haizhung

You got it backwards. Bill Gates and Alex Karp don’t pay megamoney for lumber or farm land. They consume a bit more than the average person, but not by the same %age as they are richer.

But everyone else can’t afford basic necessities or furniture anymore. And so being a farmer or a woodworker or whatever becomes a less attractive job, less people will do it, and you will have a harder time finding someone fixing your plumbing. Or pay a premium.

Instead, the ultra-wealthy are demanding extreme luxury, and so a would-be farmer is now a hotel page boy carrying around some rich dudes’ luggage, hoping for a tip.

If unions were truly ineffective, companies wouldn’t spend millions on union busting firms.

Or, you know, solve this politically and implement an economy that redistributes wealth from the top back to ordinary people.

To be fair, this happened all across the western world. The US with Reagan, Germany with Kohl and Schröder, and many other countries followed the same path.

Prior to that, neoliberal think tanks have been working for almost decades to prepare the dismantling of the public institutions.

Well, color me surprised, but you’re right: in contrast to china, Malaysia, and other SE Asia states, India’s plastic trash is mostly (97%) self-made, with the largest contributor being single use packaging for consumers.

Just a reminder that the worse climate change gets, the larger the difference is that a single 0.1 degrees makes. 1.0->1.1 degree difference in global warming is barely noticeable, but 2.9->3.0 makes a huge difference.

So, paradoxically, the worse the situation gets, the larger our incentive should become to avoid yet another increase in global warming.

You do understand that they are suffering because of choices made for them, by the west? Its our plastic that flows through their rivers.

No?

> From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury

Please show me that moment, is it in the room with us right now?

On the contrary, giving money to the public would actually help the economy, but people continuously vote for politicians who are (ostensibly) “careful” with the money.

There is no need to fix it. A deficit in the governments’ budget is a surplus on someone’s private bank account.

If you wanted to “fix” the budget deficit, you’d have to collect all the money that the US has printed. At least that’s how I understand MMT.

> The house called 15 of your 113 scored numbers: 13%. Blind guessing would average about 12.6 of them (11%). The house called 1.2 times as many. Only 5 of the 206 people in a psychology study were more random than you. The house found you extremely hard to read.

I did a PhD in a stochastic-related field though, so I know about some “tricks” (in that most humans are too random and eg. dont sample long running sequences)

No it will not, propaganda and scapegoating will.

This is thrown around as some sort of truism that humans become animals at the smallest inconvenience; but there is simply no evidence for it. On the contrary, there is loads of evidence that humans work together and support each other especially well through hardship.

You could quite literally introduce a wealth tax and then set the (additionally) taxed money on fire; and it would improve living standards.

The point is to lower the economic power of single individuals that compete against the entire rest of the nation.

Not only that but they are actively moving into these countries, because, like everybody, they like a functioning government that provides infrastructure, housing and health care for their citizens. This makes for much more livable cities and a happy society.