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US spends over $8,000 per capita on healthcare, compared to about $4,000 in UK and Japan, both of which have universal health care.
This isn't a problem tech can solve. It's a problem only politics can solve.
The headline reads: "the costs outweigh the benefits."
Except there's no mention of the greatest benefit: improved quality of life for all participants.
I explained very clearly why the circumstances surrounding the expeditions pushed the Europeans to be more greedy than their Chinese counterparts. The fact is that the Europeans pillaged the New World and the Chinese didn't. I believe mainly economic considerations led this to be the case. I don't know what your explanation is.
Don't be so sensitive that any hint of criticism as taken as a condemnation of your culture. I don't see how "opposing arguments" add anything to the conversation. I know very well that the reconquista was just finishing when Columbus set sail and that Spain had been dominated by an Islamic caliphate for centuries. I don't think that excuses his atrocities.
"the English, which didn't have all that wealth"
What? The British mastered the slave trade and its Caribbean slave colonies were perhaps the most productive of the era.
I neither wrote not implied that Europeans are evil -- you assumed that. The fact is that colonialism and the slave trade, despite creating massive amounts of wealth for some, were horrific for its subjects. And Western Europeans were the first to scale both colonialism and the slave trade globally. This isn't debatable, it's plain fact.
Unfortunately, people like the interviewee explain away early western economic domination by referring to Western European intellect and culture, and ignoring the dark side. This has been the case since the beginning of economic history. Adam Smith didn't even bother to discuss slavery in The Wealth of Nations even though he knew how critical it was to the development of capitalism.
It's time to be honest about how we got here. If the ugly truth offends you, I don't know what to tell you.
This article ignores decades of scholarship about the roots of the industrial revolution and capitalism.
The short answer is that the Europeans (maybe for some of the reasons given in this article), were greedier than the Chinese.
It's likely that the Chinese empire reached the New World before Columbus. http://www.economist.com/node/5381851. But the thought of enslaving an entire population and stealing all their natural resources didn't even occur to the Chinese explorers. Whereas the Chinese expeditions were financed by the empire, the Europeans expeditions were financed by debt, so the men needed to arrive on land and quickly acquire wealth for themselves at all costs, or else they would return to Europe broke or never return at all. And this led them to commit the horrendous acts in the New World we know so much about.
Western Europe, now full of gold and silver stolen from the New World had levels of wealth it had never experienced. This led to increased demands for certain goods (like English wool), which forced the population off of the land and into urban centers, thus creating the landless working class. This process was called The Enclosure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure. An urban, landless working class, was a necessary condition for the industrial revolution. The extraordinary wealth ready to be invested in industry, a product of colonialism and the slave trade, was another necessary condition for the industrial revolution.
Wage theft causes American workers to lose an estimated $50 billion dollars per year.
Usually low-income workers, many of whom are not in a social class where they're friends with a smart lawyer, are the victims.
This is just the SV flavor of what millions of American workers suffer from year-round.
This guy is an absolute douchebag. He's a disrespectful piece of shit and anyone involved with Soylent in any capacity ought to be ashamed with his antics. For those who don't know, Lincoln Heights is a working class neighborhood, that as of the last 2-3 years is undergoing rapid gentrification.
There's no such thing as reverse racism. There's only racism.
Give it up. I left out an important part in my original post: this guy only got media attention in America. No media attention in the Arab world, because being a Google employee didn't make his sacrifice any more significant. The European media had enough sense to not focus on this guy either. Only the insufferable mainstream American media is self-centered enough to push the narrative that an employee of an American company was instrumental in the Arab Spring.
Please, cut it out with the bullshit. This guy played a negligible role in the Arab Spring. The only reason he received the media attention he did was because he held a prominent position at an American company.
Calling him the Arab Spring's instigator is an insult to Egyptian activists and organizers, not to mention the revolutionaries in Tunisia.
This mentality was necessary for national survival given their history. From being doped up and murdered by imperialist westerners during the opium wars to being occupied and raped by imperial japan.
A unite and take on the world mentality is what allowed China to win sovereignty, and given how far they've come, I'd say the "us against the world" mentality has worked wonders for them so far.
The comparison is apropos. I've lived in Hollywood most of my life and have to spend time in SF for work. The entertainment people get a bad rap for being superficial douchebags and chronic bullshitters, but it doesn't even compare to the SF scene. At least in Hollywood, if someone thinks they're hot shit, you can go on imdb and see if they're really as self-important as they think they are. In SF everyone is the best programmer, is working at the most important non-profit, is building the next huge app, and it's very difficult to tell if they're full of shit (hint: 99% of them are).
Right, and many of the pirates become pirates because they were fleeing the autocracy of legitimate merchant ships.
And the newfound freedom of pirates was a direct threat to the state. It's no wonder that in a span of 50 years, as mercantilism developed, pirates went from being knighted (Francis Drake), to being the worst kind of criminals (Blackbeard).
Thanks, added to my reading list.
Yea sure, those terms were used by Westerners in 1761. I bet the Africans would have seen it differently.
Nevertheless, it is our duty to correct the terms they used to better reflect the reality. And this is common practice. If it weren't, Socrates would be remembered as a corrupter of the youth and Galileo as a heretic.
No, not at all. Freedom does not occur in isolation.
Commemorating the end of WW2, German president Joachim Gauck said, "On May 8, 1945, we were liberated — by the people of the Soviet Union." The crew on the slave ship were not "free men," even if they were well-meaning.
This article is full of misnomers.
First of all, the "slaves" were actually kidnapped Africans. They had yet to do a day of forced labor and had not yet undergone the years of conditioning it took to turn a free man into a slave.
Second, the "free men" were actually slave traders. Yes, there was a ban on slave trading at the time, but that didn't stop them.
If you're interested in learning about what happens when kidnapped Africans and free men come into contact, study what happens when slave ships came into contact with pirate ships. As a general rule, pirate ships were egalitarian, as it helped preserve social harmony on the ship. And the composition of the crew was usually multiracial. Over 60% of Blackbeard's crew was black. Oftentimes, when the pirates took control of a slave ship, they would take the goods they wanted, free and arm the kidnapped Africans, and let the ship go on its way.
Walmart has been pouring money into RFID as a replacement for barcodes since the mid-90's. Analysts have said that by mid-2000's, every product package would have an RFID chip. Fast forward to 2015 and we aren't any closer. Andreessen is a fool who got lucky.
It was probably edited by a crisis management firm.
Buycott helps you keep track of corporate malfeasance https://buycott.com
Generally the way slaves were captured was that the Europeans would approach a west African tribal chief and give him an ultimatum. Either you bring us a boatload of slaves from the interior or we'll just take you and your people. The Africans weren't making a profit either way.
The Europeans deserve 100% of the blame for the slave trade.
The barbarism began 200 years prior when Africans were stolen from their homeland. Slavery in Haiti stood out as particularly brutal, even by Caribbean standards. The white landowners in Haiti were greatly outnumbered so they had to resort to unrestrained barbarism to keep the slave population in order.
L'Overture was admired by many in revolutionary France because of his compassion towards the former slave-owning whites and mulattos. He was incredibly forgiving and humane given the circumstances. Even the former slave-owners couldn't hate him because he consistently stuck his neck out to protect the lives of whites and mulattos.
What you reference happened in 1804. In 1803, L'Overture was arrested and exiled to France where he died later that yet. Also in 1803, Napoleon announced that he would re-introduce slavery in Haiti. The whole episode would have been avoided if Napoleon had a conscience.
No, that was their final destination. Brazil had by far the largest slave population in the world. Haiti was the crown jewel of the French empire and the envy of all nations. The caribbean slave trade began to decline when Toussaint L'Ouverture rose to power in Haiti (The Haitian and French revolution were very closely intertwined) and slavery was abolished.
The seminal book on this period of Haitian history is "The Black Jacobins" by CLR James.
This has been done before (and posted to HN), and it had the same problem. Way too many false positives, especially with older sites.
I think Circa was a pretty innovative app, so I'm trying to pull some lessons from their failure.
They raised nearly $6m and never made any money. The product was pretty good, but the question is what was the business staff being paid to do?
According to their website they had 8 editorial staff and 10 product staff members. This seems like too large of a team for not having product-market fit. Would they have had trouble securing more funding if their burn-rate was half of what it was?
As much as I admire many of the people working towards divestment from fossil fuel companies, I think the whole movement is defeatist. Great, you convince your university endowment fund, pension fund, etc to divest -- now what? Now those shares will be bought and controlled by an institution that is immune from popular pressure. Who wins here? Nobody.
On the other hand, if instead of agitating for divestment, the students/workers/activists were to ask for proxy votes, then we could put up a real fight at shareholder meetings. Sure, we might not have enough power to elect board members in the early stages, but nothing builds a movement more than meeting up with like-minded people and confronting the enemy face to face. It would provide a forum for activists to make connections with one another, grow the movement, and get excited about the possibility of fighting climate change by being an engaged citizen.
It's heart-breaking to me to see so much support given to this divestment movement -- I've never seen any of the major figures involved give a justification for why we should be divesting rather than fighting the corporations head on. Especially since proxy fights have a history of driving movement growth in the US. Divestment is a retreat. If climate change is really as much of a threat as most of us know it to be, then retreating should not be an option.
This is written by someone who has little knowledge of Los Angeles, especially east of Los Feliz. Her descriptions of downtown are outdated.
Yes, Skid Row and the surrounding area still has the largest concentration of homeless people in the US. Just a block east of Skid Row is The Arts District, which is in terms of real estate prices, the hottest neighborhood in Los Angeles right now. It's where all the trendy cafes (Blue Bottle, Stumptown, Urth Cafe, etc.) have decided to open up shop in Los Angeles. Traditionally the area had attracted artists because of the large, cheap commercial and loft style spaces available, but in the last 3-4 years it's become unrecognizable. Back in the 90's it was an extension of Skid Row. Today, it's filled with yuppies who can afford to pay $3,000 a month for a 1,000 square foot studio. It's the only neighborhood on the Eastside where rental prices are comparable to Venice/Santa Monica. The homeless population continues to hang on to control of an ever-rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. It's an eerie feeling watching a hopeless residents of Skid Row slowly push a shopping cart down a busy intersection like a living dead man, as Teslas and Benzes swerve to avoid him.
Just one block west of Stumptown coffee, there are boarded up commercial buildings on 7th street. It's the southern border of the Arts District, and even though most of the foot traffic is homeless people, the landlords are asking $12,000 a month for a storefront of under 2,000 square feet.
In Los Angeles, Hollywood is the cultural capital, downtown is financial capital, and the SM/Venice is the tech capital. But East LA is the soul of the city IMO. Not just the city of East LA, but everything east of downtown all the way to Rowland Heights. Of course Boyle Heights and the neighboring cities are the Mexican cultural centers. Remnants what LA used to be before the mass migration west and before the US government deported millions of US citizens of Mexican heritage [1]. I live here now and I love it, even though living here means that you're more car dependent than most other places in Los Angeles. A few miles east and you're in Monterrey Park, the city with the highest concentration of Chinese residents of any city in the US. Walk into a popular restaurant around here and the sights, sounds, and smells will be almost identical to Hong Kong. And then there's everything South of the 10, which the author didn't really get in to either. The point being, Los Angeles is much more than Santa Monica east to Los Feliz, and people who are considering moving here ought to look beyond those boundaries if they want to get a better understanding of the city.
Actually, it refers to a phrase used by Walter Lippman in his seminal 1922 book, Public Opinion [1]. The genesis for the book is the lead-up to World War 1. The US population was rabidly ANTI-war at the time. In fact, Woodrow Wilson won re-election on the slogan "He kept us out of the war."
But the US banks were in a position to lose billions if Western Europe was defeated in the war, and so the power elite decided that it was necessary for the US to enter the war to protect the interests of the 1%. The intellectuals of the time believed that it was possible to win over the American public by creating what was effectively the first mass propaganda campaign in history. At the time, the word "propaganda" didn't have the negative connotations that it has now, so Edward Bernays, who was really the mastermind of the effort, wrote a book titled "Propaganda" summarizing everything they learned in converting the American public into Hun-haters.
After the war ended, the fear that the liberal intellectual class stirred up against the Huns, was immediately transferred onto the communists. And then these same intellectuals moved into comfortable positions on Madison Ave and made millions creating the modern advertising industry.