Bingbong
3d ago
Overall there’s a neglect of the ‘what’s the alternative’ problem. Like yes working in a sweatshop sucks, but subsistence farmers try it and then beg the places to expand so they can get their friends and family on. The world is not naturally ‘nice’ and plenty of people can improve their lot by quite a lot with it still sucking.
This is essentially the issue with so much Western discourse where people assume that 'middle class person in a Western Democracy' is the natural water level for human existence since they don't have any real understanding of how shit the world is/was a country over or a century back.
Bingbong
3d ago
Industrial Revolution is a series of processes that is widely copied and not a random windfall.
Bingbong
3d ago
Exactly. Good for the emerging world peoples and tax-avoidant who've been able to take advantage of the Gulf States, but the whole thing is borne on essentially a massive oil lottery win and all the neighboring states sans oil are absolute messes. Being able to just buy luxury space communism for a tiny population (which isn't going to necessarily last and has already crumbled before) for 50-100 years is pretty piss poor in the terms of broader civilizational accomplishment.
Bingbong
4d ago
Are we giving all the civilizational accomplishments of the Chinese to the Mongolians since they had whatever tenure as colonial overlords?
Bingbong
4d ago
He does seem to be drinking the Techbro Abundance Kool Aid a bit too hard and I'm skeptical he's going to be successful longterm. I do agree with you that I'd rather 'Arabs spend a lot of money trying to actually build productive things even if too ambitious' to the 'Whores' or 'Wahabbism' alternate routes on the tech tree, though.
Bingbong
4d ago
Brother the folks running Iran are not better. They also live off oil revenue and are degenerate.
Yeah but they've had periods where they've managed to genuinely better themselves and hold actual jobs and whatnot.
Bingbong
4d ago
Are they? Egyptians are pretty separate to Arabs especially the vintage that made Egypt a big deal initially. That's like saying the Byzantines were Turks.
Bingbong
4d ago
Broadly agreed. Iran atleast capable of putting together a solid situation whilst essentially everything South of there has nil chance outside of occasional massive petrochemical windfalls that they will inevitably squander in the longrun.
Bingbong
5d ago
Yeah Persians are way more organized and productive than the vast majority of the region. Turks might be able to compete, and other groups just can't really do functional society in absence of massive Oil lottery wins.
Bingbong
5d ago
Really? The US military kills lots of civilians in all prior wars, even up to the very end of the Afghan war they were accidentally hitting random people with suspicious tubes in their truck.
The conditions and scrutiny of most recent US military campaigns would be totally insane by any historical metric. 'You must only hit confirmed military targets in a hostile populace who have every incentive to deliberately misreport the status of casualties and have a bunch of weapons that can be profoundly lethal out of nowhere plus you have an aggressive media operation actively jumping on any excuse' is not a proposition that could really exist in any prior period.
Bingbong
6d ago
Though, admittedly, my first quick search for a small-sized tightly-clustered student population didn't support my theory. Only 56% of Los Alamos High School seniors took any AP exams, and only 43% passed at least one? What the hell? Do the good nuclear physicists just not have enough kids?
Surely there'd be effects like the senior personnel having more resources for boarding school/private education whilst the shitkickers on base are just putting their kids into the local school regardless. Also I'd imagine there are some nearby actual Los Alamosans who'd likely skew redneck/native as hell.
Bingbong
6d ago
Is anybody saying the children are totally unworthy of empathy? The argument is more that it's unintentional collateral damage as opposed to an operation solely conducted to kill civilians with no particular greater strategic or tactical significance
Bingbong
9d ago
Yeah. I've got a two year old and if you leave any sort of an autoplay going for more than 2-3 videos you quickly end up offramping to some mix of pure AI sloptent, Elsagate content or 'Youtube Poop designed to stimulate unattended toddlers via a mix of stock sound effects and popular action figures'. Say what you want about 'unattended child stays up till 2AM and ends up accidentally seeing the Indie French Avant Garde stuff' atleast that was gated by time and attention spans.
Bingbong
13d ago
Especially an issue for a place like Dubai with minimal safety nets for foreigners, though I guess the other alternative is 'net drain foreigners cling to the host country whilst reasonably-productive ones go off and try to look for the optimal deal elsewhere' is even worse.
Bingbong
14d ago
I know full-time deranged amateur ladies of the night who'll still brag endlessly if the fortnight's beau happens to be a doctor
Bingbong
15d ago
Doesn't this make logical sense?
Sometimes I do feel like there's a kind of opposite effect for men where if a 8+ starts being friendly to me for no obvious reasons my immediate reaction is 'wait what's the angle/scam here' as opposed to 'woah this beautiful person has randomly decided to kindle a friendshi'
Bingbong
15d ago
I'm sure the people do exist who'd match her energy, just in the modern world of dating-app brain a lot of 'matches that would be perfectly successful if arranged marriages/strong family introductions were still a thing' end up getting nuked since the dude held a fork wrong on the first date and she gets irrecoverable Ick.
Bingbong
15d ago
Medicine's particularly tricky to get with normies due to a combination of relocating a lot during peak years and absolutely brutal hours. Most top tier earning/educational professions don't have the same risk of being banished to the middle of nowhere for 3 years in order to get residency or specialization requirements out of the way.
Bingbong
17d ago
China being rich and prosperous is its default state for most of the last 3000 years.
Exactly. Also why I'm relatively optimistic about the Iranian efforts compared to a lot of other places in the broad proximity. They've got a history of functional civilization and being broadly productive. Some places are just going to be continually civilization-resistant in the longrun.
Bingbong
17d ago
China has minimal interest in playing world police as long as there's a somewhat-stable global market to sell into and securing its own needs in terms of resources isn't overly threatened. I'm pretty sure they don't see a need to become hegemon, just continue to increase their economic heft whilst the USA can maintain its gigantic costly international welfare efforts.
Exactly. It seems pretty implausible that the current medical hiring split is the one that's maximally recruiting those with the capability to be good medical professionals, especially when there's a ton of random carveouts for affirmative action identities
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