That literature is playing fast & loose with terminology to justify a preexisting conclusion.

Anyhow, we know what life was like before Great Society programs, and it wasn't higher wages for the poor, we've just forgotten because it's been so successful. That memory hole oddly works in favor of both those who promote expanding welfare and those who oppose it.

> Walmart couldn’t pay $12/hr. if tax exemptions and SNAP and other aid didn’t fill the gap.

From a basic macro economic standpoint, most welfare programs push wages up by marginally reducing the labor pool. In a free market, how would Walmart be forced to pay a "livable wage" if entitlements didn't exist? Do you really think people would just choose not to work and starve if their wages didn't cover all their expenses? Out of spite? It doesn't make sense, and it certainly doesn't comport with history. It makes even less sense when people buy this argument yet also support minimum wage laws.

The counterexample is the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC). EITC increases as your wages increase, theoretically incentivizing work, rather than diminishing as you earn more. This would increase labor supply. What tends to happen to prices (i.e. wages--price of labor) when supply increases but not demand? Presumably the more cogent literature bemoaning Walmart's labor practices is primarily relying on EITC while hoping the reader glosses over the distinction.

That doesn't tell you the answer because the programs were instituted prior to the productivity increases in the 20th century. Are people better off now than they were before the general availability of electric light or mechanized transportation? Probably, but that doesn't mean you can trace the development of modern agriculture to the existence of SNAP.

> In a free market, how would Walmart be forced to pay a "livable wage" if entitlements didn't exist?

People frequently have choices between jobs that are easier or otherwise more pleasant and jobs that pay more. For example, long-haul truck drivers get paid significantly more than short-haul drivers, but they also sleep in their trucks and don't get to see their families most nights. Likewise, a lot of jobs require you to get a degree or certification, which can be a lot of work, which people may not be willing to do if they don't need to.

If you give them "benefits" then they take the easier job over the better paying one. Which allows the employer offering the easier job to pay less and still get applicants. It also creates a poverty trap if the benefits are contingent on not making more money, because then the compensation advantage of the higher-paying job is much smaller -- in some cases negative.

> EITC increases as your wages increase, theoretically incentivizing work, rather than diminishing as you earn more.

Except that it does diminish as you earn more, because it has an aggressive phase out. For a single person with no dependents, the phase out kicks in below federal minimum wage. If you had a minimum wage job at 30 hours a week and wanted to work 40 hours, increasing your hours would cause you to receive a smaller EITC.

There is a reason the EITC represents ~0.1% of the federal budget, and it's not because it's a bad idea, it's because it's implemented in a way that prevents people from getting much from it.

That's a slight of hand. There's value in choice, and that value is being reaped by the worker precisely because poverty programs make it possible.

But let's go with that example. You're assuming the number of truckers and trucker-hours would remain constant. But they wouldn't. That's just not how dynamic systems work. There are other people for whom short-haul trucking is the less desirable choice than what they're doing now, or who work fewer hours than they're doing now. Without the welfare subsidies, the supply of short-haul trucking labor would likely increase--more people working more hours. Similarly, you're assuming the demand for short-haul trucking would remain the same at higher wages. But demand in economics is not the same thing as "I would like" or even "I need", and at higher wages the demand would likely diminish.

The whole argument is the economics equivalent of a perpetual motion machine, and it's sold by throwing contrived complexity at people and hoping they don't think it through. Like perpetual motion or free energy machines, at the most miniscule scale there are exceptions and caveats (maybe short-haul wages in particular would rise, especially after accounting for the totality of labor economy changes), but those exceptions don't scale to a systems level. That doesn't stop con artists from selling their Rube Goldberg machines, though, knowing the vast majority of people won't think it through.

What the rhetoric is trying to do is bolster support for a livable wage through radical policy changes by drumming up anti-corporate sentiment. It's in service of a normative argument (a "livable wage" is a reasonable social ask, IMO, notwithstanding its amorphous nature), but disguised as a scientific argument that can only result in failure by setting wrong expectations about how markets and policy operate, ultimately reinforcing cynicism.

It seems like you're ignoring the same thing you're objecting to: It's a dynamic system.

If long-haul trucking companies offer less desirable but higher paying jobs and easier jobs aren't paying a living wage then people would pick the harder job that lets them not starve. Which means the easier jobs would have to pay more in order to attract workers, unless those workers can get government assistance. If they can, the easier jobs can get people to work without paying more, because the assistance programs let them pick the easier job even at lower pay. In other words, the subsidies were supposed to go to the poor and instead they went to the lower-paying employers.

In a dynamic system the long-haul companies would then have to respond if it became more desirable to work somewhere the pay is low enough to get government assistance, but the phase outs give the low-paying employers another advantage.

Say the undesirability of the job is good for $15k/year in additional compensation. However, if you got paid $15k more, you'd lose $10k to government benefit phase outs and additional taxes. To actually get paid $15k more, you'd have to "get paid" $45k more. Which is to say, the employer with the low-paying job can pay you $45k less.

But it's a dynamic system, so they might "only" pay you $35k less and then hire more people. The trucking companies would then have to pay $45k more than them when it used to be $15k. Even with Walmart paying less than before, their relative advantage has increased. And there are two ways to get something a long distance over land: A long-haul truck the whole way, or a short-haul truck to the rail yard, a freight train, and then another short-haul truck. So then instead of a truck driver getting higher pay per mile over 2000 miles of driving, a different one gets lower pay per mile over 60 miles of driving twice, and a rail company gets the rest.

So the low-wage subsidies cause the amount of higher-wage labor demand to go down by making it less competitive with non-labor alternatives to perform the same function, as labor is diverted to the lower-paying jobs even while enabling them to pay even less.

> There are other people for whom short-haul trucking is the less desirable choice than what they're doing now, or who work fewer hours than they're doing now.

All of that is already baked in to the existing numbers; the long-haul drivers get paid more because fewer people want to do it.

> Like perpetual motion or free energy machines, at the most miniscule scale there are exceptions and caveats, but those exceptions don't scale to a systems level.

Only they're not exceptions. If you subsidize something you get more of it. What happens if you subsidize low-paying jobs but not higher-paying jobs?

A competitive, general-purpose web search engine with its own full index is _brutally_ hard and expensive.

This is the reason there are only a few world-class like russian yandex, chinese baidu (to not state the obvious names like google).

What do you think a site like Google is giving you these days? They are explicitly bad at indexing the small web. Their search technology is not better than Kagi, and made worse by ads and LLM ad bias. So what is this big "world class" thing they do that can't be replicated?

The web is not the same place it was years ago. Indexing all the slop and scams and ads is not useful to me as a consumer.

Though my gut tells me the probability of their 100% own full-blown search is very-very low.

From the current point in time few people are in the market for a paid privacy focused search.

Most of the time I spend on kagi this year is a glorified bookmark to imdb, wiki, and what have you: around 700 queries per month, which is basically the same as I have in chatgpt according to yearly stats.

But I will continue be a paid Kagi user.

They own the dam, but the Federal government still owns Hetch Hetchy water and land. Permission to use Hetch Hetchy is governed by the Raker Act, which stipulates[1] that SF can only resell the electricity and water through public municipal districts, not to private utilities:

> Sec. 6. That the grantee is prohibited from ever selling or letting to any corporation or individual, except a municipality or a municipal water district or irrigation district, the right to sell or sublet the water or the electric energy sold or given to it or him by the said grantee:

> Provided, That the rights hereby granted shall not be sold, assigned, or transferred to any private person, corporation, or association, and in case of any attempt to so sell, assign, transfer, or convey, this grant shall revert to the Government of the United States.

The original plan was that SF would build both aqueducts and transmission lines to SF, branches of which could serve other municipal districts. But they only ended up building the aqueducts, and contracted with PG&E to transmit the electricity. The question is, is SF violating the Raker Act? Previous administrations have said no or demurred requests to answer the question; typically the people raising the issue want the dam removed. SF claims PG&E is acting as their agent and everything is above board. But, above board or not, I've read some old articles that suggest there's a 50+ year-old understanding or gentlemen's agreement between SF and PG&E, that PG&E would give the City of SF (if not its residents) sweetheart pricing on transmission, etc, and defend the status quo in DC so long as SF didn't attempt to buildout it's own transmission lines or otherwise cut PG&E out of the loop. But if SF did do that, PG&E would lobby DC to terminate the grants under the Raker Act. From the beginning, many cities in California, and even politicians outside California, have resented the Federal grant to San Francisco, so presumably with the right trigger a very large lobby could quickly arise and demand the Raker Act be replaced with a new deal that gave other municipalities in California a direct stake in Hetch Hetchy. It's even possible PG&E comes out on top, because who's going to transmit the electricity?

Of course, that story leaves alot of unanswered questions. But it sounds plausible to me. With CEQA, etc, there's zero chance SF could ever build out its own transmission lines today; it would take untold billions and, more importantly, decades--far longer than the Raker Act would likely survive. Currently the City of SF basically pays nothing to power its public buildings (schools, etc), MUNI buses and trains, and possibly SFO (which SF owns and operates). The budgetary and logistical upheaval that would happen if the Raker Act grant was rescinded (which, again, almost every other municipality in the state would support) is mind boggling. Even if we assume every mayor has earnestly wanted to cut PG&E out of the loop and do right by SF residents' individual power bills, what sane, term-limited administrator would invite that chaos? Plenty of mayors have broached the subject, but invariably such suggestions silently stop, so presumably it's just a negotiating tactic with PG&E that both sides are very careful not to let get out-of-hand.

[1] https://sfmuseum.org/hetch/hetchy10.html

Then there's the state-wide need to increase transmission capacity because of the switch to renewables, the future politics of which are kinda unpredictable. It's hard to imagine SF getting singled out and left out in the cold, considering the state already has many large municipal utilities getting better deals for their residents.

[0] https://www.siliconvalleypower.com/residents/rates-and-fees

It's a common claim on HN that when a regulator caps profit margins, that incentivizes the entity to make-work to increase absolute revenue and thus profits. But capital markets, i.e. investors, only care about marginal returns. Unless your profit margin cap is really high relative to average returns in the global market, there's no market pressure to do this, AFAICT. Capital projects require investment, but what investors have so much money burning holes in their pockets that they're eager to invest at marginal rates lower than what they could invest elsewhere?

The only financial incentive for this would have to come internally from the company, say from executives whose compensation would increase merely by dint of larger absolute revenues. For regulated entities maybe that's plausible? But typically executive compensation is usually tied to margins and given in stock.

I only just came to this realization when reading about the effect of tariffs and a description of why they drive up prices much more than you think. If the import price on a widget is $100, a 10% tariff drives it up to $110. If the next purchaser in the supply chain was originally paying $X, you might think they would just pay $X + $10, and on down the chain, so that retail prices only rise by $10. But that's not how it works. If the importer was adding 20% (not atypical), they're going to need to sell the widget at $120 + $10 + ($10 * 20%), so $132.00. The next purchaser will need to do the same, but on their purchase price. Whereas before they were selling at $120 + ($120 * 0.20) = 144.00, now they need to sell at $132 + ($132 * 0.20) = $158.40, an $18 jump, not $10. It compounds on down the chain. Why? Your investors are expecting you to add a Y% margin. The reality is a little more complex, of course. Maybe a supplier can get by with a smaller profit margin, but the floor is going to be their cost of capital for buying supply, which may be least 5-10%.

[1] NPR generally has always had a liberal bias, but their professionalism was sufficient to keep them straight shooting. Even Justice Scalia used to listen to NPR News, at least as late as the aughts.

PBS on the other hand— while obviously coming from an institution that exists because of things liberals value— clearly puts a lot of effort into representing most mainstream views charitably. It’s almost like if Reuters had a daily news hour.

The biggest sticking points theologically today, from what I gather, arise primarily from 19th century Catholic pronouncements regarding papal infallibility and Mary, specifically the Immaculate Conception and how it relates to Original Sin. Most of the historical disputes (e.g. re miaphysitism, theotokos, unleavened bread, purgatory) have largely fallen away as misunderstandings.

In the case of papal infallibility, all ancient churches admit that the Rome pontiff held supremacy, but there was never agreement on precisely what that meant. The Catholic articulation of papal infallibility offends the synodal view of how doctrine is established, and while many Catholic theologians, including several popes throughout the 20th and 21st century, have publicly explained that popes can only legitimately pronounce what the church, synodally, has already accepted, the precise language used in the formal dogmatic pronouncement is too strictly worded. And it doesn't help that many fringe conservative Catholic theologians are more pro-pope than any pope since the the 19th century and promote this more extreme interpretation.

In the case of the Immaculate Conception, it's not so much that the Catholic view is unacceptable to Orthodox or Orientals, but that the Catholic doctrine is too specific (similar to infallibility) and excludes their alternative framing that beforehand had been understood not to be incompatible with union. Some (all?) the Syrians (Churches of the East), though, seem to accept it, despite not having a tradition rooted in the Augustinian articulation of original sin. And views of the Immaculate Conception among Orthodox and Oriental churches nominally in union with each other differ. (But to be clear, the differences are extremely technical; to most people, including Protestants and especially non-Christians, the varying views of all these churches would be indistinguishable, and theologians themselves often seem to articulate them wrongly, at least compared to how their patriarchs do.)

The Filioque also isn't a theological barrier. The way it's formally understood in Catholicism is not in conflict with accepted Orthodox or Oriental theology, but for various reasons Orthodox see it as an offense to synodality and respect for previous councils' compromises about how far to go in textually articulating the Trinity. I would think most Orthodox theologians see themselves closer theologically to the Oriental churches, but Oriental churches have changed the creed in much more significant ways--IIRC, the Armenian Church added whole new paragraphs. Not that Orthodox theologians are any more willing to overlook these changes, but they certainly don't make much hay about them.

Note that one of the ancient Syrian churches (I always get their names confused) is poised to reunite with the Catholic church. All the doctrinal stuff has long been ironed out, which took about a century, IIRC, from the beginning of earnest dialogue. The sticking point relates to the Catholic church demanding the Syrian church replace their organically evolved clerical disciplines and practices with comprehensive written canonical rules similar to the Catholic church (Latin and Eastern). In truth, the division between the Catholic, Orthodox, Oriental, and Syrian churches have always been primarily cultural (lay) and political (clerical), not theological. The theological differences have tended to be exaggerated on all sides in service of political (clerical, state, and social) machinations. The 19th century Catholic dogmatic pronouncements were largely triggered by political and social revolutions in Europe which caused turmoil among Catholics, with subsequent political and cultural backlashes that resulted in the peculiar theological focus that unfolded and overwhelmed the typical ecumenical circumspection of church leaders.)

Theological differences among churches nominally in union with each other are often arguably no less significant than between churches where union is supposedly not possible. And there has often been de facto union. For example, for several periods throughout the centuries the Orthodox and Oriental churches in Egypt de facto placed their churches under the authority of the rival patriarch while they weathered political winds and suppressions, without the feared theological contamination divisive theologians claimed were inevitable, and despite the claimed differences being deemed much greater and more incompatible than they're believed to be today.

Reunification with the mainland isn’t a completely unpopular idea in Taiwan. The economic ties are already extremely deep (largest trading partner by far).

> In the Paleogene and Neogene Periods (~66 million to ~1.8 million years ago), the mountain chains that today constitute the Atlas were uplifted, as the land masses of Europe and Africa collided at the southern end of the Iberian Peninsula.

But it also notes,

> The Anti-Atlas Mountains are believed to have originally been formed as part of the Alleghenian orogeny. These mountains were formed when Africa and America collided

Anti-Atlas? If we jump over to the Anti-Atlas article we see,

> In some contexts, the Anti-Atlas is considered separate from the Atlas Mountains system, as the prefix "anti" (i.e. opposite) implies.

and

> The summits of the Anti-Atlas reach average heights of 2,500–2,700 m (8,200–8,900 ft),

So in addition to subsequent events, the portion of the Atlas originally formed with the Appalachian is geologically distinguishable from the other portions of the Atlas chain, and actually significantly lower than the parts of the chain formed later, though not as low as the Appalachians.

The PRC was doing just as fine before they executed all the CIA's agents. I don't see any relation. There's never been any hint from either the US or China that those agents were doing anything other than passive intelligence collection, as opposed to actively interfering in domestic Chinese politics. And in any event, the scope of historical CIA operations has always been overblown. In every case I'm aware of, the CIA leveraged a tipping point already well underway to nudge things one way or another. Developing countries are often already highly unstable and prone to regular disruptive power shifts; it's a major cause of their poverty and inability to fully develop. And in many of the outright coups the CIA has been implicated, the extent of the CIA's involvement was simply talking to and making promises to various power players already poised to make a power grab, Chile being a prime example--the Chilean Senate was the architect of the coup, and the CIA merely offered safe harbor to nudge Pinochet, who was waffling because he wasn't convinced it would succeed. The exceptions were during the middle of the Cold War, ancient history in modern foreign affairs.

The KGB/FSB has always been lauded for opportunistically taking advantage of preexisting situations with small but smart manipulations, but that's just how intelligence agencies have always worked in general. When your interventions are too direct and obvious, which they always will be if you're creating a crisis from scratch, you risk unifying the country, Iran being a prime example.

Beyond being self-contradictory (CIA is passive but also they interfere on key issues) this is just false. The West has spent a lot of (covert) resources undermining China in the past decade in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, trade and tech wars, COVID, and so on. All attempts which have failed dramatically, perhaps partly due to the lack of IC penetration into society and government.

I said the CIA's intelligence network in China which was dismembered was passive, the same way China's network in the US is passive, not that the CIA is passive everywhere else. But maybe you wouldn't describe either as passive, which is fair, but I don't think that definition fits with how most people conceive of what active political manipulation looks like. Note also I didn't mean to imply that promoting a coup by offering safe harbor is passive in the same sense; I would definitely categorize that as direct domestic political disruption, just not of the kind Hollywood or conspiracy theories depict, which is what people assume when CIA involvement is implicated.

And I'm not sure what you're talking about regarding Hong Kong, Xinjiang, or Taiwan. Is public criticism interfering in domestic politics? Sanctions arguably are, which the US uses regularly around the world, but in the context of China, it's always about money and trade wars and international disputes. The US is active militarily in Taiwan in terms of training and arms supplies, but this is largely at Taiwan's insistence, and the US does much less than Taiwan wants. And none of this involves direct CIA involvement beyond the intelligence collection and sharing networks, both with and without the local government's approval.

I'm curious if you have specific examples. I know the US has proposed sanctions for China's policies in Xinjiang, but I don't remember anything actually coming of it. If I'm misremembering, that's fair, and I understand why China would consider actual sanctions domestic political interference, but note that this is also a cultural divide between Chinese and Western political philosophies--the latter is much more moralistic, and interventions against perceived human rights abuses aren't necessarily considered to violate the principle of state sovereignty.