mikeyBoy14

Taylor Swift chose to list on Ticketmaster with full knowledge that those fees would be included.

Interesting topic, but the article's writing style is god-awful and a bit hard to get through.

So it's not the best analogy.

I don't think that's quite right. The act of changing the channel wouldn't have impacted the station's ad revenue because the tech couldn't tell if the ad was served. On YouTube you actually deprive the site of ad revenue with an ad blocker. And if enough people do it, you could also deprive creators of material earnings.

Mate, a good third of the countries on that list are currently suffering such brutal ethnic violence that it might be considered genocide. Close to half are riddled by islamic terrorism, usually directed towards ethnic minorites. At least two of them are in the middle of civil wars.

There's a not insignificant chance that it'll be the secured creditors' company soon 😂

To be fair, this is how people tend to react to change, generally. I remember every time Facebook or YouTube did a site redesign in the early 2010s people were always up in arms.

Jake and Amir parodied this well in their "Facebook Redesign" episode.

On the other hand, Google/Apple Pay are both pretty great products that replace a horrendous legacy payments system. Recall that for like 40 years the most innovative consumer payment system looked like this. And it was essentially a duopoly as well (Visa/Mastercard).

At the end of the day, cash is still a thing as well.

Yes, but if you're willing to drop $1k on a non-gaming VR headset you're probably also willing to drop $3k. Might as well spend the extra and get the premium product if you're going to pay the premium price (or so the thinking is likely to go).

I just don't get it. While it's eased up a bit, we're still in one of the hottest labour markets of all time. If your job sucks that much, just quit.

I just don't think that's supported by the data though. On virtually every measure, living conditions have improved across the globe over the last century. You can pick out specific metrics where things are worse in specific countries (housing is the most obvious example where affordability has declined), but taken as a whole I just don't see how you can draw any other conclusion.

Here's a question in response: would China have seen such a huge reduction in povery if it didn't offer cheap labour in the first place?

The main draw for foreign investment, capital inflow and trade, I would argue, was: (a) heavy investment in its stock of "hard" capital assets (i.e., great infrastructure); plus (b) an army of people willing to work for wages far lower than the countries making those investments (but generally higher than most of those people were making in agrarian sector).

This is arguably one of the most important (and complex) things for the world to understand well. There are billions more people around the world who haven't been able to escape poverty whose futures really depend on getting these kinds of policies right.