hogFeast

It is hard to find an explanation for this other than Germany has been co-opted by Russia. Ukraine has been separated from the herd and will surely fall. Putin will be on Germany's border by the end of the decade.

No, the page was created for "freedom day" (and the consistent predictions that it would unleash an apocalypse).

But the problem is that expertise is used to shut down debate...that is the reason why it is controversial.

People do not disbelieve experts because they think they are experts themselves. They disbelieve experts because the argument today is: I am an expert, I am right, if you disagree with me you are likely a danger to other people.

What has changed is the attitude of "experts" to other people. And I say "experts" because it is also increasingly common for people who have expertise in one subject to claim that they have expertise in another subject, and use that authority to elevate their claims beyond contention.

It isn't about scepticism or some kind of re-interpretation of scientific truth...it is one group of people attempting to use their authority to force through their view of what society should be like. If you want to see what the looks like, China is led by "experts"...it isn't pretty. I think Covid has brought this to the fore because you have scientific "experts" ruling on societal and political issues, not because people necessarily disbelieve those claims (ofc, experts and politicians are very clear to make this unclear...they want you to believe that the people who oppose them are lunatics, they aren't, they are rarely people who deny Covid is occurring or deny vaccines work...they just have different political views which suggest different solutions to those problems...there are no experts in politics, that is why we have voting, "experts" today are attempting to shut down debate, shut down politics, and would shut down voting if given the chance).

Also, another big issue is that experts undermine themselves. I can only speak to what is happening in the UK but experts here have made predictions that were fairly consistently untrue - https://data.spectator.co.uk/category/sage-scenarios - people did not disbelieve these predictions at the start, they disbelieve them now because the evidence is clear: the predictions are consistently wrong, and consistently used to justify a political decision that the "experts" want (one that has massive externalities in areas that the "experts" don't know about...paragraph 3 again). This happens, no-one can predict the future, no-one can predict the course of a pandemic 100%...but the problem is that the "experts" are saying: we can predict this, we are correct all the time...again, this is something totally different. Again, what has changed is the experts, not the people.

The principle of requiring healthcare staff to get the vaccine is already established. Most countries in Europe already do this. This is not the same thing as requiring all employees to be fired if they fail to have a medical procedure that the President deems necessary. Your point, however, is totally anti-science: 500 years ago, would you ask for someone to be fired because they didn't use the appropriate amount of leeches? It is amazing that the people who go on about this kind of thing don't understand basic elements of what science is.

So your employer is allowed to sterilise employees with disabilities? Perhaps only those employees with mental illness? If you question whether this is realistic, this happened in the US 70 years ago, and the very same principle was used to sterilise disabled people en masse. The ends do not justify the means, this is ubermensch ideology (only those who can rise above morality and do things that others are unwilling to do will possess the future...it is madness, it is something that hasn't existed in politics since the 30s...and, to be clear, it existed in the US too).

The ruling that you mention was also used to sterilize disabled people. It is funny that you mention Nazi Germany...they did that there too. But, of course, everyone else is just overreacting, the ends justify the means, only people of true vision can break free of the rules that limit others, the ubermensch has appeared, hail.

And yes, there are medical exemptions, there are religious exemptions, there are lots of exemptions because, again, it is fairly obvious that the state forcing people to have medical procedures is not a good idea. Trying to say that you have suffered so much already (please, pathetic) so the vaccine is fine is one of the weakest arguments. That can be used to justify anything if you just tell people how hard your life is. You have no moral compass. Something is a good idea or not.

Okay, so you don't understand what social policy is either. Wow.

It always seemed very tiring to me: work out who the person is, work out what political allegiance they have, and then decide to agree or disagree with them/potentially having to reorder or reinterpret X or Y to make it all fit.

Regardless of that: if I am someone who believes that vaccines do not work (and btw, in the context of American politics...this does not seem a wild conspiracy, you see the same level of nonsense distributed by people on the left too) then am I likely to be convinced by the govt attempting to rescind support from me? No. If anything, that suggests to me that I am probably correct.

In other words, the point of removing unemployment insurance is to hurt people who disagree with me...this is not smart (and again, an ironic position to take from people who view themselves as very liberal and open...next-level stuff).

No, I am not. People are paying for the medical resources they use. Nice try though (I would learn more about social policy, the point of social policy is that it is for everyone, not people who agree to a medical procedure, not people who have political views you agree with...this is why the US doesn't have a welfare state, because people believe money will go to people "who aren't like them").

Economic policy has had a huge role in that. If you are wealthy, you can borrow money for free, you can pay no taxes, and you can invest your free money at 10%+...oh, and the govt will bail you out if it goes wrong.

I worked in equity research at a financial adviser, I am not anti-markets at all (although am probably towards the left of things, for economics more than anything...substantial inequality is not sustainable economically) but the reason why the US doesn't have downward mobility is because rich people do not need skills. You need money to get rich, not skills.

If you look at other countries with similar economic models, for example the UK, you see much higher downward mobility. Again, the simple reason for that is less buoyant financial markets (and btw, UK property has gone through the roof and wealthier individuals in the UK own proportionally more property...the US is really, really out there). The only place that is really comparable are explicitly corporatist states like Germany and China...and the former has (tbf, fairly weak) mechanisms to guarantee a certain living standard.

I don't really understand the US system at all. The welfare state is Bezos and Musk's space projects. And people wonder why their fellow citizens are struggling? You are rich, but you live in a society where many other people are suffering...that isn't wealth.

Investment management is a classic example of this. CFA has a low pass rate (it isn't that hard really, tens of thousands of people do the exam in India and China so that impacts the pass rate), most people do it but, ofc, the really useful knowledge can't be tested...picking a stock isn't like passing a exam. And worse, you get lots of people who pass the exam, acquire false sense of confidence, and then make mistakes (or don't ever move beyond the "parrot" level of intelligence).

I think maths is another one, as conventionally taught. I hated maths at school because it was largely sitting down in a room, doing the same thing over and over again like a computer...quite reasonably, I asked myself whether this was a productive use of my time. As an adult, I have taught myself everything again, it was far more enjoyable and useful because I actually took the time to understand the concepts (and no, none of the stuff I did at school was useful, it was just mindless computation).

I don't necessarily think exams are a bad idea but they don't produce knowledge, experience, or real expertise. They are often misused (as is certification, I knew a guy who worked as a fund manager and was a senior member of the CFA for ethics and standards...he stole from employees regularly).

The logic used in these "ideas" is so comically bad that you know an economist must have thought of them.

Ah, I can see you are real expert. I look after two elderly people, probably the biggest problem that they have is with applications that change state based on how you touch it. Even something as simple as picking up a call in Android is totally unintuitive (if anything, Android has got worse...tbh, I barely understand the incantations that one has to perform to do things on there now). Another big one is hidden menus, they don't understand that you have to click the burger for this hidden menu or that an arrow on the button means you can click through (Apple is actually better in how they structure menus).

I understand why these products have been designed this way but I don't think the people who make them understand how badly they are designed for some people. I am a web dev and, imo, a lot of this comes from ways to make your app "look cool" on mobile. Add some buttons, make your app a bit longer vertically...it isn't the end of the world.

I will say though, they find tablets far easier than computers. Tablets present a very simple interface of things to do. Computers seem more complicated (ironically, you see this with kids today even young adults in their early 20s...they have no idea how computers actually work, and often don't understand anything beyond...click this, and app opens). Both hate phones, they can use them but they feel uncomfortable using them.

On the OP, you just have to take stuff over. If you are paying bills or whatever, you should just do it yourself. It will save you time.

France weighs very heavily. With Germany, they led the move earlier this year for the investment deal with China. The decision was made to become reliant on China, and the pandemic significantly worsened this dependency because China's faster recovery essentially mitigated the economic effect of the pandemic.

But it was a choice. Germany's politics appears to have been totally compromised at the highest level by Russia and China (Scholz seems to have been hand-picked by China, his positions on China couldn't be more worrying regardless of what he has said in the past month). France is moving in the same direction, although it is hard to separate this from the profound weakness of Macron.

There is no equivalence with the US either. The French position (and German) position on Iran makes no sense, it is the equivalent of: pretend the problem doesn't exist, and it won't exist (again, with policy being led by business interests). The interests of the US overlap totally with the EU, the US has been funding European defence for decades to the tune of tens of trillions but, of course, France and Germany will continue to nuzzle up to Iran, China, and Russia because they waved their chequebook in front of exporters in economically weak regions.

The only saving grace has been the EU which has effectively counterbalanced France and Germany in these areas (they stopped the investment deal with China). But, again, the policy positions of France and Germany are incomprehensible. It is not that France is insignificant but that their policy is totally at odds with the US and the EU. The reason they aren't opposing China is because there is a strong desire to support China.

I don't think it is only about being personable. That is obviously very important but it is as much about being able to insert yourself into someone else's life and help them. You meet someone, they have a problem, and you can say: "Oh, I know X or Y". That is very big, being a connector to lots of people with skills is the same as having those skills yourself.

But I agree totally. Most of my family worked in the public sector, I had no idea about any of this stuff until I started trying to get a job. And some of the people who I grew up with who were totally incompetent but were sociable/well-connected ended up doing very well (I went to a private school, so my sample is quite interesting: I know a guy who was very smart, went to college, trained in law at the top law school in my country, worked hard, but couldn't get it together ended up becoming a chef...meanwhile a guy who got straight Ds, scraped into uni, did no work whilst there is working as a PM at a top fund manager...they don't teach you this part of life in school).

On the OP: college isn't real life, it isn't anything like real life at all because you don't need to be an expert or have knowledge to extract economic value (and that isn't a bad thing at all). As someone who went to private school and saw a decent amount of privilege, it didn't helped kids who came from poorer backgrounds. These kids went to college (which probably would have happened anyway, they are smart) but most (not all tbf) struggled in the real world because they had poor social skills. I have a long list of utterly mediocre human beings who are punching well above their weight in life (and tbf, this is a bad thing...the guy I mention above shouldn't be managing anyone else's money...not to be harsh, he just shouldn't), and a list of one or two people who came from a poorer background and got out. I think that is down to a combination of socialization, understanding business, and nepotism (I wouldn't overestimate the latter, all of the people who punch above their weight had the ability to walk into a room and make another person feel like they had known them forever).

The BMJ, ironically, is prone to publishing articles that make unverified claims without making clear rather significant conflicts of interest.

Infamously, they published a largely spurious article which claimed that UK govt cuts had killed hundreds of thousands of people, they failed to make clear several aspects of the data that didn't support their conclusion which ofc was that doctors should get more money, they also failed to mention that one of the authors ran a company selling stuff to the NHS that was linked to the conclusions or that the lead author of the paper had no statistical training.

Unfortunately, life is like this. Doctors would prefer that people just listen to them, they are very serious people after all, we should believe everything they say. Most fact-checking services in the UK have a ludicrously political bent, they pick whatever facts and sources support their argument. In practice, they are just attempting to stop all debate about a topic. Life is messy, people will have different opinions even if they acknowledge the same facts, proof is often messy and unclear (if you look at some of the forecasts for Covid this year, just ludicrously wrong and all errors in the same direction...we need criticism, we need debate...afaik, only one publication has actually highlighted all these forecasters who dominate the media making consistently bad forecasts...where are the fact-checkers now? Too busy hunting down shadows on Twitter.). Deal with life as it is, not life as you wish it was (again, doctors in the UK are more guilty than anyone in civil society of this error, their lobbying/political power is immense, their view is: might makes right).

They are going to get popped by journos.

Twitter got popped left and right by journos and this was despite the platform being a huge source of revenue for the media, and the owner's politics.

The week they go public, the stories will start getting published about the content on there, the weak moderation (community moderation...lol), journos sending emails to companies asking whether they like their ads appearing along X or Y figure, etc.

The line that Huffman has taken before on this stuff (basically live and let live) works if you are private. It will go down extremely badly after the IPO.

Sorry. Reddit is already dead.

(Btw, I have no idea why this is...it makes no logical sense because being a public company changes nothing. But the media seems to understand that they can print something, that thing can potentially move the stock, and then they can bounce management into doing something).

The working day was 10-16 hours for most of the 19th century. But work then was totally different: a lot of it was piece-rate work, most factories didn't directly employ anyone, etc. (this was also true of proto-industry which is often used as some kind of proof that working conditions can be different).

This came down to 8 hours per day as the labour movement grew stronger. The concept of burnout makes no sense outside of the present, it was just politics. The move to 8 hour days was faster in countries that had tighter labour supply and/or greater political representation for working people (i.e. Australia and the US).

The structure of work has rarely been determined by efficiency. There is a greater context of norms, other obligations that people have, economics, politics, etc. Even within the developed world and within individual countries, there is significant variation. Indeed, the only limits within most countries is at the extreme i.e. an employer requiring 12 hours of labour without a break or something.

The most "efficient" kind of work is piece rate. Some people do this today but I think that most people chose not to do this because it is inconvenient.

You have explained the mindset I am referring to. Thanks. Saved me time.

How do you think scientific progress happens? They didn't just have flame wars in the past, they literally set humans alight. Even today, science is a very emotive topic (I studied economic history, people have fierce arguments around 17th century agricultural practices...humans are emotional beings).

I think the problem today is that people are unwilling to debate emotional issues, unwilling to have their own views challenged, and confuse their own emotional response to some topics with their own feelings of safety and well-being.

It is perfectly fine to have strong opinions, but because you hold a strong opinion does not mean you have to go to the grave with it.

Also, I am not really sure that there as many flame wars as people think. A lot of what people call "flame wars" are people attempting to trigger other people. If you get triggered by what someone says online, you only have yourself to blame.

HN tends to attract people from an educational/professional background that encourages critical thinking.

I couldn't disagree more.

HN is one of the few places where you will get people who have no idea about a topic expounding at length on that topic. The psychology of this place is fascinating.

It is unrelated to education and, for some people, education is deleterious. Engineering is, in my experience, definitely one of the worst subjects for teaching false confidence. I worked in finance, sometimes client-facing, and worked a lot with individual investors in a business I started...any kind of engineering background was a red flag because, time after time, they rarely accepted the limits of their knowledge (doctors is another one, I don't think anyone who has met a doctor would dispute this either). Engineering backgrounds also seem to the cornerstone of most modern authoritarian states (the CCP and Singapore's fetish for engineers as an example).

So learning critical thinking is something that is totally distinct from attending university or even the job you do. People who are totally ignorant of something are far more aware of the limits of their knowledge. Not always, they are probably more prone to irrational or emotional reasoning but, again, I don't think critical thinking is something that can be taught in every case.

On the original post, I think people believe that it is difficult to have conversations about politics because of the behaviour of a small minority of people. In some online places that minority is very large. And in many communities, moderation is also aimed at limiting disagreement. The result is inevitable. HN has the community it moderates for.

I used to play League...then I found out everyone who played that game had slept with my mother.

I explained it already. The reason why you don't think it has been explained is the same reason you don't understand. I said nothing about prop trading...but you don't are missing knowledge that you get taught first year in a finance course, and you were a engineer...as I said, I don't think you have any awareness about the limits of your knowledge.

You still don't understand the mistake you have made. Again, don't go into finance. You don't understand basic elements of what is going on here.

You have it on in the background. Some streams have a very engaged community, everyone is there flooding the chat all the time. But in most streams the viewers aren't engaging, they have it on the background, it is on their second monitor while they play games or work or whatever. Viewership went way up during the pandemic too.

I don't think it is for everyone but I prefer it to TV/Netflix/whatever. I didn't even play games when I started watching (I do now, but only once or twice a week). Some people prefer amateur porn to Brazzers.

T1 is a very extreme example. He seems to have no life, he plays the same game for 10-12 hours/day, he is pretty toxic, he seems to have few other interests and no social life...that is fine, he is an astute businessman but most other streamers aren't doing this. They play variety, they do IRL, they have social lives, they take breaks. Even xQc, another streamer who is notorious for 20+ hour streams every week, plays variety and goes outside...sometimes (he recently did an IRL stream at Universal).

So I think it is like a lot of entertainment: the job can be intense, there is often little separation between personal and private but the pay is generally pretty good. Even on Twitch which really struggles with promoting smaller streamers, there are people far down the chain earning $50k/year with relatively small communities. Is that better than a startup? No. But not everyone can move to SF or go to college either.

I don't think being swatted or harassed is that common either. If you are a big streamer and you leak where you live, then maybe...but it doesn't happen as much as it used to (xQc got swatted repeatedly this year, and someone broke into his house...it does still happen).

Also, Twitch chat is toxic but most of the negative comments are not serious. I understand why normies wouldn't understand that but part of the fun for (some) streamers is battling with chat. It isn't a very serious place.

So you are saying that they attempted to write off taxes and also attempted to minimise the estimate...you should not go into finance my friend.

And yes, your response is the kind of misconception that I think the journalists banked on.

It was. You don't understand what you have linked me.

Trump's tax cut - 12% of GDP CARES - 12% of GDP Further stimmy (iirc, this was a bill passed in December after the election) - 5% of GDP Biden Stimmy - 10% of GDP Infrastructure Bill - 15% of GDP

This is why the CBO's projections have suddenly become very controversial. As I made clear, this is not all current spending. It is difficult to talk concisely about all the packages above because the cadence is totally different but the quantum of the effect in the medium-term is 40-50% of GDP (it is probably a bit higher tbh). This only becomes apparent over the medium-term and future % of GDP, obviously, depends quite heavily on GDP growth elsewhere in the economy. The size of the fiscal stimulus being applied however is massive (the chart you linked me shows 10ppts of growth...you realise this supports my argument? 25% growth is a lot in one year...it hasn't happened outside of wartime afaik).

I think everyone, including the writer of the article, understands the mechanism at play.

That is the most interesting aspect of these articles. They are optimised for the title, not the content. Ignore the oil spill: if you lose $100m, you won't pay tax on that..."Billionaire pays no tax" is a better headline than "Billionaire loses lots of money". If you think that a wealth tax is a good idea, fine just say that...don't bother with the article. But the reason most journalists don't write about wealth taxes is because they lack the actual knowledge to understand why we don't have wealth taxes, they just write misleading bullshit about income taxes instead.

This isn't just splitting hairs either. There is enough real information on inequality in the US (this is something that most journalists are very clever about...this is an article about inequality because journalists know that the target audience will interpret it that way). You don't need the bullshit articles. These articles misinform the public, they don't need to be written.

The evidence for the expectations model has changed significantly over the past two years or so. Obviously, central banks are going to move slower given that expectations has been the consensus for two decades. But I think academics are realising (about seven years after markets realised) that central banks have a huge role in signalling and the consumers form their expectations about inflation based on the past (note: the last point is compatible with evidence for expectations when inflation is falling...in other words, if inflation was falling over your sample you would be unable to distinguish between an expectations-based theory and a moving average-based theory of inflation).

Also, investors won't start exiting the market if they expect expansion in housing stock. Financial markets trend, they absorb information imperfectly, they overreact, and there is massive volatility as all this occurs. Indeed, there are some investors who base their investment strategy on the inability of markets to react to capital cycles (Marathon Asset Management have written books about this). Investors have different time scales, if the housing stock was going to expand then you would see capital pile into the sectors because people will chase that growth expecting to flip at a higher price at the top.

It is amazing to me that people don't get this. Government spending of something like 40-50% of GDP over the past few years. That spending has been leaking into the money supply because the market can't absorb the debt (this is amazing given that all the big exporters own massive amounts of dollars). Handing large stacks of cash to business and consumers. What could possibly go wrong? The last time there was something like this was in the late 60s: the US was consuming heavily, was a huge importer, exporters collecting dollar balances, fiscal expansion into infinity...it is very exceptional (and to be clear, the level of expansion today is something like 4x what happened then).

The supply of goods hasn't really changed much. Labour supply is lower by a couple of percent. Raw materials prices up a bit. Demand is up by something like 20-30%.

Also, it is worth noting that what you are seeing in the US is worse because there has been the highest level of growth in govt spending (over the past few years, to be clear), and the most amount of fiscal leakage. Even Canada, which really went balls to the wall, isn't seeing the same level of inflation.

A good explainer is - https://www.bridgewater.com/its-mostly-a-demand-shock-not-a-...