maceo

US spends over $8,000 per capita on healthcare, compared to about $4,000 in UK and Japan, both of which have universal health care.

This isn't a problem tech can solve. It's a problem only politics can solve.

The headline reads: "the costs outweigh the benefits."

Except there's no mention of the greatest benefit: improved quality of life for all participants.

I explained very clearly why the circumstances surrounding the expeditions pushed the Europeans to be more greedy than their Chinese counterparts. The fact is that the Europeans pillaged the New World and the Chinese didn't. I believe mainly economic considerations led this to be the case. I don't know what your explanation is.

Don't be so sensitive that any hint of criticism as taken as a condemnation of your culture. I don't see how "opposing arguments" add anything to the conversation. I know very well that the reconquista was just finishing when Columbus set sail and that Spain had been dominated by an Islamic caliphate for centuries. I don't think that excuses his atrocities.

"the English, which didn't have all that wealth"

What? The British mastered the slave trade and its Caribbean slave colonies were perhaps the most productive of the era.

I neither wrote not implied that Europeans are evil -- you assumed that. The fact is that colonialism and the slave trade, despite creating massive amounts of wealth for some, were horrific for its subjects. And Western Europeans were the first to scale both colonialism and the slave trade globally. This isn't debatable, it's plain fact.

Unfortunately, people like the interviewee explain away early western economic domination by referring to Western European intellect and culture, and ignoring the dark side. This has been the case since the beginning of economic history. Adam Smith didn't even bother to discuss slavery in The Wealth of Nations even though he knew how critical it was to the development of capitalism.

It's time to be honest about how we got here. If the ugly truth offends you, I don't know what to tell you.

Wage theft causes American workers to lose an estimated $50 billion dollars per year.

Usually low-income workers, many of whom are not in a social class where they're friends with a smart lawyer, are the victims.

This is just the SV flavor of what millions of American workers suffer from year-round.

This guy is an absolute douchebag. He's a disrespectful piece of shit and anyone involved with Soylent in any capacity ought to be ashamed with his antics. For those who don't know, Lincoln Heights is a working class neighborhood, that as of the last 2-3 years is undergoing rapid gentrification.

Give it up. I left out an important part in my original post: this guy only got media attention in America. No media attention in the Arab world, because being a Google employee didn't make his sacrifice any more significant. The European media had enough sense to not focus on this guy either. Only the insufferable mainstream American media is self-centered enough to push the narrative that an employee of an American company was instrumental in the Arab Spring.

Please, cut it out with the bullshit. This guy played a negligible role in the Arab Spring. The only reason he received the media attention he did was because he held a prominent position at an American company.

Calling him the Arab Spring's instigator is an insult to Egyptian activists and organizers, not to mention the revolutionaries in Tunisia.

This mentality was necessary for national survival given their history. From being doped up and murdered by imperialist westerners during the opium wars to being occupied and raped by imperial japan.

A unite and take on the world mentality is what allowed China to win sovereignty, and given how far they've come, I'd say the "us against the world" mentality has worked wonders for them so far.

The comparison is apropos. I've lived in Hollywood most of my life and have to spend time in SF for work. The entertainment people get a bad rap for being superficial douchebags and chronic bullshitters, but it doesn't even compare to the SF scene. At least in Hollywood, if someone thinks they're hot shit, you can go on imdb and see if they're really as self-important as they think they are. In SF everyone is the best programmer, is working at the most important non-profit, is building the next huge app, and it's very difficult to tell if they're full of shit (hint: 99% of them are).

Right, and many of the pirates become pirates because they were fleeing the autocracy of legitimate merchant ships.

And the newfound freedom of pirates was a direct threat to the state. It's no wonder that in a span of 50 years, as mercantilism developed, pirates went from being knighted (Francis Drake), to being the worst kind of criminals (Blackbeard).