It was always short sighted tax policy. We’re just living with the blowback.

But in 1954, apparently intending to stimulate capital investment in manufacturing in order to counter a mild recession, Congress replaced the straight-line approach with “accelerated depreciation,” which enabled owners to take huge deductions in the early years of a project’s life. This, Hanchett says, “transformed real-estate development into a lucrative ‘tax shelter.’ An investor making a profit from rental of a new building usually avoided all taxes on that income, since the ‘loss’ from depreciation canceled it out. And when the depreciation exceeded profits from the building itself—as it virtually always did in early years—the investor could use the excess ‘loss’ to cut other income taxes.” With realestate values going up during the 1950s and ’60s, savvy investors “could build a structure, claim ‘losses’ for several years while enjoying tax-free income, then sell the project for more than they had originally invested.”

Since the “accelerated depreciation” rule did not apply to renovation of existing buildings, investors “now looked away from established downtowns, where vacant land was scarce and new construction difficult,” Hanchett says. "Instead, they rushed to put their money into projects at the suburban fringe—especially into shopping centers.

http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/in-essence/why-america-got-malled

But Slightly More Rotting Corpse has the better environmental policy which we’ll need before the last remnant of Florida is fully swallowed by the sea in the next 4 years.

The “spandrel hypothesis” is the front runner explanation. Essentially we didn’t evolve to have chins but rather evolved other things that are helpful, and the chin is a byproduct of that other evolution. Not harmful so it didn’t get selected away, but not helpful.

This is why I don’t take family photos with a hat or flag that announces my political affiliation.

I think it’s clear he’s a fan of Apple and Tesla but he does make negative statements about them, the Cyber truck was not a positive review and he always criticized the fit and finish of Teslas. And he critiques Apple’s idiosyncracies like the proprietary charger and lack of calculator app on the iPad.

I guess my point is that he’s not a journalist he’s a reviewer, we are tuning in for his judgement, his opinion. If he personally likes the products from a certain company, that’s not a bias that impacts his capacity to do his job well.

Like movie reviewer giving Pixar a bunch of 10/10 reviews, and then criticizing Cars 2 as a mediocre cash grab. Maybe they are biased for Pixar, or maybe Pixar just puts out a lot of good movies. As long as you’re calling out the bad moves, that’s what we want from a reviewer.

The fair concern is when he gets exclusive access like this, I don’t necessarily care about the puff piece interview but you hope it doesn’t influence his future reviews.

The last time he was in the wider media discussion was because he negatively reviewed the Fisker Ocean and the Humane Pin and people were calling him a company killer.

The actual reason why is that everyone was expecting Hillary to win and she had vowed to “end private prisons.”

So everyone was calculating in a 90% or whatever chance Hillary wins, with some percentage chance she actually fulfilled her promise. Instead they got a 100% chance they would stay around for 4 years and probably get a tax cut. Pretty big adjustment is appropriate.

(Also old 2016 articles about Hillary are so quaint. They even mention Obama closing Guantanamo lmao)

Yeah the guy who was going to pass permanent corporate tax cuts and temporary individual tax cuts, funded by chaining individual tax brackets so taxes go up for individuals after 10 years, won. That’s great for corporate profits. And great for the 10% who own 90% of stocks.

It’s horrible tax policy and detrimental to the majority of Americans but it absolutely should make stocks increase.

I don’t think anyone would notice on the cloverloop.

Non-politicized decisions are wacky, the Sackler decision had Gorsuch and Jackson in the majority and Kavanaugh and Sotomayor in the minority.

“Coincidentally,” the abortion and gun rulings are all exactly the same 6-3 teams based on who appointed them.

It’s pretty much settled fact that this Supreme Court puts ideology over impartiality.

Dumb framing. They aren’t panicking, they’re framing the results so they can fit them to their narrative no matter what happens. Biden wins = he was on drugs, no way senile and incapable Biden could win otherwise. Biden loses = full proof he’s senile and incapable.

There’s no economic reason the nominal GDP of any country or the world in general has to continuously increase. The important metric is per capita production. As long as people get continuously more productive through innovation, standards of living will continue to increase.

At the national level, vying for long term economic power in the world, a higher and younger population is going to be a huge advantage very soon and countries should be trying to get as many immigrants in their borders as they can. But instead they are…going a different direction.

The one example I’m familiar with is a name brand ice cream company that produces the store brand ice cream too…in that case the recipe is different, cheaper ingredients to cut costs to the bare minimum. But using the machines for a higher volume saves money.

I’m sure ‘same exact item’ does happen too but just ‘same manufacturer’ doesn’t mean exactly the same item.

Can’t believe Harriet Tubman got all that infrastructure up.

If you’re saying “you should not restrict ALL culture to rich people” then, we’re not. There is plenty of culture available for free on YouTube, or on broadcast TV channels, or FreeVee. And paying for one paid subscription doesn’t make you rich, $10/mo or whatever is an accessible price for a subset of digital media to a non-rich person. And those libraries are sufficiently large that you would not run out of material to watch even if you only had one service.

If you’re saying “everyone should be provided literally all digital content for free at all times” that is a pretty extreme position which does sort of break the economics of any content being produced. Digital content would have to be plastered in way more ads or be government subsidized or something to have the money to make more of it. That’s not a political position I’d be on board with.

If you just want the current system but with you being allowed to download the stuff you want to see on services you don’t pay for…again, there’s an argument for that, but let’s not pretend it’s some high minded one. It’s selfish. You probably have the money to pay for HBO Max for one month to watch the new Game of Thrones and the Barbie movie but you don’t want to pay money and it’s really easy not to.

That doesn’t track at all. I can’t afford a Lamborghini so the need arises for access to stolen Lamborghinis for cheap? It’s absolutely not a need, you can just go without or only access the free media that is available to you. In the car example, I can just buy an old Civic.

If it’s stealing bread to feed your family that is one thing, because it’s an actual need. If it’s getting stuff because you want the more expensive version instead of the version you can afford, there’s no need there.

The ethical argument is that there’s no one harmed because you can’t afford it anyway. It’s not that you need it like a starving man’s bread.

If there was no DEMAND it wouldn’t exist. It exists illegally specifically because it can’t be done legally at the price point. That doesn’t mean anyone needs it, all the content is presumably available elsewhere. It just costs money and people don’t want to pay money.

I don’t want to pay money either, I’m just not high minded about it.

I disagree with the implication that the Bible or even Jesus’ teachings as told by the New Testament, are left wing or right wing. It doesn’t map to modern politics at all because it’s ancient, their politics were just different, and also it’s not univocal, it’s hundreds of authors who all had different politics and different willingness to import their politics into their religious text.

Because of that, you can easily read it to confirm your biases, no matter what they are. Apostles went out as married pairs to spread the Gospel in early Christianity, that’s in the Bible, so women are equals and should be allowed to be priests? But also women should cover their heads and be silent in church, that’s in the Bible too. So who should we listen to? There’s no “right” answer except whichever confirms your biases.

Even if you are trying to read it historically, I’d argue the historical Jesus (from the Q source sayings and implications from what different authors added or subtracted from Mark) was remarkably egalitarian for the time but he was doing it from the perspective of an apocalyptic preacher, eg he said his followers should give up all their money to the poor, but it was because the world was going to end during the current generation… which was 2000 years ago. So does that even apply as a life lesson in the modern day if the world isn’t ending?

So the religious right may well have read the Bible, and come to a different conclusion than you, and they’re not necessarily wrong, and neither are you.

I feel like weight class doesn’t do it. Women have higher body fat %. Is a welterweight woman athletically equivalent to a welterweight man? I don’t think so.

An 87 year old man using a slur, I feel like you get a slight pass sometimes for being old and not knowing a formerly-commonly-used word has become derogatory.

But he used it, got called out, issued an apology, and then used it again. Yikes.