There are no 1st Amendment issues with Amber Alerts or weather alerts pushed to my phone, for example. But if CNN or Fox News are allowed to post to this proposed service, now we've got a different animal.
And, if I may, I think the point is that is all well and good, but for reliability's sake, a publicly, not privately, controlled alternative to any of the above (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, etc.) should be carefully considered. Mastodon is perfectly set up to be a valuable ADDITIONAL option for local governments using Twitter -- that doesn't mean "stop posting to Twitter," it means "also post to Mastodon" and be certain that, whatever shortcomings that may have, it's not entirely susceptible to the whims of a billionaire. Similarly, are Facebook posts by local government failing to reach users because of some change Zuck made to The Algorithm? Maybe we need to start looking into effective alternatives. If not, then we don't.
Those self-owned things, the website and RSS, already exist; all governments I’ve interacted with have one, and the subject of the article is no exception: https://news.gov.bc.ca/connect
The reality is that when it comes to spreading info to citizens you can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.
> removes the incentive to compete to be the home of corporate headquarters
No, it shifts the means of incentives. It's no longer a race to the bottom tax rate.
As I understand it, the problem with a border adjustment tax is implementation overhead; it would be expensive to audit. Noting that the IRS in the U.S. is not funded enough to investigate tax fraud as it is, this seems to be a major problem. You would also likely need foreign cooperation. There's no reason to believe a corporation headquartered in the U.S. needs to be truthful about their foreign revenue, and how would you know if they were without a foreign government's assistance.
The problem with implementing a world-wide minimum tax rate is organization, getting all countries to agree and stand by it. This is something the world has been engaged in doing for around 100 years now. We've had failures (League of Nations) and successes. There's no guarantee of success, but importantly, tax havens can be isolated if 130+ countries agree to do so, until they follow suit.
Basically, even if global minimum tax is not the optimal solution (which remains to be shown), it's better to have a sub-optimal solution that can be implemented than an optimal solution that's impossible.
Governments should earn their taxes the same as a person should earn their income. Governments "earn" their taxes by making the benefits of operating in a nation worth the tax. Price fixing and collusion is illegal for companies to practice. Being a government doesn't remove the deleterious effects of price fixing and collusion. An international base corporate tax rate makes nations not care if the tax rate is even worth it to businesses. If the tax rate isn't worth it then a business will close or just never start.
Lets say that a corporation choosing a home nation is akin to you shopping for a good refrigerator. The refrigerator manufacturers don't like that one manufacturer is selling their equal quality fridges at 50% less than everyone else. There are two choices for manufacturers. Collude and fix the price of refrigerators or figure out what the 50% cut rate company is doing and try to compete. If the manufacturers choose collusion they can continue with business as usual without making improvements to cut cost or improve quality. But, they will cut cost, possibly sacrificing quality, as that is now the only way to increase revenue. The incentive to improve is removed and the risk of a refrigerator cabal outsider pricing at 50% increases. If the competitors instead choose to work on reducing cost or improving quality you as the consumer get cheaper higher quality fridges. Under the price fixing regime, when an outsider starts selling a fridge at 50% the fixed price the cabal either has to destroy them, bring them in the fold, or remove the price fixing.
With price fixing an outsider will always arise. Competition is the only solution that doesn't destroy itself.
> Governments should earn their taxes the same as a person should earn their income
So you're coming from the perspective that individual minimum wage is wrong, and applying that assumption everywhere. Thanks, but I absolutely disagree. I don't see a reason to discuss further when we're so far apart on our base assumptions of reality.
Yes, that is where I am coming from. In both situations the incentives are the same. Do the hard work to improve and get more or do the bare minimum and get what is required by threat of force.
> You would also likely need foreign cooperation. There's no reason to believe a corporation headquartered in the U.S. needs to be truthful about their foreign revenue
If I understand it right, you actually wouldn't need this much. Foreign revenue would be the other countries' responsibility. So the implementation would look something like a domestic VAT coupled with deductions for domestic expenses. It's true that the US doesn't have a VAT but that's been well-tested in many other places.
Agree with your conclusion though, they've got to prioritize how much time / political capital they invest into each issue and putting a huge amount of effort into this sort of thing (when it went nowhere recently and would likely go nowhere again) probably would be a mistake.
Exactly, pensions were considerably more common in the 1960s also, but at the end of the day, I don't really care if my retirement is actually funded by a pension or a 401k or by stuffing dollar bills under my mattress, I want to know when I can retire and how comfortably I can live when I retire.
Yes, getting into the weeds is valuable, but here we're talking about the money in your bank at the end of the day, and that CEO salaries haven't changed much doesn't say anything.
Yes, a CEO should be making more money than the average employee. The debate is over how much -- why do CEOs get absolutely massive bonuses and golden parachutes and stock options and for employees it's expected that you put in the work in the hope of future recompense in terms of bonuses, promotions, etc.
Didn't you just say the stock owners were being diluted by the CEO compensations? Doesn't that include the 401k and pension funds? Isn't this is a massive transfer of wealth the the managerial class, justified simply because they can do it, and leave the consequences to others to clean up.
Bingo. The massive growth in the stock market in the past 40 years is directly a result of the massive inflow of capital from middle class 401k purchases. Overinflated CEO compensation packages are a way to siphon some of this into the pockets of the ruling class.
I think the Cyclically Adjusted PE ratio is more useful in this regard. It does seem to point to overinflated prices compared to earnings. The current PE ratios are only surpassed by those during the dot-com boom when people found it difficult to create valuations grounded in reality. One theory is this is due to access to cheap capital in the last decade +
Because their decisions can drive a company into bankruptcy or transform it into a trillion dollar company. Your average line employee has no such leverage from their actions.
That would make sense as a post-exceptional-transformation windfall. Not as standard comp for keeping the seat warm while saying "yeah do more of that thing that prints money".
I don't know, but half of them are below average by definition.
Take a scan down the Fortune 500 and put a star next to each one you think has had 'exemplary leadership' rather than 'competent administration' or 're-arranging deck chairs while the titanic burns'.
The CEO of eBay got busted sending bloody pig masks to people who left bad reviews on the internet, for god's sake. These people aren't a higher plane of being.
But also, the board makes CEO decisions, and it's not totally uncommon for board members to also be CEOs of other companies, so they buy the kool-aid because they also benefit from it.
Plus, CEOs and boards don't exist in a vacuum. You've got to keep up with the Joneses if you think you're letting a good candidate get away.
Almost everyone owns stock in all the major companies - indirectly via their 401k or index fund.
To a first approximation, there are no non-stockholders.
One real question is why, when stockholders vote on CEO compensation, fund managers are allowed to cast the votes of fund investors. If you invest money on behalf of other people, there are all sorts of fiduciary duties to keep the money separate, but that money gets you votes, and you get to vote them according to your personal preferences, not according to the preferences of your investors.
1) The CEO compensation, while grotesque, is a drop in the bucket. Would I avoid eBay because they've employed a revolving door of terrible CEOs? No, I avoid them because they're a bum opportunity. The CEOs know this, better ones go elsewhere, yet somehow they still pay top dollar for the leftovers they can get.
Good company, bad company, the CEO compensation won't drive the stock price. It's still grotesque and unnecessary, you could pay half or less and get the same mediocre result in most cases.
2) I lied, I don't avoid eBay. I buy the same index funds as everyone else. Shareholder activism is a myth right now unless you're one of a very few people controlling in actuality a very small % of the market.
Compared to Steve Jobs, Cook is milquetoast. He's fantastic at supply chain management, and milking existing products/services. He's exactly what stockholders have wanted for a CEO after the Jobs died. Someone to basically do the same thing for decades. Milk the iPhone for all it's worth.
Yes, I know he's introduce the Watch and AirPods. But he also introduced the HomePod. He's no tech visionary, and eventually his value will drop and Apple will need a new leader. But for now, he's warming the seat.
Do you really believe Cook is just warming a seat? There's a lot more to running Apple than being a visionary.
I'm an Apple shareholder since before Cook, and admit I was skeptical about Cook. But as a shareholder I'm very happy with Cook's leadership. If his compensation is $$$$, that's cool with me.
BTW, Jobs was a visionary, sure. But that wasn't enough - he nearly wrecked Apple through mismanagement. Next Inc. bombed due to his mismanagement as well. But Jobs learned how to run a company with his management of Pixar, and then returned to Apple as still a visionary, but with management competence.
But hey, I might be wrong. Let us know how your shorts on Apple are working out.
I don't own any stocks directly, I prefer index funds. But I've owned Apple hardware since 1984, so perhaps I've invested in Apple through side channels.
I'm sure Apple shareholders are happy with Cook's leadership. AAPL has done very very well in the last 20 years. But is that due to Cook, or is that inherent in being CEO of a company that
created the iPhone? Would Scott Forstall have been as effective in driving the stock price higher had Tim stayed as COO?
Imagine Apple today without the iPhone. It would still be a 2nd tier personal computer manufacturer with a recognizable design aesthetic. But everything that makes Apple the trillion dollar gorilla stems from the iPhone. Not only the outsized profits from selling 200m units a year, but without the iPhone, there's no iPad. No watch (same cpu designs). And no M1 Macs to boost sales to 2x the previous year. All stemming from a bet Apple made in 2004.
And when they drive it into bankruptcy, the company will still go to court to argue that these bonuses, compensation, parachutes should be paid, regardless. Win-win game. Except for the employees and shareholders.
There's of course legal ways to do similarly. I thought this was a good example of John Krafcik's resignation which to a certain extent meets the same aim:
As is nearly always the case with these types of conspiracy theories, never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
More charitably, you can explain most of these actions (maybe excepting Robinhood's actions) by the mods of these platforms and locations being roughly as surprised by things as Melvin Capital.
What, today, is stopping a billionaire from parking nearly anywhere they like and then just paying the fine, over and over? Or, beyond that, the quality of civil or criminal defense you can expect to receive is directly correlated to how much you're willing to pay.
> Signer agrees to become contract murderer unless pre-empted by local laws and regulations.
I'm over-exaggerating, and I get the value when it's prohibitively expensive to write a TOS when it's essentially impossible to pre-emptively vet the legality of all possible clauses internationally as laws constantly change. But if the clause I wrote is technically valid, then what's the point? Just write a short phrase saying "We're going to do whatever we like, unless it's prohibited by law. Accept? Y/N"
Before we get to the answer we need to realize that a slippery slope is often presented to make the opposition realize that they're being irrational or missing something. Once this realization has been made it is often also unnecessary to actually answer the question.
Engaging in this type of discussion leaves the choice of where to stop at the individual level to justify and not swallowing what an expert says today or tomorrow and ignoring all information left out of the communication.
Forcing mask wearing probably won't go anywhere federally. The states is where it becomes a problem.
The elected authorities, whether local, regional, state, or federal, preferably as advised by trained and trusted experts.
> Should we always be forced to wear masks going forward given that we've been made aware of the efficacy?
If that makes sense, as determined by the above answer.
> Why stop at Corona? Flu is next.
If that makes sense. In fact, there would almost certainly be a net benefit to society for the majority of the population to wear masks during flu season, and literally no reasonable downside. But it won't happen, despite making rational, logical sense, because our society can't even get people to wear masks, maintain social distance, wash your hands, etc. during an actual, honest-to-God pandemic.
> Who decides when we are required to wear masks?
See the first answer.
The value of your "slippery slope" argument doesn't seem to be there to me; you seem to have already decided that the buck of mask wearing or public health in general stops at the individual level, ignoring the fact that that's simply not true. Cue rehashed arguments discussing seat belts, nudity, etc. etc.
> Forcing mask wearing probably won't go anywhere federally.
Cue: I'm not comfortable giving that type of power to the elected officials. Their power should be limited.
Cloth masks aren't effective yet we're all pretendying, even the experts (who were all laughing at the plebs who were scared before mask mandates, wanting to wear masks and not knowing how to use them) [I'm in a very large medical community and this was the general sentiment before the WHO and Fauci changed their tune]
Experts disagree. Politicians fear blowback so they see who the media are agreeing with and then do that. They aren't rational actors.
And no, mask wearing has many negative effects.
E.g. of Experts and Politicians making mistakes: lockdowns, they have much worse negative effects than positive but they look politically good. Experts don't present any reason for them that is backed scientifically as a whole.
Who should we give the right to take away our freedom?
Experts lie, politicians lie and they do don't care. I don't trust them with that much power.
You seriously don't think "we should decrease the number of people born with Down Syndrome" is a morally defensible position either?
I don't think "we should decrease the number of people born homosexual" is a morally defensible position, but decreasing incidence of Down Syndrome, or autism, or Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, are absolutely morally defensible positions, and in fact, are regularly done -- people everywhere socially discourage pregnant mothers from drinking alcohol, for example, and I don't think the discouraging third-parties are the ones who are in the wrong in that situation.
I think having a child AT ALL, regardless of any other concerns, is an individual decision that should be made by mature, capable adults. I don't think it's necessarily a "morally defensible position" to have a third kid when you're struggling to take care of the previous two just because you belong to a religion that thinks prophylactics are immoral, and I would never, for example, judge a potential parent who decided to terminate a pregnancy because they were told it is unlikely their child will be born alive, and even if it is, would be unlikely to live for long.
Yeah, I'm not arguing abortion is bad. I'm saying that we should deeply consider the morality of choosing to do it in such cases, because people with Down Syndrome or autism or other such differences can totally lead reasonably healthy and happy lives.
Nowhere did I claim that it is reasonable to "judge a potential parent who decided to terminate a pregnancy because they were told it is unlikely their child will be born alive" (in fact, I'm Polish and am horrified at the new law recently passed in the country in which I was born, which specifically intends to do away with this specific act).
I think it's fine if you can't support another kid because you can't support another kid. I think it's fine if your kid won't live because your kid won't live.
But people with Down Syndrome and autism do live. And I think we should strongly consider the morality of the situation before going down that road. If someone is already struggling enough as it is keeping their lives together and finds out that this is the case, I would at least say it's more defensible than otherwise, because it is indeed harder to provide for some kids. But all kids are hard to provide for in their own way, and perhaps that person shouldn't be having kids anyway if that's the case. After all, we can't ever test for everything; it's entirely possible still to have a kid with something that can't be tested.
And people do discourage pregnant mothers from drinking, because that's an easy step to take to ensure higher chances of a happy and healthy baby. It's a false equivalence to compare that to terminating a potential life.
I won't judge people for their decisions. They have their reasons for doing what they'll do. And I'm absolutely unabashedly pro-choice. And of course I would have a hard time dealing with hearing that my kid will end up having Downs or whatever. But I think there is an aspect of morality to consider here, and the plain-and-simple "we should decrease the number of people born with Down Syndrome", presented without exception (as you put it, "absolutely"), does not fit my view. It's too close to eugenics for my taste.
> People are alarmed by these moves because they represent a wider trend in which the left increasingly does not recognise the right as politically legitimate, i.e. they do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist.
Those two things aren't remotely the same. The legitimacy of the right in the U.S. is an open question when they participate in direct voter suppression, gerrymandering, continually lose popular votes but still gain controlling power of the strongest apparatus of the government, have used that power to appoint (shortly) 16 of the last 20 SCOTUS Justices going back to 1969 using rules they are quite literally making up on the spot. "Consent of the governed" is a valid question under these scenarios.
But you need to provide some very strong evidence "they [the left] do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist." You're using some very strong language based on very weak arguments.
The fact you, presumably, pass off things such as Russian interference in fair and free elections as "conspiracy theories" should, god willing, be absolutely damning to your credibility. Or that "herd immunity strategies," as mentioned in the tweet you link, should be presented as a valid and equal alternative strategy to NOT LETTING PEOPLE DIE; you're arguing flat-earthers should be given equal footing in a debate with NASA.
Keith Olbermann, currently hosting on the mainstream news channel of YouTube (/s) after being evicted from actual mainstream news, is the opposite of strong evidence. Further:
> "The hate he has triggered, the Pandora’s box he has opened, they will not be so easily destroyed,” he said. “So, let us brace ourselves. The task is twofold: the terrorist Trump must be defeated, must be destroyed, must be devoured at the ballot box, and then he, and his enablers, and his supporters, and his collaborators, and the Mike Lees and the William Barrs, and the Sean Hannitys, and the Mike Pences, and the Rudy Gullianis and the Kyle Rittenhouses and the Amy Coney Barretts must be prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society while we try to rebuild it and to rebuild the world Trump has nearly destroyed by turning it over to a virus."
The implication "should not be allowed to exist" is very different from "prosecuted and convicted and removed from our society." So even taking a marginalized voice talking from his YouTube channel, arguing that the left believes the right "should not be allowed to exist" is a ridiculous stretch.
His YT channel is small....but he has ~1M Twitter followers. Put in context, that's 2x the followers of TYT's Cenk Uygur, 4x as many as Jimmy Diore, and just a few hundred k short of Steven Crowder. That is not indicative of a "marginalized" voice IMO, and your only defense of his position boils down to "Hey he's not advocating for genocide, just mass incarceration of our political opponents." That strikes me as a tone-deaf position to take on a social media site where hand-wringing over the fate of the Uighurs in China is so en vogue...
Unless you have better evidence than Keith Olbermann to back your statement, I think we're done here. I'm not going to go back and forth about Twitter followers as a valid metric for gauging public opinion on genocide...
you need to provide some very strong evidence "they [the left] do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist."
You literally start by saying:
The legitimacy of the right in the U.S. is an open question
Perhaps you're using an odd definition of legitimate, but generally for a political movement to be recognised as legitimate means it is allowed to take part in the political process, to be supported by people without suppression and so on. Terrorist groups are not politically legitimate, political parties with voters are. It gets tricky in the unusual cases where political parties and terror groups become closely related, as was seen with Sinn Fein and the IRA.
You yourself are now arguing that maybe the right isn't legitimate because of a bog-standard list of leftist talking points, none of which are obvious or uncontroversial, for example what you call "voter suppression" is more obviously interpreted as enforcing existing laws that define who can vote; calling this "suppression" implies that no such laws do or should exist. But nobody is arguing that, are they?
But you need to provide some very strong evidence "they [the left] do not believe non-leftists should be allowed to exist."
This thread is literally about Twitter shutting down a conservative newspaper that has reported news relevant to an election in which conservatives are competing. The NY Post and the story it reported no longer exists on Twitter. How much clearer a piece of evidence do you want?
And again - hold a mirror up and look at the reflection. Your post ends by saying that I should not be given "equal footing in debate" i.e. that people with those views should be (debate-wise) wiped out, not allowed to exist at all. You are the embodiment of what I'm talking about.
By "not allowed to exist" I don't mean literally executed in a mass genocide of half the voting population. Using such an interpretation is very bad faith, assuming that's what you're getting at.
I mean not allowed to be visible, to play any part in the public sphere, not allowed to "exist" in the sense of mattering to the structures of power in a country. Being forced to be invisible, forgotten, erased from the written and spoken record. And with that far more rational interpretation you can hopefully see that your views definitely qualify.
There are no 1st Amendment issues with Amber Alerts or weather alerts pushed to my phone, for example. But if CNN or Fox News are allowed to post to this proposed service, now we've got a different animal.