151–160 of 504 posts
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Regulatory capture doesn't seem like it applies to Walmart... How regulated is discount retail?
wages, social security, labor laws ... it's a bit harder to pin down, maybe this is all "just" lobbying?
While I am a big fan of Jonathan Haidt, and have read several of his books, I can't help but feel that this is written from a point of view that is entirely too impressed with (if also afraid of) technology. Peter Turchin predicted escalating levels of polarization in the US, reaching a peak around 2020, without any need to look at social media. The level of political polarization now, while high, is less than the la…
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Lol I literally just did it. I have friends from around the world that talk shit about Americans constantly. They love Canadians. America and loud obnoxiousness are synonyms in lots of the world. People laugh at loud people and say oh they're probably american. When I was in Holland this is exactly what my dutch friends said everytime they saw loud people. In Mexico there are lots of resorts where people literally tr…
Ah! OK, I don't agree with you in general, but you inadvertently brought up a good point. There's the perception of Americans online and that in person, and I'm sure Russia has done it everything it can to make sure we're hated abroad as much as possible. You have a bunch of friends online who think Americans are all fat, loud, obnoxious and ignorant. Join the club. Most Americans think that as well. Definitely anoth…
I'm not saying I agree with it. Just something I have noticed.
And my friends aren't online. They say this in person. For example, in a bar and hear someone being loud. American.
Seeing tourists making lots of unnecessary noise in the street -> american.
This is half joking but also what people seem to actually think a lot of the time.
40 years of austerity in the west. Life span actually decreasing. Desperate people act out.
We are so rich that our poor are chronically fat. Even very poor people have very high standards of material living. Refrigerators, televisions, heat, etc. Many people in the world do not have these things still. There are people for whom lifespans are limited by things other than diseases of wealth (i.e., obesity).
The basic problem at the core of your complaint, I think, is a too-uneven distribution of social status. The basic cause is is keeping up with the Joneses. You and I measure our social status relative to that of the other people we observe (both in person and via electronic media). It is entirely possible to be a person of very high social status who views himself as rich and privileged, but who nonetheless has a considerably lower material standard of living than even poor Americans. This could be a chief in a small-scale society, for instance. He can be king of his local mountain, but die early of easily preventable disease
(There are other likely perks to his position that poor Americans won't usually get, though, like good mating opportunities and ample leisure time)
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> What I see missing from Haidt's analysis is increased federalism and localism as a solution. I'm theoretically in favor of this, but ... one of the reasons we need a bigger, more powerful federal government is to have a governmental entity that can take on the massively more powerful private entities (corporations) that exist. No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. The federal government can (or could,…
> No state government can take on Walmart or Amazon. An alternative theory posits that these massive corporations in fact depend upon the centralization of governmental regulatory and fiscal powers for their very existence. Regulatory capture is much easier to pull off when there’s only one central authority that needs to be captured.
This is the dumbest thing I have seen come from Jonathan Haidt. If social media is this powerful a destabilizer of societies, I wonder how Haidt explains first world countries like Germany, Canada, and most of the rest of the planet that have social media but haven't fallen into the same sort of divisiveness the US has.
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I think you’ve got this backwards. Social and cultural issues—different people’s conception of how to preserve freedom, when life begins, how to socialize their children, God, etc.—are always important to people and always have been. What precipitated the independence war that created my country was a language movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_language_movement It’s the insistence on ideological uniform…
That's a Republican narrative, not really backed up by any sound historical analysis. Whereas creation, nurture and development of wedge issues is a standard right wing tactic across the world. Be it love-jihad in India, miscegenation in USA, jewish hatred in nazi Germany or recognition of Ahmediyas as muslims in Pakistan. It incentivizes voters to vote on ideological lines while ignoring/ letting politicians/wealthy…
> Case in point- gun laws, abortions, gay marriage are simply not a focus of right wing parties in India.
I said social and cultural issues are important to people—the specific social and cultural issues that cause disagreement obviously different between countries. Guns are a flashpoint in America because there are lots of people like my wife whose family history involves guns. Her ancestors fought in the American revolution and used guns to secure independence. They used guns when crossing the continent to settle the frontier. They used guns to protect themselves and hunt long before there was police officers and grocery stores anywhere nearby. All of this stuff is part of their cultural identity.
Obviously that specific issue isn’t relevant in India because it’s been fully settled for thousands of years. But the conflict between Hindus and Muslims similarly involves cultural identity.
> Instead the wedge issue they have nurtured and developed is the hatred of muslims and Christians.
So your example of how cultural and social issues aren’t important to people is to point out the conflict between Hindus and Muslims? Don’t you see how that parallels the conflicts in America between Christians and secularists?
And if you think religion is an inconsequential “wedge issue”—I’m sure those Muslims and Christians will be willing to conform to what the Hindus want, right?
> I am not sure what the significance of Bangladesh 's creation is in this context. The primary reason for independence was Pakistani governments failure to cede power to the east Pakistanis who had won the elections.
Yeah but why did they do that? It was because East Pakistan was a different cultural and ethnic group (Bengali) than west Pakistan. Bangladeshi nationalism was sparked by the language movement, where Bengalis began to think of themselves as a distinct people with a different culture and language.
10 years later, Google Translate is still not dependable in real world colloquial usage ( I moved abroad ). It works for simple things, but the risk of miscommunication is way too high. I’ve learned ( been trained) to restructure my sentences in less idiomatic ways to get Google to make sense, but it’s still a dice roll . There are certain ideas that are practically unreachable. Knowing the local language grammar a bit, you rely on Google translate for bits and pieces, then compose sentences / ideas / communication yourself.
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You are giving too much credit to Putin. All he did was identify already-existing issues and fuel them further. Saying this: "The reactions to what I'm saying will be predictable" is a good attempt but doesn't really work I've found. Of course it's predictable, that doesn't make it incorrect. Yes you guys have been played, but if you didn't see huge growing divisions within the united States well before Putin started…
> huge growing divisions within the united States well before Putin Of course I'm not saying Russia created our national schizophrenia, which stems literally from the birth of the nation, but they sure as hell helped exacerbate the condition. Russia deliberately amplified and inflamed the culture wars so that they could corrupt and weaken the US from within without being noticed. From fake online accounts, to financi…
But... I have noticed this before 2016. Years before.
Example of bad American institutions: physical therapy, high schools, colleges for physical therapists. Food. Look at how horrible people eat in America. You'd expect the best country in the world to have a little bit more education when it comes to their bodies and the filth (food, pollution, information) they put into them. Not to mention how horribly ignorant people are about their physical health. These are the ones I have noticed.
I can't comment on the others.
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a federal government is a single body of policy which states opt into (more or less permanently). one read on GP is that we don’t need something this rigid for every coordination problem. time-limited and domain-limited agreements to which only some (large) subset of states agree could, possibly, accomplish the same things — perhaps with less political backlash in the process. for example, state AGs band together in…
>a federal government is a single body of policy which states opt into (more or less permanently). I'm unclear as to why you're implying that the EU doesn't fit this definition, because the EU can be literally described under those terms.
as for litigation, i thought it was the individual member states that were suing Big Tech. i thought the only role the EU itself played here was that of explicitly stating the conditions under which members can do such things.