Are you ignorant or just deliberately ignoring the genocide of the Palestinian people with an estimated 680,000 dead (~30% of Gaza) that occurred with widespread support of almost every western democracy?

China may be an authoritarian state but I would argue their large scale human rights abuses are far tamer than what these so called western democracies have been doing for the past 2 years and the direction we're headed.

https://x.com/snmrrw/status/1717906441925751223

They want US citizens to communicate on US platforms where they do have influence and control so they can censor speech and continue the capitalist forever wars.

People don’t want to be exploited and see home ownership as a way to get out of that cycle of exploitation and building enough wealth to someday retire.

I don't know how much this applies to California, I think they cap property tax increases there, not sure how the rates differ by town?

A single state-wide standardized marginal property tax rate would probably work best. Those with $5 million+ single family homes should be paying a higher percentage to discourage that type of housing. Additionally that tax money could be collected at a state level and distributed more equitably (to towns that aren't as wealthy).

Ultimately single family homes need to be phased out in these kinds of places and replaced with higher density along with mixed zoning. Mixed zoning should reduce the need for more car based infrastructure which is extremely expensive and allow more efficient public transit to be built. That would lower costs for regular people since they wouldn't need a car to get places.

I believe people should be allowed to form their own opinions about his motives beyond what US government propagandists want the US public to believe.

Contrary to public belief, I don’t think they did it because they hate our freedom. And I think if you do believe that and you also see no problem with platform after platform trying to scrub the document from public view then you’ve got your head on backwards.

Regular people without that same wealth and power should have some amount of privacy from their government.

It’s not impossible to hold those two beliefs without being a hypocrite.

Are regular people not allowed to read or share content created by anyone the US government doesn’t like? Are people not allowed to form their own opinions?

What a joke. The “free” democratic west where communication is limited by a handful of large corporate interests and a murderous government that pressures them to censor content they don’t like.

TikTok may be owned by a Chinese company but there is no doubt in my mind they are being pressured by US authorities to control what is disseminated on their platform. I don’t think congress just forgot about wanting to ban TikTok, I think it’s likely they were able to rein in control of the platform.

What Osama Bin Laden did in 2001 isn’t justifiable but neither is decades of US interventionist foreign policy that has left millions of innocent people dead or living in poverty and continues to the present day.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38297414

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I do wonder if it could be argued (maybe even in the current monopoly case against google) whether youtube engaged in predatory or below-cost pricing in order to drive out all of its competitors, establish a monopoly, and now use that monopoly in order to "raise prices" i.e. increase the amount of ads on its service in order to maximize its profit margins.

Although this does seem to be the business plan of basically every startup out there. Get VC funding, run at a loss and burn through money but gain a monopoly market share, and once you've done that you can raise your prices and have a profit margin that far exceeds what should be normal.

The solution is a simple number on food (1-100) that tells a consumer how healthy (or not) a product is and takes into account caloric content, additivies, sugar content, etc. This is something the government should be doing but since the US is governed by radical conservatives that are immensely corrupt it’s likely not going to happen. There is an app I’ve recently started using called Yuka that does this.

I’m also not opposed to banning certain categories of unhealthy products entirely.

Your point about overconsumption is valid but again, I don’t believe this is the fault of consumers, this is just a result of the capitalist system which encourages overconsumption in order to keep the system from falling apart.