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Stay Gold, America

blog.codinghorror.com

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Re: Stay Gold, America

#91

Post by sixstringtheory »

alkonaut wrote: post #83
fifilura wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not voting is a poor way to show dissent since it practically gives your vote to whoever gets the majority. Better then to vote for yourself, vote blank, vote for whoever you would rather have in charge, or vote for the least bad.

Yes. It's important to vote IF you think the elections are legitimate and fair. By voting (blank, for yourself, for Mickey Mouse) you say "I didn't like any of the candidates, but I'm ready to accept the result of the majority", thereby giving more legitimacy to whoever is elected. Not voting can be dissent (I disagree with the process, I don't think it's fair etc) or simply apathy. But in either case it gives less l…

Who here believes Trump will pull punches because the election wasn’t satisfactorily legitimizing?

If you get killed on the high ground, you’re still dead.

Re: Stay Gold, America

#92

Post by dandellion »

coldtea wrote: post #51
throwpoaster wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America is the best country in the world for growing something new. Source: I am a non-American who does business in America.

> America is the best country in the world for growing something new The 27th best, if that new thing is supposed to lift your social/economic status upwards: "The US ranked 27th in the 2020 Global Social Mobility Index". But it might well be the best for people to build new businesses of scale (especially already well off people).

That's because making it easy to start your own company will only provide upwards mobility to My grandpa worked in agriculture, my dad in a factory, and I'm a software engineer. The only reason I became the first in my family to go to university is that in my country as long as I passed all my classes I was pretty much guaranteed to not pay a euro for attending university. I even went to one of the top 5 universities for CS in Spain, which might be crap compared to US ones, but economically I'm much better off than my parents.

Affordable university education can provide upwards mobility to a lot more people.

Re: Stay Gold, America

#93

Post by palmfacehn »

Laments price inflation, without mention of the inflation of the money supply. Laments the increasing cost of education, without mentioning guaranteed student loans. Laments the cost of healthcare, without mentioning the increasing regulatory burden on the healthcare system or the gov. enabled cartels. Laments inequality, without addressing the central bank driving the over-financialization of markets via easy money.

Maybe there is a case that can be made where more central planning can fix these issues, but it is unserious to leave it unaddressed.

Why don't more people vote or engage with state institutions? Perhaps it is because we regard these systems to be immoral and politics to be a fruitless endeavor. The US was founded by individualists who claimed they wanted to limit government's role in our lives. Today the US government accounts for 27% of the US's GDP. Those who aspire to cut this spending are labeled as "un-american" by the author.

Even after the author's journey of upward mobility, he engages in classism. We rightly condemn those who condemn those who use pejoratives for racial classes, ethnic classes or genders, but somehow it is socially acceptable to blame social issues on "The Rich". Even on this site, I regularly see articles which use, "World's Richest Man" as a pejorative.

I listen. I get it. I understand people are unsatisfied. Those who do not seem to understand the latest electoral outcome seem to be asking, "Why can we not double down with even more gov. central planning?"

https://www.aha.org/guidesreports/2017-11-03-regulatory-over...

https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/feder...

https://www.google.com/search?q=cantillon+effect

Re: Stay Gold, America

#94

Post by rubzah »

Reading Jeff's story, perhaps he should put some of the money towards fighting alcohol (mis)use in society. So many families destroyed like Jeff's, not to mention being a major component of expenses in the health sector.

Not to downplay the other contributions which are fucking awesome.

Re: Stay Gold, America

#95

Post by huijzer »

Especially with the current high polarization, I am becoming more and more appreciative of historians. They are not perfect, but do find useful parallels from time to time. My favorite recent talk was by Niall Ferguson [1]. And sure, it's probably a good idea to take him with a grain of salt since he is incentivized to push the idea that all universities are bad and only his university is good (he is co-founder of an university), BUT with that in mind I still thinks he makes great points. One of his points in the talk is that the left nowadays appears to be more busy with feelings than economic inequality.

He also compares the current environment to Nazi Germany. Now a lot of commenters on YouTube think this is inappropriate. Nazi's were bad. End of discussion. If you think that too, I would like to defend Niall a bit here. You can disagree with Nazi's and still listen to Nazi's. How else can you learn from their mistakes? How else can we figure out what went wrong and avoid it happening again?

[1]: https://youtu.be/aazlO39MPMg

Re: Stay Gold, America

#96

Post by gadders »

thrance wrote: post #58
gadders wrote: post #50

I don't know how you can want to improve democracy, and be in favour of universal mail-in voting, the most open to abuse form of voting there is.

That's a big lie promoted by the republicans who don't like mail-in voting because democrats use it more [1]. There is still absolutely no evidence that any fraud ever happened with that system. [1] https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/13/politics/trump-mail-in-vo...

No evidence yet. I guess we might find out more in the next 4 years when it is investigated properly.

If you want to put elections beyond doubt and make everyone accept the result you should have voter ID and paper ballots. The public holiday idea is probably not a bad one.

Re: Stay Gold, America

#97

Post by BriggyDwiggs42 »

roenxi wrote: post #78
BriggyDwiggs42 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree on the principle, but I want to argue a small point. You say intelligence, when I think an average IQ person who studies policy as a hobby and puts time and effort into being informed will be vastly more capable of proper governance than a 115-120IQ person who doesn’t put the time in. I think the main thing here is education and information distribution and how (in our case, poorly) we set up the infrastructu…

Well ... if I were going to be precise, I'd prefer that people with >110IQ, Stage 5 on Bob Kagen's 5-stage adult development model, had an interest in politics, a well developed sense of fairness and evidence-based beliefs were running the show. But that is a big ask and I might not like it when I see it. Either way, encouraging stupid people to participate is not the way. At best it is a harmless no-change manoeuvre…

I’d like to see that too, but the way to get citizens with the qualities you desire is, imo, infrastructural and not best done via a filter. Currently, we churn people out of high schools half literate then feed them profit-driven slop on their tvs and phones, then we expect them to somehow make cogent political decisions. I don’t know this for a fact, but my intuition is that if you improved the relevant infrastructure you’d produce a majority population capable of pretty solid political thought, where your solutions more resemble band-aids with undemocratic side-effects. It would be harmless if you did it perfectly, but any real-world anti-voter filter or social pressure would inevitably be used for undesirable, irrational ends.

Re: Stay Gold, America

#98

Post by pjc50 »

imacomputertoo wrote: post #55
coldtea wrote: post #7

> We are at an unprecedented point in American history, and I'm concerned we may lose sight of the American Dream The understatement of the year. From all I read, hasn't it been dead and burried for decades? (Of course not for some founder who hit the jackpot like Jeff). "Evidence indicates that in recent decades social mobility in the United States has declined, and income inequality has risen.[7][8] Social mobility…

people have been saying the American dream is dead my entire life. I'm tired of hearing it. I'm also tired of people saying the American dream is about becoming a billionaire. It's not. It never has been. It's always been about having the opportunity to improve your wealth and living standards. Sometimes that means just leaving something better for your children, much like the Italian and Irish immigrants did That Am…

> Buying a house is a very expensive and slow way to build wealth.

Buying a second house may be questionable, but the first house has so many tax and leverage advantages as well as "hedging" against the volatile rental market. Especially when Americans can get 30 year fixed mortgages!

> but they can give their children a better life. it's certainly not easy, but it's possible. The working class, however (not the most poor), routinely chooses to put their money into flat screen tvs

What if they want to give themselves a better life, rather than just their children?

> flat screen tvs

All TVs are flatscreen now. This is a "tell" that somebody is mentally copy-pasting a rant from the early 2000s.

Re: Stay Gold, America

#99

Post by watwut »

coldtea wrote: post #70
Hilift wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has always been poor people in the US. There seems to be more shame and stigma attached now though, along with denial. I think that is one of the reasons the iPhone is more popular in the US. It helps people feel like they aren't poor.

> There has always been poor people in the US. ...and those poor people in the US could always look up to much better social mobility trends than the current ones.

"Always" is massive overstatement. If you was a woman, your only way up was if you found rich guy to marry you. It is not that women did not actually worked, but they had only lower paid jobs with no possibility of promotion available. If you was black, your abilities to go up were obviously severely limited.

Even for whites, south had very stable social hierarchy - you had a place where you was meant to stay at. It was resembling aristocratic setup rather then actual free for all capitalism. Civil war changed that by a lot and opened mobility options that were not there before.

Re: Stay Gold, America

#100

Post by pjc50 »

alkonaut wrote: post #83
fifilura wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not voting is a poor way to show dissent since it practically gives your vote to whoever gets the majority. Better then to vote for yourself, vote blank, vote for whoever you would rather have in charge, or vote for the least bad.

Yes. It's important to vote IF you think the elections are legitimate and fair. By voting (blank, for yourself, for Mickey Mouse) you say "I didn't like any of the candidates, but I'm ready to accept the result of the majority", thereby giving more legitimacy to whoever is elected. Not voting can be dissent (I disagree with the process, I don't think it's fair etc) or simply apathy. But in either case it gives less l…

I don't think you've adapted to the level of motivated reasoning in current politics: if people want to declare the election illegitimate, they will do so, and they can make up claims about how it's illegitimate faster than you can debunk them.
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