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I'm just saying in the absence of any alternatives (which I'm sure there are), it's better to have 1% of trillions of dollars going towards advancing humanity and technology than 0%. I am fully aware that 99% of that money is going to be burned on WeWorks and the like.

Never said TCJA or the Bush era tax cuts were used for good purposes :) but it's probably better for the country in the long run to have excess money flowing into tech VC funds rather than being spent on memecoins and shitty electronics. That way maybe 1% of the funds will have positive returns rather than all of it being set on fire.

Eh, quick DM to Wall Street Journal or Financial Times and if it's a decently large bank the PR fallout will quickly prevent any potential retaliation.

Well I think a big contributor to the current inflation problem was the last round of stimulus passed right as the pandemic was starting to wind down. At that point unemployment numbers had almost gotten back to normal and most revenue numbers for things like restaurants, travel, etc. had recovered to at least 70% of pre-pandemic levels. And then some states like California dumped even more money into the economy through multi-round state funded stimulus checks over a year after the pandemic started. The unemployment programs also should have started winding down the moment vaccines were widely available rather than 6 months after the fact.

I personally know a lot of people that just dumped their stimulus checks on memecoins or wasted it buying spurious goods. I'm sure the used car and electronics market also was greatly affected by stimulus as well.

The Fed also should have limited its stimulus to buying Treasuries rather than MBS. It makes no sense for the government to buy mortgage backed securities (basically a freebie to homeowners/homebuyers who are already wealthy).

> Right now the labor market is good for workers

It is good _nominally_. Real wages are basically flat. Meanwhile, for everyone who didn't get a raise or can't currently find a new job for whatever reason, they're losing purchasing power. On top of that, the housing market has been completely destroyed by the Fed printing money and shoving it into mortgage backed securities. In many nicer areas of Southern California you used to be able to get a starter home for $600k (manageable for someone in a working class profession like a nurse or mechanic), now nothing on the market is less than $1.2M.

Also you forget that a big reason the labor market is so tight is because a couple million Boomers retired early during the pandemic.

Gentrification is a classic example of supply and demand from microecon. As an area becomes nicer to live in it gains more and more demand with people with high willingness and ability to pay. Supply remains fixed, because of US zoning laws, or grows more slowly than people come into the neighborhood. The price goes up because of _demand_ going up without supply going up.

Why does it gentrify in the first place? Because the initial group of "gentrifiers" took the time and money to develop the area to make it more appealing, thus increasing demand.

Economics says you can't fix it no matter how much regulation you impose because at some point all the surrounding businesses, etc. will be gentrified too and force out poor people. Even if you freeze rent, ban new businesses from coming in, etc. the existing business owners will start to cater to their new clientele simply because the demand from those customers is much higher. The only thing you _can_ do is ban people from moving to the neighborhood, at which point you've turned into the worst parts of the Soviet Union.

The US and Europe have great safety regulations for workers. It turns out given the choice women would rather not live in the middle of nowhere in -40C weather getting soaked by crude oil and mud every day, even if it pays six figures. Why do men do it? Because there's a societal expectation that they provide for the family as a breadwinner.

> teachers with X degree and Y years experience get Y0,000 ±5%

That would never work in tech. And the higher paying firm you go to, the less it works. High performers in FAANG can have refresher and bonus multipliers of 2.5x the base performance rating. In HFT high performers total comp can be double or triple low performers' TC.

I would think it shouldn't work for teachers either. In the US there is a marked difference in teacher compensation between good districts and bad districts and you see the quality difference in the students that come out of those schools.

Ironic they leave out Asian men in the graph at the top. I guess those numbers wouldn't fit their "America is racist" trope.

Other than that though, standardizing pay will balance the playing field towards smaller companies. Bigger companies will face pressure to standardize pay packages per level (see: Coinbase, Uber) which limits their ability to reward top performers. Smaller companies won't have that same pressure. The pay gap is largely a function of how much each gender negotiates on average and if you take away negotiating then people will just leave to places where they're paid what they're worth.

Unfortunately the party in charge right now is trumpeting the idea that inflation must be because companies are price gouging customers rather than trying to slow down domestic spending. The other party doesn't like to balance budgets either and if the Fed even touches interest rates the market (and everyone's 401k) tanks.

We have a huge trades shortage and COVID might force a lot of supply chains to come back at least in part to the US. The demand for new construction has never been higher either.

A large portion of society that doesn't want to work on hot, dusty, dirty worksites might become obsolete with nothing useful for them to do. But there are absolutely jobs that are accessible to no-skill workers with only 1-2 years investment in schooling.

> This isn’t a flaw in a healthcare system, it’s a symptom of a broken transport system.

Nobody wants to sit next to piss/weed/cig smelling people and get their shit robbed on public transit (see: BART) if they can afford a car instead. Plus, US light rail runs at much slower speeds than places like China due to NIMBYism, so it also takes longer than driving to get places.

> The very least you can do is pay their healthcare .

The very least they could do is come into the country legally. And by the way, a lot of the really crappy jobs are done by legal residents, like garbagemen, sewer maintenance, lineman, etc. Guess what? My local taxes pay for those workers to have good salaries and I'm happy to pay. The US also has a visa for farm workers to come to the US as well.

> national borders create an arbitrary and discriminatory barrier to free movement people and enforce QoL disparities across the world.

Spoken like someone who is privileged and wealthy enough to be unaffected by open borders. Globalization has destroyed the American factory job, along with its high wages, and you still claim open borders are the way forward? Pro tip, don't claim to be morally superior when you work as a software engineer making $$$ that has a huge demand supply imbalance. If you really believe what you're saying then go work in India in a bodyshop making $10k and working 80h weeks, but pay your US cost of living. That's what millions of blue collar workers are facing when you open borders.

Please exit your bubble and talk to some real working class people for once. People like you are like the engineers I meet who openly talk about how self driving cars are going to disrupt the industry as they get into an Uber. Zero self-awareness.

> everyone in the administrative region gets covered for everything

That leads to rampant abuses. For example in certain East Asian city states with "universal" healthcare people would use ambulances as taxis because they were free. You need copays to prevent this kind of abuse.

And you also forget that the US has a big illegal immigration problem. By and large illegal immigrants make minimum wage or lower, generally under the table (i.e. not paying taxes on it). By covering healthcare for them you are automatically subsidizing illegal immigrants at the cost of citizens and permanent residents. Is that fair?

If you think these aren't legitimate outcomes of allowing everyone to have free healthcare then you're naive.

Climate change is perhaps one of the many reasons both the Roman and Byzantine empires fell or lost ability to project power. The Byzantine conquest of Italy was finishing up when these plagues hit and they never recovered their original strength again.

One has to wonder whether modern agriculture is no longer as affected by these kinds of changes or whether the war in Ukraine is just a sign of things to come.

Not quite true, because on-die data transfer is a lot cheaper than off-die. If you look at full system power consumption between even chiplet based and monolithic Ryzen products there is a large difference.