When your fire insurance is worth more than your house.

Behavioral economics posing as labor economics. Behavioral economics is completely fake and has no value. It’s effectively social psychology for libertarians.

These are all franchisees. These people have no real power other than controlling labor costs.

He was a physics phd with a focus in gravitational waves, never a professor. His phd thesis has 0 citations.

We don’t see the social mobility required for a merit-based society. Harvard’s Equality of Opportunity Project highlighted the increasing importance of the “birth lottery” in this country.

Drug trade: Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer of opium, which can be refined to make heroin.

The illicit drug trade isn’t just heroin, it’s moving opioids into India so they can be resold to the pharmaceutical industry for our legal-opioid epidemic.

China doesn’t need to produce the fast chips because their comparative advantage is in quantity manufacturing.

You have to take power dynamics in consideration when talking about comparative advantages. For example, when comparing the US to the textile industry in East Asia, the power dynamics perpetuate unequal labor conditions because more the affluent economic can leverage their buying power to dictate terms that are favorable to them but detrimental to workers.

Both minerals and the people immigrating are both economically advantageous to larger more powerful countries. The connotation difference is rooted in racism.

Chip manufactures should think twice about headquartering in the US. Why get caught up in a sanction war when you could just not.

No, the IMEI number on the phone are explicitly blacklisted for not being FCC approved.

The Secure Equipment Act of 2021 effectively prevents Americans from being able to use many (but not all) modern Chinese phones. While you may see them for sale on Amazon etc, you cannot activate them on any carrier.

I mean that’s what you must to do when you take over a hospital, as said by the International Humanitarian Law. Great for not doing more war crimes I guess?

So they can sue you if you resell, but they don’t have to buy it back if they don’t want to. A prime example of anti-competitive behavior in effort to control competition in the secondary market and to manipulate market prices. They aren’t even afraid of anti-trust lawsuits. I’m also guessing they anticipate this product is going to be a failure if they’re willing to take such a risky position.

Mein Kampf advocated for territorial expansion based on “Lebensraum” (living space) for the German people. This involved a deeply racial component, as it involved the displacement or extermination of non-Aryan populations.

So the book that features views of nationalism and racial purity, and how these views ultimately progressed genocide? Why would they read such a thing.

I’m now convinced he wrote the article.

Over-intellectualization can cause rationalization of otherwise atrocious things. Academic texts can be difficult to understand which can cause people to take away wrong conclusion, which can cause actual harm.

I’ll give an example, let’s say an economist says “Palestinian people are less productive than Israeli people”. This statement causes harm, even though no harm was intended. Many people will interpret this as Palestinian people being less than Israeli people and embolden racist ideology. But the actual statement was a statement of fact because the economist has a different working definition of “productive”: Palestinian people have less net output (likely from seizure of industrial equipment, less access to education, etc). Is it okay to explore the right for Israel to seize Palestinian land even in an intellectual way? Probably not, because we live in a world of science-as-a-religion with a lot of blind faith.

Are you okay?

Lame reply, do better next time. I worked hard on that.