BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
The neighborhood of Hampstead is just at present exercised with a series of events which seem to run on lines parallel to those of what was known to the writers of headlines and "The Kensington Horror," or "The Stabbing Woman," or "The Woman in Black." During the past two or three days several cases have occurred of young children straying from home or neglecting to return from their playing on the Heath. In all these cases the children were too young to give any properly intelligible account of themselves, but the consensus of their excuses is that they had been with a "bloofer lady." It has always been late in the evening when they have been missed, and on two occasions the children have not been found until early in the following morning. It is generally supposed in the neighborhood that, as the first child missed gave as his reason for being away that a "bloofer lady" had asked him to come for a walk, the others had picked up the phrase and used it as occasion served. This is the more natural as the favorite game of the little ones at present is luring each other away by wiles. A correspondent writes us that to see some of the tiny tots pretending to be the"bloofer lady" is supremely funny. Some of our caricaturists might, he says, take a lesson in the irony of grotesque by comparing the reality and the picture. It is only in accordance with general principles of human nature that the "bloofer lady" should be the popular role at these al fresco performances.
User ID: 628
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
23d ago
· Edited 22d ago
You haven't really said much about what bothers you about their way of life
I like the people close to me having basic freedoms like my wife not needing to wear a niqab. I like being able to argue using reason and being able to counter "The good book says X, therefore you are wrong when you claim not X" without being denounced as a heretic. I like being clean shaven (yes, the Taliban imposed a beard requirement on all men the last time they were in power), I enjoy dancing and music etc. etc.
I can go on and on...
and the way you talk about them seems more like a point in their favor than anything else
Oh boy, if you don't like me you really won't like the Taliban. When I say they are my coethnics I don't just mean they have the same skin colour as me/come from the same part of the world, I mean that I, like a very large portion of them, am Pashtun (complete with tribal affiliation and all that). The values they grew up with are the same as those my parents instilled in me as a child and from where I derive my belief system today, except that I've become extremely westernised (people call me a coconut back home - brown on the outside, white on the inside - and I can't really say they are wrong). I'm like the grown up version of Kamal's son from Kipling's Ballad of East and West after the British system has completely laundered him.
Think me but fundamentalist Muslim when you think of the Taliban and then reconsider whether you want someone like that to rule over you.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
23d ago
but I recognize it as humane
Only someone who has never experienced the direct influence of the Taliban would think that way. The Taliban are like fire, they make good servants but bad masters (in the sense that they keep the overton window open for moderate Islam by taking all the attacks which would have come upon moderate Islam otherwise). Putting them incharge of other human beings or in general handing them any power at all ends badly (see how they commit terror attacks when handed power etc., they're even planning on bringing back stoning for adultery!). They work best as zoo specimens, not wild animals.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
13d ago
Or when their political future is now determined by the flood of migrants which repopulates the region, as opposed to their coethnics in Moscow.
Bold of you to assume that the plan isn't to repopulate both Ukraine and Russia once their mutual destruction is complete. Imagine the glory of taking over both the ancient Slavic "center of the world" Kiev as well as the modern one, Moscow. And the best part of it all will be how bloodless and peaceful our conquest will be, nay it will be even better, it will be done with the full consent of the conquered. Much like Rurik's original arrival into Novgorod back in 862, they are going to invite us to come over and rule over them. Could you ask for anything better?
Sometimes I ask myself: "Are we Gog and Magog?"; but nah, that's too farfetched and fantastical...
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
13d ago
And Trump is ahead on Hispanics right now. Pledge to make immigration easier and he'd be even more ahead than he currently is.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1mo ago
Yeah, it's extremely weird that Google et. al. went on hiring sprees when they could have just given their employees next level money. All those weird side projects that haemorraged money led to lower return on capital employed, which pisses off investors (even more than not giving them fat dividends does) and also pisses off your employes compared to the counterfactual where they would get millions a year.
Funnily enough I was recently talking to a (leftier than me) friend of mine who didn't know that all the big famous investment banks were public companies and that anyone could buy their shares.
After I told him he was extremely surprised by this fact and opined that they must be an excellent way to make money only to be brought down back to earth after I told him that in reality they were really shitty investments because all that money they made went to their employees as salaries and bonuses, leaving their public investors with mediocre returns.
He said something along the lines of "Of course this happens, typical greedy banker behaviour". Because I value this friendship I wisely left it at that and changed the subject, but deep down a part of me wanted to quip "Firstly you complain about big companies putting investors ahead of their employees and how this makes them capital-B Bad/greedy, and now here you have an example of a class of companies which do the opposite and put their employees ahead of their investors and now you are calling them capital-B Bad and greedy for this behaviour? Make up your mind man!"
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
14d ago
Because I was called out for being too late with my nothingburger prediction before I'll make sure to get it in early this time around.
Nowhere. In. Two. Weeks.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
25d ago
Eh, it really shouldn't matter to you all that much if you are personally smart, that's suggestive that your family is also relatively smart and that (assuming you pick a good partner), your descendents will also be decently smart (regression to the mean notwithstanding, unfortunately the influence of your family on your children doesn't "factor through" you completely).
It's just so unfair
Life is what life is. There are highly intelligent people rotting away in the third world while 80 IQ clueless imbecilles in western welfare states who only have it in them to take out more than they put in live decent and comfortable existances. No amount of rage from me or anyone else at this injustice is going to change this so I've come to accept it and move on. I have extended family in the former situation too so it's not like this is just a theoretical problem for me.
(I also believe intelligence gives rise to moral worth, I'd happily eat a chicken - provided it was slaughtered in a Halal way - I very much would not eat a chicken that had human level intelligence and would be horrified if such a being was treated like how we treat chickens today)
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1mo ago
SK's protectionism worked because it was done with a spear pointed at the ass of the local companies who were always told it was going to be time limited and would be wound down gradually and so they had 15-20 years to become internationally competitive or they were going to die out anyways. Most crucially this threat was believable to the point that the local companies shaped up and actually became competitive on the world stage.
Unfortunately you can't replicate it in the modern day US because their culture of lagresse and gibs mean that tacitly the companies know that even if the current government says the tariffs/support will end in 15 years political considerations near expiry time will lead to it being probably extended because who wants headlines like "poor salt of the earth car factory workers left destitute after government pulls funding to cut the taxes of the wealthy"? As such the car companies have zero real incentive to modernize and can just coast off of government subsidies and having a captive market. The ultimate loser of all this is going to be the taxpayer who now gets his hard earned money given to these relicts and just to add insult to injury is forced to buy worse products at higher prices.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
19d ago
The average American is pretty self centered. I'd be surprised if they thought of any nation that is not of immediate concern to them.
Yes, just freshly seen on orange cat site: https://rdrama.net/post/260165/american-forgets-the-rest-of-the
I guess this is a privilege you get from being a citizen of the global hegemon, you end up forgetting even the mother country which birthed you.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1mo ago
Another valid solution is state sanctioned "beating the shit out of bad human beings until there is no more shitty behaviour left in them". This is surprisingly effective at getting those who are immune to reason to see sense. Operant conditioning works just as well on humans as it does on lower animals.
Six lashes for his rude behaviour followed by a solemn promise that he's going to get another sixty lashes if anything untoward was to happen to the woman afterwards would set him straight very quickly.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
23d ago
Yes, Tate is a very very bad Muslim because of his actions if he even recited the Shahadah and isn't just doing this as a bit to gain more followers.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1mo ago
Why not? Assuming you mean Wegovy instead of Ozempic as that's the Semaglutide product specifically designed for this.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
27d ago
Looking at it in more depth you seem to be right. Also the electric arc furnace seems to work by taking scrap steel as input instead of iron ore like the blast furnace does. This changes my view of the project significantly, I'm now much less in favour of the change. I wouldn't even call the new thing a steel producer, it's more a "steel recycler".
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
27d ago
the return of these jobs will allow these poorer regions in the midlands and north to thrive again.
These jobs are never coming back. The UK manufactures more today in real value terms that it ever did in the past, but automation means we need fewer and fewer jobs each year to support this manufacturing. This trend is not going to change and if anything is going to accelerate (see how Tata is closing down their old labour intensive steel furnace and replacing it with a more efficient highly automated furnace that's going to pump out a lot more steel with a lot fewer workers). These towns and regions are dead and will stay dead. People need to realise this and move on.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
25d ago
This place is more rightwing than it was on Reddit
Agreed. We seem to somehow be undergoing reverse Conquest's second law...
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1mo ago
who ends up getting the blame
Simple, the person who took the drug without a prescription. This is no different to how if you park in an open parking lot you have to bear the risk of someone breaking in and stealing your shit.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1mo ago
Aw that sucks, and to think I was having so much fun spamming this everywhere:
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1mo ago
An alternative punishment could be requiring a two page essay on rule-following
LLM go brrrr...
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
1mo ago
· Edited 1mo ago
Allow me to present a more parsimonious explanation of everything we're seeing:
Rust is clearly the systems language of the future. It can be just as fast as C++ and has a much nicer syntax/doesn't have weird idiosyncracies (ok, the last point is debatable). However there are lots and lots of C++/C "dinosaurs" whose livelihoods are going to be threatened were it to lose out in favour of Rust. Thus they need a way to protect themselves (as is only natural) and are trying to at the least slow down the adoption of Rust.
In a bid to do this they've found a feature of rust, namely the fact that it forces you to write good code, presented it as "undesirable" and created a narrative of how rust takes away your "freedoms", thereby aligning themselves to one side of the culture war in a bid to leverage the power of that side to protect their income stream. Nevermind that you can very easily write memory unsafe code in rust by just declaring an unsafe{} block around everything.
It's all the usual ploy of people hating technological progress and advancement because it's coming for their daily bread so they put up spurious blocks and fearmonger to ensure that coin keeps flowing to them.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
13d ago
Nah, I believe I have a duty to let people know there are better alternatives than the current social system state they are stuck in and pointing out situations in which our system would have outperformed your system is a particularly good way to do so. Islam is a proselytising religion after all you know...
contaminating yourself with the filthy Westerner mindset
Oh boy, It's way too late for me on that front, I'm already 80%+ western at this moment in time and I'd expect my future trajectory won't shift me much from here. Plus it's not like the West doesn't have a lot of good things going for it, it's just that Westerners don't need to be told about them because they already follow them to some extent. They need to be told about the good things they don't yet subscribe to.
My preferred system is not the one we have back home, it's a syncretic mix of that and the western system, biased if anything more towards the western way.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
4mo ago
Anybody Here? ...
Nobody? ...
Well, alright then:
A large study from all of Sweden has found that increasing people's incomes randomly (actually, increasing their wealth, but you can convert wealth to income via an interest rate very easily) does not reduce their criminality. The authors find that via a cross sectional model, people with higher incomes are less likely to commit crimes (this just compares rich people to poors and sees rich people are less criminal), while when they switch to a "shock" model where people who won what is effectively a lottery don't see reduced criminality in either themselves or their children. This is a pretty big blow for the "poor people are more criminal because they don't have money for their basic needs" theory.
Original study here: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w31962/w31962.pdf
Marginal Revolution post discussing this here (also reproduced below, post has an additional graph at the end on the link): https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/12/why-do-wealthier-people-commit-less-crime.html
It’s well known that people with lower incomes commit more crime. Call this the cross-sectional result. But why? One set of explanations suggests that it’s precisely the lack of financial resources that causes crime. Crudely put, maybe poorer people commit crime to get money. Or, poorer people face greater strains–anger, frustration, resentment–which leads them to lash out or poorer people live in communities that are less integrated and well-policed or poorer people have access to worse medical care or education and so forth and that leads to more crime. These theories all imply that giving people money will reduce their crime rate.
A different set of theories suggests that the negative correlation between income and crime (more income, less crime) is not causal but is caused by a third variable correlated with both income and crime. For example, higher IQ or greater conscientiousness could increase income while also reducing crime. These theories imply that giving people money will not reduce their crime rate.
The two theories can be distinguished by an experiment that randomly allocates money. In a remarkable paper, Cesarini, Lindqvist, Ostling and Schroder report on the results of just such an experiment in Sweden.
Cesarini et al. look at Swedes who win the lottery and they compare their subsequent crime rates to similar non-winners. The basic result is that, if anything, there is a slight increase in crime from winning the lottery but more importantly the authors can statistically reject that the bulk of the cross-sectional result is causal. In other words, since randomly increasing a person’s income does not reduce their crime rate, the first set of theories are falsified.
A couple of notes. First, you might object that lottery players are not a random sample. A substantial part of Cesarini et al.’s lottery data, however, comes from prize linked savings accounts, savings accounts that pay big prizes in return for lower interest payments. Prize linked savings accounts are common in Sweden and about 50% of Swedes have a PLS account. Thus, lottery players in Sweden look quite representative of the population. Second, Cesarini et al. have data on some 280 thousand lottery winners and they have the universe of criminal convictions; that is any conviction of an individual aged 15 or higher from 1975-2017. Wow! Third, a few people might object that the correlation we observe is between convictions and income and perhaps convictions don’t reflect actual crime. I don’t think that is plausible for a variety of reasons but the authors also find no statistically significant evidence that wealth reduces the probability one is suspect in a crime investigation (god bless the Swedes for extreme data collection). Fourth, the analysis was preregistered and corrections are made for multiple hypothesis testing. I do worry somewhat that the lottery winnings, most of which are on the order of 20k or less are not large enough and I wish the authors had said more about their size relative to cross sectional differences. Overall, however, this looks to be a very credible paper.
In their most important result, shown below, Cesarini et al. convert lottery wins to equivalent permanent income shocks (using a 2% interest rate over 20 years) to causally estimate the effect of permanent income shocks on crime (solid squares below) and they compare with the cross-sectional results for lottery players in their sample (circle) or similar people in Sweden (triangle). The cross-sectional results are all negative and different from zero. The causal lottery results are mostly positive, but none reject zero. In other words, randomly increasing people’s income does not reduce their crime rate. Thus, the negative correlation between income and crime must be due to a third variable. As the authors summarize rather modestly:
Although our results should not be casually extrapolated to other countries or segments of the population, Sweden is not distinguished by particularly low crime rates relative to comparable countries, and the crime rate in our sample of lottery players is only slightly lower than in the Swedish population at large. Additionally, there is a strong, negative cross-sectional relationship between crime and income, both in our sample of Swedish lottery players and in our representative sample. Our results therefore challenge the view that the relationship between crime and economic status reflects a causal effect of financial resources on adult offending.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
13d ago
Only if more materiel from the west doesn't materielize...
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
20d ago
· Edited 20d ago
The UK I'm sure has it's equivalent.
Deliveroo riders.
These are recent immigrants who left their family back home to try and get a slightly better life for themselves, however the amount of vitriol aimed at them from all quarters of the white british establishment (high and low) is something to behold. You can make reasonable complaints about them (such as their moped driving being absolutely terrible and a potential danger to public safety because for some reason known only to God and the British state it's possible to drive a moped without a full driving licence as long as you put a big red L on your vehicle) but the attacks coming at them frequently seem to be little more than attacking them for its own sake.
While I personally don't like them either (I also don't dislike them, they just are there) at the very least they know how to properly say "Thank you Sir" when handing over your food, which to me places them above a majority of the "native" people of the UK.
BurdensomeCount
Singapore is the only country that learned the correct lessons from the British Empire.
13d ago
Yeah, just the responses under that tweet.
Trump had a policy where he wanted rich European countries to pay the same amount that gets charged to medicaid/medicare for these medicines however he wasn't able to get it implemented before he was booted out and the Biden admin scrapped it.
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