The youth unemployment rate in the US is around 10 percent. I'd say a two and a half times difference is pretty significant.
Would you rather move to San Francisco or Paris straight out of college? Which you do think has better career prospects? Do you think that has anything to do with the extreme difficulty of hiring and firing workers in France?
Indecency isn't a crime in the US, so you couldn't get extradited for it.
If you had committed a crime in Saudi Arabia that is also illegal in the US and the US courts have ruled that the extradition is legal, I don't see what's wrong with being extradited.
. . . my friends didn't want to switch, so instead I simply stopped using Facebook and started using Telegram/email/SMS/IRC/any of a dozen other communication methods to talk with my friends?
> So, before capitalism, people didn't build widgets?
Sure they did, at sustenance level. Or do you think that the noncapitalist economy of preindustrial Europe could produce enough widgets to sustain the modern standard of living?
>My point is that labour does not need capital to produce value (Although access to capital can increase the amount of value labour can produce.) Capital without labour is, quite obviously a lame duck.
This is looking more and more false by the day, to be honest. At this point, companies that employ hundreds of thousands of assembly line workers that produce "actual value" are less profitable than companies that automate that same assembly line using capital. On the flip side, the return to human capital in the form of educated workers has certainly increased.But I challenge you to build Google or Facebook without the venture CAPITALists who provided the money to purchase the infrastructure and hire the labour. The knowledge economy is great, but at some point the software still has to run on hardware purchased with, you guessed it, capital.
The point being that capital and labour are both necessary for a functioning economy, and concluding that labour is the only thing that matters and that anyone rich must be a rent-seeker leads you to becoming Venezuela or Argentina.
I guess I don't see the distinction. If I see your license plate at the supermarket and post online that "license plate AAAAAA was seen at Whole Foods on December 6th", how is that qualitatively different from a license plate reader scanning your plate and storing that "license plate AAAAAA was at coordinates XX.XXXX, XX.XXXX at 2015-12-06?"
Unless you want to draw a line between information which is directly observed by people and information which is collected by machine, this seems like a difference of degree, not of kind.
Is that really what you got from the article? I feel like the author makes a pretty valid point: everyone pattern-matches people at first impression. If you decide to climb on a tower of moral virtue because you think you've consciously decided to stop pattern-matching on the basis of race/gender and thus don't introspect about your (many) other subconscious biases, you're really not doing anyone a favor.
One paragraph later, they also propose that the disparity is likely because black families have less accumulated household wealth and so are more likely to end up in delinquency than white borrowers of the same income. Like a lot of racial disparities, it doesn't come down to explicit racism by companies or debt collectors, just by a confluence of societal factors that leave minorities in a more precarious financial position.
I really recommend you read about the Effective Altruism movement if you want a detailed response to your questions.
In response to your question, you are totally right! Anything you can do for most of these problems will probably be completely meaningless compared to the scale of the problem. Almost certainly, the rational decision is to do nothing. So what?
The entire idea of altruism is that you make an economically irrational choice to contribute to a cause that produces positive externalities for society but does not benefit you directly (if it did, it's not altruism anymore: it's just an investment).
Measuring caring in terms of dollars allows you to maximize your possible contribution. Imagine a highly-paid consultant who cares about the homeless, so he volunteers at the local soup kitchen for several hours a week. If he instead simply worked for those same hours and earned $100 an hour, he could pay 10 people to work at the same soup kitchen and help 10 times as many homeless. That's the kind of tradeoff you don't think about if you don't realize that money is fungible with regard to caring.
In the longer run, realizing that money <-> fixing things means that you can also decide to dedicate your life to making money and donate a significant chunk of that money to the cause of your choice, leaving both you and presumably society better off than if you had dedicated your whole life to volunteering/working for your cause in the first place, since your money can fund specialists in the field who are probably more effective than you, as a random coder/manager would be.
And no, this doesn't imply that if billionaires hold the most effective resources for solving the problem, you should give up. Instead, dedicate yourself to effectively convincing said billionaires to care about your cause. The guy(s) who successfully convinced Bill Gates to donate to malaria eradication have probably saved more lives than every volunteer who was previously working on that effort.
The point is, realize that if you want to care, you should make a difference in the most effective way possible, and often that is by leveraging money and resources in ways that most people would not consider "charitable work" in the traditional sense of the phrase.
Please, tell Ukraine and the rest of Eastern Europe about how the Russian thread is an invention of the western media. I'm sure the Russian military support in the Donbass is also just an invention by CNN, right?
So you're suggesting that being poor is a genetic condition (and one that apparently should be perpetuated)? Because that sounds even more dehumanizing than suggesting that the poor consider their resources before choosing to have children.
There are many, many places on earth where you can go and live precisely the lifestyle that the vast majority lived before the Industrial Age. Assuming you live in the US, there are literally tens of millions of acres of land in the West around the Rockies where you can live completely away from modern industry. Grow your own food, build your own cabin, never touch modern medicine.
If you really feel that all progress for the past thousand years has been worthless, go ahead and live a life from a thousand years ago. I'm pretty sure it will take you less a month to realize that life sucked back then.
Would you rather move to San Francisco or Paris straight out of college? Which you do think has better career prospects? Do you think that has anything to do with the extreme difficulty of hiring and firing workers in France?