What are you not understanding about seizing the money being the violent part? People don’t exactly take kindly to their money being seized, and at present there is 0 legal mechanism to seize all billionaire’s wealth.

Trying to add that legal mechanism into the system is what you will see extreme resistance to including state sponsored violence.

It’s like you are hand waiving the most difficult part

All of the groups mentioned in your quote from the article are opposing AOC because of her stance on Palestine not being strong enough. It has nothing to do with her “not being maoist enough”.

A ceasefire in Gaza is extremely popular among the electorate, so this stance is pretty solid according to your “flock to progressive ideals” argument. Linking to the wikipedia page on Maoism to make your point here makes absolutely no sense. Especially considering the liberation maoists are stated as being “a much smaller maoist caucus [within the DSA]” right there.

If you want to make an argument that there should be no hesitation in endorsing her despite her support for the iron dome and support for Biden/Harris with them “working tirelessly” behind the scenes on a ceasefire, be my guest.

This is kind of an interesting thought experiment around laws in general. If you made guns illegal tomorrow you would certainly increase guns crimes because anyone who doesn’t give up their guns is now committing a crime. Similarly all sales of guns would now be illegal and the demand for illegal guns would go way up resulting in more black market trade.

But the framing of the question leads to that conclusion. If what you are actually after is something more akin to “if legalizing drugs decreases violent crime then shouldn’t legalizing guns also decrease violent crime?” This is more interesting in my opinion.

Now let’s assume for a second that legalizing drugs does decrease violent crime (I do believe there I’d research that supports this). What crime is reduced? It is likely that crime around the drug trade itself is what is mostly reduced: you do not have as much cartel, gang, mob, and other organized crime entities around who are committing much of the violent crime. Drug users themselves are probably committing less of the crime than the actual distribution as using drugs is often times not an inherently violent act.

For guns the gun itself is a tool of violence. You cannot use a gun without committing a violent act. Now not all violent acts are violent crime, as target practice is not exactly illegal, but it is still violent. If you make manufacturing of guns illegal less will be manufactured which means less will be in existence therefore there is inherently less access to tools of violence. I’m sure the drug smuggling trade would introduce more violence as it would increase drastically. However the increase there may be smaller than the decrease of just having less guns in the world.

I guess the key difference is that guns are a tool of violence much more frequently than the use of an illicit substance is most likely.

Most of the things you listed are not moral things.

• staying positive
• making friends
• looking for a better job
• saving money
• selling online
• therapy
• religion
• sleep

All of these have nothing to do with moral good or evil. An evil person can stay positive that their plan to steal credit from coworker will result in their promotion. An evil person can make friends and take more than they give from the relationship. An evil person can take a better job that exploits vulnerable populations. An evil person can hoard wealth… And on and on.

It seems like you are saying things aren’t working out for you financially, socially, etc. And for a lot of that cognitive behavioral therapy can certainly help you reframe bad thinking and patterns to make things better. That doesn’t mean all your problems are solved, but it can make things better.

Many of the things you listed are wise things to do rather than morally good. And even if they don’t result in your idea of “success” they almost always result in something better than having not done them. For example saving money. Let’s say you save 10,000 and inflation makes it only have the purchasing power of 8,000. You find yourself in a spot where you are unemployed and that 8,000 is going to be a saving grace. It will help your life way more than if you had blown it on 10,000 worth of vacations or consumer goods.

This was not the spirit of the article. It made clear that a problem that has faced tech all along is unclear leverage. A factory worker stops working and nothing gets built so no profit. A R&D tech worker stops working and that just means some potential future technology that may or may not exist doesn’t get built which doesn’t immediately hit profits and may not at all.

They were trying to explain the struggles of union drives in tech that have been here all along. The “worse deals” it attributes to the increased interest rates of 2022 and cracking down on “woke” workers.

On AI they were saying that tech workers may now see themselves more like traditional workers rather than artisinal coding masters with low unemployment. This shift could cause a greater incentive to tech workers to discover their specific leverage to push for more security.

It also highlighted how campaigns about specific demands (ie not working with military) are much easier to push than pushing for unionization which is more abstract and controversial.

Very good read, lots of nuance.

Let’s take your example of a Hyundai Santa Fe. 5 year total cost of ownership according to Kelley blue book is ~$64,00 while the plug in hybrid Hyundai tuscon is ~$54,000 and the Hyundai kona is ~$49,000. (Note I adjusted the numbers for all up to account for $6.00 gas)

If the question is about small vs big the big tuscon is about the same as the small kona since it is a hybrid. So you can have big and save at the pump. Now why would someone spend $10,000 more for a Santa fe over a tuscon? I dunno, car buying is complicated and emotions come into play quite a bit.

I suspect you wouldn’t balk at someone getting a small car at an upper trim level, but that could be them spending $20k more for fancy gizmos and leather seats.

The more surprising thing is people are spending $50,000k for 5 years of transportation regardless of energy source. If you want to save money on transportation, paying cash, buying used, or keeping what you already have are much bigger savings options than how big the vehicle is.

I’ve seen someone trade in a big v8 SUV with horrible gas mileage for a small sporty sedan and told themselves they were saving money. But the 15% 5 year loan they picked up was telling a different story.

I’m curious why you think “you own this game from our store front in perpetuity” is required to rival the ownership of physical media. If I buy a game from Walmart am I allowed to go back there when my disc was damaged and get a new one? Of course not.

GOG allows you to download and backup the installers of the games themselves, if you back these up well you can use those installers in perpetuity to get your game back on any machine in the future.

The point of this is not to be a direct undoing of Sony’s decision. This about preservation, one of GOG’s big missions. The games listed as having this in the article are old games who already had physical media, and as part of the preservation effort they are trying to preserve the context of the physical media which is a very significant aspect of the game.

What do you mean by google knows it is you? Is this about google fingerprinting you and giving you search results that are only for you? Or because you are signed into a google account for YouTube or gmail or something?

the data behind these statistics are so riddled with bias that I am extremely dubious about them, to the extent that I think it’d be epistemologically safer to largely disregard the stats

This right here is what I’m arguing against. I’d go so far as to say applying this at a macro level is dangerous and destructive (and let me be clear I am not accusing you of doing anything dangerous or destructive, this has been a lovely conversation and I hope I carry no offense. A politician saying this would scare me, but talking about this in a small setting is interesting and productive).

What I have seen from your argument is the possibility for bias at a few different levels of hypothetical data. Now again I’ll caveat that this is not my area of expertise and I’m probably not doing a great job representing the body of literature, but let’s examine a few studies to hopefully demonstrate what I mean. In this study accessing women’s arrest rate for violent crime there are some interesting charts that help illustrate my point (which is largely unrelated to the focus of the paper). They came up with this set of graphs:

I’ll grant that these partially illustrate your point (the part I said I agreed with), the arrest rate for a crime is not necessarily tied to the act of doing the crime itself, and it does so by comparing victim reports of crime with arrest records as a victim report has nothing to do with if an arrest is made or not. Now you could also say that maybe it is less likely that a victim of a woman committing assault is less likely to report they were victimized along with them less likely being arrested. Sure I could even get behind that, but does that account for the 10-20 fold difference in both of them? That would be wild.

For an ever clearer example of this let’s look at another citation (shared author as before) looking at gender differences in drunk driving. In this analysis it was found that 30% of self-reported drunk drivers are women, 25% of DUI arrests are women, and 18% of legally intoxicated drivers in fatal crashes are women. Here we would need to come up with an explanation that up to triples the “real” counts of DUI driving for all three of these stats. We’d have to say well women are 2x less likely to self report than men (why?), they are 2x less likely to be pulled over for DUI (maybe because cops don’t target them as much?) , and that they are 3x less likely to cause accidents that result in death (I guess they are just better drunk drivers by a massive margin).

Even if there are potential for bias in the data you can then account for it with other studies, for the last point the cleanest way would be to ask “are women better at driving under the influence than men?” and a study that tried to tackle exactly that found that “women displayed greater impairment than men on all behavioral tests and also reported higher levels of subjective intoxication compared with men.”

Sure we could poke and prod at hypothetical biases in this data but just because you can generate a plausible explanation for bias doesn’t mean you should “largely disregard the stats”. The reason I claim this is dangerous at the macro level is because this is how you get climate change deniers, vaccine skeptics, smoking and lung cancer deniers, and on and on. There are times where it is appropriate to raise eyebrows at statistical findings, but with something as clear cut as violent crime with men vs women it is not it.

Your reply here I pretty much agree with completely but you have moved the goal posts quite a bit from your initial comment.

What I’m gathering from your comment here is that crime statistics need to be carefully considered because of a large risk of bias in police responses to things let alone the justice system itself. Totlally agree with that.

But your original point that we just don’t know if women actually commit less crime than men is not supported here as I don’t believe it was in your original comment. Virtually all the data I have seen (and I admit I’m nowhere near a subject expert on this) suggests men commit more crime then women. This goes beyond police searches, convictions, etc. Its everything. It is extremely unlikely that there is enough types of bias across the entire dataset of crime stats across the world to make it so women commit roughly the same amount of crime as men (or even more crazy MORE crime).

Now one of the big issues with this is that “crime” is a squishy definition, if we count speeding of 1mph over the limit than just the number of miles driven per gender would be enough to sway the stats. Cause everyone speeds all the time pretty much which is a “crime”

Basically all our data suggests that men commit more crime than women across the boars like the original poster said. I don’t necessarily disagree with your comments about bias in data, but your final conclusion I don’t think is accurate:

I strongly believe that we don’t know if men commit more crime than women. I think it’s plausible that it could be true…

Sure I don’t think we know this with 100% certainty but it is much more than plausible, it is with a high degree of confidence true. If all of the data points to one conclusion I don’t think it is very fair to throw your arms up and say there could be bias everywhere, show that there is bias across the board and then let’s try to account for the bias. I don’t even think you have shown there to be bias.

You also state

women are effectively undercounted if we’re talking about who commits more crime

This conclusion I don’t see proven in your analysis, racial bias does not equal gender bias and it’s quite a jump to use that as evidence. Also we have more data than just who is caught or who is sentenced, there are surveys asking if you have ever shoplifted (sure these need to be take with a grain of salt), there’s data about the suspected gender of a perpetrator of crime when it is initially reported. Etc. Etc.

It is a very important thing to keep in mind statistical data is not infallible and in some cases only slightly useful (self reported surveys). But if you take all that into account and look across the board we can be rather confident men commit more crime than women. Not 100% but probably 90%+

You introduce the possibility of bias but don’t really prove there actually is that bias in any data sets. This argument feels dangerous in the opposite direction of what Donna Haraway is warning about, you have taken weaknesses in the entire category of statistical data to throw their conclusions out entirely without having specific reasons to.

While this is certainly technically true most modern economists believe that companies compensate for this by offering lower wages, so it’s kinds 6 of 1, half dozen of the other.

Maybe put this way, if I didn’t work at my company they wouldn’t pay either half of the social security and medicare. So its mostly me who’s bringing that money to the government since I’m the catalyst.

This is mostly right but I think missing the point. It’s not 12.2% on the first bracket and 2.2% on the second. It’s 12.4% on the first $184,000 and ZERO On the rest. The 2.2% is not the marginal rate they are currently paying, it is the effective rate if you add up all the taxes paid divided by all the income. It’s so low because people with salaries beyond 184k stop having to pay any of this tax on their next marginal dollar.

And the reason this is a big deal is because this tax revenue is what is used to fund social security payments for older folks. The social security reserve fund that is running out (which will result in a significant reduction in payment to these old folks) could possibly be all or mostly funded if we made people making more than $184,000 pay the same rate as everyone else.

I just want to start by saying I think you are coming at this in good faith.

I disagree that it is as cut and dry as “private citizens cannot [own land]” from the link you posted a private citizen cab get a land grant for 70 years to do with the property what they will. Now sure it might be said that this isn’t technically owning the land but it is nearly indistinguishable from a normal American with a house.

And if we want to get real pedantic the fact that the USA can eminent domain your land kind of shows that you are just leasing it as well. This is a bit of an exaggeration since most land has not and likely will not be taken, but the point is it CAN.

I’m not super familiar with how inheritance works in China but if you can will your property to a relative and then they get a fresh 70 year grant then this is basically indefinite. Now maybe that’s where the difference is if you can’t do that, but that’s not what I think of when I’m thinking of “ownership”