caseydurfee
Joined 14 years ago
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241
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110
Member since
Apr 13
Recent submissions
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
Any list of "free" countries that has [the UAE](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_the_United_Ara...), Chile and Singapore in their top 10 is using "free" in the Orwellian sense.
"Labor Freedom" is perhaps the most galling. One might think it would cover the right of laborers to organize and collectively bargain. Or the right to have safe working conditions, sick days, severance pay, access to childcare and healthcare.
In fact, it's the exact opposite. A perfectly free workforce in Heritage Foundation's verbiage would be one with no worker protections or individual rights of any kind and a 100% labor participation rate - to them, quite literally, "labor freedom" is slavery.
Maybe France does have to many workers' rights to compete with other countries, who knows. Heritage's numbers aren't granular enough for me (or you) to assess that. But re-defining the meanings of basic words so one can accuse people who disagree with you of "hating freedom" is pathetic. Please try to find some other way to make your case that's befitting educated adults discussing a serious issue.
Comment · 9 years ago
Point of clarification: Pai was appointed to the 5 person FCC commission by Obama. He was named chairman by Trump. FWIW, the previous chairman, Tom Wheeler (ostensibly a Democrat), probably would've dismantled net neutrality if Obama hadn't come out strongly in favor of it.
I find it incredibly frustrating that people clearly see the need for referees in sports, but not in business. Nobody's saying that the NFL or the NBA would have better competition if there were no refs.
Comment · 9 years ago
What's the point of content-free, incoherent, misspelled comments like this one? There's nothing even remotely like what you're describing in the actual article.
Comment · 9 years ago
"The government hardly ever creates wealth. They can create the conditions for wealth creation by getting the heck out of the way."
Yes, we're aware that's how it works in shitty novels about trains from the 1950's.
Here in the real world, every single technological innovation in the iPhone was created by the US Government, or with the assistance of US government-funded basic research. This book breaks the whole thing down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State
Google Maps is a particularly terrible example. It wouldn't exist without GPS, a technology invented by the US government.
Hong Kong's government puts billions of dollars a year into technology research. That's not a good example, either. Furthermore, HK has lower income inequality than Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Burundi, The Gambia, Swaziland, Botswana, CAR, Sierra Leone and Namibia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq... . So your statement "everybody else has just about the same as everybody else" in sub-Saharan Africa is total bullshit.
Japan and Scandinavia have relatively low rates of income inequality (especially compared to sub-Saharan Africa). Are you saying those countries are less innovative than Namibia (highest income inequality in the world)?
Finally, the idea that the sole difference between "Sub Saharan Africa" (a region that encapsulates over a billion people and over 40 countries which you regard as a monolith) and Hong Kong is due to "government policies" is childishly ignorant. Africa is not a country.
Comment · 9 years ago
All the truthering in this thread is a bit much.
Some of the nastiest bullying I've observed (and experienced) in my life has been from smart people towards even smarter people that they resented. I'm getting more than a whiff of that here.
I don't know if this girl is a Mozart, but there sure are a lot of angry Salieris in these parts.
Comment · 9 years ago
"your poor lifestyle decisions."
Why frame the issue in this way, except to make yourself feel better about being complicit in denying your fellow citizens access to basic healthcare?
The alternative explanation is that you genuinely believe all issues requiring healthcare are the result of "poor lifestyle decisions", which is plainly ludicrous.
I think you should give some serious consideration as to why your brain forces you to frame the problem in this way. I suspect it's because at some level you do feel morally culpable for whether your neighbor lives or dies, but that inevitably leads to a position where some social programs are morally just, and a belief in orthodox anti-statism is more important to you.
The only way to square that circle is to frame all healthcare issues as "poor lifestyle decisions" and social programs as "like slavery". Much easier to feel better about a child dying because they can't get access to basic healthcare if you can just hand-wave it away as "poor lifestyle decisions."
Your attitude is sickening to me. Why not just go full-on black hat and say "fuck the sick" instead of pretending all healthcare is due to "poor lifestyle decisions"? At least that would be intellectually honest, and no less evil.
Comment · 9 years ago
For some perspective here, the maternal mortality rate in the USA is 28 per 100,000 births. So skydiving is about 50x safer than giving birth.
Comment · 9 years ago
Inflation also took off like a rocket in Switzerland in the early 1970's: https://tradingeconomics.com/switzerland/inflation-cpi
Switzerland was on the gold standard until 1999. Since abandoning the gold standard, inflation in Switzerland has been minimal.
Clearly abandoning the gold standard does not necessarily lead to inflation. You haven't even shown a correlation here, much less causation.
Comment · 9 years ago
"If you show probability work like Hillary having lower election odds, then this is new definition of hate speech."
I get that the guy is angry. I would be too if I got locked out of my accounts, but this is a ludicrous accusation -- the new definition of hate speech?
"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." The idea that google is waging war on this guy because of election predictions he made 12 months ago is absurd on the face of it.
Our society has been completely taken over by Hofstadter's [paranoid style](https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...). Everything is taken as evidence of some vast conspiracy of fascists or communists. (A couple weeks ago there was an article posted here alleging that google was suppressing anti-communist websites.)
Replace "freemasons" or "international bankers" with "social justice warriors" and we're right back in the 1950's again.
Comment · 9 years ago
Comcast is the most hated corporation in America. There's already a big competitive opportunity for non-terrible ISPs.
Comment · 9 years ago
A lot of products start with half the population, though, and it's not considered weird. The old euphemism is "shrink it and pink it" - originally design for men, then put out a women's version.
If Spectacles take off, they can always "grow it and bro it" later. Starting off with a focused target market seems like a reasonable approach to me.
Comment · 9 years ago
Apparently, a company with a 644 Billion dollar market cap, co-founded by a man whose parents fled the USSR for political reasons, is secretly trying to promote Communism.
Comment · 9 years ago
Isn't the control group the part of the graph from 1993-2000ish, where perception and reality are fairly closely correlated?
I guess that raises more questions than it answers. What about the rise of cable news? That tracks the change in the graph more closely than the rise of social networks. What about 9/11 and the war on terrorism? A significant portion of the US population lost their shit and never got it back. I'm not sure we should pin all or even most of the change on social media.
I think you have a point that the "good old days fallacy" has been around since forever. But it also seems like something dramatically changed 15 years ago or so.
Comment · 9 years ago
Century: Spice Road would be an obvious match for Splendor.
Counterfactual. The article you link to is laughable on the face of it. "A new study for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University" carries about the same intellectual heft as "A new study for the Eat More Beef Center at Hamburger University."
You seem the sort of person able to recognize others' ideologies while incorrectly assuming your own beliefs are rational and well-founded. Are you generally tolerant of or convinced by counterfactuals when they don't support your ideology?