En 1979, un presentador de TV le preguntó a Milton Friedman si no le daba vergüenza defender un sistema basado en la codicia.
La respuesta se estudia hasta hoy:
«—Cuando ves la mala distribución de la riqueza, tan pocos que tienen tanto y tantos que no tienen nada… ¿nunca has dudado del capitalismo, de si la codicia es una buena idea?
—Primero dime: ¿conoces alguna sociedad que NO funcione con codicia? ¿Crees que Rusia no funciona con codicia? ¿Que China no?
¿Y qué es la codicia? Ninguno de nosotros es codicioso, claro. El codicioso siempre es el otro.
Los grandes logros de la civilización no salieron de despachos del gobierno. Einstein no construyó su teoría por orden de un burócrata. Ford no revolucionó el automóvil así.
Los únicos casos en la historia en los que las masas escaparon de la pobreza son aquellos donde hubo capitalismo y libre comercio.
—Pero parece premiar la habilidad de manipular el sistema, no la virtud.
—¿Y qué premia la virtud? ¿Crees que un comisario comunista premia la virtud? ¿Un Hitler? ¿Crees que los presidentes americanos eligen sus cargos por virtud… o por peso político?
Dime: ¿dónde están esos ángeles que van a organizar la sociedad por nosotros?
Yo ni siquiera confío en ti para hacerlo.»
our insurance denied all of our newborn’s claims which is something else i could rant about but we already fixed it with them. anyways i was looking at the bills from the hospital and they billed over $400 for them to resuscitating my baby at birth. that’s insane.
In 1998, the College Board was sued because despite getting higher grades girls kept doing worse than boys on the PSAT. The assumption was the test was biased not the grades. The College Board changed the test and how they calculate National Merit scholarships.
A Playplace for grown-ups: a McDonald’s restaurant in Atlanta, Georgia introduces a 24-hour business center where customers can freely use a telephone, fax machine, printer, and computers connected to the Internet.
For me, it's that he felt obligated to include a photo of what is ostensibly his daughter's butt (undoubtedly a mental visualization aid) so readers can more easily contemplate it being sexually harassed.
I follow this Chinese blogger on YouTube named GuYi Alone. She's a Chinese millennial (36) who moved from one of the interior provinces to Shenzhen, and now lives in an "urban village" - dense, run-down, low-cost housing that cuts down on commute time.
She earns about $700 a month. In China, that could get her better accommodations (with a longer commute). Ones that have showers and elevators, for example. But she refuses to upgrade her living standards because she's not eligible for social security. According to her, only people who work in some state-run industries have that privilege (for "building the country") - and she still has to pay into the system despite neither her nor her parents being eligible for payouts.
So she sends money back to her provincial parents (her father, a Boomer, still works construction, and recently lost a finger in an accident), pays the absolute bare minimum for living expenses, and saves every other yuan for a rainy day. Because, as somebody over 35, she's less employable in the Chinese market with every year.
She's not starving. And she herself admits that she could live more comfortably if she was willing to save less. Her job seems to involve video editing or some related skilled professional work. But you'd be hard-pressed to find a comparable full-time working professional in the United States living like this. Or experiencing such acute anxiety about imminent, age-related unemployability.
The DMV was where I suddenly became aware of how stark the IQ gap actually is in practice.
I went to ask a simple question. My first iteration was this, verbatim:
“The roads are covered in ice, so I know it’s not happening right now, but I wanted to ask about motorcycle road tests. You have to have a motorcycle to do the test, but you can’t buy one in this state without the motorcycle endorsement on your license. So, how does that work?”
First answer, verbatim: “Well… we can’t do them in winter.”
It took five increasingly condescending rephrasings to get an answer and I was so stunned by the experience that I can’t even recall the answer.
This incredibly ugly interface is specifically designed to cope with the fact that the DMV is a jobs program for the medically retarded.