>And now others are insisting that Apple should not have that control (even when they themselves are doing the same thing).
Exactly Apple organized developers, giving the developers a collective power to rival Apple's unilateral dictatorship...sure Apple could call their bluff like they always do with any one single developer, except if these developers collectively withdraw from the Apple ecosystem in mass, Apple would lose developers/market share/market cap.
Now if only consumers would collectively organize against big tech in the same fashion, big tech wouldn't seem so big, and consumer could begin to dictate how these platforms collect use their data.
Easy Congress put on bandannas and robbed the tax payers of about $18,000 each.
Congress then turned around and gave taxpayers $1,200 each, of their own money, that total amount can be doubled that to account for the temporary unemployment benefits increase. The rest of the taxpayer money went to the FED so they will guarantee the prices of shit stock...the market can't lower because as many rich CEOs and investors cash out their shit stock the FED is there to buy at these artificial prices.
Its not healthy obviously, its just another in a long line of scams on taxpayers who paid for the golden parachutes and will be left holding the bag. There is about $4.2T the FED has to buy stock at artificial prices so it will be sometime before this bubble pops.
I'd really like to read more about how tax payers are paying $18,000 each but all I can find as a source is some twitter comment and a reddit thread where the claim is disputed. Do you have something more substantial I could read? At first glance it seems extremely exaggerated so I'd like to get my head around it.
I think this is simply dividing the cost of relief packages by the number of taxpayers. It’s oversimplification of government budgeting to the point that it doesn’t mean much of anything other than to give a sense of scale.
We've proven that the US can write a check whenever it wants, and yet whenever we talk about helping regular Americans with free college or healthcare or UBI the national conversation is "how are we going to pay for it?" Writing a check to wall street to bolster profits while leaving Americans to mostly fend for themselves is still theft.
And if you are working and don't pay income tax it's because your employer is legally allowed to pay you poverty wages.
>But people who don’t earn much money aren’t going to be responsible for that bill because they pay no (or almost no) income tax.
Maybe, but the devaluation of the dollar as a result of this additional and significant debt is only going to effect the daily lives of people "who don't earn much money."
The US doesn't have a history of defaulting on its sovereign debt, and I haven't heard any serious claims that that is going to change anytime soon. In fact, its a great time for the government to take on debt, since even very long term debt costs less than inflation - 30 year debt is 1.4%, and 10 year debt is <0.7%: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/data-chart-center/i...
Historically the US debt balance has gone up for longer and by higher amounts than it goes down. I don't see how this pattern leads to a zero balance in the future?
Whether it gets repaid or not has no bearing on the fact that taxpayers were robbed and their future taxes were used in large part to prop up an historically overvalued stock market completely detached from traditional P/E ratios.
Plus the working class will be made to suffer as their measly incomes, taxed at significantly higher rates than capital gains, will be worth even less due to devaluation of the dollar and inflation.
And state and city governments went ahead and took 80% of their covid money to pay themselves or their sinking pensions, etc.
> As part of the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act signed in March, Sacramento County received $181 million to fund necessary programs or expenses tied to the COVID-19 pandemic ... Of the nearly $148 million that the county has already spent in the last few months, more than $104 million went toward paying for salaries and benefits
This is going to be a very interesting and telling litmus test for the future of the Country in the next few months.
If public schools go the route of remote teaching, which I think they will...then I don't see much choice but for State, County and local governments to go to war against the Teachers Unions and lay waste to upwards of 75% of the teacher workforce. Lets ballpark about 3M teachers losing their jobs and the entire educational system reformed where there is very limited public school in person attendance. As bad as losing 3M jobs would be to the economy, there will be untold negative impacts on children and parents that will have to leave their children unsupervised during the day.
It should take one really good "lecturer" and then a bunch of TAs. The TAs would be lower paid off course. Would it be fewer overall all? Maybe not, but salaries would change.
In a lot of states, it's not legal to leave your kids unsupervised depending on their age. I would guess that if they laid off teachers (which I think is unlikely on a massive scale due to them facilitating the online classes), then those laid off teachers might be hired as tutors or baby sitters.
I'm not so sure of this. First of all, remote learning takes just as many teachers as in-person learning unless the education plan is just "watch Khan academy and check in with us in a year." In fact under the hybrid models being proposed in areas like NYC it will take more teachers as the teacher doing in-class learning cannot simultaneously handle remote instruction. There are some decent ed-tech products out there but they can't put education on autopilot.
Second, even if you had the technology to automate remote learning during the crisis, are you going to fire all your teachers only to rehire them in Spring/Summer? No I don't have a crystal ball on the future but I'd be surprised if by Spring we didn't have some form of viable if not 100% effective vaccine. We won't be locked inside forever.
Tax revenues which have been decimated by the crisis. Unlike the Federal government which can effectively borrow/print whatever it needs, states and municipals are limited by the real world and either have balanced budget requirements or de facto requirements imposed by the bond market/fiscal realities. The equation is simple. Tax revenues have plummeted while expenses have risen due to the costs of coping with the crisis (unemployment, medical services, etc..). Am I saying all of these tax dollars are spent with great efficiency? Of course not. But imposing unnecessary austerity in the middle of a crisis has proven time and time again to do nothing but prolong and deepen economic pain. It would be arbitrary and destructive if say US defense spending can remain immune because it has access to infinite credit while our school district and firefighters will be cut because they are state/local funded.
Also, they are paying a lot of overtime in health related workers or to make up for workers who test positive and for increased cleaning crews, so not only are the hours going up but they are paying the 1.5x rate more often. Sacramento is also relatively expensive and I assume there are a high number of state employees there since it's the capital.
My understanding of the evolution of Earth flora is that prior to plants being green, the dominant plant life was red (think of red algae blooms) and that the current dominant green plant life likely evolved to use different photons along the EM spectrum where there was less competition.
Funny enough as I understand visible light and the EMR spectrum there is no "green" (color/wave length/energy) rather the color green is a construct originating not in the light spectrum but in the mind of the observer.
There is a range of wavelengths of light that humans perceive as green. The same is true for every color that is part of the rainbow. In contrast, the "pure purples" do not appear in the rainbow, and there is no single wavelength of light that humans perceive as purple (it requires red light plus blue light).
The perception of color is a pretty wild area of science. Colors seem to be culturally dependent. In that, people literally cannot see the difference between blue and green if their language does not have words to distinguish them. Even when big rewards are given for the 'correct' answer. Colors also follow certain patterns, with colors like blue being the last to be named in a culture.
Color is still there, just like there are frequencies between A4 440 Hz and A#4 466.16 Hz. Most of the people can't name "color" of pure sound. Yet they feel difference.
Its the other way around. A classic study from the 1960s found that color words and the correlated perception were pretty similar among a large number of languages. That suggest something physiological about color perception.
What is curious is how color words evolve. Most languages have between two and eight basic color words (and color concepts). Those with two colors is almost always the same two colors- light and dark. The third color is usually red-brown. And fourth usually blue-green.
>In that, people literally cannot see the difference between blue and green if their language does not have words to distinguish them.
People literally can see the difference between blue and green even if their language doesn't differentiate between the two, I don't know if you're misremembering a claim and a negation sneaked in so please don't take this post too harshly if that's the case, but the idea that say Japanese people can't tell the difference between blue and green is patently false and should be addressed, in fact the video you linked almost does so at 2:34 -
>Some researchers took this and other ancient writings to wrongly speculate that earlier societies were colour blind.
That Homer described the ocean as wine in colour is not an issue of perception but one of language in trying to describe a colour that is not differentiated from other colours, the same is true for other 'perception' issues in the ancient world like green coloured honey. To be clear visual acuity tests have been done on modern populations and tribes which don't differentiate between such colours or overall define less colour categories and it should be no surprise to learn that they can see the difference between those colours just fine.
The whole idea that it's a difference in perception is fraught with issues, like what happens when a language naturally develops words for new categories of colours or new colours? Does a generation undergo the collective experience of literally being able to see/differentiate a new colour? If so why isn't this written about more, is it something that only happens in kids? What would be the reason for this sudden shift in perspective, because it certainly isn't a physiological change that occurs.
What happens when an adult learns a second language which differentiates between more colours? The classic romanticised view here is that learning a new language literally let's you see the world in a different perspective, but then why is it that enhanced perspective rarely more than a curiosity (language x has two words for this colour)? The Russian language has separate words for a dark blue (siniy) and a light blue (goluboy) but English doesn't differentiate between them, do the Russians see an extra colour? What does the science say? Well the science is somewhat interesting here, Russians are able to differentiate between dark blues and lighter blues ever so slightly faster (124ms), but this is worlds apart from the claim that some languages are literally capable of seeing more colours.
In general this line of thinking is known as linguistic relativity, or the view that language shapes perception and cognition, and is something that has generally been discredited among linguists as being discriminatory and harmful as well as being based on faulty reasoning or studies and occasionally fraudulent papers. For example, and I really don't mean to attribute any malice to your post, but if we're considering Homer as being unable to differentiate between an ocean blue and a dark red wine, what do we make of cultures and languages that don't differentiate between smoking, drinking, or eating? Do they not know the difference between those actions? What about the Pirahã people who only have two words (differentiated by tone) for 'small quantity' and 'large quantity' and no other words for numerals? This line of thinking is fairly harmless when applied to the way we perceive colours but can be actively harmful to people who perceive the world the exact same way we do but don't have as expressive language for these particular topics.
For anybody interested in more linguistic oddities and/or the damage linguistic relativism can do I recommend the book 'The Language Hoax' by John McWhorter, there's also an hour long talk on it available on Youtube [0]. The book deals with the more recent studies on how language affects the ways we think in a grounded way and shows how minor some of the best examples given can be like in the case of dark and light blue in Russian. The book is also in response to the general public's view and romanticism of linguistic relativity and in particular in response to a book by another linguist Guy Deutscher titled 'Through the Language Glass', where Guy feeds into the perception that language helps shape the way we think, and it is a good book but it still doesn't get close to saying that other languages see more colours.
There is no need to travel to jungles. Subtle differences are all around us.
* plants - trees, grasses, flowers, native and garden species, once I knew maybe 400 names, now come to disuse and quickly slip away
* food - ingredients and prepared
* fonts - Comic Sans, Times New Roman, Helvetica and many more
* car models - a lot of people know them by heart
It would be a strange claim we do not perceive difference without a name. We do but we do not care. And when we care we want to communicate and names become handy.
I had heard of the similar Purple Earth Hypothesis[1] wherein organisms with photosynthesis based on retinal arose in the oceans early on. Chlorophyll-based life developed deeper and took advantage of the red and blue light that filtered through.
The hypothesis seems pretty speculative, but maybe it's compatible with this new research, which could explain why green plants came to dominate despite retinal being simpler.
Land plants are newer than algae, but green algae is older than red algae (as evidenced by the endosymbiosis order). But maybe green algae got dominated by the others pretty early on.
edit actually that's brown algae that's the derived one. red and green it looks like both come from the original endosymbiosis.
I was thinking about the same hypothesis but IIRC it was highly speculative, with the main evidence for it simply being that modern plants evolved to use those other photosynthesizers' castoffs. We may not need that hypothesis anymore if we have a solid reason to avoid green anyway.
>54% of Americans own stocks, either directly or indirectly.
But its negligible ownership stake, during the pandemic we have seen the multiple single day market swings that more than erase the collective holdings of 80% of investors. Moreover, 1% of investors own more than 33% of the market and the top 10% own >80% of the US stock market, that type of top heavy system is always bound to topple.
Yes, and that was addressed immediately in the next paragraph:
> While it's true that the top 5% owns a disproportionate amount of stocks, that's just a function of the wealth distribution. If everyone in the US had half of their personal wealth in the stock market, the top 5% would still own a large % of the stock market just by virtue of what it means to be in the "top 5%" today. This fact doesn't change the fact that a stock market crash would still be devastating to the middle American that owns stocks (directly or indirectly).
> In fact, when the stock market crashes, it's median stock holders that are the worst off, because the wealthiest stock owners will still largely remain millionaires even if the stock market plunged.
>A stock market crash wouldn’t improve the economic situation... Many Americans have retirement and pensions tied to stocks.
Sounds like a free market isn't good for the Free Market. A crashed stock market would create opportunity for new investors to invest during this historic downturn...instead during this historic downturn the market is being artificially supported (at record high prices nonetheless) so no new investors will enter.
Free market economics asides, I could imagine the bourgeois and bourgeoise running around during the French Revolution telling the plebs how revolutions and guillotines aren't good for the economy.
fair point, I remember during the financial crisis in 2009 how i felt the bank bailout was unfair and the market should have been allowed to sort it out.
Since then i've come to believe that lives are tied to market prices so it's more complicated. You can let it crash and create opportunity for new investor, you can also watch someone drown and create a new spot at the pool. ...it gets complicated.
Probably something to do with shallow breathing so you inhale and exhale more often the one should without maximizing oxygen intake per breathe nor efficiently regulating oxygen/co2.
But how could we be "conditioned" to breath in a certain way? It reads like a conspiracy to me but maybe that's not what they meant?
To me, breathing is a highly personal thing, I doubt there is any outside force able to change how we breathe for the worse. I just don't see the attack vector. We breathe how we feel we need to breathe.
>But how could we be "conditioned" to breath in a certain way?
bad posture, overweight, too little exercise, too much stress. Not much of a stretch to think that the behaviour that gives countless of people snoring, backpain, or high BP may also negatively effect how we breathe.
>Why, at the government level, do we not look at best practices worldwide?
Because there is a ruling class and for the rulers it is not about best practices or happiness, it is about maximizing wealth and maintaining power.
Education and healthcare (which should be considered human rights not industries) are very helpful in seeing some of the tools the ruling class uses to maintain power. Both education and healthcare are standardized enough they are rated by Country and while the US spends more on both than any other country the US is not even close to being rated number 1 in either category.
Yet, to your point, when one points to other countries as evidence how well other systems work (with less funding) that person will be demonized as Anti-American. Even in the current pandemic where the numbers speak for themselves, we are subjected to having to hear the ruling class get on TV and tell us how we are #1 and doing better than every other Country and even worse in many cases this ruling class refers to the pandemic in the past tense and proclaim how they defeated it. It is Machiavellianism incarnate.
Coincidentally neuroscientist Andrew D. Huberman was on the JRE podcast yesterday and among the many topics/studies he discussed was one where electrodes were hooked up to brains and the subjects were given complete control over the areas they stimulated.
Contrary to what one might think (or at least the scientists) that the subjects would stimulate areas of sexual response or pleasure, it turns out they elected to stimulate areas of anger and frustration.
Without knowing exactly what "news" you found yourself reading, I think its a fair guess the majority of news now-a-days (or maybe always) triggers this area of the brain and so you are probably just elected to trigger anger and frustration over stimulating your brain with the natural beauty of the world around you (so don't feel bad apparently this is the norm).
As others note you don't need to be a monopoly to violate anti-trust laws. However, as it relates to being defined as a monopoly this ability to leverage your market position to stifle competition is the exact type of behavior that would support a finding of monopoly...most non-monopolies can't leverage their market position to unfairly compete
Exactly Apple organized developers, giving the developers a collective power to rival Apple's unilateral dictatorship...sure Apple could call their bluff like they always do with any one single developer, except if these developers collectively withdraw from the Apple ecosystem in mass, Apple would lose developers/market share/market cap.
Now if only consumers would collectively organize against big tech in the same fashion, big tech wouldn't seem so big, and consumer could begin to dictate how these platforms collect use their data.