To be fair, this is how people tend to react to change, generally. I remember every time Facebook or YouTube did a site redesign in the early 2010s people were always up in arms.
Jake and Amir parodied this well in their “Facebook Redesign” episode.
On the other hand, Google/Apple Pay are both pretty great products that replace a horrendous legacy payments system. Recall that for like 40 years the most innovative consumer payment system looked like this. And it was essentially a duopoly as well (Visa/Mastercard).
At the end of the day, cash is still a thing as well.
Man, Lemmy is savage with its downvotes.
And also stop goes for hikes in the middle of a heat wave.
I just don’t get it. While it’s eased up a bit, we’re still in one of the hottest labour markets of all time. If your job sucks that much, just quit.
I just don’t think that’s supported by the data though. On virtually every measure, living conditions have improved across the globe over the last century. You can pick out specific metrics where things are worse in specific countries (housing is the most obvious example where affordability has declined), but taken as a whole I just don’t see how you can draw any other conclusion.
Here’s a question in response: would China have seen such a huge reduction in povery if it didn’t offer cheap labour in the first place?
The main draw for foreign investment, capital inflow and trade, I would argue, was: (a) heavy investment in its stock of “hard” capital assets (i.e., great infrastructure); plus (b) an army of people willing to work for wages far lower than the countries making those investments (but generally higher than most of those people were making in agrarian sector).
This is arguably one of the most important (and complex) things for the world to understand well. There are billions more people around the world who haven’t been able to escape poverty whose futures really depend on getting these kinds of policies right.
Do you think poor wages around the globe is a recent phenomenon? In any event, something like a half a billion people have been lifted out of poverty in China since the 70’s when it opened its markets up. There were sure as hell some losers from that process too, but I don’t think the progress on that front is something to overlook.
If you’re being sincere, the quick and dirty argument is to place the Fraser Institute’s 2022 Index of Economic Freedom and The Economist’s 2023 livability index and put them side by side.
My grandparents worked 16+ hour days toiling away on a farm doing hard labour for like 60 years. They ate meat and potatoes for nearly every meal because grocery chains weren’t a thing for them (and they didn’t get a fridge until the 60s anyway). A bunch of their family members died of the Spanish Flu and other illnesses that we’ve since cured. That includes both my grandma’s parents when she was maybe 10. The highest-tech thing they owned until they were in probably their 50s was a 13-inch black and white TV that got like 2 channels with its bunny ears.
If you’re saying my biggest issue is that the house I bought cost double or triple than they would have paid in inflation-adjusted terms, I’d say I came out ahead.
I dunno man, my quality of life is like 10x better than my grandparents’ and 1000x better than maybe 8 generations ago, and I’d argue that’s mostly attributable to liberalised free markets.
I haven’t read either, but the following two are on my list:
That’s one of my favourite things about my pup 😂 It’s funny how people disagree on these things.
You think dog people are crazy?? I assure you, there is nothing crazy about the chewed up baseboards and furniture in my house from when my dog was a puppy. Nothing crazy in the slightest about having a dirty floor 24/7 because she brings mud and dirt in from her walks. I feel prefectly sane when she wakes me up barking in the middle of the night because she hears noises outside. Calm and collected when she chews up fresh sticks all over the bed.
You’re the crazy one, my friend!!
This is some weird-ass propaganda article. The article frames this whole thing as a wronged war hero seeking justice, then just slips in a little tidbit that a court found he literally comitted war crimes, before going back to listing his medals.
Quote:
A judge dismissed the defamation claims, finding the articles were substantially true. The judge also found Roberts-Smith was responsible for four of the six unlawful deaths he had been accused of.
Mate, in basically all common law jurisdictions an agreement can be a legally binding contract regardless of its form. While there are some narrow exceptions (largely dealing with specific instruments or real property), by and large that rule holds. Even an oral contract is legally enforceable.
Pay what a fair wage, the GPU farm? 😂
As a counterpoint, it would be quite unfair for the law to allow people to breach their agreements purely based on the medium used to enter into an otherwise valid contract.
E.g., what if the non-breaching person had invested considerable time or money complying with their end of the bargain in reliance on the promise? What if, as I understand the case was here, the parties completed multiple agreements over text and came to rely on that medium as the convention?
In any event, the analysis leaves a lot of room for a judge to consider the factual background and reach a fair outcome.
While the novelty of accepting a contract through emojis is pretty goofy, judges applying contract law to hold people to commercial promises like this is otherwise a pretty run-of-the-mill thing, even when the promise was over text.
There’s a not insignificant chance that it’ll be the secured creditors’ company soon 😂