The article talks about manipulation from the US, but the examples are: Cambridge Analytica (which was British, not American), Querdenkers (who were German), and Éric Zemmour (who is French). I mean is this seriously advocating for the censorship of protests coming from the German public?
What these people want is censorship that only allows progressive arguments to flourish. They already have all the laws that make non-progressive speech forbidden, but they are struggling to apply them to companies that are the other side of the pond. Having social networks here would allow them do to so easily. To that I have to say no thanks.
> Cambridge Analytica (which was British, not American),
Saying that the manipulation was done by the UK because Cambridge Analytica happens to be Brittish completely misconstrues what happened.
> Cambridge Analytica was working for United States Senator Ted Cruz using data harvested from millions of people's Facebook accounts without their consent
> Facebook later confirmed that it actually had data on potentially over 87 million users, with 70.6 million of those people from the United States.
As a Spanish person I can’t even imagine what would make someone come here to live - I suppose you’re already exceedingly wealthy?
Almost all of my friends with higher educations have left for northern countries, as the situation here is untenable for young people. Of course if you have money that’s not an issue… and evidently the kind of money that makes that non an issue can only obtained in places like the US.
Spain is one of the best places in the world to live if you have a steady income, you don't have to be wealthy to be happy. I've lived there for many years working for Spanish companies, with spanish salaries.
But seeing how you blame mass immigration, mostly uneducated and low-skilled workers, for the fall in wages of the educated people leaving the country, I wonder if your vision isn't too myopic and narrow on economic issues due to political bias.
As for the struggles of the young people in the country, because real state is inaccessible, I agree with you, but it's a problem in most capital cities of the civilised world.
I didn’t blame mass immigration for the fall of wages of educated people. Maybe you misunderstood what I said. It’s uneducated young people who suffer from that. I have clarified my other comment.
>Almost all of my friends with higher educations have left for northern countries, as the situation here is untenable for young people.
>Bottom of the barrel wages for natives are the result of uncontrolled mass migration - we have received millions of immigrants in the last decade, which has basically destroyed wages.
Putting those two sentences of yours together triggered that thought in my mind, I apologise if I was wrong.
when you say "immigration has destroyed wages" you mean "immigration has lowered the floor of low wages" but you also imply "businesses CAN pay higher wages but WON'T".
i wouldn't blame the immigrants there. the whole thing managed correctly would be (or actually already is) a huge boon for the country. the suffering of the young and poor seems to be a choice made by the greedy.
Well that explains it doesn't it? One can cheaply employ your youth at bottom barrel wages and buy up or rent the real estate without competition with native professionals. And I'm not damning anyone who does that, it helps the locals more than them not coming at all. The Spanish government has more or less set up the incentives to play out this way -- that Spain is a place to come on holiday or to retire but not a place for native educated professionals to partake in business.
Bottom of the barrel wages for the uneducated natives are the result of uncontrolled mass migration - we have received millions of immigrants in the last decade, which has basically destroyed wages, and has made the poorest suffer.
On the other hand real estate is held by wealthy old natives and laws are enacted to make sure that real estate increases in price forever, the young be damned - no one cares about them since our population pyramid means they’ll always be a minority.
I’m very interested in understanding the challenges in building more affordable housing in Spain. Do you have any resources you’d recommend or be willing to discuss more offline?
Regarding renting, it’s legally almost impossible to kick out a squatter, which means most people choose to leave their empty homes closed instead of renting them, which, added to mass immigration, has led to a surge in rent prices.
It’s a complex, nuanced topic, but the cost of living in most of Spain is much lower than the US. Healthcare in the US for a family of four costs me >$20k/year. You can live comfortably in Spain for ~1.5x that in euros.
Again, it comes down to how you define "Right" doesn't it?
Clearly Christian theology and other strains of thought think otherwise... that there's an ethical/moral "rightness" which can be judged independent of what the powerful say.
To be clear, I'm not arguing for that position. I just am pointing out in part why the Democrats and liberals are so pathetically unable to confront this situation. They thought they were part of a gentleman's club, and they could all take turns ruling according to a set of rules.
The liberal philosophy is just the mirror opposite, isn't it? "This poor, marginalized group is suffering, that's wrong! We need regulation to stop it. Oh look, we found another over here, this is injustice! Let's all take action to rid this wrong from the world".
I mean, I'm personally a kind of Marxian. I won't defend liberalism, though I'd prefer not to live in an illberal society.
To me the present-day "left" liberal is not just profound hypocrisy but also a refusal to confront the reality of class conflict in capitalist society. The kind of liberal you're talking about will do "everything" to rectify injustice against every identifiable group except the largest group in society, the working class whose labour feeds the whole machine.
There was a slogan in the 20s and 30s when the socialist movement was confronted by (and lost to) the rise of the authoritarian right. "Socialism or barbarism" [and no, peanut gallery, the "left" in North America is not "socialism"]. Guess which part you're getting now.
That’s not true. They have the same amount of calories roughly. It’s physically impossible for animal fat to have that many calories. Tallow has 900 calories per 100 grams while olive oil has 884. They are almost pure fat and pure fat has 9 calories per gram.
This is completely wrong. For example, you can increase the amount of oil or butter in a recipe, doubling or tripling its calorie count, and you would never be able to tell from a picture.
The point of the app is to figure out the calories of a meal automatically by taking a photo.
Without knowing the amount of sugar, butter, oil, etc. is used in a dish, one cannot know if a dish is worth 250 kilocalories or 750 kilocalories.
If I need to manually fill in details of ingredients and amounts to get to the calories to be have an error margin of less than 100%, then the app is not useful and is at best misleading.
That this would happen is evident to everybody with a minimum knowledge of economics. It’s the same reason UBI won’t work because it would make prices skyrocket.
It certainly could. Depends a lot on the specifics of how the UBI is implemented, and how UBI affects salary levels. If everything remained the same and everyone just got x more income each year, then yes, inflation is very likely. On the other hand, something more like no questions asked/no demands made social security, where the only requirement is being unemployed, could improve conditions for people who are unable to work while paying for itself in eliminating heaps of red tape, and also freeing up a lots of manpower towards helping people sort out their lives instead of pouring over disability pension applications, without paying out a bunch of money to people who don't need it because they earn plenty from work already.
One could also pay out ubi universally, but have a one time down-adjustment of salaries the first year.
Right and wrong. Right if it increases aggregate demand more than available economic production thus leading to inflation.
But if we overall had capacity to tame in the added UBI, then no. Unlike targeted subsidies like EVs, UBI is do much better. Each industry is still competing with other industries
Excessive use of colour can certainly be vulgar - but restrained use is a valuable tool for clarity. As I type this, Firefox shows no hint at all that it has input focus, other than the tab's background being very slightly lighter and the tab's title text being very slightly darker. It's not so very long ago that colour would have been used to communicate this information clearly and unambiguously.
I don’t live in America but here we don’t use credit cards but we have micro loans and people overwhelmingly sign those for things they absolutely do not need.
What these people want is censorship that only allows progressive arguments to flourish. They already have all the laws that make non-progressive speech forbidden, but they are struggling to apply them to companies that are the other side of the pond. Having social networks here would allow them do to so easily. To that I have to say no thanks.