3 ms·

Delivering results for whom exactly? Look outside and you'll see homelessness rising and storefronts closing. The entire failed national pandemic response is d

Delivering results for whom exactly? Look outside and you'll see homelessness rising and storefronts closing. The entire failed national pandemic response is due to the perverse incentives of our system. Five hundred thousand Americans (and counting) are dead because we couldn't close the economy for a couple months and pay people to stay home.

exolymph 6y ago
Far be it from me to argue that the United States is competently administered compared to, e.g., a successful firm. It's still a global superpower for a reason, and that reason is not "communism will totally work this time"
- omegaworks 6y ago
  Of course you can't argue with the substance of my point. All it goes to show is how willing you are to write off half a million dead Americans for continued profits and power. Power to do what, exactly? It's not just the communist countries like Vietnam and Cuba, even capitalist countries with newly minted leftist leadership like South Korea, have weathered this crisis with orders of magnitude less loss. The systems for rending economic value from the value of human life are deeply entrenched here. Always have been[1]. That we can divorce the success of firms from the success of the people providing the value on the ground doing the work is a testament to it. It doesn't make us awesome, it makes us abhorrent. The people that you claim "soar" are not randomly distributed, they are frequently born into favorable economic situations that allow them to develop the talents that make them super rich. In our lifetimes those islands of stability have degraded entirely in the service of ensuring the super rich can get even richer. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619...

3 ms·

Delivering results for whom exactly? Look outside and you'll see homelessness rising and storefronts closing. The entire failed national pandemic response is d

by omegaworks 6y ago

exolymph 6y ago
Far be it from me to argue that the United States is competently administered compared to, e.g., a successful firm. It's still a global superpower for a reason, and that reason is not "communism will totally work this time"
- omegaworks 6y ago
  Of course you can't argue with the substance of my point. All it goes to show is how willing you are to write off half a million dead Americans for continued profits and power. Power to do what, exactly? It's not just the communist countries like Vietnam and Cuba, even capitalist countries with newly minted leftist leadership like South Korea, have weathered this crisis with orders of magnitude less loss. The systems for rending economic value from the value of human life are deeply entrenched here. Always have been[1]. That we can divorce the success of firms from the success of the people providing the value on the ground doing the work is a testament to it. It doesn't make us awesome, it makes us abhorrent. The people that you claim "soar" are not randomly distributed, they are frequently born into favorable economic situations that allow them to develop the talents that make them super rich. In our lifetimes those islands of stability have degraded entirely in the service of ensuring the super rich can get even richer. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619-america-slavery.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/1619...