Yes, Trump has been a fantastic disappointment. At least he didn't start any new wars (sorry mustache man!). Some part of me cannot believe the fiscal/budgetary travesty perpetuated by the Republicans in federal office. They took Obama's deficits and tripled them. The same deficits and Fed policy they (rightly) harped on for the previous 8 years.
One thing I would say is don't put too much faith in the polls. Republican voters are notoriously unwilling to talk to pollsters. Trump will say Covid is outside of his control and you're welcome for all the welfare checks; the minute they put Biden on stage, some percentage of the electorate will realize he's actually senile. My guess is that it'll be close.
Yes, FB is a private company and all that. But they have clearly been censoring speech and cannot be protected by common carrier rules, as they are a publisher.
This change of designation, of course, would be a significant financial blow, once they started losing lawsuits. But you can bet that if one considers their gov't influence and status as a money-spigot for leftist politicians, they have no fear of this actually happening.
It's only the little people who have to worry about running afoul of the law---not HRC and not FB. Welcome to the late Roman Empire.
Everyone agrees* that the gov't should at its root fundamental level handle infrastructure. Water, the most essential element to human life, should have been prioritized over over every other foolish pet project. Let's hope it gets done; looks like it's going nowhere: https://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-droug...
Yes, but have the bozos in Sac learned anything? Have we built new water infrastructure to support a population 3x the size vs. when the original, now-ageing infrastructure was built? Was there a cessation of 40% of freshwater being drained into the oceans to preserve the habitats of baitfish and other environmentalist causes? No---we told farmers they were evil because they grow almonds, told people they need to conserve/pay more for water, and have not fixed any fundamental problems. Instead, the now-suspended train to nowhere was Jerry Brown's contribution (though nowhere near as bad as giving gov't workers collective bargaining "rights" in the 70s, fleecing taxpayers till the end of time), whereas his father's legacy was building actual infrastructure.
There is going to be another drought---there has always been drought in California---and nothing will have been fixed. Maybe since the central CA aquifers were significantly drained (they actually sank!) in this drought go-around, next time the farmers will well and truly go out of the business, to the delight of the anti-business pink-haired SF crowd who doesn't realize that despite seeing a vast expanse of water on the horizon every day they walk to work through human excrement to the Twitter Ministry of Truth, the freshwater actually comes from Hetch Hetchy, dammed in the 1930s, and built for a population of the mid-20th century.
The whole water crisis happened due to political and central planning incompetence---no one has been held accountable and nothing has been learned: expect a repeat.
Taking morality out of it for the time-being, taxes serve as an additional barrier to entry for smaller companies; these tech giants have hordes of lawyers and accountants to make sure they pay very minimal taxes (if any). These companies are also multinational, so they can keep money overseas and search for tax havens globally---a choice smaller companies don't have.
The point is: you can give big companies whatever rate you want, but they're in the strongest position to circumvent it, and they will. The better choice is to lower taxes substantially and give the smaller companies a chance to accumulate capital faster, so they can compete.
I agree that the primary cause of all this is government interference regarding barriers to entry. However, did the regulation help insulate these companies against competition in the first place or did they use their money and power once established to pass laws that would keep competitors at bay? Lobbying reaps disproportionate rewards---those CEOs who stick by their non-rent-seeking principles are leaving big money on the table and will likely be replaced by shareholders. (Econ Talk had a good podcast on this recently.)
Regarding trust busting, it is worth noting that these tech giants give an immense amount of money and support to the left. Might as well give Warren some bipartisan support so we can thrash them a bit---it would be sweet poetic justice to attack these statist zealots with the very government power they worship.
There are a lot of problems---namely: debt, cost of living, and third-world immigration---that this generation has to face.
That being said, we are still probably the second-richest generation in the history of the world. Look at the squalor people lived in only 80 or 100 years ago: whole families in one-bedroom houses with no central heat or A/C, a chamberpot in the corner of the room, wood-burning stove providing all heat and cooking, and almost certain death by most diseases. If they wanted to start a business, they'd have to save enough capital to start a brick-and-mortar enterprise in a local market.
We have the ability to buy a $500 computer and start a business or learn a new skill from anywhere. We have access to wondrous modern healthcare (yes, which gov't interference has increased the price of, but the quality is nonetheless excellent). Cars are much better than they used to be---your 10-year old Japanese car with power windows will run until the bumpers fall off, and then probably keep going.
I'm certainly nowhere near where I want to be financially, but perhaps I'm striking an optimistic tone today because I watched They Shall Not Grow Old over the weekend. One of the veterans talks about how he was retreating after an offensive and saw a fellow 16-year-old writhing on the ground in pain after being blown to bits. He knew the boy was done for, and put him out of his misery. By comparison to what they endured, we live in Heaven-on-Earth.
The road and bridge infrastructure in this state is completely falling apart. The water infrastructure was built for a population half or a third of what exists currently, during the Pat Brown era. Calpers has half a trillion $$ in unfunded liabilities, which the younger generation---many of which still live with their parents---is supposed to pay for.
And the Democrats chose to spend $100 billion on an effing train to nowhere.
Whether he happens to be correct or not (a broken clock is right twice a day), Krugman has zero credibility. He has a Nobel Prize, so people listen to him, but the man is a dyed-in-the-wool Keynesian who takes no responsibility when his prognostications fail to materialize again and again.
Where are the specific examples, you ask? There's an entire podcast devoted to smashing his (often-contradictory) arguments: https://contrakrugman.com/
How many years do people spend in Prussian-model government schools or private schools with mandated State-sponsored curriculum? 12? And the average person isn't imparted enough skills to work on anything besides a precarious assembly-line or perpetual min-wage job?
The story here is not an indictment of robots taking menial jobs; rather, it is an indictment of the atrocious education system that teaches people NOTHING of value. Maybe even less than nothing, since it propagandizes and infantilizes them.
If Walmart ran the schools and produced a bunch of know-nothings as a result, we would never hear the end of it. But somehow the State gets a pass. Even worse; they get more money!---per capital spending has increased 3x in the last 60 years with worse results.
Colleges sell themselves as providing remunerative employment training when it suits them, and hide behind this excuse when kids (esp. Humanities majors) can't garner gainful employment. "What, you thought you were paying $200k to increase your earning potential?! Crazy kids---this is all about personal development. Life is about more than money!" (Try not paying your student loans back, and you can see exactly how little they care about money.)
Even if we pretend that the majority of people attend college not for the purpose of increasing their value to employers and getting out of their parents' house, but for personal edification, colleges don't even accomplish this ostensible goal! Most students are more ignorant in most subject matter than the day they step foot on the campus - https://www.nysun.com/new-york/students-know-less-after-4-co... ; https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/01/whats-c.... Often they're propagandized for four years, saddled with debt, and told that they got an "education", so it's nobody's fault but their own if they can't find a decent job.
Three cheers for the AWS certs and modern-day educational options and good riddance to the corrupt university system (propped up by taxpayer-subsidized monies, of course).
It's impossible to tell exactly what would have happened in a bankruptcy, but the entire company would have almost certainly been restructured, which would have meant generally clearing out the dead wood: shuttering factories, renegotiating anachronistic/extravagant union contracts, etc.
Coercing private citizens to pay for mismanaged companies and subsidize the gold-plated pension benefits of Baby Boomer employees is utterly immoral.
This is exactly how I would have imagined a trip would go. $85 billion market cap for a car that can't travel to most areas of the globe at all or with severe inconvenience? Give me a break.
Electric cars have been around for 100 years, and they've been consistently inferior. We've perfected the car with the internal combustion engine. Empower automobile engineers to make marginal improvements, but otherwise: can we please spend precious capital elsewhere? Think of all the cures or improvements to human life this money could have gone towards, rather than this stupid electric car will-o'-the-wisp. Build some nuclear power plants! Go to Mars! (In fairness, Elon's trying the latter, as long as Tesla doesn't become a financial albatross around his neck.)
Why must the history of humanity always be the story of one step forward and two steps backward?
You voice a lot of similar conclusions I've come to, as someone who's mid-level and came through the bootcamp/practical application route.
One of my coworkers has a Math/CS degree and I feel like he's light-years ahead of me when it comes to solving algorithms, to address just one facet of your comment. He can see the underlying problem/solution at a much deeper level. At the same time, I think that teaching the deep theory first would have been too abstract to me; it makes more sense now that I have some practical experience and have encountered real-world problems that need to be solved.
Which would be fine if the companies acknowledged that they are having trouble hiring because they're extremely picky.
Exactly this. I'm mid-level, trying to switch jobs. Several front-end javascript positions I interviewed for asked me anything from pretty tough algorithms to "how does Angular do namespacing" to object-oriented questions relating to Java to how to style a page and add event listeners to it without ability to reference the docs, etc.
The questions per se are not undoable, but the the sheer magnitude of the corpus they can ask questions from is what's so difficult. I accept this and try to cover as much as I can in self-study and outside courses, so I can better in future interviews. But it is a substantial burden timewise, and seems to be of diminishing marginal utility regarding actual, on-the-job performance, which is pretty annoying. Oh yeah, and then they reveal that they want to pay me $75k per year for a mid-senior position, in California. I know people who make that starting out of college as Account Managers for bigger CPG (consumer packaged goods) or pharma companies, with a company car and cell phone. (Granted, I think those jobs would be boring and also at-risk over the long-term, but the time spent/compensation difference seems out of whack.)
If there really were a shortage, companies would check for fundamentals but relax their standards and offer more on-the-job training for candidates. And wages would be significantly higher! Should get rid of H1Bs as a start, and see if that helps.
The criticism here is that google's leaders and employees have explicitly advocated on behalf of and contributed to leftist causes, which promote the view that taxation should be greatly increased to decrease inequality, pay for government programs, or myriad other reasons. When Trump was elected, they had company-wide meetings concerning the sad state of the country, where melancholy leftists could vent their unhappiness (no such reaction greeted Obama's election). James Damore was harassed and eventually fired when he accepted the (fake) invitation to challenge "Social Justice" orthodoxy concerning gender. They didn't address his evidence, but rather went after his livelihood.
My point being: they are one of the richest companies in the world, committed to a leftist worldview. The fact that they do everything they can to funnel money away from the poor, downtrodden, socioeconomically-disadvantaged, marginalized, etc., which they so loudly proclaim "need our help!"---the word hypocrisy doesn't even cut it.
I cannot believe braindead Biden is a) the candidate, and b) has a very solid chance of beating Trump. The man can hardly get through a sentence. The emperor has no clothes! (https://twitter.com/brithume/status/1286130348888403976?s=20)
Yes, Trump has been a fantastic disappointment. At least he didn't start any new wars (sorry mustache man!). Some part of me cannot believe the fiscal/budgetary travesty perpetuated by the Republicans in federal office. They took Obama's deficits and tripled them. The same deficits and Fed policy they (rightly) harped on for the previous 8 years.
One thing I would say is don't put too much faith in the polls. Republican voters are notoriously unwilling to talk to pollsters. Trump will say Covid is outside of his control and you're welcome for all the welfare checks; the minute they put Biden on stage, some percentage of the electorate will realize he's actually senile. My guess is that it'll be close.