For anyone viewing this thread now, take into consideration what wikipedia says about MEMRI:
"Critics describe MEMRI as a strongly pro-Israel advocacy group that, in spite of describing itself as being "independent" and "non-partisan" in nature,[5][6][7] aims to portray the Arab world and the Muslim world in a negative light by producing and disseminating incomplete or inaccurate translations of the original versions of the media reports that it re-publishes."
"co-founded by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli-American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser in 1997"
I think there is a deep irony in using MEMRI publications as evidence that a human rights watch org has ideological bias.
it said that organization reported a company for engaging in slave labor, it then took donations from that company while agreeing not to cover LGBT rights in the middle east in return, but when it was caught it agreed to give the donation back
I would hardly describe it as a nothingburger for human rights organization ethics, but that's only me
We can't talk about lowering headcount without due consideration to the loss of precious collaboration and diversity, things we spent the last 2 decades having rammed down our throats as critical to any exceptional team. Mask is off now I guess.
I don't agree with everything on this channel but Gary's Economics does a good job articulating a perspective that the lowered quality of life is directly related to growing wealth inequality.
Gary's angle is mostly based on wealth being a zero sum game. I think new wealth does get created but I agree that the vast majority of wealth is existing assets and their growth probably dwarfs any net new wealth creation.
It feels perverse to say, but I feel like the UK doesn't have enough income inequality.
The effective pay of a person making £80k per year in London isn't really all that different from a minimum wage worker in social housing. Especially when things like child benefit, student loans, and potential council tax reductions are involved.
I think it's better to be at the top of the working class than the bottom of the middle class.
£80k a year works out at £4,166.14 per month (assuming plan 2 student loan and 0 pension contributions).
Full time minimum wage works out at £25,397.00 per year or £1,819.48 per month (assuming no student loan or pension contributions).
That works out as a difference of £2,346.66 per month. It's plausible the cost difference between social housing and private rent for a 3 bed in Westminster could make up that difference alone.
Westminister social housing is obviously a favourable case, but we also have to consider benefits:
In the scenario of 2 kids on that min wage salary it seems like you'd get £34.15 per month in universal credit.
Whilst small on its own, the universal credit status unlocks many other benefits and perks. Potential discounts of up to 100% of council tax could be possible depending on local authority (avg council tax in London is £157.75 per month). The NHS low income scheme can be accessed: getting free prescriptions and support with health travel. Another big thing would be getting access to social tariffs on energies and utilities. Together these could add up to hundreds of pounds per month.
The min wage worker would also child benefit at £187.17 monthly.
Firstly, if you earned £80k and needed a 3-bed flat, you would categorically not try to live in Westminster. The rent alone would come out well over £3k per month [0]. It's one of the most expensive places to rent in the country. Looking at the disposable income from £80k for a 3-bed flat is highly selective.
Secondly, money isn't the only factor when it comes to social housing. Consider that social housing is notoriously ill-maintained and has characteristics in line with the poorest 40% households [1]. And if you do live somewhere unsatisfactory, the waiting time for a 3-bed is around 3 years for non-high-priority applicants [2].
He doesn't suggest that the economy is a zero sum game, but that the distribution of that wealth matters and in our societies we're increasingly distributing wealth unevenly so that tiny minority of people increasingly control and own all the wealth, assets and means of production thus depriving other people of economic opportunities and crippling the economies.
In your example of building more, in order to a new building get erected someone owns the land, someone owns the materials, someone owns all the assets and the capital required to build. The people who invest to this will of course want to turn a profit on it.
In England, only the King owns the land, and Parliament can deploy any resources in the UK it wishes by simple Act of Parliament.
The only other thing there is is human labour, and that can similarly be deployed if we choose to.
As we discover every time we go to war.
So no there is no cabal of hoarders preventing anything, and no shortage of stuff or money. All that is preventing regeneration is the political will to do so.
In reality Gary is a member of the Outer Party, and he wants to take money off the Inner Party and give it to his mates so they can all play at looking after the Proles while value signalling to one another.
I'm neither an economist or mathematician. But I'm smart enough to observe my surroundings. I observe that the middle class is shrinking rapidly. Wealth concentration is increasing rapidly. Income has not kept up with the price of goods. And it's increasingly difficult for working people to accumulate wealth.
Can you point me to other theories which articulate the cause of my observations?
New wealth can be created, but it seems like at least since the 90s, we've been in a pattern where the people with most of the wealth would prefer a sort of stasis, because that way their chunk of the pie doesn't get smaller by comparison to the rest. They'd rather have slow, managed, inflation-swallowed "growth" than the ups and downs that accompany leaps forward but sometimes change who is on top.
So we've gone from "everyone will have flying cars" to "the rest of you will eat bugs." Castles and jets for the few; austerity for the rest of us. Which certainly isn't new, but it's not what was promised, or what seemed possible within living memory.
New wealth "creation" is a lie. It only looks that way because of devaluing currency and population growth.
No conspiracy theory beliefs required to see this one. At the end of the day, what we are buying and selling is compute time on our brain CPU cluster. We can reshuffle what gets our attention, and the relative cost of things can change, but ultimately the only way to increase "wealth" is to get more underlying resource: human brainpower.
I see the counter argument coming from a mile away: yeah, but your poor is not your grandfathers poor. You have an iPhone, gramps did not. My counter is again simple: relative value. Electronics were a frontier at the time, and are a commodity now. They are now cheap, and this is compensated by a huge increase in the cost of basics like housing.
Perhaps the bigger issue is old wealth destruction. We live in a world of effectively infinite low cost electronics, clothes and food, but the things which used to be abundant are now actually quite scarce.
Housing is most obvious example here - but the costs of driving (excluding vehicle purchase), childcare, wedding, and energy are now radically higher than ever before. In these areas it feels like we've gone backwards in productivity.
I take some silicon from high-purity quartz in North Carolina. I make CPU chips out of them. Have I not created wealth? Is not the CPU chip more valuable than raw, high-purity quartz?
I planted $10 worth of potato seed this year, and I'll be harvesting at least $100 worth of potatoes in a few months. It would take a lot of economics books to convince me I haven't created wealth. Unless they've redefined "wealth" to the point of uselessness as a concept.
Wealth is created by taking less valuable inputs and producing something new of greater value. For the HN crowd, that might mean using a little energy and a cheap computer to produce software that provides something even more value than the sum of its parts. Clearly you can create wealth out of "thin air".
Perhaps you mean in the net? Where new wealth is created, equal old wealth must be destroyed? But wherein that aforementioned software was additional value destroyed in order for the net wealth to remain the same?
> It only looks that way because of devaluing currency and population growth.
Not really. While we often measure wealth in currency, which is subject to fluctuations over time, wealth is not the measurement itself. In the same vein, the physical distance you currently know as a kilometre will still be the same distance even if we redefine the kilometre.
Quality of life has been going down for most Americans over the past few decades. It's harder to buy a house, raise a family, etc. on a modest income. Increasing cost of goods has outpaced wage increases but there are probably other factors at play too.
Americans lived in a world where all you needed was a decent job and you could have a good life - defined by what I said above. That's not the case anymore and they're upset about it - they're looking for someone or something to blame.
The republican party chose to blame immigrants and the democrats chose to blame lack of DEI. This fractured the citizens into two camps who can seemingly find no middle ground anymore.
Meanwhile, the wealth gap continues to increase and the middle class is shrinking. But neither political party can run on a platform of reducing spending AND higher taxes on wealth. They'd lose their funding sources - so they're stuck with immigrants and DEI.
Meanwhile, Trump sees an opportunity to extract wealth from the working class by reducing government spending and diverting those savings to corporations and the wealthy. Moderate Americans feel a bit powerless given how quickly our long standing legal and government structures seem to be deteriorating.
I think curation is the key. I sort of trust Disney to curate content for my kids. I definitely do not trust Youtube to do it.
I don't want my kids to be able to "discover" content. Why is that always the feature? Rhetorical question....I know the answer, engagement and stickiness. I just don't like the answer.
I've moved from NextDNS to ControlD. NextDNS seems like it's been abandoned--good luck getting any level of support--and I've been really happy with the feature set of ControlD.
I found that most of the content on YouTube kids existed as a means to advertise products. I don't necessarily care to understand the economics of it because it just doesn't provide enough value to bother.
What I do understand is that I don't want my kids being tricked into watching ads because something about watching adults open toys is entertaining.
There's a lot of brain drain in Kerala with people getting educated and leaving. Those that leave do, however, send money back to their families and I know many who return to live in India after 5-10 years. This was the case a decade or two ago and I'm not sure if it's still the case.
I had many aunts or uncles who would leave their family behind in India and work in the middle east for many years before returning to India. This practice helped them shore up savings and build houses.
Remittanced only contribute to 15% of GDSP. 65% is from tertiary sectors of IT, Healthcare and Tourism. Kerala gets substantial investments from private companies instead as opposed to large corporations in Gujarat for example. Investments in Kerala rarely grab news headlines as it’s mostly private investments.
The guys I knew from Guatemala doing yardwork/construction in the US had the same setup. They’d sleep in shifts in bunk beds and then go home to their new ranch after a few years.
[1] https://www.hrw.org/financials
[2] https://www.influencewatch.org/non-profit/human-rights-watch...
reply