Viewing profile — yterdy

You've given individual solutions to try to fix a systemic problem, which of course does not work. They are good ideas; they are also not enough, and don't even begin to address th…

Monetary expansion underlies and significantly influences if not drives, everything you mentioned (save the nature of US mortgages, which is still related in the sense of it being …

You're comparing ideal to ideal, not practical reality to practical reality. Here's a fact: the Chinese middle class is the size of the US's entire population. The whole thing. Cit…

>Deflating prices on existing housing means either the lender (ha!) or the homeowner takes the loss. Okay. (Expand or they're going to flag you for snark.) The cohort that is curre…

>You have to ask why housing prices doubled, and ask how easy or likely those underlying conditions are to reverse. Massive monetary expansion via QE and low interest rates. Resolv…

[flagged]

Continuing to the next step of this argument that has been had before ad nauseum: the West is arguably worse in these regards because China et al. make no bones about preferring or…

Recently: Google refuses to turn up old pages. I was recently searching for a person who used to have a notable web presence before passing away about a decade ago. I had to dig to…

Again, some things aren't worth fixing, and they build up. The fabric on my headliner detached. Quickly went from "foam slightly exposed" to "sagging across the width of the backse…

It would be nice if I could "work with" a mechanic. Pay 1/4 the labor cost and she guides me (I also rent tools and shop time from her so it's more like 1/2).

Exactly. Its failure was a self-fulfilling prophecy imposed by PE (and other malicious financial actors). Like Toys R Us and many others, it was a stable but unremarkable business …

>Property values keep increasing because demand is exceeding supply. Not quite. Property values keep increasing because the monetary supply keeps increasing, one effect of which is…

It should be noted that "told they must" is not simply bad Boomer advice, but a reflection of the reality that the vast majority of white-collar work (even work that must mostly be…

>But why doesn't this happen to restaurants, or super markets or car mechanics? It does. The reasons you cited just makes it worse in medicine.

That's not true at all. In war? The Nazis took great pains to preserve (stolen) art; the Islamic State went out of their way to destroy it. Americans vigorously catalogue war effor…

For sources with similar protocols/track record that you can actually see the work of, I'd look at people like Sarah Kendzior and Cory Doctorow. One focuses on how corruption and a…

It's a double-edged sword. Without that ubiquity, 4 years ago today, George Floyd would have just been known as a junkie who slipped a fake bill and had a heart attack, if he was k…

Depending on who you ask, Google's search issues started as early as 2010 (Instant) or 2016 ("brands"). Many of the things people complain about regarding Google's culture - shutte…

This argument has been had a thousand times before, and it would be a waste of time to relitigate it. Suffice it to say that "intrinsic value" is subjective, artists absolutely con…

https://youtu.be/XL7Wxqr2ZRk https://youtu.be/0SvfNhMlnBE Even "cheap Chinese shit" is made by hand.

It's a bit of a stretch to call musical instruments - which are often handcrafted and not manufactured because an object that produces a particular sound requires tolerance that sh…

Because, half a century ago, it would have been built by a government research agency or a designated monopoly that was obliged to share it with the public, instead of the quasi-mo…

Note that my root comment got flagged. It really hurts my faith that people in this forum are reasonable.