I have found otherwise good people are capable of intentionally doing awful things to another human, even if you have known someone almost your entire life, a switch flips and it is like a full psychopath is unlocked. Many only need the moral cover, certain they are right, to say and do awful things to another.
This was always true but it seems to me that social media, in all its forms, not only takes your privacy, it also takes your empathy. At the root of many mental health disorders exists narcissism and for the past few decades an increasing number of people have been added to the empathy erasing internet hate machine.
In most cases people see what they prefer to see. Their response to such impossible questions tells you more about them - how they see the world, their sense of life - than it does humanity at large.
I agree, this is a hard subject, whether people are good or not. I've always believed we're all capable of doing good under certain conditions, but let most get out of their comfort zone and they'll turn on you like a mad dog. (sorry) Proof? just look at our political scene the last 5 plus years. I won't debate any thing ideologically anymore with co-workers, they simply default to anger when you press them to explain how they feel and why about any difficult ideas.
This was going to be part of a bad stand up comedy routine I am never going to do. Bald is the last label and category that hasn't had its time to shine. Even actors who have hair take media roles that bald men traditionally have. Like Patrick Stewart being replaced by a dude that has to shave his head to be Professor X. And there is a ton of subtle bald hate in society even to the point of influencing career advancement. That is the same media representation problem other groups have.
With all that being said, down with groups and labels. Gotta move on from it as it is too easy for the wealthy class to take our self defined labels and categories and turn everyone against each other. The internet has allowed this process to be amplified.
A cursory Google ("who replaced Patrick Stewart as Professor X") shows that James McAvoy portrayed the character from 2011-2019, sharing some overlap with Stewart (2000-2017 and 2022).
Or it is just a way to neutralize years of unnecessary negative energy. Of course bald women have it worse. Did you really create an account to say that? Well more power to ya
> Or it is just a way to neutralize years of unnecessary negative energy.
That is not an "or" to my comment. I realize that's what you were doing. But by being so narrowly focused on male baldness, it comes off as an incel rant because you come off as ignorant and narcissistic by not addressing the elephant in the room; female baldness.
> Of course bald women have it worse.
...and? Again, the main issue is your entire piece not only doesn't mention it but comes off as unaware of it entirely. Or if not unaware, just so self obsessed that it doesn't occur to you.
> Did you really create an account to say that? Well more power to ya
You could have easily seen this was not the case by going to my profile page. Again, you come off as so self absorbed that you don't bother looking up basic facts that are right at hand.
None of this (or my original comment) are meant as a slam. It is intended as constructive criticism.
Edit: After skimming your Twitter I now realize you are suffering from mental illness and I sincerely hope you get the help that you need. I apologize for throwing any criticism your way, clearly you are dealing with enough already.
I think your emotions about recent supreme court rulings are influencing your reactions to an offhand comment about male pattern baldness. You need to learn to separate issues. You will be much happier in life. Not every post is some clarion call for action and not everything needs to be twisted the way you have done here.
Thanks!
EDIT: Thank you for reading my Twitter page! Sadly it is not mental illness but my right to a trial and due process was stolen by a corrupt government. Read about punitative psychitary sometime. The East German Stasi would often use mental illness as an excuse to take away basic rights like due process. You will likely understand this one day if it continues. I do appreciate the personal insult based on a situation you know absolutely nothing about.
It is also a concern when developing these "weapons" that after using them, they could potentially be reverse engineered. In that context a successful payload that appears poorly constructed could be intentional.
Either way, for the mission goals it was a success.
Many are saying there is no recession now or coming soon and point to various figures to prove it... This ignores deep structural problems that have been covered up by QE. QE itself was a cook the books kind of scenario to provide liquidity... Then it became impossible to roll it back once companies and the market got addicted to the money.
So now we approach a point where tightening has to happen because both the Federal Reserve and U.S. Govt have run up the balance sheets and debts to very high insane levels not meant for "peace time".
Now as they attempt to roll it back, certain issues start to appear. First due to lots of factors... main one likely being generational bretton woods style changes to the global economy and the reserve currency used. The only argument against this is that China, Russia and maybe most of OPEC moving away from using dollars to handle various transactions tends to cause certain unexpected issues while that is happening.
One of those is inflation since for mant years it has been one of the United States main exports...
So while all of this is rolled back or changed, it reveals all of the existing structural problems that were never really addressed...
All of these factors either mean a big crash or a controlled demolition of the whole QE system and a global reordering of trade.
There are far too many factors to control and many more are not controllable. So expect a crash.
To determine when this is likely, maybe watch the repo and reverse repo market rates. Since 2020 they have increased steadily, now in trillions of overnight funding needed, and continuing to grow. This could quickly lead to something not often discussed where the Federal Reserve loses the ability to control interest rates.
It is kind of a paradox, balance sheet growth -> liquidity -> inflation -> higher borrowing costs -> more balance sheet growth.. This process cant go on forever...
Many metrics exist to watch it but the idea that the Govt will one day say OK we cant fund repos tonight, everything financially will be locked up by morning... like 2008 but worse..
That Paul Volcker guy had a lot of good ideas that they tried and failed to implement since 2008. Maybe those will deserve a second look, once all of this is over. Point being, nothing was fixed since the 2008 crash and as soon as the free money runs out, it will be obvious.
Also, inflation kills democracies more often than anything else.
Trade Wars 2002... A popular old BBS door game with many scripting options to automate trading and many other aspects of the game. Also when I started getting into hacking and exploits. MajorBBS was a lot of fun in that regard.
Most of these graphs can be explained by the Nixon shock as other people have mentioned. This also factored into what is considered backing a currency, in this case the global reserve currency. Leading up to the “Nixon shock” there was a decades long move away from direct gold to dollar conversion. The replacement was the petrodollar combined with the move to more of a fiat reserve currency. Then you had a geopolitical struggle over the 1970s with oil producing countries that exists to this day. By 1979, Iran’s revolutipn happened which pushed the U.S. closer to the Saudis, cementing the defense agreement that had been in place for decades, itself mirroring one the British had with the House of Saud. The petrodollar concept underpinned much of the next few decades and we have only begun moving away from it.
Since the debate at the end of WW2 that led to Bretton Woods, which currency or the Bancor would handle reserve currency functions, in addition to the petrodollar, the U.S. bond and treasuries specifically have been closely tied to this system. Also during the 70s, you had China begin opening up, then as a way to kind of solve the trifflin dilemma, the U.S. would grow the world economy being an importer, so long as the money found its way back with treasuries and other foreign investments. Japan began playing a bigger role here too and as everyone continued industrualizing and globalizing, the U.S. economy grew along with it because of this system. It was also a great way to sort of export inflation along the way too. A big problem in the 70s that we are seeing again today.
So if a big crash is coming, expect another Bretton Woods type agreement first with an attempt to control the strength of the dollar.
The difference this time is that there really isn’t another China to bring into this system, and in fact, many foreign countries have looked to avoid using USD all together. Just ask Russia about that.
Of course, these are just a few reasons for all of this. There are many factors, like the increase in productivity from computing, and advances in other industries that increased productivity and output.
Historically you will see patterns like this, similar ones exist between 1929-1945, 1864-1918, and so on.
Unfortunately, everytime this system is challenged, a sort of global reordering, there are economic crashes, and often large wars. We might be seeing another example of this now…
Because their productivity hasn’t increased as much as that of people with higher incomes. The productivity of surgeons and software developers increased significantly, and so their incomes, while cleaners and factory workers are not much more productive than 60 years ago.
How much more productive surgeons are? As in patients operated per working day or week? Outcomes surely have improved, but I'm wondering about speed in operation it self, not recovery.
Actually I think you should when that work is not scalable. Surgeons can very well be measured by how many patients they operate on. And quality improvements are a thing, but how much more productive is there? 1,1x or 2x or 3x? Probably not magnitude more. So really their pay should only be that much more...
If you can completely fix a hernia with 99% success at the first try without a hospital stay, you are significantly more productive than somebody that has a 50% success rate and that requires patients to stay in hospital for a week, even if you operate on the same number of patients.
Speed of operation or lumps of labor per second is not the only applicable metric and, outside of certain cases, it's not a very good one. Average patient health (arguably an ill-defined term) has many ways of being assessed:
* Fewer deaths from preventable diseases
* Breakthroughs in pharmaceutical research production
* New and improved medical devices to counter chronically debilitating sicknesses
* An increase in elective surgeries with fewer long-term effects
1971, I remember it well. It was plain to see Nixon had always been unsuitably too dishonest for any position of leadership or trust.
Modern civilization was built on the transition from barbarism during which the gold standard had been established for centuries.
Remember modern man adopted the precious metals standard in pre-historic times. i.e. Prehistoric Man. So it's been around a long time.
Investors just as shrewd as today recognized that all wealth arises from natural resources to begin with, and their scientists and geologists had millennia to identify and procure the most universally rare long-lasting element that could be accumulated and passed down the most reliably that people would actually pay for. But of course they would need to pay in some other way.
Different regimes over the millennia, both the few that are historically recorded and the remaining majority of advanced civilizations that will never be known, have had greater or lesser degrees of barbaric greed that were still endemic because of their cultural traditions, and this has always had a disparate effect on their relationship with precious metals, especially gold in particular.
It was not unique in different parts of the world for the doctrine to become all gold belongs to the king, whether gradually over time or by occasional edict.
In 1913 circulating legal tender US dollar bank notes were centralized & privatized, separated in a way from the government mint which remained the sole source of gold dollars.
The complementary silver standard had been removed politically in earlier decades. Silver dollars were therefore theoretically backed by gold. Just act like silver is not the other precious metal that civilization was built on, nobody will notice.
In 1933 began the recall of all gold & gold dollars to the king. No more circulation under penalty of law.
In exchange, the substitute bank notes were given a curated strength & stability for the remaining lifetime of the victims. Still tied to gold.
After 1960, silver moved up in price relative to stable gold, so the mint had a reason to remove silver from US coins by 1964, with even copper soon to follow.
This seemed to be a precautionary effort in case a cold war might need to be waged using currency salvos.
But once oil skyrocketed even more threatingly there was pressure to devalue the currency to pay for it, so the dollar was going to need to be debased beforehand. The misfortunates of 1933 were no longer a strong force and inflation was run up the flagpole without as much skepticism as there should have been. So inflation it was.
In exchange Americans would be once again allowed to own gold, but only if they could afford to purchase it after it had skyrocketed which almost no average American could even consider with the pricing pressures everywhere else.
Going forward from 1971 we're just going to act like gold had not been the standard of wealth and commerce since civilization began, if not since the dawn of modern man.
I would estimate that's a serious break with tradition.
As we can see, the other shoe dropped and the recall was completed.
It wouldn’t generally, but productivity increases are not even across the entire population/workforce and, furthe, some of the productivity gains may be captured by organized groups.
Let’s say you have a population of software developers and cleaners and that the productivity of software developers doubles while the productivity of cleaners remains the same. Developers may demand higher salaries and increase the demand for some goods or services, say housing, whose price may increase, leaving the cleaners worse off. Providers of such services may organise (explicitly or otherwise) to capture part of this productivity increase (say blocking the construction of new apartment blocks), making the situation for cleaners even worse.
If the economy doesn't grow at the rate of productivity growth and the most productive people don't work less then some people will become unemployed and won't find a job.
Because people aren’t literally worse off. Just different-off. Housing is more expensive, but as others have said, there’s a growth in 2 income households so if you account for “percent household spend” instead of per capita spend it’s a more reasonable number. At the same time, a lot of that productivity has gone into leisure activités that weren’t available before. Growth in games and movies and travel etc.
No, absolutely not. House prices have grown much faster than inflation even if you introduce a fudge factor 2.
> Growth in games and movies and travel etc.
Is that like "eat cake"? Housing is incredibly more expensive, education is incredibly expensive, but don't worry movies are cheap and that more than makes up for it, right?
> House prices have grown much faster than inflation even if you introduce a fudge factor 2.
No prices have grown a lot in major metros where Software people work. I’m sure SF is insane. But also NYC according to the article has “only” grown by 200% - so it’s literally cheaper on a household level if you include wage growth (assuming you go from single income to double income), and I’m sure Cleveland has a lot less growth. According to (1) housing has only grown 150% nationwide.
It’s not “eat cake”. Houses have grown bigger over time. They gained electricity and running water and 2 car garages and high efficiency water heaters. But people also replace their now 2 car often and buy new iPhones and stream high qualitymovies from their large high def TVs. At some point houses don’t need to get bigger and theirs no more room in Silicon Valley for single family homes but there’s always room for more consumerism delivered faster priced cheaper and plenty of businesses who will deliver. Proof is that housing is becoming a smaller part of the GDP (0) despite becoming “unaffordable expensive”.
As a bonus, according to this article (2), houses are 150% larger and rentals are 200% larger since 1970s. So I guess you get what you pay for?
Maybe you should stop with the hypocrisy. The people that complain about expensive housing are the most annoying because they are the ones who least care about making housing affordable, they just pretend that they care to strike up some virtue points. The moment you mention land value taxes people are going to argue how evil it is to give everyone enough housing and how the rights of a single family owner are more important than the rights of renters and how multi family homes are ghettos and how nobody should suffer the disgrace of living in one.
Imagine going grocery shopping because you need food to live. You see the prices posted and you pay at the register. Then a few months later Trader Joes sends you a bill for $200,000… The entire Health care system is absolutely insane.
My experience with it has been decent, but I am an expat with Western money.
For some stuff like a rabies shot or my girlfriend’s oral surgery, we used the public system. It was cheap and and reasonably efficient.
For everything else, we used a private hospital. It was also cheap, and the quality was comparable to the US. E.g., under $500 total for an endoscopy, a sonogram, doctor’s visits, etc. to diagnose and treat a stomach ulcer.
All of that was in the last 3 years in Ho Chi Minh City.
Now, there certainly are some squalid hospitals, especially in the countryside. Further, $500 is a lot of money for most VN people. Having written all this, I guess I realize all I have are some anecdotes.
I had to find a hospital in Haiphong once. Memories of limping in to an emergency ward at dawn begging for painkillers only to find the beds and floors covered in the blood of the last night's patients...
It is only insane if you think the purpose of the healthcare system is to provide healthcare. A lot of people make that mistake. The whole thing makes more sense when you realize the purpose of the healthcare system is to generate profits.
No, because the entire purpose of grocery stores is also to make profits, and yet they price competitively and transparently. The problem is that healthcare has senselessly been given a long leash to price opaquely in a way that doesn’t allow price discovery to emerge.
Let me give you a comparison from my personal experience.
My wife was pregnant. The hospital she chose to give birth in specialized in giving birth. Our health plan was administered by a large company, and was used by over 10k employees at our company.
During the pregnancy, I tried multiple times to determine how much the pregnancy would cost. Neither the hospital nor the insurance could tell me any estimate for the cost. I had no way to price shop or save or budget. I was completely at the whims of the hospital and insurance.
Also. They over charged me for at least one procedure.
My wife gave birth at a hospital in our network, but our daughter needed ICU care (in their opinion). We were given no choice in the matter and our child was taken to the ICU. And surprise, surprise, the ICU doctor we had no choice in selecting was not in network, and a low 5-figure bill was racked up for care we didn't really want and our child almost certainly didn't need. Also a very difficult thing to fight when you've got a newborn.
Man, that kind of experience would really make me lose faith in society. My wife needed a caesarian and was rushed to the operating theatre, but at no point was there any thought about cost — I just trusted that the doctors knew their business (and they did). It's so completely natural that anything that can happen while giving birth is covered by our mandatory healthcare insurance that the thought wouldn't cross your mind in the Netherlands (and obviously no bill came).
Hospitals and pharmaceutical companies do funny stuff with pricing worldwide, but at least patients aren't usually bothered with it.
Well nobody really has faith in the system to begin with.
We went into the process battling the system and ended it battling the system.
The various types of care that were provided were all fine and good but the decisions about which care to do, who does it and how much it is going to cost leaves a lot to be desired. But you know that going in.
"Also a very difficult thing to fight when you've got a newborn"
Same for people with a serious disease like cancer. They don't have the energy to spend all their time on negotiating with hospitals ind insurance. They either pay up or go bankrupt.
And when you don't pay, they sell your debt on to collections. Collections will sue to get a judgement against you, which will allow wage garnishment and other types of confiscation. Finally, say goodbye to your credit rating.
They charge because the power in the hospital/patient relationship is so very asymmetric.
Generally, yes, they'll have to see a judge. Not always, but usually. However, it's really common for debt collectors to present a judge with a stack of cases for entry of judgement. Can be a few hundred at once, it's a scaled process. So going before a judge isn't really a barrier for debt collectors.
Of course for a debtor, it's a different ideal. May have to take time off work, find child care, etc. Very unbalanced power in the debtor/creditor relationship.
It is in my country, so why couldn't it be in the USA? Here we always know how much I'm going to pay for a procedure ahead of time, no surprises, procedures have sticker price just like groceries.
- If you have health insurance: you always know ahead of time what hospitals are in network, then the price for all out of pocket expenses are listed in the contract with the insurance company (prices adjusted yearly). You only ever deal with your insurer, out of pocket co-pays came in next months bill, just like a phone bill or credit card bill , it is actually illegal for a doctor or hospital to charge you directly for anything in that case. Any dispute (like the one in the article) is a business matter between the insurer and the hospital, nothing to do with you.
- If you don't have insurance and decide to go for a private hospital: the hospital will sell you a fixed price package for each procedure or a big package for the whole stay, each with a fixed contract signed ahead of time. There is no surprises, no one signs a "blank check" to the hospital like those "service agreements" in the USA.
And that sort of begs the question doesn't it? why isn't buying healthcare basically the same as buying groceries? both are large complex industries with lots of moving pieces that rely on vast networks of distributors. what makes healthcare so special that a person could see a 200x increase in the amount they were quoted for a service vs what they paid?
From my own anecdotal experience, my domestic partner had to be hospitalized for a suicide attempt. The ambulance took her to the hospital in my neighborhood which was in my network. By law they had to place her on a 72 hope suicide watch in the intensive care unit. I called my insurance company to relay all this information and was assured that it would all be covered by my insurance since a) the hospital was in network and b) the treatment was legally required.
Fast forward to 6 months later when I finally get the bill. For $40,000 ... because the insurance company only authorized a 2 day stay in the hospital when state law said the hospital couldn't release her until after the third day and despite the fact that this information was provided to the insurance company both by myself as well as the emergency room staff before she was admitted (I was sitting right next to them as they called, so there is no question they were aware of the circumstances).
The insurance industry is an absolute nightmare and a parasite, providing no value to the ecosystem at a dramatically inflated cost. The sooner it is abolished and healthcare is made a fundamental human right and socialized the better off we will all be.
If we're to exist in a capitalistic society where healthcare has a price tag, then I have a right to see that price and have confidence that it won't change arbitrarily.
Due to the abstract nature and infrequent experience of healthcare solutions in the US, I believe people need to have these abstractions drawn to illustrate the absurdity of it all.
This was always true but it seems to me that social media, in all its forms, not only takes your privacy, it also takes your empathy. At the root of many mental health disorders exists narcissism and for the past few decades an increasing number of people have been added to the empathy erasing internet hate machine.
Just look around, the proof is everywhere.