Machinery, computers, and the internet do more than hundreds of slaves/servants worth of work (how many musicians and actors would have to be at your call to replicate YouTube, which is free?). A poor person in Europe can still travel all over the Eurozone by train, etc. In the first world, we pivoted to "food insecurity" instead of "hunger", but the most common signifier of being food insecure is obesity: more food and alcohol than a person should want, at least. The only one that is a definite downgrade among those you list is the lack of owned houses and/or land.
> A poor person in Europe can still travel all over the Eurozone
I picked a rich person in the Americas with hundreds of slaves, many houses, considerable land, a thriving business delivering returns, political connections, and frequently holiday on another continent.
This is well above the standard of living of a poor person in contemporary America.
China already claims Taiwan, and has for decades; the only thing keeping it practically separate is uncertainty over the outcome in various dimensions if China tries to take it militarily. I don't think there's any doubt that if they were sure they could take it relatively bloodlessly and without significant repercussion, they would do so immediately.
The US recognizes Taiwan as part of China since the 70’s though its position is quite ambiguous! I found this document by the US congress that explains the history behind the rather bizarre situation Taiwan finds itself today: https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12503
Nope. The US One China Policy (not to be confused with China's One China Principle) only "acknowledges" China's claim over Taiwan. The wording is intended to be vague so that each side can interpret the meaning according to their own interests (like China claiming "acknowledge" actually means "recognize").
You're right, of course. What I'm saying is what happens if anyone with any lethal force proclaims they need territory which isn't theirs for their own security. Dangerous rhetoric and extremely dangerous precedent if this plays out.
I dunno if the "just paraphrasing [...] Fox" works as an explanation for success. It sounds like you believe he just keeps unaccountably stumbling into piles of cash and power?
An ageing Biden and Dubya have also occupied that office and they don't exactly strike me as "master persuader" types either.
Nobody is accusing Trump of lacking ambition or charisma, and there's also no doubt the party machine that backed him is pretty sophisticated in the arts of political campaigning. But there's a difference between being a "master persuader" able to convince almost anyone of almost anything and being a shameless braggart in front of an electorate that's unusually impressed by a celebrity's overconfidence and wealth, and also being a lot less shameless about appealing to their chauvinistic attitudes than predecessors.
Biden was a great campaigner and speech maker. Similar to Trump in that he wasn't afraid to piss people off. Don't let the dementia addled version that you saw in his 80s fool you into thinking he wasn't a man of extreme outlier political talent to get where he was. So was W Bush. You think going up on stage and acting like the smartest guy in the room (as many who worked with Bush say he actually was) is going to win you any votes? But acting like Bush will. That's not something just anyone can do. And you think calling 3 men out of 300 million "master persuaders" cheapens it? Any player in the NBA is a master basketball player and there are hundreds of them at any given time.
Trump was born rich to a father who taught him cruelty and insulated him from consequences. It was a golden ticket.
He still managed to go bankrupt 6 times, and couldn't get financing. He had to resort to selling his name or getting money from one of the most corrupt banks in the world.
He's rumored to have been despised in the NY social scene since his youth and up to the present.
He's been accused of rape by his own ex-wife and SA by more than 20 others. He bought pageants so beautiful women would have to interact with him. His longest relationship is with an illegal migrant (possibly trafficked) escort whose visa he had to pay for.
He gained no following during his time at the head of the Reform party.
Since 2015 his political base, like Nixon's, is largely built on white grievance and fear. It's incapable of building much once in power.
Now the Trump family accumulates money by selling power, hot air, and fleecing fools.
I'm having trouble finding any evidence for that. E.g., https://web.archive.org/web/20030808111721/https://edition.c... -- here's a thing from February of that year that (if I'm understanding right) reports Ventura leaving the Reform Party because he didn't like its endorsement of Pat Buchanan for president; it mentions Trump, but only as one person Ventura might have supported as a presidential nominee, and it actually quotes Trump saying to Ventura "you're the leader". Trump was never the Reform Party's nominee nor anyone else's. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_2000_presidential... says that "he never expanded the campaign beyond the exploratory phase".)
It's not entirely clear to me that there was actually such a thing as the leader of the Reform Party, especially in early 2000 when there was a lot of infighting, but if there was one it seems to me that it might have been Ventura but certainly wasn't Trump.
As @hnlmorg mentioned, the term is only typically used for people who are at a level where they could be managers, primarily supporting others, but are instead still contributing directly themselves. It's almost the opposite sense from your "insulting", in my experience.
For companies using Google Calendar as the primary meeting scheduler, one issue with this is that there's a setting for short meetings, but it only supports ending the official meeting 5 or 10 minutes early: "End 30 minute meetings 5 minutes early and longer meetings 10 minutes early".
But if you're in a meeting already, people are expecting that they have time until the hour or half hour point, so in spite of the meeting officially ending at H:25, it really almost always lasts until H:30 unless you have someone who wants to leave early and can enforce it by actually leaving.
It surprises me a bit that even engineering managers at Google agree with this policy and yet it's not an option in the Google Calendar settings.
> find out a way of guaranteeing that this trust would never be betrayed
I have no idea how to solve this. The pressure to cash out just gets stronger as the business succeeds more. Even starting the "business" as a non-profit is no guarantee, as we've seen with OpenAI!
You could certainly create a pro-user EULA that specifically locks in your company's ideals and forbids reneging on them in the future. This is essentially what the GPL is - it's an end user license agreement that is exceptionally user friendly.
Pro-user EULAs just aren't popular because they limit future monetization paths for the company, but it sounds like that is exactly what you want.
I think the snark comes from (and becomes merited through) an article that shows such an utter lack of empathy towards the problems that the vast majority face on a day-to-day basis.
No, when Alice and Bob are people whose hardships are actual hardships. It's not just that it's a hardship that's rare, or that "it's just a different hardship", or something — I can read about genuine plight that might affect some small portion of the population and empathize with that, and they with me at the same time – even implicitly, without statement in the article. But this, by virtue of being written, explicitly is unempathetic, whereas "this rare cancer affects 8 people" is not. That's not a problem I wish that I had, vs. this is a problem faced by someone who is well off, to even call this a "hardship" is a stretch.
To do so during a time when tech is also dragging its reputation into the mud by generally harming the rank and file, through large corporations whose actions are not held to account in anti-trust laws, to tech bro oligarchs who wine and dine with power while the rest of us are worst off in a time of unprecedented inequality, to tech laying off hundreds of thousands of employees over the last few years, to LLMs replacing hard working people with slop-generators… is just additional insult to injury.
The article is simply, itself, shallow. "… Is a Lesson for the Rest of Us" — no; barring unforeseen and extremely unlikely circumstances, I'm literally never going to have the "problems" faced by Brin, because I have no expectation of ever retiring with "perpetual wealth" levels of money.
Per a quick search, that's 0.2%, not 2%. Not sure about what "housing insecure" means, so that's harder to check. Also, that is just a one-night snapshot, and many of those won't be homeless if you check back later.
In the event that someone is directly attacking Americans in America, I think you'll find that Americans are more united than it appears.
Americans culturally have seen ourselves as the "Good Guys" for the last century or so, and Good Guys imply Bad Guys. If there aren't any credible Bad Guys external to the US, Americans start thinking the Bad Guys are the rich, or the coastal elites, or flyover country, or liberals, or whatever. That's just 'cause there's no one else to be against, though; it'll pass.
Hence Trump's continual (and false) claims that the cities he's targeting are lawless and dangerous places.
The above applies to federal US military forces. The laws specifically exclude the US Coast Guard. Non-military federal forces (FBI, ICE, etc) are also excluded.
It also, in the more complicated quirk, excludes state military forces (i.e. "National Guard" units). These forces can be activated under a variety of different legal frameworks (see https://www.nationalguard.mil/Portals/31/Resources/Fact%20Sh... ), some of which allow their use for domestic police functions (Title 32 and SAD), because they're still under the command of the state governor (who can use military forces to perform domestic policing functions inside their state or a neighboring state).
There's also a special exclusion for Washington, DC, as technically the president is sort of its governor for many purposes.
Given that background, what actually happened...
- Trump activated National Guard units under Title 10 (aka federal active duty service), because this doesn't require the consent of a state's governor
- Trump then deployed these units to several cities, some with the support of Republican governors and some without the support of Democratic governors
- The administration's legal team realized performing policing functions with the above forces was on extremely shaky ground
- Therefore, they mostly claimed (loudly) that they were deploying "the military", but in actuality used them for extremely limited, non-policing purposes (picking up trash, talking to tourists, guarding federal buildings, guarding other federal agents performing law enforcement functions)
Another potential goal of the war may have been to demonstrate that the USSR couldn't hope to win a conventional war against the US (the 1973 Easter offensive fielded 700-1200 tanks of various kinds, and the US destroyed 400-700 of them with trivial losses to US forces). The Soviets were using 15-20% of their economy to produce, among other military items, 4000 tanks a year, so a demonstration that the US could destroy so much without significant losses or any particular economic strain could have been shocking. If that was a real goal, though, it probably couldn't be openly discussed at the time, which would have contributed to the "why are we even there?" mood of the American people.
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