The "economy" is not just what is captured in formally taxable income. Large swaths of the economy is composed by absolutely essential reproductive labor that receives no direct monetary compensation. Conversely, the existence monetary income doesn't necessitate that economically meaningful or necessary labor is being performed, just that it is being compensated for in a formal manner.
Then, of course, there's unearned income -- very much so related to the topic of "stock ownership" that started this thread -- which, by definition, is acquired not through any meaningful contribution of labor to the "economy", but instead as a reward for the incidental private claim to profits our economic system happens to allow to people.
Also, "federal" here does not include not include payroll taxes, which are, nonetheless, considered "federal taxes" in any colloquial conception of the term.
Of course, in addition to the lying by omission, the true irony here is that the "lack" of "federal" taxes paid by the masses is more so a symptom of a deeply inequitable economic system than the counterbalancing endorsement of the status quo the OP likely envisions it to be.
It's related in that it morally licenses the privileged to be OK with wealth inequality because, see, the masses are actually being supported by the magnanimous benevolence of their betters.
This article is a jumble of broad strokes of conjecture with effectively zero empirical substance that vaguely alludes the just nature of the "meritocracy"; I have a hard time not interpreting it as a puff piece for the status quo.
Some people, in an otherwise disadvantaged situation, will benefit from this; that is completely fine in isolation. Still, it's wholly naive to assume that Amazon is doing this out of some sense of looking to do a "nice thing".
Most obviously, it is clear that this is being pushed as a pathway to IT education. Amazon, as a business, has massive vested interests in, one, increasing the size of the IT labor force, and two, promoting buy-in to its own IT infrastructure. It is irrational to not initially assume that this initiative is being conducted primarily to pursue such interests.
My criteria for being "happy" with the actions of a corporation like Amazon hinge on them doing something utterly unimaginable: going against the interests of their shareholders for the ultimate benefit of society at large. If, for instance, Amazon starts advocating for meaningful and equitable worker representation in business decisions that affect said workers, I'll be "happy".
I've never used PM, but just ran through sign-up for their free service. What could they do differently with regards to this issue? Simple. Make the legal limitations of their service -- or at least their understanding of them -- explicit, transparent, and above all, utterly conspicuous to anyone looking to use their service.
No. The root cause of the embargo is, manifestly, that the Cuban Revolution ousted American capital interests from the island and gave the preverbal finger to US economic hegemony. All else is secondary, after-the-fact justification. Broadly similar story for Iran. The US has proven time and again that it ultimately has little interest in things like democracy and freedom, but if you fuck with the money, woe be to you.
As a general principle, yes, all of humanity matters, and all grave matters deserve grave attention. At the same time, how a given issue impacts you and those around you, how much influence you can possibly have over the matter, and how much responsibility you and those like you truly bare in its existence are all of upmost importance when deciding where you should be putting your emphasis, morally speaking.
For example, for your typical US citizen, decrying the plight of the Uyghurs is fine in principle. But if one goes and weights things relative to the above criteria -- though admittedly there's no clean way to do so -- I'd argue that China's Uyghur genocide would not even make the top 100 of things that deserve to be morally prioritized (again, by your typical US citizen).
And forgive me if I read to far into what you wrote past what you intended; it just struck me as possibly flattening a bit too much.
Iran has a shit regime (corollary: all countries' regimes are shit, just some more than others).
To your question, it's a matter of emphasis. You have a fundamentally greater moral imperative to criticize your own government (I assume you're not Iranian living in Iran) and its dealings/shortcomings simply because you can, in principle, actually have some relatively significant impact on its actions. So no, there is no need to ignore the conduct of the Iranian government, but if you place emphasis on it disproportional to what you actually have influence over, your moral priorities are fundamentally misplaced.
The one time I remember being spanked as a child was -- many, many years after the fact -- explained to me in passing to be for the exact reason you describe. It seems neigh impossible to me to validate that the spanking was "necessary" in any reasonable interpretation of the word; sure, I was never hit by a car as a kid, but you can't really prove a negative either. I can say, unequivocally, however, that 2-year-old me experienced the spanking as a completely arbitrary and utterly humiliating display of violence with absolutely no rhyme or reason whatsoever.
I'm generally not in favor of spanking, but just some observations:
- It's easy to find people who were spanked that are in favor of spanking, people who were spanked that aren't in favor of spanking, and people who weren't spanked that aren't in favor of spanking. People who weren't spanked that are in favor of spanking seem almost non-existent.
- Just perusing Google Scholar and reading abstracts, studies of spanking much more often than not link it to negative outcomes, most commonly "externalizing behavior". And while some studies find it not meaningfully linked to negative outcomes, no study I have seen links it to positive outcomes.
- Children not understanding logic the same as adults does not entail that physical punishment be necessary in child rearing.
> migrants to the US have twice as many [citation-weighted papers] as migrants to other countries, or four times as many as those who stay at home
Nitpicky, but... this is also only for IMO medalists (from 1980 to 2000) publishing papers in mathematics (up until 2017). It's pretty darned specific, even as it pertains to academics. Even as it pertains to mathematicians, it's a single snapshot of somewhat recent history.
"Our model suggests that persons sleeping 5 and 7 hours over-reported, on average, by 1.3 and 0.3 hours respectively."
For self-reporting sleep studies, perhaps people have it in their head that 8 hours is how much they're "supposed" to sleep and they over-report to better match that?
Of note, however, while the CDC data I linked comes from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System which does appear to be merely a self-reporting survey question (https://www.cdc.gov/sleep/surveillance.html), the data in the Economist article comes from an app (www.sleepcycle.com). Granted, I suspect the latter almost surely suffers from some kind of non-trivial selection bias.
While I'm not necessarily a fan of this particular article, I feel it relevant to point out that explicitly denying the "homogenous myth" of Japan has political value as a counter to its all-too-common use by conservative nationalist ideologues in Japan to casually brush aside the entirely valid concerns groups who don't check off all the boxes of "being Japanese".
> Those Korean-Japanese are no less Japanese culturally
To this point, however, on a somewhat lighter note, notice that the birth rate of Korean-Japanese shown in the article's graph dips sharply in 1966. This is due to it being the year of the Fire-Horse (https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Hinoe_uma), which AFAIK is a superstition unique to Japan. We're due for another Fire-Horse year in 2026, so it'll be interesting to see what happens then, too.
A ML model giving a single false positive is generally uninteresting and meaningless in evaluating its overall performance. Also, note that the details clearly state that, even for high bot scores, some non-trivial percentage of examples in their training data were still labeled as human.
As an aside, for those interested, the GitHub page for the tool's Python API (https://github.com/IUNetSci/botometer-python) lists relevant papers regarding the functioning/design of the tool.
I was in Japan two years ago; got pneumonia and needed antibiotics.
Went to a hospital with no insurance and no appointment. I was being seen by a doctor within 30 minutes. Doctor wanted to do some additional labs just to rule other things out, but he was worried that it would be expensive for me given the lack of insurance. He called up billing with me still in the room and had a price within a couple minutes: ~$70 USD.
Ultimately I left the hospital after being seen, getting chest xrays, the additional labs, and antibiotics in hand. No insurance and I paid less than ~$160 USD.
Looking at ~350k-400k for my dad if he lives another 5 years. Given his spending before Alzheimer's 200k would be an easy choice for us even even from a purely cold financial perspective.
Then, of course, there's unearned income -- very much so related to the topic of "stock ownership" that started this thread -- which, by definition, is acquired not through any meaningful contribution of labor to the "economy", but instead as a reward for the incidental private claim to profits our economic system happens to allow to people.