Just because it's considered acceptable doesn't mean that you can't get in trouble for it down the line if you get the wrong people upset. "Acceptable" bribery goes far beyond giving a gift to your underpaid doctor. What I meant by funding payroll is that it's pretty common to basically "donate" to a hospital and then afterwards your kid magically has a job there.
What those who fetishize China's punishment of billionaires need to understand that what allows for this punishment is also what allows for even more blatant corruption. Rule of law is just something that doesn't exist. You may think that the US no longer has rule of law under Trump, and while that's true to a certain extent, for the most part people act with a rule of law mindset because that's what they are familiar with.
> If you get caught in China, Vietnam, or Singapore the penalties for white collar criminals is zero tolerance.
LOL. Bribery is basically required in China for anyone with a medium sized business. Otherwise, you'll be indefinitely blocked by a bureaucrat who has no incentive to help you. Departments in municipal governments are often underfunded and bribery makes up for a significant portion of their effective payroll.
> What is the goal when you start arguing with someone online? Is that goal achievable?
I'm sure this is some sort of confirmation bias, I've noticed fewer stupid talking points for topics where I argue about online. I doubt it has any impact in people's political beliefs, but people end up being slightly less ideological and more hedgey. IMO, establishment figures are too dismissive about engaging with the public because they think they're above it, but this is how you end up with DOGE laying off departments only to beg for them back.
Also, honestly, I just enjoy the feeling of putting a dumb person in their place. Occasionally, I'm the dumb person, but I don't really mind that since I'm not really tied to any viewpoint. Being more informed also satisfies my mild superiority complex. Also, even if I don't learn from others, generally learn from the process of defining my arguments.
The new laws in the US don't require any real verification. Parents who care will just select a flag on device/OS setup that gets passed to websites. They can also just lie if they really want to. In the EU, they are trying to verify age with zero knowledge proofs.
It would be nice if the author actually spelled out the specific weaknesses of those approaches or even just referenced those laws instead of fear-mongering about "spying on kids", but I suppose that would be to much to ask of someone who made a career out of vibes based rage. Ironic that Doctorow is so eager to capitalize on the enshittification of journalism.
The reason all the communist powers switched to capitalism is because they too realized that people with purely selfish intentions can unintentionally help society by satisfying market demands.
Just because capital is happy to take advantage our current incompetent authoritarian populist administration doesn't doesn't mean they don't prefer predictable technocrats in charge. Trump was outspent during all of his campaigns.
There is a tax loophole where you buy a lot of land and donate 90% of it to the government to be "public parkland". However, in actuality, you're the only person who has convenient access to this land and nobody else can build there, so you get nearly all the benefits of this land while claiming a big tax deduction.
It doesn't sound like what is happening here, but I don't think you should be able to block development on land you donated indefinitely.
I'm sure that they have a fatter margin on the the iPhone, but the iPhone does cost quite a bit more to manufacture. Cellular itself is probably $50 or so. The iPad has more material, so you may perceive you're getting more "device per the money" but the cost of those materials is dwarfed by the cost of manufacturing the additional components.
This is incidentally why consumers don't buy small phones even though they say they want them. They feel cheaper even though they cost about the same to manufacture.
The oil is on Alaska/Norway's land, so they can choose what they want to do with money from selling that oil including distributing it or purchasing assets. Sanders seem to be proposing to arbitrarily seize half of the companies.
> like just setting up proper parental controls on a device
This is literally what is being written into California law. The OS will have an "age flag" that is configured at device setup that passed to other apps. The law explicitly was written such that it wouldn't need identity verification, but that isn't stopping scaremongers claiming it as such.
People had no problem starting clinics in the past and they probably could today if they really wanted to, but there is little incentive to for the past few decades while the stock market has been booming. Why spend 80 hours a week struggling to run your own clinic and paying off loans when you can work 40 hours a week working for somebody else's clinic and invest your savings in the stock market?
Sure, but ownership being the root of inequality was the one thing that he was actually correct about. CEO to worker pay ratio is something that is completely irrelevant. Companies spend orders of magnitude more money on its shareholders (dividends, buybacks, and reinvestment) than executive compensation.
Not sure why the left cares so much about CEO to work pay ratio these days, especially when Marx himself recognized that ownership was the true source inequality. A CEO is just a really well paid worker. Even CEOs who become billionaires do so from capital appreciation more than compensation.
They'd probably make this a feature for paying customers. I don't think the economics of scalping this at scale would make sense you're spending money for months and risk Spotify banning you if you get caught.
Maybe only a handful of people morally consistent or geopolitically neutral. It's unlikely that Saudi Arabia actually cares if Meta gets themselves kicked out of the nation, but it's easy to blame Meta because money in their pocket is money that isn't in mine. Meanwhile, oil money is ultimately what enables Saudi Arabia to get away with human rights abuses, but don't you dare do anything that makes me pay more at the pump.
"Flash-Lite" is a different product from "Flash", which is more expensive. They couldn't be more confusing with their naming though, especially since they have 3.1 Pro and not 3.1 Flash non-lite.
I visited California a month ago and had some of the best strawberries I've ever had for $4/quart off the side of the road near Bakersfield (best I had was Oshii berries before they started to sell to grocers, but that was at luxury fruit prices).
The Sunnyvale farmers market was a different story though. Two of the vendors gave out samples. One of them tasted like Safeway strawberries. The other gave out these small strawberries that were really sweet, and this vendor had a lot more business even though their berries were $1 more expensive. However, the ones that the vendor actually sold were much bigger than the sample strawberries. I was suspicious, but bought them anyways. Sure enough, when I tried them, they tasted like Safeway strawberries. My takeaway from this experience is that America sells bad produce less so due to supply reasons and more so that Americans just have poor taste in produce.
What those who fetishize China's punishment of billionaires need to understand that what allows for this punishment is also what allows for even more blatant corruption. Rule of law is just something that doesn't exist. You may think that the US no longer has rule of law under Trump, and while that's true to a certain extent, for the most part people act with a rule of law mindset because that's what they are familiar with.