Ah, yes, the brutal regimes of modern-day Norway, Sweden, Iceland, and others in Northern Europe!
where people aren't routinely bankrupted by medical debt, and don't enter adult life or the adult workforce straddled by terrible student loan debt, and workers have rights!
Obviously, the sort of inequality we have in the U.S.--now greater than that of imperial Rome--obviously that's the right way to be, and the only way society (or at least a tiny fraction of it) can thrive. Right? That's what you're saying, right?
There's a substantial and growing body of social science research that indicates that inequality leads to a whole host of social ills--see Wilkinson and Pickett.
There's also an intuited sense that when so very many people (1 in 4 children now!) are underfed, and so very many have no real access to medical care (1 on 6 americans), when education is becoming ever more inaccessible, and when the few institutions that have successfully defended workers from a hardscrabble life of hopeless poverty are virtually destroyed, AND there are a few people who don't really work harder (and certainly NOT billions of times harder!) than the rest of us, but enjoy quirks of market, law, and birth to amass vast wealth, that something might be wrong with the system that allows them to do that.
We're trapped in an economic system that concentrates resources and power, whose foundations we have been so thoroughly indoctrinated to accept that we treat them as immutable laws of nature, rather than inventions to serve us--all of us, not just the ultra-wealthy. Laws of nature, we might be stuck with. Inventions of our own making, we might could improve upon.
Good luck. That looks like a terrible idea, but good luck all the same.
Please share whatever lessons you learn in marketing and promoting, of course--I know we could always use another perspective on that side of the challenge.
I'm wary of anyone who uses terms like "state-coerced" - it suggests that the author has bought into an ideology that is decidedly not reality-based. Too often, phrases like that run in packs with ideas like "taxation is theft" (it isn't, of course).
We used to have real pensions from companies, too. It used to be that, by working for a company, part of your benefit was that they'd pay four your retirement. Of course, this is bad for the bottom line, so they cut that.
Of course, the social safety net isn't generous. I'm not sure why you think that. Social security pays out enough to keep _some_ old people from abject poverty. For some unfathomable reason, you think that reintroducing that kind of suffering is a solution?
Oh, wait, I caught it - "if you want any sort of public assistance, you have to ___". On rereading what you wrote, I don't think you're interested in proposing honest solutions to solvable social problems (i.e. you're trolling).
(And...your second-paragraph rant suggests that you think that people are, by default, totally immune from advertising and group pressure. Do you really think that this is so, or is this also trolling?)
No less an extremist as Thomas Jefferson supported the estate tax, and we still have it for many good reasons. This article talks about it better than I could:
I note that he claims to have 29 sites, but hasn't listed them. A simple list of the 29 super-duper money-making sites...that shouldn't be so hard to provide...
I'd upvote you a thousand times if I could. You've just modeled the kind of humility and maturity that can actually make the world a better place. Thank you for this..it hasn't gone unnoticed.
Is that an attempt to discredit someone just by tossing out a scary-sounding label? What if we haven't been programmed to fear Marxism, and "cultural marxism" just makes you sound like an ignant fool?
In other, politer words, what exactly are you trying to say here?
I'm sorry, maybe you can explain it like I'm five.
What does the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of the public or private sector have to do with a centrally-planned economy?
Or, let me be charitable (because I think I know what you were getting at...) and instead put it to you this way:
Let's say government-financed or government-run health care is more efficient or more cost-effective than privately-run health care, because there's no privately-run insurance company that exists to extract a bit of dosh from every doctor-patient transaction.
(And safe money's on government-financed/run health care buying better health care for its citizens, dollar for dollar and measuring on a variety of health outcomes. I've seen a lot of arguments from theory that "more free markets, less regulation" would do as good a job, or better, but I haven't seen evidence of that, just arguments from theory.)
Does this mean that a country that adopts a single-payer or government-run health care system for its citizens has _also_ adopted a centrally planned--or in your words, "government-directed"--economy?
Ah, but maybe he's not overlooking, for one example, the broadband monopoly or (essentially non-competitive) duopoly that exists in contemporary American society.
Compare what we've got with countries where the government owns the physical medium and leases it to a variety of bit-carriers--it's tough to argue against that kind of observable evidence.
There are plenty of cases where government stewardship of the playing field--with private companies competing on that playing field--works out for the great benefit of the citizenry.
"Generally government is poor at picking winners, and inefficient" [citation needed]
"Often the government people end up on the side of workers in the field rather than the public that they're meant to be serving." [citation needed]
Oh, it was all opinion.
That's fine.
In my opinion, government is as efficient as the private sector (ever seen the waste and mismanagement going on in these huge megacorps? it's insane!), and by definition can be _more_ cost-effective than the private sector because there is no need to turn a profit. Private businesses have, built in, a bit of skimming off the top for the owners (and there's nothing wrong with that, of course--that's part of why people start businesses), and government-run services by definition do not. They're not profit-seeking services. They're public services.
(You may disagree on what ought to be a public service, but once we're all on the same page that the government ought to do some things, it's just a matter of hashing out what those ought to be...)
Also...wait... NASA has grown into an organization that works for the glory of its leadership? what? sorry...again...what?
Gender bias is a touchy subject in these tech blogs and the responses to this (yet another) article are, predictably, dismissive. It was one person's fault, there's no widespread gender bias, the instructor should have things differently, someone has seen women be jerks too, etc.
So while there really does seem to be a measurable, observable difference in gender involvement in computing (e.g. in CS enrollments, in working in the industry, etc), these anecdotes always get tossed as not significant.
So what I'm wondering, and this is an open question to everyone here: would anything convince you, personally, that gender bias is real, or has a significant measurable effect, or is a problem? Would it take a certain kind of experiment? Some kind of data or analysis? (Or is the answer, "it's not a problem"?) Like, what sorts of articles would people _not_ jump on the bandwagon to tear to shreds?
where people aren't routinely bankrupted by medical debt, and don't enter adult life or the adult workforce straddled by terrible student loan debt, and workers have rights!
Obviously, the sort of inequality we have in the U.S.--now greater than that of imperial Rome--obviously that's the right way to be, and the only way society (or at least a tiny fraction of it) can thrive. Right? That's what you're saying, right?