331–340 of 452 posts
Always fun to read that. They weren't against machines because they had a religious fear of machines. The machines were taking their jobs.
Just like Facebook is complaining now that Apple is ruining their business model?
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So the US bailed out the banks with a Trillion dollars, got it all back with a profit, used massive QE to successfully cushion their economy, without inflation. Which is bad. Meanwhile the EU which at the time was crippled over Greece, lagged far behind in the recovery and still haven't properly addressed deep flaws in the Euro are our saviours?
If you can forget the divide in the wealth gap in the US, sure the US has been very successful at recovering from '08.
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Actually the global poverty line has been on a steady decline over the last three decades ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty ). We have made untold advances in the medical sciences (hello MRNA vaccines), we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels, and we are living in a time when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights (well, primarily in the West a…
The irony of this comment is you say > The global poverty line has been on steady decline That's about right. We measure poverty as less than $2 per day. It's an arbitrary number. It would need to be $7.50 to prevent malnutrition and lower than 50% mortality. If we use the 7.50 mark the number of people in poverty has increased dramatically since the 80s.
What does 50% mortality mean here?
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Yes and we need to avoid the nirvana fallacy. I live in a country with public health care and every so ofter people are sent home to die from scheduled surgery because there aren't doctors or other staff available. My dad had 99% clogged heart arteries before he got treatment. My brother works in the US and prefer their system, but then he's got a good job - still a data point for the discussion.
So, how rich is your dad? Because unless it was "can drop quarter of a million dollars or more" rich, then no, in the US he would've just been sent home to die. The existence of a public healthcare system running at capacity is not evidence the US system "doesn't have this problem". Being denied treatment because you can't afford it is objectively worse then being denied treatment because the system is busy. One prob…
Both are fixable. Given enough money.
But if not fixed the results will be the same.
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...And not enough to cough up the thousand bucks, the welcher. :-D
I agree that Sale should have paid the bet and claimed that he was a bit "early" about when the destruction would come. In 1995 a person could have bought a US Treasury zero coupon bond for about $130 maturing in 25 years for . . . $1000. No other purchase would have been necessary to cover the bet. Relatively cheap insurance, I think.
No, it hasn't. I tended to think that the Internet, or more specifically social media, brought more harm than good to the world and society. But now I don't think it's true. Tech connects people, it shows us that people on the other side of the world are actually the same like us, it gives us instant access to almost all existing information and knowledge, it easily solves problems that were almost unsolvable before…
It can if you are open-minded, less so if you are in an online community that aggressively demonises the out groups.
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Actually the global poverty line has been on a steady decline over the last three decades ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_poverty ). We have made untold advances in the medical sciences (hello MRNA vaccines), we are rapidly divorcing ourselves from our reliance on fossil fuels, and we are living in a time when there is an unprecedented level of awareness for basal human rights (well, primarily in the West a…
The irony of this comment is you say > The global poverty line has been on steady decline That's about right. We measure poverty as less than $2 per day. It's an arbitrary number. It would need to be $7.50 to prevent malnutrition and lower than 50% mortality. If we use the 7.50 mark the number of people in poverty has increased dramatically since the 80s.
This seems surprising to me. What do you think is the best source for me to learn about this metric? I found a lot of info on the methodology behind $1.9/day [0] but couldn’t find much by looking for the $7.50/day mark and how it has changed over time.
I found this guardian article referencing $7.4/day [1] but the link they give to Peter Edward on an ethical poverty line doesn’t work. When I search for Edward’s concept I find papers from him [2] but they seem to reference $2/day.
Edit: I was able to find a gapminder analysis [3]. They break income into four groups, less than $2, less than $8, less than $32, more. The shift in poverty is still positive so I’m not sure what measure is being used to show 1B more under $7.5/day. This may be due to demographic trends where that group is growing faster. It is important to consider the overall proportion, not just absolute number, as well as the alternative of where they would have been (ie, a billion under $7.50 is better than a billion under $1.9).
But it’s hard to discuss without source data and methods.
[0] http://iresearch.worldbank.org/PovcalNet/methodology.aspx [1] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals... [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/014365905004327... [3] https://www.gapminder.org/tools/#$state$time$value=2020;;&ch...
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The doctrine was M.A.D. .. or mutually assured distruction[1]. I believe the (arguably crazy) idea was that the weapons wouldn't ever be used. The fact that each nuclear superpower has a similar amount of weapons assured that the equalibrium would stop the worst from happening. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
That page says "Although the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, the MAD doctrine continues to be applied." I get the feeling that's not generally known. Isn't that kind of extremely weird? I've never seen discussion of it on HN, for example, or maybe what to do about the prospect of living indefinitely under the threat of MAD. With more countries with nuclear weapons all the time. Well, you read here about people not…
It's a tough goal - perhaps the hardest there has ever been - but it's not impossible.