balance_factor

9 ms·

1.
by balance_factor 9y ago
> skills and professionalism can be valued by the free market by people competing for them; why, despite pure populism for the lowest common denominator, someone wants to return to something like this, is completely beyond me. The real d
2.
by balance_factor 9y ago
> Or maybe people are naturally more attracted to the extremes (left and right) when given the choice. If by given a choice you mean people are usually not given a choice, but in mid-1600s England, late 1700s France, mid 1800s USA, and m
3.
by balance_factor 9y ago
> Heredity can be measured via twin studies - if twins are adopted into two different families or cultures: what commonalities can we still find, beyond random variability. And how often does this happen? It is about as common as a sigh
4.
by balance_factor 9y ago
It is an old argument, and I think a correct one. Money at the top is mostly spent on capital investment. Capital investment makes commodities which are sold to consumers/workers. Who is going to buy all these things if people are t
5.
by balance_factor 9y ago
When the Russian Revolution took place, many of the areas you discuss were part of the Russian empire. So "Russian occupation", if that is what it was, did not start with the Bolsheviks. Hungary is a different story, but then of
6.
by balance_factor 9y ago
Starting in 1945, Russia had a very strong desire to pull out of Berlin and east Germany, it never wanted to be there. England and the US had agreed that Germany would be demilitarized, but then reneged on that promise, and formed a milita
7.
by balance_factor 9y ago
> It was also the year of the Tet offensive, an enormous attack by North Vietnamese forces, and of more than 16,000 American deaths in the Vietnam War, more than in any other year. Sigh...half a century later the Tet offensive is called
8.
by balance_factor 9y ago
There are two sides in every war, and in the war on poverty, those fighting to create and preserve poverty currently hold most of the cards. Harken back to 2000 and let us read the business press...I will pick one article by example ( http
9.
by balance_factor 9y ago
The example Ricardo gave for comparative advantage was Portuguese wine for English cloth. More than two centuries later, Joan Robinson reexamined comparative advantage using Ricardo's original example. How had such trade affected the
10.
by balance_factor 9y ago
> What happened very quickly in 1917 was the development of committee power, so the development of local, direct democracy in terms of local committees, soldiersâ�� committees and, of course, the Soviets. And I think that those instituti
11.
by balance_factor 9y ago
This is the sort of thing that led to the decline of the Soviet economy, which had been doing very well up until that point. People nowadays usually remember the creaking Soviet economy of the late 1980s, but from the late 1920s to Stalin&
12.
by balance_factor 9y ago
It's interesting what words are not in the article. Words like heir, inheritance, profit, interest, rentier. The word rent is there, but assumed as a tenant, not landlord. I assume the Forbes 400 richest are in the 1%. How did the K
13.
by balance_factor 9y ago
The Quora link you put says the reason the 1980s report is no longer relevant is the drawdown from Cold War nuke levels. The Nature letter was written by Russell Seitz, who is also skeptical against the harm cigarette smoking can do, that c
14.
by balance_factor 9y ago
1) Capitalism is creating commodities, like corn, and then shipping them. Picking one billion corn stalks is a lot more cost and effort than picking one corn stalk. With software nowadays, you create the first product, and then with the pu
15.
by balance_factor 9y ago
It's great that these RFE's are happening, and Trump should have closed things up even earlier. There are plenty of people with skills out there who may not know every feature of Vue.js 2.5.3, or who are 30 years old and thus &qu
16.
by balance_factor 9y ago
Different things can be shown by different measurements. Income disparity in Brazil is high, so you have a few people like Jorge Paulo Lemann worth tens of billions of dollars, and then a lot of poor people. So per capita GDP there is mor
17.
by balance_factor 9y ago
The percentage going to military spending out of total government spending is only as small as it is on the chart if it's decided to try to have a very narrow view of what constitutes military spending, but a broad view of what can fit
18.
by balance_factor 9y ago
I suppose it's the fading light of England's imperial hubris that is oblivious to why a Chinese man would fail to appreciate that he is the "subject" of a monarch who lies over 9,500 km away. What rights do those the Bri
19.
by balance_factor 9y ago
England's army occupies the six north counties of Ireland, so as to make its people subjects of the queen. Those who have stood up and fought back, to drive out this foreign army are "terrorists", and Rudd demands the abilit
20.
by balance_factor 9y ago
> the "oppressed" Sure, how are they oppressed? In 1938 Barcelona was bombed because the army wanted to destroy the republic and what existed of Catalonia autonomy. So any existing Catalonia autonomy or democracy of any form
21.
by balance_factor 9y ago
The tech giants negotiations are relying on the monopoly that the state provides. Just to pick one piece of legislation, the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, the government disallows various worker/employer agreements that benefit those doing t
22.
by balance_factor 9y ago
> Standard Oil came about through mergers. This is the one where antitrust fits -- you break them up, problem solved. Problem solved if they're actually broken up. Exxon (Standard Oil of New Jersey) and Mobil (Standard Oil of New Y
23.
by balance_factor 9y ago
> I see no evidence that the CIA directly gave weapons to Al-Nusra or other Al-Qaeda affiliates. And zero evidence of any direct funding or support of ISIS You stick a very key word there, directly. In fact the US is who funded and arme
24.
by balance_factor 9y ago
Of the four gospels, it is generally said that Mark was written first, and John was written last. The earliest manuscripts of the gospel of Mark do not mention the resurrection at all. Later manuscripts have verses tacked on, in what is now
25.
by balance_factor 9y ago
> instead of relying on twin and adoption studies Twin and adoption studies have never been reliable. They have ranged from dubious methodology to outright fraud such as in the case of Cyril Burt.
26.
by balance_factor 9y ago
> Russia is said to be currently supplying arms to the taliban. Their goal there (to disrupt american efforts) would be the same as in NK. And of course, the original supplier of arms to the people who formed the Taliban was the United S
27.
by balance_factor 9y ago
As it is rarely mentioned in the US media, I'd just note that the US pretty openly interferes in Russian elections, and has been doing so for a long time. It's curious this is virtually never mentioned amidst all the accusations
28.
by balance_factor 9y ago
> I can't think of any country in the western world who has a social welfare system on the same low level as the US - and yet we don't have such a 'decline in social indicators'. Quite the opposite. But I thought the
29.
by balance_factor 9y ago
North Korea has been making peace offers for a while, South Korea has been in discussions with them, the US has turned them down without much consideration. North Korea, China and Russia all think Trump's bellicose attitude towards Nor
30.
by balance_factor 9y ago
The current governor of Texas once sued the EPA because the EPA claimed global warming could affect public safety. Of course, denial that burning carbon fuels can cause climate change including more powerful hurricanes was one of the corner

More ›