Eh, I'd disagree on the Instagram front. If you look at the reels section, where most spend their time, it's just a more deplorable Tiktok. 80% of the content on there is soft core porn advertising one OnlyFans girl or another. The other 20% seems to be brain rot memes. I reinstalled it recently after 8 years of not having it, and immediately deleted it.
Here's the thing, Instagram figured it quickly that I might spend another second or two looking at an attractive lady, but that isn't my preference for what I would see in the feed. Merely because I have libido Instagram became absolutely unusable no matter how many times I tell it I'm not interested in insta-bitches showing skin, it knows I'll look, so Instagram is gone out of my life.
Too bad because other topics like woodworking and mountain biking we're interesting and less... provocative, but that's not good for Instagram.
That's hilarious, I got a bit of the same "problem" but with Facebook (I don't use Instagram), but it's generally pretty actress or (for some reason) ballerinas.
I'm not gonna lie, I kinda like it.
I have found out that the algorithm will adjust itself relatively quickly if you don't click on stuff (at some point it decided I was into foot fetish and it disappeared quickly).
With that I get stuff about philosophy, math (memes), science and technology stuff with a lot of animals videos.
The algorithm isn't designed to give everyone exactly what THEY want.
The algorithim is optimized for "engagement", and therefore optimized specifically to trigger addiction as quickly and effectively as possible. The lower level softcore porn and rage bait and brainrot memes are what triggers addiction in people prone to it.
It's exactly the same situation as slot machines. They are made by the same companies in many cases that made some of the best and most fun arcade and video games. But if you aren't prone to gambling addiction, they aren't fun, because they aren't optimized for fun, they are optimized for addiction. The same triggers and stimuli that are most effective at triggering addiction behaviors are LESS effective at being "fun" to non-addictive people.
"The algorithm" is literally not meant to feed people what they want. "The algorithm" serves only the interests of the company, which is to efficiently keep eyeballs looking at a feed in order to sell ads. Giving most people what they want is genuinely counter to that.
This definitely works. I have two profiles on IG: one for musical instrument related things and one for painting miniatures. I’ve been able to keep both profiles strictly on topic by aggressively using the “not interested” button whenever something not related pops up.
That's basically what I do on youtube, except not logged in, using browser profiles to keep the cookies separate. If you exercise strict discipline then you can make the youtube algorithm work for you. Slip ups ruin it quick though.
The problem is, I haven't used it in 8 years, so there's no way to know my preference. The email is also not tied to any other accounts than perhaps a few browser video game accounts from my youth (miniclips, runescape and the like). My guess is that it fills the feed with sexualised content because it's the most popular kind, and eventually repopulates it depending on subsequent follows. The problem is I only follow friends and family, not celebrities, so that would prove difficult to do.
Mines' the same. My local firewall blocked the site when the YouTube embbed tried to play, and when I switched to my work VPN it blocked the domain altogether.
I've visited it in person, and it's utterly bizarre. You emerge from a monoculture pine forest (you can see the straight trees in the background of the photo) into a glade with the most amazing mix of ferns and moss that aren't found anywhere else in the forest. It made me really emotional to be honest. Scotland is beautiful in its own way, but to be frank it's mostly farmed woodland or shep pasture now. The true wilderness is few and far between, so seeing something that old with so much life bubbling around it, so then merge into a barren pine farm, made me deeply upset.
This seems entirely more digestible than AoE though. Don't get me wrong, I've read that book probably 6 times over in my life - it's fantastic- but it's a university text book. This new book seems aimed at simply getting a product out the door, which is a different but useful niche.
Indeed, and it was written for the typical electronics course that's part of the undergraduate physics curriculum, which is how I encountered it in the early 80s. A year later they switched to a different text because AoE was too hard.
I don't think I've ever met an engineer who used it in college. Except it might be like Messiah's quantum mechanics book -- something you read after you already understand the subject matter. That's why the second through sixth readings are the best. ;-)
But I think the physics students were learning electronics for a different purpose, to support laboratory research, which depends heavily on electronics. The course was expected to be accompanied by a lab, and we had a lot of chances to learn about making and breaking things throughout our degrees. Maybe the electronics course helped us figure out which ones of us became experimentalists, or theoreticians.
And both Electronics and manufacturing were also much more primitive in those days. Real products were closer to our hacked-together prototypes than they are today.
> I don't think I've ever met an engineer who used it in college.
Hey, I did! And I had to teach out of it... that was an experience. (I distinctly remember pulling it out in class one day, as a TA, to show the students a figure that was particularly good... and got yelled at by one kid because "that's not our book" and "we shouldn't have to read that". Even the other kids rolled their eyes at that one.)
It really is a text that's made for physicists and hacker-types. There is a ton of great information on building one-offs and prototypes. Not so much for getting products out (so. many. trimmers.).
It's probably a bit of one, a bit of two. Despite spending everyday in the garden growing up, I've always struggled with allergies and they've changed throughout my life. I was deathly allergic to tomato's and eggs as a child but grew out of it around 11-12, became very allergic to pollen and pet dander at 5, which is now life long, and recently in my late 20s become allergic to hazelnut and some other foods I've yet to pin down (my mouth comes up in hives with no rhyme or reason while eating occasionally). I've also developed oesophagitus in my late 20s, to the point where I choke on foods daily unless chewed to a pulp before swallowing.
To me, it seems the parasite theory makes sense in tandem with hygiene. Some people by upringing become predisposed to allergies, while others have genetically as a result of humanities constant fight against intestinal worms. As our genetic profile changers as we age, so does how our bodies express said genes which would be designed to fight something we no longer have.
"Just decided" =/= decided today. They decided months if not years ago, after months of negotiations with local authorities. Don't look at plants opening now to judge the current administration. Look at it 2 years from now.
I don't know - the article specifically said Honda will produce the cars "to avoid potential tariffs". I don't think the Trump tariffs were in place "years ago"...
Of course, a marketing line to fit the current situation (and curry favor with the current vindictive administration) is easily added/updated at press time.
This does not mean the making of the deals and building the factory had anything to do with it at the time, but stating that those past decisions also have benefit in today's situation is not surprising.
It also does not mean that this has anything to do with the actual reason the deals and investments were made years ago. As you point out, those deals & investments years ago couldn't have anything to do with this week's tariffs.
The biggest win the Republicans and billionaire class ever had was convincing the American public that left == liberal. It's not. Blue hair, trans flag, black lives matter, pro-palestine, etcetera; these are socially liberal stances. "Left" doesn't mean any of these things for the rest of the world in a conventional sense. Left means unions, workers rights, socialism or sydicalism; generally, power to the workers/99%/people rather than the capatilists/monarchists/regime.
Americans should continue to conflate socially liberal and economically left-wing at their own peril.
It's worth noting that labor unions have mobilized all over the globe in solidarity with Palestine. Given that the main bone of contention in this country is continued material and financial support to a military campaign it feels odd to lump in with "social liberalism".
>Left means unions, workers rights, socialism or sydicalism; generally, power to the workers/99%/people rather than the capatilists/monarchists/regime.
Everyone claims they're the true voice of the 99%. Trump, despite being a billionaire, claims he's defending Americans workers by imposing tariffs and deporting undocumented immigrants. More broadly the right claims that they're fighting against the "elites" in the media/academia/corporations/"deep state".
It was surreal watching Trump, the man who has made his very name into a corporate product, campaign against Hillary Clinton with claims that she's too influenced by corporations. And, somehow, our politics managed to get even stupider since then.
Turns out Thatcherism only works as long as the state still has assets to sell off. The delusion that assets would stay in the hands of the working and middle class, and not end up with the wealthy inheriting class, has to be one of the biggest political failures of our government on the modern era. It's lead to the possible death of the Conservative Party if they fail to fight off Reform and the Liberal Democrats.
You're surely joking. The IMF isn't bailing out the UK, and there aren't 3 day week debates because of the failing power supply. What's led to the death of the Conservative party is them doing exactly the opposite what a lot of Conservative voters want: bigger economy, and slower immigration.
Regarding the immigration, sure, the Conservative voters maybe want less of it, but rich and influential Tories actually like immigration as it allows their businesses to thrive (even more). The UK has more capital going around than her own people.
We didn't leave the EHCR. So there is an argument that we don't have full control of our laws. IANAL and won't pretend to know the specifics.
> Regarding the immigration, sure, the Conservative voters maybe want less of it, but rich and influential Tories actually like immigration as it allows their businesses to thrive (even more).
Not just Conservative voters. Almost 1 in 5 Labour and Lib Dem voters want to see it reduced.
Generally 52% of the UK want to see it immigration reduced in some capacity according to the migration observatory. This was roughly the Vote Leave percentage.
The ECHR is an international agreement like many, many others. It has special status in UK law only because we chose to: that was the purpose of the Human Rights Act. You can also take complaints of breach to the European Court of Human Rights, but they have no enforcement powers (in particular, Russia often decided not to bother complying, and we've avoided enforcing their ruling on prisoner voting rights with their tacit consent).
It used to be the case that we were also tied into the ECHR (and playing nice with the rulings of the ECtHR) because it's required by EU law even though it's not an EU instrument and the ECtHR isn't an EU court. But as we've left that's no longer an issue.
Finally, I'd just say that there's little objectionable about the Convention, and for the most part it tracks very closely with existing British common law (not surprisingly, as it was a Churchill-supported project in the first place and intended to export what was great about the British tradition of liberty as much as to bind us into Europe). There are a few edge cases where politicians and certain newspapers get into enormous flaps about individual cases, but it's really not that constraining a convention: most of the clauses have get-outs for crime, morality and public order and the margin of appreciation is generally quite broad. It's not perfect any more than, say, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms is, but the complaints are mostly grandstanding.
I know. I felt like it needed to be pointed out that even on parties that are seen to be more centre-left/left that there is good portion of voters that are opposition to immigration.
This is because I don't think it is as much of a right/left issue like it is frequently framed.
> The UK has more capital going around than her own people.
Wealth and income are not zero-sum. Generally, people produce more than they consume (or we'd all be living in caves). Reducing people reduces output, growth, and wealth.
Legal immigrants from the EU were not the only source of migrants to the UK. Many come from elsewhere, legally and otherwise. Guess what: we have Brexit but we still have immigrants - impossible?! </sarcasm>
Plus it was never about immigration, it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.
> it was always - I think - a classic case of misinformation and greed from many places. Sadly many people fell for it.
Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow? Considering there is data that partially contradicts your belief that it wasn't about immigration, maybe your assessment about their level of understanding of the issues involved is also incorrect.
> Why do many people assume that if someone thinks differently about a particular political issue they must have fooled somehow?
politicians sometimes lie…?
the £350 million a day bus springs to mind as one example. the amazing trade deals which will unleash our new economy were another.
like, those things sound great. people wanted those promises to become real and believed the people who were saying those things could implement them.
turns out implementation is sometimes a lot harder than waving your hands and making a bunch of promises.
edit —
especially when the advertised numbers are factually wrong, and people know they are wrong — i.e. they lied.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
That isn't a big enough reason to assume everyone's been fooled. Or at least, the people who disagree with you have been fooled. That's possible, but it's also possible you've been fooled. So bringing it up one-sided is a bit grating.
i’m going to post the quote above again, with more context from another quote, because you’ve avoided quoting the bit which actually demonstrates that this is a big enough reason to assume that enough people were fooled.
> On 27 May, the UK Statistics Authority chair Andrew Dilnot made a stronger statement against Vote Leave, stating that the continued use of the figure was "misleading and undermine[d] trust in official statistics".
misleading is politics speak for “lying with statistics”.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
two years later, after the claim was repeatedly denounced as being misleading and false multiple times, 42% of people surveyed still thought it was true.
that’s a significant representative proportion of the population, given 52% of people voted to leave.
it’s no wonder that 7 years later “brexit remorse” among leave voters is sitting pretty at around 60% or so (cba to source this, i think it was a yougov poll reported in the independent).
Most people are quite aware that politicians lie. It is a common trope in movies, tv and media generally. Politicians are quite disliked in the UK generally. So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.
> A study by King's College London and Ipsos MORI, published in October 2018 found that 42 percent of people who had heard of the £350 million claim still believed it was true, whereas 36 percent thought it was false and 22 per cent were unsure.
So? People frequently cherry pick information to justify their decisions after they have already made them. I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.
People seem to forget that a good portion of the Media and Parliament (including the Prime Minister at the time who won with a majority) were in favour of Remain. What is often ignored is that if you look at UKIP voter percentage before the referendum. It had risen from 3.1% to 12.6%. That was rising well before the bus campaign was a thing.
The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine. I also don't believe Dominic Cummings on how effective it was btw.
But in any event this will probably be my last comment on anything political on here because you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.
i find your comment weird. hopefully my reply clarifies why i find it weird. probably not. i’ve drunk too much coffee today.
> I actually looked up the actual report (not the wikipedia summary). While much more people generally believe the 350 million figure voted Leave, there was a decent percentage of people that believed the figure and voted Remain.
64% Con/65% Lab leave supporters versus 32% Con/20% Lab remain supporters. so, 65%-ish (hand wavy representative stat) of leave supporters believed the claim, which was misleading / false.
65% x 52% = 34% of all leave voters (very back of a napkin maths here). that’s a sizeable chunk of people who believed the lie. enough people to possibly swing the vote, given there was only 2% in it. that’s enough to swing it if there was no bus claim.
> The Leave Referendum was about many things. It was partly about immigration, it was partly about sticking it to an entitled political class, part of it was about sovereignty. Making it about a figure on the side of the bus is asinine.
i completely agree.
but the bus is a great example of how people get lied to by politicians, who then potentially get their 34% of people convinced. which was the point i was trying to make. politicians lying has a significant impact on the outcome. it’s not solely responsible, but it has an impact. they bear some responsibility for the shit show we currently have now.
interestingly, the ipsos mori / KCL study confirms this somewhat
> you get downvoted for simply defending half the people in my country that voted a particular way.
1) commenting about the voting on comments is something we try to avoid doing here. have a read of the site guidelines to understand why (you’re a new user so i don’t know if you’ve seen them before or not)
2) people on HN generally speaking tend to be pedantic nerds like me who are probably somewhat on the spectrum somewhere and when they see a claim will call people out on it when it is wrong.
> Leave voters are least likely to answer correctly (16%) and most likely to wrongly think that European immigrants contribute less than they take out (42%).
> Leave voters are most likely to hold these incorrect beliefs: European immigration has increased crime; decreased quality of healthcare services; increases unemployment among low-skilled workers.
^ ipsos mori/KCL study
there’s your problem. you’re aligned politically with people who are, to put it plainly, more wrong about this subject than they are right. so when you try and defend your position on here, you are going to get significant pushback on claims because, frankly, a lot of the claims made by other people who voted the way you did are either wrong or misleading when they make their claims.
3) i wasn’t on the site in 2016 (did HN exist then? who knows). imagine what it would have been like back then!
4) i hope you stick around. compared to some commentators, you’re doing a bang up job with actually reading studies (which meant i’ve gone and read the study and learned something now! thanks!).
> So this idea that people blindly believe politicians is nonsense.
bonus round. most people don’t believe politicians. they do, however, vote based on who the sun newspaper tells them to vote for (well, until recently).
There is in the section entitled "Preferences for different types of migrant: origin, similarity, skill level". (There doesn't seem to be a way to directly reference it in a document).
> Country of origin is not the only factor that people take into account when considering preferences on immigration. In the European Social Survey 2014, British respondents reported how many immigrants should be allowed based on a question that specified both the country of origin (Poland or India) and the skill level (professional or unskilled labourer). The results revealed that when migrants are professionals, opposition is low, and when migrants are unskilled, opposition is high (Figure 5). Research has shown that people’s general preference for high-skilled over low-skilled migrants is mainly driven by perceptions of their higher economic contribution
> The preference among the British public for highly skilled migrants aligns with previous research indicating that, when questioned about the criteria for incoming migrants, skills are considered more important than other factors such as race/ethnicity and religion.
My view is there needs to be a version of Godwin's law related to client of supposed 'racism', i.e. the one who claims ${issue} is caused by/related to 'racism' thereby loses the argument unless he comes with solid proof.
I see no proof, spurious claims of 'racism' do not count as such so it actually was about immigration.
It's disingenuous to pretend Brexit wasn't at least partially motivated by in-group preference. Almost as disingenuous as implying that there's anything wrong with having said preference. I don't open up my house to people I don't know regardless of their potential to contribute to it economically. Why is this treated as immoral when the same reasoning is applied to the immigration system?
I am not pretending anything. I've showed some actual evidence to back to back up my view point.
Moreover, time after time the British public are surveyed about their views on immigration and ethnic background is not something that is important to a large portion of the people taking part.
Are there some people that do care? Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.
> Sure there are, but they are very small minority typically.
From your own data, 25% of respondents agreed with the statement: Allow none/only a few immigrants of a different race/ethnicity to come and live in [the UK]. This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.
You have to read the analysis below as well as look at the charts. From the articles I linked
> As a further way of characterising countries, we include a second measure based on the percentage of people saying that immigration ‘makes the country a worse place to live’ On this measure, the UK maintains a similar rank position as one of the more positive countries in the sample, and similar to Switzerland at 18%.
> These two measures can be thought of as capturing opinions on future migration flows and current population stocks. In most of these 13 countries, it appears that people are more negative towards the idea of continuing flows than about the immigrants already present. Finland, for example, is a country where 42% of the public would prefer few/no immigrants of another race coming to live there, whilst, at the same time, just 19% think immigrants make the country a worse place to live.
It is still much better than many other countries in Europe.
> This isn't a small minority and I can guarantee you the distribution of these attitudes isn't equal between leavers and remainers.
Ok sure. I probably shouldn't have said minority. Yeah of course the distribution isn't going to be equal. However people pretend it was all about racism when it clearly wasn't.
The UK economy is already pretty small per-capita compared to other first-world countries. I'm certainly not one to argue for growth, but what is it about UK's conservatism that demands degrowth? It strikes me as antithetical to the liberalisation that I would think would form the right flank of the spectrum.
From my perspective, even economic concerns are driven by fear of immigration: it's just the same old "immigrants are taking my jobs but also somehow not growing the economy so I am now economically displaced" trope.
Britons do not, actually, wish to carpet their entire island w/ semidetached housing, so each and every immigrant occupying a flat is one less that a native could be living in.
It works as long as you have an economy and eyes to see it worked with her policies in place and didn't work before she was elected.
The Tories benefited massively from Thatcher because her policies massively benefited Britain. Without them, Britain would be far poorer today. Britain's problems today are not because of too much Thatcherism but because of far too little. The areas of greatest concern are those areas that they didn't manage to do much with, like local planning.
The idea of the market building housing only works if the market is allowed to do so. It isn't. That isn't a problem with the idea of the market building houses - it manages to do everything else in the economy just fine - but with planning laws.
Thatcherism is shortermism manifest. It's the same attitude that plagues the corporate world - focusing on next Quarter profits rather than the next 20 years. It leaves nothing left at the end but a broken state and more billionaires than we ever had medieval kings, while the rest of us slide back into Dickensian poverty, be you doctor, engineer, soldier, or social worker. We traded state wealth (sold off massive amounts of passive income generating assets like housing and utilities) for short term economic GDP growth in the 90s and early 00s, and now we brunt the cost of it because our passive income has gone. The Tories were more worried about re-election than they were keeping the middle class alive.
Our utilities and infrastructure are now drain us for every penny we're worth, and guess what? They're largely owned by other countries now. Our train networks, our energy companies, our communications, and so on, go to pay the French/Chinese/Scandinavian/etc government's. Somehow other countries manage to make profit on state asset; something which Thatcher never had the capacity to do. That's not considering the private industry, which makes £MM in profit, pocketing it instead of reinvesting it in the state which is the primary mandate of public ownership. Individuals abroad or in the 0.1% profit make money from our state, while the rest of the country withers.
This seems backwards to me. Labour can leave; someone can get on a plane in the UK where they get taxed 40%, and arrive in Dubai where they're taxed 0. Their buildings and assets can't come with them however. Capital that's not ethereal assets like stocks, shares, credit, etc, can't be moved. If you want to leave the country you need to become liquid, which means you sell off your assets and whoever is left in the country gets to buy them at cheaper rates.
The issue is when we allow people who do not live or pay tax in this country to make profit on assets in said country. A landlord who lives in the Cayman Islands should not be able to collect rent on UK assets while not paying the UK government tax in turn.
> This seems backwards to me. Labour can leave; someone can get on a plane
most labor does not individually have the means to leave like that.
also, you're talking about capital moving as in already-invested capital, while I'm talking about the people with capital making decisions to invest in the first place.
Of course they do. They've built entire careers around the concept that the whole economy can be models on N=1. Inequality doesn't fit into their models, so they dismiss it out of hand because otherwise the 20+ years of their life they've spent devoting to their craft proves to be no more useful than a horoscope.
The VAST majority of developers I've encountered aren't interested in building sustainable codebases. Mainly that's because that's not what their bosses want so it's in their best interest not to care about it. I could see the same happening if the economist's bosses don't care about sustainable economies.
Depends on the developer and on their organization they work for. Ideally, most do, but the pressures of work and the styles of project management sometimes sideline that, or the team ends up in survival mode where they merely try to stave off the inevitable spaghetti apocalypse
LOL I just read something yesterday (possibly a tweet by Carmack?) that game devs optimize for public perception of their game and that is it. Certainly not long term maintainability unfortunately!
Inequality is very simply to include in these models, and they do. The problem is that the models often show that the median quality of life improves faster when there's somewhat more inequality in the system, which flies in the face of every socialist intuition. It's a lot easier to pretend we need state-enforced equality.
It's simple to include, but there's no denying that the 101-level economics models steer you away from thinking about inequality harder than Vin Diesel in a car chase.
Carefully omitting the fact that the economic notion of value is wealth-weighted (and you can march enough elephants through this loophole to wage a class war), drawing attention away from "rich people getting paid for being rich" dynamics by dividing out wealth wherever possible, inviting you to use averages where "rich get richer" hides "poor get poorer" -- it's a masterclass in propaganda. I have literally never in my life seen a more artful tapestry of deception than Econ 101.
101-level models in every field elide important details. That's pretty much their whole point. And it doesn't make them propaganda, it makes them a perfunctory introduction.
I cannot think of another subject whose “101” level magical thinking has affected the real world as much as economics, though. At some point the purpose of a system is what it does, and economics 101 affects the political discourse in a way I struggle to find adequate comparisons for.
No, you don't omit the leading term by accident. Not five times in a row from three different angles.
In any case, this is also matter of historical record: the purge of left-wing thought from economics and politics at the end of the New Deal Era was loud and vicious. It didn't stop at ensuring capitalist principles got top billing, it scorched the earth until even the most earnest self-examination of capitalism's largest weakness was cause for cancellation. You bury it, or you wear the scarlet letter. Most chose to bury it, and here we are.
Inequality exists on a spectrum and there is something in between Gini coefficients of zero and one.
If anything, I think economists have grossly underestimated how large increasing levels of inequality have had such a corrosive effect on our social cohesion and political systems, and that obviously does have a huge impact on eventual economic outcomes. This societal/political breakdown is not something that economists usually model well.
That does seem to be a large part of why those who were on the fence voted for Trump. So even if it's not the core, it's a large part of why he won the election.
I certainly think, that regardless of the underlying hard numbers, there's a very strong perception that life is getting harder for the average person, and that most of that is due to their money going towards things that they resent. Exactly how and what will vary from person to person and depend on their information diet and political leanings, but there's a big undercurrent of discontent with the status quo and a strong belief it's due to a relative few benefiting from it, and this especially jives poorly with any assertion that "actually, the numbers show most people are just fine!"
I would, if I had the time, like to dive deeper into this sentiment: there's a decent amount of evidence that people are better off, on average (and median, so not prone to distortion by the hyper wealthy), than ever before, and yet this isn't how the average person perceives it. What I don't know is whether this is because said evidence is wrong or misleading, because inequality matters more psychologically than the absolute wealth, whether expectations have simply grown above the growth in wealth, or whether it's because there's been a flattening of the curve where historically disadvantaged groups have gotten better off but advantaged groups have become worse off.
I don't know if anyone is really arguing for state enforced equality. Just that in a capitalist system money naturally accumulates at the top and slowly regresses into a socialist like centrally planned economy as fewer and fewer people have meaningful wealth to allocate. A little inequality is good because there's a reward mechanism for allocating resources better but a lot of inequality locks
up the economy. And the only thing to really do is tax it and recirculate it back to
the bottom.
