Yes, you are correct, thankyou.
But these are defined-benefit pension plans (e.g. a police officer who retires after 20 years with a pension which pays 70% of their salary) which, by law, are available to a much larger portion of the working population in France than the few public sector organizations who get that kind of pension in the US. It’s the fact that the benefits are guaranteed that make them such a long-term risk, that and that not being a 401(k) or other kind of personal pension savings means that current pension obligations have to be paid out whatever the state of previously invested contributions.
Or taxes.See the USA - Social Security has been constantly raided to quasi-balance the budget due to the decades long surpluses, but when those surpluses run out, that money gets “paid back” as low interest t-bills generally. State level pensions have similar issues, but can’t borrow money to cover, but can invest that money in vehicles other than t-bills, which leads to some wildly different solvency calculations amongst states due to anticipated returns not always being in line with what payouts will be, and some very risky investments (see Kentucky and a couple of other states getting crushed by the CDS markets).
And, of course, there are those who wish the uncertainty pushed onto retirees rather than pension funds.
Again, so is Social Security, which is available at 62.
I really empathise with leaders who have to put through policies which are necessary but deeply unpopular. On the other hand, I’m not sure if raising pension age is the only way to fix this, although that seems easiest, mathematically speaking.
In other news, Liberal school districts allege teh RICO against social media companies!
I wonder what they hope to accomplish with these ridiculous lawsuits. Do the parents in their regions want this? Schools are already so stretched for money, why do they think this is a good use of it?
It looks like, based on that article, that the law firm involved has agreed to take the case on contingency, so a thoughtless School Board official could easily assume that that meant it was cost-free. And they’ll only learn different when the discovery requests and deposition appointments start coming in.
Meanwhile, things are going great for Sinema’s obvious plan to pivot to FOX News.
Sharp as a rubber ball, that one.
Spinning back to this (may end up a different thread)… an interesting article on the thought behind these lawsuits:
“What were the issues that really got people outraged and angry? Because that’s the low hanging fruit,” Van Tatenhove added. “We were looking for that outrage and that anger, because it seems to short-circuit our critical thinking centers.”
That’s exactly the kind of content that Facebook’s algorithms have favored, according to Frances Haugen. “When you give more distribution to content that can get reactions,” she said in a recent MSNBC interview, “you end up rewarding more extreme content. Because the shortest path to ‘like’ is anger.”
Van Tatenhove says he is personally in recovery from drug addiction and, during our conversation, compared the allure of conspiracy theories to that of heroin. “While heroin feels great, it ruins your life,” he said. “While conspiracy theories feel great and we get all those chemical releases — much like shooting heroin — it’s damaging to our country and it’s damaging to our democracy.” He suggested that the U.S. needs an analogue to “methadone” for our conspiracy-theory addiction.
And the legal theory:
“What we are looking at is the ‘public nuisance’ legal theory, which allows government entities to hold companies liable for unique damages caused as a result of a company’s conduct,” said Ron Repak, a lawyer who is representing Pittsburgh-area schools in a similar lawsuit.
The lawyers who spoke to Salon pointed to precedent-setting lawsuits of years past, based on claims that companies had deliberately addicted their customers to harmful products in search of greater profitability. The most famous of these were the consumer protection cases against tobacco companies that began in the 1990s, which were so successful the federal government joined in.
I wasn’t sure where to put this article, which I think is really good. It’s a sort of push-the-pendulum-back critique of progressive anti-racism, particularly how it plays out in interpersonal interactions.
In a vacuum, many of the prescriptions advocated by the anti-color-blind crowd are reasonable: We should all think more about our privileges and our place in the world. An uncomfortable conversation or an honest look in the mirror can be precursors to personal growth. We all carry around harmful, implicit biases and we do need to examine the subconscious assumptions and prejudices that underlie the actions we take and the things we say. My objection is not to these ideas themselves, which are sensible enough. No, my objection is that anti-racism offers little more than a Marie Kondo–ism for the white soul, promising to declutter racial baggage and clear a way to white fulfillment without doing anything meaningful to combat structural racism. As Lasch-Quinn correctly foresaw, “Casting interracial problems as issues of etiquette [puts] a premium on superficial symbols of good intentions and good motivations as well as on style and appearance rather than on the substance of change.”
Yet the problem with the therapeutics of contemporary anti-racism is not just that they are politically sterile. When anti-color-blindness and its ideology of insistent “race consciousness” are translated into the sphere of private life—to the domain of friendships, block parties, and backyard barbecues—they assault the very idea of a multiracial society, producing new forms of racism in the process. The fact that our media environment is inundated with an endless stream of books, articles, and social-media tutorials that promise to teach white people how to simply interact with the Black people in their life is not a sign of anti-racist progress, but of profound regression.
The subtext that undergirds this new anti-racist discourse—that Black-white relationships are inherently fraught and must be navigated with the help of professionals and technical experts—testifies to the impoverishment of our interracial imagination, not to its enrichment. More gravely, anti-color-blind etiquette treats Black Americans as exotic others, permanent strangers whose racial difference is so chasmic that it must be continually managed, whose mode of humanness is so foreign that it requires white people to adopt a special set of manners and “race conscious” ritualistic practices to even have a simple conversation.
If we are going to find a way out of the racial discord that has defined American life post-Trump and post-Charlottesville and post-Floyd, we have to begin with a more sophisticated understanding of color-blindness, one that rejects the bad color-blindness on offer from the Republican Party and its partisans, as well as the anti-color-blindness of the anti-racist consultants. Instead, we should embrace the good color-blindness of not too long ago. At the heart of that color-blindness was a radical claim, one imperfectly realized but perfect as an ideal: that despite the weight of a racist past that isn’t even past, we can imagine a world, or at least an interaction between two people, where racial difference doesn’t make a difference.
I can’t read the whole thing because paywall, and honestly that’s okay, because I think it would just make me mad. I think racism is a terrible thing, and I don’t think it makes much sense to pretend that anti-racism is just as bad a thing. Though it strikes me that this is precisely the sort of article the Atlantic would be eager to publish.
I am curious about the good color-blindness of not too long ago. When was that? Does the author say?
It is pie in the sky. He doesn’t offer a path, just wants us to get to the end.
I think that it’s totally natural for the author to… not want to have his entire public persona determined and dictated by his race. He probably thinks that he’s… more than simply a Black man, and his race isn’t the thing that you need to be focused on when dealing with him.
Which seems totally natural to me… I never define myself on the basis of my whiteness. The only people I know who do that are total pieces of shit.
Just like I define myself by… everything else in my life that isn’t my race, I can imagine that a Black person would want to do the same thing. They’d want to define themselves on the basis of their actual actions in life, not how much pigment they have in their skin as a result of their genetics.
I agree with his premise completely, I just think it is impossible.
It’s not like that. It’s basically just a particular form of performative progressivism that dissolve theory and reality till they’re inseparable. Sure that can be annoying on many levels, but like, save us red pest and deliver us from black death, sort of annoying. This is sort of We Are Decided ideology being put into action. Which is still better, imo, since they’re at least trying. But of course it’s just putting a Ukraine flag on your Twitter profile. It doesn’t interrogate actual problems and turns the solutions to them into effectively consumer-choice solutions like picking straws or selecting milk substitute A instead of B for filling up your thick plastic cup at Starbucks. That might strike one as more than annoying if you’re actually the living target of their attention and not some idealized version they imagine from social media.
But as i’ve said many times, imo, this is because American politics is utterly broken. Nothing you care about will happen, nothing can be done, and you’re entire political life is spent just hanging on to the gains you have and stopping the other side from winning. This has been going on for at least 30 years, if not more. All this self-flagellation and politics-by-consumption is the consequence of that. Most people of course don’t even realize it, because they don’t realize the political system is actually broken, because it’s all they’ve ever known. Progressive politics can be annoying, but they basically cannot do anything else but put a Ukraine flag next to their Black Lives Matter hashtag. Because, really, they can’t do anything, because the political system is broken. Even this professor can’t do anything. Nobody can do anything at all. So the annoying white teachers othering him unintentionally would probably love to help make structural changes. But the political system is broken. It’s the best they can do and it’s a bit silly and naive and pointless and makes him into something totemic and weird.
You must be height deprived.