https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law

Unfortunately we do have precedent. Through all of history almost no one owed their own home. It was by extraordinary government intervention in the 20th century through loan programs, incentives and building, and impediments to speculation, that made it uniquely happen in our era.

As the government steps back from continuous intervention favoring individual home ownership and low to nonprofit housing, the more profitable rental economy will re assert itself: it is always more profitable to own a property to rent out then to live in it and the market will reflect that if left to itself.

Price fluctuations (eg 2008) do not change the fact that land price increases have far outpaced wages for decades. So yes, it is rational to be very concerned.

And note that Zillow is not selling these 7k properties to would be homeowners but to investors.

Naturally I hope this does not happen but it may not be much harder than gaining the sympathies of a few pundits with strong Nielsen ratings.

There probably is a theoretical way to do it that encourages innovation but it’s hard to see a society ruled by self serving individuals not wrecking it pretty fast.

Unless he is using these numbers to suggest we need to prioritize driving down land prices and rentier practices etc more than worrying about trade imbalance. But this certainly does not seem like his intent.

At any rate, the numbers 11% and 3% are as fictional as the Taylor Lorenz quote but the amount of skepticism differs greatly. This hints more of ideology based beliefs than fact based.

On the contrary, it does indeed and has been known to do so for many decades [0,1]

Indeed, in Citizens United, SCOTUS in the concurring opinion claimed the founders intent in the 1st amendment was to allow monied interests to own and influence media for political purposes.

The question is not whether distortion exists but how prevalent it is.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Akre

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noam_Chomsky#News_media_and_pr...

Youtube is _not_ the government but by reigning in falsehoods, is acting in _opposition_ to the government here. So what Youtube is doing is the very definition of _freedom_ of expression. A government pressuring them to carry pro-government messages is the crime, not the other way around.

You are now having the government and pro-government voices pressure non-government organizations to publish pro-government material while claiming that it "protects" freedom of speech. This the exact _opposite_ of freedom of speech, it is in fact forced propaganda.

So indeed there is no "but" because it is _the government_ that is in the wrong by pressuring publishers in what they must include.

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13301372676801863...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13304872462360289...

https://twitter.com/LizRNC/status/1330186217355350020

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13303679886215946...

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/13305556452134830...

https://twitter.com/TeamTrump

> If you were a businessman in Germany during WW2 you would not have been a brave warrior fighting to preserve democracy, you'd just have moved on with your life and kept running your business, as would have (and as did) most people.

Different people have different opinions about right and wrong. A different set behaviors by a large number of people would bring about a different outcome. Left unchecked, the luxury of dissent becomes more and more painful for company and individual.

Everything in the US is political now: face masks, 5G networks, vaccines, mail. Facebook dominates people's lives yet is an endless spam of politics. Google search is facing anti-trust because it is "liberal", while the ISPs and other monopolies are strangely un-molested. Every tech company, apolitical or not, is automatically suspected by half of the country mostly because of their address.

But just for clarity, the major US debate is whether the election was fraudulent or not which is considerably higher stakes than a contest of identity. You can hedge your corporate bets by having no opinion on the mater but necessarily one of those parties is directly subverting the democracy. For anyone ok with that, then silence is undoubtedly a profitable path: why cut your business in half and alienate half of potential customers/employees over mere democracy?

"An adjustment to suffering that requires powerful people to loose some power" means exactly the same thing as "an adjustment to suffering that requires a powerful class to loose some power."

Often attempted adjustments are categorized as blind ideology and, by implication, chaos. For the erudite it's called "abstract ideology", for the less so it's simply labeled "communism". The effect is the same: portray reform as destruction and create comfort for the beneficiaries of society in the status quo.

Conversely, both laissez faire-ism and Ayn Rand's thesis are both very much ideologies but they are not called that by those who approve of them. I know of no possible definition of "ideology" that does not also apply to the both the American and French revolution as well as the motivation of every soldier in every army and indeed to the ethics driving every action that is not self absorbed.

Blindly following some policy like "burn all X" or "policy Y always results in maximum wealth" is disastrous. But I'd say that that differs significantly from an ideology like "all human beings are entitled to X".

The plantation owner worries only about the bottom line and the suburbanite is upset that the homeless are visible not that they exist. When these positions become virtues and problems are dismissed as abstractions, the society dies.

I had a lengthy more thoughtful post here but it seems I had mistaken a pronouncement for a discussion. The near instant voting response made me realize that absurdity, especially in light of the fact that I am responding to the second of two posts by the site's governance where college professors are singled out as a threat to freedom even as unmarked vans and secretive police round up the "dreaded" diversity proponents in Portland and other cities.

So I shall leave it to persons devoted to maximizing short term profits from new products and the "freethinking" commentary from persons seeking funding from same, to bloviate on how to "protect" society from intellectuals and liberalism.

It is not were potential Einsteins or Galileos debut their big new ideas. It is not were cover ups about WMD or anything else are initially exposed. All of that is very sensibly on real sites. To the contrary, rather than being where good ideas originate, it's sole purpose is to attract eyes for advertisement.

The catastrophic problem is their algorithm that massively pushes conspiracy theories, outrage and demagogue's propaganda that would otherwise never be seen and would never get beyond the crackpot website they happened to be posted on.

Facebook is not were any valuable information originates, it is instead where failed ideas and advertisements are endlessly push on it's users. But any attempt to correct that algorithm, manually or otherwise is now portrayed as censorship by those who benefit form it to get support from everyone else. Likewise, it is very effectively used as a propaganda tool by some parties yet ironically any attempt to slow that is portrayed as censorship.

It is not remotely where ideas fairly compete. To the contrary: shocking but false ideas are given an enormous advantage but adding an annotation contradicting them is called censorship. To such an extreme that there is a warning on Lysol bottles not to drink it but if a meme on Facebook telling people to drink Lysol has a similar warning attached by Facebook, it is called censorship.

The notion Facebook could ever afford to bother with any but a tiny silver of the most conspicuously false and harmful posts, let alone judge every post for accuracy, is not reasonable. It could not remotely be picking sides on every tv debate, reading every user's post or reviewing posts about the photoelectric effect for accuracy. And at any rate, Facebook is not the web.