Plus the separation of powers seems too reliant on the president being a decent human being. It'll be interesting to see that play out over the next decades.
Investors don't want 5x revenue valuations, they want 30x growth.
Make 'real infrastructure' and 'housing' companies attractive products for investors to buy and they'll buy. (No idea how to do that, don't ask me! :))
That's the thing. You have to remove the unsustainable nonsense that looks like 30x growth in order for investors to be willing to invest in 5x revenue valuations.
(If you have real things that are actually producing 30x growth then that's fine, obvs.)
Maybe investors shouldn't treat inversion like casino gambling. With their capital, they could make inversions (or even their own businesses) that grow slower but steadily.
We need to kill the idea that a) this is what investors should be looking for, and b) it's even possible aside from a 1 in 1,000,000,000 fluke.
All of these economic instruments are supposed to be there to serve the needs of real human people, not just to make the wealthy even wealthier. We need to break this cycle of ever-escalating capital chasing capital, and get investment in things that will actually make people's lives better.
capitalism is kinda-sorta weaponized greed, but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value. IMHO blaming regulators for not nudging capital in the politically desirable way is appropriate: either they shouldn't be regulating because they don't know how, or they're regulating according to a hidden policy instead of whatever they say. (cue 'why not both'.)
There is no need for hedging language, it is entirely weaponized greed.
> but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value.
No, its in a way which tries to remove constraints from the power of the capitalist class, and full enable their dominion over society -- that's what drove it and how it evolved from prior systems.
The assumed existence of competition (along with other assumptions) making it optimal was a much later, after the fact attempt at rationalizing it in response to criticism, and actual attempts to promote competition were later yet reforms limiting capitalism, not part of its essence.
> capitalism is kinda-sorta weaponized greed, but in a way that tries to promote competition and thus create actual value.
In practice, capitalism itself doesn't really promote competition, but rather competition is an externally-enforced situation required to keep capitalism from going off the rails. IMHO, capitalism naturally evolves towards monopoly (otherwise antitrust laws would be unnecessary).
Are you being deliberately obtuse? In case you aren't, the answer is roads, bridges, public transportation, electrified rail, grid modernization, utility-scale storage and solar. We need these things desperately, and instead we're going to get sheds full of video cards from here to the horizon.
If you want to spend your money and time building bridges for electrified rail, go ahead. Nobody is stopping you. Other people clearly feel they have enough of that and would rather invest in datacenters. Who are you to say they're wrong?
I say they're wrong, and I do so in my capacity as a citizen. These large pools of capital should not be allowed to follow the whims of a handful of unelected oligarchs who have clearly lost the plot. In a functioning society, this scale of decision would not be left to the whims of international finance capital, but decided via democratic means. It's unfortunate that the last scraps of the Fordist labor truce are unraveling, because it means that I and my comrades are going to have to discipline this generation of oligarchs just like our grandparents did the last really nasty one.
This kind of absolutist individualist argument just rings more and more hollow as we see the very real consequences of that philosophy for our society.
Who am I to say they're wrong? A human being, that's who. A human being who lives in a modern society that does not have to prioritize the whims of the wealthy few over the needs of the many. We can choose to set stringent requirements on people who have that much money, and therefore power, and that is not evil. Indeed, it is the furthest thing from it.
And what happens when those people don't want to have your requirements "set" on them? Do you force those peaceful people to do your bidding with violence? Would that not make you the evil ones?
Look at the reply from the guy I was questioning. It took just two or three mild questions for him to go full Hitler, talking about how his comrades will have to "discipline" a whole generation of "oligarchs" (i.e. anyone who makes things he doesn't personally prioritize).
Collectivist thinking always leads to violence, and eventually societal failure.
There's nothing violent about using elections to make the decision to tax rich people so that we can spend (formerly) their money building roads and bridges. The idea that this is the road to Hitlerism is absurd, and thankfully this rhetorical stance no longer rings the slightest bit true to anyone within earshot of the working class.
Also, as I'm sure you're aware, I was using "discipline" as a term of art to mean "withhold our labor until their profits suffer and they are willing to negotiate". This was the strategy employed the last time we seriously dealt with concentrated capital getting high on its own supply. It is also not a form of violence. What's the alternative? Capital using force to require us to work against our will? Would you call that slavery? Or just serfdom? Which do you advocate?
Let the market solve it. If the market requires educated adults the market will create that environment or something, answer is probably private schools. I assume they’d say something like that.
Slight problem with that if you would like to live in a functioning, thriving democracy: democracy in the sense of "one person, one vote" requires or at least greatly benefits from a broadly educated population. It's not sufficient, but very likely necessary.
>Let the market solve it. If the market requires educated adults the market will create that environment or something, answer is probably private schools. I assume they’d say something like that.
I don't pretend to speak for anyone else, but I am more than my economic inputs and outputs, and while it was in a somewhat different context, Heinlein's prose applies in spades WRT your assertion:
“I had to perform an act of faith. I had to prove to myself that I was a man. Not just a producing-consuming economic animal…but a man.”
― Robert A. Heinlein[0][1]
The market has never solved anything in ways that are beneifical for humanity. (Just commenting on the first part of your comment, given that your last sentence implies you're just saying what market evangelists would say.)
The notion that everyone conscripted into a war is guilty by default is absurd, but always inevitably comes out to play during the height of moral outrage.
I don’t think your comparison works because Israel does not have a comparable anti-war movement that the US had during the Vietnam War. In fact, if the media is to be believed, there has been enthusiasm on the part of Israelis to take part in the fighting.
Wouldn’t that only make vietnam vets more blameworthy? There was a whole movement against it and they still chose to not give up their home/family and choose exile even when it was less stigmatized to do so.
Your comparison doesn't work because Vietnam War didn't start with Vietnam attacking USA, holding many hostages, the group leading the charge having religious ideology viewing Americans as second class citizens as well as people to ethnically cleanse, all while bordering USA.
Maybe we should be thinking differently about those too then. Or maybe the environment is different where one generation should “know better”, having lived through another 50 years of human development and ubiquitous access to information.
10s of thousands of scum flew from all around the world from their comfy lives to Israel to enjoy participating in an attempt at total destruction of a nation composed in half from children, by starving them, bombing them, shooting them, and burying them alive.
These were not conscripted in any way whatsoever. These 10s of thousands deserve full blame, and fuck them all.
Humans build identities around their homes. It’s why any plan that involves relocation implicitly or explicitly requires violence.
It’s absurd to suggest Israelis should effectively “self deport” from their homes. It’s unrealistic to the point that it’s effectively dismissing the problem instead of honestly engaging it.
Sure. Not great. But also not relevant to charging individuals.
If we’re to learn from Sykes and Picot, a good place to start would be in acknowledging the primacy of the living over the dead, and those on the ground over ideals from abroad. One conclusion from that is we shouldn’t be condemning men we’ve never met for actions they are only affiliated with.
You can think killing someone is justified without thinking they are morally culpable. There’s a reason the laws of war don’t endorse summary execution of surrendering combatants, beyond the practical benefits of encouraging more humane conduct towards your own troops.
right guys, it’s only like 80% of that population that has the ideology we don’t like
and in the other 20%, many of them don’t get conscripted due to a religious exemption that includes being in a totally different ideology that has always disagreed with the other
odds not looking good, speaking as a betting man, not one with any actual opinion just need my prediction market bet to hit
What is the ideology we don’t like? I think it is easy to throw stones when the reality is that if your nation suffered a similar attack, many many people would get swept up in anger and outrage and retaliatory madness.
What Israel is doing is wrong, but I don’t think it would be unique among
developed states experiencing something similar.
Zionism is the belief that there should be a Jewish ethnostate, it should be called Israel, and it should go in the geographic location where Israel now is.
That definition would exclude half of the early Zionist conference attendees, who would have accepted any region where refugees could gather, and seriously considered multiple locations.
The formation of Israel was a shitshow. The region has always been a shitshow, it’s the coast closest to the cradle of civilization. But it’s unfair to refer to the Nakba as peaceful. (Though it’s no less peaceful than the nutters calling for the destruction of Israel in response.)
I don't believe I referred to the Nakba or anything else as "peaceful" - of course the Zionists engaged in (non-peaceful) violence, before and during and after the war. But the point is that, contra the claims that ethnic cleansing is "at the core" of Zionism, violence wasn't the Zionist starting point and unlike the Palestinians they were content with a peaceful solution; neither of those things would've been the case if violence was fundamental to their project.
No, I'm not. Really frustrating to have to explain this repeatedly.
While ethnic cleansing undoubtedly occurred, it wasn't the original intent "at the core" of the Zionist project. Rather, the intent at the core of the project was - precisely as always stated - desire for Jewish self-determination, and (once again) they initially set out to attain that through peaceful and legal means and were happy to accept an internationally supported solution that did not involve ethnic cleansing.
I'm really not sure how to make this clearer: there was an entirely workable plan that would have gotten the Zionists what they wanted without ethnic cleansing, they accepted it, no further violence needed to occur. The proof is in the pudding: if ethnic cleansing was core to the project, such a plan could not have existed and/or the Zionists would not have accepted it.
Instead, the Arabs refused this, had zero interest in trying to negotiate any kind of peaceful solution, began to ethnically cleanse Jews throughout the Arab world [0], and launched an international war effort to subjugate or oust the Jews from the region.
The Israeli defense and retaliation ultimately included ethnic cleansing of its own. That's undeniable. But even here it wasn't core to the project; it wasn't a war goal at the beginning. Per Wikipedia [1]:
Initially, the aim was "simple and modest": to survive the assaults of
the Palestinian Arabs and the Arab states. "The Zionist leaders deeply,
genuinely, feared a Middle Eastern reenactment of the Holocaust, which
had just ended; the Arabs' public rhetoric reinforced these fears". As
the war progressed, the aim of expanding the Jewish state beyond the UN
partition borders appeared: first to incorporate clusters of isolated
Jewish settlements and later to add more territories to the state and
give it defensible borders. A third and further aim that emerged among
the political and military leaders after four or five months was to
"reduce the size of Israel's prospective large and hostile Arab
minority, seen as a potential powerful fifth column, by belligerency
and expulsion".
It's tragic that they arrived at that "third and further aim"; I'm looking back on this with 80 years of both distance and hindsight, but I can at least conceive of a world in which they didn't.
I don't mean to whitewash what the Israelis did in the war - any more than Palestinian supporters want to whitewash what the Arabs did and intended to do, I suppose. But I was replying to someone asserting that the State of Israel simply could not exist without ethnic cleansing, that to be a Zionist fundamentally means to support ethnic cleansing. This is what I'm disputing.
> Zionists purchased land in the region and immigrated legally
Colonial Britain famously sold a lot of land they didn't control, occupy or reasonably administrate. The Raj comes to mind.
The Balfour Declaration, in context, was like buying a car title from the impound lot. The slip of paper might say you own it, but nobody ever notarized it at the DMV. And now the person who put 50,000 miles on the odometer is going to see you in court for the rest of their life.
> thus ethnic cleansing is at the very core of Zionism
Ethnic cleansing is absolutely not at the core of the existence of a Jewish state. This rhetoric is particularly unhelpful since it seems to suggest that Palestine needs to be ethnically cleansed if Israel is to exist, which is absurd.
> Ethnic cleansing is at the core of every ethnostate
What makes Israel an ethnostate? (Versus a nation state.)
Demographically, and structurally, Israel doesn’t look dissimilar from e.g. China, India, Russia or most European countries. None of them require ethnic cleansing.
> You can't have, say, a racially German state
Race is a social construct. What constitutes a “true” German has been debated annd fought over among the tribes since before Cæsar.
And I’m not even sure how one would go about defining an Israeli “race” without being incoherent. (Which is fine. Plenty of races are defined in a way that is internally inconsistent. But none of that requires ethnic cleansing as a consequence. Just periodically redefining racial boundaries to broaden what being X means, the way American whiteness has evolved over the centuries.)
You just called it a Jewish state and now you're pretending that a Jewish state isn't an ethnostate by definition. A purposefully created white state is an ethnostate; a purposefully created German state is an ethnostate; a purposefully created Jewish state is an ethnostate. Ethnostates are very very bad. And it doesn't matter who's a "true" member of the group; it matters only that there is a group. There could be an ethnostate for people with brown hair and that would be bad regardless of whether or not people with black hair were counted as brown-haired.
> you're pretending that a Jewish state isn't an ethnostate by definition
It isn't. Certainly not in a way that requires ethnic cleansing.
What definition are you using? Are all Arab states ethnostates? What about monoethnic countries [1]?
> Ethnostates are very very bad
Because they arise from ethnic cleansing. Nobody has a problem with Egypt or Finland being monoethnic, and I think it would be incorrect to call them ethnostates.
If Egypt and Finland (and Iceland and Palestine) are ethnostates, then we've broadened the definition to where they seem to be fine.
> it doesn't matter who's a "true" member of the group; it matters only that there is a group
Of course it does. If you can expand the group, you don't have a problem. The very act of nationhood is an exercise in defining groups of people.
One can have a liberal, democratic, Jewish state that isn't an ethnostate. Nothing about Israel's existence requires ethnic cleansing. That's just a weird own goal that argues for it.
> suggest you look up the definition of an ethnostate before trying to argue about it
I’m literally asking for the definition you’re using. Because none of the ones I’m seeing match what you’re saying. And the way you seem to be defining it turns “ethnic cleansing is at the core of every ethnostate” into tautology.
Pretty sure military aged males aren't allowed to just leave Russia at this point without prior approval. And sometimes are forcibly conscripted on the street
"People in EU" are Hungary and Slovakia for pipeline gas and crude oil. Belgium, France and Netherlands for LNG. Most see a huge problem with it and pledge to phase it out by 2027.
So EU nationals can’t even phase out their fully voluntary usage of gas for 5+ years because it would cost a bit more despite financing Ukrainian deaths, but conscripted soldiers are blameworthy because they didn’t abandon their home and everything they know to become a fugitive of their state rather than get conscripted?
It's not (only) a matter of cost, but availability. People need fuel to heat their houses. In order to fully replace Russian gas, other facilities (like LNG container terminals) need to be built. That has been done and is being done, but is complex and not instant.
Should it have been done before February 2022? Yeah, probably.
To be fair, conscripted people did not take part in a war. The ones who take part are those involuntarily mobilized in 2022, well paid volunteers and convicts who get a pardon after serving for a certain time.
I see a huge problem that the annexation of crimea started in 2014, escalated in 2022 to a full war and invasion, and eu countries can’t be bothered to move off Russian gas before 2027.
Calling a population that you forcibly displace from their homes “refugees” is certainly a choice. Not a correct one, but certainly a choice nonetheless.
Same here as well as for other streaming. They want to watch the show more than a couple times, I’ll download it. No way I let my kids get brainwashed by these people with their weird algorithms they don’t understand themselves.
> Once enrolled in Vine, Voices may request products from thousands of brands selling in the Amazon store which are shipped to their doorsteps at no cost. They then use the products and provide insightful reviews that reflect their honest and unbiased opinions - positive, neutral, or negative. Reviews of a product ordered through Vine appear in the same location as other reviews. Amazon Vine reviews are distinguished with this special badge "Vine Customer Review of Free Product" for full transparency.
Sounds like such an obvious conflict of interest to me, it's in the employees interest to leave reviews that make it more likely for someone to buy that product, what other reason could there be?
Opposite data point, where I live, there's lots of people working the floor. I'm usually asked if I need help at least once when I'm there. Maybe it depends on the store or whatever the umbrella org is.
Given the US is a democracy (presuming voting is reasonably representative of the voter's intent, i.e., voter fraud is not significant in determining the "will of the people"), and plenty of examples where the candidate that was outspent/had less money still won, blaming money is a cop out.
The majority of people who bothered to vote in Wisconsin since 2010 voted for Johnson. Money has an influence but isn't determinative.
> I can sort of respect that the dependency list is pretty small, but at the cost of very unmaintainable 20k+ lines of utilities. I guess it really wanted to avoid supply-chain attacks.
> Some of them are really unnecessary and could be replaced with off the shelf solution
Lots of people would regard this as a good thing. Surely the LLM can't guess which kind you are.
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