Readit NewsDo you want your country's current political leaders to have more weapons to suppress information they dislike or facts they disagree with? If yes, will you also be happy if your country's opposition leaders gain that power in a few years?
(Muni bonds typically have favorable tax treatment for investors vs corporate bonds)
Hasn't means tested social welfare basically been proven to be bad in every way, regardless of political or economic belief system used to analyze it?
There are lots of positive things that can be done to improve affordable housing - removing impediments to housing density like allowing multiple units on a lot, increasing building height limits, removing parking spot requirements, removing requirements for extra staircases, lowering property taxes, and removing bureaucratic approvals that are full of secret bribery and favortism.
But just stealing money from one set of people to give someone else below-market rent doesn't fix the systemic issues at all, and creates perverse incentives where people are locked into semi-poverty to keep their means tested housing.
Society is not made better by someone refusing a higher-paying job because it would mean they no longer qualified for their apartment.
US TV is endlessly about reducing a certain subset of the US to a bit of a caricature to entertain. Real housewives of (insert town), Jersey Shore, Sopranos, Duck Dynasty. I don't think anyone here believes all Italians in Jersey are mafia.
Real maturity comes from being able to laugh at yourself without getting offended at every second line.
I suspect a whole lot of TV fails both parts of this test. The audience doesn't understand and there is only a little bit of truth and a lot of simplification.
If you want to incentive domestic reindustrialization, you do it with things like the Inflation Reduction Act, CHIPS act or the "Green New Deal" where congress lays out clear sets of rules in law with a mixture of tax incentives, loan programs and spending to give investors and corporations confidence to make decade-long commitments of capital to major projects.
Or your retirement account. Everyone is mad about investors and companies making money. Sure, there are ultra wealthy people (mostly founders) that benefit disproportionately. However, most people who hope to retire some day rely on a 401k, pension, etc which is dependent on stocks. Retirement accounts have about $36T in the US, mostly in equities and corporate bonds.
The richest 1% own half the wealth in the world and the gap is getting wider. Since 2020, for every dollar of new global wealth gained by someone in the bottom 90%, one of the world’s billionaires has gained $1.7 million. (Source: https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/wealth-inequality-o...)
So yes, some of the wealth is going to your retirement account. But for every penny going to a middle-class professional workers retirement, there's about a thousand dollars going to some hedge fund manager or the trust fund of the grandson of some robber baron who got rich a hundred years ago.
Trump is kind of the perfect storm, it looks almost deliberate. I wonder if right wing media will still be able control the narrative and place the blame on some other minority in all the down trend -- wether the US might recover or stay on that trajectory.
Europe has its own problems, and US instability will magnify them. The last 20 years have shown that China is essentially uninvestible for foreigners. Japan maybe offers relative stability but without growth. Commodities might seem like a safe haven, but will decline in value in a recession.
For the pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign wealth funds who hold the hundreds of billions of dollars of US debt instruments, what are the realistic option? Buy billions in gold? Invest in Japan, South Korea and India? Bet on a European turnaround? Yolo it on fartcoin?
I'm not sure what the safe haven is when America goes bankrupt.
HFCS and “ultra processed foods” (food with all the fiber removed) are much more likely.
I’ve also noticed school lunches often jam artificial sweeteners into stuff that should not be sweet. They’re known to cause excessive hunger, and at the very least train kids that everything needs to be sweet.
There's some evidence HFCS is worse than sucrose (standard refined cane sugar) and some metabolic mechanisms to make that plausible, but it's a relatively minor difference compared to just the overall amount of consumption.
10 grams of "sugar" (sucrose) is 5 grams of fructose. 10 grams of high fructose corn syrup is 5.5 grams of fructose.
A diet going from 10 grams of any sugar per day to 50 or 100 grams of any sugar per day is going to have a drastically larger impact on health than if the 10 grams were sucrose vs HFCS.
I'd rather die a "John Doe" than live in an authoritarian police state where it's a crime to not give ID to police.
The title "Oops, Scientists May Have Severely Miscalculated How Many Humans Are on Earth" is entirely misleading- it's not "scientists" who have miscalculated this, it's government bureaucrats in various countries who are responsible for collecting and reporting census information in their region.
This matters, because we live in a world where many people get much of their information only from headlines, and a recurring narrative of "Scientists make mistakes" or "Scientists can't be trusted" has real impact to policy on climate change, vaccine hesitancy, and other areas where distrust of scientific knowledge or expertise causes uninformed people to make decisions harmful to their own well-being or harmful to those around them on everything from nutrition to pollution to evacuations before hurricanes.
I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. I can wear comfortable pants. I can throw laundry into the wash in the couple minute gap between meetings. And when the last meeting ends, I close the laptop and I'm already home, no miserable drive in rush-hour traffic.
Of course, there is something worse than in-person meetings. Which is meetings that are hybrid, with a groups calling into zoom from two different conference rooms in different locations. Those manage to be far worse than just everyone individually joining the zoom. And ironically, that's the type of meeting that becomes common when you force your distributed workforce back to offices split across a dozen locations.