Yes, can we have Napoleon's unite Europe back? Or at least the Third Reich? Austria-Hungary was also a terrific idea as was the Ottoman Empire (why did the Greeks every want to rule themselves?)
Why not? Let them fork, iterate and improve. They have a strong identity and economy, so they must be doing something right. Maybe being tied to a monolith even hinders their progress? (Just ideas for thought.)
Sometimes parts are weaker than the whole. The strong economy is possibly part due to investments made with the assumption that Catalonia would be part of Spain for the foreseeable future.
Would London have been the de-facto financial hub of Europe, if people knew Brexit was coming?
Everyone on Earth has a petty identity. If we allow secession just so every self-identifying group can 'rule' themselves then we encourage those petty identities when we should be discouraging them and instead encouraging universal humanism.
Germany is a federated state, stark differences between the regions (the dialects vary a lot, but not as much as the Spanish and Catalan languages differ) but it does work because the government is not centralised like in Spain or France, and the Bundesländer have their say there's a lot of respect for each other. Spain's PP has always shown disrespect to any federalization and autonomy of the spanish regions.
Except the government in Spain is not centralised at all. The comparison with France is just...
IDK where are you getting this ideas but is mostly the opposite. PP is disrespectful about everything but that doesn't mean that there's no autonomy, there's a reason why every region has an "autonomous government" and are called "autonomous communities", basically because they have that autonomy.
>"85% of tech jobs at the company were held by men, and women engineers at the company experienced a deeply unpleasant environment."
But many women have come out to defend the company and say their experiences at Uber were positive. Yet that doesn't fit in with the narrative, so it's ignored.
I dislike most insects. So long as this doesn't impact humanity's ability to thrive on the planet I don't mind. Since we're doing just fine in the face of such significant losses in biomass I don't really worry.
Maybe this is due to widespread use of insecticide? Even so, I'm shocked that the decline is so significant. In none of the major extinction events of the past have insect populations dipped so dramatically.
But regardless, I dislike most insects. So long as this doesn't impact humanity's ability to thrive on the planet I don't mind. Since we're doing just fine in the face of such significant losses in biomass I don't really worry.
I'm glad this is the top comment, because I don't often see common sense critiques of UBI that acknowledge price adjustment.
We can't just print money, that is obviously going to fail as it always does. So... Will we try to implement UBI with wealth transfers? Taxing the rich and giving to the poor?
That seems to be the only alternative to printing money, meaning that UBI is not an innovative idea whatsoever. It's just wealth redistribution.
Of course you don’t print money. You tax everyone more. And you give everyone a share of that tax.
> UBI is not an innovative idea whatsoever.
It’s not claimed to be. The idea is literally hundreds of years old and is pretty well understood. There seem to be a lot who are just coming across it and applying lazy thinking and biases to it and mostly getting it wrong.
Again, the math simply doesn't work out. The tax increases will be huge, and since most of the real tax revenue is in the middle class, you'll have to bump their tax rates up dramatically.
Giving UBI of $10K/year to every citizen of the US is $3.25T. That's more than all the Federal revenues in 2017 (0). And $10K isn't enough. So you'll end up needing confiscatory tax rates on everyone, and possible a wealth tax (not just income). The distorting effect of this level of taxation would be incredible, just from an economic viewpoint. From a political view, it would lead to revolution.
When areas begin to attract wealthier people, they can begin to attract nicer businesses and infrastructure as a result. So the entire neighborhood becomes nicer.
Should we keep things bad? Of course not. Make things nice, and those who can afford to live there should be able to live there.
Trying to make it about race is just racist in itself.
Survivorship bias is kind of bullshit, I mean luck does play a role in success, but the longer you work at something, as long as you have a good idea/plan of attack/all the other traits needed to succeed in a field, the less luck will play a role in determining your success. Luck matters less and less over longer timescales, as long as you keep doing the right things.
Possessing those positive traits you speak of is also a matter of luck: the upbringing of an individual has been proven to affect one's ability to make correct decisions. Effort counts, and it counts a lot, but let's not pretend that we can override causality with it. That's why we have things like welfare and social nets.
Agreed. If you're really smart and a prick, well, then you're just a really smart prick. Intelligence and emotional mastery are divorced from one another.
Intelligence and creativity are also divorced from one another. Unlike Newton, da Vinci, Einstein, most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural sense. Their creativity is rather directed towards fitting in more effectively and being more social than the norm. Which in extreme cases looks like multiple personality disorder, i.e. changing one's responses according to context, the opposite of integrity, including the intellectual integrity required to create new stuff.
> most intelligent people aren't creative in the cultural sense
I would beg to differ. Most of the people I know of high intelligence seem to be a jack-of-all-trades, with almost all of them having, if not a heavy love of language, a decent dollop of it.
Ultimately, there is art and creativity in everything, you just need to know where to find it. The type of creativity that creates a stunning artistic composition is the same sort of creativity that creates a masterful Rube-Goldberg system, and the same sort of creativity that creates complex formulas to describe and generalize real life occurrences. Your brain knows the constraints, sub-patterns, and has an array of tools that allow it to intuitively define the form, and you go through processes to fit it.
What I mean is that intelligence and creativity are independent of each other and since most people don't make significant contributions to culture then neither do most intelligent people.
The potential for anonymous slander is too high for a real system like this to be justified. Whispers turn to rumors which turn to falsehoods. Someone interpreted as being "creepy" in texts by one woman shouldn't have his life ruined by an anonymous post on a spreadsheet.
Agree, but this is also a serious and (apparently) widespread issue which moreover sounds like a combination of technical and social measures could help to address it. So it seems like a good idea to have a discussion about it.
Traditional procedures that balance due process and expedient justice are the solution here. Anyone who faces abuse needs to speak up to either HR in a corporate setting or the police, if appropriate.
Currently, there is a problem. People don't believe victims, and it can be fatal to one's career to come forward.
What you're describing:
> shouldn't have his life ruined by an anonymous post
...hasn't happened so far. So you're trying to defeat a solution to a real problem by bringing up a not-yet-real problem that may never be real.
It's like saying, "Well, we don't want to put seatbelts in cars because they may trap someone in the car after it's crashed." Yes, that might be true, but there's a much bigger problem of lots and lots and lots of people being killed by not having seatbelts at all.
"It’s because their products are index funds. They measure their performance by how well the track the relevant indexes, not their absolute return.
If they have to not invest in stocks that make up an index, they’re more likely to deviate from their target performance.
If you want to make ethical choices with your investing, invest in a product that specializes in such a thing, or invest in individual stocks.
Vanguard having to change VFINX from “S&P 500” to “S&P 500* (* except companies that our board believes support genocide)” would make their performance much more difficult to measure.
I see how the optics are strange, but it’s not Vanguard’s business to be making ethical choices with their passive investment products"
