hopefulengineer

China is just catching up to what the rest of the developed world has gone through

in the past there was no world trade organization and there were no multi-national free trade agreements. It's like saying china should be allowed to enslave people because it happened hundreds of years ago. There are now laws against it

I've seen this argument parroted multiple times on many different websites. It's either just the blind leading the blind or Chinese sock puppets spreading lies to justify blatant trade abuses

The biggest problem for small and medium communities is brain drain. It's a vicious death spiral because the smart and ambitious kids basically have to move away to large cities to get quality jobs.

The only solution I can think of is incentivizing remote work so people don't have to be concentrated in cities. You might not even have to incentivize it because it's a tremendous advantage as a tech company to be able to recruit from any where in the country where lots of talented people don't want to move for family reasons or don't want to live in a city

Musk is a great marketer and communicator, he convinces people that making luxury cars is saving the world because they are electric. The people buying them also feel like they are heroes saving the world. Humans have a need to feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves and Musk provides it.

Steve jobs did the same thing, their marketing was all about pushing how apple users think different and are changing the world by being mindless consumers

pretty depressing that you're better off buying politicians rather than actually building a good business if you want to get rich

What is the US supposed to do? You literally cited two cases, Ukraine and Libya, which are polar opposites. Ukraine the US is criticized for NOT intervening, middle east and Libya US is criticized FOR intervening.

And now we have Myanmar muslim situation and Yemen where people are begging for US intervention, but in all probability if we intervened we would be getting criticized for it by the same people asking us to intervene in a few years

1. US military is only 16-18% of federal spending. Entitlements like social security, medicaid, and welfare make up 65-70% of federal spending. The majority of military spending is on salaries and benefits anyway, it's essentially a welfare program itself

delivers the least

2. most major advancements in tech and healthcare are due to the military. Silicon Valley was built on military spending. Self driving cars were initially funded by DARPA. AI was funded by military. If you have a job in the tech industry you can thank the US military

There's also the minor detail of the US navy making global trade possible and the strength of the US military making traditional war pointless which has resulted in the last few decades being the most peaceful in human history in terms of probability of dying in combat

I mean Marin County is 80% Democrats is one of the best places to live in the world

sure, if you're white and well educated. The brown serf laborers have all been nicely segregated away so you don't have to see the misery

https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/03/17/marin-county-ra...

progressives would have an easier time convincing conservatives to support their policies if the most liberal places in the country weren't complete hell holes with the worst income inequality

be the change you wish to see in the world and all that

California, New Jersey, and Illinois all in bottom 5 for quality of life, New York at 37.

https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/rankings/quality-of-...

why would any company invest in R&D if it could just be immediately taken for free?

A russian newspaper was given access to the Russia dump in 2010 and there's no evidence they have conservative info, unless you're able to post a source

Older family friend made $30/hr in the 60-70s with pension and benefits working in a meat packing plant with a high school education. Same job today pays $15/hr with no benefits thanks to illegal immigration. There's a reason people like the Koch brothers spend millions in support of illegal immigration, they wanted to drive down the labor cost for jobs like the above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0

Offshoring and illegal immigration has killed low skill jobs and given billion dollar multinational corporations the ability to demand whatever they want from workers because they have unlimited labor supply.

This doesn't just effect low skill labor either, it forces more people to go to college and take on debt which then drives down the wages of high skill work as well. It's a scam and the american people should be angry

The old media powers want their control back, so they say "see the stupid masses need us to distill the information to them, these plebes can't handle it themselves". It all sounds very similar to what the European monarchy said about the United States, that democracy would fail and that the US would be begging for a king to rule them. Freedom has risks, but I prefer that to living in a gilded cage.

It mainly has to do with the fact that social media enabled things that these people didn't want like Brexit and Trump. They were singing social media's praises during Arab Spring

The difference is that most people weren't aware or didn't care until he announced his support of Trump. Nothing objectively changed, but like a bunch of robots everyone immediately started calling for him to be removed from the Facebook board of directors and the relationship with YC to be ended.

yup, Silicon Valley is a hivemind of people patting themselves on the backs as being intellectual contrarians. If you want to see what happens when someone with actual contrarian thought voices their opinion, see James Damore or Peter thiel and how fast they were excommunicated for their heresy.

you've romanticized higher education into something it's never been. It started off as a means for the children of the wealthy to network and show off that they were wealthy enough to waste years of their lives learning information with no practical value like Latin. Actual useful skills required for society to function were learned on the job

The most logical and efficient option is for the government to subsidize some open source books for crucial topics and then provide a testing and credential system to prove knowledge on said topic.

Why doesn't the government just use eminent domain to buy out some Nimby's in crucial areas and build some high rise apartments? The housing issue is 100% supply and demand. If I could wave a magic wand and create 1,000,000 apartments in SF rent prices would drop.

I'm assuming there's political pressure from wealthy land lords who don't want their cash cow slain?

Guide to implement neo-feudalism:

1. Remove all trade barriers, allowing corporations to outsource all low skill manufacturing jobs and ship back the finished product with no consequences

2. Don't enforce border laws, allowing the remaining low skill jobs that weren't offshored to be taken by illegal immigrants with no federal labor protection, forcing native citizens to go for higher education if they don't want to accept 3rd world wages

3. Create a student loan program that doesn't allow debt to be discharged and allows colleges to continually increase prices, resulting in skyrocketing tuition costs, turning your citizens into debt slaves and driving down skilled wages due to the flood of college graduates

4. Enjoy your increased profits as the middle class dies and is replaced by a two tier society of elites and plebes.

The current system has been created by corrupt politicians and the rich who have bought them. Productivity has increased but all the wealth is going to the rich because of current broken free trade laws allowing infinite labor arbitrage.

Nobody wants to hear it but the only reason people vote for anti-establishment candidates like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump is because the establishment is failing the people.

If Clinton got in we were basically 100% going to war with Russia since she promised to create a no fly zone in Syria. I consider that a win. Not getting into a nuclear exchange with NK is also a plus.

Trump is actually punishing China for the first time in decades. With Bolsonaro in office in Brazil we now control 80%+ of world soybean and corn production, meaning we can effectively starve China into compliance if necessary

Economy is doing well, wage growth is above inflation for the first time in decades, 3.1% as of today's jobs report.

A couple I can think of

1. Zero to one talks about the importance of optimism vs pessimism for the future. Compare Obama saying the US needs to get used to sub 2% GDP growth vs Trump saying we can hit 5%. Trump isn't afraid to think big at the very least when it comes to space force and similar big projects

2. Thiel is libertarian and sees Trump as a means to reduce government. Romney got in trouble a few years back for saying a hard truth, that 47% of people don't pay taxes and are never going to vote for less free stuff. At some point it becomes two wolves arguing with a sheep on what's for dinner

3. Personal gain, Thiel has Palantir as well as another company that would use AI to create a "virtual" boarder wall via image recognition

reposting what I've said about this before:

the US was the only country on earth that had nukes for 5 years and was unscathed from WWII. We could have demilitarized and enslaved the entire planet under threat of nuclear death, but instead we gave away billions to help Japan and Europe rebuild. There's never been a more selfless act in human history as far as a country not seizing an opportunity to gain power is concerned. There's probably never been a larger power disparity between a single country and the rest of the world than post WWII USA, and they did exactly nothing to take advantage of that disparity.

US is far from perfect, mainly due to unconstitutional actions by our intel community and military, but as far as superpowers go there's really no comparison.

I think having the last super-power behave like a good neighbor and a role model would have a more positive impact on the world

the US was the only country on earth that had nukes for 5 years and was unscathed from WWII. We could have enslaved the entire planet under threat of nuclear fire, but instead we gave away billions to help Japan and Europe rebuild. There's never been a more selfless act in human history as far as a country not seizing an opportunity to gain power is concerned. There's probably never been a larger power disparity between a single country and the rest of the world than post WWII USA, and they did exactly nothing to take advantage of that disparity.

Not to say US is innocent in recent years, but it's still minor considering there's nothing stopping us from plundering the world other than our own morals

I am not really defending China (just a bit, because I feel the racist undertone on those attacks)

Russia gets slammed just as hard on all fronts and nobody cares to defend them, China can take a little abuse.

Brinn was well known for having sex with female employees, seems like a thin line when there's such a power disparity. Based on insiders it seems like having sex with Sergey was a pretty sure way to get a promotion https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-...

Everybody is talking about the social aspect of Bolsonaro in brazil, but the major thing people are ignoring is the impact on China. Together US and Brazil produce 80%+ of the worlds soybeans and corn. Brazil has been friendly with China for years but Bolsonaro hates them more than Trump. If they work together they can effectively starve China into complying with trade laws

My point is that we should be offering citizenship to these people instead of H1B, which is glorified indentured servitude that only benefits giant corporations. Not to mention the blatant fraud in hiring practices companies use to justify more, ie: nobody in the US has 15 years of experience with ReactJS, tensorflow, or another technology that hasn't even existed that long, so we need more visas.

If it was actually about getting talent and not driving down wages we would be giving these people citizenship.

Majority of deaths are caused by fentanyl produced in foreign countries and shipped into the US to be cut into low quality drugs. So sanctioning those countries would be a good first step

The initial addiction though is due to doctor's and drug companies. There's plenty of evidence of drug companies pushing doctors to prescribe these drugs when they really aren't needed. Fine the companies, arrest the doctors and executives who push this stuff in the name of profit.

As for government, if you think the average congressmen cares about long term tax revenue vs that sweet pharma lobby money today, you're naive.

Government has no incentive to do anything about this. They would prefer disgruntled, jobless people keep themselves in a drug induced stupor to people getting angry at their government stabbing them in the back for multi-national corporations.

In reality these drugs coming in from foreign countries should be treated as an act of war, we've already lost significantly more Americans to this epidemic than Vietnam, the long term economic cost is probably in the hundreds of billions. If another country did that kind of damage via bombing we would retaliate, but these deaths from drugs don't have a big enough emotional impact to get citizens angry

It's supply and demand 101, illegal immigration combined with offshoring lowers wages and increases profit margin for the wealthy. Low wage jobs are taken by illegal immigrants, forcing US citizens to take on debt to go to college, where wages are also lowered because there are now thousands of college grads desperate to pay off their debt that can't be eliminated through bankruptcy due to congress being lobbied. A wonderful scam. Same thing with big tech companies pushing for more H1B to push down engineering wages and lower standard of living. This stuff shouldn't even be left vs right, it should be common sense.

Here's bernie sanders talking about how open boarders is pushed by the koch brothers to give them cheap labor

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf-k6qOfXz0

We're rapidly heading towards feudalism 2.0. You can already see it in the Bay Area(and essentially any major urban area) where only the wealthy can afford a home. The majority pay a large chunk of their income to their landlord