Hongwei

Our entire social contract relies on the a redistribution of wealth from young to old. Boomer Communism, it's currently called.

If you are currently paying taxes, you are funding Medicare and Social Security (insert whatever name for your country). The deal is that when you retire, the next generation funds your entitlements.

If the next generation is not large enough, that deal breaks down, leading to almost impossible political choices. Do we increase taxes on the remaining working population to fund the larger retired one? Do we defund entitlements and tell retirees to figure it out, when they themselves paid into the system that is now bankrupt?

I appreciate PG's writing as always.

I'm skeptical that the super-rich are only generating 5% on their money. My anecdotal experience is that it's usually north of 15%. They have access to investments that main-street does not.

If we plug in 15% instead of 5% in PG's reasoning, the effective income tax increase is quite a bit lower.

Smugness usually turns people off. It doesn’t matter how smart you are. No one likes people who act superior to them. Hilary lost over her “deplorables” comment. It makes me sad that the left is not taking the right lesson from this election.

Is it the critics of performative anti-racism or the actual performers of performative anti-racism who are undermining anti-racism?

RIP. As a Canadian I've always liked that we technically had the Queen as our head of state. I wonder how attitudes will change now that her 70 year reign.

I buy the first, not the second. Retailers often charge consumer packaged goods companies (CPGs) for preferential placement in aisle and carry no risk on inventory. The bigger the retailer (eg. bestbuy, walmart), the more likely they can assume no risk on inventory with a full return policy to the CPG. Best Buy just rents out space on their store floor to individual brands.

Thanks! fixed

Could be the same timeline, but would still need a mostly new cast. Stargate SG-2 just doesn't have the same ring to it!

I don't know. I would say I'm d) believe that the West cannot and should not enforce a lockdown the same way authoritarian China or Singapore can, and therefore it is doomed to fail.

So: * lockdowns are guaranteed not going to eradicate the virus the way it has in China. * lockdowns are guaranteed to crush small businesses and restaurants, creating an L-shaped economic recovery and putting the West at a disadvantage in future geopolitical conflicts. * the vaccine works but will take a year to rollout to everyone and it is unimaginable that the public will tolerate a lockdown for more than a month * herd immunity might work

I truly welcome any debate on this as I'd love to be wrong about my critique of my country's (Canada) approach to all this. We seem to be not having our cake and not eating it too.

They can if they stop enrolling and paying tuition. There are plenty of options online for college-style certifications that most employers in my industry (software engineering) would accept.

I get that other professional training with certifications would be harder to do online, but those tend to be done in community colleges anyway. The most "abusive" shops are universities offering BS degrees to students swimming in debt.

I hope so too :) And fair enough, thanks for the the kind discussion, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth.

I agree with you that current market incentives do not capture externalities like environmental harm. (eg. soil erosion, in the case of a farmer who doesn't rest his fields)

I hope to convince you to hate the game, not the players. So that we can focus our efforts at the root cause. And to take a measured approach: it's not all bad. I'd rather have our current quality of life (in Canada) than to live in a pre-industrial world in the longhouses of the Aboriginal Peoples who used to live where I do. It seems romantic, but I'm sure I'd be a terrible hunter. I choose to believe that human progress will continue to solve the problems we face, in time. Because historically we always have. Let's root for more Elon Musks instead of hating on the average capitalist.