5 ms·

I think the conclusions stated in the abstract are empirically visible. If I walk outside and actually interact with people, there seems to be little division a

I think the conclusions stated in the abstract are empirically visible. If I walk outside and actually interact with people, there seems to be little division and hate. If I spend time consuming media, things look quite different. Humans are tribal so hate of the other tends to sell. Yet, even in the early parts of the 2000s, an Muslim cab driver in New York would willingly sell a ride to a Jewish passenger, and a Jewish landlord would willingly rent a space to a Muslim renter. The same is true across most of the USA. When people shoot off their mouths about something, they’re not necessarily talking about what they’d actually do, but often merely what they feel in that passing moment. Most people do still behave in a sane and moral way day to day, because physical proximity moderates their behavior. Similarly, we see disaster everywhere in media, and there is disaster, but in real life… hunger is almost gone, living standards are high, soul and body crushing work is continually being made easier to handle, and we have more awareness of things like mindfulness, mental health, and loving kindness (all of which were no no words when I was younger). The world is a good place, mostly.

dmix 4y ago
I’ve often wondered how George Carlin would react against the modern progressive movement towards gatekeeping speech. Especially with his soft language and dirty words bits. https://youtu.be/o25I2fzFGoY https://youtu.be/o25I2fzFGoY Sometimes it’s easy to get so wrapped up in your well intentioned culture where you end up being ridiculous and detach yourself from reality.
- matthewdgreen 4y ago
  George Carlin's shtick was to use racist words mostly to make a point about how stupid racism was. He also spent a lot of time attacking anti-intellectual movements. I have no doubt that he'd poke fun of current progressive speech codes, but I don't think you'd find him carrying water for the other side. This is an important distinction that some folks don't seem to understand.
  - dmix 4y ago
    Carlin was always a big lefty. Every critique doesn't mean you're 'carrying water for the other side.' Although I know it's trendy to ignore nuance in language these days.
  - mensetmanusman 4y ago
    Criticizing progressive speech codes is carrying water for the other side, because it’s the only side criticizing it. It’s not like the other side is wrong about 110% of things(although this statement may be against progressive speech codes currently).
    - atmavatar 4y ago
      I disagree. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your chosen side is to act as a check on its most fringe elements.
    - jjulius 4y ago
      >... because it’s the only side criticizing it. That's an absolute that's not true. I've seen a variety of people lambaste it, from right-wingers to independents, apolitical folk to even some progressive folk. Isn't nuance neat? :)
    - jackmott 4y ago
      I am a progressive and I think the speech codes are silly and sometimes even harmful.
    - kcplate 4y ago
      > Criticizing progressive speech codes is carrying water for the other side Wow. Do you realize how dangerous that attitude is for humanity? There is not a political, religious, or moral philosophy on this earth that should be beyond criticism for the inside or they outside.
082349872349872 4y ago
> When people shoot off their mouths about something, they’re not necessarily talking about what they’d actually do, but often merely what they feel in that passing moment. I hope that the existence of things like ChatGPT (which does not "care" about the truth or falsity of its utterances) will cause people, in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the AIs, to consider paying more attention to consistency.
- Duwensatzaj 4y ago
  ChatGPT might not care, but its creators certainly do, and they’ve embedded their politics into how it responds and what topics it considers taboo.
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    How would one go about creating a non-politics-embedding chatbot? Assuming no memory, everything's going to come down to choice of training set, and that seems pretty difficult to do in an objective manner.
  - epivosism 4y ago
    details on how they inserted present-day political beliefs into chatGPT https://cactus.substack.com/p/openais-woke-catechism-part-1 https://cactus.substack.com/p/openais-woke-catechism-part-1
    - 082349872349872 4y ago
      This is a good case in point. Citizens United is safe from ChatGPT-authored briefs, because judges are among the few people who care about consistency in argument. (if we get an AI that performs self-consistency checks, I'll reexamine this statement. but we're not there yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092710 )
  - cudgy 4y ago
    Don’t ChatGPT and other scrapers at their core essentially steal information from content creators and present it as their own content without attribution in many cases? Whose politics does that represent? Are they thieves or freedom fighters?
Spooky23 4y ago
When my child was born, my wife and I got more involved in lots of things and enjoy it. The key “innovation” is that we interact with all sorts of people. I coach a baseball team with guys who range from a police sergeant to a chief counsel to a guy who bakes wonder bread to a real estate developer. You know what? We’re all the same and we’re all friends. We all want the best for our kids and have fun playing baseball. That’s important, the other shit is a waste. When I see people get angry about whatever the TV guy says, I just shake my head and say “Why do you care about this guy?”
sweezyjeezy 4y ago
> The world is a good place, mostly. Well, reading your second paragraph - I'm not sure I would apply that to the entire world necessarily? This year's global hunger index estimates that close to a billion people 'lack regular access to sufficient calories', and that progress here had stagnated in recent years [1] . Similarly, globally workers are generally not very happy, including an all-time high reporting of stress of those surveyed by Gallup [2]. I don't mean this to come across as overly negative and denying progress. But your post has an air of 'mission accomplished' that I don't agree with. [1] https://www.globalhungerindex.org/pdf/en/2022.pdf https://www.globalhungerindex.org/pdf/en/2022.pdf [2] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace-2022-report.aspx https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-...
- BirAdam 4y ago
  I don’t deny that at all, but remember that 1 billion, while huge is 1/8 the global population. If we compare that to prior eras, things are looking up. Edit: I don’t mean to imply “mission accomplished” but merely that all the lines seem to be going the correct direction. Problems are not solved overnight, but rather with experience and sustained effort.
  - kodah 4y ago
    personally, I didn't read what you wrote as "mission accomplished".
  - megaman821 4y ago
    Also, most those without adequate food are suffering due to oppressive government regimes or conflict. We have enough food to feed everyone.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  > This year's global hunger index estimates that close to a billion people 'lack regular access to sufficient calories', The fact that is a minority rather than majority is a miracle. The last 100 years is the first time in hisotye that the vast majority of people on earth didn't have to regularly worry about starving to death.
_ktx2 4y ago
Before I left Reddit we had a bunch of self-assigned Progressives on an overtly liberal subreddit (the kind where you tag your ideology with flair) brigade a Jewish person for simply existing. That spawned a lot of conversations where I saw a familiar pattern: 1. Excuse making and reasoning 2. Anger and argumentation 3. Flight or acceptance That day, the subreddit mourned a bit. I think people's ideals were semi-dashed realizing that hate could make it's way into such a party. To me, the hate wasn't surprising. I left (big P) Progressivism within a year. In conversations with other Progressives I noticed a few trends: - Veterans were nearly left out of intersectionality. Some are overtly hostile and don't realize they are (or don't care). - American Progressives focus on race rather than, or in addition to, class limits their interpretation of the world and overtly excludes serving places like rural areas without belittling or disregarding them. - Their stark views on the way society should be prevents them from making incremental plans that people can be moved on over time. - Their language is, frankly, hostile a good amount of the time when directed outward. It very much creates an atmosphere of a team sport which is brutal. I'm not alone in these interpretations and if you search there's actually a rather large swath of liberals looking for something new. I'm looking forward to whatever we build next.
x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago
Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't a problem for those who are targeted by such ideas. This is the same rhetoric used during the Jim Crow and chattel slave era where slavers and Jim Crow supporters harped on everything being fine and lovely.
DharmaPolice 4y ago
I'm definitely not a doomer (and I find it an asinine position in generally) but it is concerning that people are reporting fewer friends than they did in the past [0] - even as we publicly acknowledge mindfulness, mental health, etc. People imagine social problems as explosive - race wars, food riots following famines, etc. But alienation and loneliness (with the obvious psychological consequences) are far more likely things we'll have to deal with. 0 - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/11/friendships-less-is-now-more/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/11/friendships-less-is-n...
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  People don’t care about community, because there is an infinite amount of pseudo-community in their pocket.
stanleydrew 4y ago
> When people shoot off their mouths about something, they’re not necessarily talking about what they’d actually do, but often merely what they feel in that passing moment. Agree, but these things do matter on the margins. A Jewish landlord may almost always rent to Muslims, but once in awhile might not. Or might apply stricter standards to rental applications from Muslims on occasion. There's been a lot of progress for sure, but self-reflection in order to understand your own implicit biases is work that's never really finished I guess.
dragonwriter 4y ago
> Yet, even in the early parts of the 2000s, an Muslim cab driver in New York would willingly sell a ride to a Jewish passenger, and a Jewish landlord would willingly rent a space to a Muslim renter. In the early parts of the 2000s, Muslims (and people who had outward appearance that ignorant people associated falsely with Islam, often Sikhs) were targeted in a wave of hate crimes across the US, as well as fairly arbitrary acts by government, with very little public opposition. (Largely, this was triggered by an act which itself was something of the antithesis of love and tolerance, though it was directed at people who had nothing to do with it.)
- rayiner 4y ago
  Fixating on an uptick in the occurrence of a low probability event (hate crimes) is missing the forest for the trees. It’s like analyzing the performance of a website under a major DDOS and fixating on the fact that 99th percentile response times went up, while ignoring that the site stayed up. It’s sloppy analysis. America’s domestic response to 9/11 was nothing short of amazing. Had Muslims killed 3,000 people in India in a similar attack, Muslims would have been driven out of their homes en masse. You would be able to see the effects of that on aggregate statistics such as income, health, wealth, etc. 9/11 had no effect on the fact that American Muslims are among the most affluent groups in America, much more so than white Christians (which is an achievement unmatched in pretty much any other country). As a brown guy with a Muslim name who moved to the south in 2002, I didn’t even notice any anti-Muslim reaction. What I noticed was there were suddenly all these movies about civil liberties, and the TSA was conspicuously searching white women at the security line. (Contrast with say Japan or China, where to this day I have a nice airport lady follow me around before boarding.) That is of course not to say there wasn’t none. But when shit goes truly goes sideways for a minority in a country everyone notices it.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    Yes. This is a strength of our country. It's very weird that conservatives have a hard time capitalizing on it, and instead seem intent on legitimatizing the debate over whether it's a good thing at all.
- 4y ago
yboris 4y ago
I think you're right about the assessment that the world is better now (at least on average) than it has ever been. Though small caveat about your claim "hunger is almost gone, living standards are high". I hope you're aware of the comparatively abysmal poverty most of the world lives on as compared to the developed countries of the world: https://income-inequality.info/ https://income-inequality.info/ 80% of the world's population is living on less than poverty level in the US (and this is PPP - purchasing power parity adjusted income). 20% live on less than $2/day.
- FabHK 4y ago
  Yes, and that is a vast improvement over how it used to be. The number of people in poverty has fallen not only in relative, but also in absolute terms, which is utterly amazing. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/the-share-and-number-of-people-living-in-extreme-poverty?country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/the-share-and-number-of-p...
robomartin 4y ago
> The world is a good place, mostly. Very much so. There are several problems we need to solve that, I believe, are crucial for the advancement of society. In no particular order: 1- Lies in the media. Social is hard, however, traditional media should not be protected at all if they lie. In the US, I do not believe the protections afforded to the press were intended as a license to lie and manipulate. 2- Politicians should not be legally protected if they lie. That is the case today in the US. A politician can say someone is a terrorist pedophile a million times and they suffer no legal consequences. This is most often used to smear each other during elections and beyond. 3- The forcing function driving the behavior and focus of politicians does not include a variable measuring good, positive, useful, constructive or beneficial outcomes of the work they might do. Given this, their entire focus is consumed by winning elections and engaging in never-ending smear battles with the opposition. The end result is they rarely accomplish anything of note. 4- Bills must be focused on the relevant matter and nothing else. It is truly counterproductive and dangerous to allow politicians to stuff bills with unrelated matter. At the very least, this material is never really exposed to enough daylight and debate. 5- Laws have to have expiration, review or re-ratification dates. Perhaps this should apply to a certain category of laws, not all. However, it is clear that there are likely a massive body of laws that should not be in the books today, at least in the form they were originally created or intended. Three that come to mind are the Postal Agreement (which subsidizes millions of shipments per year from China), the First and Second amendments. The first needs to evaporate. The other two are in serious need for changes. Media and politicians should not be protected if they lie. Gun rights and responsibilities need clearer treatment. 6- Again, in the US, we have a huge problem of being taxed with no political representation or influence. If, for example, you are an independent or republican voter in states like California, your vote is, effectively suppressed, erased, discarded. The same is true of other states and political perspectives if they are “winner take all”. I have lived in CA for about 40 years. Despite the fact that I pay federal and state taxes like everyone else, my vote has never had any value at all. It is summarily discarded in each and every election where that mechanism comes into play. That, objectively speaking, isn’t right, regardless of party or state. If people pay taxes, their vote should be counted. This is part of the reasons for which a third party is doomed to fail in this nation. 7- Anyone should be able to run for office without requiring hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Every candidate should have equal footing and no advantages afforded by money. No more political donations. We should have a national elections website where every candidate gets a free space to post essays, position papers, plans, proposals, videos, etc. Rule #1: You can’t smear anyone. There are more. These, I believe might be the most important. Imagine the news without lies and real investigative reporting behind everything asserted. Imagine politics without the constant bombardment of lies. Imagine politician’s jobs depending on merit and outcomes rather than lies told for votes and words, outright buying of votes through various means. Imagine if every law was required to be reviewed, ratified, modified or eliminated every few decades. Imagine if your vote counted, regardless of where you happen to live. Imagine if we took money out of politics and implemented an equitable system that allowed anyone to run and removed the influence of big money from our political system. I happen to think this would make for a better society. Not perfect. Can’t have that. We could have better. Definitely.
jackmott 4y ago
[dead]
jfengel 4y ago
If I spend time consuming media, things look quite different. I believe it's a mistake to discount that media, though. People will hold their tongues in public, but say something closer to what they really believe in social media. As Mike Tyson famously said, "Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." The media itself wouldn't be a problem, except that it also shows up at the voting booth. That's where disrespect turns into force. Government has the ability to force people to do things and to deprive them of rights. Regardless of what people say when you're outside talking with them, it's clear that there's a link between the social media discourse, increasing incivility by politicians, and their willingness to use government to act against those they do not like. The news may present a more dangerous picture of the world than it should, but it's also neglectful to say "Everything looks fine to me". There are genuine dangers that affect real people. Many people still do soul-crushing and body-crushing work for a wage that cannot support them, much less their families. Not everybody has a high standard of living. And many people are finding their rights slipping away under a political process heavily based on falsehoods. I'll grant that it's not all bad. But you really need to grant that it's not all good, and a lot of people are worried for good reason. Sweeping them under the rug just invites people to believe that this is the reason why the bad things are so bad.

dmix 4y ago

I’ve often wondered how George Carlin would react against the modern progressive movement towards gatekeeping speech. Especially with his soft language and dirty words bits. https://youtu.be/o25I2fzFGoY https://youtu.be/o25I2fzFGoY Sometimes it’s easy to get so wrapped up in your well intentioned culture where you end up being ridiculous and detach yourself from reality.

matthewdgreen 4y ago
George Carlin's shtick was to use racist words mostly to make a point about how stupid racism was. He also spent a lot of time attacking anti-intellectual movements. I have no doubt that he'd poke fun of current progressive speech codes, but I don't think you'd find him carrying water for the other side. This is an important distinction that some folks don't seem to understand.
- dmix 4y ago
  Carlin was always a big lefty. Every critique doesn't mean you're 'carrying water for the other side.' Although I know it's trendy to ignore nuance in language these days.
- mensetmanusman 4y ago
  Criticizing progressive speech codes is carrying water for the other side, because it’s the only side criticizing it. It’s not like the other side is wrong about 110% of things(although this statement may be against progressive speech codes currently).
  - atmavatar 4y ago
    I disagree. Sometimes the best thing you can do for your chosen side is to act as a check on its most fringe elements.
  - jjulius 4y ago
    >... because it’s the only side criticizing it. That's an absolute that's not true. I've seen a variety of people lambaste it, from right-wingers to independents, apolitical folk to even some progressive folk. Isn't nuance neat? :)
  - jackmott 4y ago
    I am a progressive and I think the speech codes are silly and sometimes even harmful.
  - kcplate 4y ago
    > Criticizing progressive speech codes is carrying water for the other side Wow. Do you realize how dangerous that attitude is for humanity? There is not a political, religious, or moral philosophy on this earth that should be beyond criticism for the inside or they outside.

082349872349872 4y ago

> When people shoot off their mouths about something, they’re not necessarily talking about what they’d actually do, but often merely what they feel in that passing moment. I hope that the existence of things like ChatGPT (which does not "care" about the truth or falsity of its utterances) will cause people, in an attempt to distinguish themselves from the AIs, to consider paying more attention to consistency.

Duwensatzaj 4y ago
ChatGPT might not care, but its creators certainly do, and they’ve embedded their politics into how it responds and what topics it considers taboo.
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  How would one go about creating a non-politics-embedding chatbot? Assuming no memory, everything's going to come down to choice of training set, and that seems pretty difficult to do in an objective manner.
- epivosism 4y ago
  details on how they inserted present-day political beliefs into chatGPT https://cactus.substack.com/p/openais-woke-catechism-part-1 https://cactus.substack.com/p/openais-woke-catechism-part-1
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    This is a good case in point. Citizens United is safe from ChatGPT-authored briefs, because judges are among the few people who care about consistency in argument. (if we get an AI that performs self-consistency checks, I'll reexamine this statement. but we're not there yet: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092710 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34092710 )
- cudgy 4y ago
  Don’t ChatGPT and other scrapers at their core essentially steal information from content creators and present it as their own content without attribution in many cases? Whose politics does that represent? Are they thieves or freedom fighters?

Spooky23 4y ago

When my child was born, my wife and I got more involved in lots of things and enjoy it. The key “innovation” is that we interact with all sorts of people. I coach a baseball team with guys who range from a police sergeant to a chief counsel to a guy who bakes wonder bread to a real estate developer. You know what? We’re all the same and we’re all friends. We all want the best for our kids and have fun playing baseball. That’s important, the other shit is a waste. When I see people get angry about whatever the TV guy says, I just shake my head and say “Why do you care about this guy?”

sweezyjeezy 4y ago

> The world is a good place, mostly. Well, reading your second paragraph - I'm not sure I would apply that to the entire world necessarily? This year's global hunger index estimates that close to a billion people 'lack regular access to sufficient calories', and that progress here had stagnated in recent years [1] . Similarly, globally workers are generally not very happy, including an all-time high reporting of stress of those surveyed by Gallup [2]. I don't mean this to come across as overly negative and denying progress. But your post has an air of 'mission accomplished' that I don't agree with. [1] https://www.globalhungerindex.org/pdf/en/2022.pdf https://www.globalhungerindex.org/pdf/en/2022.pdf [2] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-workplace-2022-report.aspx https://www.gallup.com/workplace/349484/state-of-the-global-...

BirAdam 4y ago
I don’t deny that at all, but remember that 1 billion, while huge is 1/8 the global population. If we compare that to prior eras, things are looking up. Edit: I don’t mean to imply “mission accomplished” but merely that all the lines seem to be going the correct direction. Problems are not solved overnight, but rather with experience and sustained effort.
- kodah 4y ago
  personally, I didn't read what you wrote as "mission accomplished".
- megaman821 4y ago
  Also, most those without adequate food are suffering due to oppressive government regimes or conflict. We have enough food to feed everyone.
kneebonian 4y ago
> This year's global hunger index estimates that close to a billion people 'lack regular access to sufficient calories', The fact that is a minority rather than majority is a miracle. The last 100 years is the first time in hisotye that the vast majority of people on earth didn't have to regularly worry about starving to death.

_ktx2 4y ago

Before I left Reddit we had a bunch of self-assigned Progressives on an overtly liberal subreddit (the kind where you tag your ideology with flair) brigade a Jewish person for simply existing. That spawned a lot of conversations where I saw a familiar pattern: 1. Excuse making and reasoning 2. Anger and argumentation 3. Flight or acceptance That day, the subreddit mourned a bit. I think people's ideals were semi-dashed realizing that hate could make it's way into such a party. To me, the hate wasn't surprising. I left (big P) Progressivism within a year. In conversations with other Progressives I noticed a few trends: - Veterans were nearly left out of intersectionality. Some are overtly hostile and don't realize they are (or don't care). - American Progressives focus on race rather than, or in addition to, class limits their interpretation of the world and overtly excludes serving places like rural areas without belittling or disregarding them. - Their stark views on the way society should be prevents them from making incremental plans that people can be moved on over time. - Their language is, frankly, hostile a good amount of the time when directed outward. It very much creates an atmosphere of a team sport which is brutal. I'm not alone in these interpretations and if you search there's actually a rather large swath of liberals looking for something new. I'm looking forward to whatever we build next.

x86_64Ubuntu 4y ago

Just because you don't see it doesn't mean it isn't a problem for those who are targeted by such ideas. This is the same rhetoric used during the Jim Crow and chattel slave era where slavers and Jim Crow supporters harped on everything being fine and lovely.

DharmaPolice 4y ago

I'm definitely not a doomer (and I find it an asinine position in generally) but it is concerning that people are reporting fewer friends than they did in the past [0] - even as we publicly acknowledge mindfulness, mental health, etc. People imagine social problems as explosive - race wars, food riots following famines, etc. But alienation and loneliness (with the obvious psychological consequences) are far more likely things we'll have to deal with. 0 - https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/11/friendships-less-is-now-more/ https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/11/friendships-less-is-n...

mensetmanusman 4y ago
People don’t care about community, because there is an infinite amount of pseudo-community in their pocket.

stanleydrew 4y ago

> When people shoot off their mouths about something, they’re not necessarily talking about what they’d actually do, but often merely what they feel in that passing moment. Agree, but these things do matter on the margins. A Jewish landlord may almost always rent to Muslims, but once in awhile might not. Or might apply stricter standards to rental applications from Muslims on occasion. There's been a lot of progress for sure, but self-reflection in order to understand your own implicit biases is work that's never really finished I guess.

dragonwriter 4y ago

> Yet, even in the early parts of the 2000s, an Muslim cab driver in New York would willingly sell a ride to a Jewish passenger, and a Jewish landlord would willingly rent a space to a Muslim renter. In the early parts of the 2000s, Muslims (and people who had outward appearance that ignorant people associated falsely with Islam, often Sikhs) were targeted in a wave of hate crimes across the US, as well as fairly arbitrary acts by government, with very little public opposition. (Largely, this was triggered by an act which itself was something of the antithesis of love and tolerance, though it was directed at people who had nothing to do with it.)

rayiner 4y ago
Fixating on an uptick in the occurrence of a low probability event (hate crimes) is missing the forest for the trees. It’s like analyzing the performance of a website under a major DDOS and fixating on the fact that 99th percentile response times went up, while ignoring that the site stayed up. It’s sloppy analysis. America’s domestic response to 9/11 was nothing short of amazing. Had Muslims killed 3,000 people in India in a similar attack, Muslims would have been driven out of their homes en masse. You would be able to see the effects of that on aggregate statistics such as income, health, wealth, etc. 9/11 had no effect on the fact that American Muslims are among the most affluent groups in America, much more so than white Christians (which is an achievement unmatched in pretty much any other country). As a brown guy with a Muslim name who moved to the south in 2002, I didn’t even notice any anti-Muslim reaction. What I noticed was there were suddenly all these movies about civil liberties, and the TSA was conspicuously searching white women at the security line. (Contrast with say Japan or China, where to this day I have a nice airport lady follow me around before boarding.) That is of course not to say there wasn’t none. But when shit goes truly goes sideways for a minority in a country everyone notices it.
- tptacek 4y ago
  Yes. This is a strength of our country. It's very weird that conservatives have a hard time capitalizing on it, and instead seem intent on legitimatizing the debate over whether it's a good thing at all.
4y ago

yboris 4y ago

I think you're right about the assessment that the world is better now (at least on average) than it has ever been. Though small caveat about your claim "hunger is almost gone, living standards are high". I hope you're aware of the comparatively abysmal poverty most of the world lives on as compared to the developed countries of the world: https://income-inequality.info/ https://income-inequality.info/ 80% of the world's population is living on less than poverty level in the US (and this is PPP - purchasing power parity adjusted income). 20% live on less than $2/day.

FabHK 4y ago
Yes, and that is a vast improvement over how it used to be. The number of people in poverty has fallen not only in relative, but also in absolute terms, which is utterly amazing. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/the-share-and-number-of-people-living-in-extreme-poverty?country=~OWID_WRL https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/the-share-and-number-of-p...

robomartin 4y ago

> The world is a good place, mostly. Very much so. There are several problems we need to solve that, I believe, are crucial for the advancement of society. In no particular order: 1- Lies in the media. Social is hard, however, traditional media should not be protected at all if they lie. In the US, I do not believe the protections afforded to the press were intended as a license to lie and manipulate. 2- Politicians should not be legally protected if they lie. That is the case today in the US. A politician can say someone is a terrorist pedophile a million times and they suffer no legal consequences. This is most often used to smear each other during elections and beyond. 3- The forcing function driving the behavior and focus of politicians does not include a variable measuring good, positive, useful, constructive or beneficial outcomes of the work they might do. Given this, their entire focus is consumed by winning elections and engaging in never-ending smear battles with the opposition. The end result is they rarely accomplish anything of note. 4- Bills must be focused on the relevant matter and nothing else. It is truly counterproductive and dangerous to allow politicians to stuff bills with unrelated matter. At the very least, this material is never really exposed to enough daylight and debate. 5- Laws have to have expiration, review or re-ratification dates. Perhaps this should apply to a certain category of laws, not all. However, it is clear that there are likely a massive body of laws that should not be in the books today, at least in the form they were originally created or intended. Three that come to mind are the Postal Agreement (which subsidizes millions of shipments per year from China), the First and Second amendments. The first needs to evaporate. The other two are in serious need for changes. Media and politicians should not be protected if they lie. Gun rights and responsibilities need clearer treatment. 6- Again, in the US, we have a huge problem of being taxed with no political representation or influence. If, for example, you are an independent or republican voter in states like California, your vote is, effectively suppressed, erased, discarded. The same is true of other states and political perspectives if they are “winner take all”. I have lived in CA for about 40 years. Despite the fact that I pay federal and state taxes like everyone else, my vote has never had any value at all. It is summarily discarded in each and every election where that mechanism comes into play. That, objectively speaking, isn’t right, regardless of party or state. If people pay taxes, their vote should be counted. This is part of the reasons for which a third party is doomed to fail in this nation. 7- Anyone should be able to run for office without requiring hundreds of millions or billions of dollars. Every candidate should have equal footing and no advantages afforded by money. No more political donations. We should have a national elections website where every candidate gets a free space to post essays, position papers, plans, proposals, videos, etc. Rule #1: You can’t smear anyone. There are more. These, I believe might be the most important. Imagine the news without lies and real investigative reporting behind everything asserted. Imagine politics without the constant bombardment of lies. Imagine politician’s jobs depending on merit and outcomes rather than lies told for votes and words, outright buying of votes through various means. Imagine if every law was required to be reviewed, ratified, modified or eliminated every few decades. Imagine if your vote counted, regardless of where you happen to live. Imagine if we took money out of politics and implemented an equitable system that allowed anyone to run and removed the influence of big money from our political system. I happen to think this would make for a better society. Not perfect. Can’t have that. We could have better. Definitely.

jackmott 4y ago

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jfengel 4y ago

If I spend time consuming media, things look quite different. I believe it's a mistake to discount that media, though. People will hold their tongues in public, but say something closer to what they really believe in social media. As Mike Tyson famously said, "Social media made y'all way too comfortable with disrespecting people and not getting punched in the face for it." The media itself wouldn't be a problem, except that it also shows up at the voting booth. That's where disrespect turns into force. Government has the ability to force people to do things and to deprive them of rights. Regardless of what people say when you're outside talking with them, it's clear that there's a link between the social media discourse, increasing incivility by politicians, and their willingness to use government to act against those they do not like. The news may present a more dangerous picture of the world than it should, but it's also neglectful to say "Everything looks fine to me". There are genuine dangers that affect real people. Many people still do soul-crushing and body-crushing work for a wage that cannot support them, much less their families. Not everybody has a high standard of living. And many people are finding their rights slipping away under a political process heavily based on falsehoods. I'll grant that it's not all bad. But you really need to grant that it's not all good, and a lot of people are worried for good reason. Sweeping them under the rug just invites people to believe that this is the reason why the bad things are so bad.