Lemmy.zip instance admin

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Not voting for a candidate who is tacitly supporting a genocide on that basis is not “doing bad things” no matter how much bad faith spin you try to add. The candidate has to earn the vote and that applies to non-voters too. Some people care about certain issues enough to abstain from voting on that basis and others vote strategically because its not a team sport. You just want validation for your own voting decision by implying those abstaining from voting are directly or indirectly responsible for your candidate’s opponent winning which they are not. If Harris wins or loses it will be based on her and her party’s policy and campaign decisions.






  • Government spending/revenue as percentage of GDP is the common proxy for government size. That said actual empirical evidence doesn’t lead to clear cut conclusions about the relationship between economic growth/outcomes and government spending. It’s very much dependent on the country, quality of government institutions and components of the expenditure.

    Intuitively, you can clearly see that if you had 2 identical countries where 50% of gov spending went to building schools, hospitals and roads in one and paying interest on national debt in the other then you would expect very different outcomes with the same government “size”.

    For the US, that metric has been close to 30% for the last several decades with spikes during crises like 2008 and 2020 (changes to money supply or “minting” is a component of government size but usually a temporary one). It’s been relatively stable outside of that since the 1970s. https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-spending-to-gdp

    Relative to the rest of the world’s rich countries it’s on the lower end:

    In my view, it’s highly dependent on the quality of the government institutions and components of spending. People immediately think of inefficiency and bureaucracy when governments are brought up but there is empirical evidence to show that gov spending on things like education and infrastructure are usually “productive” in additional to contributing to factors that may not be properly captured by measures like GDP growth.

    In short, people reducing government spending/regulations as inherently bad/controlling are at least not being completely honest because it’s a very complicated discussion.






  • The official number was at 30k only 2 months in and that was only the names confirmed by a medical system already at the brink. Do you genuinely believe it only rose by 5-10k in subsequent 8 months of unrelenting assault? US doctors said that they have compelling reason to believe the death toll is 90k+ based on their time treating the wounded there. Another estimate is at 180k published in a medical journal as previously mentioned. Hamas were estimated to number around 30k before the conflict began (About 1k were killed inside Israel after Oct 7 and were not counted in the death toll) and they are still capable of fighting in most areas of Gaza according to recent reports.