It could be because the value of the policy changes due to changing circumstances, like switching career fields to a less dangerous job or getting a favorable medical diagnosis. Or regulatory arbitrage, perhaps Apollo can price life insurance policies more accurately because they don't have to comply with the same regulations insurance companies do.
Man, taking Spanish in high school blew my mind. I'm a native English speaker with excellent grammar (I missed one question on the reading and writing section of the SAT), but it's all subconscious. I just go with what sounds right when I read aloud in my head, and it's almost always correct. When we started learning about conjugating verbs in Spanish class I was like, we do this in English? I had never thought about it before. I still haven't thought about it, I have no idea what tenses we have in English. But I can speak and write it just fine! Brains are pretty crazy.
You're making some extremely strong claims, with minimal evidence. I don't deny that the CIA can be pretty nasty to 2nd and 3rd world governments, but claiming the US is a "colonial overlord" over our European allies is just not true. The first priority of our European allies is domestic politics; just like us, everyone wants to get re-elected. Sometimes domestic politics push countries towards the US, sometimes they pull them away. Countries like Hungary and Turkey make diplomatic trouble for the US, and we don't launch coups against them. The US would love it if Germany built up a decent military, but Germany isn't because the political will just isn't there. Between the 60s and the 90s, France literally left NATO. Europe in general has been extremely slow to scale up artillery production to support Ukraine (the US has been better, although but not by much); if the US had as much power over Europe as you think we do, we would have just told Europe to up production and they would have. But this did not happen.
Ever wondered why the population of Tokyo keeps going up? Hint: it's because of the apartments
> In the past half century, by investing in transit and allowing development, the city has added more housing units than the total number of units in New York City. It has remained affordable by becoming the world’s largest city. It has become the world’s largest city by remaining affordable.
> Those who want to live in Tokyo generally can afford to do so. There is little homelessness here. The city remains economically diverse, preserving broad access to urban amenities and opportunities. And because rent consumes a smaller share of income, people have more money for other things — or they can get by on smaller salaries — which helps to preserve the city’s vibrant fabric of small restaurants, businesses and craft workshops.
This a common misunderstanding of the international laws of war, and international law in general.
In our personal lives the government can compel us to follow the law with the threat of overwhelming force; if I break the law I will be arrested, and regardless of how much I fight back I will not be able to stop it. Laws in our everyday lives are like commands from a parent to a child; the government, as the parent, can and will compel the child's obedience.
International law is different. If a state breaks international law, there is no entity willing or capable of using overwhelming force to compel obedience. States have armies and some have nuclear weapons; the amount of force required to compel a state to behave a certain way is huge, and generating that force is extremely costly. When states break international law there are consequences, but at the end of the day violence is generally not on the table.
Effective international law is a balancing act. An international standard of warfare that placed extremely strict standards on when it was permissible to kill civilians would make fighting a war significantly harder. No state would obey such a law because winning the war is the absolute highest priority, making the law worthless. Instead, laws of war try to outlaw actions that don't affect the ability of a country to win a war. No chemical or biological weapons (high explosives are more effective), humane treatment of prisoners (discourages the enemy fighting to the death), and no killing civilians unless in the pursuit of a military objective (if it's not in pursuit of a military objective, then it's a waste of resources). The goal of the laws of war is to prevent unnecessary violence, not prevent violence altogether. It's a case of "perfect is the enemy of good."
That's to be expected, a dollar in India goes much further than a dollar in the US. https://data.oecd.org/conversion/purchasing-power-parities-p... says a dollar in India can buy you about 23 times as much stuff as that same dollar could in the US, although I'd expect that number to drop significantly for highly technical projects like a moon landing.
Price difference applies only to wages and other non-portable costs. The prices for products and commodities which can be easily moved are roughly equal on global markets due to arbitrage. You can't get the raw materials or computer chips any cheaper in India.
The world is not zero sum! The average human is better off now then they were any number of decades ago, and things have improved for those on the bottom even more. 38% of the world lived in extreme poverty in 1990, by 2019 that number was down to 9%. In that same time frame access to basic sanitation increased from 32% to 56%, life expectancy increased from 64 years to 71 years, and so on with various of quality of life statistics.
Designing an economic system for "fairness" is a horrible idea. I would rather live in an economic system with high inequality, high standards of living, and high social mobility, than in a system with low inequality, low standards of living, and low social mobility. Inequality is bad in the same way that debt or medicine is bad: the danger is in the dose. A society with extreme inequality is probably screwed, but a society with moderate inequality is not necessarily worse off than a society with low inequality.
Wealth taxes have been tried many times, they don't work very well.
> In the natural world hoarding works in the opposite way. A stash of nuts doesn't magically grow. Quite the opposite. Real effort has to be expended to preserve the stash.
So you would prefer to spend your time roaming the forest in proletariat ecstasy looking for more nuts, rather than using the nuts to plant some trees?
> So you would prefer to spend your time roaming the forest in proletariat ecstasy looking for more nuts, rather than using the nuts to plant some trees?
Planting trees would be productive activity, not hoarding. This is exactly the type of behaviour that should be rewarded. Of course, we need people to have access to resources in order to engage in productive activity (in this case land).
Regarding your comment about the world not being zero sum, I agree to an extent (hence my comment that it is largely zero sum). Obviously we can - through productive activity - 'create wealth' in many ways. Another commenter gave the example of turning sand into silicon chips. My concern though - and where I think a zero sum situation exists - is with those resources that are fundamental to security, agency, and well being like land and clean water. I don't want my children to grow up in a world where they live to 120 but all of those resources are already hoarded and the prices are so high that they have little to no chance of getting a share. A world where only a few have access to use natural resources for their own benefit is a crappy world however you look at it.
> Wealth taxes have been tried many times, they don't work very well.
There's a whole debate to be had here, but I think I'll just say that I don't think that this is the case.
The whole point being made in the video (which I think very few here actually watched) is that the only ones who benefit from this contracting/expanding are the top 1% (realistically more like 0.1%).
If the economy is growing (not a zero sum game as you say), but the economic ability to own assets is decreasing then you are creating a situation where after some time all assets are owned by only very few. I'm not sure if you consider that a good basis for society. I certainly would prefer my children not to live in a cyberpunk distopia.
That's barbaric. White collar crime is a policy choice. Economies require a certain amount of slack in order to function. If an economy had a zero tolerance policy for white collar crime than nothing would ever get done, because differentiating between fraud, incompetence, and bad luck is extremely difficult in all but the most straightforward of cases. If we wanted to de-incentivize white collar crime we have so many options that are (a) more humane, (b) more effective, and (c) less controversial. We could start prosecuting more cases of fraud, or improve regulations, or increase incentives for whisteblowing, or reform corporate governance, or any of a million other ideas.
Either that or it makes it really hard to find the person who understands the code you just changed to verify you didn't miss anything. I don't work for Facebook, but I'm often the person who does large scale refactorings - since I know I'm human I want an expert to verify those that look at all scary.
