This quote is eerily similar to net result of one of the Four Pests Campaigns during the Great Leap Forward, where sparrows were targeted for extinction: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
“Researchers also found that common birds from just 12 families, such as blackbirds, sparrows and finches, account for over 90 percent—or over 2.5 billion birds—of total population decline. Experts believe that habitat loss due to agricultural development and intensification is most likely the driving factor.”
The result was a calamitous famine, and it seems big Ag is on a similar path, but in a wildly different context.
> it seems big Ag is on a similar path, but in a wildly different context.
Big Ag is indeed on a worse path, as they are literally depleting soils and biodiversity, engineering a monoculture propped up by fertilizers synthesized from fossil fuels. It's a completely unsustainable system that is sucking the Earth dry and carpeting it over with astro turf.
How many people are not working because they suddenly no longer have a reliable place for child care? Lots of jurisdiction's protocols will shut down day cares or in-person schooling for a week or more after a single case. In that environment, who are you going to get to take care of your child that may have been exposed?
> How many people are not working because they suddenly no longer have a reliable place for child care?
This was the first potential explanation TFA examined. It said that this effect was "negligible":
> It is commonly believed that school closures have made it impossible for parents, particularly mothers, to take a job. The evidence for this is mixed, though. Analysis by Jason Furman, Melissa Kearney and Wilson Powell III concludes that extra joblessness among mothers of young children accounts for a “negligible” share of America’s employment deficit. Despite talk of a “shecession” early in the pandemic, in most rich countries the worker deficit for men remains larger.
I disagree completely. If we were satisfied with a lower standard of living, one parent could stay home to take care of the kids. Keynes predicted 15 hour work weeks but he missed that we would increase our standard of living faster than the productivity gains.
> I disagree completely. If we were satisfied with a lower standard of living, one parent could stay home to take care of the kids. Keynes predicted 15 hour work weeks but he missed that we would increase our standard of living faster than the productivity gains.
Is that productivity really needed/used for standard of living gains? Or do you need two incomes now because of a combination of capital taking bigger cut and dual-incomes bidding up the price of things.
Also you have the phenomenon of companies trying to increase sales by reducing the service life of their products, which just increases churn without increasing living standards.
If schooling were about actual education and not signaling, there would be competitive pressure to improve product quality (like any consumer good: TVs, computers, microwaves, cars…).
There is no competitive pressure to improve educational outcomes because society doesn’t really care. It’s a signaling mechanism for the top quintile and a childcare holding pen for the rest.
The bus driver is just a component of the system; the quality of transportation system itself should be getting better (cost per mile, electrification, GPS tracking, etc.). I can pull up my bus schedule and its current location in an instant. A decade ago I'd be waiting in the cold for a bus that may never come.
In theory, the quality of the education system itself should be improving (online classes & evaluation, recorded lectures, more materials, sharing of the best techniques, etc.), of which the teachers are a single input. But, we know how that's turned out. Education is a political football and society doesn't actually care about the outcome.
Not sure why that matters. The point is that parents want their kids in school and the current pandemic conditions restricts that, so parents are forced to be at home with their kids instead of working at a job.
It turns out the question isn't "what provides the best education for kids (at home/in person)", it's "what provides the most convenience for parents".
You could have parental-supervised online learning be 5x as good as in-person, but society demands we send kids to school to get them out of the house so a parent can work. We pay lip service to the actual education of the child.
No real point except pulling the veil from our revealed preferences.
If Keynes "missed" anything, it might have been that labor compensation would cease to have anything to do with productivity. The capitalists are consuming more and more, so there is nothing left for ever-more-productive labor.
>The capitalists are consuming more and more, so there is nothing left for ever-more-productive labor.
That's a plausible explanation, but a bunch of charts with no analysis other than red arrows[1] pointing to the early 70s, makes for a terrible argument in support of it.
Some people see those charts and immediately recognize something they already knew. It's fine that you didn't. It's not as though there are that many links in this whole thread. I appreciate anyone with the stones to counter an argument by data with an argument by xkcd.
>Some people see those charts and immediately recognize something they already knew
In other words, you know it's not trying to prove something, but rather reaffirm what some people already believe? I'm not sure that's any better. If anything that's worse, because you're knowingly engaging in lowering the quality of conversation on this forum.
>It's not as though there are that many links in this whole thread.
But why add a random site that does nothing but contribute to the noise?
>I appreciate anyone with the stones to counter an argument by data with an argument by xkcd.
The onus is on the person making the claim to prove it, not on the respondent to disprove it. If all you're presenting is a bunch of charts with arrows on them, I don't see why I have to debunk each individual chart[1]. It suffices to show that the argumentation style is flawed.
I don't consider the St Louis Fed to be "a random site", but perhaps you have some sort of special term for why citing government economists is also out-of-bounds. It almost seems as if you prefer to police rhetoric rather than actually engage with the argument.
It is both childcare and education and that's not bad. Anybody thinking otherwise is straight up delusional and should talk to a couple of working parents with children aged ~6-16.
I find it strange that people are surprised that a significant component (but by no means all) of schooling is childcare. It is also education, socialization, and general development, but having a smaller number of adults providing childcare makes sense as a society, even before we think about childcare aptitude.
This post gets to the core that the relevant axes for belief in Bitcoin and decentralized crypto in general lie in "knowledge" vs "trust in the system."
The main issue I have here is that the knowledge bit glosses over the "high trust in the system/high knowledge" quadrant quite a bit. One perspective from those folks that's missing is that Bitcoin's day of reckoning will inevitably be if and when it becomes a material threat to the system, that the system itself will react to (1) suppress Bitcoin and (2) replace its own currency with one that re-establishes trust.
The history for currencies around the world broadly follow the pattern we're seeing unfold today: a "hard" currency becomes devalued, typically due to some event like war, loses trust, and the system replaces it with a new currency that can re-establish trust. Some examples are the greenback-dollar relationship, the mark-rentenmark-reichmark, and the 1994 Brazilian real.
The other shoe here is that, as part of the playbook for establishing new currencies during a crisis, the governments always suppress alternative currencies, whether those were bank-issued notes in the 19th century US, FDR's massive gold confiscation, or re-valuing debts in terms of the newly established currency - all options are in play, and there is basically nothing that the government will stop at to run it's playbook to stabilize the currency in crisis.
In that context, maybe the smart/high trust people think "Crypto is a cool technology, but it can be used to create the next central bank currency so why do I care about this one when anyone can create a new coin" and also consciously or unconsciously know that the government is going to take massive action to suppress a $1MM bitcoin.
Some good references for how currencies (and contract denominated in the currency, like debt & assets) evolve in various crises throughout history: "Principals for Navigating Big Debt Crises" by Ray Dalio, "Debt: The First 5000 Years" by David Graeber, Perry Mehrling's course "Economics of Money and Banking."
Pensions used to be common in the US, IBM is from that era, but if you entered the workforce in the late 70s or early 80s then you probably missed that boat although the US stock market has benefited enormously since that time from all that money being put into securities backed retirement funds.
Financial services companies play the same game - bonuses get paid first couple months of the year so around Christmas they cut as many people as they can. Real jerk move but not as bad as working someplace thirty years and then losing your retirement three months before.
I think many companies have moved from pensions to 401k over the last couple decades, but people who came into the company during the pension regime typically retain their pensions. Someone who is approaching 55 could well have a legacy pension.
When people refer to a "pension", they're usually talking about a defined benefit plan that requires little or no funding from the employee's paycheck. The amount of money you get at retirement is determined upfront, and based on things like years of service and average wages over some prescribed time period.
I had employer match with a 3 year vesting period at one place. I've never had anyone else do more than 12 months, and not everyone did that. The matching is for the paycheck you just paid me for work I already did. Why is it tied to the end of the year? As an employee retention hook it's a lousy idea. It's too small, and lacks all of the dopamine of watching a stock price seesaw up and down, wondering what it'll be worth when you can finally spend it.
This is stunning false equivalence. None of the opinions you offered are similar to Tom Cotton’s apologia for “sending in the tanks”. The NYT Opinions section is still, for better or worse, still quite diverse in its opinions. Ross Douthat and David Brooks are not leaving anytime soon.
> None of the opinions you offered are similar to Tom Cotton’s apologia for “sending in the tanks”
What makes this matter? Precisely, why?
Does not the radical character of this editorial highlight, as starkly as ever, that this is grossly at odds with the official opinion of the Grey Lady?
Do you somehow impute a net persuasive power to its appearance in those pages? Do you therefore believe the publication presents an increased risk that such a scheme will be carried out? How?
Do you perhaps believe that many dangerous racists will find themselves emboldened by its publication, as if racists with a military-police fetish were notorious for subscribing to the Times and justifying their opinions with what is written on its pages? I think not, sir, though you may find them watching Fox.
The Times could write a thousand opinion columns to their decent readers, warning that Republicans aspire to quash protests with the military; their combined weight would be as nothing compared to the Republican himself telling you in his own words, putting to rest the possibility of doubt.
Precisely why it matters is that the debates you cite in the WSJ are in a completely different realm where you can have reasonable people disagree. I don’t think Cotton’s Op-Ed is novel territory for either the NYT or WSJ, but I think it’s a reasonable position that the NYT should not legitimize calls to violence as a resolution to an ongoing domestic issue.
The NYT operates on links, this is not cable news. Of course it will be shared on FB and elsewhere, so not getting your point at all.
As for the final point, I think there’s a reasonable debate to be had there! I don’t know exactly where I stand on it, I personally find the piece disturbing and it crosses the line in a functioning democracy. However, it certainly informed me beyond a doubt to Cotton’s and his colleagues’ opinions, so I just have to trust others felt similarly.
> the debates you cite in the WSJ are in a completely different realm where you can have reasonable people disagree
I began to write by discussing one of those pieces in the WSJ as a moral equivalent or worse, discussing how I would like to say that no reasonable person could disagree — yet in fact, I must admit that they could.
But forget that. My real point is about journalism.
We are met, on one side, by those like Cotton, who fête thuggish, authoritarian, militaristic oppression, as you are well aware. It is one threat to our freedom. Journalism by itself will not save us, of course, but at the same time, I do not see how we can be saved without journalism.
But those who oppose it, especially the journalists? They are cut from grain of Senator Joseph Raymond McCarthy. Did you learn in your history lessons about the Red Scare? There were once bona fide Communist spies in our nation's government, in great number, and he set out to bring them down — and yet, when we speak today of the House Unamerican Activities Committee, and when we speak of McCarthyism, it is not because they saved us from these spies. It is because they fomented a culture of repression, paranoia and fear which chilled our freedoms and harmed our democracy — and, incidentally, did a poor job of rooting the spies.
Today we do not have the benefit of a single leader like McCarthy to illustrate in so concentrated a manner the disgusting nature of what is being done. We have no singular Mr. Welch to ask him, "Have you left no sense of decency?" when, for nothing more than his own self-aggrandizement, this leader smears an innocuous nobody in a Congressional hearing. But we do have the Washington Post, smearing an absolute nobody in the national press for not being refused from a non-company holiday party two years prior. We have the self-righteousness of those would-be crusaders, and we have the self-censorship for fear of bringing down their wrath.
And in particular, we save a special set of poisons, not for the overt racists, nor even for those who fail to oppose them, but for those who would dare temper their opposition with some other principle. James Bennett's true crime was poisoning the purity of his allegiance to the cause by favoring Journalism. For this he was ejected from the paper. He is far from the only one who will lose his job or be blacklisted in the purges.
So good on you and everyone else for unsubscribing in the name of purity.
Ok, I think we just disagree on what is journalism and that’s fine. The Opinion page is not journalistic, it’s just other people’s op-eds selected by an editorial board and said board is not immune from either bias nor criticism.
The rest of the paper is generally outstanding, though they have some high profile screw ups. Can’t trust anything 100% ever, but I don’t think this incident reflects on the rest of the paper. Regular NYT subscribers (myself included) already know what they’re getting in Opinion, and I personally think it’s trash.
If you go back in time, the NY Times used to print a lot more conservative op-eds. For example, here's a classic, where William F Buckley, a well known conservative (from a different vein than modern conservatives) proposes tattooing a red letter A on the buttons of gay men infected with HIV:
Cotton could have written a far better editorial and people would complain a lot less. I tried to read it giving him the best intentions but it didn't take long to realize that he really just wanted to send out the military to beat people up.
Yep I’m not defending the NYT Opinions page or editorial board, in my opinion it’s an embarrassment for an otherwise solid paper of record (not defending NYT in general, either - they have made some serious mistakes).
However, the poster is trying to put the Cotton op-Ed in the same league as fairly mild policy debates in the WSJ. I find that dangerously close to legimitizing it.
And that’s infinitely more on-point than some relatively mild policy debates in the WSJ! The difference in those cases would be the foreign policy concerns vs a domestic debate, so there’s still some context to discuss, but the comment I’m replying to is blowing this out of proportion and also legitimizing Cotton’s op-Ed by comparing it the prior ones.
That tweet was referring to shipments from China to Italy, many of which were paid for and orders. Some were donated, but the articles present it as a grand gesture instead of Italy attempting to provision their own supplies on the market.
It’s a sad mix of propaganda and temporary faith in a shaky globally supply chain.
