I'm not sure how this article would be any different if Culdesac had written their own "journalistic" article about itself and paid The Guardian to publish it.
If our current scientific understanding of cosmology, quantum mechanics, biology, etc. doesn't fill you with awe and humility, I don't know what will.
If it doesn't fill you with gratitude that we have even the slightest ability to exist, and to experience and understand any of this, I don't know what will.
There are many dimensions by which to compare healthcare systems (e.g. availability of care, cost, quality, speed) and different samples and statistics to consider (means, medians, 10th-percentiles, different demographic groups e.g. different races, different worker groups e.g. tech workers).
It's complex, but overall the US system is better than Canada's. It's not as clear cut comparing the US to some European countries, but with Canada it's mostly clear cut. And it's especially clear cut for tech workers. If you work in tech, you're highly likely to have very good coverage through your employer, you will almost surely experience much better availability and speed of care, probably better quality, and the extra out-of-pocket costs are absolutely dwarfed by the superior pay in the US.
It looks at some recent time period (roughly, during COVID) and breaks down the growth in money spent by where it goes (e.g. company profits, labor, etc.) and how much of it is due to real growth in output vs. being due to purely inflationary price hikes. It aims to show that a disproportionate amount of the excess money spent, beyond that accounted for by real growth, went to company profits.
There are two problems with the approach in this article.
First, its choice of time period is somewhat arbitrary. Over the course of this particular 11 quarter time period (Dec 2019 - Sep 2022), corporate (+38%) and small business (+30%) profits grew much more than labor expenditures (+17%). But just from the data presented, over the final 8 of those 11 quarters, growth in corporate profits (+22%) and labor expenditures (+18%) were comparable, and growth in small business profit (+7%) was much less. This article doesn't present the data, but what would happen if choosing a longer time scale? Quarter over quarter we see business profit growths are very volatile, sometimes growing, sometimes shrinking (negative growth). So unless you're looking at longer time horizons like decades, you can probably find runs of 8-12 quarters showing any narrative you want.
The other problem is how this article tries to determine how much growth in each component was real vs. purely inflationary. The problem is it assumes the real growth of each component was the exact same (about 6.5%). After observing 38% nominal growth in corporate profits and 17% nominal growth in labor expenditures, it simply assumes the real growth in each (due to real growth in output) was the same 6.5% for each of those categories. One implication of this presumption would be that over any time period, the real output growth of corporations and the real output growth of small business would always be the exact same, percentage-wise. This is definitely a completely flawed presumption. And it's doing most of the heavy lifting in the paper's overall argument.
First, the intro with the dog analogy. If you remotely see your relationship with your employer as you being the beloved family dog, you're the problem.
Second, the author quotes a paper on downsizing in a journal and afterwards says, "[i]n all my searching I wasn't able to find any hard data which suggests layoffs either enable a company to better compete or improve earnings in the long term." However the conclusion of the very paper he references says, "[t]he findings of this field study indicate that downsizing can improve an organization's financial performance but not in the near-term.... [R]esearch strongly suggests that it likely will take three or more years for organizations to be able to truly see the financial benefits of downsizing." If you look at all the graphs in the Results section of the paper, it shows that companies who downsize started out being weaker performers than those who weren't downsizing, but a few years after downsizing they were largely able to close that underperformance gap.
You're right about the first part. I actually am Canadian, though haven't lived in Canada for over a decade. Absolute brain fart on my part. If you asked me outside the context of this article what Rogers does, I would've listed cable, Internet, telephone provider before any of its media/publishing stuff, but got tunnel vision in the context of this article.
I forgot about the degree to which Rogers is vertically integrated (ISP, cable provider, landline and cell provider, TV stations, radio, partial ownership in all major sports teams, etc.) and the degree to which this is a duopoly with Bell in Canada. But it's no wonder they can get the courts to issues these orders against themselves (and their smaller competitors) to legitimize actions that protect their broader interests.
The content producers (NHL) and publishers (Rogers) neither own nor operate the content distribution networks (ISPs). However they make commercial terms with each other to give one party exclusive rights to distribute the other party’s content via the ISPs, implying a restriction on how any other party (eg ordinary citizens) can use the ISPs. Since they don’t actually control the ISPs, they’re having the government enforce the terms of their commercial agreements against parties that weren’t part of them.
Doesn’t seem like this should be the role of government, but not surprising for Canada. On the spectrum of irrational distrust of government to irrational trust of government, any population is going to have a distribution. Canada skews towards greater trust of government, with more broad and intense irrational trust in government in the last few years than I’d ever noticed in the decades prior.
Discriminating based on race/sex is racist/sexist. It’s sad today that many people (racists and sexists) staunchly believe the opposite of the above when discrimination is going against the race or sex who “deserve” it, going so far as to call this kind of racism “anti-racism”. Worse, though, is that many others lack the moral clarity or courage to admit that they understand that discriminating based on race/sex is racist/sexist, and thereby allow this kind of racism/sexism to perpetuate.
I’d be interested in seeing the program that OP’s colleague has to see energy consumption per device. I want this for electricity, gas, and water. The utilities are starting to get into smart metering, but they’re not up to what I’m looking for yet, at least not my providers.
Yeah, it's a matter of whether you want to address problems proactively (nip them in the bud), or reactively after you have a crisis on your hands. If you live in reality, you can see problems and growing trends, and take action (or at least demand of politicians) to do something about it. People SF instead are so deeply mired in a cult-like ideology that they'd rather stick their head in the sand for a very long time denying there's a problem, in fact castigating anyone who points out there's a problem, and instead vote for people who will further an agenda while exacerbating the problem. Read some of the comments on Breed's Medium post: https://londonbreed.medium.com/a-safer-san-francisco-eb40d9d.... You can't help people who won't help themselves.
I mean more like, you can generally eat food from grocery stores and restaurants and trust it'll be pretty safe. You can get medical operations and pharmaceuticals, and generally trust them. There are actually extremely large problems here, e.g. Purdue and fentanyl, but even there Purdue has been fined to death by the government. Still, there are huge problems for sure. The problems need to be addressed, but I think if you look to narrowly at some of the problems, you think the whole system needs to be overthrown. Sure that sentiment is increasing, but more pushed by well-off elites than a genuine grassroots uprising. This is one of the biggest problems we face today IMO.
I don't think DeFi helps with most of the problems you're talking about. Supply chain issues, COVID-related business restrictions, health care prices and the role of insurance providers, none of these are caused by centralized financial systems.
> The most important takeaway is to avoid new tokens that haven’t undergone a code audit. Code audits are a process by which a third-party firm analyzes the code of the smart contract behind a new token or other DeFi project, and publicly confirms that the contract’s governance rules are iron clad and contain no mechanisms that would allow for the developers to make off with investors’ funds.
But how do you know which third party auditors to trust?
What DeFi projects are laying bare is that it’s an absolute marvel that we have functional societies at the scale we do today (USA, EU). Most people can live their lives intuitively knowing which instructions to trust (financial, groceries, restaurants, medical, you name it). All of it is ultimately backed by laws, systems, real people who can be held accountable, and government monopoly of force. Furthermore we rarely have to see that stuff for the system to work and that monopoly on force is rarely abused.
It could be a meaningful technological shift if a lot of the financial infrastructure goes decentralized, digitized/programmatic, and open source. But I’m dubious the mainstream person’s day to day experience will change much, the stability and peace of mind afforded by the structures of our current society are pretty amazing and I don’t see them being replicated in a purely digital and decentralized form.
1.
The data I’m referring to is in the link I was referring to. See how far left on the spectrum SF is. Take also your figures on registered voters in each party. I suspect SF is many standards deviations from the national mean split.
Can we agree on any possible intersubjective standard for too extreme? If not, fine, we revert to solipsism.
If either of the data mentioned in the first paragraph is a possible metric, how many standard deviations is too many?
If not this standard/metric, will you propose another? I challenge anyone to propose a metric or set of metrics that reasonable people will entertain as a standard of measuring a cities extremes, plus a set of thresholds that reasonable people will entertain as determining too extreme/not too extreme, and then coming to the conclusion under these metrics that SF is not too extreme. In other words, any way you want to slice it, SF is too extreme, unless you refuse to “slice it”.
2.
National political duopoly is problematic, but we live in a democracy. Every citizen is free to have their own positions, vote for whoever they want, and run for office if they don’t like who’s running. Your perspective is not your skin color, you can change it and update it as you participate in the real world. Citizens of SF simply cannot blame the national duopoly for their choices. It’s completely possible to foster, appreciate, and embody diversity and non-partisanship of thought. It’s possible to foster a culture of balance and diversity, which in turn could encourage the partisan competition you mention.
SF even has ranked choice voting which should weaken the duopoly’s death grip, in theory.
The national structural problems you mention are true for every city. There’s nothing in the water or Karl the Fog that uniquely prevents people in SF from doing what I mentioned above. But they don’t, that’s their choice, that’s SF culture, and that’s the problem.
Both problems may be present, but I think one of them is the bottom line/root cause. It’s a numbers game. I don’t think there are enough who are in touch with reality to influence election results.
I think the problem is San Franciscans are out of touch with reality. The root problem is not the GOP brand; despite the flaws in the GOP brand that is not the bottom line.
No one is saying every geographical subdivision needs to reflect exactly the aggregate distribution at the national level. I expect the split in individual cities to deviate from the national mean split. Based on my subjective experience living in SF, and based on the data, SF’s deviation is too extreme.
Sure, we can regress to a form of solipsism and just say there’s no possible discussion to be had about whether SF is too extreme. Yes, God has not written down a cosmological constant of what threshold determines too extreme vs not too extreme. I think it’s pointless for us to gaslight ourselves into this belief. If we can’t say SF is too extreme, how can we say crime is too high, or persecution of LGBTQ is too high, or anything else?
In the link I shared above, SF deviates as far left as the scale can go. If you think it is possible to have an inter-subjective conversation about whether SF is too extreme, but think SF isn’t, what would need to be true for you to declare SF past the threshold?
I was thinking of 2018, but I don't remember Ellen Lee Zhou being Republican, only Richie Greenberg. Four unaffiliated-but-Democratic candidates ranked higher, Ellen and Richie were next both with less than 5% of the vote. Mark Leno and Jane Kim were the two I recall banding together; they were #2 and #3 respectively after London.
> But San Francisco has 316k registered Democrats, 137K registered with no party preference, 33K registered Republicans, and 15K registered with other parties. Expecting symmetry between the nationally major parties in San Francisco is silly.
Good question. I didn't mean this to refer to a specific politician, I meant that SF isn't the kind of place where such a politician could thrive. I think in a healthy place, you would see a healthy balance of right and left politicians who genuinely have to contend with one another. I would expect conservative politicians to win elections when things like crime and quality of life start to go the wrong direction. I don't think the delusional climate in SF is conducive to this healthy balance.
My recollection of the election when Breed won was there was one Republican, and I don't think he got many votes. Ideally there would be multiple Republican and Democratic candidates, with strong and worthwhile candidates from each party, each getting a decent share of votes. I recall the two other popular Democratic candidates competing with Breed banded together (don't remember what that meant exactly, I think they were recommending voters to vote for both of them in their ranked choices) and their platform for dealing with homelessness was to give them all cleaning supplies and have them clean the streets of SF, thereby killing two birds with one stone (giving the homeless productive, gainful occupation and dealing with all the litter, needles, human waste, etc. on the streets). I can't think of a more out-of-touch idea than that, but this was the #2 choice for San Franciscans.
I think anyone sensible would have simply asked for what Breed is now proposing to do. Voicing that opinion in SF years ago would've made you a pariah. It's a common sense opinion if you're living in and observing reality, but that's simply not what SF culture has been about.
Based on who San Franciscans has been electing, it seems too many live in world of progressive delusion far removed from reality. Reality got too real, now elected officials react. If only the citizens of SF could bring themselves to support and elect politicians who would’ve nipped this tragedy, years in the making, in the bud. Breed talks about the need to change course now — SF needed to change course long ago.