181–190 of 267 posts
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Nobody competent? I think I'd be quite competent, thank you very much.
no need to take it personally.
To say that we'll run out of competent people to lead is nonsense.
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I would argue that the 10 years after 08' have also lacked responsibility. I think the secondary effects of the covid shutdown are going to highlight some very poor decisions. Mainly rallying the economy, rather than making it more robust. I'm interested in seeing what happens with housing specifically.
thats basically my point, Companies still aren't taking responsibility for anything and are running the companies to keep the share price up so the Exec team can collect on their options in 4 years and move on. Similarly the government seems completely incompetent, and willfully blind to the risks being taken.
Two things come to mind: - stock buybacks can be eliminated with legislation - Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are still under government conservatorship
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In what way does China have the U.S. beat from a military standpoint? I am no expert, but as far as I know, the U.S. military is still far stronger.
The only reason we've had relative peace since WW2 (75 years) is because of the strength of the US military. Prof. Hanson has argued that America's isolationist policy before WW2 actually caused it. China generally doesn't start foreign wars, because they're too busy waging them on their own people. :) About the only way the US could lose a war is by total surprise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Davis_Hanson A…
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In what way does China have the U.S. beat from a military standpoint? I am no expert, but as far as I know, the U.S. military is still far stronger.
The only reason we've had relative peace since WW2 (75 years) is because of the strength of the US military. Prof. Hanson has argued that America's isolationist policy before WW2 actually caused it. China generally doesn't start foreign wars, because they're too busy waging them on their own people. :) About the only way the US could lose a war is by total surprise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Davis_Hanson A…
I would question that assertion. The number of large scale wars between countries has certainly fallen in the past 75 years (and was falling before then too), and the number of deaths from war has also fallen dramatically, but the number of wars and state-based conflicts has gone up significantly - https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-conflicts-and-i... - and back in 2014 there were only 11 countries on Earth not officially involved in at least one war - https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/world-peac...
Globally, the conflicts we have are smaller and less visible, and kill fewer people, but we have less peace now than we've ever had.
This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasingly pissed off. In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I di…
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> You realize Trump lost the popular vote right? I am well aware, but that has nothing to do with the almost half of eligible voters who didn't vote at all. Californians who didn't vote in 2016 (~9m) far outnumber Hillary's margin over Trump (~4.3m). There's only "no point voting for president in California" because 9m Californians don't vote. That's nothing to do with "the system", that's a choice that every single…
> If you live in California or New York, there's basically no point in voting for president because there's such a large Democratic majority and it's winner-take-all. Winner-take-all in any state that leans predominantly in one direction means that your vote doesn't matter. Unless those 9 million people happened to all be of the Republican party (extremely unlikely), it wouldn't have made any difference had they vote…
How likely is simultaneous failure of 9 out of 30 of them? Totally unlikely if you ask me. And some redundancy is built into the system, so it's not like failure of 3 will cause loss of power in 1/3 of the U.S. - most likely none at all (or maybe only scheduled blackouts in peak times in some of the places). In Cyprus, we had such an event in 2011, when 2000 tons of explosives Russian tried to smuggle into Syria, wer…
> how likely is simultaneous failure of 9 out of 30 of them? Totally unlikely if you ask me. It's quite possible because their failure probabilities aren't independent. A geomagnetic storm could take most of them out at once. Like respiratory pandemics, this is an event that happens every ~century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm
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It's pretty interesting that most countries in Europe are unitary states while most countries in the Americas are federal states. Maybe due to the centuries of warfare in Europe the states that survived were unitary states that could better handle external threats. Or maybe it's a holdover from a tradition of monarchy that the Americas never had. Interestingly, Germany is also a federal state. Yet we never seem to he…
> Yet we never seem to hear... For reference, do you hear about any internal German politics?
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Berkshire is the 5th largest reinsurer in the world[1], so not likely to happen... [1] https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/breaking-news/t...
Not sure what you're trying to imply. Reinsurers do in fact reinsure against their own risk. It's turtles all the way down.
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> Luckily, Bay Area and LA residents travel to China a lot, so we already had substantial herd immunity by February 1. Ummn, what? This sounds like an entirely made up factoid, and certainly isn't supported by the dashboard. The estimates of how many people in a population have to have had COVID-19 are very high. Even if you buy the Stanford study, which is itself controversial, the estimated numbers for how many hav…
It’s not just the Stanford study: antibody studies everywhere, from New York to Sweden to Italy are showing similar results. The “criticism” on those studies are more hypothetical and not universal. It’s like “this study could be wrong because X”, and “that study could be wrong because Y”, but there are more than enough now to draw statistical conclusions. The difference between 20% (NYC antibody positives) and herd…
The NYC study is interesting; of course, it's a random sample of people at grocery stores and community centers i.e. "those who are out and about in a pandemic", not a truly random sample. But it's intriguing nonetheless.
Still, I'm not sure what the course of action that it supposedly suggests is: make everywhere in the USA 3x as infected as NYC at its peak? That's 40K more dead there and I doubt that the extrapolation to the rest of the country would be fun.