I'm not convinced those are the "smartest people" as much as the people with the correct ambitions and connections in the current system.
IMO, the "smartest people" are really fucking bored and doing nothing meaningful right now. You really think "the smartest" people are people who find working on Google's ad machine enjoyable? That they are programmers or traders?
Since when has "smartest" meant seeking the highest wage? Einstein didn't look for the highest paying job he could get, he took a do-nothing job and worked on what he cared about instead.
Fermi too took jobs that allowed him to pursue his passion, rather than accumulate wealth.
Newton blew a shitload of money on a pump and dump scam and spent all his time on proto-chemistry and calculus.
Bell basically ignored his company after patenting the telephone, giving almost all of his shares of the company to his new wife, who in turn entrusted them to her father, the guy who helped Bell make the company and who was defacto in control of the company. Bell spent a good amount of time studying the new field of Heredity.
The brilliant people involved in the invention of computing as a field during WW2 were doing it because it fascinated them. The military would have been happier with simpler computing machines. Von Neumann distributed a document describing EDVAC that helped nullify patent claims of the inventors.
The internet itself runs nearly entirely on free software and volunteer work!
It's insane that people are so utterly propagandized in the US "Hyper capitalism is best" mindset that even those who think the system doesn't work still implicitly believe that the system works to put the smartest people in the top earning jobs! Why do you believe smart people are primarily motivated by money?
Maybe, just maybe, smart people don't actually align their preferences to a market system at all! Maybe their priorities aren't actually money, or fame, or power.
The south sent him new canes to replace the one he nearly murdered a guy with. The problem we are experiencing with Trump has been here for a very very long time.
>And also, it's just data. Just take some random samples.
You are not at all working with "data" or "samples". You are just making arguments and supporting them with examples. That's not science, that's philosophy or persuasive essay writing.
You are generalizing those arguments in insane ways. Just like the worst philosophy. You are drawing conclusions from extremely weak claims that don't even map to reality in the first place.
You can't say "Math works to describe the head of broccoli so I can just think hard enough and understand geopolitics". That's emphatically not science.
No it isn't. A company is authoritarian by design. You cannot force change from the bottom because that is inherently designed against by the very concept of a corporation.
The control rests with the board and the executives. They have the control and the power and can make decisions.
Nobody cares what the employees of a company think because capitalism doesn't care.
It's meaningless to talk about what the employees think or care about. They are selling their labor and value to the corporation that is legally entitled to outspend all of them to get whatever it wants.
If you have more money than god, you no longer get to play the "I didn't know" game. You have the resources. If you don't know, you made a choice to not know.
Your own citation says that the original estimate was at least 2 weeks, and further looks found that important components were undamaged, and most of the damage was easily patchable, like the flight deck and hull. Her damaged boilers were not fully repaired and she was not able to make full speed.
This isn't that abnormal for 20th century warships. They were designed to be mostly flooded and still floating, had significant redundancy, and especially in the USA, massive efforts and training and resources were spent on damage control and management.
The USS New Orleans Cruiser in WW2 had 150ft of it's front entirely blown off by an ammo detonation. One quarter of the ship just gone.
The spent about 11 days on a crippled boat, patching things up and putting out fires, and then she sailed backwards to a friendly port, and was eventually fully refurbished and refit.
This wasn't some era of magical American super productivity. It's what these ships were designed to do in some way. They were built to be hit by rather large weapons after all, and attempt to survive. Look at what efforts it took to finally sink the Bismarck and the Japanese super battleships.
Municipal water usage in California is only 20% of all water usage. The rest is almost entirely agriculture, and all that agriculture uses a strange system of water rights where you do not have to reduce consumption during a drought, and the last person in line instead absorbs all the drought problems.
This creates an insane political environment where the rich as fuck agribusiness which owns that final water right is incentivized to get that tiny municipal water usage reduced as much as possible to squeeze out a tiny bit more water for their own business, rather than reform the dumb water rights system which would ensure that they only shoulder a tiny tiny portion of drought scarcity but probably force them to pay a little bit for irrigation improvements or stop growing almonds as cheaply.
The only reason the rest of the country even knows about the California water situation is because those bottom rung agribusinesses are still wealthy as all fuck and have actively paid for national political campaigns
Most municipalities get their water out of the same system, it's just they need so much less so they get by. Also, of the 20% that used by urban water systems, 50% is for outdoor irrigation.
The definitive book on the subject is "Cadillac Desert"
Wealth concentrates because of shitty tax policy and lack of enforcement of existing, on the books regulation to enforce a competitive market.
Famous Trust Buster Teddy Roosevelt was a progressive republican who openly stated he had no desire to harm or kill industry in the USA but was instead working to ensure there continued to be competitive pressure to make that industry work better.
Employment has never effectively redistributed wealth. Possibly it improved things a little bit after the black plague reduced the labor pool by about 25%.
The only peaceful and low death form of fixing obscene wealth inequality has always been government, through taxes.
The democrat party wanted to push socialized healthcare 70 years ago and didn't succeed. They tried again during Obama's term but couldn't get the votes because at least one "Democrat" politician openly refused to vote for a socialized health care plan.
What do you want? If there were more Democrats in office in 2010 we would have already had socialized healthcare.
People keep getting pissed that the party without power can't do things. If you want a politician to change something, you have to vote for them first
Even the people who vote for Trump understand that, but so many people who think they are smart can't understand that about voting for democrats. They continue to get pissed that the democrats secure the presidency and nothing else and can get nothing done as is intentionally the design of the american system
FDR's New Deal was possible because the Democrat party held about 80% control of both houses of congress and the presidency. Their threat to pack the supreme court to bypass them worked because it was trivially doable for them. You want a New New Deal? You have to vote for more Democrats.
IMO, the "smartest people" are really fucking bored and doing nothing meaningful right now. You really think "the smartest" people are people who find working on Google's ad machine enjoyable? That they are programmers or traders?
Since when has "smartest" meant seeking the highest wage? Einstein didn't look for the highest paying job he could get, he took a do-nothing job and worked on what he cared about instead.
Fermi too took jobs that allowed him to pursue his passion, rather than accumulate wealth.
Newton blew a shitload of money on a pump and dump scam and spent all his time on proto-chemistry and calculus.
Bell basically ignored his company after patenting the telephone, giving almost all of his shares of the company to his new wife, who in turn entrusted them to her father, the guy who helped Bell make the company and who was defacto in control of the company. Bell spent a good amount of time studying the new field of Heredity.
The brilliant people involved in the invention of computing as a field during WW2 were doing it because it fascinated them. The military would have been happier with simpler computing machines. Von Neumann distributed a document describing EDVAC that helped nullify patent claims of the inventors.
The internet itself runs nearly entirely on free software and volunteer work!
It's insane that people are so utterly propagandized in the US "Hyper capitalism is best" mindset that even those who think the system doesn't work still implicitly believe that the system works to put the smartest people in the top earning jobs! Why do you believe smart people are primarily motivated by money?
Maybe, just maybe, smart people don't actually align their preferences to a market system at all! Maybe their priorities aren't actually money, or fame, or power.
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