> Right, but normalizing to the price of bread and milk is even more ridiculous than normalizing to the federal budget, which is not excellent for this purpose, as you point out.
This reminds me of the phrase "if you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail".
> Poor people buy less stuff, and presumably rich people get rich by not buying more stuff commensurate with their incomes
One implication of the above statement would be that everyone is now buying less and yet somehow the economy is growing? Those two ideas aren't strictly necessarily opposed to one another but it certainly doesn't seem like a good place to start. The economy could only be growing through investment if this were the case.
> Even the falling fertilizer consumption might be explained if poorer people are shifting to more processed junk food.
Is there any junk food that isn't composed of organic matter primarily? Most "junk" food in the US that I can think of is corn based which would of course still require fertilizer...
This is true if you only consider the first order effect of copyright.
However, the second order effects would lead to, for example, significant decrease in investment of the creation of any work that has marginal production of near $0. Why would Disney/Marvel go to the effort of creating the Avengers movies when those movies could be shown freely by movie theaters? They, of course, would not as there would be no way to recoup their investments. Now the millions of "the many" who have freely exchanged their dollars for movie tickets are worse off. Nobody wins, not the few and not the many.
Why would GRRM write the next two works in ASOIAF if ANY publisher could take the text, print it and sell it without remuneration to GRRM? At best he would because he's already rich but would he ever have in the first place?
The winners in your world may very well be Amazon and others with the easiest/best distribution platforms at the cost of the creators and in turn at the cost of all as the creators no longer create.
There's a big difference between seeing high concentrations of carbon dioxide as indicative of poor ventilation and seeing high concentrations of carbon dioxide itself as detrimental to cognitive function.
Way OT, but, I'm interested in why you and the parent comment are writing Netflix with a capital "F" as NetFlix. I've not seen this in any of their branding or collateral before. Is there a specific reason for it?
I think wrt NYT, the facts are all true but purpose should also clearly be a part of it. Imagine a headline which said "Trump kills man on White House lawn with Colt .45" and the man was attacking him with a machete.
When many (most?) people are aware of the prior tariff tirade by Trump and not everyone reads the meat of an article, I think it's irresponsible to not include the _why_.
It seems most posters didn't really read the article as the tariffs appear to be in compliance with a WTO ruling on something illegal the EU is doing wrt subsidies to Airbus. Unsurprising that the NYT and HN goes with the lead that Trump is unilaterally fucking up world order yet again but in this case it doesn't seem so deserved.
I really wish both groups (the NYT and HN) would be more nuanced when it comes to Trump. Otherwise, we all end up justifying Trump's and other Alt-Righties' claims of bias.
> I do not want my buying habits mined , bought and sold, etc. They are my property and not subject to the whimms of amazon or any other company.
In order to make a purchase of X it is required that another party exists to make a sale of X. Let's call this transaction A. Why do you believe that the metadata of transaction A is owned solely by the purchaser and is not equally owned by the seller?
Even further, is there really a differentiation between the purchaser and the seller? It's really just an exchange of a good or service for dollars where the "buyer" is the one with the dollars and the "seller" is the one with the good or service.