It's funny as a economist people thinking that the free market is some kind of god, that the invisible hand is infallible. He never argued markets work without institutions. He believed governments must enforce justice, prevent monopolies, and provide public goods for markets to function properly.
When the policy is that X happens, procedural oversight can't be claimed when X doesn't happen. If X doesn't happen, then the policy is being rejected or ignored. No matter which, it allows the executing agent bias to be on full display and set the tone. There's a reason why a compliance office becomes the norm.
Yeah, this is a common problem with these kinds of issues. Data can be open, data can be available, but if it's not easily exploitable and parseable by anyone there will always be a third party that would do so for a premium. Data has to be ready for consumption when shared by the state. That's why one of my very strong objections that we divide datasets by year on a continuous registry. It should be one dataset with a single column that tells you the year the row corresponds to.
I would recommend reading the paper rather than the article, or at least the abstract:
> Compared to a noise-free control night, EN reduced N3 deep sleep (p < .0001) while PN reduced REM sleep (p < .001). Adding PN to EN worsened sleep structure, despite minor dose-dependent improvements of EN-induced sleep fragmentation and N3 sleep increases. Earplugs mitigated nearly all EN effects on sleep but started failing at the highest EN level (65 dBA). Morning cognition, cardiovascular measures, and hearing were not affected by nighttime noise, but subjective assessments of sleep, alertness and mood were significantly worse after EN and PN exposure.
> "well what specific laws would I write to combat addictive design?"
You can't. You don't need to specify how to comply with the law, just that generally a goal must be met. That's good lawmaking there, since it's flexible enough to catch all future potential creatives way to break it. I remember someone comment about how working at MSFT as a compliance officer, dude was going around saying that it's not the letter of the law that must be followed, but the spirit of thereof. They rolled over him and released the product nonetheless. Almost immediately came the EU investigation and that crap had to be reversed an put in accordance to what the stated goal of the law is.
Yes, but apparently the biggest players now abuse their comparative advantage positions. So, we are back to mercantilism to the detriment of all humanity.
Effective tax rate is what you should be looking at. The most efficient tax rate is one that describes a exponential saturation, where it starts growing faster once it reaches the point where you have too much wealth.
With how many statements of fact you make, you are pretty wrong. There's not one of them being right. We have enough productivity that a minuscule part of the population can produce and distribute the basic needs for every human on earth. There's literally humans that can't find jobs to do because we don't educate them well enough to go and offer services that other humans need. Not only that, we try to say that they don't deserve enough pay to supply their basic needs.
And yes, I'm talking about teachers and medics. We don't have enough of either, because we don't pay them enough compared to their workload. Those things we will always need, in great quantities to support our population. Greater quantities than engineers, architects, researchers, etc. but guess where everyone flocks because it pays more?
A welfare state that was genuinely targeted to serving basic needs of the population would look vastly different from present-day France and other comparable countries. Take a look at Singapore; last I checked, it was not known as a place where people might be at risk of starving. The underlying problem is that people expect the welfare state to solve issues of social marginalization, which are actually the result of fraying social capital as opposed to a mere lack of resources. Welfare states make these issues actively worse, not better.
For instance, when every employer (including those that may be only marginally successful to begin with) is expected as a matter of law to extend onerous labor protections against firing and laying off to each and every worker,[0] this results in marginal workers (who may have been socially marginalized originally for reasons of ethnic heritage and the like) being completely excluded from the market, which makes their plight even worse. (Except for forms of "gig work" or informal employment, of course - which in practice function to sidestep the most onerous regulations to some extent.) A very relevant issue in present-day France.
[0] And to fund those costly welfare programs through payroll contributions that are levied on employees and employers alike - which is its own issue and often amounts to exploitive, confiscatory taxation for the most marginal workers.
Pure unregulated market, that doesn't guarantee free market assumptions does that. Capitalism doesn't need it. Without mechanisms that allow for the free entry/exit of competitors, fair and simultaneous access to information, preventing cartels/price fixing, .... a bunch of assumptions for perfect free market to happen, the market will tend towards monopolies due cumulative advantage (in econ. known as Matthew effect), since small advantages compound into dominance.
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