A Supreme Court judge (Scalia) made the case that torture was legal under the US Constitution, as it only prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. So, torture for other reasons is obviously fine.

I think, never stopping to consider the implications must count as an example of “white privilege”.

They called it. I had already forgotten about that, so thx for the reminder.

A tax like this will make the prices of some goods go up. Such price increases are measured as inflation.

This is a highly regressive tax. It’s 50% on certain items below 5 EUR (soon 10) and less for items above that. Over the price, the rate goes down. For items at 50 EUR (100 EUR), it is only 10%.

Making cheap clothing in particular more expensive doesn’t sound much like looking out for the 99%.

Productivity because it’s in the OP.

I used to argue with climate change denialists, so I already know the pitch. I can’t be bothered anymore.

Running anything means understanding the facts you are facing. Running a society means looking at statistics. You must know what they say or do not say. Someone who does not know what “productivity” means is not going to be part of the solution.

No, that doesn’t assume any of that. I don’t even know why you would think that.

AFAIK, the Irish situation is because multi-nationals get to pretend that they make their profits there for tax purposes. On paper they produce stuff there and pay the low taxes. -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_erosion_and_profit_shifting

It’s a known issue and has been for years. But you can see the problem. It’s a complicated issue. People who might care aren’t even able to get their heads around the very simple textbook definition of “productivity”.

Yes and no. Productivity is not measured in physical output. It’s measured in how much money people pay, which has problems, of course. If it really goes straight to the landfill, then nothing has been produced. Countries may pay for that sort of thing with taxes to create jobs, but that’s not a neoliberal thing at all.

Eventually, the only reasonable way to measure productivity is in terms of what people want. That’s what you do when you look at what people pay for something. Any other way would also have problems.

Failure to consider environmental degradation and resource depletion are indeed problems. Norway is a better example for this. They have a very high productivity on paper, because oil. But that basically pretends that they literally produce the oil, rather than pumping it out of the sea floor. In reality, that’s more like selling off an inheritance. And that’s not even considering the damage done when fossil fuels are burned.

On a national level, in macro-economics, productivity is GDP divided by total hours worked (for money).

I’d say that a high productivity generally means working less hard, because machines do the tough bits. A high productivity requires a very high skilled labor force, using a lot of machines and robots. It’s by definition an efficient and effective use of labor, though one could ask pointed questions about environmental degradation.

Those are not the assumptions, but there are indeed a great many problems with measuring productivity.

Usually, you only count work for money. Cooking dinner at home does not go into the statistic. Ordering dinner from a restaurant does. I would say that it is a problem that the “production” of leisure time is not counted. Of course, it’s not clear how this could be reasonably done.

“Productivity” already goes some way towards addressing such problems. It is usually GDP divided by hours worked (for money). US Americans work far more hours than their European counter-parts, so that their average incomes are much higher. Whether they are actually richer, depends on the value of “free” time. “Free” in quotes because it does not include necessary work like housework or healthcare visits.

If you look at a list of countries by productivity, you will find that it more or less matches common intuitions about what the rich countries are. That’s where people want to migrate to, so it does tell you something.

“Productivity” is how much a worker produces in an hour. Lower productivity means either that a people have to work longer hours, or make do with less. So, who cares? Pretty much everyone.

It’s the topic of the thread, so I thought… FWIW I’m not sure that the GDPR really does what people hope, but that’s a different topic.

Does the DMA actually do anything about that, except weakening monopolies?

It certainly helps that there isn’t big money lobbying against this, so I don’t think you deserve these downvotes.

But this is very much an expression of the neoliberal ideology that the EU has in its DNA. The opposition to monopolies is one positive aspect.

Direct link to paper: Nature Human Behaviour: “Socio-cultural practices may have affected sex differences in stature in Early Neolithic Europe”

(Kudos to https://feddit.de/u/mettwurstkaninchen for posting a report that actually linked to the source.)

Don’t think the previous explanation is quite right.

Yes, the money in your account (aka commercial bank money) is a debt that the bank owes you, payable in cash (central bank money). The banks need to borrow cash from the ECB to make good on their debts. Only the ECB is allowed to literally print cash.

Central bank money is, by law, what you can pay debts with. It’s not backed by anything. It’s what backs other things.

The banks create the commercial bank money simply by going into debt, but they are limited by the fact that they have to borrow cash to make good on that debt. The ECB raises the interest rates at which they lend out cash, if the banks create too much money and create inflation. It lowers the interest rates to encourage the banks to create more money for investments or consumer spending.

1 Problem: People use less and less cash. If people don’t want cash anymore -> infinite money glitch. This is easily fixed without a central bank digital currency (CBDC).

2 Problem: Banking crises. What happens when a bank can’t pay its debt? Until the early 20th century, that meant that your money was gone. In the wake of the crisis that triggered The Great Depression, this was fixed with mandatory deposit insurance and other legislation.

You still have the problem that our payment infrastructure - vital for the day-to-day economy - relies on banks being able to make good on their debts. In the US, retail and investment banks had to be separated by law (Glass–Steagall Act). This provision was repealed in 1999. This is often argued to have contributed to the problems around the 2007-2008 banking crisis.

If the ECB were to take over the payment infrastructure, it would be safe, no matter what happens to the banks. This may be not nearly enough to actually deal with banking screw-ups, though.

No worries. I just thought it funny.

Login-wall. But what’s that? I can use a Google or Facebook account! Yay!

Her Majesty’s Government doesn’t serve the common people? When did that start?