81–90 of 96 posts
"Fascism doesn’t just exist in the marketplace of ideas, but in actual persons living in our cities, funding and constructing their visions for our collective future." said the man in the brownshirt, unaware of his own uniform
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Silicon Valley was never liberal. It was always pro libertarian, wrapped in some kind of social progress branding. What changed is that the mask slipped... The same people, who preached openness and democracy, now pivot overnight to nationalism and strong state fantasies when regulation or taxes appear, like for example Marc Andreessen recent disgusting ideological flip-flops. Calling this an intelligentsia is too ki…
> nationalism Nationalism isn’t inherently immoral. Nationalism is the belief that people with a shared history, culture, language, or identity, ought to have political self-determination and a special loyalty to their own nation. Where nationalism can go wrong is when it becomes exclusionary (eg defines nation as ethnic, racial, or religious), when it claims moral superiority, suppresses internal dissent, escalates…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think my system is zero sum! Acknowledging that some population will be harmed is not saying it’s equal and opposite to the benefits. Medicare for all is useful to many, many people. But it does have downsides to some populations: the ownership class loses some amount of power and control, wealthy people with excellent private healthcare are likely to have worse outcomes, the healthcare insurance industry wou…
How does the ownership class lose benefits under Medicare for All (MFA)? What does ownership class mean? Let’s compare China and U.S., the former has near universal healthcare, but also an unemployment rate of 20%. The U.S. spends more on Medicare than it does for Defense, and the bulk of that money goes to the healthcare industry in all its forms. They don’t touch the healthcare industry function because it’s the la…
As for lesser outcomes, I’m not sure how it works practically, you’re probably correct. My understanding is the current system trades based on who can pay, and m4a works triage based on need. So given the same healthcare bandwidth, I assumed those who push to the front of the line based on pay would no longer be able to do so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The "1984" ad is from... well duh, 1984. Apple was a small startup in a niche industry back then - fighting against centralization and control by building "a bicycle for the mind" that would push useful computation to the "edge" where it can be controlled by the user.
> The "1984" ad is from... well duh, 1984. Apple was a small startup Small startup in 1984? Apple IPOd in 1980 and had a market cap in 1984 of $1.6 billion, which is just under $5 billion in today’s dollars.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does the ownership class lose benefits under Medicare for All (MFA)? What does ownership class mean? Let’s compare China and U.S., the former has near universal healthcare, but also an unemployment rate of 20%. The U.S. spends more on Medicare than it does for Defense, and the bulk of that money goes to the healthcare industry in all its forms. They don’t touch the healthcare industry function because it’s the la…
The ownership class will 1) have to pay more in taxes and 2) will lose power over their employees who under the current system are pressured to keep their jobs or lose healthcare. As for lesser outcomes, I’m not sure how it works practically, you’re probably correct. My understanding is the current system trades based on who can pay, and m4a works triage based on need. So given the same healthcare bandwidth, I assume…
I also don’t think there’s a strict technical definition for “owner class”, it’s a catch-all political smear term used by Marxist-Leninists to enforce social stratification, and alienate community members from each other.
Who is an owner? The homeowner that could lose everything without a job? The business owner that could be bankrupt in 3-4 quarters? Or is there some arbitrary income threshold? A lot of people are hand to mouth without their jobs, including some earning 500K per year. Even millionaires end up having to work normal jobs if their lifestyle eats up their reserves. Or is it investors? Basically, everyone via their homes or retirement accounts; 65% of Americans are homeowners, and 75% have retirement savings, and 62% invest in stocks. Reasonably, I think unless your family unit has sustained inter-generational wealth (I mean wealth, not high-incomes), you wouldn’t meet the technical definition of this term, if it had a strictly defined one.
> For the untainted, effective altruism (EA) is a very online social movement popular in tech circles, which was originally concerned with how to get rich philanthropists to donate to the most “effective” charities Man this really makes me mad. Why do people love to hate on EA so much? Why is effectiveness a bad things? Is the author really advocating giving money to random charities? Or do they prefer no giving at a…
EA today is about as "altruistic" as the CCP is "communist"
Silicon Valley was never liberal. It was always pro libertarian, wrapped in some kind of social progress branding. What changed is that the mask slipped... The same people, who preached openness and democracy, now pivot overnight to nationalism and strong state fantasies when regulation or taxes appear, like for example Marc Andreessen recent disgusting ideological flip-flops. Calling this an intelligentsia is too ki…
> nationalism Nationalism isn’t inherently immoral. Nationalism is the belief that people with a shared history, culture, language, or identity, ought to have political self-determination and a special loyalty to their own nation. Where nationalism can go wrong is when it becomes exclusionary (eg defines nation as ethnic, racial, or religious), when it claims moral superiority, suppresses internal dissent, escalates…
almost all wars are fueled by nationalism
Here’s an idea. What if instead of left/right wing, you’d sort ideas into useful and useless buckets, given that the context of these labels will change depending on your use case. X is useful for Y, but useless for Z. Ideally, you are tooling around with pro-social ideas for your governance or societal organization frameworks, which is a necessity if you’re optimizing for freedom, morality or ethics. Sadly, in lieu…
Are racism, misogyny, and superstition useful or useless? Now one could argue that those things are not right or left wing. There is no epistemology for what any given ideology -- political or religious -- consists of. An apologist can simply deny that "negative" things are part of their ideology.
Obviously, they're useless and counter-productive.
There's no rational reason to think that there is a significant difference between people with different skin/eye/hair colour or between genders, but it's obviously a simplistic tribal belief. What we end up getting is a huge amount of wasted talent because of tribal politics - imagine how many Einstein-like intellects have died in poverty with no access to education.
It seems to me that people use racism and misogyny to help them stockpile wealth which is a big detriment to society - rather than working together, we have people working against other people.
Even the idea of "races" is itself flawed and has no meaningful basis apart from "they look different".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> nationalism Nationalism isn’t inherently immoral. Nationalism is the belief that people with a shared history, culture, language, or identity, ought to have political self-determination and a special loyalty to their own nation. Where nationalism can go wrong is when it becomes exclusionary (eg defines nation as ethnic, racial, or religious), when it claims moral superiority, suppresses internal dissent, escalates…
it's not inherently immoral but it's inherently dangerous because it can be so easily weaponized almost all wars are fueled by nationalism
Many wars, especially modern ones, are fueled in part by nationalism, but almost none are caused by nationalism alone or mostly caused by nationalism alone.
Instead, they're driven primarily by other factos: power & security, economic interests, religion or ideology, contorl and authority. Nationalism is often a tool rather than the root cause.