Crimea was Feb 2014, and then in Jul 2014, Malaysia Airlines flight 17 was shot down by "pro russian separatists" in eastern Ukraine. Seems like they were laying the groundwork for a while. I have no idea what portion of this wikipedia article is true:
The problem was the government providing the blank check loans with no underwriting. Without that subsidy from future taxpayers, incentives would be properly aligned.
No lender would have been stupid enough to give 18 to 22 year olds $200k for bullshit degrees and sports facilities.
The onus would have remained on employers and government to pay for education, rather than a certification, because they would have been the ones paying.
College should have never been presented as the only way to the middle class. In high school they shutdown my advanced trades class, maybe I could have been ready to hop into a decent job after graduation.
I recently spoke to a young art school grad who talked about getting on disability over a life of the corporate grind.
Who am I to disagree ? The Pentagon has never passed an audit, the government coffers are effectively a slush fund for defense contractors.
At this point, I think a universal basic income is the only way.
Not enough jobs exist for everyone. Poverty doesn’t need to exist
>College should have never been presented as the only way to the middle class. In high school they shutdown my advanced trades class, maybe I could have been ready to hop into a decent job after graduation.
Not unless you were willing to compete on price against people in China learning the same advanced trades.
No, I search a few YouTube videos, and buy less than $100 of tools and supplies that were made in China from Home Depot, and fix the issue. Or a plumber uses tools and supplies made in China to fix the issue.
“Advanced trades” would be making and fixing the machines used to make the tools and supplies to fix the leak.
> It's really strange how we're just letting them get away with this.
Choosing to pay less is what almost all people do, and it is consistent with almost all of human history.
> They're on a fast trajectory toward putting Americans completely out of work and without aid, even though they're American companies first and foremost.
When push comes to shove, i.e. paying lower prices to consume more goods and services or paying higher prices to ensure your countrymen can buy more goods and services, almost everyone will choose to pay lower prices. See political unpopularity of sufficient tariffs to stop imports.
“American” is a nebulous term, and Americans have been choosing lower prices for many decades before the current crop of employees at the global big tech companies chose lower prices. It is no different than when someone picks up lower priced workers outside waiting Home Depot, who are there because they do not have legal work authorization in the US.
I think it's all bad and counter-productive toward a stable society though. I think economic sacrifices likely have to be made to ensure long-term viability. What we're doing now is accelerating the demise of everything. The entire planet even.
There are no places in the US that Tmobile is the only wireless mobile network provider. While all 3 mobile network providers have weak coverage areas, Verizon is considered to have the most reach.
GP said:
> there was a dramatic increase in regulations for banks (of all kinds)
and if I can deposit funds, make "investments" (gambling or not.. to me most stock investments are gambling anyway since they pay out in dividends based on quarterly profits) and withdraw money, that is at it's core a bank.
However, in these and many other cases they are now effectively unregulated ones. Partly because the executive branch responsible for said regulations have their hands in the pie.
>and if I can deposit funds, make "investments", and withdraw money, that is at it's core a bank.
Not according to pretty much all countries. When a depositor is making investments, that is called a brokerage, not a bank. But these gambling websites are not making investments either.
Also, with the transition to digital currency, banks don't really have the same purpose anymore of storing and guaranteeing people's access to their money, now that money is entries in a digital ledger and there is no risk of losing the money (outside of political risks where someone edits the database). They have been obviated, but the system persists.
>most stock investments are gambling anyway since they pay out in dividends based on quarterly profits
This is not true, publicly listed companies' boards regularly choose to vary dividend amounts based on longer term cash flow, and you will be sorely disappointed if you are expecting dividends to land in your account as a function of quarterly profits.
And how do you expect a business to work if it did not vary dividends? No business knows the future, and dividends are the same as owners paying themselves a profit, so if owners do not know how much profit there will be in the future, how can dividends be a "known" quantity? They have to be based on profits, they literally are the owners distributing the profit amongst themselves
Any venture in life is gambling, just like people exploring the oceans and traversing continents without knowing what was ahead of them was gambling. But that is a different type of gambling than risking money with no effect on the outcome such as on the aforementioned gambling websites and casinos.
>If you're paying a million euros of income tax a year in France, Italy is very tempting. As for US citizens, Americans are always taxable on worldwide income, so moving to Italy would not help their tax bill.
This characterization:
>selling for an unsustainably low price)
also applies to previous governments and voters that approved defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare that needs ever growing populations to fund it.
I can see the situation just as easily be characterized as “avoid being liable for an unsustainable debt”.
Income and assets are different though. They will tax what you earn, but they aren't trying to tax your net worth afterwards. Idk how France can go after the assets of people who move.
They weren’t ashamed, they wanted their kids to have a higher quality of life. They looked around and saw themselves and most others who swung hammers to have a lower quality of life than they would have preferred for their kids compared to those in offices.
Everyone can swing a hammer after they get home from work if swinging the hammer is virtuous.
> They weren’t ashamed, they wanted their kids to have a higher quality of life. They looked around and saw themselves and most others who swung hammers to have a lower quality of life than they would have preferred for their kids compared to those in offices.
Is that true? I do not know about the US, but in the UK skilled people who work with their hands out earn many who work in offices, find it easier to be self employed, and have greater job security.
It was true. Probably started tilting back the other way after 2008. There is a lag in perception though, but it’s still very much boom and bust type work. Healthcare is probably the new dependable, decent paying, blue collar work.
Office work, however, lends itself to scaling, so earning potential is always more. Swinging hammers is great, but owning the business that hires the people who swings hammers is going to allow you to earn more, because it can scale. But you’re right back to office work.
> There is a lag in perception though, but it’s still very much boom and bust type work.
Boom and bust in something like construction, true, but what about something like plumbing? its not cyclical because so much of the work is repairs and maintenance. On the other hand there are lots of white collar jobs that are cyclical.
We have had a huge strike in the UK (specifically at the largest local authority in Europe) because bin men's pay (not basic pay - it was a bit more complex) was reduced to bring them in line with teaching assistants (because of a court ruling that it was discriminatory to pay mostly male bin men more than mostly female teaching assistant).
Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work well before 2008. The influx of East Europeans slowed it down, but did not reverse the trend.
>Lots of office jobs have been badly paid compared to skilled work
"Pay" is not a scalar measure, it is a vector with multiple components. Roughly speaking, pay is short for "pay to quality of life at work ratio". Which incorporates everything a person thinks about when choosing what to sell, including volatility of pay, what coworkers will be like, possibility of injury, commute time, the weather and conditions you will be working in, potential upward movement, potential for harassment at work, location of work, potential of finding a spouse with xyz characteristics, etc.
Swinging hammers or plumbing or whatever can strictly pay more, but not may not be sufficient to incentivize people to choose to do them over being paid less in an office. Pay someone 300,000 GBP per year to do 40 hours per week of plumbing working, and the UK would have plenty of plumbers, and parents would be recommending their kids to become plumbers. But if the differential is only 10,000 GBP? Maybe not worth it.
I do a lot of damage to other species and humans now and in the future with the energy use caused by my large detached single family home and various leisure travels and imported toys.
The two paths I see would be giving up a lot, including my family since I doubt my wife would go along with it, and live a much less consumptive lifestyle, starting with less space. In the meantime, billions of people in China/India/Brazil/Nigeria are waiting to increase their consumption.
Or I stick my head in the sand and continue ignoring the problem and living the one life I have, and let nature take whatever course it will.
It’s women’s rights that causes that. Turns out, making and raising a baby more than one or two times is not a preferred option. And zero is preferred a lot of times too.
It's not a correlation, it's a conditional statement.
If women have the option to choose, then the vast majority choose 0, 1, or 2 kids. This conditional statement is upheld by basically all the total fertility rate trends in the world.
I'm seeing the same trends in rural and urban areas.
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