Episode 294 has Skyler giving his commentary on the following entries to r/shitstatistssay: Alexander Finnegan writes, “Stalin and Mao never intentionally caused any famines”; @ikarlymarx writes, “the CEO of target makes 17 MILLION dollars a year, meanwhile a worker at target makes at $13/hr, that’s THEFT”; and AcceptableBother writes, “its pretty obvious that school choice is an attempt to siphon off government money to private schools with less oversight and fewer responsibilities”.
Tag: money
What I’m Thinking
1. Getting people to be rational about politics is an uphill battle during the best of times. During a global hysteria, it’s hopeless. 2. Due to this doleful realization, I refrained from discussing the lockdown when it first emerged. The best course, I deemed, was to wait for readers to simmer down. 3. Since many have now simmered down, here’s what I was thinking three months ago.
Technocracy is Evil and Inhumane
Fuck the cold metallic gloved dead hand of human chess playing technocratic ghouls who want to squelch and contain and document and track and sterilize it to death.
Curiosity: The Master Impulse
Curiosity is the greatest threat to concentrated power and prestige, so those who have power and prestige labor endlessly to create the mind-killing opposite of all curiosity. Consensus. Obedience. Being seen as “normal”, “in the know”, “respectable”.
What We Would Now Know, If Demagogues Didn’t Rule Every Country on Earth
About six months after the rise of COVID-19, humanity still doesn’t know the answers to a long list of critical questions. Yet amazingly, we have a straightforward and ethically unimpeachable way to decisively answer all of these questions – and countless more. The method is: paid voluntary human experimentation.
Sushi and Health Care
All sushi is not created equal. If I brought you a tray of gas station sushi, you’d have a different […]
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What Motivates a Billionaire?
Is money the only possible motivation for a politician or politically active individual? Of course not. It can be the main motivation for those who aren’t rich yet, but once someone is rich they still have to be motivated to use the political means against their fellow humans. Otherwise they wouldn’t.
The Other Great Shutdown
Coronavirus originated in China, migration brought it here, and suddenly life is terrible. Dogmatic libertarians can keep droning on about “liberty,” but everyone else now plainly sees that strict immigration controls could have stopped this plague – and only strict immigration controls can stop the plagues of the future. This argument sounds so right. What could possibly be wrong with it?
If Gas Prices Jump at the Pump, Thank Trump (and Other Politicians)
“Remember $2 gas?” former House Speaker Newt Gingrich asked in 2012 as he sought the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. Politicians love to remind us of low gas prices in the past and promise their return in the future. But in early April, Reuters reports, US president Donald Trump threatened to severely curtail the US government’s military relationship with Saudi Arabia unless the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) reduced oil output to drive prices back UP.
Commentary on State Capacity and State Priorities
“Caplan’s point is a good and striking one. His conclusion is fairly extraordinary, though: He is apparently claiming that all (or a plurality) of the major decision makers in the American government are power-hungry demagogues who deliberately decided to channel money into stimulus rather than research because they are bad people.”