Semjeza

Maybe I’m biased, but I find it hard to believe that those 150 million (nearly half the population of the US?) would see a notable drop in the quality of their lives if their iPhones were Samsung, or Huawai, or any other non-domestic company’s.

You’re right in that “meaningfully improve” and “disproportionate” aren’t precise or scientific terms, either.

And re: colonialism, I think more people have managed international trade without going coloniser than did, so it can’t be seen as the sole origin. Needs more to germinate.

On the main issue, I’d say while GDP is far from perfect, it’s better to have the measure than not. Even if it works best as part of a range of measures and not over relied upon as it tends to be in popular understandings at the moment, in my view anyhow.
Temper it with more inequality stats, and also median wages vs. cost of living.

I suspect that what the person you replied to, meant with “meaningfully improve the lives of US citizens” was that the amount Apple contributes to the GDP of the USA (odd, since much of the goods aren’t domestically produced) is disproportionately high compared to its impact on quality of life of people in the US as a whole.

While I’m sure most Apple employees are paid slightly above the median wage, I don’t know the median salary for an Apply employee. I also, like you, am not utilitarian enough to think that a handful of people living large in opulence makes up for the way inequality is harming living standards and the economy as whole (not to mention the impact of it all on the planet). Additionally, Apple and large companies don’t buy from, or in most cases sell to individuals. They buy and sell mostly to other companies and only at the end do smaller branches or franchises sell to actual people. Mostly you have numbers and goods moving between old fashioned AIs running on human-processing power, but not actual people.

• P.S. Colonialism didn’t begin with international trade, because the colonies were part of the colonising nation. They begin with murder, exploitation, and appropriation of conquered territory - trade could only happen once the formerly free regions were given a colonist government with sovereignty apart from the colonist home nation. And most of them were also just corporations originally too; and many who went were coerced either directly (by violence or law) or indirectly (by economics).

You’re very correct, in that any measure that becomes valued turns into a gamified target.

I do think that we have a habit of using GDP rather than GNP to obscure how many British products have been bought by Yanks, and have their profits syphoned off overseas.

My bigger issues with GDP is how it does tend to end up as the sole yardstick used in mainstream economics debates, and how it often includes financial services - which seems an artifical inflation; for instance simply paying the fees on a savings account (or even the overdraft fee) count towards GDP figures by default, but then arbitrarily choosing what to exclude makes a whole lot of new problems, and is something else you’re right about, too.

I thought it was a common first name because of all the fooling around in the Cyberdog dressing rooms?

A strong belief in separation of government from society, and traditionally opposed to unity of state and religion too.

Islam as a whole, prior to Peak Colonialism (which obviously led to some serious cultural and social restructuring) Islam was big on society-religion being apart from government and power. Leave government alone and ignore it as much as you can to live well within society - Sharia as a social code for getting along, with more wiggle-room and freedom compared to medieval laws from governments or local elite.

Debt , pp. 220-225 has a lot more of Graeber on the matter and we can both check the bibliography for more in depth reading.

If any European thinks we don’t have to get much better with how we treat Romani, Sinti, and other traveller groups they’re objectively wrong.

Simply not being as terrible and as murderiffic as the US isn’t the goal, and really should be taken as a given for any society even attempting to be suitable for humanity.

Until a bunch of unknowns and uncertainty are added because no-one knows the future.

And they almost always assume that their actions won’t lead to a decline in users, too.

No, that’s Europe.

The PRC days off are appalling in comparison. And the previous comment didn’t even mention make up days.

Generally they’re not, provided they can keep it low key.

And since within the PRC it’s quite easy to fire people, and courts and settlement is about how much 面子 you can make the company lose without pissing off local authorities vs. the 关系 and pressure they can bring to bear to have you drop it there’s not much to be done.

“ask” that people do overtime, and then fire them for not being a team player, or downmote them into a stressful deadend if they don’t take the voluntary overtime.

Shia has far fewer states and been less interested in temporal power, even Iran is quite an odd case.

Graeber also liked to point out that Shia Islam is quite anarchistic and anti-state authority.

And also that markets divorced from state power lacked a lot of the coercive power they have in the modern Anglo-European unity of state and capital.

I appreciate the choice made over X-ray fish, Xantops, and Xerus.

Going hard, and I wonder what other letters have.

No, the age of America is over.

The Trump preaidencies aren’t a radical break from the past, he’s just an unveiling of it’s darkest, ugliest, impulses and the logical conclusion of its ideals.

Maybe European mainstream leaders can convince themselves to get back into bed with US imperialism, as we benefit from it so much, but US in the eyes of the people never recovered post Iraq II, and across the whole world the US is now primarily seen as the demagogic bully that it is.

The US must learn to get along with its neighbours and treat other nations and people with respect.

Suicide only stopped being a crime in many parts of the world recently… Euthanasia is much larger step beyond that.

Let’s give things time.

Other guy did a good job on the main points, but I’ll add something I saw in a study on a kind of bird in the US:

The birds realised cigarette butts had an antibacterial effect, and made efforts to collect and use cigarette butts in their nest building for eggs and chicks.

Learning and making use of novel materials.

I think you’ve focused on the extraordinary conditions of the protagonists, and ignored the features of the world for normal people.

Most people do not battle their pokémon regularly.

Pokémon are partners, not slaves - and the people who treat their pokémon as objects are consistently bad and harmful of society. And you’ll note that this is an area that villainous teams focus on.

There is a lack of poverty, healthcare is free, education is free, and there isn’t hunger or homelessness.

Society works to support each other without the profit motive. Except for those who push into competitive battling, and criminals.

The thousands of years old tradition from non-Abrahamic Persia, (in fact a proto-IE region with shared religious rites with Slavic, Celtic and Germanic Europe), predating not only the splits of Christianity into Eastern Orthodox and Other, but of Christianity actually existing, doesn’t show it was a Pagan tradition?

What else do you call non-Abrahamic religious rites?

(And apparently new evidence has since backed up Bede’s account of Pagan Oestra in the British Isles, too.)

There have been more discoveries since Grimm boys, and despite earlier scepticism scholars are now mostly accepting that there was an Eostre diety worshipped in Europe around the Spring Equinox.

New findings and archeo-lingustics have supported Grimms and Bede, so the existence (culturally) and worship of Oestra (or however your 1000BC Celto-Germanic language spelt it) is now generally accepted by scholars (and anyone who isn’t pushing an anti-intellectual, and often antisemitic, “war on Christianity” agenda).