I hope you will consider one thing, and please don’t mistake it for political correctness. The phrase “from good people” is distasteful and I think we’re all better off not implying such a thing as “bad people”. If the intent is to define a division, it’s important to be specific lest we undermine our egalitarian goals. I know you don’t mean it to be exclusionary, and probably instead aim to evoke positive feelings. But, for me it does the opposite. People accustomed to being excluded are likely to read “from good people” and wonder if that includes them or not.
I'd use great. Good people is usually used to mean decent people, whereas great people is used to mean impressive people, which may or may not be moral, as in great man theory of history.
They all have healthcare when they need it and have no health-related bankruptcies or anxiety over such. Having a part-time job isn’t crippling to their health and safety. Their transportation systems are cutting edge as well.
If you combine only the tangible cost benefits of healthcare and transportation availability, that should account for approximately the difference in disposable income.
You’re making the common (and fatal) mistake of evaluating a government on the terms of a private business entity.
Governments are of the people so long as the people maintain them as such.
When you treat a government like a business, it falls behind on it’s maintenance schedule, and begins to resemble one. There are a lot of people who wish the government was their business, and will encourage you to play along. These people work night and day to lower your expectations of what you’re capable of.
Stop falling for it!
The USA had some ingenious (and flawed) founders who set in place some rights and traditions that reserve at least a small finger hold which resembles democracy, by which the people can mobilize effectively.
But, in any nation, that fingerhold can exist when enough people come together en masse.
> You’re making the common (and fatal) mistake of evaluating a government on the terms of a private business entity.
> Governments are of the people so long as the people maintain them as such.
"We the people" decided that government has some set of tasks to perform. Those tasks require resources, so "we the people" decided that we should steal some portion of each others' earnings, in order to provide a means that these tasks be accomplished.
The continued legitimacy of this ... arrangement ... is due to Social Contract Theory.
If, for discussion's sake, we temporarily step into the average-person's shoes and accept the Social Contract Theory at face-value, then it is most simple to conclude that what we are really doing is paying the government a lump sum in exchange for some set of services, and by garrulously quarrelling and advertising to each other we can decide who pays how much, and what is the set of services, and to a limited extent how the services ought be provided; under the limitation that if all the lump sums can't pay for all the services, then the difference will have to be made-up by printing more money and thereby reducing everyone's purchasing power (in short: further theft-from-all).
From that we can conclude that the "best" government would be the one which satisfied the majority of the desires of the majority of the people while appearing to take, in return, as little as possible. Does that not sound like the goal of a business?
> The USA had some ingenious (and flawed) founders who set in place some rights and traditions that reserve at least a small finger hold which resembles democracy, by which the people can mobilize effectively.
Correct.
Problem is, that kind of mobilization will cause enough chaos that it's not worth doing it over just a parking-ticket racket.
No, it will likely require some single, unambiguous, flagrant, overt, unapologetic and high-stakes treason against the letter of our principles and procedures ... before the 2nd Amendment's most fundamental purpose is put-to-action.
And I have no faith that the outcome of such an event, will be nontrivially better than the Articles of Confederation; it probably won't even outshine the Constitution of 1788.
But this whole discussion is going far afield enough that my betting-money says we'll soon hear from Fearless Leader Ang...
The new signs caused the rate of tickets at the spot to slow down, not stop. According to the charts, there are still 300 tickets per year being written at that one spot. That is huge.
It's not a coincidence that that huge number of tickets is being written in a busy bar area.
Advertising underwrites and funds almost all of it.
Can we really assume the social media we know today would exist in it's present state without advertising? I think it would be inconsiderate and wholly unimaginative at best to suggest that it would. I think separating the two is a mistake.
The internet forums I grew up with in the late 90s were, I would argue, nothing but healthy. They exposed me to worlds of encouragement and knowledge. The social media we have now seems to be no comparison.
"Making people watch ads" is not the problem with advertising. The problem is the existence it creates for ourselves. Advertising, at it's current levels in the US, dictates our whole conception of the world we live in. I wonder if many will ever realize this without studying humanities and working in the ad industry; two things that combined have depleted my faith in humanity unless we can reverse this grave mistake. To think this is just an issue of time lost sitting through ads is just a misunderstanding of what advertising in 2018 even is, or of how it defines the world you think you live in.
You are correct as far as that goes, but you are partly reversing cause and effect.
Yes, advertising is the motivation to do these tactics. But it's not the problem in and of itself. Any other time-based money maker could replace advertising and nothing would change.
That's an indication the problem does not lie there.
But I put that word "time-based" for a reason: If you make money not based on engagement, but at a fixed rate per person, some things would indeed change. But only to a point: After all they need people addicted in order to convince them to stay, and recommend to others.
Strawman, of course, but I think it's excusable in this case. Advertising is definitely out of control in the US. Entertainment, I would argue, is not, and studies repeatedly undermine the accusations against entertainment. Advertising is an entirely different beast.
So, advertising and entertainment are separate categories, and it's important to respond to them separately.
Entertainment does not present with ulterior motives in the way advertising does. There are a lot of blurry lines in this discussion, but I think they should be the focus. I think it's the manipulation in blurring the lines that we are really contending with. Entertainment does not generally present with blurry lines, but that's gradually changing, whereas advertising has been blurring the lines for far longer, and tech does so more through utility than anything else.
So, if entertainment is generally what it claims to be, advertising is more shape-shifting. As popular culture has subsumed it, logos have become decoration on clothing, brand names find themselves in pure art forms like musical lyrics, etc. and all the while serving to promote. It's easy to consider these conflations as notable chaos, but as long as it all remains conceivably easy to ignore (something I think Aristotle would readily debate), we consider it excusable.
Tech does not conflate the business intentions of it's product with entertainment like advertising does, but instead with something that is conceivably more difficult to ignore: utility. Social networking tools that the tech industry provide have become critical to a citizen's well-being. Getting a job that pays the bills generally means needing to promote one's self on social media. Even if it doesn't, one can never know if their insecurity is a result of avoiding thus, so they are by all accounts forced to participate. This goes quite a bit deeper than the repercussions of, say, modifications to T-Shirts and music. The utility of technology has a deeper correlation with civic duties and every-day utility. If it didn't, social media would unlikely seem so critical to adults, and teens alike.
It's important to remember how useful electronic communication is when discussing social media. There should be no debate over this. It's amazing.
And, I think it's worth asking if psychological damage of social media (assuming it exists) is exacerbated by advertising. The most obvious exacerbation is in funding through ad sales, and that can hardly be overstated. And such funding strategies probably undermine product design. But I think there's even more to it...
As we know, advertising abstracts our conceptions of who we are through archetypal narratives, and plays to the weaknesses of the self-identity problem. It does so in a purely intentional way. I worked in advertising for years, and this is what it's all about. But, I don't think that's how the tech industry works. It is providing unquestionable utility. But, an increase in communication can exacerbate the issues that undermined self-identity creates. So my point here is that I'm not sure this should all fall on tech, and I can't help but wonder if we need to shift all of the blame to advertising. This would at least give us an idea of where we stand.
> It's ironic that an entity dependent on ad money would create such a title.
No, it's not. As you say, they are dependent on ad money, which should not suggest they choose to be. I would assume quite the opposite. I would assume they would prefer integrity, and are aiming for such the best they know how. Again, it's the advertising.
That book is so full of nonsense. It’s a string of desperate theories that strive to explain present-day tensions in such a way that ignores the context of present-day. The milieus of turbo consumerism and associated economic strife are in conflict with certain less-compatible self-identities, and not others. This underwrites everything the book aims to address with far more cohesion (as is often the case with successful realism) and is an infinitely more fascinating theme at that (also often the case with successful realism). It’s too bad the author was so desperate to avoid it. For whatever reason, the author goes digging where’s simply nothing to dig. The result is boring, hardheaded exoticism.
I know he claims the subjects are his own family, but I’m not buying it. The subjects are his agenda.
I grew up in the same part of the country around the same time as the author. While I agree not everything in the book is a fully realistic depiction, it is honestly highly accurate in many regards. It goes in depth with the type of inconsistent, moralistic and tribal decision making and thought process in Appalachia in a more detailed and accurate way than I’ve seen in almost any other account.
I’d suggest to also read the book Dreamland about the opioid and prescription drug epidemic in Appalachia.
Between base knowledge of how tribal morals work there, how skills gap unemployment had hit that area, and how the addiction crisis has hit them, it helps dramatically to understand why it creates a conservative-leaning voting bloc that feels scared of modern progressive politics and would generally vote modern Republican despite having deep historical roots in voting Democrat as a worker solidarity signal.
Steve Case bankrolled the fictional accounts in Hillbilly Elegy so that he would have a sympathetic figure head for his Rise of the Rest movement. Is J. D. Vance even his real name?!!
Haha, I guess this is a fair response, but you're misinterpreting my point. I'll explain.
I don't think he "made it up", and I don't want to accuse him of blaming somebody, but I don't know how else to put it. In so many words, he basically says that, at the end of the day, the culture he's writing about is riddled with it's own shortcomings and needs to be brought to an end. Whether he alludes to historical economic strife or not (he does some), his ultimate assessment is that it's too late to do anything but save these poor souls. He communicates this idea with a lot of contention, because otherwise he would have been dismissed much sooner. A lot of the issues he writes about are legitimate, but he takes a mistaken turn towards accusing the traditions and personalities of his family.
It's not a 2-dimensional issue. Those traditions and parsonalities exist, but they are far more principled than the neoliberal traditions he promotes. And for whatever truth there is to his historical explanations, there is loads more that he avoids. His insistence on attributing present-day tensions to something like "outdatedness" is extremely ignorant.
The word for this turn that he takes is just hopelessly congruent with neoliberalism, and, unfortunately, it does serve his agenda quite well. He's got a partnership with a VC who aims to capitalize on techish business deals in the rust belt. Presumably, the VC aims to play savior and ultimately rip a lot of people off.
I hope you will consider one thing, and please don’t mistake it for political correctness. The phrase “from good people” is distasteful and I think we’re all better off not implying such a thing as “bad people”. If the intent is to define a division, it’s important to be specific lest we undermine our egalitarian goals. I know you don’t mean it to be exclusionary, and probably instead aim to evoke positive feelings. But, for me it does the opposite. People accustomed to being excluded are likely to read “from good people” and wonder if that includes them or not.