As The Guardian has previously pointed out https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/apr/03/us-cuban-twitt...: USAID and these orgs were "undermining Cuba's communist government". Now it's time to celebrate. People will now be free to live as they wish under communism or whatever else they choose. It is not for us to choose whether people want to be invaded by Russia or ruled by Castro. If they don't want this, let them choose otherwise.
Apple has been doing personal agents for a while. They're crushing it so hard they must be tired of winning at this point.
For instance, the other day, the Siri button in maps told me it couldn't start navigation because it didn't know where it was. It was animating a blue dot with my real time position at the same time.
Don't get me started about the new iOS 26 notification and messaging filters. Those are causing real harm multiple times a day.
Personally, I just buy stuff from a store and return it if I don’t like it. I don’t need to trust the store because the US has good enough consumer laws. It’s a store not my wife. I don’t need to have these ethical dilemmas over getting Coke Zero delivered.
Sorry? I don't care what Cloudflare opposes, that half of the websites I use stop working during La Liga matches + Vodafone apparently goes above and beyond to block sites for knowledge sucks, regardless if CF or Trump are involved or not.
I did. You just don’t read enough to be able to understand. Up the count a little this year since there’s still a lot of time and you might reach comprehension.
I don't think the problems of US corporations are due to being over-capitalized, they're all to do with interactions with the political and media sphere plus unnecessary conflict with the staff.
If no corporation is allowed more than 1 million dollars (10 years of median income) then 10 average people can counter a single corporation. That’s a good ratio.
It's also impossible to have a larger business than a restaurant, or almost any kind of technological or manufacturing industry. The limited liability corporation has existed for hundreds of years for a very good reason.
Heck, even things like shipping, the oldest insured industry, become impossible. Corporations used to have minimum capital requirements that were roughly in the region of a year's average income. https://www.doingbusiness.org/content/dam/doingBusiness/medi...
("corporation has too much money" and "individual has too much money" are different problems; Elon Musk is a problem in the way that Apple isn't)
And has life gotten better in those years? These days Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai are stealing all of our work. Back in the day, a father could take his kids on a grand tour of Europe and discuss philosophy in the cafes of Vienna all on a single income.
That's too arbitrary, and you say that as if a billion dollars is a lot of money.
It's not.
There was a time when millionaires were considered 'rich'. Now that's just a retiree, in most housing markets, who's paid off a house. Or even a townhome... and in some places, a condo!
It doesn't matter "whether it should" cost that much, that's irrelevant for my example. The point is, being a millionaire isn't a big deal. It's common. It doesn't mean wealthy.
Likewise when a company is large, and has infrastructure all over the world, and is worth much of a T, a B is nothing. Cash reserves in the billions is really not all that much, just fiscal prudence.
An alternate is that "banks should get free money, by forcing all companies to borrow money for capital projects". Because if you tax companies for "wealth", then they'll just spend all that capital on loan payments.
I feel people have such weird ideas about taxation. People see "oh no, someone has free money!" then get excited and want to tax. What? The goal of taxation isn't "take money from anyone we can", nor is it 'wealth redistribution', it's instead 'how to pay for joint projects' that all of society benefits from.
Losing track of that last bit, is when people stop asking "should we tax" and instead say "they have money, so tax"
You write:
> The goal of taxation isn't "take money from anyone we can", nor is it 'wealth redistribution', it's instead 'how to pay for joint projects' that all of society benefits from.
But I think the author of the comment you were replying to had a different goal in mind. I think their goal was "prevent corporations from getting too big".
We can and should debate whether that is a goal we should be trying to achieve, but if it is then progressive taxation for companies might be a way to achieve it.
We might presume that was the goal, yet it wasn't explicitly stated. And many have a goal of generic wealth redistribution, and will inject such into any conversation about large companies.
One might note the unrestrained concern about fluid capital acquisition, in the post I replied to. It's not having billions in infrastructure that was cited, nor having a large number of employees, both metrics of size, but instead having fluid, unused capital.
If we wish to constrain upon size, there needs to be nuance, conjoined with the specific industry, and even sub-industry. Some capital equipment costs can be enormous. Should we work to prevent financing such via stored profit? Should we work to force companies to finance, then pay off, just to feed the banks, rather than store and then spend?
Should we tax so that "big ideas" may never occur?
I think far more would be gained by ensuring taxation just stays fair between smaller and larger company structures. There's a lot of book-keeping that can be done as a large company, to hide profits, that cannot be done when you're a small mom and pop.
Tax is not only that, it's a way of incentivizing growth in the "correct" areas (areas that build long-term value), and correcting inevitable distortions in the market. One of the problems with money is that it's both extremely important for some people (on the edge of poverty) and a complete plaything for others (investor class).
So? People are starving to death in the US and so many are homeless. Because a bunch of Bay Area retirees are millionaires doesn’t mean we shouldn’t wealth tax them. For every dollar over median wealth they should face a 10% wealth tax so that we can fund universal healthcare. There are many studies that show healthcare is more important than wealthcare.
> For every dollar over median wealth they should face a 10% wealth tax so that we can fund universal healthcare.
A ten percent wealth tax would put most investment returns into the red. Savings and investment would plummet. Capital would flee the US, interest rates would skyrocket, the US dollar would become worthless, the housing market would collapse. You wouldn’t be able to fund roads, let alone universal healthcare.
Exactly. People all over America are saying that illegals are taking their jobs and a bunch of coastal liberals are trying to convince them it’s not real? Maybe believe them to start with. Talk to them. Don’t just start ivory tower intellectualizing like you’re Matt Yglesias talking about how Biden is in terrific shape.
Well, okay, so just like this article talks about, people often find it easier to declare a source of a problem, rather than describing a symptom they're having.
Illegals aren't taking their jobs - there's plenty of studies evidencing that that's not true. *BUT*, people are feeling:
1. under-employed
2. under-paid
3. in some level of pain, economically
4. feeling insecure, financially
And they're saying "it's those damn illegals takin' my job" to reflect that pain.
Sure, propaganda plays a part of the experienced pain people have; but it's often not all of it. Propaganda is less effective when people are comfortable.
It's looking a lot like when you say "believe them", you mean "rewrite what they say and believe that thing instead". Yeah, I can do that for any political affiliation.
Not at all. I believe the experience they're expressing, when expressed in the most positive light. I'm not going to entertain a racist perspective, such as "there's too many brown people here" or similar; but I will entertain a more favorable perspective: "I feel like I can't get a different job if I lost mine", "I can't afford groceries", "My rainy day fund isn't large enough for a rainy day and this makes me scared". "It doesn't feel like there's enough jobs to go around". All of these could be very real, underlying statements to the statement "Illegal immigrants are taking all the jobs". Obviously more conversation would be necessary to get the exact issue they're actually experiencing.
But just like a patient coming to a doctor and saying "my back hurts, I must have a herniated disk"; or a customer coming and saying "your website sucks, you should rewrite it in React", there's not enough information there to get to the true, underlying cause; *BUT* you can wholly believe the patient that they are in pain, or at that there is something about the website that isn't meeting this user's needs. That's step 1. Believe the person in their experience, then investigate and address the real root cause of their pain.
Sometimes the patient says that the arm they no longer have hurts, or that everything hurts but the opiates you gave them last time did the trick, more opiates please, or that the world is sad and empty and the only way out is offing themself. And sure, you can rightly believe that they're in pain in all three situations, but not in a way that is informative about which side to take on vibecession.
They’re usually quite clear that people who violate the laws of the nation are taking jobs that were meant for them. If you’re giving their jobs to criminals and claiming that they’re just feeling anxiety. The US isn’t an economic zone. It’s a country. If there is no American that the job can be done by then the job shouldn’t be done.
These people are clear about what they want. But you rewrite that in a patronizing tone. “You’re just afraid for your job”. No they’re angry that you’re using the country they built as an economic machine.
"They" built? Who is this "they"? I don't know of any people of 250 plus years of age. And workers, no matter one generation or ten generations of lineage in the country have "built" it.
Unskilled labor is a myth. When we kicked out all the agricultural workers, it wasn’t just that it’s hard to find replacements, the replacements also learned how hard it is to actually do that kind of actually skilled work.
We're going with "unskilled labor is a myth"? Really? You could have given me 1 million guesses and I never would have come up with that. Unskilled labor is not a myth. It's a description of work that requires a shorter amount of training time for someone to be able to do the work, as opposed to, say, a dentist who needs years of schooling. Jobs where the primary requirements are physicality often qualify, with professional sports being a notable exception.
And if the work is really hard so no one wants to do it, labor markets generally have a pretty reliable mechanism for correcting that situation by raising prices. You could argue that higher food prices would be a problem, but you can't argue that imported labor doesn't impact it. No "study" will ever prove that importing labor doesn't suppress wages or that "unskilled labor is a myth".
They're saying a cocktail shouldn't cost double digits.
They're saying they can't afford doctors or health insurance.
The complaints are specific about specific changes in affordability, not 80's AM radio talking points. They mostly aren't suddenly saying illegal immigrants are taking their jobs.
(Certainly some people are, but it's not really a bigger contingent than any other time in the last... 30? 40? years...)
But they are also saying no to build more houses. They are also screaming and clamoyring to tariff the world 500 percent and then some more. Many people say many things, many people are also economically and mathematically illiterate and or pretending to be due to some vested interest.
I think there comes a point when people are so adamantly illiterate and antimathematical (and a good helping of other fun things like racism), they are beyond help.
We shouldn't be giving participation trophies to people who slept through world history class and then fall for recycled demagoguery about how it's the poor who are sucking up all the wealth and not the rich.
Abstract: Due to racial wealth inequality in the U.S.—inequality that benefits White Americans on average—many Americans associate White people with wealth. Yet, many White Americans report feeling like they, personally, are “falling behind.” We conducted a five-wave longitudinal study with a representative quota sample of non-Hispanic, White Americans (N = 506) during the 2024 U.S. presidential election. We found that White Americans who feel they are falling behind White and Asian Americans, while also being close to being passed by Black and Hispanic Americans, within a perceived tight status hierarchy, reported the most support for DEI bans and Trump, controlling for objective status. Further, White Americans with these status perceptions were most likely to vote for Trump in the 2024 election. We conclude that White Americans’ subjective perceptions of their position in the racial economic hierarchy meaningfully relate to political attitudes and behavior.
The Findings: Using a statistical technique called Latent Profile Analysis (LPA), we identified distinct groups based on where people subjectively ranked themselves and other racial groups on the American status ladder.
* We found a specific group of White Americans (~15% of our sample) who perceived themselves as "tied for last place" with Black Americans.
* Crucially: This group was the most likely to vote for Donald Trump and support bans on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
* Importantly, this effect held true even when we controlled for their actual income, education, age, and gender. In other words, feeling like you are losing status predicted voting behavior more strongly than actually having low status.
End all American foreign interference.
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