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I don't think the problem is lack of loans. The problem is the price of assets. This is a structural problem (this used to be something we used to tell developing countries and here we are)

Essentially, the asset prices need to match economic activity. Another way to think about this is that house prices should be affordable to the median household (teachers, nurses, office staffs, blue collar workers)

The reason it is not affordable is because of laws and unequal taxation.

Access to loans is NOT the problem!!


This is good. I kind of buy into this theory. About the 100-300 year cycle, that stands as well. History is littered with changing reserve currencies.


No. This is like blaming hammer-as-a-service company for hammer murders.

If you're leasing out equipment, you better have reasonable tracking/prevention mechanisms of your equipment. This is much like tracking car leases, computer leases, apartment leases.


wat.... ? 1. you rent a car, and on the Term of Service you declare you are not going to use it for anything illegal .

2. Go rob a bank with it.

3. The rental car company is liable?

According to this logic, if you checkout a book from the library, hit someone on the head with it, then the library is liable....

Society will stop functioning in this case. Google would have to start requiring background checks to open a gmail account...

If FB/Instagram was: 1. Actively promoting that illegal activity, or 2. Turning an blind eye / not removing posts that are clearly doing illegal stuff, then they might be liable...

The point is that there are hundreds of millions of accounts in FB/Instagram, and it is almost impossible to monitor everything that goes on it.....


> wat.... ? 1. you rent a car, and on the Term of Service you declare you are not going to use it for anything illegal . 2. Go rob a bank with it.

3. The rental car company is liable?

No. The rental car company should

1. Do driver record check 2. Contain enough info about drivers to aid law enforcement

I believe it is faster to sign up for an instagram account than getting a rental car.

Social media cannot prevent everything. On the other end of the spectrum, they can't just brush themselves off of the responsibility either. This is simply, to protect children and vulnerable.

They need to be ok with losing fake users, bots and illicit activity accounts from their MAU counts.


What a load of nonsense! The planet needs lesser people.

If economics is the problem, fix the damn econs, not the planet.

I'm not naive. I understand that the young will have to produce more per capita to support the masses of elderly. But the solution to this is not producing more kids. The solution is somewhere along the line of better economic distribution


I've said this in the past but I'm going to reiterate at the expense of much downvotes again.

America is the third world country of all developed countries.

For individuals like you seeking human connection, I highly recommend SE Asia as a place to permanently migrate to.

You will find meaning in mingling with people who don't care about the rat race on the edge. Comes with its own shortcomings but you've lived the lonely life of America. It cannot go lower than this.


What's incredible is that once you factor in PPP, this is equivalent to $200B in local purchasing power.

Imagine how much new economic activity that is for a country whose GDP is only $2.5T


More like $30-$40 billion not $200 billion. The current PPP multiplier is somewhere between 3 and 4.

PPP is most useful when looking at domestically manufactured items and services. When looking at anything that needs to be imported, normal exchange rates are a much better tool. In fact due to import duties in India, many international goods are more expensive in India that in most of the west.


I literally used the multiplier here: https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p...

As shocking as it sounds, PPP multiple is really 18x


That's not the PPP multiple -- that's the PPP exchange rate.

From the chart you stated. Total, National currency units/US dollar, 2000 – 2018

I.e, in PPP terms 18 Rupees is one US Dollar.

In real terms, about 70 Rupees is one US dollar, given a PPP multiplier of slightly under 4 at current nominal exchange rates.


If you compare just the house rents in all the major Indian metros then PPP is around 4 5.


Then compare it with major US metros only and not entire US.

The multiplier again becomes 18x


OK but labor is a dominant cost in most of these startups. The labor is all local, being paid local wages. PPP is absolutely relevant.


If you adjust the funding for PPP you have to adjust GDP too :P


That is accurate


Yup. I don't think most people today realize what a one-time event American wealth was after world war 2.

After WW2, the rest of the developed world was destroyed and the under-developed world was colonies. Today, they all have woke citizens working hard to reach a developed lifestyle. Which means America has to compete, hard!


Men in black


A few reasons:

1. Weather in most northern states will cause death

2. Transportation for poor doesn't exist in the US

3. If one can't find jobs in SF, forget about being able to find them in Tulsa. Reasons vary from number of employers, lack of transportation, lack of education, felony record, divorces/child support.

I think the easiest way for someone to imagine this would be to think os the US as a dense jungle. The bounty is plentiful but there are death traps everywhere. Only the death traps are man made.

You need to find the patch of this jungle where you are likely to survive. Which means living under a rock in region A is better than dying in a barren desert in region B.


The proponents of current form of capitalism miss a big big aspect of free-market capitalism. That is: taking losses.

Every capitalism proponent is so tied up to the stock market that they don't want to see losses. Thus they resort to policies that would somehow socialize losses.

If you are really free market, you need to accept losses.

- Let the FED not print money which causes inflation which is driving a regular life out of the young's reach

- Let students declare bankruptcy on student loans

- Let your social security go bankrupt, it is market driven

- Let your house prices go underwater. Whoever said it should always go up and that the young should burn their lives to buy it from old geezers at elevated prices.

But no, the boomers don't want those losses. This is where cries for socialism is coming from.


> The proponents of current form of capitalism miss a big big aspect of free-market capitalism. That is: taking losses.

It might be clearer if you just called "the current form of capitalism" crony capitalism. It's not free market and that's why I laugh whenever people say that capitalism is failing. Progressives won a long time ago (during the Progressive era) and crafted a massive government, instituted heavy centralized planning, and we're seeing the failure of the centralization of government play out today.


Are you really kidding me? I'm not sure if you are looking at things objectively when you blame progressives (for something they didn't even do) while the current administration is enriching the oligarchs


Enriching the oligarchs? Compared to under Bush and Obama when their administrations espoused the notion that "everyone dies if we don't inject massive amounts of money into irresponsible corporations." Everyone enriches oligarchs. Blaming it on one administration or the other misses the larger point that strong central planning is the defining feature of anything done by federal govt nowadays (something that, like I said, we got from the early 20th c).


Every administration has a problem. You are the one who brought some "progressive" nonsense in the first place, when you yourself know that it's not a political party issue. It's a problem with our politics which is sold out to the highest bidder.

Oligarchs in our system are people funding lobbyists. How else do you think Oligarchs work?

Let's be rational and remove the blame game. Focus on the problem and we know none of the political leaders are doing anything to fix it.


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