Trump, Bernie, & Elizabeth Warren are the most prominent politicians (not named AOC). And similar to their prominence, their politics are very similar too. Donald Trump wants to prevent tech and the direction the world is going in and look who's offering up ideas to do the same? Bernie Sanders the progressive leader of the left and his counterpart aggressive progressive Elizabeth Warren.
Breaking up the tech companies sounds like an attempt to punish them for giving consumers pricing advantage. Why should suppliers have more pricing control? To get further light on what I'm saying read here
Ask yourself this: How did users benefit from Facebook acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp? The short answer is: Not at all. Many Instagram and WhatsApp users don’t even realize the apps are owned by Facebook (making declarations of “I’m quitting Facebook for Instagram” rather comical). The most revealing section in Mark Zuckerberg’s recent manifesto was about messaging and “interoperability.” This is a nakedly desperate attempt to justify the mergers by creating some utility for the user, where right now there’s none.
If the benefit created is weighted towards Facebook by allowing it to acquire more user data, well what's the problem with that? Who cares if consumers give their information and data away? The problem is that there's no consumer benefit to doing it, but they enjoy it. And, more to the point why not create a consumer benefit?
This is where I think the Freedom Dividend makes sense. Suppliers should integrate more productive tech, reduce costs further, and consumers should be able to sell whatever they want, have unlimited choice, cheaper prices, and ultimately live lives they feel are more fulfilling, without any weird socialist progressive agendas.
Thoughts?
Get this lolbertarian nonsense out of here. Your nonsensical argument of "people not caring" could extend to all types of harmful issues that have long-term or unforeseen externalities. The populace is dumb in general and does not understand complicated issues, news at 5pm.
The tech companies have been limiting speech, pushing clown world issues like it being okay to put your 8yo on hormone blockers cuz he once said a dress was pretty, and buying up competition in explicitly monopolistic ways. They should be regulated in some capacity.
I'm sure some regulation outside of this would come to help navigate consumers through their rights. But it is their rights. This isn't even an idea first conjured up by me. Back in like 2017, when Bitcoin first came onto the mainstream, there was talk about social media instituting a token based reward system for users' activities.
I don't think Facebook should be able to create manipulative information, but consumer's should benefit from the reorganization of the world, and we should start making tech work for us now, not the other way around.
Additionally, I agree with this writer in the link I posted. Facebook doesn't exhibit monopolistic behavior, which the writer describes as sucking up the supply side, because they're not integrating vertically into things like content. The content is still being published by separate content creators, Facebook (most of the tech companies today, like Amazon too) are monopsonistic or consolidating the demand side and leveraging buying power to get a pricing advantage.
You didn't address his single most important issue. The fact that Facebook, Google and Twitter censor think tanks, political candidates and even political parties while undisclosed advance political opinions which aligns with their own. Twitter, themselves, even admitted that the only reason they don't use algorithms to censor rightwing politics is because it would lead to too many conservatives being censored and in turn a back-lash.
You have been extremely concerned with Russian influence in the American election. However, you haven't written extensively on the issue of social media companies meddling in election, within and outside the US.
Zizek has raised some relevant and intellectual honest concerns on this topic, albeit I don't come to the same conclusion as him.
Facebook is a content creator when it edits and deletes and promotes content.
Parts of the Freedom Dividend make some sense to me but I can't get my head around the argument that it won't cause inflation. On Andrew Yang's website he claims that the Dividend won't cause inflation because it's redistribution by way of a Value-Add Tax rather than printing of new money supply. However, I can't understand how $1,000 to every person in the US won't cause inflation for lower income goods, in particular housing. Folks who couldn't afford a home can now rent a roof over their heads, and the folks that were in lower income housing before will look to upgrade. How would this not increase rent and home prices in the types of housing poor and lower-middle class Americans live in?
I can understand packaged goods prices staying relatively static thanks to the Amazon-effect, global supply chains, etc competing away inflation, but housing is a highly regulated and localized good. Supply lags demand (or never catches up at all - hello SF). Where I think it affects inflation the least is in goods purchased by higher income households. The lower the % that $1K per month is relative to a household's earnings, the less of an inflationary effect on the universe of goods typically purchased by them. E.g. the Freedom Dividend probably won't have much of an affect on the sales of yachts or 6 bedroom homes in Pac Heights.
Curious to hear what others think about UBI and inflation.
Yang's UBI plan is so terrible that it's dead on arrival if it were ever proposed in Congress. The argument to conservatives is that it's similar to Friedman's negative income tax, which is a truly breathtaking claim if you know anything about the negative income tax (hint: they are such dissimilar policies that they aren't even recognizable as cousin proposals).
Because the proposal is DOA, I have little interest in going into detail about all of its flaws, but suffice to say that the $2-3 trillion per year cost is assumed to be paid for by the paradoxical idea of increased economic growth into the headwinds of material tax increases.
> Donald Trump wants to prevent tech and the direction the world is going in and look who's offering up ideas to do the same?
Source?
never happened
I honestly don't see how the two things (FB buying companies) and the Freedom Dividend are connected to each other. What am I missing?
Besides, how would dysfunctional cities from California handle it? The sanctuary ones? Freedom dividend for illegal immigrants? Good luck with that.
Read the article
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