> Near zero interest rates + COVID remote work + PPP loans = Booming economy
One more factor to add to the equation...when everyone went remote during COVID, all brick-and-mortar businesses had to quickly move to conducting their businesses online driving demand for SWEs.
> Puff piece with 1000+ words that doesn't ever assert anything in particular that the author was wrong about
His article mostly talks about other things but I think his title is sufficient. He says that he never thought that the news would become so unreliable that he would end up getting his news from randos on Bluesky who simply share what they know without an intention to monetize it.
Personally, I think the Firefox browser right-click options are one of the more useful right-click menus. The one on the Apple OS is a better example of excessive and worthless.
> Maybe I'm just remembering badly, but I don't remember encountering this twenty years ago; back then the rules were clear that you either didn't accept credit payments, or you did and it was the same price as cash
But before that it was commonplace to see discounts for cash, especially at gas stations. Then credit-card issuers started prohibiting it in service agreements, but that was outlawed during the Obama administration.
From my understanding, it wasn't the bombing that motivated Japan to surrender even though this is commonly taught, it was the recent Soviet declaration of war and fear of invasion/occupation.
I think the logic goes something like...in a democracy, government policies should reflect the will of the people. The majority of the people are against exporting jobs overseas when the economy at home is not doing well, especially when the people that control the hiring are becoming obscenely wealthy at the cost of impoverishing the workers.
Who else first? Doesn't every democratic countries populace broadly attempt to vote in their own interests? Was there ever a pretext that they shouldn't?
There’s a lot you can do to directly help other countries that indirectly helps your own country. Creating a rules based system (vs a “might makes right” system) means the powerful don’t just get to take everyone shit, but it does mean everyone gets an opportunity to prosper.
Allowing US companies to find talent abroad means those companies can deliver better products and makes competition more viable (ie lowers prices for consumers). If we only care about “jobs” and the size of paychecks, then protectionism is the way to go. But if we actually want to provide broad based prosperity (especially for our own citizenry), then you should not protect a small subset of high paid workers.
Why should American voters be expected to vote in India's interests? Cheaper shit isn't good enough, not least because that derives from the premise that companies pass savings on to consumers.
Companies don’t pass savings to consumers, competition does.
Why should American voters pay more for everything so that SWEs can be paid exorbitantly?
I shouldn’t need to explain to you why protectionism is bad. There’s 200 years of economic research on this and it shows that protectionism always backfires.
You're just regurgitating old arguments which were once used to persuade Americans that outsourcing manufacturing to China was in America's best interest. Few Americans still find this persuasive, you can find senile babyboomers who still profess these kind of beliefs, but that's about it.
Besides, in trying to formulate an explaination for how offshoring is actually in America's interests, aren't you tacitly acknowledging that it is only right and reasonable to expect American voters to vote for what they perceive to be American interests?
The old arguments were right. Americans live materially better lives than anyone else. People are disenchanted because of the things that can’t be outsourced (housing, education, healthcare) have become so expensive.
The America First doctrine, in practice, has meant using power to do things that nominally appear in our interest, but don’t account for the second and third order effects. ie bully allied nations into accepting high tariffs without reciprocating, which doesn’t account for our own industries being hurt by higher input prices, a new reluctance to enter the US market, less competition, etc.
Protecting US workers from competition nominally helps those select workers, but it also makes them uncompetitive, steers businesses from setting up shop here at all, makes things more expensive for US consumers, and reduces innovation and upskilling.
Things become a great deal more complicated when you consider the US is not the only country on earth, and the vast majority of countries do not have the well-being of their population at heart.
The extreme cases are well known. But let's just give the statistic: the average global wage is $24000 in PPP, according to the UN. In other words, such a global system will be on average a 75% pay cut for US workers.
By the way, that's a PPP paycut, in other words a paycut without anything getting 1 cent cheaper. Not your housing. Not your food. Not your playstation. Not your cost of living. We'll be back to deciding which day in the month we'll have a little bit of meat.
The scary thing if you've ever been there is that India actually cares more than most countries for it's people.
And the truly terrifying thing is that income is distributed along a power law. In other words, it'd be a 50% pay cut for Donald Trump and a 90% pay cut for you and me.
https://www.canarymedia.com/articles/solar/virginia-to-becom...
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