same, to bloviate on how to "protect" society from intellectuals and liberalism.

It might seem that way but, as the many posts bellow show, that is literally what is being advocated. There should be no disclaimer on posts advocating drinking Lysol because: the parents would have hurt the kid anyway, there are already warnings on the bottle and, the sole remedy should be punishing the parent. It is Poe's law incarnate.

Facebook is not the web, it is a toy devoted to advertisement.

It is not were potential Einsteins or Galileos debut their big new ideas. It is not were cover ups about WMD or anything else are initially exposed. All of that is very sensibly on real sites. To the contrary, rather than being where good ideas originate, it's sole purpose is to attract eyes for advertisement.

The catastrophic problem is their algorithm that massively pushes conspiracy theories, outrage and demagogue's propaganda that would otherwise never be seen and would never get beyond the crackpot website they happened to be posted on.

Facebook is not were any valuable information originates, it is instead where failed ideas and advertisements are endlessly push on it's users. But any attempt to correct that algorithm, manually or otherwise is now portrayed as censorship by those who benefit form it to get support from everyone else. Likewise, it is very effectively used as a propaganda tool by some parties yet ironically any attempt to slow that is portrayed as censorship.

It is not remotely where ideas fairly compete. To the contrary: shocking but false ideas are given an enormous advantage but adding an annotation contradicting them is called censorship. To such an extreme that there is a warning on Lysol bottles not to drink it but if a meme on Facebook telling people to drink Lysol has a similar warning attached by Facebook, it is called censorship.

The notion Facebook could ever afford to bother with any but a tiny silver of the most conspicuously false and harmful posts, let alone judge every post for accuracy, is not reasonable. It could not remotely be picking sides on every tv debate, reading every user's post or reviewing posts about the photoelectric effect for accuracy. And at any rate, Facebook is not the web.

I'm pointing out a problem with a real post that actually exists right at this very moment.

So the enormously popular post telling parents to make their kids drink Lysol should not have even the slightest warning next to it because the poster could be like Galileo or Einstein?

Because they were hammered into submission by demagogues and their supporters who rely on disinformation and conspiracy theories to retain power.

...the bifurcation of the American dream. It used to be that working-class folks could reasonably aspire to buy a house. ...So unemployment is going to be bad for one part of America...

Housing as institutional investment and institutional land speculation is a condensed example of why stocks can rise during an economic catastrophe, why housing will become yet more unaffordable and what drives increasing inequality between wage earners and asset owners.

Redfin's stock has been part of the record breaking rally during the pandemic because the drop in housing prices that would have kept them somewhat in sync with a drop in income will instead be at least partially absorbed by Redfin and other speculators and so make housing even more unaffordable. As we know, the model is to offer a desperate seller a low price then keep the unit empty until a new higher price is met. So a unit stays empty longer than necessary, prices are kept high by a seller that can afford to do so (ie Redfin) and profit is made from widespread economic hardship.

In particular the housing crisis is not due to bifurcation between wage earners, it's a simple perpetual shift upward in housing prices that affects everyone who works for a living. Portraying it as bifurcation obfuscates the cause of the problem by creating a conflict between wage earners with different incomes while portraying the speculator's actions a inevitable, natural and harmless. But housing is not expensive because some people earn what they are worth, it is expensive because housing is used as investment.

the risk of getting Covid19 and not getting access to hospital resources is much lower than expected, so it was true.

Not quite true, NYC was over stressed and there is at least one mass grave and are still corpses in refrigerator trucks.

Luckily, social distancing worked better than expected: peak daily US death was reduced to approximately 2,700 rather than approximately 3,000. And the curve was flatten more than expected with the death rate remaining at peak longer.

One can't extrapolate from the success of social distancing to imply that _not_ doing social distance would be less harmful.

The results of our original experiment turned out to be different than our expectations

To the contrary, the proposed solution worked as expected. The social distancing combined with state-level quick action reduced the severity of the predicted disaster. In addition, people who would normally go to the ER "just in case" did not for fear of contagion. Or because they lost medical insurance. Or because visiting a GP became difficult and so there were fewer referrals. All reducing strain on hospital resources.

Certainly, The predictions of what would happen without out social distancing still stand as the data behind it is unchanged. And if that isn't enough, there is the 10x fatality rate of Sweden vs its neighbors.

Since Sweden dropped from the narrative when it showed serious differences from its neighbors, it hints that criticism of social distancing is either (justifiably) emotional or (unjustifiably) politically. If it were from an honest appraisal by epidemiologists or economist, there would concrete counter projections and remedies rather than imprecise claims about it's success and ambiguous calls as to what a new policy should be.

It is horrible that the US death total exceeds the Vietnam war and that there is serious economic hardship. That is the terrible truth for natural disasters when no plans are in place (let alone actual preparation) and the response is slow. I hope the lesson from this disaster is that we are prepared next time rather than convincing ourselves nothing serious happened.

yeah, dictatorships and leaders with and autocratic mentality like to downplay disasters. An obviously harmful policy.

Perhaps the propaganda efforts are comparable but I submit that it is a topic separate form Chinese censorship that extends well outside China.

Likewise, in a discussion of US propaganda, to bring up Chinese censorship as a rebuttal would be a strangely off topic distraction.

It's absurd to compare the US to China because:

1: It's not the topic

2: it's a blatant falacy

3: it distracts from the main point adding unneeded emotionalism

and 4: Even with it's current slide toward Eastern European style strongman state, it's not remotely as bad to it's people.

Another perhaps core issue is whether the party in power gets there by majority will or is there due to legalisms, archaic power distribution and voter suppression. The party that people didn't vote for is not likely to run anything in their interest.

Even if Popcorntime was considered functionally the same as Grokster, GitHub certainly isn't. In order for GitHub to be held liable, not only would the DMCA have to stretch to Grokster like tools but even further to anyone who provides any service to such a team building such a tool.

So any Patreon account or Slack account a Popcorntime team uses. I imagine this is what The Motion Picture Association is aiming for.

And as you hint, the difference between the court's regard for ordinary people vs powerful organizations is especially stark here. Copyright infringement and any tool that might be used for it is mightily prohibited while car theft tools like the Slim Jim are still manufactured and easily available in stores. But only tools made by less powerful groups like Popcorntime and Grokster, as far back as VCRs, those tools produced by large corporations remain legal.

All accurate and objective and good for everyone to know early rather than late. Moving a bit further from the specifics, it's worth noting that this is not a natural state of affairs. Humans evolved to be in groups of about 30-100 people who they knew their whole lives and thus making catastrophic deception nearly impossible. Likewise vast sums of wealth did not exist nor total social and fiscal isolation surrounded by the complete opposite that characterize our city streets and daily life.

My point is that human psychology did not evolve in the context of our current world and will have enormous difficulty dealing with its bad sides. Although the specifics will vary, the number of people in the poster's position is undoubtedly enormous, with the vast majority too tired or ashamed of discussing it or just blaming themselves. This being the case, it would be nice to have serious study of it and resources to address it more effectively. Not to criticize any poster, but it is unfortunate than seeking advice from the web is currently the best one can do.

Will there be objections from companies that have been part of the biggest stock rally in generations, large companies that took piles of the small business bail out money and, companies like Domino's that have thrived yet had to be forced to allow employees to wear even legally required masks?