Counterfactual. The article you link to is laughable on the face of it. "A new study for the Mercatus Center at George Mason University" carries about the same intellectual heft as "A new study for the Eat More Beef Center at Hamburger University."

You seem the sort of person able to recognize others' ideologies while incorrectly assuming your own beliefs are rational and well-founded. Are you generally tolerant of or convinced by counterfactuals when they don't support your ideology?

"Labor Freedom" is perhaps the most galling. One might think it would cover the right of laborers to organize and collectively bargain. Or the right to have safe working conditions, sick days, severance pay, access to childcare and healthcare.

In fact, it's the exact opposite. A perfectly free workforce in Heritage Foundation's verbiage would be one with no worker protections or individual rights of any kind and a 100% labor participation rate - to them, quite literally, "labor freedom" is slavery.

Maybe France does have to many workers' rights to compete with other countries, who knows. Heritage's numbers aren't granular enough for me (or you) to assess that. But re-defining the meanings of basic words so one can accuse people who disagree with you of "hating freedom" is pathetic. Please try to find some other way to make your case that's befitting educated adults discussing a serious issue.

I find it incredibly frustrating that people clearly see the need for referees in sports, but not in business. Nobody's saying that the NFL or the NBA would have better competition if there were no refs.

Yes, we're aware that's how it works in shitty novels about trains from the 1950's.

Here in the real world, every single technological innovation in the iPhone was created by the US Government, or with the assistance of US government-funded basic research. This book breaks the whole thing down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entrepreneurial_State

Google Maps is a particularly terrible example. It wouldn't exist without GPS, a technology invented by the US government.

Hong Kong's government puts billions of dollars a year into technology research. That's not a good example, either. Furthermore, HK has lower income inequality than Nigeria, Rwanda, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Burundi, The Gambia, Swaziland, Botswana, CAR, Sierra Leone and Namibia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq... . So your statement "everybody else has just about the same as everybody else" in sub-Saharan Africa is total bullshit.

Japan and Scandinavia have relatively low rates of income inequality (especially compared to sub-Saharan Africa). Are you saying those countries are less innovative than Namibia (highest income inequality in the world)?

Finally, the idea that the sole difference between "Sub Saharan Africa" (a region that encapsulates over a billion people and over 40 countries which you regard as a monolith) and Hong Kong is due to "government policies" is childishly ignorant. Africa is not a country.

Some of the nastiest bullying I've observed (and experienced) in my life has been from smart people towards even smarter people that they resented. I'm getting more than a whiff of that here.

I don't know if this girl is a Mozart, but there sure are a lot of angry Salieris in these parts.

Why frame the issue in this way, except to make yourself feel better about being complicit in denying your fellow citizens access to basic healthcare?

The alternative explanation is that you genuinely believe all issues requiring healthcare are the result of "poor lifestyle decisions", which is plainly ludicrous.

I think you should give some serious consideration as to why your brain forces you to frame the problem in this way. I suspect it's because at some level you do feel morally culpable for whether your neighbor lives or dies, but that inevitably leads to a position where some social programs are morally just, and a belief in orthodox anti-statism is more important to you.

The only way to square that circle is to frame all healthcare issues as "poor lifestyle decisions" and social programs as "like slavery". Much easier to feel better about a child dying because they can't get access to basic healthcare if you can just hand-wave it away as "poor lifestyle decisions."

Your attitude is sickening to me. Why not just go full-on black hat and say "fuck the sick" instead of pretending all healthcare is due to "poor lifestyle decisions"? At least that would be intellectually honest, and no less evil.

Switzerland was on the gold standard until 1999. Since abandoning the gold standard, inflation in Switzerland has been minimal.

Clearly abandoning the gold standard does not necessarily lead to inflation. You haven't even shown a correlation here, much less causation.

I get that the guy is angry. I would be too if I got locked out of my accounts, but this is a ludicrous accusation -- the new definition of hate speech?

"Never attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity." The idea that google is waging war on this guy because of election predictions he made 12 months ago is absurd on the face of it.

Our society has been completely taken over by Hofstadter's [paranoid style](https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-am...). Everything is taken as evidence of some vast conspiracy of fascists or communists. (A couple weeks ago there was an article posted here alleging that google was suppressing anti-communist websites.)

Replace "freemasons" or "international bankers" with "social justice warriors" and we're right back in the 1950's again.

If Spectacles take off, they can always "grow it and bro it" later. Starting off with a focused target market seems like a reasonable approach to me.

I guess that raises more questions than it answers. What about the rise of cable news? That tracks the change in the graph more closely than the rise of social networks. What about 9/11 and the war on terrorism? A significant portion of the US population lost their shit and never got it back. I'm not sure we should pin all or even most of the change on social media.

I think you have a point that the "good old days fallacy" has been around since forever. But it also seems like something dramatically changed 15 years ago or so.

"so little trust and understanding"

Assuming smugly that people who disagree with you don't understand how capitalism works is childish and totally out of line.

In general, please try to make your point in a way that doesn't assume people who disagree with you are ignorant or stupid. Nobody here is saying that regulation makes everything better. It's a strawman.

> Since all new creativity is held hostage in the hands of insensitive investors who promote the development of White business leaders to the exclusion of any other forms of creativity. Seventy five percent of all investment dollars are placed into the hands of White men. In the tech industry, most companies are run by, lead by, and pay the bulk of their company’s value to White men, the primary beneficiaries of such investment effort.

1. This certainly doesn't posit that all white people live perfect lives.

2. This is 74 words out of a 2600 word long essay, for crying out loud.

3. He's not wrong. If you're concerned with "wealthy vs not wealthy" it's entirely relevant that one particular cohort is far more likely to be in the wealthy group rather than other cohorts.

I get so tired of people looking to get offended by things like this.

Being technical or nontechnical is orthogonal to being able to ask the right questions about customer value. Nontechnical managers will go "framework? well if you say so" because they don't understand the tech. Technical managers will go "new framework? well if you say so" if the plan is technically well thought out, ignoring whether or not it actually creates business value.

If you wish to be taken seriously by intelligent adults, maybe try to find a way to make your point that isn't just a word salad comprised of decade-old shibboleths.