Regarding the Spanish (or Kansas) flu, there is some evidence suggesting that the second wave was much deadlier than the first because of an unusual practice connected to World War I:
Soldiers infected with more virulent strains were more likely to be shipped to military hospitals, while those infected with less virulent strains were more likely to remain in the trenches.
The military hospitals were much more active vectors of transmission than the bays of the trenches, so the normal pattern of transmission was inverted, with the more virulent strains spreading faster than the less virulent ones.
Under normal conditions, the very sick would stay home while the less sick would go to work, which would tend to push highly virulent viruses toward becoming less virulent over time.
This reminds me of the fact that hospital-acquired pneumonia is the leading cause of death in ICUs in the US.
Among people who are already going to die, the thing that kills them the most is an opportunistic bacterial pneumonia that barely even exists outside of hospitals, or other compromised patients.
The US lead over the EU in per capita productivity has massively grown over the last 20 years. There's no indication of waning American power.
America has produced 70 times more stock market wealth if you look only at companies created within the last 50 years than the EU. And this is not all paper wealth. If you look at technological sophistication, whether that's frontier AI models, leading-edge pharmaceutical drugs, total amount of compute, or the space industry, the U.S. has grown its lead over the EU over the last 50 years.
It's because the EU has largely fixated itself on reducing wealth inequality by punishing those who succeed. It's safety-maximalist approach to private industrial action has also hamstringed industry — see Germany closing all 17 of its nuclear power plants. The US doesn't really need to do much except not sabotage itself to maintain its lead. Like in all nations, laissez-faire (French for "leave it alone") allows the private sector to do the rest.
As just an average US citizen living in a not so prosperous area, this rings pretty hollow to my mind and most of Europe sure looks like it is winning over 95% of the people that live around me. We already know the stock market is divorced from reality, IP rights are a short-term benefit, and I fail to see how having more compute or starlink satellites are suppose to carry the US into future economic prosperity.
Now im not saying everything is bad, but it sure feels like a lot of the US economy is a Lamborgini shell stuck on the body of a Ford Focus and we think we are winning because most people haven't noticed yet and the profit margins are higher than ever. Europe sure ain't perfect, they got plenty of problems, but their problems are more like worrying about percentage points in the future, while in the US the worry is whether our economy is going to provide for people at all not in the top 25% long-term. And an angry and unsatisfied mass of lower class people is a recipe for upheaval with everyone on top relying on that not happening.
I'm not so sure people in Europe are better off. There are a lot of very poor regions in Europe compared to how people tend to imagine Europe. In fact, most European countries, if they were U.S. states, would rank among the poorer U.S. states.
Now, looking only at the statistics, there are certainly some things European countries are doing better than the U.S. But based on my research so far, which admittedly isn't enough for a full understanding, my tentative conclusion is that almost all of those things don't seem related to economic policy. They seem more related to things like urban planning, for example more pedestrian- and bike-friendly cities.
In terms of work and wages, U.S. wages are substantially higher than wages in most European countries. And I'm not just talking about longer hours. I mean the compensation per hour is significantly higher.
Averages tell us the general availability of wealth. To give you some perspective, most European countries are poorer than the poorest U.S. state, which is Mississippi. There just aren't as many high-paying jobs. And these figures encompass everything, including what the government spends on health care and welfare programs and education. So Europeans as a whole get much less per capita from both government and private sector. When it comes to purchasing power parity, which takes into account cost-of-living differences, the gap isn't as big as above, but it's still pretty significant.
> It's because the EU has largely fixated itself on reducing wealth inequality by punishing those who succeed.
It's actually because America pivoted[1] from manufacturing to higher-margin services (financial, tech[2]), and generations of American Diplomats had negotiated trade deals that ensure American services are never shut-out or hobbled in most countries. American companies won't look so special,or be nearly as profitable, once they lose their default status that allow them to siphon money from all over the globe -including Europe
2. Silicon valley caught lightning in a bottle. Other American locales repeatedly tried and failed to replicate it - so it rules out American legislative attitudes as the vital ingredient.
If you're familiar with American capital markets and global venture capital, you'd know that it had almost nothing to do with these trade deals. They had a marginal impact. The amount of capital available to startups and established companies at all stages of their development was the main difference. And the difference between the US and EU in that regard came mostly from the US simply not sabotaging itself the way the EU did with extremely high taxes on the top income earners, as part of an agenda to reduce wealth inequality.
The fact that the tech industry concentrated in Silicon Valley is simply due to network effects. Regardless of which locale became the Schelling point for U.S.-based technology companies, that locale would have succeeded, because of the national economic policy it operated inside of.
> ...that locale would have succeeded, because of the national economic policy it operated inside of.
The US policy is about to become a lot more robust and a lot less laissez-faire. Over the decades, the public image of tech CEOs has switched from benign, awkward but genius dorks, to out-of-control bond villains.
There's a tech backlash happening in the US, if you've been paying attention, and legislators follow the voter zeitgeist.
Correct. There seems to be a pretty broad tendency across societies to fixate on reducing wealth inequality. I don't think the U.S. is going to escape it. Taxing the rich is the most popular thing in the world. There's nothing the common man prefers more.
Even if US companies only had the US market, they'd be massive — Google gets ~50% of its revenue from the US alone, Amazon over 60% from North America, and most other Big Tech is in that same range. The US market by itself is plenty huge. And the EU provides 20-30% of US Big Tech revenue. Even losing all of that (very unlikely even under protectionist policies), US tech companies would be doing well, with 70-80% of their current revenue.
Sure, full-blown protectionism everywhere would make the world including the US poorer (less specialization, less division of labor), but it would also harm EU exports, as the US is the EU's biggest importer, and moreover it wouldn't change the factors behind the growing US-EU gap. US-EU trade policies with each other are basically the same. The difference is internal, and mostly comes down to the US just not sabotaging the private sector as much.
The EU did retaliate to Trump's tariffs with its own.
Anyway, I wasn't making a point about recent developments. I was talking about more long-term trends showing that why the US has outpaced EU in economic growth.
A pretty strong, evidenced-based argument can be made against current nuclear regulation standards and for less onerous ones.
Nuclear is currently 10,000 less dangerous per unit of energy produced than the largest sources of energy: coal, oil and natural gas. We could afford to let nuclear get 10x less safe, so that it becomes vastly less costly to deploy, and a very possible result would be that it would replace the largest sources of energy, and would still be three orders of magnitude less dangerous than the sources of energy it replaced.
Of course regulation is necessary. The point is that current nuclear regulation is disproportionate to actual risk, and that this mismatch has made nuclear uncompetitive relative to energy sources that are demonstrably far more dangerous on a per-unit-of-energy basis.
"Regulating crypto grifts" is a nice euphemism for prohibiting mutually voluntary economic interactions involving digital currency, and putting open source developers in prison:
Tornado Cash is an open source software protocol that uses smart contracts and a cryptographic method known as zero-knowledge proofs to enable users to conduct private transactions on the blockchain. Neither Roman Storm, nor any other person has the ability to stop or modify this immutable, unstoppable protocol.. In this context, Tornado Cash operates much like the Bitcoin or Ethereum network. The prosecution of Roman Storm by the Southern District of New York (SDNY) in U.S. v. Storm for his role in developing Tornado Cash will set a chilling precedent for the crypto industry by holding developers liable for how third parties use their open-source code.
The case hinges on allegations that Storm violated 18 U.S.C. § 1960 by operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business, despite Tornado Cash being a non-custodial protocol where users retain full control of their funds, challenging the applicability of Section 1960 to decentralized software.
The money laundering conspiracy charge raises concerns about whether developers can be criminally accountable for the actions of bad actors, like North Korea’s Lazarus Group, who used Tornado Cash to obscure illicit transactions. A conviction could deter innovation by discouraging developers from creating privacy-focused tools, fearing prosecution for misuse beyond their control, while an acquittal might affirm that writing open-source code is protected speech under the First Amendment.
The outcome will likely shape the legal boundaries of developer liability and the future of decentralized finance (DeFi), impacting how regulators approach immutable protocols."
"Mutually voluntary economic interactions" is a nice euphemism for scams. Yes, the people who get hoodwinked in a scam enter into these agreements voluntarily, but we as a society want to discourage scammers because we don't want to deal with the economic cost of people losing their life savings. We also don't want to incentivize sanctioned countries to build ransomware industries propped up by naive economically illiterate people buying into decentralized ponzi schemes.
Going after scams was never the issue. Actual scammers were prosecuted, and no one objected to that. In fact prosecutions against scammers have recently ramped up, and people in crypto are ecstatic that those individuals are finally facing justice. The issue was that under the previous administration more than 20 startups were being targeted without evidence of fraud, while regulators were pushing rules so overbroad that they would have made vast areas of DeFi presumptively illegal before any misconduct occurred.
As for this resort to national security justifications for the clampdown:
The countries the U.S. sanctions are sanctioned because they are authoritarian hellholes that strip their citizens of their rights in the name of national security. That is the same basic tradeoff the 'gatekeep crypto' faction is trying to impose here: sacrifice freedom for security. Indicting a software developer for money laundering because he released open source code that allows people to transact privately on a blockchain is so beyond the pale that it's hard to believe this is what the officials in charge believe in.
And this approach to risk management is objectively ruinous. It's because North Korea strips its people of freedom in the name of security that its economy is smaller than Kansas'. We shouldn't emulate that.
So now you want to classify any advocacy for crypto as an investment a scam and prohibit it. That would be a massive infringement on the First Amendment and basically a repudiation of any principle associated with a free society.
Is this kind of censorship law what you meant by a Democrat "regulating crypto"?
You completely misunderstand. If you advocate joining somebody else's ponzi scheme and aren't aware of it, you don't go to jail. If you do it knowingly, you could be prosecuted. If you run the ponzi scheme, you definitely will be prosecuted. Similarly, if you run infrastructure that circumvents sanctions, you definitely will be prosecuted. It's straightforward.
If you try to avoid prosecutions for those crimes on free speech grounds, the prosecutor will laugh at you. You might as well declare yourself a sovereign citizen.
Most crime is intra-racial. Group A will do better over time, with fewer people becoming victims of crime, if it is subject to better policing, because more of the malevolent actors within it will be incarcerated or deterred from engaging in (mostly intra-racial) predatory behavior.
That is only part of the equation. You may be removing more malevolent actors in the immediate short term, but depending on how that policing is done, you might also be creating more malevolent actors too. Overpolicing a group can create distrust between the community and the police. Once you feel the system does not care about you or treats you unfairly, there is little reason for why you should care about it. And if P(Caught|Group X) != P(Caught), the system is treating you unfairly.
I would argue we as society don't want crime to stop simply for the sake of crime stopping (or for prison labor), but ultimately because we want to feel happy and safe from harm and unjust treatment. The systems we design need to factor in the humanness of the police and their communities and make sure they are not set up in a way that loses sight of that bigger picture.
The idea that there is a certain category of content that is harmful and there are certain people who have the authority to declare what is harmful is extremely dangerous, practically how every single censorship system has ever been built.
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