a_humean

33 ms·

271.
by a_humean 10y ago
It is very much an American phenomenon calling factory workers Middle Class. Elsewhere in the world the middle class refers to members of the professions - doctors, lawyers, academics, politicians, senior civil servants, successful manager
272.
by a_humean 10y ago
A variation of a common refrain these days that I found funny and a little insightful is that: "Reality has a well-known center-left technocratic recovering-neoliberal bias." https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/sta
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by a_humean 10y ago
Thank you for the link to Gelman's blog; it looks interesting.
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by a_humean 10y ago
I would check out Philosophy Bites, which is a podcast interviewing active research philosophers in 15-20 minutes about their topics. http://www.philosophybites.com/ Check out Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, which is f
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by a_humean 10y ago
Does Australian count as non-western, in which case Armstrong's contributions debunk the entire article?! Joking aside, I don't really know of a lineage or pedigree for a major active research area that is non-western, but I am no
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by a_humean 10y ago
Two things. Firstly, well I suppose I should strip the pretense. There is the added difficulty that we lack enough willing partners, or "practitioners" , on the other side to bridge the gap. There aren't many working philosop
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by a_humean 10y ago
Because I was leading to my point about citation networks and didn't want to bore you to death about theory names like causal theories of reference and semantic externalism in philosophy of language.
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by a_humean 10y ago
"I am not sure that philosophers believe they are doing work like mathematics" As someone with a postgraduate background in Philosophy I can say that, within at least the Western Analytic (mostly anglophone) tradition, that many d
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by a_humean 10y ago
Quoting an 18th century politician citing 18th century anecdotal evidence does not convince anyone who does not already occupy that viewpoint. Especially from outside of the US where the degree of unquestioning reverence, whatever their vir
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by a_humean 11y ago
You don't watch/read Shakespeare for M Night Shyamalan twists, but instead for the quality of the language, the actor's performances, and the director's liberties with the script.
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by a_humean 11y ago
Well their citizens have the option of using an alternative currency such as the USD or Euro or whatever if their leaders really screw up, and it doesn't seem right that you should lock out policy tools from developing countries just b
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by a_humean 11y ago
Yes, but in the case of encryption we have competing issues relating to commerce, privacy, crime, and national security that have to be considered and weighed - which is a political process. In the case of gold buggery all we have is a poli
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by a_humean 11y ago
I think many people would say that bitcoins aren't apolitical, but a new kind of gold buggery. Making it difficult in principle for a government treasury or a central bank to make certain kinds of decisions about monetary policy is pol
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by a_humean 11y ago
Oh sorry, I forgot that part of the history. I was a little young at the time so the Hatfield crash is not something I remember in much detail.
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by a_humean 11y ago
When Beeching wrote the report the stations, carriages, services, and rail were publicly owned and centralised under one public company: British Rail. In the mid-90s the services, carriages, and the stations were sold off as 14-year franchi
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by a_humean 11y ago
During the video they said 1/3 of America's energy requirements from America's coasts.
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by a_humean 11y ago
Ah sorry. Consumption tax is usually understood to mean a tax collected at the moment of transaction based on the value and type of product/service, not as a yearly calculation that is more akin to a variant of an income tax.
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by a_humean 11y ago
Well if the problem is general excessive consumption, then a tax on consumption will help. But consumption tax is not necessarily progressive (or at least not sufficiently progressive enough to warrant the label) as its impacts on the poor
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by a_humean 11y ago
Basic reason is that it displaces the existing population through increasing prices in housing and services and alienates the existing population socially and culturally. The only people that experience the benefits of gentrification are we
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by a_humean 11y ago
I'm afraid you have completely misunderstood him/her. I'm pretty certain that he believes the industrial revolution eventually brought about amazing social change and genuine life improvements for everyone that made life much
291.
by a_humean 11y ago
To counter the unfair Luddite bashing: The problem the Luddites had is that they were skilled labour facing the possibility of destitution with no welfare state to provide time and money for retraining into new occupations. They could see t
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by a_humean 11y ago
I think in this case the difference is that FIFA doesn't yet a lot of political power in the US compared to Europe and South America, but was in the process of significantly expanding its influence to the US, which drew the attention o
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by a_humean 11y ago
Much less so now than in the past now with Valve/Steam's fairly good support for Linux/SteamOS.
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by a_humean 11y ago
The journal or the editorial board (staffed by publicly funded academics), as a connoisseur, is separate from the distribution mechanism that is the private publisher. My department at my alam mater edits a top 3 journal in my original disc
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by a_humean 11y ago
Because none of that is really free; it is a matter of determining the funding model. Newspapers haven't quite figured out the model, and during the transition we could end up losing a number of the 'quality' press and the in
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by a_humean 11y ago
Because you can't buy $1 billion in individual cash saving accounts; there isn't a supply of them and a bank won't sell them to you. When you have very large sums your options of what you can buy and kind of the returns you c
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by a_humean 11y ago
That makes some intuitive sense, but I would raise two problems for that thought experiment. Firstly, I very much doubt you will see negative rates within consumer or retail products, or even attached to the rates seen by pension funds who
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by a_humean 11y ago
I didn't say they would be successful, but merely 'trying'. If you want to address demand issues or excessive savings you typically look to fiscal policy, but that is basically a non-starter for political reasons. The Fed and
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by a_humean 11y ago
Excessive saving can be a problem, which the Fed is trying to address. It can be problem that can depress demand and drive down inflation to deflationary levels, which can further depress demand as people put off payments. On the issue of p
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by a_humean 11y ago
In my opinion pedantry isn't helpful for stimulating conversation. You admitted ignorance of the causes of US poverty and of US history ('As a non-American I am less than qualified to provide an answer'), suggested a very sim

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