I think this is sarcasm, but in case it's not isn't this the opposite of trickle down? Trickle down means lower taxes for the wealthy so they'll then have access to those extra funds to create jobs (through direct and indirect actions (investing in their companies, buying more stuff, etc.)). This is actually taking money away from the wealthy.
If this works (meaning NYC gets the revenue without kneecapping those extra property taxes in the long run because the wealthy bail on their second homes, which would drive down prices and therefore property taxes), it would be an anti-trickle-down win.
I'd slightly adjust what you're saying because I think in this NYC case, and oftentimes generally-speaking, those funds are not reserved solely for what would conventionally be considered social programs.
Only adding this because I think it's important to point out that tax increases that solely target the rich are not always a transfer of wealth from rich(er) to poor(er), but sometimes fund things that those rich taxpayers also benefit from (in the NYC case those funds could easily be paying part of the police, parks, sanitation, etc. budget).
I'm asking this earnestly, do you ever follow up and ask if the added money/income offsets the additional wear and tear on their vehicles? Like do most of those folks you talk to understand the potential trade off? I would think the average rideshare driver understands that generally ("of course the added mileage decreases the value of the car!"), but I wonder how many folks take the time to quantify it, even roughly. Seems like a logical follow-up question when you're interviewing/making small talk with them.
Well it's the drivers themselves who voted to join the union, so presumably there's something they want to see changed. No need to speak for people who've already found their voice.
Not sure why you want to bring race into this, people from all backgrounds have the right to free association and deserve labor representation.
I have no issues with people unionizing, I think they should use their free association power as they see fit. What I take issue with is the "exploitation" framing. Everyone working for Uber is doing so voluntarily.
A union using their power to increase workers wages is not "reducing exploitation" they are using their bargaining power just as selfishly as corporations do.
When we talk about labor negotiations, that word should indicate theres no exploitation happening, its two parties negotiating and coming to an agreement.
> When we talk about labor negotiations, that word should indicate theres no exploitation happening
So in a world where no labor negotiation is happening, is exploitation possible? If Uber drivers had no legal recourse to form a union (or no avenue to otherwise participate in genuine negotiation with their employer), would it be fair to say that they might be in an exploitative employment relationship?
> Everyone working for Uber is doing so voluntarily.
Personally I don't feel that this precludes exploitation taking place. Exploiting someone is taking advantage of their hard circumstances or lack of alternatives to unethically profit (in the usage that I'm familiar with). For example I would consider hiding fare pricing breakdowns from employees and consumers, so that you can leverage their lack of information to increase your profit share, to be 'exploitative'; particularly if you hold a virtual monopoly on the taxi market in an area. For an example outside the gig-work world I'd point to price-gouging as another type of 'voluntary' exploitation; consumers may be 'consenting' to pay extremely elevated prices, but if they have no meaningful alternative and genuinely require what is being sold then it's not really 'consent' so much as 'resignation'. IMO true consent requires genuine options, not just that you signed your name on the dotted line.
yes, that is why price gouging and monopolies are illegal and employment agreements are not.
so again, unless you think all trade is exploitative, im not understanding your argument. Selling labor for money is the exact same transaction as walking into Walmart and buying a banana.
> Selling labor for money is the exact same transaction as walking into Walmart and buying a banana.
In the same comment you say that the government has to help guarantee that Walmart won't exploit you in this banana purchase transaction by outlawing price gouging and monopolization. If labor is the same type of transaction, it stands to reason that certain types of employment can be exploitative, despite the 'voluntary nature' of the transaction. Is your issue with the 'Uber exploits their contractors' framing simply based in the fact that Uber has not broken any labor laws?
Since you're having trouble following me I'll give a quick summary here. You initially said:
> if all these drivers are getting horribly exploited why are they doing it?
My point is simply that this is crap reasoning: people voluntarily participate in exploitative interactions all the time if they lack genuine alternatives.
Can you shed a bit more light on this? I can't find any evidence that there are that many fatalities related to that plane, at least related to its operations in flight. Seems like there are few or if my quick look shows even zero fatalities related to it flying. You wrote "associated" but can you define what you mean by that? During manufacturing, maintenance and other non-flight-related incidents?
Not sure if this is too high level, but do you have a "dashboard" of sorts for very high level US immigration stats for tech you could share? Perhaps you have access to a series of charts that show overall visa applications, then broken down by type, the change over time (by year, for instance) and then the approval/denial rates and the change in those rates over time?
You obviously have a front-row seat to how current US immigration policy is impacting tech and so would love to see some high level stats showing the actual change.
I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be, but I'm still shocked to see things like this. And I'm fully aware of Trump's Scotland experience and how that contributed or directly led to this, but, still, shocked. And then I'm also shocked because I know that at least half, if not a good bit more, of US citizens are in agreement with this strategy. Not sure how I can still be shocked but here I am.
And I say that not as some rabid renewables person. Just the insane binary thinking, regardless of the dollars and cronyism at work. There's zero room for nuance, which I guess is my biggest complaint about the world at large.
Aside: people who think climate change will be the death of us all, and sooner than later, I get it, and I fully appreciate you pushing for a cleaner and more livable world. At this point I'm just going to sit in the corner and hope you, and China, figure it out and then it spreads quickly to the rest of the world, which I think at this point is pretty much a foregone conclusion barring a nuclear war (will refrain from commenting about how the likelihood of that has ticked up the past couple of weeks in an area teeming with (sarcastically shocked this time!) fossil fuels).
I'm always gobsmacked when Trump says things like, "We need to get rid of all the wind turbines! They are killing all the birds! Look at the foot of any tower and you'll see nothing but dead birds!"
Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.
> Is there a single person who things Trump gives a single damn about the birds? It is obviously just a pretext.
This can be seen by the changes to the interpretation of the 1918 Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA) his administration made in 2017 during his first term.
Briefly, they said it only prohibited intentional killing of birds. So say I wanted to pave over some wetlands that are a crucial nesting grounds for some birds that are covered by the MBTA to build a parking lot.
Before, the near universal interpretation of the MBTA by nearly everyone in any of the countries that are a party to the treaty (US, Canada, Mexico, Japan, and Russia) was that I can't put my parking lot there.
Under the Trump interpretation as long as I'm not building my parking lot there to intentionally kill the birds I can do it.
This was overturned in court in 2020. Just before leaving office in 2021 they tried to again make that the interpretation.
Wind turbines are also miniscule compared to issues like pollution, land use, windows, and cats. Also you can track migration and turn them off at key times if it's a huge issue (this is part of the motivation for research I'm going to do later as part of my master's dealing with tracking hawk flocks via weather radar).
Wind turbines are an issue but approximately 0% of the 30% decline in US birds since the 1970s
Edit: to be specific to Trump, funding for bird conservation has been an issue under his administrations and he's weakened things like migratory bird treaty act. Obviously he doesn't care about birds and the bird community is very frustrated with him
Never thought about it, but that's a great point and comparison. From quick Google search: 365 million and 988 million birds die every year from window collisions (that's US alone). Windmills/turbines: 140,000 and 679,000. Then if you do per windmill vs. per building obviously the windmills are going to "win," but it's the absolute that would seem to matter in this case.
As you said, that has nothing to do with the actual preference for fossils vs. turbines, but a great point nonetheless.
Domestic cats kill on the order of 100x as many birds as windmills do.
Fossil fuels also kill millions of animals every year (not just birds), and harm the health of humans. Even ignoring the long-term effects of CO2, fine particulates cause respiratory problems, higher blood pressure, and can cause cancer. The tricky bit is you can draw a straight line from the burning of coal to any particular (heh heh) death, it is just a statistical shift in health outcomes.
Anyway, all of that absolutely dwarf the birds getting killed by wind farms.
Yeah, I'm your parent and I think I wrote that reply without reading it over because I was attempting to point out, with numbers, how absurd it is that anyone would say "windmills are bad because of how many birds they kill" as if that's a logical argument vs. the countless other things that kill birds en masse.
Yeah, see the reply I left with your sibling. I am in full agreement with you and wrote my comment way too quickly because I was trying to rebut the argument that windmills are in any way responsible for some crazy number of bird deaths.
Since you wrote "honest question" I feel like I should answer... I expected what's happening and I expect even worse in the future. And goes to show you (I!) can still be shocked even when you're expecting some pretty rough stuff.
I would have expected them not to vote a primitive person. And the most shocking part is people pretending he's got some sort of master plan or that the rest of us are just not seeing his genius. Absolute cinema, I swear.
This might surprise you, but only a minority of eligible voters vote. So while it looks like 50% of people believe this is a good strategy and we should do it based on the percentage of people who voted for Trump, in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good. The problem is that few of those people vote.
So in all seriousness, if we could get a significant fraction of the young people who are negatively impacted by these policies to actually vote against the people enacting them we could see real change. But if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on then nobody will do anything about it until it's too late and we're shooting at or throwing rocks at each other.
> if we keep telling them everyone believes in this stuff and your vote doesn't count and so on
I don’t know if you can fix lazy. Turning out new voters basically happens once a generation. The rest tell themselves tales that their vote could never matter, and in doing that, subtly endorse the status quo.
This is kind of why I ultimately find cynicism to be inherently lazy. This is coming from a very cynical (and often lazy) person.
It takes no effort to be cynical, I can tell myself "everything sucks and I shouldn't care because nothing matters anyway" and justify not doing anything I want. I can justify not voting, I can justify not helping someone if I see them struggling on the street, I can justify not even improving myself.
In the last couple years I have been trying my best to override my cynical tendencies because ultimately I think that they are bad for me. I vote in every election I am able to because even if it's infinitesimal, I at least tried to do something to avoid whom I deem bad people getting into office.
Agree. And look, being cynical and just minding your own matters is fine. It means the system is working well enough for that person that doing anything isn’t actually worth it. But those people are also electorally—and more broadly, politically—irrelevant. So if you’re trying to do something, betting on them tends to be a losing pitch.
I relate to the feeling. I am extremely cynical. I fully believe the world is fucked and we are in for a very turbulent 50-100 years. I still work to improve myself and the world because WTF else are you going to do? At least doing something feels better than doing nothing.
I've just grown to really respect older people who manage to stay excited and optimistic. It's so much easier to become a cynic, and I think it required effort on their end to try and be a positive person.
Your comment is extremely reductionist and reverses causality for a large number of voters. Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency. So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power many voters (correctly) conclude that their vote will not lead to meaningful change.
> Both political parties have multi-decade track records of aggressively supporting pro-corporate political agendas at the expense of their constituency
Someone only tuning into general elections and making this complaint is either not intellectually there or plain lazy. Very few places in this country have zero competitive elections on the ballot. And none exist where calling electeds and showing up to advocate don’t move the needle. Doing those things takes effort, however, and I concede that for a lot of people that effort isn’t worth it since they’re comfortable enough—personally—with the status quo.
The flip side is that leaves a lot more room for everyone else. It’s genuinely surprising how accessible power in America is once you start wielding it. That sucks when nobody is watching but a few paid interests. It gets interesting when you find yourself, repeatedly, as the only person in the room with the levers.
That elections are "competitive" is utterly irrelevant in a political system where local, state, and federal legislation is almost exclusively drafted by lobbyists. Lobbyists who in addition to supplying pre-written legislation also supply staffers with pre-formatted position statements to distribute to anyone who bothers contacting their office about said.
In practice that "competition" you seem so taken by produces nice sound bites and some column inches on whatever culture war rag is being waved in the face of the citizenry, and literally nothing of substance that addresses any of the myriad slow burning economic and systemic crises that have been building for the last 40 years.
Using agriculture as a microcosm for the larger economy there has been nothing proposed much less ratified to address the complete chokehold Monsanto, John Deer, Cargill, and Tyson Foods have on every aspect of the agricultural industry . And they've had literal decades to make a move.
Princeton University released a study 16 years ago that concluded the US was a de facto oligarchy and if anything legislative capture has only deepened in the US since then. Hell at the local level I've watched the county planning board float a ballot initiative to greenlight a major construction project which was soundly rejected by local voters. Net result: 5 years later they broke ground on the project anyway. So you can tell me there's movable needles out there until you're blue in the face, let's see some reciepts.
> So in light of literal decades of watching prospects decline regardless of which party is currently in power
Quick question: how many _months_ total in the last quarter century have the Dems had the Presidency, Senate, and House at the same time.
The answer is 47. Forty seven total months. Out of 300. We got the ACA (Obamacare) and the Inflation Reduction Act during those brief time periods, too.
The ACA was poorly camouflaged pork for the insurance industry and healthcare statistics have continued to decline since it was passed. Who did the IRA pay off?
> in reality a minority of people in the US believe this is good.
I'm not convinced. The reason why many of these people don't vote is because they don't think Trump is that bad. They probably don't agree with everything, but that's true no matter who is in office.
> I know this US government is fully-committed to fossil fuels and about as rabidly anti-renewables as can be,
Don't fall for the political narratives, they are designed to distract you while the theft is taking place. The sponsors of the circus are rabidly cynical and pro-selfish. They are spreading the narratives, not believing in them. There is certainly a few conservatives in power who hold that the earth is only 6000 years old, who see no other option than burning down the town as a way to escape confrontation with progress and emancipation. But this is mainly what kleptocracy looks like.
The narratives work though, that is the sad reality. News anchors and the public are stuck in a loop about "children being forced to change sex, woke, climate hoax, but her e-mails, but Biden, ...", anything but what is happening at the crime scene.
- Widespread arrests and murder / deportations of US citizens.
- Federal agents routinely kidnap pregnant child abuse victims so they can be transported to Texas where they're denied health care + forced to carry their assailant's child to term.
- Blowing up fishermen + using the footage in weird 80's movie montage propaganda films.
- Installing censors at most news organizations in the US.
And literally hundreds of comparably bad stories. They arrive at a rate of 2-3 per day, and have been for over a year.
I don't think you're wrong if the following holds true: Before the housing bubble burst, banks lent funds to countless borrowers who couldn't, ultimately, afford their mortgage payments (because the banks didn't do their due diligence when underwriting the loans). This was widespread across pretty much every bank and mortgage banker. Not sure of the actual percentage of borrowers who, when all was said and done, had no business getting a mortgage for a house or condo, but suffice it to say it was well into the double digits percentage-wise (there's much more to this than simply banks and borrowers with Wall St. playing a major role in the collapse, but just keeping things simple).
In this private credit situation the analog for the banks are these private credit funds that have raised the capital they've lent from institutions and high-net-worth individuals (as opposed to banks, which have funds from consumer deposits). The analog to the individual mortgage borrowers from 2008 are actual companies.
To connect the dots, if the private credit funds were like the banks pre-2008, where due diligence was an afterthought, then this could turn out to be similar. So the real question is: are the borrowers (businesses in this case) swimming naked? Or do you believe the private credit funds when they say they actually conducted a good amount of due diligence when extending their loans? Once you know the percent of the companies that are naked you can evaluate whether this could/would end up similar to 2008. Nobody knows that yet, even, I suspect, the private credit funds themselves.
Yes, instead of banks lending sub prime mortgages directly, it's as if they are lending to private equity groups who are then lending rather undiscerningly. Within the last week, we now have Blackstone, Blackrock, Owl, and Morgan Stanely limiting withdrawals on private credit funds. Not a good look...
Even the best due diligence can't do anything if a crisis (not necessarily banking-related, a Middle East might just do the trick) starts manifesting itself and now many of those businesses have issues in paying down the debt they owe.
Late to reply here, but, yes, agree generally, though I don't think what these private credit companies are being accused of falls into that category (i.e., I think they're being accused of playing fast and loose with their due diligence, which was baked into their competitive advantage over the banks themselves. The competitive advantage being "we'll close quickly" without all the fuss a bank would require).
I've had quite a few conversations with someone who claims to be in the know about this situation (though, really, I don't think they're any more in the know than anyone!) and they swear up and down it's all a misunderstanding, which, cynic though I may be, immediately makes me think the accusations are at least somewhat true.
"I did my due diligence but didn't anticipate these risks". Doesn't sound like due diligence to me. Not having a plan to unwind your position if SHTF doesn't sound like due diligence to me. You can argue it any way you like but it boils down to "The money was good and I didn't think the worst was gonna happen".
I agree with this and tend to think due diligence needs to not only account for the regular course of business, but also for the exceptional circumstance. You'll never be able to accuse someone of not thinking of the exceptional UPSIDE circumstance, of course. The problem is the complete ignorance of the exceptional downside. That said, your parent is right that you can't really do due diligence on "war in Iran." Instead you something like "ok, if there's a shock to the system and 20% of our loans default what does that mean for our business?"
My comment was mostly against the idea that due diligence is a silver bullet, it isn’t. Of course that it can “catch” the most egregious cases, like outright fraud, but, again, no due diligence process can read the future.
I canceled my subscription, but have not yet exported and deleted because I'm an idiot, and also because I'm not sure if deleting it will have any actual impact (is it a hard delete? Likely not, even if they say it is).
And I'm just trying to play out what happens if Anthropic, and Google (if they haven't already), capitulate. Am I just going to forego using the best models and suffer any repercussions of not having access when the people who couldn't care less if the military is using AI for illegal uses continue to leverage them? When I say illegal I'm talking about the surveillance-of-US-citizens red line Anthropic would not agree to. The autonomous weapon one I'm sure there are zero laws against and so that wouldn't actually be illegal.
Can't repeat this enough and I'd like to make sure to connect the dots. The Big Beautiful Bill that was signed into law cut taxes. To keep the US Federal Government from going (even more) into debt, Trump introduced aggressive tariffs (it doesn't matter that he introduced the tariffs before the BBB became law because he/they knew the BBB would pass and that was baked into the tariff decision).
The BBB tax cuts benefit the wealthy much more than the average person. The tariffs are borne by both the wealthy and by the average person when they buy tariffed goods, but those tariffs are easily absorbed by the wealthy while acting as an additional tax on the average person by increasing prices. This is just about as direct a transfer of wealth from the average person to the wealthy as you could possibly put into place (barring an actual transfer where the average person is taxed and those dollars are literally transferred directly into a wealthy person's bank account).
In a way, it's a genius move. Convince a healthy chunk of the US population that you're on a populist crusade to bring jobs back to America while increasing the wealth of the wealthy and taking even more of the average person's income. Don't forget that the reason the jobs were exported in the first place was to decrease costs so that, you guessed it, wealthy people would get wealthier (but at least in that scenario the cost of a tv went way down, am I right???).
All that said, I don't mean to suggest that bringing jobs back isn't actually a goal. It's just not the primary goal. My take on the priorities of the current admin's tax policy, including the tariffs (which, broken record, are taxes) 1. decrease taxes on the wealthy 2. decrease income taxes on everyone else who pays taxes 3. get "everyone else who pays taxes" to fund the decreased taxes on the wealthy 4. bring jobs back. Somewhere in there is also "create a mechanism for opaque profiteering." I'm not quite sure where that falls on the list. Cynically it's probably number 2.
A lot of words and somehow still missing the point. This is a pretty straightforward question: should the US government be able to force a company to do business with it based the government's unilateral terms? I think the answer to that ought to be no, they should not be forced. And there's no other discussion to have.
You can discuss whether a corporation is violating some law, and punish them if they are, but I don't think jumping from "corporation doesn't want to do business with the gov" to "corporation is a national security risk" makes any sense.
It's right in the post, but just to save folks a click it's a 77% drawdown in the position so it's a substantial move. I see they also trimmed Apple, but, for comparison's sake, looks like that was only a decrease of 4.3% of the position.
If this works (meaning NYC gets the revenue without kneecapping those extra property taxes in the long run because the wealthy bail on their second homes, which would drive down prices and therefore property taxes), it would be an anti-trickle-down win.
edit: grammar
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