@_andrenunes @patrickc @asymmetricinfo @pietergaricano @paulkrugman Very much incorrect . The US is a service based industry. They design stuff, built elsewhere.
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sgood
3.1K posts
sgood
@gladtobeCDN
geo-political geek
Toronto, Ontario Katılım Ocak 2014
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@gladtobeCDN @patrickc @asymmetricinfo @pietergaricano @paulkrugman In Europe it’s literally all money printing, in the US they still build stuff
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Luis (and @pietergaricano) are correct below, and @paulkrugman is much too sanguine about Europe's challenges.
As it happens, the same wealth point that Luis mentions also struck me when I traveled to Nashville a few weeks ago.
Luis Garicano 🇪🇺🇺🇦@lugaricano
We stopped everything to write an answer (link below) to Paul Krugman's two posts of today (one informal, one with a simple model) arguing that Europe is broadly not falling behind the United States. The change measured by the Draghi report, he argues, is mostly due to growth in the technology industry, which has distorted GDP numbers without actually leading to higher standards of living. We should believe our eyes when we walk around France and walk around Mississippi. Krugman is wrong. The measures he uses understate European stagnation. This matters enormously. Divergence with the United States is the strongest evidence for reform in Europe. 1. The growth numbers Krugman compares the United States, France, and Germany at purchasing power parity in current prices. On that measure, France's and Germany's position relative to America has been roughly constant since 2000. But current price comparisons miss productivity gains in sectors where prices fall. If America produces twice as much software while the price of each unit halves, the value of American software output looks unchanged even though the volume has doubled. Most economists therefore use constant prices, which fix the base-year PPP level and apply each country's real output growth on top of it. American output growth has concentrated in tech, where prices have fallen tremendously as productivity rises. In terms of the volume of things produced, America has pulled away from Europe. 2. Is it all the tech industry? Krugman concedes this tech divergence but says it is not welfare-relevant. The American growth lead is an accounting artefact of measuring more iPhones at base-year prices, not a sign that Americans are actually richer, because Europeans buy the same iPhones at the same world prices. This is not the right way to think about the world today, as an earlier Paul Krugman would have argued. His model assumes tradable goods, interchangeable workers, marginal-cost pricing, and no profits. Each assumption fails. Most of what households buy is non-tradable: housing, healthcare, childcare, education. When American tech firms bid workers from haircutting to coding, American haircut wages rise. Germany has no growing tech sector to do the bidding, so German wages stay flat. Technology is not priced at marginal cost. Apple's margins are around 40 percent. Anthropic's inference margins are at 70 percent. The major platforms enjoy network effects, switching costs, and lock-in that hold prices well above what a competitive market would deliver. A large share of the productivity gains in technology stays as profit. A lot of the value of American technology dominance shows up in equity, not in wages. Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon together are worth $21 trillion, more than the entire combined stock market value of all European stock markets. Around 60 percent of US equity is held by American households. The median French or Spanish household holds almost no equity. The median employee at Meta, a company with almost 80,000 employees, earned $388,000 in 2025. This advantage is not going to go away. Krugman's own 1991 paper, cited in his Nobel prize, showed that comparative advantage in modern industries is produced by increasing returns to scale, specialized labor markets, supplier networks and the agglomeration of suppliers, workers, and ideas in particular places. Once an industry concentrates somewhere, the concentration is self-reinforcing. Europe is being pushed away from the next round of technology industries (AI!). 3. What about inequality? Another retort is that GDP per capita hides substantial inequality, and so even if America is rich on average, this is mostly due to the super wealthy. But despite the US's high pre-tax income inequality, it also achieves higher median incomes than Europe, in part because of such a high base, and in part because it actually redistributes more than many European countries. The cleanest comparison is median equivalised disposable household income: income after cash taxes and transfers, adjusted for household size and purchasing power. According to the OECD's 2021 numbers, the median American earns 30 percent more than the median Dutchman, about 31 percent more than the median German, and about 52 percent more than the median Frenchman. 4. What about hours worked? Krugman points out that while American GDP per person is higher, most of this is because Americans work more. For this divergence to be an hours worked story, Americans must work more relative to Europeans now than they did in 2000. The opposite has happened. Birinci, Karabarbounis, and See in a 2026 NBER paper show that about half of the American-European hours gap that existed in the 1990s has reversed by the end of the 2010s. Americans work fewer hours per person than they did in 2000, while most Europeans work more. 5. Is America not a bad place to live? Walk around Alabama and France: surely the former cannot be substantially richer than the latter? American cities often have poorer centres and richer suburbs or exurbs. European cities preserve richer and more attractive historic cores. A visit to a city as a tourist in America compared with a city in France will leave one having seen different spots on the income distribution. Americans in Europe go to the nicest and richest European cities. Rather than a walking around test, do a driving around test. Go to the periphery of any modern American city and see a level of new-built material wealth that is extremely uncommon in Europe, with thousands of enormous four- or five-bedroom homes. In the South, in places like Nashville and Austin, drive around the downtowns to see hundreds of luxury apartment buildings springing from the ground. This construction boom is replicated virtually nowhere in Europe today. The other question is generational. Housing often costs more in Europe than in the United States, despite the quality of the housing stock generally being much better. Europe has nice city cores but these are inaccessible to young Europeans. Consider the salaries available to entry-level workers. The starting pay for a London police officer is $57,000. In Washington, DC, $75,000. The entry-level Deloitte consultant job in Madrid pays around €28,000, roughly $33,000 per year. In Charlotte, the entry-level Deloitte job pays $63,000. There are many things to dislike about life in America. But relative to 25 years ago, the gap in material wealth has shifted dramatically in America's favor. siliconcontinent.com/p/european-sta…
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@MiltonicMindset @mboudry @JuliaHB1 It is time for everyone to understand that all those living in Gaza are not innocent. They are 7th century genocidal barbarians . They are all complicit in what you all now see. They have no moral standard and are deserved recipients of the response.
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Maarten, what is your argument, exactly? Let’s assume every single claim is not only true, but understated.
What does that have to do with murdering tens of thousands of children, and destroying almost every building in Gaza?
We know that the Israelis have also systemically raped people. Should we flatten Israel? I don’t think so. Do you?
What moral standard are you operating under, exactly?
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A while ago, I watched the infamous 47-minute video documenting the atrocities of October 7th — the one not made publicly available, to protect the privacy of the victims.
The worst part of this video is not what it displays, but who is displaying it: the perpetrators themselves. Gleefully. Sadistically. Unabashedly. Most of the footage was filmed by Hamas terrorists on their GoPro bodycams, some also by ordinary Gazan civilians on their cellphones.
Even the Nazis tried to cover up their atrocities, but Hamas brags about theirs for the entire world to see. The killers are euphoric throughout the massacre, and their relentless, ecstatic cries of "Allahu Akbar" (punctuated by the occasional "Kill the Jew!") are simply nauseating.
Some images are seared into my memory forever. I will never forget the two boys in their underwear — one with his eye socket hanging out of his face — asking his brother whether he thinks they're going to die, while the Hamas monster who had just thrown a grenade in their saferoom helps himself to a drink from their fridge, taking a casual break from the slaughter.
Neither will I ever forget the terrorists playing football with a severed head. Or the Thai migrant worker whose head is viciously hacked off with a garden hoe — another "Zionist colonizer" getting what he deserved, right?quillette.substack.com/p/what-did-you…
Or the throngs of Gazans crowding around pickup trucks loaded with the mutilated corpses of Jewish women, filming and spitting on the bodies. Or the woman in Kibbutz Mefalsim, crouching and begging in vain for mercy.
There is some evidence of sexual violence in the video — the charred corpse of a young woman with her legs splayed and her genitals exposed — but not much. Apparently even Hamas draws a line somewhere: they are not as proud of raping Jewish women as they are of murdering them. Or, more likely, they simply didn't want to embarrass the delicate sensibilities of their legions of useful idiots in the West.
But yes — there was rape. Not "rape" in scare quotes, as the apologists would have it, but sadistic, murderous sexual violence, documented in a new damning new report by The Civil Commission, an independent Israeli women's rights NGO. (video summary here: youtube.com/watch?v=K7fJuz…)
Across its 180 pages, the report describes "a recurring pattern of rape and gang rape; sexual torture; mutilation; targeted shooting to the face, head and genital area; forced nudity; binding and restraint; genital burning; objects inserted into intimate areas; post-mortem sexual humiliation; and execution during or after sexual assault."
And it was premeditated and organized. The terrorists crossing into Israel carried printed Arabic-to-Hebrew phrasebooks with handy expressions like "take off your pants," "lie down," "spread your legs," and "don't make trouble." I wonder why they expected to need those particular phrases?
I know one thing: no civilized country on earth would tolerate the existence of an organization like Hamas on its border after October 7th. Not one. This includes every self-righteous Westerner currently lecturing Israel from thousands of kilometres away, without an inch of skin in the game.
dailymail.com/news/article-1…
YouTube
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@davidharsanyi Radical Islamists take victory out of the fact that they are still around. Sacrificing all is a small price to pay as long as they can continue their goal of a Caliphate
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Other than losing their entire navy, air force, a few strata of political leadership, top military minds, over 1,000 senior IRGC and Basij commanders, air defense and radar sites, numerous scientists, ballistic missile stockpiles and most launchers, drone and missile factories, proxies, etc.. Iran has the upper hand.
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@DrJacobsRad The weak response is not just applicable to City Hall. We have been gaslit by all levels of government . To quote "An institution that cannot ensure the safety, inclusion, and dignity of its own community cannot credibly sustain its claim to excellence." This is Canada .
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The most important question to ask is what brought us to this point?
In my opinion, a weak response from Mayor Chow and City Hall to outrageous acts of hate has allowed boundaries to be pushed to the point where we now need a highly visible and heavily armed police presence.
Toronto Police@TorontoPolice
The Toronto Police Service is introducing new measures to strengthen public safety in response to a more complex security environment. Today, we announced the launch of our new Counter-Terrorism Security Unit and increasing high-visibility deployments in key areas across the city. These steps are not tied to a specific-threat — they’re about prevention, readiness, and keeping our communities safe. Learn more: tps.ca/media-centre/n…
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If you can’t call out antisemitism clearly, you are part of the problem.
Canada is drifting.
And now the world is noticing.
“More synagogues… desecrated, burned, shot at… than in any other country.”
“We’re witnessing a polite pogrom.”
Read that again.
That should stop us in our tracks.
theatlantic.com/international/…
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@UJAFederation As a Torontonian it is incomprehensible that we are cheering that “TORONTO POLICE DEPLOY NEW HEAVILY-ARMED COUNTER-TERRORISM OFFICERS TO THE STREETS” . this a step that marks Toronto as a city that will no excise the radical elents from society. And we watch the slide into hell
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In response to today’s announcement by the Toronto Police Service establishing a new Counter-Terrorism Security Unit and launching Task Force Guardian, the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs (CIJA) and the UJA Federation of Greater Toronto (UJA) issued the following statement: cija.ca/jewish_leaders…
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@JoshKraushaar @NoahIZatzman It is hard to read this without concluding that although Carney may not be antisemitic, he is certainly indifferent to its rise and spread throughout Canada.
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@TeamKerzner @MatthewTaub If I may quote “We also discussed the need to confront radicalization which is a threat that must be taken seriously and confronted head on!”
Now do something about it. You have the power and the obligation to.
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Earlier today I had a follow up meeting with Ambassador Rabbi Kaploun, President Trump's special envoy to monitor and combat anti semitism.
We discussed the urgency of governments around the world and in Canada to protect their Jewish communities, not passively but with tremendous focus, action, and resolve.
There is no doubt that the worldwide Jewish community is under siege and I reiterated that our government led by Premier @fordnation will continue to bring forward legislation and regulations that will protect the Jewish community and #ProtectOntario.
We also discussed the need to confront radicalization which is a threat that must be taken seriously and confronted head on!
Nobody will ever see me on the sidelines or afraid to speak out!
@StateSEAS
@IsraelMFA
@MatthewTaub
@UJAFederation
@CIJAinfo
@CanadianFSWC
@IsraelinToronto
@bnaibrithcanada
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@opinion @WajahatAli @RonBrownstein Why do you not understand that Israeli’s would rather have their lives and those of their families safe from radical jihadist neighbors than worry about the public opinion of Americans. Let them all live under the same threat and see how they respond.
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Netanyahu may have won Trump over, but he’s losing Americans in the process, @RonBrownstein says 🎥
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@NeilOberman @YoniFreedhoff We are oblivious to the fact that Canada has succumbed to our leadership that believes they can just gaslight our Jewish leadership and all will be ok. We blame “demographics”. Israel has always been demographically challenged, but they are collectively loud & proud. We whine.
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@ChrisMurphyCT You do understand that every member of Hezbollah and those protecting them wish to see you dead as well and they are killing many Americans still today by being a key member of the drug cartels.
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Trump's illegal attack on Iran has set off regional war. The latest - Israel's ground invasion of Lebanon. 800 are already dead.
1/ Tonight, I want to walk you thru a🧵on how devastating this new war could be, and how Trump's blunder set it in motion.
theguardian.com/world/2026/mar…
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@CanadianFSWC It is quite clear to me that all levels of government and TPS are being told to tolerate antisemitism. I’m sorry the only way to stop this is for a group of strapping Jews wades into this crowd and rips up those signs . We have to take matters into our own hands. No friends.
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@ScarlettGrace92 How did those “Orthodox” Jews get there?
It’s Shabbat so I’d be interested to know what hotel they’re in where they don’t use electronic key cards or elevators OR how they got downtown without money or using modern transportation AND how they’re carrying outside an Eruv
Scarlett Grace@ScarlettGrace92
Leading the Al Quds day march in Toronto 🇨🇦
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@megynkelly @GoldsteinBrooke A typical response of those that are lost in their own maniacal desire to be relevant . You cannot dissuade a functional idiot with facts and reason . Their position is only grounded a the economics of outrage . Slaves of the algorithm.
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Dear @GoldsteinBrooke - I regret to inform you that this shit doesn’t work on me anymore. Take care.
Brooke Goldstein@GoldsteinBrooke
Megyn, it’s honestly sad to watch someone who was once a respected and serious journalist let bitterness and emotion override the principles that built her career. Reposting content from Ryan Grim, cofounder of the Soros funded Drop Site News, just because you share a problem with Israel, is a stunning collapse in judgment. You’ve said nothing about the tens of thousands of Israeli children who have been bombarded by nonstop Hezbollah rockets in the past week…the very reason Israel has had to strike in Lebanon in the first place. But you’re amplifying a platform that pushes the grotesque implication that because someone’s relatives died in war, someone whose brothers were allegedly members of a terror organization that murders American citizens (Hezbollah), committing an antisemitic terror attack in Michigan can somehow be understood or excused. For the record, multiple people associated with Drop Site News have alleged links to Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad. The outlet has profiled Hamas terrorists, denies rape on Oct 7, and regularly aligns with the same pro-Putin figures who spent years shilling for Assad in Syria. Editorially, Drop Site News is blatantly pro-Islamic Republic, pro-Hamas, and anti-American. This is what you’re amplifying now, @megynkelly?
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@LevittMichael @Mark_Goldberg Study history. Al Quds day was established by the Ayatollah in 1979 to end Ramadan and rally in support The elimination of Jews from Palestine. By definition it is based on hate - kill the Jews - and promoted by those in support of Iran - a designated terrorist state. Simple.
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An Al-Quds Day march expected in Toronto this weekend, alongside others planned across Canada, is profoundly disturbing.
These rallies have historically featured banners of Ayatollah Khamenei and chants calling for “intifada,” along with calls for death to the United States and Israel. If that unfolds in our city, it will be a shameful stain on Toronto and on our country.
The threat environment in our city is already serious. In recent days, gunfire has targeted synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses and the U.S. consulate in Toronto. Jewish and Iranian communities remain under threat.
At the same time, the Iranian regime and its terrorist proxies continue to issue explicit threats against Israel, the United States and the West.
Authorities in London have banned this year’s Al-Quds march over public safety concerns.
Against this backdrop, demonstrations in Canada that glorify the leadership of the Iranian regime and amplify violent rhetoric should alarm every Canadian.
If any leader in a position of authority is prepared to step up and act to protect public safety and social cohesion, now is the time.
Hate and incitement have no place on our streets or anywhere in our country.
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@ezralevant @SalmanSima @TorontoPolice Please study history. Al Quds day was established by the Ayatollah in 1979 to end Ramadan and rally in support The elimination of Jews from Palestine. By definition it is based on hate - kill the Jews - and promoted to those in support of Iran - a designated terrorist state.
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What a liar.
You don't need a "hate crime" charge to arrest someone for trespass, mischief, vandalism, uttering threats, assault or other crimes committed by these IRGC foreign nationals.
This is a decision by @TorontoPolice to let Iran's agents run the streets.
Rebel News@RebelNewsOnline
Toronto police Supt. Stefan Prentice details how hate crimes are enforced, noting it's "extremely complex" and "requires a lot of evidence" ahead of the Al Quds Day rally. These "issues are not easy to resolve in the moment," but charges may be laid after the fact, he says.
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@Safety_Canada No , the funds are not appreciated. They are an admission by the Government that they are prepared to tolerate and allow the hate to continue. But, here Jewish Community is $10 million to buy bulletproof glass.
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Minister Anandasangaree announces $10M available in federal support to help Jewish communities in Toronto and Montreal protect themselves against hate-motivated crimes. canada.ca/en/public-safe…
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