Firefox market share is certainly down but is usage really down 85%? I thought the market share was down partly because of smart phones and the browser market has expanded a lot of the last 10 years, especially in poorer countries were more and more people get internet access.
> It took a World War that killed millions of people (and was -- surprise! -- a major artificial government stimulus) to get out of it.
You are describing the broken window fallacy here. War and destruction doesn't help the economy. What happens in war is that useful resources in the economy are diverted from productive use and mutual beneficial trade to death and destruction.
You're right that the broken window fallacy is a fallacy when the economy is not in a depression, but it can be a bit more situational and complex than that.
When aggregate demand is "stuck" at a depressed level (high unemployment causes low demand, resulting in more low unemployment), the stimulus of war can actually help pull the economy out of its stuck position, even if the war is destructive. Of course, once it's no longer stuck, the continued destructive stimulus is just destructive.
There are better fiscal ways to pull the economy out of a depression than war, because most wars don't pay much in the way of dividends, unlike large scale public works. But even if the stimulus isn't a great ROI in "normal" times, it can have a high ROI in "depressed" times due to its ability to get demand unstuck.
A report from last year estimates that 95% of the bitcoin trading volume is fake [1]. There's no real identity behind a wallet so bot networks can easily pump up the volume and price. Another study claims "A single actor likely drove the USD/BTC exchange rate from $150 to $1000 in 2 months." [2]
I have no reason to believe these Q conspiracies but I understand why people believe them, when we know about all the past shady activities like COINTELPRO, MKUltra, WMDs in Iraq, all the involvement South America, NSA spying, etc.
I have to admit, i've stayed away from the Q conspiracies, knowing where they all came from and just generally hearing the nonsense of the few things I have heard.
But, I have to admit, had I read more of it at the time, I would have been ready to believe it.
Ever since then, I don't like writing this comment, people completely dismiss me after that, but a friend of mine actually did apply for a job about a year before that all came out, at a pizza place, not a chain, some tiny little hole in the wall in a seedy neighbourhood, and was shown a back room with some matresses where she was told she could 'make extra money'.
The thing is, there are dark, terrible seedy things that go on in the world, but, unlike what people like Q and the people that believe him think, it's not some grand unified conspiracy involving every level of government and large companies.
It's places in your neighbourhood, apartments where women are trafficked from foreign countries by gangs and pimps to make them money, or they run hidden brothels out of businesses they own.
Conflating these things to a giant conspiracy though is wrong and takes attention away from the people actually doing terrible things and lets them keep getting away with it while everyone's busy going after this shady non-existent shadow network.
your bar is pretty low if you think the fact that actual conspiracies exist justifies engaging in believing arbitrary conspiracy theories.
This is akin to believing that all women cheat just because it actually happens to be the case that you met one that actually did, or thinking all Jewish people are trying to get your money because you were once defrauded by one.
The problem with paranoid mindsets is not that they're always incorrect, it's that they're pathological in their structure.
Conspiracy theories also obscure the big reasons why things are messed up in society. The root causes often boil down to human frailty and/or bad luck--things that require a lot of plodding work to fix. Commercial aircraft are pretty safe because we've spent decades fixing problems one by one. At this point there are not many left.
So what, we should disbelieve all conspiracy theories by default? In the rare case it happens to be true, it'll probably be too late to act upon, just like COINTELPRO and MKULTRA.
We can assign the possibility of Q being true without actually taking a side and acting on it. I can say "this is both compelling and unlikely to be true, but as I long as I don't have to act on it, it doesn't matter if I believe in it or not". We can let the evidence over time build a stronger case for it or destroy it.
The only reason I can see not to do that is if it introduces unacceptable consequences in the meantime, as the article is suggesting, but it seems like the reporting against it is ridiculously cherry picked and disingenuous. There's probably a much stronger case for stopping BLM as a organization at the moment, but I don't think I've seen an Atlantic article suggesting that.
For the time being, Q seems like a harmless movement. It would be a red flag if Q denounced a group of people without justification, but Q has been pretty specific about the things and people it denounces, and if things go according to Q's plan the people it's denouncing are going to have their chance in court .
>It would be a red flag if Q denounced a group of people without justification
Which they have. Only well-known Democratic-party-affiliated personalities are implicated. The blatantly partisan narrative creates great potential for political violence.
And like many other conspiracy theories, the narrative is full of antisemitic tropes:
https://www.adl.org/qanon
Finally, there's the obvious logical difference between conspiracy theory and conspiracy fact. The latter has actual evidence supporting it.
And the probability of this menagerie of preposterous claims actually turning out to be true would be close to zero due to the vast number of participants who would have to keep silent. The more people who participate in any given conspiracy, the less time it can be kept secret on average:
The point of my first post was to say we don't have to assign any probabilities at the moment.
I'm just viewing it as compelling entertainment. Outside of this thread, I haven't mentioned it to anyone. It's probably premature to unwaveringly denounce or support it. When we have to actually act on it, or if it causes actual crime in the real world, that's when it helps if you take a stand.
If knowing for certain one way or the other would influence one’s choices, a truly rational agent (which humans only approximate) must always at least implicitly assign a probability.
Some people are appealing to people who believe it in their political campaigns. I think this is sufficient to make it relevant.
I'm turning your argument around: why go around and invent fake conspiracy theories when actual conspiracies are a thing and are nothing like the fake ones?
My guess, people are moving away from the cities out to the suburbs because the great thing about the cities are all the social events, restaurants, and activities which are mostly shutdown and a lot of people don't need commute to work since they work remote now. So might as well move out from an apartment into a bigger house. Then there might also be a fear of higher crime, taxes, etc
This theory doesn't make a lot of sense to me, I've heard it a few times though. Why would someone buy a house away from the city during a temporary pandemic shutdown, assuming when things eventually open up again more in say max a year or two, they will need/want to be back in the city? I mean permanent remote work is one thing, I guess, but everything else that has 'gone away' hopefully will not be that way permanently (?)
> assuming when things eventually open up again more in say max a year or two, they will need/want to be back in the city?
Well, I do not have a huge sample to drive any conclusions.
But I know a couple whose adult children live in other parts of the world (one in Miami, the other in London).
So the couple is choosing, finally, to sell their NY city home and move to south east Florida closer to one of the children.
Largerly, besides emotional reasons (lack of feeling secure, feeling of being unwanted, feeling of being robbed by local taxes, wanting to be closer to their children) -- they no longer see that their home price will continue to go up to justify sitting there as an 'investment vehicle'.
They are closer to retirement age, so their needs, perhaps are different then others.
They also do not want their children, under any circumstance to move back to NY city or NJ.
Not sure that I buy the theory either at the macro level, but I think one thing I have personally seen/heard of is people who are now realizing how much they don't like the city life (even when things are open) and the pandemic is the straw to break the camel's back here and convince them to go elsewhere to try something else. The key is that it's not temporary for them.
Even the people that are there for work and already knew their city reality may also be realizing their gained happiness out of the city is worth more than the financial boost of their job in the city.
People buy gas guzzlers because they want them and the dip in gas prices makes the TCO calculation something they can convince the other decision-maker in their household is a battle that's not worth picking.
Where you live is a compromise. With the city benifet gone but not the suburban ones the suburbs look attractive to people who are on the fence anyway.
I'll be very surprised if things get much better anytime soon, certainly not before the end of the year. Maybe two years from now... but I wouldn't bet on it. I live in a city where some questionable calls were made with regard to rioters, so I'm eager to put some distance between that and myself.
I think the argument is that it's displaced consumption, where people who would normally have waited for the perfect time to pull the trigger are now all moving at once.
Chris Masterjohn has an interesting talk called "Resolving the Vitamin D Paradox" where his hypothesis is that vitamin D, A, and K all need to be balanced for proper regulation of vitamin K dependent proteins.
Swiss cheese is produced in the US and hamburgers are not always from Hamburg. I don't really see the problem. If consumers want to know where it's from then the country of origin can be included on the package.
Sure! Then let me then sell my own kind of iPhone. For Apple it's enough to write on the package that is made in California to make the consumers aware /s
When I feel good my body and heart has a slight euphoric feeling and alcohol moves me further away from that. I used to drink but sort of just gradually reduced it over time after meeting friends who didn't drink, it wasn't really a conscious decision though, just going by what makes me feel good
Yeah, it would be nice to be able to replicate a warmer and sunnier climate indoors during the winter.
Another thing you can try is to use red to near infrared light which has been shown to affect the mitochondrial electron transport chain. I read "Brain Photobiomodulation Therapy: A Narrative Review" a couple of days ago which is pretty interesting.
