[Note: I don’t have a fully-formed opinion about Nate Silver, so I’m speaking in general terms.]

People should be accountable for what they say. If you routinely spout off bullshit and people decide you’re full of shit, you have nobody to blame but yourself. If people don’t listen to what you have to say in your area of expertise because you’ve developed a general reputation for being full of shit, you also have nobody to blame but yourself.

When it comes to random C-list celebrities, I don’t have the patience or inclination to figure out which of their opinions I should or should not take seriously. It’s all or nothing, because I have better things to do with my time than try to figure out whether a particular statement by an untrustworthy person happens to actually be accurate. If I know enough about a topic to tell which of their statements are accurate, then I can just figure out on my own what to believe and skip the middleman.

You’re only as immortal as GRRM himself. Have you tried Brandon Sanderson? His work isn’t nearly as gritty as Martin’s, but his world building is top-notch, and he, um, actually writes.

That’s a really big “if”, especially when you consider how billionaires actively use their influence to maintain an underclass by fighting against government policies that would help lower-class people become middle-class.

Hmmm. I can’t see most of the comments in this thread. Probably because they’re from people I blocked because they were posting tankie bullshit.

It’s both. The mere fact that there are people with billions of dollars to throw around means a large amount of the world’s productive capacity is spent catering to the whims of billionaires when it could instead be spent on useful things for ordinary people. And because money is inseparable from politics, billionaires can more or less directly bend government policies to their will, greatly hindering anyone else from having a real say in government policy.