Microblog Memes

I know the sorts of words he likes, and I just haven't got that kind of spare time right now.

Don't you remember all the pedantic asshats saying that 2000 wasn't a new century? "There was no year zero!", "People just want all the digits to change!", "You're celebrating a year early!"

Yes, but most people ignored it and celebrated the new millennium at the end of 1999 and beginning of 2000 anyway.

See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium#Debate_over_millennium_celebrations

It's quite interesting. For example Fidel Castro made sure that Cuba celebrated correctly at the end of year 2000. And the U.S. Naval Observatory, official timekeeper for the country, held a party for the new milennium then too.

Apparently yeah. In fact, it's actually easy to tell which years are in the 2nd millenium just by knowing its final year.

But people chose to celebrate the new millenium in 2000 because it's much more fun to have every single digit in a calendar year change than having only one digit change and calling it "a new millenium". Also, January 1, 2000 looks and feels so much cooler in my opinion, unless you write it in the dd/mm/yy format (mm/dd/yy wouldn't make much of a difference), in which case 01/01/01 has that nice satisfying feeling of all variables being the same value.

Doesn't look that way to me, given that the change has been pretty smooth and shows up on specific regions and adjusting for outliers and inflation (and matches the rise in median income).

More importantly, it's not incompatible with global inequality on the rise. Different stats measure different things.

Renewable energy beating expectations is the opposite of greenwashing, it specifically compares actual generated renewable energy against previous projections. If you want to poke holes into it for the sake of... denying anything good has ever happened, I guess? you should instead point out at how disproportionately that growth is driven by China.

And again, that's perfectly compatible with CO2 emissions going up. Different stats, different things.

Bullshit. Global inequality is on a constant rise.

You are one of the many who has equivocated the 'wealth gap' with the incidence of poverty, when there is no direct casual relationship between them at all.

All the wealth gap essentially is is just a label of who has the most wealth. But you don't need to be anywhere close to that to be stable/comfortable.

Fact: if everyone on Earth was poor, the wealth gap would be zero. A small/non-existent wealth gap does not equal things being in good shape.

Fact: The correlation between the size of the gap and the incidence of poverty in world history is negative--in other words, long ago, the gap was smaller, and many more people were desperately poor.

Fact: It is absolutely possible for there to be a wealth gap, even one as large or larger than the one we have presently, while no one is poor. Further, it's extremely unlikely that the hypothetical total eradication of poverty would shrink the gap at all, or even slow its growth.

Fact: If you waved a magic wand so that everyone in every county of the US, for example, had their income raised to the median, essentially wiping out poverty nationwide, the size of the wealth gap would literally be unchanged--the gap from broke to comfortable is nothing compared to the gap between comfortable and 'wealthiest on the planet'.

New wealth is created constantly, it is not zero sum and never has been. And there will always be someone who has the most.

P.S. The World Bank's poverty line has never been lowered that I can see, only raised, most recently in 2022 from $1.90 to $2.15 per day. So no idea what you're talking about with 'lowering the poverty line to make capitalism look good'.

but I'd wager that it was mostly because the really poor country got a bit better off.

That's what happened. The bimodal world income distribution has become unimodal as the working class of East Asia has seen a lot of improvement. Inequality in the first world went up since a lot of working class jobs left their countries while the wealthy were able to get richer.