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Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

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Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#461

Post by brewdad »

freeone3000 wrote: post #217
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The way this stuff is measured is broken. The baskets of goods aren't comparable. Given the choice between a $1000 (real) basket of goods from 1956 and a $1000 (real) basket of goods from 2022, which would you pick? To me the answer is obvious, 2022. Everything you get will be better. Better textiles, better food, cheap electronics...

From 1956? I'll take the automobile, please.

That car from 1956 would look cool, assuming everyone else wasn't driving the same thing, but would be objectively worse in almost every way compared to the cars of today.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#462

Post by inter_netuser »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #148
inter_netuser wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The west hasn’t seen proper austerity yet, just barely warming up. Maybe soon.

> The west hasn’t seen proper austerity yet, just barely warming up. European Troika (EC+ECB+IMF) debt induced Austerity literally _caused_ deaths in the heart of Europe. [0] This pretty much seems like 'proper' austerity unless you feel that we need perestroika living conditions for austerity to be real. [0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/francescoppola/2018/08/31/the-t...

All sorts of government policies induce deaths: leaded gasoline, lax pharmaceutical safety, etc.

Maybe we should be more frank? Debt is an abomination and is evil.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#463

Post by coldtea »

defterGoose wrote: post #456
coldtea wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We're talking about social science, not biology here, so the individual is the atomic unit. Not every observable property is available on the "atomic unit". Some only appear (emergent properties) after the association and observation of many such units, that is, in a group. In particle-terms, a single atom can't be a crystal. Or a living organism. But there are absolutely things that happen at the level of crystal…

> Not every observable property is available on the "atomic unit". Some only appear (emergent properties) after the association and observation of many such units, that is, in a group. Name a property of the group that's more than a sum of the properties of the individual. Population, for instance. The crystal analogy, again, isn't helpful because we're talking about social science, not physics.

>Name a property of the group that's more than a sum of the properties of the individual

An individual cannot exhibit groupthink without a group. They also can't have in-group bias without a group. Both important properties in group dynamics.

Roles and positions within a group are similar to the "crystal example" as well, with groups forming particular patterns under specific pressures, patterns impossible to the individual (e.g. an individual is not a "protest march" or a political party).

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#464

Post by octoberfranklin »

HWR_14 wrote: post #449
octoberfranklin wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just outlaw or intensely regulate these massive, centralized You can even do this with mere taxation rather than needing the full power of regulation. Graduated corporate income tax. Instant diseconomy of scale. That's a good thing.

Except it's easy to break a corporation into many constituent parts. That's assuming there are any US based profits to tax. Most companies of a certain scale only make money in Ireland, the Netherlands and the Caymans.

> Except it's easy to break a corporation into many constituent parts.

Both the tax code as well as securities law already have something called "look-through" that deals with this.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#465

Post by michaelmrose »

rayiner wrote: post #331
michaelmrose wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Issues trivial enough for your opponent to disarm by ceding them without society harming consequences make poor wedges. A maximally appropriate wedge is one in which you take a harmful extremist view and present it as righteous without dealing with the results of actually fully getting your way. Abortion has been a great example for decades. Taking away millions of woman's right to choose what to do with their own bo…

> Abortion has been a great example for decades. Taking away millions of woman's right to choose what to do with their own bodies in order to save what are almost entirely insensate lumps of cells I used to believe this too because of America’s awful science education. It wasn’t until I went to the ultrasound appointments for my first kid that I realized how incorrect that was. A 13 week fetus, which under Roe can be…

Neither fingers nor sucking them make you human. What's in your womb at 13 weeks is much stupider than the mouse in a trap in your basement or what's on your sandwich.

Almost all the neocortical prenatal brain development takes place in the third trimester. Electrical activity exists at 13 weeks but it's incapable of consciousness.

It's simply ridiculous to tell a women who unequivocally is an actual human to subordinate her body to the preservation of a less than mouse if she doesn't want to.

The simplest solution is to declare a person a person if it survives birth or is liable and intended to.

It's only complicated if we make it so

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#466

Post by blindmute »

howinteresting wrote: post #430
blindmute wrote: post #373

Overall, red side wants things to stay the same or go back, and blue side wants things to change. If the gap between them is widening, it's because blue side is trying to change things too rapidly. Red side seems to want to go back to 1950 at the earliest; it doesn't seem to me like they're increasingly backing up into 1800s or earlier. But the blue side is increasingly pushing for things that many are not ready to e…

FYI trans children are not new and minors have been transitioning in the US for the last 50 years. It's only more recently that it has been turned into a vile political issue by the right. https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/histories-of-... As a transgender person who was once a child but was not aware of the possibility of transitioning back then, I would have loved the opportunity to do so.

Nice try, but unfortunately I'm one of those people who reads books about topics they disagree with. I've read that book already, and it's disingenuous bordering on a lie to imply that what was happening decades ago to children as cited in that book is at all close to modern full transitions, nor were the motivations the same.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#467

Post by hotpotamus »

ameister14 wrote: post #374
michaelmrose wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Issues trivial enough for your opponent to disarm by ceding them without society harming consequences make poor wedges. A maximally appropriate wedge is one in which you take a harmful extremist view and present it as righteous without dealing with the results of actually fully getting your way. Abortion has been a great example for decades. Taking away millions of woman's right to choose what to do with their own bo…

Here's the funny thing about abortion laws. The Democrats have had a majority multiple times since Roe v Wade or even Casey and they have consistently failed to codify Roe into law. Why? Because they really like the money they get for threatening a woman's right to choose, too.

Democrats have indeed codified Roe into law in states where they can. Federal law doesn't really work that way though, which is probably why Roe was recognized through penumbras of the constitution or however they would say it. It all gets a bit silly and pompous when we take it to the priests of the law in funny robes, but the practical results of Roe were an almost perfect compromise and undoing it does not seem like a good idea to me.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#468

Post by random314 »

michaelmrose wrote: post #465
rayiner wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Abortion has been a great example for decades. Taking away millions of woman's right to choose what to do with their own bodies in order to save what are almost entirely insensate lumps of cells I used to believe this too because of America’s awful science education. It wasn’t until I went to the ultrasound appointments for my first kid that I realized how incorrect that was. A 13 week fetus, which under Roe can be…

Neither fingers nor sucking them make you human. What's in your womb at 13 weeks is much stupider than the mouse in a trap in your basement or what's on your sandwich. Almost all the neocortical prenatal brain development takes place in the third trimester. Electrical activity exists at 13 weeks but it's incapable of consciousness. It's simply ridiculous to tell a women who unequivocally is an actual human to subordi…

These same people are only too happy see kids separated from parents and kept in cages. The non stop propaganda has lined them up to be deeply Christian, hate immigrants, blacks and the poor, distrust vaccines, trust ivermectin, love guns, hate abortions, hate green energy.

The OP is not deceiving anyone when he says that watching an ultrasound made him change his mind on abortions. This is just a narrative trick that presents the " human life begins at conception" belief in a very dramatic fashion. OP probably made up his opinion much earlier when he decided which tribe/ingroup he is going to sign up for, and will support all of the Republican platform right think one way or another.

The artificial creation of the wedge issues is so absurdly obvious that it sometimes defies belief that people don't recognize it. A reply to an apparently benign business question "is usps actually losing money" will immediately reveal the person's voting choices with 99% accuracy. People are asked to sign up for a tribe in their formative years and then they simply take down notes from the propaganda and assume rigid positions. Propaganda was invented to convince the American people that joining world war 1 was necessary. It has never left us, since.

https://www.history.com/news/world-war-1-propaganda-woodrow-...

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/2/17189302/si...

The real issues facing the country are absurd health care costs, dropping life expectancy, unavailable urban housing and ridiculous student loans. Neither Democrats nor Republicans are interested in solving the problem. Who really has the time to worry about other people's abortions and guns in the middle of all of this.

While Republicans are absolutely nuts, Democrats can be forced by massive public pressure to make at least some minor moves to address these problems - thanks to Bernie. But they will do it in a way that their corporate brethren are not hurt in the least bit.

Consider the price cap of 35$ on insulin. It doesn't mean that the insulin manufacturers profit will drop. Merely that everyone else's premiums will increase so that corporate profits aren't hurt. Bush shafted Medicare's ability to negotiate drug prices too.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#469

Post by HWR_14 »

octoberfranklin wrote: post #464
HWR_14 wrote: post #449

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it's easy to break a corporation into many constituent parts. That's assuming there are any US based profits to tax. Most companies of a certain scale only make money in Ireland, the Netherlands and the Caymans.

> Except it's easy to break a corporation into many constituent parts. Both the tax code as well as securities law already have something called "look-through" that deals with this.

To my understanding, that only works if the corporations are still owned by a master entity. It wouldn't do anything if, for instance, an apartment complex of 1,000 units was split into 1,000 corporations that paid a non-profit HOA, and each of the 1,000 corporations just happened to have the same ownership by natural persons.

Re: Why the past 10 years of American life have been uniquely stupid

#470

Post by spupe »

lamontcg wrote: post #428
spupe wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don't you address any counterfactuals that don't fit your theory?

You haven't cited anything "counterfactual".

I mentioned Canada and France. Could also list other countries like Austria and Netherlands that had similar issues. Hell, even Brazil, who had been improving economically and especially for its poorest people consistently since the 90s, and was taken over by a far right government that rose through social media, exactly the way Haidt describes.

My point is that what we are witnessing here is better explained by the sudden access to social media rather than socioeconomic deterioration. By the way, we agree that the working class in the US (and UK) have also experienced a relative decline in the past decades.

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