wot

So Sinclair media is requiring all of their local TV stations to denounce "fake news" and promote "unbiased" reporting. Which means basically "stop saying mean things about Trump". American journalism is already terrible. But it's becoming further and further detached from any thread of ideal about objective journalism.

"We understand truth is neither politically left nor right." You sure about that mate? I believe there are definite cases where truth does land on one side of the political aisle, e.g. global warming.

Poor optics, lol. I think they meant to say, "Republicans don't want there to be any poor people", but the way they phrased it was.. well, "Republicans hate poor people because..." is never going to sound good no matter what follows.

Republicans believe people choose to be poor.

Also raped.

Yeah, I have a friend who self-describes as libertarian (lol), who basically says he does not believe people can't work their way to success.

I asked him if he thought it was possible for every single person to move upward in social class, like if it would be possible to eliminate all poverty. He didn't think so, there will always be economic losers. Okay, I said, so it's not possible for every single person to work their way to success. So maybe we should set up our society so their lives aren't awful. I also talked about social mobility, and how it's stagnating or getting worse in every study that's been done, and how rising inequality contributes to making it harder to work your way to success.

Despite kind of seeing the contradictions within his own view (people can work their way to success but there must be an economic loser class, and objective data about social mobility), he still refuses to accept that you can't just become a billionaire by working hard.

I'm not sure how you break through the barriers to intuition and belief to get people to grasp that things can be more complicated than their first approximation. It's like telling someone that there's a comprehensible set of moving parts under their car hood, and that all you need to do is think about it and you can understand why it works. But they refuse to believe that there's anything but magic dust there which pushes the car forward. There's just no way to break past that initial learning barrier in most people.

My personal favorite Republican argument goes like this: "Welfare is bad because it rewards people for being poor. If you ended welfare, then those people would be forced to get jobs, and then they wouldn't be poor anymore."

i.e. an economic argument against transfer payments, suggesting welfare programs increase the opportunity cost of working to the point that sitting on your ass becomes a more attractive alternative for those who have a sufficiently high marginal utility of free time. Econ 101 level stuff, chapter 1 stuff, initially sounds fine but ignores chapter 2 that tells you free markets seek to maximize profit, not to reduce poverty.

Our culture deems conditions like poverty and child malnutrition unacceptable. Everybody agrees that those conditions should go away, so when I criticize Republicans and other conservatives for their views on the subject, I'm not claiming that they all literally hate poor people. I'm claiming they don't understand economics. They don't understand the problem or why they've been making it worse. They see the inefficiencies in social programs, and conclude that social programs are the problem - without considering the hint that maybe the fact that our economic system demands so many bolt-on kludges and hotfixes and "mixed markets" that maybe there's a deeper structural problem, and inefficient social programs are all that's holding **** together.

wow, you know Steven Horwitz???

https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/896tzr/the_1_grabbed_82_of_all_wealth_created_in_2017/

Goddamn economic ignorance is so widespread. It's awful. Economics 101 should stop teaching supply-demand curve useless bull**** and teach people how to comprehend basic terms.

For those too lazy, the article says that 82% of the new wealth created in the 2017 went into the hands of the global 1%. So, out of the gate, we get this stellar comment:



This person apparently doesn't grasp the difference between wealth and income. Wealth is net worth, it's the value of assets, homes, cars, etc minus debts. Income is how much you earn in wages, etc. So income is irrelevant.

To be in the top 1% of people who hold wealth you need to be worth ~$770,000. That's close to the 90th percentile of wealth in America.

And that's not even the worst of the comments:



Yeah, because these people are just sitting around with their thumbs up their asses watching stock tickers and aren't actively changing policy to create the situation.



Ahhh.. yeah Bezos on his own merits "created" billions of dollars of wealth.. get real.



Except it literally doesn't, it's talking about new wealth created and knows some of it went to poorer people.



Uh, wealth sure can be a zero sum game. I take 100 dollars from you. That wealth gain was zero sum. Obviously any sensible approach to the subject involves actually deciphering how people are gaining wealth, and not just by making platitudinal assertions you learned by reading mises.org?



Yeah but redistributive policies also have no effect on growth or any other major economic markers, and I'm sure that 500$ could do quite a bit for some people in the poorest regions of the world. That's a couple years salary to the poorest. Not to mention, some services can be highly beneficial and administered for much less than a basic redistribution like this.



Another person just making **** up.

By the way, pretty much all major taxation and spending policy I can remember in recent history amounts to regressive taxation, which actually is implicitly zero sum wealth thievery. The Republican Tax bill is a shining example of that.

I despise so greatly people who are bootlickers for the wealthy elite. I just can't respect any person who is accepting of their relationship to extreme wealth in this country.

but building factories is haaaaaaaaard

Exactly, creating wealth is much harder than stealing it. And Americans are so illiterate they can't see how blatantly zero sum many of the policies we have actually are.

It's almost as if most economics "education" is really just a grab bag of empty rhetoric crafted to defend billionaire interests.

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/02/opinion/china-communist-party-workers-strikes.html?smid=fb-nytopinion&smtyp=cur



"communist"

remember, when i say i'm a socialist, all i mean is that <at a minimum> labor should have the power and right to fight without fear of intimidation, harassment, etc., and ideally labor could run more of their own lives without control from anybody above them. notice one key thing: i'm not describing anything about the structure of government, though the idea i'm saying is inherently democratic.

The way you get people over this hump, by the way, is to use the Socratic method. Lead them through to the conclusion by asking them questions.

Someone who knows just enough microeconomics to hurt himself (safe to assume gender given it's Reddit) is mostly confused by the complexity of modern scarequotes-"wealth" formation. It's best to ask them to think about the stock market the way rich people do, collapsed into a single commodity - a black box managed by people who are, for all intents and purposes, interchangeable. Get them to stop thinking about realized capital gains and stock trading and all of that stuff. Look at the stock market in aggregate, treat it like one big savings account that everybody shares, where all stock purchases are deposits, and realized capital gains are only considered withdrawal if they're discharged for living expenses. Then get them to compare index market cap growth versus GDP growth using their favorite search engine. Lead them to realize that market cap = all of the money in the savings account, and GDP = the total income of all people. Ask them to reason through what it means when savings are growing faster than income. Ask them how they save money? What do they give up? What are we, collectively, giving up by putting our money into "our" savings account, the stock market?

China is clearly communist and socialist, just like North Korea, and just like the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia were. This is what socialism is, a brutal dictatorship against the interests of the people and labor in particular. You don't get to play these silly academic semantic games, you don't get to cherry pick and claim that these governments aren't real socialism. They're socialist and they call themselves socialist. If you were in this room with me, I'd bop you on the nose for saying such a stupid idea.

^ just in case anybody was wondering how Jordan Peterson would respond to this post.

It's called the national socialist party - but I don't see many people partying??? This is bull****

If democracy is so good then why does North Korea suck? ��

Knapp house of Saud softening on Israel. Iran or Israel smoking crater by EOY 2019 lmao

Since Amazon is in the news: https://theintercept.com/2017/11/02/amazon-amendment-online-marketplaces/

So I have a facebook to use messenger, and I don't post much information but I do comment sometimes on friend's posts, sometimes to debate. Facebook's algorithms detect me as politically moderate.

All hail Reid, arbiter of the moderate political opinions.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/youtube-shooter-nasim-aghdam-was-vegan-who-had-complained-about-n862586

We will NOT have equality until we see equal representation of women as mass shooters.

It thinks I'm on the far left...

Probably helps I almost never interact on any level but talking to people, so it doesn't know how i feel politically. I'm also much more politically neutral when public-facing.

Also I wouldn't be surprised if liking a mother jones article makes you "far left" to facebook

Facebook’s algorithms are perfect, they know you better than you know yourself. Haven’t you ever heard that story where Big Data outed a gay guy and told a woman she was pregnant?? If Facebook says you’re a radical leftist, it means you are one. That’s why Facebook is the market leader in social media and a hotly demanded advertising space.

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/04/facebook-most-people-could-have-had-their-public-profile-scraped.html

Why is this such a scandal for most people? I assumed from day one any information on facebook, including private chats, is basically public knowledge. Yet everyone always seems so shocked.

I guess most people don't think too much about how the world around them functions

I wonder how many straight people Facebook had to out as gay in order to get that delicious PR plant.

Tim Wu in the NYT!

[quote=Tim Wu]
After years of collecting way too much data, Facebook has finally been caught in the facilitation of one privacy debacle too many. When Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, testifies before Congress, which he plans to do this month, lawmakers will no doubt ask how Facebook might restore the public’s trust and whether it might accept some measure of regulation. Yet in the big picture, these are the wrong questions to be asking.

The right question: What comes after Facebook? Yes, we have come to depend on social networks, but instead of accepting an inherently flawed Facebook monopoly, what we most need now is a new generation of social media platforms that are fundamentally different in their incentives and dedication to protecting user data. Barring a total overhaul of leadership and business model, Facebook will never be that platform.

Every business has its founding DNA. Real corporate change is rare, especially when the same leaders remain in charge. In Facebook’s case, we are not speaking of a few missteps here and there, the misbehavior of a few aberrant employees. The problems are central and structural, the predicted consequences of its business model. From the day it first sought revenue, Facebook prioritized growth over any other possible goal, maximizing the harvest of data and human attention. Its promises to investors have demanded an ever-improving ability to spy on and manipulate large populations of people. Facebook, at its core, is a surveillance machine, and to expect that to change is misplaced optimism.

What the journalist Walter Lippmann said in 1959 of “free” TV is also true of “free” social media: It is ultimately “the creature, the servant and indeed the prostitute of merchandizing.” But social media itself isn’t going away. It has worked its way into our lives and has come to help satistify the basic human need to connect and catch up. Facebook, in fact, claims lofty goals, saying it seeks to “bring us closer together” and “build a global community.” Those are indeed noble purposes that social media can serve. But if they were Facebook’s true goals, we would not be here.

The ideal competitor and successor to Facebook would be a platform that actually puts such goals first. To do so, however, it cannot be just another data-hoarder, like Google Plus. If we have learned anything over the last decade, it is that advertising and data-collection models are incompatible with a trustworthy social media network. The conflicts are too formidable, the pressure to amass data and promise everything to advertisers is too strong for even the well-intentioned to resist.

So what stands in the way of building a genuine alternative? It isn’t the technology. A good Facebook competitor needs merely to build a platform that links you with friends and allows posting of thoughts, pictures and comments. No, the real challenge is gaining a critical mass of users. Facebook, with its 2.2 billion users, will not disappear, and it has a track record of buying or diminishing its rivals (see Instagram and Foursquare). But as Lyft is proving by stealing market share from Uber, and as Snapchat proved by taking taking younger audiences from Facebook, “network effects” are not destiny. Now is the time for a new generation of Facebook competitors that challenge the mother ship.

One set of Facebook alternatives might be provided by firms that are credibly privacy-protective, for which users would pay a small fee (perhaps 99 cents a month). In an age of “free” social media, paying might sound implausible — but keep in mind that payment better aligns the incentives of the platform with those of its users. The payment and social network might be bundled with other products such as the iPhone or the Mozilla or Brave browser.

Another “alt-Facebook” could be a nonprofit that uses that status to signal its dedication to better practices, much as nonprofit hospitals and universities do. Wikipedia is a nonprofit, and it manages nearly as much traffic as Facebook, on a much smaller budget. An “alt-Facebook” could be started by Wikimedia, or by former Facebook employees, many of whom have congregated at the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit for those looking to change Silicon Valley’s culture. It could even be funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which was created in reaction to the failures of commercial television and whose mission includes ensuring access to “telecommunications services that are commercial free and free of charge.”

When a company fails, as Facebook has, it is natural for the government to demand that it fix itself or face regulation. But competition can also create pressure to do better. If today’s privacy scandals lead us merely to install Facebook as a regulated monopolist, insulated from competition, we will have failed completely. The world does not need an established church of social media.
[/quote]

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/opinion/facebook-fix-replace.html

Also I am reminded now of that Tim Wu Vox podcast that you posted, Eversor, that I ought to get back to reading Wu's book recommendation, Remains of the Day.

In a way, I think this kind of editorial, from a professor and public intellectual such as Tim Wu, well embodies the pinnacle of American "regulation of democratic capitalism by op-ed". Facebook, which clearly had the incentive to exist in our economic system, is seen as an individual misstep, from which we as a society may collectively learn from, so that some future founder of a company who reads this editorial by seeing it on Hacker News is inspired to start another "unicorn" that somehow manages to also be socially upstanding, rather than regulating Facebook as a monopoly. I think this is a very idealistic, almost utopian idea that is especially prevalent in California, and one which appeals to those who see technology as a successor to existing psychological, legal, and economic ruts, like Richard Stallman, or any number of visionaries such as Doug Engelbart, Ted Nelson, or Alan Kay (as well as the would-be capitalists and libertarians of Silicon Valley).

Now this: Jon`C ruins everything

"When a company fails, as Facebook has, it is natural for the government to demand that it fix itself or face regulation. "

That's not really how it works in the US though, is it? You circumvent regulation by bribing politicians. Corporations are people and the well-being of those people is a bipartisan issue. Correct me if I've misunderstood.

(In reply to myself)

I think part of the problem is that Americans all believe that we can keep the existing system by fantasizing about somehow participating in a cathartic dialogue about how we all agree with what's wrong with the last generation of problems such a system has created: if I can state the obvious and also believe I can get rich trying to sell a successor that doesn't have the same problems, well, that's really seductive.

Ask any founder in Silicon Valley what they are doing, and they won't tell you that they are trying to get rich. Invariably, they will tell you that their company is "trying to fix X".

I dunno. AT&T was a monopoly and was regulated by the government. Our current government, since Ronald Reagan, has had a toxic ideology against this. (Famously, Reagan broke up AT&T, ending the government granted monopoly, which supposedly increased competition.) I think things have gotten worse. I also think that as it stands today, we are still in the honeymoon phase of unregulated, privacy invasive technology start-ups, which has only just begun to show signs of turning sour.

Fun story: when AT&T was broken up, Bell Labs' research budget tanked.

A lot of the computer science researchers went to go work for Google, a far less innovative company from what I gather.

But yes, generally speaking, our system of regulation, while far from being completely useless, is in many ways an embarrassment due to "lobbying".

That said, I suspect that people may well simply leave Facebook en masse, probably for some other site instead (which doesn't necessarily respect users' privacy). And I'm not sure it should be necessary for Facebook to be a monopoly to be properly regulated. Of course, in the EU, there are new regulations coming into effect that Facebook will need to adapt to, but I believe Zuckerberg has said that he doesn't plan to roll out the necessary changes outside of Europe.

Businesses do weird things when their marginal cost of production is 0.

I don't know if that mindset is especially bad as stated. It aligns with a technocratic vision of government that sees government and politics as deriving their purpose from the demand to address problems in society and as functioning by providing solutions to those problems. And it also coincides with liberal ideas about limited government, and the view that private individuals are more capable than government bureaucracies. I think the real problem is this idea that if you "connect" people with IT it will automatically produce a better, more peaceful world. It's obviously untrue, and, furthermore, naive. And Facebook has not taken any responsibility for the ways in which "connecting people" has been corrosive, or corrected for it.

Trying to fix problems isn't bad by itself. Maybe what's worse is that Facebook wasn't really designed to fix a problem except to help Harvard students get laid.

And, obviously later on, the problem it was intended to fix is for advertisers could better target potential customers.

I don't think it's bad at all. It certainly speaks to long-standing and useful American myths. Actually, my feeling is that prima facie hostility to these myths makes for a sort of litmus test of political belief, with the far left just rolling their eyes even before reading the next part of your paragraph.

Maybe the real problem here is that as we all are figuring out the shortcomings of these myths, the capitalists are laughing all the way to the bank, and nothing ever really changes. (And do we really want it to?)