Meme - Haroon Akram-Lodhi: Sorry, but the problem with golden rice is that it does not address the fundamental issue: people lack vitamin A because they are too poor to have a nutritionally - balanced diet. Technologies can't eliminate poverty"
"'A catastrophe': Greenpeace blocks planting of lifesaving golden rice"
"So we shouldn't make kids not be blind WTF"
"Technologies can't eliminate poverty" "Objectively wrong "
"the fundamental issue" "Root cause discourse is always bullshit"
Left wingers don't want to alleviate suffering, but to push the left wing agenda
Nobel winners slam Greenpeace on GMO crops - "About a third of living Nobel laureates—108 at last count—have signed an open letter Thursday which attacks Greenpeace for campaigning against genetically modified crops, especially one called Golden Rice. Addressed to the global environmental group, the United Nations and governments, the letter says Greenpeace has "misrepresented the risks, benefits and impacts" of genetically altered food plants. "There has never been a single confirmed case of a negative health outcome for humans or animals from their consumption," wrote the top scientists... "Opposition based on emotion and dogma contradicted by data must be stopped." The Nobel winners singled out Golden Rice as a genetically modified crop with huge potential to improve health and save lives in the developing world. A patented strain developed in the 1990s, Golden Rice contains an artificially inserted gene which boosts the level of vitamin A-rich beta-carotene. The World Health Organization estimates that a quarter of a billion people in developing nations suffer from vitamin A deficiency, causing up to two million preventable deaths per year and half-a-million cases of childhood blindness. Golden Rice's developers say a single serving provides about 60 percent of daily vitamin A requirements. It is currently distributed royalty-free to indigent farmers on a humanitarian basis. Greenpeace however hit back at the Nobel laureates. "Accusations that anyone is blocking genetically engineered 'Golden' rice are false," Wilhelmina Pelegrina of Greenpeace Southeast Asia wrote in a statement. Corporations are using the strain "to pave the way for global approval of other more profitable genetically engineered crops," she said."
From 2016
Calla on X - "Being forced to ask an employee to unlock a toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, and shampoo is actually insane, fuck capitalism"
wanye on X - "If the people who created the culture and legal environment that leads to this can still find a way to blame "capitalism," then you should understand that they're *never* going to admit failure. They will *never* reflect. They won't *ever* consider that this is their fault. And I think you should approach them accordingly. They aren't rational, honest actors who are responsive to new information."
Meme - "I have to work an hour before I can afford to buy 3 of these *black rubber oil seal*
I make 3,000 of them every hour."
Parker on X - "Imagine taking credit for your output when you don’t own the materials, tools, or facility you work in. If the output is truly the laborers then they could do it themselves, but they don’t, because they take entirely for granted all the company contributes."
planefag on X - "Wait that dude is a $100,000 injection molding machine?"
Bonjo on X - "And a 1 man oil extraction, refinement, shipping contractor with a distribution and retail branch. Very busy dood."
Pathfinder on X - "He thinks *his* labor is 100% of a products cost."
Greco - Remun on X - "Why doesn’t he make 3,000 of them an hour in his garage then? It’s because he doesn’t make 3,000 an hour, he presses a button on the 800,000$ machine that makes 3,000 an hour"
Daniel on X - "We can’t have factories in America because the white Reddit guy you pay $27/hr to push a button on a $1m machine immediately starts thinking he’s the one making the product"
memetic_sisyphus on X - "The progressive world view is an inherently self centered one. Any talks of community is demanding the community provides something to them, never what they owe to their community. When such a person looks at their job they imagine they’re the only one responsible for their product. Not once do they think of the other people working. Not once do they think of the logistics, the rent, the utilities, the upkeep, the R&D process. All they think about is themselves, and how they should get more."
wanye on X - "It took me a long time to realize that communists really do have these extraordinarily stupid emotional reactions to ordinary reciprocal relationships. Like, I just couldn’t get it for the longest time, but eventually I just had to accept that, no, they really do feel these emotions for some reason. Like, they enter into the same kinds of transactions that you and I do every day, but they feel extremely used and abused and manipulated by them. It’s absurd and childish and embarrassing, but in some sense I guess they can’t help it that those are the specific emotions they feel every time they trade with another person. This is why you can’t really fight communists with “facts and logic.“ It really has nothing to do with it. What you have to understand is that when they engage in ordinary kinds of trade, they walk away feeling resentful and manipulated and taken advantage of. That’s just how they feel. It’s probably an atavistic, vestigial emotion that was functional and adaptive when we lived in small tribes and some certain percentage of the population is unable to filter those feelings through the realities of modernity. It’s kind of sad in a way. They feel these strong emotions, which were adapted for a time and place that no longer exists and there’s nothing they can do about it. They have to spend their entire lives fighting for the stupidest possible economic arrangements, because they are a slave to obsolete emotional reflexes."
Roo Barker | Facebook - "The greatest quote about economics I've ever heard, and one that is true about pretty much everything:
There are no solutions, there are only trade-offs -Thomas Sowell"
Left wingers think there're no trade-offs and you can get something for nothing. This is partly because they conceive of the world as static, rather than dynamic. When you think people don't respond to incentives...
Thread by @PhilWMagness on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "🧵Thread on @gabriel_zucman's claim that billionaires pay a lower tax rate than the average American, as published in yesterday's @nytimes. The short version: Zucman manipulates his data to fit a pro-tax political narrative. You can see this by comparing to his own earlier work. In 2018 Zucman (along with Piketty and Saez) published an article in the prestigious Quarterly Journal of Economics, estimating the avg effective tax rate on top income groups. They argued that the gap between top and bottom earner tax rates had closed due to payroll taxes. But they also noticed something interesting when you look at the average effective tax rate paid by the wealthiest 1% of earners. It had only slightly decreased between the 1960s and the present! Even more stunning, this pattern also held when you restricted the data to only the ultra-wealthy. Here is Zucman's 2018 series for the top 0.001%, which is basically billionaires. They paid 44% in 1940. By 2014, that had only dropped a little. It sat at 40%. A few months after his QJE article, Zucman realized he had a problem. He had been arguing that tax cuts in the 80s were responsible for rising inequality, and that we needed a new wealth tax. But his own effective tax rate data undermined this case! gabriel-zucman.eu/files/saez-zuc…
So what did Zucman do? Quite simply, he changed the way he calculated effective tax rates to make them fit his story. The blue line is his 2018 published QJE version. The orange line is the recalculation, which he touted in the New York Times yesterday. As you can see, there's a drastic difference in effective tax rates for the same exact income group of ultra-wealthy billionaires. Zucman's old stats showed the rate dropping from 44% to 40% between 1962-2014. His new version showed a change from 54% to just 23.5% in same years. So what changed? The answer is how Zucman allocates corporate tax incidence. This is a complex empirical subject, but for 60+ years economists have recognized that the corporate tax burden does not entirely fall on the person who nominally owns the shares
Zucman's 2018 QJE article followed the conventional approach that economists use to allocate corporate tax incidence. And that gave them the results we saw above. In 2019, when Zucman began advising @senwarren, he needed a new story to justify tax hikes. Instead of peer review, he went to @_cingraham of the Washington Post with a new set of numbers and his now-famous claim about billionaire tax rates. washingtonpost.com/business/2019/…
Zucman executed this change by sleight of hand. In October 2019 - with no announcement - he deleted the old replication file for his QJE paper from his @UCBerkeley website and replaced it with the new numbers. He only restored the old file after he was caught & heavily criticized. Comparisons of the old and new data files revealed the discrepancy in the two sets of numbers. I was the first to find it, but many others on twitter subsequently noticed the same thing. But the question remained as to why the two versions diverged in such pronounced ways. When the excel files were compared, an answer soon emerged: Zucman had completely jettisoned his old way of allocating corporate tax incidence from the QJE article. The main difference between the QJE data file and th WaPo/NYT version is that he now allocated all corporate tax incidence to shareholders. The rich own more stocks & corp taxes are below top marginal income tax rates, creating an illusion that billionaire rates drop over time. After he was caught, Zucman needed to rationalize his new approach to corporate tax incidence. He started putting out powerpoint slides that completely jettisoned the Harberger assumptions from the QJE & instead fully assigned corp incidence to shareholders gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucm…
This new approach calls for a bold rejection of over 60 years of empirical economic literature on corp tax incidence in favor of a new, untested, and extremely heterodox approach. It's the sort of thing that needs vetted by economists, not "peer review" by a NYT editor. There are more problems with Zucman's approach. His NYT chart not only claims that billionaire taxes dropped - it also claims that taxes on the bottom 50% of earners have dramatically increased since the 1960s. But have they? Zucman's claim about taxes on the poor is historically implausible, because the introduction of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) in 1975 and subsequent expansions of it have generally relieved the federal tax burden on the poor. Yes, payroll taxes have offset in other direction. But EITC is huge. Here are the CBO's figures on how the EITC has evolved over time. It provides a dramatic tax-reducing benefit to the bottom 50% of earners, and beyond.
So why don't we see this effect in Zucman's NYT chart? Because he intentionally excludes the EITC as a tax credit.
To summarize, Zucman's "stunning graph" in the NYT is a result of two acts of data manipulation.
1. He suppresses the true effective tax rate on the rich over time by misallocating corporate tax incidence to them.
2. He simultaneously inflates the rate for the poor by excluding EITC...
There's a larger issue of the mismatch between Zucman's tax analysis, which *intentionally* excludes tax policy measures to benefit the poor, and his advocacy of further tax policy measures for the poor as if they did not already exist."
This won't stop left wingers from continuing to claim that billionaires / "the rich" pay a lower effective income tax rate than the middle class
Meme - Ida Bae Wells: "Most wealth is not used to create jobs. Most wealth is stored away and used to create more wealth for the wealthy family."
Half a Sandwich @Koz112096: "If by "stored away" you mean invested, then yes. Most wealthy people invest their money to turn it into more money. Investment often creates jobs"
Ida Bae Wells @nhannahjones: "How?"
Half a Sandwich @Koz112096: "Are you honestly asking how investment creates jobs? If so, when businesses receive investments, it is often used to expand and/ or upgrade that business. Did you think all businesses did with investment money is stick it in their pockets?"
Ida Bae Wells: "Yes."
Left wingers really think the rich treat their money like Scrooge McDuck, keeping it locked up and swimming in it
the Rich on X - "my guess is that in 20 years from now the difference in standards of living between the US and most of europe will be so large that "but they have a welfare state" will be a moot point"
wanye on X - "It’s already the case in lots of fields. You have Europeans who are making $20,000 or $30,000 or $40,000 less than their American counterparts bragging that they get free healthcare worth $10,000 a year."
Josh Ellis on X - "Like, the world would undeniably be a happier place if every town had at least one 24 hour coffeeshop and bookstore (with a cat). People would go there all the time. But maybe not enough to make a constantly increasing profit. Maybe not even enough to pay extortionate rent."
wanye on X - "The core confusion here, the rot way deep down in the middle of the idea, is that communists don't realize that prices are like a thermometer is to temperature -- i.e. they measure something real. Prices aren't just a silly obstacle designed to make other people money and keep you down. The rent is high because lots and lots and lots and lots of people want access to that same parcel of land that you want for your bookstore (with cat). And there has to be some way to decide who actually gets access to it. Private property rationed by price isn't perfectly cosmically fair (what is?); it's just the best possible way to do it that addresses the most objections. It's the one that gives a motivated person some *hope* of access to a desirable property. It's the one that ties effort to output, however imperfectly, the one that rewards insight and courage and ingenuity, however imperfectly, the one that maximizes human freedom and independence and flourishing, however imperfectly.
The problem for Josh here is that when people are allowed to do whatever they want to do, when they're allowed to make their own choices, when their own money is on the line, *they don't do the things Josh would prefer that they do*. And that's just tough fucking shit for Josh. It's just tough shit. But he doesn't want it to be tough shit. He wants to remake things so that there are more coffeeshops (with cats) because that's what Josh wants. He wants to make people stop doing the things he doesn't like and start doing more of the things he likes. He thinks that if he got put in charge, if people like him got put in charge, then they could just force people to do more of the things they like. It's very inconvenient for Josh that people are instead allowed to do whatever they want and not what Josh wants."
constans on X - "The thing about a 24 hour place is that the rent works to your advantage. You pay rent on 24 hours a day for the space. NOT staying open theoretically costs you money that you’re paying. It’s not the rent that prevents 24 hour coffee shops from opening, it’s labor costs"
A tax on millionaires might soon pay for universal free community college in Massachusetts
Massachusetts Could Lose $1 Billion a Year From an Exodus of Wealthy Residents - "High earners are fleeing from Massachusetts, which could cost the state almost $1 billion in income tax revenue every year, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. By 2030, more than 96,000 residents making $19.2 billion in adjusted gross income are expected to leave annually, according to a new study from Boston University’s Questrom School of Business... Massachusetts also recently put into place a 4 percent surcharge on incomes greater than $1 million, Bloomberg wrote. The “millionaire’s tax” has brought in some $1.8 billion in revenue in less than a year, but it may also be driving away residents in that bracket. “Short run, we may be getting more tax revenue,” Williams said. “The question about that is, ‘Has that increased outmigration?’ If that data says it has, then the state needs to weigh that cost.”"
Eric S. Raymond on X - "The dirty secret that confounds all modern attempts at improving outcomes by social engineering is that the low-IQ, the poor, and the badly behaved now pretty much coincide, statistically speaking. Why? Because free markets and meritocracy mine the virtuous poor for people who can be productive and useful; they uplift and become, at the least, petits-bourgeoises (and tend to marry each other rather than other bottom-quintilers). Which is an excellent thing, but... ...it means your bottom quintile loses those people. Its average IQ drops. Its average time preference goes up. Its propensity to criminality actually rises. Now run this effect over several generations. Your civilization gets wealthier and more successful because it's using its human capital optimally. But your bottom quintile gets...worse.
The US is the wealthiest society in the world, with the longest history of meritocratic idealism. The idealism produced the wealth, of course, but it also means we were the first to mine out our deserving poor. I estimate that it happened around 1970 when the last pockets of dirt-floor poverty in Appalachia were cleaned out. This effect also means that all policy interventions intended to better the lives and prospects of the bottom quintile have decreasing returns over time. Their problems become progressively more intractable and more genetically loaded The bitter paradox - for which I do not have an answer, only a clear view of the problem - is that a meritocratic society inexorably produces increasing stratification long fault lines defined by innate traits like IQ."
What is taken to be a failure of meritocracy is actually proof of its success
wanye on X - "If you start with these assumptions:
1. History wasn't a meritocracy. Many with talent and intelligence were kept down.
2. Society is increasingly meritocratic.
3. Intelligence is heritable and varies.
Wouldn't you expect class mobility to level off over time?"
Voters aren't just sick of the Tories. The Western model is broken - "You might think that the Conservative party is facing a uniquely catastrophic fall in public confidence. But the scale of the collapse in its support is not exceptional – or even particularly remarkable – among ruling Western governments. In recent years, we have watched time and time again as governing parties and coalitions in the major democracies have suffered either outright defeats or electoral setbacks of historic proportions. Centrist respectability has lost out again and again, often to populist forces. There is a common theme in these rejections of traditional parties and their leaders who had grown almost indistinguishable from one another. The assumption of the post-war West that the state could provide unlimited resources to insure its population against poverty, ill health and social disadvantage while maintaining a thriving market economy, has reached its endgame. This is a crisis of the democratic socialism which, in one form or another, has prevailed in all the advanced countries. A great debate had dominated a succession of governing generations: how can you provide what electorates now expect in terms of welfare state security and publicly-run services while permitting the freedom that allows private enterprise (which must fund all of this beneficence) to grow and prosper? Now, thanks to a peculiar succession of events that included a European war and a pandemic, we have the answer: you can’t. The demand for limitless government support and intervention is simply incompatible with the fluctuations of a market economy which must expand through innovation and individual enterprise if it is to produce the only real wealth there is. The various formulae which attempted to find an ideal balance between state-guaranteed safety and capitalist risk-taking have been exhausted. State provision has to be financed by capitalist growth and this is now proving impossible. The inflated expectations raised by the former have exceeded the capacities of the latter. And the voters – who are more economically literate than politicians generally give them credit for – understand this. That is why, although they are furious with the present Conservative government, they are not showing any great enthusiasm for Labour... This disillusion is the real dilemma of our times because it raises fundamental questions about the modern democratic political settlement. I believe it will be seen ultimately to be more significant than the arrival in our midst of an Islamic culture which, had the Western host countries been more robust in their self-belief, could have been handled with little difficulty... London is a truly cosmopolitan city but the great majority of people who live in it have important things in common. They are prepared to take on the challenges and obstacles that surviving in a highly competitive economic environment involves. Many of them have come precisely to engage in that competition. These voters should bitterly resent the obstacles that the Labour mayor has put in their way: making it impossibly expensive to use the cars and vans on which their livelihoods depend, allowing policing to deteriorate to such an extent that the city has become a dangerous place in which to raise a family, and making it quite clear that he is not there to facilitate the wealth creation which is the capital’s indispensable function. It is catastrophic that the Conservative party was unable to capitalise on this."
Meme - Chris Freiman @cafreiman: “Neoliberal trickle down nonsense”
"Share of the world population living in poverty *falling*"
Marianne Williamson @marwilliamson: "Someday I don't know when, but I sense it'll be sooner rather than later - there's going to be a massive backlash to the neoliberal trickle down nonsense by which a few are allowed to create gargantuan wealth at the expense of the many still struggling to get by."
Left wingers don't love the poor - they hate the rich
Meme - Pillyanne Conway @FEE _Magazine: "Now remove China and watch how the numbers change! Capitalism is responsible for very little this trend."
Chris Freiman @cafreiman: "Share of global population living in extreme poverty including and excluding China
*plummeting both including and excluding China*"
Turns out the commie cope isn't even justified even on its own terms, even if you pretend China is socialist
Richard Hanania on X - "The US is ranked as having the most inefficient ports in the world, even worse than in Africa. This hurts consumers and practically all industries. A major reason is labor unions, who fight against automation and efficiency."
The High Cost of Labor Strife at U.S. Ports
Why left wingers love unions so much
Ironically, Europe does better in adopting technology and left wingers claim to admire Europe
Opinion: Why does this union leader tweet so much about Gaza, and so little about wages? - The Globe and Mail - "Fred Hahn’s tweets tell a tale about the transformation of Canada’s union movement. The president of CUPE Ontario – the Ontario branch of the Canadian Union of Public Employees, with 280,000 members – is a very active user of the platform now known as X. To advance his members’ interests, he gets his message out there, multiple times a day. But if you arrived in a time machine, fresh from reading Das Kapital, you’d be surprised by what he’s using his digital soapbox for. He is mostly not calling for higher wages, shorter hours or better working conditions. His feed in recent weeks has been devoted mostly to other issues, notably 2SLGBTQIA+ rights and, above all, the war in Gaza... When you hear the term “union worker,” don’t picture a bunch of guys in grease-stained overalls and hardhats, having beers after another brutal day at the factory. The typical Canadian union member is now a woman – the unionized work force is slightly more female than male – in the public sector, with decent benefits, pension and job security, and who earns more than the average person in the private sector. Like the progressive movement as a whole, the union movement increasingly represents people who are university- or college-educated and white-collar, as opposed to blue-collar and working class. It’s views, and its sense of priorities, reflect that... I’m troubled that Canadians with the least bargaining power – in low-education and low-wage jobs, with limited benefits or job security – tend to have the fewest protections. If anyone needs some old-fashioned union representation, it’s them."
Thread by @cremieuxrecueil on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "In 1942, the U.S. government forcibly removed more than 110,000 ethnically Japanese people from their homes and sent them to internment camps in remote parts of the country. People are resilient, but losing everything is hard. How did victims' lives turn out?🧵... With Japan's declaration of war, Issei transformed into enemy aliens on U.S. soil. The first governmental response was for the FBI to start rounding up community leaders, resulting in the detention of 222 Italian, 1,221 German, and 1,460 Issei men that month... FDR and Attorney General Biddle made statements calling for Americans to respect the rights of minorities including enemy aliens. But shortly after that on February 19, FDR signed Executive Order 9066, allowing the military to set up exclusion zones... Arellano-Bover used Census, Japanese-American Research Project, and War Relocation Authority data to identify interned Japanese Americans so data on their socioeconomic outcomes could be put to use. If we look at home ownership after the war, we see that the interned Japanese were definitely negatively impacted: In the period 1946-52, they had significantly lower homeownership rates than Japanese Americans who weren't interned. But look at 1953 to the '60s. Recovery? Homeownership is about an asset. If we look at income data, we actually see that the Japanese who would go on to be interned had lower incomes than the non-interned Japanese in 1940, and equal incomes by 1950-60. So the internment... raised incomes? The answer to this seems to be "Yes." Not only did the Japanese who were interned recover, they caught up despite starting further behind the Japanese who weren't interned. This result is actually very robust!... The camps had more socioeconomic diversity than the places internees came from, so they were exposed to a diversity of opportunities and their family ties binding them to certain occupations were broken. There were frictions the camps help them to overcome! It was common to hear stories about internees entering poor and vowing to make it big when they got out, like this pictured one. And that's what they did: interned Japanese Americans overcame the experience and wound up, miraculously, better off for it."
Displacement, Diversity, and Mobility: Career Impacts of Japanese American Internment
Weird. I thought discrimination doomed bloodlines for all eternity, because victims and their descendants never can recover from what was done to them and their ancestors