> it would be karmic justice to start wiping out elderly investors because they were the ones with political control ignoring all the problems building over the decades
Are you "ignoring all the problems" of today? Or do you just not have the "political control" to change things? What makes you think that "elderly investors" had more control during their lifetimes?
Baby boomers outnumber other generations, and they successfully used their numbers to bend our political systems to benefit themselves at as they progressed through life.
Which I suppose is fine, that's democracy. But as they reach their twilight years and reflect upon the world they're leaving behind, I do hope they take some responsibility for the plights they've created for the younger generations.
Those figures are from 2020 - it's probably gotten worse since.
... And those wealth holders aren't just ignoring the problems of today; they're exacerbating them.
Ageism won't solve our problems - all of this is still very much a class issue.
But let's not pretend that as a generation, the Boomers didn't fail like no generation has ever failed. And let's not pretend they aren't still blaming the victim.
> getting career advice from John Carmack is just like getting career advice from a lotto winner, not everyone has the luck/genius
To a large extent, career success is the result of a combination of hard work and luck. The more you have of one, the less you have to rely on the other.
> I'm pretty sure that this type of data collection tool is in use today by the Chinese government.
Yeah US is a bit slow to that party. Alipay and Wechat-pay has roughly a billion users (conservative estimate) in China. It's widely socially accepted.
Makes more sense in the case of China, which never had wide adoption of credit cards. In Libra's case...why should I ever use it instead of sticking with credit cards?
Rather than straight cash, using it as a more-secure credit card would be enough to sign me up. It would prevent card skimmers, people copying numbers, etc. They could generate one-time card numbers for online purchases at existing merchants. Despite lots of mitigations, VISA/MC still have huge fraud problems. This would give them a new tool to lock things down.
VISA's transaction data is not the same as Facebook's social data. Combining the two is the point of concern. We have financial regulatory laws for this reason
If you make the tax system substantially less progressive, as in Sweden or other often mentioned examples, I think it is quite possible to reach a sustainable level.
I partly agree though in that US spending really makes no sense. Other countries that raise more revenue are generally quite targeted in their spending, the US govt is not...at all. It makes no sense to say that the solution to bad spending is to generate more revenue...but it is also not particularly clear that there is any desire to think about how to spend more effectively, outside of slashing everything.
Btw, just generally this reflects how far the US is behind when it comes to intellectual discussions on policy. Most (but not all) discussions about these topics in the US take intellectual force from anti-scientific dogma. Elsewhere, politics has become an evidence-based study of the merit of policies. The former approach just isn't sustainable, the level of poverty in the US is quite shocking (to this outsider's perspective).
The debt is about 3x higher in real dollars, and about 2x higher relative to GDP. That doesn’t seem like the sort of change that would take you from “moderate” to “truly massive.”
Now we enter the area where almost no commenters understand how sovereign currency debt works, and what is required for a healthy economy.
It would take a mini-treatise to summarize what's wrong with this statement, so suffice it to say that there are several scenarios where such a debt is absolutely healthy and encouraged, and no one should use it as an excuse to put their foot further on the neck of the lowest rungs of socio-economic status.
The chief complaint is that many people have almost no money and a few people have almost all the money. Where is this money? It is in bank accounts. Where does the money in the banks comes from? The banks borrowed the money from the central banks. Where did the central banks get the money from? The central banks borrowed it from themselves. How will the central banks pay themselves back? They central banks hold, among other assets, a large quantity of US Treasury bonds. The central banks pay themselves back whenever the US government pays interest on its bonds. If we want people to have more money, then the banks need more money from the central banks, and the central banks need a larger quantity of US Treasury bonds. If we want to redistribute money using taxes, we probably would want even more US Treasury bonds to be issued.
According to https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v75n1/v75n1p1.html we reached peak social security surplus back around 2008, and cross the line into deficit real soon now. So instead of having extra revenue that can be spent, the budget now has to take into account redemptions of special social security bonds to fund current operations. From the Social Security Administrations perspective they have years of funding because of the trust fund. From a congressional perspective its a double hit to the budget No Surplus + have to pay back redemptions now.
So this was a wonderful time to give a trillion dollar tax cut to corporations.
I do not know how you reduce the size of the state with the baby boom bubble entering retirement. The paranoid part of me thinks the secret solution will be a 1918 Influenza resurgence that disproportionately takes out people over 70. Solves Social Security and Medicare expenditure at the federal level and the pension problem at the state and local level.
Debt isn’t a problem in reality. Especially as the world’s reserve currency. If that ever becomes not the case, we’ll the whole monetary system will be touched. I would google modern monetary theory. I think that is the future more or less.
Me neither. If you own a property, you should be able to do whatever you want with it. The argument, that it's bringing up prices is false - AirBnB, same as Uber, exist because the prices were already high. If the prices were normal (especially here in Australia), these types of services would not profit. Think about a scenario when young couple with kids is paying so much for mortgage/rent so if they need to go overseas for a few months, they don't really have any other choice than list it on AirBnB to cover portion of the cost.
> If you own a property, you should be able to do whatever you want with it
That just isn't true though. You can't even alter a property without first getting a permit in many cases. The things you do to stuff that you own can impact the greater community, so the needs of the community need to be considered.
On a local scale, the problem is the constant in/out of short term renters. They don't care about the neighborhood, they don't care about the neighbors, they don't care about making too much noise. They'll be somewhere else in a week anyway.
Meanwhile, the actual residents have to put up with constantly changing "neighbors", noise and more often than not common fixtures getting trashed and mistreated.
On a larger scale, it drives up prices, because landlords would rather extract the much higher rates from short-term renters than the more reasonable rates a long-term renters would pay. This drives up rent, and forces people out of the housing market. You end up with Airbnb ghettos, in effect turning previously nice neighborhoods into de facto hotel businesses. Thus robbing residential areas of their cohesion and community.
Here, a few law changes were put in place to mitigate the problem, while still slowing people to short-term rent out their dwellings while on vacation. The provider (Airbnb) has to report taxable income, and there is a limit of 70 days/year.
> You end up with Airbnb ghettos, in effect turning previously nice neighborhoods into de facto hotel businesses
Except without any of the regulations that protect hotel/hostel guests.
> The provider (Airbnb) has to report taxable income, and there is a limit of 70 days/year.
I've experienced issues with this in Ireland, and this would help solve some of the problem. Particularly that of undergraduate students trying to find places to live during the school year, since most of those leases are 9 months anyway. The owner could then AirBnB their house over the summer.
It'd still be difficult for those who are looking for somewhere to live long-term, as owners can often make more money over just the summer than leasing out for the whole year to those people; so the properties would just stay empty the rest of the time, even if people wanted to rent them. Though who would rent knowing they'd be kicked out come summer? People want some stability; I'd hate to have to start looking for a rental again every summer, especially if I was working full time in a city, all because AirBnB.
“Like, hey man, if you’re complaining that the system is totally unfair and forces most people powerlessly into a narrow set of compromised choices, why are you making one of those choices?”
When I worked with Tom Morello he used to get it all the time too. It’s a bogus argument. There’s no requirement that one leave the system they are in prior to expressing fundamental doubts about that system.
I could often be described as an “anti-capitalist”, in the sense that I advocate for newer systems of organization of labor and productive resources, but I recognize that I do not live in a post-capitalist society. I still need to participate in the capitalist world to participate in society and acquire the resources I need to survive and thrive. An anti-capitalist will often need to participate in capitalism. They can still work to build an alternative system even as they participate in this one. The process of promoting or designing a new system could benefit greatly from some capitalist wealth to reach others who may want to exit.
Being against capitalism doesn't mean total aversion to commerce or the capital it generates., but opposition to market forces being the dominant ideology. Even hard core communists I know don't mind if someone is a bit rich (eg worth a few million), but are opposed to the vast concentrations of capital in limited liability firms, and want industrial infrastructure to be publicly owned.
Capitalism was never alive. We live in a state capitalist system. A free market capitalism is a fiction, and where it was almost a reality ( Somalia ), it never ended well.
Held in "secret detention" and posting a full apology including praise for the government. It sounds like the Chinese government is in full tyranny mode.
for a while after Mao's death China functioned more as an authoritarian oligarchy than a totalitarian dictatorship. Not a liberal democracy by any means but clearly less bad. This has been reversing somewhat under Xi Jinping.
China was never really a totalitarian dictatorship under Mao either, he mostly got forced out of power by the rest of the communist party in 1959 after his great leap forward reforms resulted in millions dying. He never really regained power except in a sort of spiritual sense. There is a lot of complex political history in communist China.
Its most certainly incorrect to compare Mao with Xi.
> Totalitarianism is a political concept that defines a mode of government, which prohibits opposition parties, restricts individual opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life
He was unabashedly and indisputably, totalitarian. The fact that he lost power eventually, is irrelevant. Every type of leader, eventually, loses power.
Sure, but for this argument I think the most recent Chinese Civil war to present (1927- ) will suffice. I don't give the KMT a free pass either just because they were buddy-buddy with the "West". Different sides of the same autocratic coin if you ask me.
edit: And before this devolves any further, no I don't give the "West" a pass for its tyrannical tendencies either...
What’s racist about it? The Chinese state has a very long and well documented history of brutal authoritarianism spanning many emperors and dynasties. Mao didn’t change that and neither did Xi. If you think I meant anything about Chinese individuals maybe you should re-examine my words and your conclusions...
Wew lad, that’s an awful lot of words you’re putting into my mouth.
If I had argued similarly that the American state has a history of brutality, which it does (Native American genocide, slavery, colonialism, for-profit prison labor, etc) am I subsequently arguing that Americans themselves are cruel? Of course not. Self-centered, detached, unaware of their constitutional privileges to change things or unwilling to use them, perhaps. But certainly not cruel.
I would welcome a discussion about the nuances of Chinese dynasties, individual emperors, interdynastic states of affairs, and so on, but come on, but let’s at least have a conversation in good faith, ok?
Perhaps a point to start with: individuals with very little power compared to the state have little to no say in the state’s affairs. If the state is brutal and cruel, how much of that is their responsibility? Could they be blamed for political inactivity if it only brings suffering on their household? Are they complicit in th activities of the state if they merely want to make money and live a comfortable life with their friends and families, given that they pay taxes which are used for wars and state suppression?
> Self-centered, detached, unaware of their constitutional privileges to change things or unwilling to use them, perhaps. But certainly not cruel.
It's every bit as ignorant to say that "perhaps" hundreds of millions of Americans are unaware, detached, etc. as it is to proclaim that they're cruel. Making such broad sweeping judgments about such a vast number of people, is universally a very poor approach to discussion.
There is only so much that people can do to change their world around them, even in a democracy.
Being an American, I have license to make generalizations about the people I have lived my whole life around. I certainly couldn’t say the same for, say, Chinese individuals, and my other comments in this thread read as much. I draw my conclusions about my fellow Americans from my own experiences and interactions.
It's not ignorant to say that because just looking at voter turnouts can tell you a lot about Americans' relationship with their government. At least the detached/unaware part, I can't speak to the rest of the statement.
America is a poor example because it has only existed for a few hundred years with essentially continuous government. My objection to what you're saying is that you want to lump together every various dynasty that's ruled China with every modern government, when there is little basis for doing so besides ethnic ones. Would you appeal to the cruelty of the Merovingians to say France has always been cruel? I'd guess the thought wouldn't even occur to you.
I think there is a flaw in your line of reasoning.
Many bureaucratic structures, such as the general structure of government and military, withstood the test of time throughout dynasties and interdynastic periods. For a state that governed huge areas with significant diversity in ethnicities and languages, that is very impressive! If it aint broke don’t fix it, you know?
But those same structures were very much top-down methods of management, with little room for dissent. It’s not as if all Chinese (which is a very broad definition because there are many many millions of Chinese citizens who are not Han) got to sit down together every few years or decades and decide what kind of state and society they wanted to live in.
The vast majority of all of humanity largely had the structure of their societies decided for them by the ghosts of the past and the structures that survived. We are always swimming through the inertia of our pasts.
Anyway, I hope that is more instructive of the point I am trying to make. Ethnicity doesn’t just poof into a structure of government, in a China or anywhere or anywhen else.
Edit: funny you mention France after your edit, because I was considering saying that Europe as a whole before 1945 was no picnic either. That’s why my ancestors - from four different countries, no less - got up and left for America. Nevertheless, the period of time between WWII and now is the longest Western Europe has gone without a war since the time of Rome. That’s of course not to say that Western Europeans are inherently warlike. Peasants don’t get to choose the wars their lords and kings send them off to fight. It’s quite remarkable how quickly things can change sometimes.
Are you "ignoring all the problems" of today? Or do you just not have the "political control" to change things? What makes you think that "elderly investors" had more control during their lifetimes?