https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...

And while there's lots of confounding issues here, like developing nations or autocracies with underreported or suspect data, it's pretty clear that some countries are doing a ton better than others. And it certainly looks to my eyes that among developed democracies, the nations with stronger popular adherence to mitigation strategies (in particular vaccination rates, but distancing and mask-wearing too) are the ones who are winning.

(And needless to say, the US is pretty much at the bottom of the list of industrial democracies.)

Having authorities (for example) scream in your face about their ability to wreck your career and that of all your friends and family is not what most people would consider "safe".

> In his recent book “The Contrarian,” journalist Max Chafkin assigns an ideology to Mr. Thiel, then defines it as “fascist” and even tries to blame this concocted “Thielism” for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. There is little doubt that the book would never have come to be had Mr. Thiel not supported Donald Trump in 2016.

I mean, OK. I guess it's probably unfair. But... to cite this kind of thing as an example of censorious excess and the decline of society and not at least nod to Thiel's own successful cancellation and destruction of Gawker media seems... logically suspect.

I mean, who is it not OK to destroy for ideological reasons and who is fair game?

If you have $20 to spend and want to do the least damage, give it to the government as tax, basically.

NFTs don't provide that, therefore they aren't a good medium of exchange. They aren't "scarce" in the way that money is or has to be.

They're also a Tulip bubble, but that's a different thing.

If you ran with a gang in your 20's, that doesn't give the government permanent access to a wire tap when you start doing social justice advocacy in your 40's.

That's right. And two months ago, with a case that had clear and obvious "constitutional concerns" (seriously, it undermined Roe!) they said "Nah, we're good" and refused to stay it. That's the problem here. They aren't making a legal finding at all, they're making a political finding. And you know it.

> The real debate is whether it is in OSHA's purview to do this

Not in this case it isn't. That hasn't even been heard yet. The question is whether or not to stay the mandate only.

Note that this is exactly the same panel of the same circuit court that found two months ago that the Texas abortion law (which clearly intersected with an existing right found by SCOTUS, that was its whole point!) was perfectly fine and not worth enjoining until a specific case came up.

This is just lawless. It's hard to imagine a more politically motivated judiciary than the fifth circuit right now. SCOTUS went along last time, I can only pray they come to their sense this round.

Second, your logic is exactly backwards. The reason you might infer a conflict of interest and thus judge someone's testimony because of their employer is that they might be induced (e.g. by being rewarded or punished) to represent their employer's opinions instead of their own. Here, they were called by the plaintiffs and are expected to testify against the interests of the State.

Exactly. So is the pandemic. And so is the resulting inflation. I think you agree with me.

Like it or not "home values" decoupled from "housing costs" over the past two decades. The reason for that metric change was to preserve equivalency, you don't get to argue backwards because of it.

The "poor" are, in fact, doing significantly better (economically, anyway) now than they were in 2019. I'll have to go look it up, but there was a great blog post a few months back looking at poverty statistics over the pandemic. The relief bills helped a ton.

And therein lies one of the big pseudo-centrist points here. A mild reduction[1] in fixed-rate entitlement programs is coming down the pipe at some point regardless. This essentially gets the hard part of that political calculus out of the way "for free" (or at least in a cheaper way, since you can blame covid).

[1] Contra the nutjobs who predict the Death of Social Security or whatnot.

(Edit: two replies have taken this out of context. Savings bonds have a minimum term of five years (well, without penalty). For them to have a negative yield, we need to see aggregate inflation >7.12% over the next five years. That's nuts, sorry. No one is predicting that.)

Your point seems mostly like demagoguery. I think the more interesting question is... is 5% actually bad? There's a real argument to be had here that rapid inflation reflects genuine improvements like rising wage levels and that it's worth paying for. Remember that the "biggest losers" in inflationary economies are people who hold assets, not investors (whose returns accomadate faster than things like loan terms) or wage workers (who don't have significant assets to depreciate and whose wages track inflation well).