American politics became Americans nightly entertainment, its a saturated behemoth with an insatiable appetite. It will not be long until election campaigns are non-stop. There's simply too much money in this game.
To be fair, there's basically no sports or festivals or other distractions going on right now. Politics and politics-adjacent action are the biggest topic with zero competition.
Any time you can spend a half a trillion dollars without accountability, you have a massive incentive to spend all of your time either trying to obtain that power, or trying to defend it.
Small towns and cities need to look at other means to survive than to try and bring in some large employer or factory. Those can be boons, but banking on industrialists or some keystone sort of solution is a sure way to fail.
I grew up a few minutes from Youngstown. These areas should focus more on small businesses, agriculture and other things that make a lot of sense with what is left there. Met with a ton of corruption at the local level, I don't see much of anything happening without a real and renewed interest in participation and accountability in our politics.
Thank you for this, and all of your work. There are many places you've shot and produced like this that we will never be able to get to, and this is a true joy to spend time in.
From what I hear, lots of employers get royally screwed. Namely school districts and other small-gov employers. There is something about public schools that just love buying into high-fee 403b.
Data in what state?
Does data need to be stored long-term to be used in analytics?
The outcomes of those analytics is the data that is needed and would need to exist for a time, but the day-to-day, I don't know why you would expect all that to hang around.
Google isn't making money from selling actual raw user data, its selling data about that data.
No expert, but I would imagine that decreased cost to manufacture (as factories are getting built and established), improvements in its total output (and generally the technology behind them), and longevity/durability.
When have we not been seen as disposable. The common man has been reduced to just a cog in the machine, with the exceptions being our concerted fights for what little protections we have.
Mobility is great but when on .001% of the entire global population gets to do it, and they get to do it much easier than anyone else would have (sometime skirting laws and requirements that normal people would).
The rich and elite get special treatment, when they should not. It leads to more unfair conditions.
The question should be, how can we give the average person the freedoms that the elites have, not how can we enslave the Chinese elites in the way we've enslaved the average Chinese person.
The first point would be policies aimed at distributing ownership of property etc. So for example we could have a high tax for:
1. Real estate not directly used by the owner as his or her residence or place of work.
2. Shares of a business where he or she does not work (Zuck doesn't get taxed as heavily on facebook shares as the investors do)
A major part of the problem is that ownership itself is so heavily concentrated that freedom for ordinary people is not possible. But if we have policies which encourage smaller businesses, weaker concentrations of wealth and more ownership by more people that would be a major start.
Since the freedom in question is economic mobility, it's kind of a moot point for the huge proportion of the U.S. population with limited incomes and little to no wealth to move around.
For some context in case anyone was curious, it seems that approximately 1 in 30 of people worldwide live outside the country of their birth. (Of these, approximately 1 in 10 are forcibly displaced.) Also, "the largest international migratory flow from a single country of origin to a single country of destination is the 12.7 million Mexicans living in the United States"; this flow alone is approximately 1 in 600 people worldwide.
The Federal Government or the policy makers in control of it, seem to believe that privatizing things is an approach for making them redundant, in a way.
Until we can step back from the belief that private corporations can solve every problem, we will be stuck with long-standing, and wasteful systems/situations like this.
