It's a terrible spirit in all respects. A good whisky is the choice of the discerning drinker. Vodka is the Budweiser of spirits. Best left to the club crowd and those afflicted with a degenerate palette.
I thought it was salient and not at all preachy. I came to similar conclusions several years ago. The lack of social safety nets in the US is a heavy burden in the long run for independent contractors and eventually the burden becomes too heavy. I think every independent contractor needs to re-evaluate their business every six months or so and be realistic with their long-term outlooks.
Is it low though? You read all the time that your average American barely has any money set aside for retirement or that they often need to leverage credit cards for emergencies. Even those that can put money aside, how feasible is it for them to max out a 401K? The barrier to entry into the stock market is incredibly high when you've only got at best $25 at the end of the month in your pocket.
Exactly, I would even say the situation is so bleak for some Americans (and even people all around the world) that they might as well enjoy themselves in the short term, especially when they're young, while they can, as opposed to risking it on the uncertain future.
Edit: Also, as the tax base gets smaller, I can see some of the tax advantaged accounts people have money in become not so tax advantaged. The money to replay all this debt (including infrastructure, environmental, and policy debt) has to come from somewhere, and I'd bet it's both from inflation and savings. Or someone hits the reset button with a revolution or war.
> You read all the time that your average American barely has any money set aside for retirement
That's not because there is a high bar to investing, it's that most people are financially undisciplined. I see it all the time, people get a bonus and the very first thing they do is go buy a new car. Literally one of the worst things you can spend money on is a car, and a new one makes it even worse. Many people carry CC debt, which is absolutely crazy. Keep in mind I'm not talking about people who are struggling just to put food on the table, but people who should be able to save, but instead do really stupid things with their money.
1. People who are using Robinhood for trading stocks are probably people with stable jobs and disposable income, not people who are struggling to get by. If you have enough extra money to trade stocks, you probably have enough to max out your 401-K.
2. If you only have $25 left at the end of the month, you shouldn't be investing in stocks at all. You should be putting your $25 in a savings account for emergency expenses.
The fix is to make more areas desirable to live in by reducing income inequality and stimulating local economies (which in turn creates more desirable locations). Simply saying build "more houses" in clustered cities along the coasts doesn't solve anything in the long run. Cities are in it for the long run.
San Francisco is not nearly dense enough. It can support a lot more housing. Easily. It's just NIMBYs and cronies in the way.
Despite having significant growth opportunity San Fran is already twice as dense as Seattle. Therefore Seattle has room for explosive housing growth. It would need more changes than just housing of course. But that's to be expected and totally doable.
Cities are huge economic multipliers. We don't need more cities yet. The ones we have are perfectly great! We need to more efficiently use what we already have.
This housing crisis isn't affecting just "top tier" cities.
It's not just New York and San Fran. It's Seattle. It's Denver, Austin, and Portland. It's even Nashville!
Every city, top to bottom, needs to be doing more. And they need to start now as the longer they wait the more expensive the infrastructure adjustments become.
All the city needs to do is literally nothing. Just stand back and stay out of the way. Sadly this is one of the hardest things for a bureaucracy to do.
Public transportation is a 20th century solution. If cities do nothing autonomous vehicles will revolutionize transportation wants within 20 years. Which is as fast or faster than major public transportation projects would take.
Additional housing will result in a larger tax base which will automatically cover additional schooling needs.
It's not a guarantee that self-drive for cars will not lead to more use and more congestion in cities which are not upgrading their transit.
I am hopeful for autonomous app hailed buses, but there's definitely a big chance it doesn't all work out that way, and even then there is clearly still a physical limit on how much existing road infrastructure can handle.
More desirable areas means more areas for developers to build housing. Cities cannot do more with a citizenry that is unable to keep the local economy and government institutions afloat. These cities are in a horrendous feedback loop that is seeing their economies and tax bases decimated. It all begins and ends with income inequality.
> that is seeing their economies and tax bases decimated
Wat? That is literally the opposite of reality.
The problem is cities are TOO POPULAR. Cities so successful that only the rich can afford to live in them! Increased property values, more property tax revenue, higher resident earnings and spendings. Cities aren't being decimated. Cities are so economically successful that poor people are being forced out so more rich people can move in!
The article, titled "The Middle Class Can't Afford to Live in Cities Anymore" is about people earning $50,000 to $125,000 who can't afford housing in cities. It's not about rural or rust belt communities with no jobs. Housing is plenty cheap in those areas. They just lack the jobs to go with it. A very real but very different problem.
Getting shamed into acquiescence doesn't sound very healthy to me and certainly doesn't excuse the actions of this group. It's not as if this group is providing constructive criticism to say the least. Also, what if this were {insert_ethnicity}peoplehate? It's not as if the person on the receiving end can change being {insert_ethnicity}.
I think it's of interest now because you have a direct cause-and-effect scenario in place (e.g. fake news having some effect on the outcome of a US election). Beforehand, most people would have assumed that the fake news industry simply pandered to the conspiratorial crowd without any repercussions. It was harmless...not to be taken seriously. However, now we can see real consequences, which makes for a worthy story IMO.
> you have a direct cause-and-effect scenario in place
See I was not so sure about the direct cause and effect bit.
That sounds a bit too dismissive. I am sure it has to have some effect but not sure that's the reason for an electoral landslide and Hillary delivering the worst Democratic performance in 20 some years, despite having experience, a mass media support, DOJ and POTUS on her side, a lot more donor money and resources.
Saying this is because Macedonians brainwashed our citizens about lizard people or KGB agents seems dishonest.
I'm not saying it's the single, deciding factor as to why Clinton lost. I'm simply saying that we can now see the influence fake news has on something as pivotal as a US election. Prior to this, the effects would have been written off as harmless. This is why it makes for an important story and not some attempt at scapegoating.
> I'm simply saying that we can now see the influence fake news has on something as pivotal as a US election.
Makes sense. I'd want to know the effect the fake new had. I suspect it is not as big as presented, at least not compared to the current hype about it. I am guessing you think it is more significant?
> Prior to this, the effects would have been written off as harmless.
Yap. I was joking the other day, I wouldn't mind a test before voting "Do you think Earth is flat?" / "Do you think lizard people run our government?" / "Is earth 5000 years old?". If they answer yes, they vote goes uncounted.
In traditional news organizations, editorial boards and newsrooms operate independently of each other and it's unfortunate when high quality reporting is too often dismissed with a quick "meh, it's a liberal|conservative rag that can't be trusted." The "editorialization" by the modern blog-o-sphere has wrecked havoc on the landscape and sewed the seeds of distrust. I don't think there is any doubt of that.
* Fox News and other Fox/Murdoch publications world wide claim to be traditional news organizations, but really are editorializing. Ironically, this undermines the reputation of real news organizations - people assume they do the same.
* Many on the right now value ideology over fact. Information that fits the ideology is accepted; inconvenient fact is not. Climate change, Obama's citizenship (doubted by 40% of Republicans, IIRC), and Saddam Hussein's possession of WMD are simple examples.
* The demonization of any information that doesn't fit the ideology has resulted in the right continually demonizing real news organizations, who report based on fact and not ideology.
I'm not writing that to be partisan. There is a critical problem on the right that is destroying society, democracy and civilization, and an attitude that they are not stewards of those things - as if there is no consequence. If it was happening also on the left then I'd say the same, but it's not.
> Not too mention that Maggie Haberman and Mark Liebovich (and probably a few others too that I'm not aware of) can be found in the Podesta emails sending over their articles to the Clinton campaign for review, prior to publication.
Can you reference the source for this? I ask because much of what I've seen between what WikiLeaks tweets and what's actually contained within the email messages is severely taken out of context. (e.g. not understanding what news embargos are [1]) The New York Times were also the ones who originally broke the story of the private email server.
Here's a Clinton campaign strategy document that mentions Haberman and how she has "teed up many stories for us before and [we] have never been disappointed":
Doing an advanced search on Wikileaks filtering by "nytdirect@nytimes.com" in the sender field, you'll see that the first drafts of nearly 50 different articles were sent to John Podesta:
Thank you, but in the second link, this appears to be a newsletter email from the First Draft blog on the NY Times [1]. The DocumentCloud link is certainly not verifiable as it contains only the single page.
You're right about those first drafts, my mistake.
That Clinton campaign strategy documents comes from, apparently, the Guccifer 2.0 hacks. Glenn Greenwald and Lee Fang contacted Nick Merrill to confirm the document's authenticity, but received no response.
NYT links are all paywalled for me, but I can't envision any possible excuse for what he did. I understand that "access" is a tricky problem and involves some moral grey area, but sending articles ahead of time for revision and "vetoing", and asking for permission to use a quote... those both strike me as a clear failure in journalistic ethics.
So should journalists simply never agree to have conversations off the record?
I think there are big problems with the way access and coverage are mixed up together and traded on, but I'm pretty comfortable with a journalist agreeing not to publish remarks made during a conversation and then later asking to publish some of them.
It's a terrible spirit in all respects. A good whisky is the choice of the discerning drinker. Vodka is the Budweiser of spirits. Best left to the club crowd and those afflicted with a degenerate palette.