201–210 of 784 posts
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You are going to freak out when you find out how many birds are killed by buildings generally. But you might want to sit down before i tell you how many are killed by cats.
That number is a heavy under-estimate and deliberately lowered for public consumption. But, you might want to sit down - The real slaughter is well in the millions annually.
Fascinatng that `brexit` isn't mentioned once in that article. Making trading harder with your closest neighbour can't be a great move for the economy.
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Are you referring to the libertarians who like to see government fail so they have a reason to dismantle it?
Not the OP but look at the difference between what governments can do when there is a sense of urgency (i.e it is wartime or one is in recent memory) vs what they do when it's not. My lizard brain interprets this in the following way: Elites in response to external competition or in the presence of existential threat experience strong incentives to make "real" progress. When there's little external competition, leade…
Every example I can think of involved rushing through legislation and policy changes that were not looked upon kindly given a moment of retrospection.
The New Deal, Japanese internment camps, the PATRIOT Act, Zero COVID policies, etc. The one exception might be something like the Space Race, but that also had a lot to do with Operation Paperclip, which had its own ethical dilemmas.
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In capitalism, almost everything generates economic growth if you ignore the externalities.
Fundamentally, only three things generate growth. - More resources - More people - More productivity Since productivity is generally capped at a given technology level, and resources are finite, it simplifies to people.
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if you are an employee and that is direct compensation (not deferred capital gains) then your taxes are lower than California
Is this including the use of tax advantaged accounts like HSAs/401Ks/IRAs/etc? In the US, it should be possible to get a 95th percentile household income ($300k, married filing joint) effective federal income tax rate down to 10% to 15%. Including total health insurance costs (employer + employee) plus some amount of deductible/out of pocket maximum for a family of 4 would bump it up to 20% to 25%. And then on top of…
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The irony about being anti-immigration is that immigration fuels economic growth. - Most developed countries have below-replacement child rates from citizens - Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance - Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or accultu…
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The irony about being anti-immigration is that immigration fuels economic growth. - Most developed countries have below-replacement child rates from citizens - Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance - Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or accultu…
The UK has had increased (net) immigration for decades, including a huge jump in the past few years[0]. The population grew commensurately, likely mostly due to immigration, since as you accurately point out the birth rate is low; there are roughly 13% more people in the UK now than 20 years ago. Why, then, has the GDP per capita flatlined in the same timeframe? Where is the growth that immigration is supposed to fuel?
> Immigration is the only thing fueling that population growth
This is a core neoliberal claim that smacks of "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas".
> The real argument should be about rates of cultural assimilation or acculturation
By all means, let's have that discussion! If immigrants were, by and large, able to acculturate well, there would be much less anti-immigration sentiment.
But the same neoliberalism that supported increased immigration to developed countries on these economic grounds also morphed into a dual prong of claiming that diversity is our greatest strength and that it's racist to expect immigrants to have to conform to their new host culture. Both attitudes are directly at odds with assimilation and acculturation.
Other wealth European nations that took in a lot of immigrants, mostly from grossly incompatible cultures, have seen concerning increases in violent crime and other things deleterious to social cohesion and quality of life.
> (See Japan and Russia)
Japan's population has been shrinking since 2010; its GDP per capita has been treading water for even longer, since the early 90s. Similar story for Russia, whose population has been flip-flopping from growing and shrinking for a few decades, and whose GDP per capita hasn't seen any sustained growth since the late 2000s.
So it's entirely possible to have a stagnant economy, whether or not you receive immigrants.
> Without larger younger, working age generations, social safety nets and productivity investments are difficult to finance
This is about the only unarguably true statement you made. A nation composed of too many nonworking people receiving transfer payments from working people cannot exist in that state for long.
[0]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/283287/net-migration-fig...
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Only idiots think immigration is uncontrolled. Practically all immigration is from government granted visas.
"Uncontrolled" in this context doesn't mean people hopping the border unbeknownst to the authorities. It means immigration at a rate high enough that it's beyond the capacity of the host nation to integrate the newcomers to its culture.
A village of a thousand people can accept one additional person per year indefinitely with no material change to its way of life. But it cannot accept, say, a hundred a year, especially if the hundred immigrants come from a substantially different culture, without fundamentally changing the entire social fabric.
And when such massive changes to society occur without buy-in from a convincing majority of people?[0] Well, only idiots would wonder why people think it's out of control.
[0]: In the UK, Brexit made it clear that in fact the buy-in was in the other direction.
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I hate the large scale turbines. I'm sure small scale or other designs are OK. But screw the large turbines. Where I grew up they outsourced the jobs and then we were left with ugly giants ruining the once beautiful mountains. It's on par with strip mining (aesthetically).
Aren't these also massive mass bird slayers ? The last I read, over half a million birds were killed (official under-estimate) by wind turbines in UK alone every year
60 years of tories and tory-lites slowly but surely cutting "waste", privatizing, deregulating, pushing for austerity... Let that be a lesson to the US, seeking government efficiency is a non-goal. Good, well-funded public services make productive citizens and a strong economy. Austerity leads to a dead country.
Most Western European nations have a government expenditure as a percentage of GDP of roughly 50%; half the economy is government.
Singapore, a famously productive country, is around 15%.