South Korea certainly seems like a success, with a per capita death rate about 3% of what the US saw. In fact contrary to your point, there is a very wide spread in covid impact from nation to nation. Here's a graph of all nations with 10M+ populations (scaled to eliminate Peru, which is a significant outlier that makes the graph hard to read):
And while there's lots of confounding issues here, like developing nations or autocracies with underreported or suspect data, it's pretty clear that some countries are doing a ton better than others. And it certainly looks to my eyes that among developed democracies, the nations with stronger popular adherence to mitigation strategies (in particular vaccination rates, but distancing and mask-wearing too) are the ones who are winning.
(And needless to say, the US is pretty much at the bottom of the list of industrial democracies.)
To be clear: "safe" in this context generally implies more than merely "physically unharmed". It's quite clear that Jack Ma was coerced into giving up control of Alibaba. It seems likely that Peng Shuai is being similarly pressured.
Having authorities (for example) scream in your face about their ability to wreck your career and that of all your friends and family is not what most people would consider "safe".
The first example cites what I guess is an attempted cancellation of Peter Thiel:
> In his recent book “The Contrarian,” journalist Max Chafkin assigns an ideology to Mr. Thiel, then defines it as “fascist” and even tries to blame this concocted “Thielism” for the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. There is little doubt that the book would never have come to be had Mr. Thiel not supported Donald Trump in 2016.
I mean, OK. I guess it's probably unfair. But... to cite this kind of thing as an example of censorious excess and the decline of society and not at least nod to Thiel's own successful cancellation and destruction of Gawker media seems... logically suspect.
I mean, who is it not OK to destroy for ideological reasons and who is fair game?
Obviously true, but still on balance government-directed spending (especially outside the US, but even here too) is more likely to take long term goals like climate mitigation seriously. And the big picture changes, at the level of serious regulation, can only be done by governments.
If you have $20 to spend and want to do the least damage, give it to the government as tax, basically.
Only in a specious sense. The point to money isn't "scarcity", the point to money is TRUST. You trust that $1 is going to be worth $1 tomorrow, and that it will be worth $1 to the shopkeeper and the bank and your family and everyone else. So anywhere you want to trade for something, you can do it in dollars. It's true that to provide that stability you have to control the supply, so money is "scarce". But only in the sense that the economy it represents is finite.
NFTs don't provide that, therefore they aren't a good medium of exchange. They aren't "scarce" in the way that money is or has to be.
They're also a Tulip bubble, but that's a different thing.
This seems like an attempt at misdirection. In a lawful society, the reason for surveilling suspected terrorists is because you actually suspect them of terrorism, not because they're currently your political opponents.
If you ran with a gang in your 20's, that doesn't give the government permanent access to a wire tap when you start doing social justice advocacy in your 40's.
> This was a motion for a temporary injunction so all the court said was "there are grave statutory and constitutional concerns" and so the relief was granted.
That's right. And two months ago, with a case that had clear and obvious "constitutional concerns" (seriously, it undermined Roe!) they said "Nah, we're good" and refused to stay it. That's the problem here. They aren't making a legal finding at all, they're making a political finding. And you know it.
> The real debate is whether it is in OSHA's purview to do this
Not in this case it isn't. That hasn't even been heard yet. The question is whether or not to stay the mandate only.
This isn't about getting it Right or Wrong though. This is about making pre-trial injunction decisions based on baldly partisan reasoning. The 9th and 6th may have a "partisan" view of jurisprudence, but they're consistently so. The fifth is making shit up. That's the lawless part. They don't care, they just want their side to win.
So depressing. The argument was that there are "grave constitutional concerns" with allowing implementation of the mandate (which is odd to begin with, considering that medical practice regulation like this has been done by the federal government for centuries).
Note that this is exactly the same panel of the same circuit court that found two months ago that the Texas abortion law (which clearly intersected with an existing right found by SCOTUS, that was its whole point!) was perfectly fine and not worth enjoining until a specific case came up.
This is just lawless. It's hard to imagine a more politically motivated judiciary than the fifth circuit right now. SCOTUS went along last time, I can only pray they come to their sense this round.
First, the idea of "conflict of interest" is not about allowing or disallowing testimony. That's (1) normally an argument you make after testimony and (2) absolutely not something one party to a suit (the State of Florida in this case, via its organ the University of Florida) gets to decide unilaterally.
Second, your logic is exactly backwards. The reason you might infer a conflict of interest and thus judge someone's testimony because of their employer is that they might be induced (e.g. by being rewarded or punished) to represent their employer's opinions instead of their own. Here, they were called by the plaintiffs and are expected to testify against the interests of the State.
Not for five years they aren't! That chart ends in a few months. It's just reflecting CURRENT inflation rates. Again I ask, because everyone insists on cherry picking their way around this: Where is the source predicting a >7.12% inflation rate over the next five years? There is none. That's looney-tunes conspiracy nonsense.
True enough, though if the modern real estate market had existed in the 70's then "inflation" would have been something closer to 30-40%.
Like it or not "home values" decoupled from "housing costs" over the past two decades. The reason for that metric change was to preserve equivalency, you don't get to argue backwards because of it.
That's almost exactly backwards, where are you getting this? The big inflation driver right now is (1) the increase in liquid cash in the economy due to covid relief programs and (2) the higher wage levels needed to get people to work during a pandemic.
The "poor" are, in fact, doing significantly better (economically, anyway) now than they were in 2019. I'll have to go look it up, but there was a great blog post a few months back looking at poverty statistics over the pandemic. The relief bills helped a ton.
> But the biggest losers overall are those with fixed incomes dealing with rapidly rising prices.
And therein lies one of the big pseudo-centrist points here. A mild reduction[1] in fixed-rate entitlement programs is coming down the pipe at some point regardless. This essentially gets the hard part of that political calculus out of the way "for free" (or at least in a cheaper way, since you can blame covid).
[1] Contra the nutjobs who predict the Death of Social Security or whatnot.
Great, then surely you can cite me the source you used to predict that general inflation (not, ahem, some cherry picked real estate numbers) would be higher than 7% over the life of this bond, producing the negative interest you were teasing?
Cite for that? No one with any expertise has predicted a >7% inflation level that I'm aware of. This sounds like something you got from talk radio.
(Edit: two replies have taken this out of context. Savings bonds have a minimum term of five years (well, without penalty). For them to have a negative yield, we need to see aggregate inflation >7.12% over the next five years. That's nuts, sorry. No one is predicting that.)
We would not be "in the Cater [sic] Years" regardless. The lowest inflation reported in the late 70's was about 5%, with a peak at 15%. Last year's post-covid number was 5.4%.
Your point seems mostly like demagoguery. I think the more interesting question is... is 5% actually bad? There's a real argument to be had here that rapid inflation reflects genuine improvements like rising wage levels and that it's worth paying for. Remember that the "biggest losers" in inflationary economies are people who hold assets, not investors (whose returns accomadate faster than things like loan terms) or wage workers (who don't have significant assets to depreciate and whose wages track inflation well).
https://91-divoc.com/pages/covid-visualization/?chart=countr...
And while there's lots of confounding issues here, like developing nations or autocracies with underreported or suspect data, it's pretty clear that some countries are doing a ton better than others. And it certainly looks to my eyes that among developed democracies, the nations with stronger popular adherence to mitigation strategies (in particular vaccination rates, but distancing and mask-wearing too) are the ones who are winning.
(And needless to say, the US is pretty much at the bottom of the list of industrial democracies.)