appreciatorBus

Yes.

If something is overvalued then a process that devalues it should be welcomed.

Shitting on someone else’s carpet is absolutely hurting someone.

A better example:

You prefer to shit in your own toilet but someone else prefers to shit on their own carpet.

Yes.

People working hard on problems that other people are willing to freely compensate them for is a good thing.

Activism disguised as research is a bad thing.

There are whole disciplines whose telos is now activism rather than knowledge production.

https://cdn.vanderbilt.edu/vu-wpfsx/wp-content/uploads/sites...

The behavior that leads to the issue is individual consumers driving cars. Outlawing this would nuke demand for fossil fuels which encourages risky well drilling. But since 99% of Americans drive they tend to get very unhappy about the prospect of banning the vroom vroom. This is a real and challenging political problem. We can't get around it by pretending that corporations drill for fun.

So if the profit margin is low, capitalism is bad cuz the workers are exploited.. ... and if the profit margin is high, capitalism is bad cuz the workers are exploited?

got it!

Meanwhile under communism.. the workers are exploited everywhere and the profit margin is 0 everywhere, except the black market, and the black market is the only place you can find anything.

Its resistance! (Livestreams himself gratuitously raping & killing innocent children on Oct 7)

Leftism generally

Most university departments

Almost all left of center media outlets

Distant countries with sufficiently leftist govts that they feel they have to weight in on Israel

Islam

Garden variety anti-semites

The list goes on

Stories are flagged & voted on by users.

Stories about Israel generally devolve into factional fighting with no useful content.

Users flag & vote accordingly.

Because Israel is beset on all sides, geographically, digitally and conceptually, by forces hostile to western civilization who want to destroy them at the first opportunity. Being competent at cyber is useful defensively and offensively and the existential nature is highly motivating for the people working at it every day.

Share of income has nothing to with profit margin.

I was referring to profit margin, i.e of the $x you spend on 5 lbs of apples, what % did supermarket keep.

I was talking about the supposed oppression of customers through high prices, but it’s typical that communists imagine that the purpose of an enterprise, private or public is to provide jobs to union workers rather than to actually useful products or services to customers.

Most pro-pallies are bot like. They don't care about 2nd order or unintended consequences, they may not be even aware of the concepts. It's just "western civ = bad, non western civ = good"

Looks bad

> while Japan shows the highest immigration levels among respondents, this is almost certainly due to the survey failing to reach the native Japanese population more than to any real demographic trend.

So we are admitting that the result is useless?

> despite being known as “a nation of immigrants”, only 17% of respondents from the U.S. have immigrant roots, versus 22% overall.

What was he expecting? 100%? From what I can find, US first born immigrant % is about 16%, so basically within the massive margins of error this thing has, this is a non result.

I don't think this thing is designed to elicit anything useful except vibes & giving the author a platform to pontificate.

It’s kind of like maybe the whole concept of indigeneity should just be a historical curiosity rather than something used to try to settle present day conflicts.

It sounds like you have something against indigenous people practising decolonization and want to weaponize international institutions against them.

A liberal democracy was attacked by a force of ultra right wing totalitarian religious extremists. The democracy defended itself and routed the attackers. The ICC took the side of the attackers and issued an arrest warrant for the leader of the liberal democracy.

Wonderful, then we agree, we are just haggling over the quantity or pace.

I would also introduce the concept of culture – if the economic indicators seem fine, but the culture is becoming balkanized and sectarian, then I would argue you still have a problem driven by quantity and or pace of immigration.

Again, totally one-sided.

You’re making an assumption that immigration lead leads to a better economy, ignoring the possibility of more competition for jobs, lead leading to less power and wages for workers.

Pragmatism could just as easily be a decision by the public collectively to have more babies. There’s nothing about immigration that makes it inherently pragmatic. It could be, with the agreement of the electorate, away to compensate for the electorates decisions to have fewer babies. But it’s not up for us outside of Japan to lecture them on whether or not they are being consistent on this.

This is very one-sided. There are plenty of low income and working class people who have suddenly found more work than they have had in years due to reductions in immigration.

Perhaps they have simply realized that no political decisions are without downsides, including unchecked immigration, and that on balance, they’ve decided it’s not for them?

It’s silly to claim that immigration is the only way to care for old people. We have been caring for old people for the entire history of the human race. We can start doing it again anytime.

It’s true, that it’s inconsistent to demand no immigration and simultaneously defendthe right to produce no children. But it is Japanese people who need to square that circle, not people who want to immigrate to Japan, nor people outside Japan, who feel Japan should allow immigration.

The percentage of the global population with fuck you money is so vanishingly small that a nation of 100 million such as Japan, could import them all with almost zero impact on their culture.

Furthermore, it’s deeply disingenuous to suggest that inconsiderate people only exist on the upper end of the income distribution. Assholes who want to take over and control others are found at every income level. If you want to keep your country from descending into Marxist dystopia then making fuck you money a requirement for immigration is not a terrible idea.

Different people are different.

Some of us find production and optimization more interesting than marketing and distribution.

Sure, but price is both a mechanism and another important metric.

Raising the price doesn’t “solve” shortage and no one in economics makes that claim.

Instead, the claim is more limited - that even in times of shortage if you want to make sure that the item in question is still available, raising the price will accomplish two things: it will encourage marginal production and discouraged marginal consumption.

Without prices, the only mechanism you would have to accomplish the same effect, would be a political decision about who did or not deserve to have hard bread, while you work out the production issue.

In both systems, you’re doing rationing, just by different means.

Whether under capitalism or collectivism the way you solve a shortage is always the same - you produce enough for everyone who wants the thing.

The difference is the presence for absence of the feedback mechanisms like prices. The problem with collectivism is that once you get rid of prices, there is no explicit feedback mechanism. There may be implicit mechanisms such as a waitlist, but ultimately the decision to increase production is turned into a political decision. I doubt many people care if production decisions about hard bread are made by politicians or business people, but in more consequential areas, such as housing, we have a century of experience of what happens in production decisions are collectivized and politicized. (it is illegal to increase the national stock of interior residential floor space by even one square foot without prior political approval, I.e. rezoning, variances, etc.)

Ok but Marx is a disproven hack, whose only claim to fame is indirectly starving millions of people. Not sure his ideas deserve any more air than they have already been given. Time to move on.

> people just engage in mental gymnastics to find justifications that fit their confirmation bias.

How do you know that you aren’t doing the same thing?

lol if you work in "our" industry you are by definition part of the elite in this country and the world, and yes, you have an overt political bias, you just don't seem to realize that it's a bias.