Jiro
7d ago
If all the men in the family work and all the women are married and raising children, then communalizing wealth to handle the elderly, a widow and orphans, and hard-to-finance large one-off expenses seems like a fairly unobjectionable practice.
It also depends on how much is communalized. Even if it just goes to the needy, any poor community is going to have enough needy that you could easily take away every penny that someone earns, give it to the needy, and still have needy. And the community isn't going to say "well, the needy already got 30% of his income, we'll let him keep the rest".
Jiro
7d ago
Making things easier to do has huge effects on the addiction rate. "Anyone who would be addicted already is" turned out not to be true of Internet-based gambling.
Jiro
7d ago
Apparently one main reason for white affluence in Rhodesia was that even when blacks and whites were paid the same, social obligations to family members caused problems for blacks. If people who make money have to give it to their relatives, wealth becomes useless and it's impossible to save or invest for the future.
Jiro
8d ago
This is because of how political groups in one country feed on political groups in another.
That's why Japan has much less of this sort of thing. It's really hard to have influence when the country is thousands of miles away and speaks mostly Japanese.
Jiro
9d ago
It could be that one is only allowed to caricature that which they understand very well, and due to the West's recent ascent to power, every notable example is white.
Chinese Communists are also known worldwide.
No, that isn't true.
- You have principal/agent problems where the people working for the businesses get a chance to personally gain by promoting their politics, even if it hurts the business.
- It's not true that businesses want to make as much money as possible. Rather, businesses who don't don't compete well and eventually lose. It can take a long time before the business actually goes broke. Disney has lost a lot of money by putting woke in Star Wars and Marvel, but such losses aren't going to drive Disney out of business for the forseeable future.
- Owners spending money on wokeness (and making the business, and indirectly themselves, lose money) is ultimately no different from owners spending money on, say, baseball games and directly losing money on them. The owners gain personally. (Related to #1 and #2, if the business is big.)
Jiro
13d ago
Before Operation Chokepoint was revealed, the explanation for the debanking, at least for payday lenders and porn, was exactly what you claim is the explanation here: those industries are high risk. This wasn't true; they were debanked because the government told them to. They may have actually been high risk, but the claim that they were being debanked for that was a coverup for the true reason. The lesson from this is that you should not just say "sure, those industries are high risk" and credulously believe that the credit card companies and payment processors are only reacting to market forces.
As you note, dealing with high risk has been around for a very long time. Which means that if the behavior changes, it probably isn't because of high risk, even if someone claims it is.
Jiro
13d ago
"Politicized" in this context means for the business to act against its customers based on politics.
Jiro
13d ago
Why would this be advisable? Would failure to let it go mean that he has a mental illness too?
Jiro
13d ago
Legal advice is notoriously something you are not supposed to give.
But someone offering programming or engineering advice can't personally attack someone in an argument by making engineering claims. They don't have the kind of bad motivations and incentives they would for mental health.
Yes, crypto is high risk. And as you mention, payday lenders were also high risk. But even though they are high risk, that doesn't mean that the risk is the whole story, and that there isn't any pressure of some other kind. And without looking at the payment processors' financial records or finding a smoking gun, there's no airtight way to tell the difference between a genuine market-based reason, and something else that's being covered up by giving a market-based reason that's true, but wouldn't have been such a big issue on its own.
So of course, porn generates high chargeback rates. But if you go from "high chargeback rates exist" to "high chargeback rates are the reason", it will become impossible for you to notice any other explanations.
re-evaluated the business of a platform that was onboarded as a non-smut business but was, in fact, getting about 10% of its revenue from smut.
Mastercard also lied about it, which looks suspicious, along with suddenly noticing that Steam was a problem just now.
The winds that changed when FTX turned out to be a fraud were not political ones.
That particular example was not political pressure, but there was political pressure in addition to it. Again, high risk and political pressure that makes it worse than if it was just high risk, can exist at the same time.
So the fact that the BLM riots caused a lot more damage than J6 is besides the point I am making.
If you slice things finely enough it's easy to find some difference between two things which makes their similarity not count.
BLM riots were clearly an attempt to coerce the government through violence, even if the details weren't identical.
Jiro
14d ago
Because witch hunts are a thing. And blaming the wrong target, especially blaming someone much weaker than the actual culprit, leads to witchhunts.
Jiro
14d ago
"They have a lot of chargebacks" is unfalsifiable without a congressional investigation, so it's an easy excuse. And when we did get the congressional investigation--surprise, it turned out to be pressure from ideologues, not getting a lot of chargebacks.
You would have said, at the time, that Operation Chokepoint and the crypto sequel are just the payment processors fearing chargebacks. And you would have been wrong.
Jiro
18d ago
Laws that make prostitution legal under those circumstances are usually there to prevent victims of sex trafficking from being jailed for prostitution, not to actually make legal prostitution possible.
Jiro
18d ago
That argument proves too much. You can fill a theater with a film about romance (or a play instead of a film in Lewis's time), but I would not then think that something has gone wrong with the appetite for romance (or with the appetite for films or plays as a category).
Jiro
19d ago
In the context of people complaining about migrant crime and racialized sexual predation, gypsies and Bulgarians are not the same thing, even if the gypsies come from Bulgaria.
And sure, the girl is probably a thug, especially with reports of the police constantly finding knives on people her age.
Jiro
22d ago
I'm old enough to remember when the boot was on the other foot and the Red Tribe held enough institutional power that the Dixie Chicks could face lost earnings owing to their criticisms of George Bush.
Ever notice that this is the only example the left ever brings up that's newer than McCarthy?
And it's still nonsense. The Dixie Chicks were "cancelled" for actions done as professionals in the job for which they were "cancelled". There wasn't social media back then, but the equivalent to cancellation would be if they were overheard by a reporter making some anti-American comment while eating lunch, and this got reported worldwide, and they lost their job for it. Or if someone dug out some ten year quote they made in their school newspaper which could be vaguely interpreted as not liking America and they were fired for that.
The reason people got upset about the Dixie Chicks being "cancelled" is that they made their anti-Bush comments to a different audience, and they didn't expect their normal audience to find out about it. This often worked back then, but when it didn't, tough luck--they weren't actually speaking privately just because they wanted it concealed from the wrong audience.
Jiro
22d ago
If you believe that the 2020 election was tabulated honestly and that Biden won by more than the margin of sloppiness, then Trump's response to losing the election was the biggest defection since Reconstruction,
No, it wasn't. Trump did hardly anything in response. I'd say that the Democrats' support of rioting during Covid was a bigger defection.
Jiro
23d ago
Would much prefer an unwinding of the political cold war
And exactly how are you going to do that?
Demanding sources for something that you don't doubt the truth of is a filibuster, not an honest criticism.
More options
Context Copy link