The biggest issue of Climate Change is that it doesn’t really mean anything. We need to be precise if we want action done. Our worst enemy is lack of information and the mistakes done when selling Global Warming, think Al Gore in the 1990s. Let’s not be fooled to think CO2 is such a magical evil molecule, we need to tackle much bigger problems than a chemical that earth is naturally trained to tackle.
It’s not politics, when a country promises to start the nuclear holocaust the fame changes. Putin turned Ukraine into a World War threat. Don’t be fooled, nobody expected such reckless which is a sign of desperation. Russia is certainly in some deep deep problems.
I disagree. The invasion of Ukraine was not a surprise. Even Trump was impeached for witholding aid to Ukraine because this threat has been around for a while now. I still remember when their previous president or PM sold them out to Russia by selling of a base or something and they had fist fights in their parliament because of it. The US and pals tell everyone what to do in their country, including putin (see Chechnya), they invade Iraq for Oil but act like they are better than when russia invaded Georgia. Russia's economy depends on oil sales to neighbors and to Putin, the only thing preventing the west from twisting their arms is nukes, the US has been handing out THAAD and hosting nukes in NATO states, Ukraine and Georgia have the desire to join NATO. This isn't that surprising. Putin wants a buffer of former soviet states . Of course, I personally disagree with his views but from his perspective invading Ukraine was in the best interest of his rule and preserving Russia's sovreignity.
The whole WW3 scare is silly. Putin isn't interested in a 1000 year reich. He's a KGB spy who spent his life resisting western influence, he is doing what he does best. Now that they have him feel cornerned though, things will get very bad. He may invade all the former soviet sattelites and the west should stay out of it unless WW3 is on the calendar.
This WW3 scare is IMHO stupid. Just let Russia take Ukraine? Kazakhstan? Lithuania? Georgia? Finland? Sweden? Estonia? Poland?
Where do you draw the line? I don’t think any of those are acceptable. If you don’t fight a expansionist tyrant then what do you envision happens? Sacrificing innocent free countries to (maybe) appease a monster is completely out of the question.
Things can get bad if you interfere - things are guaranteed to get bad if you don’t
They had their chance to join NATO. They made their choice to stand on their own. It sucks it russia goes after them but each nation has the right of self-determination and reslonsibility of forming alliances and and a military to defend its borders. "We won't join NATO because you will save us when the time comes anyways" is not a good stance but it is the stance these very democratic nations took.
Of course Capitalism exists outside of the government. Look at the extremes: Capitalism : Mercantile Exchange were value is created by the providers and users. Socialism : Central Government sets values and controls every single aspect of your life.
Capitalism is based on rules of property and ownership, basically that I can own something, that you can't take it away from me through violence and that I can hire people to improve that something and they won't have an ownership stake on it (unless I want them to.) Those rules come from government. If you think about a society with no centralized rules on property and ownership, it wouldn't be very capitalistic, it would be much more like an anarchic steal-what-you-can system.
Those rules regarding property and ownership predate government. The government likes to pretend that only it can enforce those rules, when in fact it is the entity most responsible for violating them. You can't seriously claim to enforce property rights when you yourself are seizing a sizable chunk of everyone's income for your own use. Also, there is no reason at all that the rules need to be "centralized" or promulgated and enforced by some special class of rulers. Property and ownership and the justice of proportional punishment for violating them are all logical consequences of self-ownership and reciprocation. People are perfectly capable of arranging to enforce their own rights without depending on an overgrown, overpriced, centralized protection racket.
The entire basis of modern public administration (and one of the reasons it can be more bureaucratic than market mechanisms for delivering services) is that it attempts to rigorously exclude cronyism. The reason for civil service tenure, for example, was to stop politicians selling public service jobs to the highest bidder, or handing them over as a quid-pro-quo for favourable decisions. As seen in the late 19th and early 20th Century 'Progressive' movement in the US, for example, the idea was for a government of the highest possible rectitude.
Now, that obviously doesn't happen in all areas all of the time. And we have moved away from that kind of rules-structured ideal over the last forty years or so in pursuit of greater efficiency (which has re-introduced cronyism in the UK to a greater degree, for example - see the present government) but it's grossly over-simplified to say that cronyism is an 'essential' part of big government, when its original foundations were intended to produce a (big) government of laws and not men.
The existence of all these protections against cronyism in the public sector is evidence that it is an inherent problem. If it wasn't, there would be no need for all the protections.
Edit: the problem is kind of moral hazard. Much like a chemical plant or nuclear reactor needs a range of protection systems to prevent the dangerous chemicals from going out of control, public administration needs a range of systems to prevent corruption getting too out of hand.
Yes indeed (and, even more so, the culture of non-corruption which reformers tried to put in place at the same time). But, like in the chemical plant, it is possible to run a government with minimal levels of corruption and many (better-governed) countries do it.
It's not just a public admin problem, either - corruption and self-dealing are potentially endemic in the private sector, too. The concern has traditionally been higher for the public sector, both because of the potential for abuse of state power and because it is/was seen to be corrosive to public trust and self-government. A private company is more likely to trade off the cost of controls versus the dollar value of the future loss (or the controller is the one running the firm strictly for their own benefit, in which case they're likely to get away with it without intervention by the legal system). And the largest companies have had actual public power greater than the smallest countries for centuries by this point, so the two concerns are not completely disjoint.
Capitalism is the ultimate democracy, everyone votes with their labour and their purchases. The more regulation, the less power the individual has. Of course, some regulation is necessary to avoid abuses.
Discussions should be on the level of what rules allow society to reach a better result, not just try to artificially fix problems because it leads to even bigger problems.
Everyone votes with their purchases, except the people with the most money get the most votes, and if you don't participate in the "elections" you starve? Sounds very democratic.
Regulations typically limit the power of the most powerful in society, whose power in turn restricts the rest of us. Thus, regulation frequently increases the freedom of most citizens.
Consider a business owner who treats his workers poorly. The workers could find new employers, but odds are they'd be treated just as poorly there, because these labour conditions are not atypical. Then a bill is passed which forces employers to improve labour conditions. Less power for elites means workers' freedom from having power exerted upon them increases.
Cronyism is indeed the disease and there is a solution on automation and transparency. Big Government is not the solutions and it will only make all the problems worse. I really don't understand why so many smart people think that solution for the whole world is to sit down and vote money into existence.
I will never work because it just can't work, everyone is different and has different priorities. A better world can only be built from the bottom up, just look at craft beer and how independent people were able to retake one of the most monopolistic industries in the world.
How exactly would automation assist in making an economic system more democratic and beneficial to the general population? Greater automation would simply push people further away from any wealth generated, creating more powerful cronies, and continuing the trend of low paid, low quality, serf like jobs in the service industry.
The DeFi space is a lot worse than the traditional economy by just about any measure right now: inequality, theft, fraud, instability, market manipulation, etc are all way worse.
Have you considered the possibility that those “so many smart people” understand these things better than you? Have you considered the possibility that the craft beer industry can’t work or isn’t feasible to occur in other sectors?
Americans are finally catching up to Third World standards. It's pretty common to work two jobs and juggle between them, it's just that you used to be able to have a decent life with one revenue stream. It seems that after covid this will no longer be the case. ;)
I know younger joking, sort of, but an averagely talented and experienced engineer can easily support a family with one income now. This article is really about how to do some game theory stuff to maximize income and be “financially free”. Something working two jobs in the third world will never provide.
