I read an interview with a Swedish expert who, while being negative about death penalties in general, was similarly confused about how long it took and all the reported thrashing, which goes against all experience with industrial accidents where people pass out and die very quickly without they themselves or their nearby colleages realising what's going on.
Something clearly went wrong here.
Right now, the bureaucratic class in education, government, and elsewhere exert a strongly negative influence on productivity, and they have absolutely no incentives to trim down red tape to put themselves out of jobs or reduce the amount of power they hold.
I think this is a misdiagnosis of whats going on. On an individual level where someones work is individually threatened by the removal of some administrative or bureaucratic requirement they might oppose it's removal but at the same time there's at least ten people in the same organization that is burdened by said requirement and dreams of it being removed. Also, even if the requirement is removed they're unlikely to be fired, they'll be reassigned and hiring will be reduced.
It is not the administrative state that is driving this, it's the regulatory state, mostly because they don't actually have to deal with the consequences of the regulations they create. It is good to pass regulation because you're then seen as "doing something" and the costs are too diffuse to be tracked back to you by the electorate. There is noone that can say no so the regulatory complexity grows and with it cost disease. It's kind of like a spaghetti code base that is never refactored because people with power have no incentive to do so and the code will never actually fail to execute, only work worse and require more compute.
That said, opinions of a department wholly concerned with dealing with some bureaucratic hurdle is suspect when asked about the value of said regulation. But again, these are usually small parts of the overall organisation that are concerned with something else of concrete value.
It is possible that llms will help but I could see it being a wash because it also enables bad behaviour which necessitates further regulation and enforcement.
Ioper
4mo ago
I'm sure Hamas lies and they obviously lied about the hospital explosion, and its a shame that media uncritically re-reports Hamas numbers but even the Jerusalem post puts palestinan deaths in Gaza at >13k.
If you have a credible argument for the real number being less than 6th of that then I would like to hear it.
Ioper
1yr ago
That reminds me of one of my wife's previous employers. Everything about the product she managed was a mess, the development team was incompetent, lazy and rife with personal bickering. The code was the worst spaghetti shit ever created by mankind and the architect too incompetent and full of himself to be propose any revisions, even though it's was so bad that further development was practically impossible. The dedicated sales person was stupid and highly sensitive about it and regularly made enemies of friends and refused to do her work.
Senior managment was aware of the problems but was so anemic that it took them three years to even begin to act on it despite acknowledgeding the problems and believing them to be urgent. (Although when they did act they did actually take good steps to improve things).
I initially thought that surely this product could only be competitive due to some bizarre regulatory capture in a part of Sweden but no. She went to a sales conference with the most advanced and prestigious customer organisations in the US and they were amazed by the product and sold very lucrative contracts... God help us.
Want to guess the industry?
Ioper
1yr ago
The most intelligent people I know are aggressively uninterested in politics and spend their time gaming, building stuff and playing golf.
Ioper
1yr ago
Good write-up.
Sweden has long had a large immigration, leading to 26.3% of the population being either foreign-born or born in Sweden to two foreign-born parents in 2021, according to Statistics Sweden.
It should be noted that this includes a lot of intra Europe migration, it's not just refugees from Africa and the middle east/central Asia.
So my predictions is that the Social Democrats will find themselves in a difficult spot. They currently enjoy the support of a sizable contingent of (presumably) conservative, muslim and immigrant voters, but also many progressive inner city Swedes, especially women. Will they be able to appease both groups going forward?
A complicating factor is that Social democrats (S) still stand to lose more voters to the Sweden Democrats (SD) than they do to Nyans. We have to remember here that S lost over two whole percentage points of voters to SD, while nyans got 0.44% of voters that may or may not have voted for S before. When the journalist Niklas Orrenius investigated the party and it's voters many claimed that they were choosing between Nyans and SD, implying that they were mostly protest voting in areas with very low voter participation.
Nyans is a heavily controversial party even among Muslim immigrants. Perhaps they can reform themselves like SD but I find that unlikely. Perhaps another party with a similar platform but with less controversial candidates will be formed, if so that would be a much bigger threat.
I would imagine that the left wing party (V) would be the primary destination of voters dissatisfied with S if they move rightwards on immigration and social issues. I furthermore predict that V will try to outflank Nyans on the issues they promote if they have continued relevance.
Ioper
3mo ago
Another major thing is housing which is very hard to compensate for.
If you live in high cost of living area living alone is really expensive.
Even if both parents are working you're going to be much poorer after a break up.
Ioper
4mo ago
Many people won't even believe that male and female humans have different physical performance in sports for any reason but different socialization.
In my subjective experience here in Sweden this has almost entirely gone away. It used to be fairly prevalent in the late 90s/00s but then both statistics and young teenage boys comfortably beating elite professional women over and over again got media attention and the narrative went away.
Ioper
5mo ago
Alternatively, they intentionally made a video with an "unexpected" result in order to draw interest... Like how practically all these videos work and reality tv too for that matter.
People getting to dunk on smug people is like catnip, video producers know this.
It could be as you say anyway but I wouldn't take that video as an indication of anything, except what the producers wanted and possibly their social circles. It's the opposite of a scientific investigation.
Ioper
5mo ago
Or shtetl/non-shtetl Ashkenazi, Sakoku/Meiji restoration Japan, etc.
It doesn't matter how intelligent you are if all you're trying to do is figure out more elaborate ways to stare up your own asshole.
What the actual value of equipment and munitions sent is by no means clear, at least to me. Is it what it nominally cost to produce when it was produced? What it cost to produce inflation adjusted? What the deprecated value of it is? What the deprecated value of it is minus disposal costs? Is it what a replacement would cost?
If anything I think much of the aid has been financially overvalued to a ridiculous degree for optics reasons and now the accounting valuation may change as the optics or political viability of appropriating funds for sending aid change.
Newly produced munitions is hard to change how you valuate it though, it costs what it costs.
Ioper
9mo ago
they would be restrained by a group of 8-10 upperclassmen dressed in various “Purge-like” masks, who would then begin “dry-humping” the victim in a dark locker room.
I'm guessing this either an extremely rare occurrence or just a flat out fabrication.
Sounds like the kind of thing that happens once as a practical joke/scaring someone, which then gets mythologised.
A similar thing happened in my club and it was definitely not a common occurrence, it happened once and was then talked about for a decade.
Less spectacular stuff happens all the time though and I imagine just regular lockerroom stuff would be unpalatable to (some) people if it was written down.
Cut out either the strength training or the MMA, whatever you find less interesting.
If you can stick with 4x a week strength or 6x a week MMA then that is more than enough. Working out and building muscle is a marathon, not a sprint. You're going to injure yourself or lose interest because you'll get so exhausted if you stick with this (and actually do the workouts for real).
10 workouts a week for an almost complete beginner is insanity. See if you can stick with one program for at least 6 months and then re-evaluate.
A related possible issue is that the average redditor seems much more likely to be a loser than the average FB, Instagram or Twitter user. Regularly when people share information about themselves they're the most pathetic people imaginable, without a job or with a shit job with shit pay, frequently mentally ill, few or no friends and romantically unsuccessful. I'm not being a snob here, these people are not average people, they are losers, often giga-losers; regardless of whether they're right- or leftwing politically.
It seems to me that pseudonymity has kind of a witch attracting effect, similar to offshoots of Reddit in general. Losers are afraid to engage with sites where they can be identified and so converge on the major pseudonymous sites, while the opposite is happening to higher status people, they want to be seen. The net effect is a great sorting.
Are these people good or bad targets for adverstiment? On one hand they likely have less discretionary income but on the other perhaps they are more likely to be whales and/or manipulable in general?
An issue here is that what people are exposed to mostly actually is "fake" (or mild) because it's mostly those people who have the energy and resources to advocate for themselves (or promote in the case of grifters). This goes for a ton of things, like autism. How much are you exposed to the mildly autistic nerdy guys and how much to the non-verbal people who need to be supervised and/or restrained 24/7 to prevent them from eating their own shit and stabbing themselves with sharp objects? (Actual example from my time working as a home carer).
How many people eating gluten free have celiacs and how many are just pretentious assholes?
How much is one exposed to the whiny Redditor/TikTok long covider and how much to the person who is about as functional as someone in the last week of their life with terminal cancer? I don't think anyone whose seen the latter in real life can believe it's fake or even psychiatric but people don't see that, how could they realistically?
I mean, a captive bolt pistol with a large caliber seems like a fairly humane way to go. I don't think there's much left when half your brain gets smashed to mush.
But at that point why just not hang people or use a guillotine? Not sure why those are unacceptable.
Ioper
6mo ago
From whom? There is no possible trustworthy source here. No pictures (I'm aware of) show anything like the scale claimed though.
A reason for why people feel like there has been such a decline in visual storytelling I think is due to how it has declined.
Firstly, while some kinds of "prestige" shows and movies have been made throughout this entire period but in contrast to earlier eras some genres have been practically abandoned, like comedy.
Secondly, I feel like the some current trends just are much shallower creative wells than earlier trends. The most prominent example of this is irony, meta commentary and deconstruction. This is further exacerbated by a ton of things effectively being serials, which do run out of steam eventually, even if the underlying concepts doesn't.
That's the thing, it is propaganda but mostly propaganda for the values and self interest of the BBC, it's employees a d their class; not the government. These can coincide and the government can put their thumb on the scales, but in general doesn't.
Ioper
1yr ago
I honestly don't even know where to go from here, since 2016 it's been validated time and again that the powers of the state and its zeitgeist are insurmountable and resistance is swiftly quelled through its institutions.
To me it seems like what has been validated is that if you elect a clown, you get a clown. The institutions aren't powerless and if you want change you need someone more competent than trump.
My parents both didn't have money and didn't have sense to save/invest much. Despite this they've earned a life wage from the asset inflation alone by merely living in Stockholm and not renting during my lifetime.
Looking at the future it doesn't really seem to matter all that much how much me and my wife earn because that is going to be dwarfed by our real estate inheritences. We're in some kind of weird permanent middle class now whose life circumstances aren't really affected by income and employment.
I look at some of my friends that come from the countryside (or from abroad) and it's pretty grim, except for the spectacularly succuesful. This is made even worse by the compressed salary pyramid in Sweden, making catching up by wage labour practically impossible.
Are things looking to be better going forward? Of course not, it looks like it's getting worse. Skyrocketing interest rates crush the highly indebted but barely affects me, so I can invest more. It also halts almost all construction while at the same time the housing crisis gets worse.
Ioper
1yr ago
I think a major issue is if one takes a setting and then forcibly tries to make it comply with ones very different political sensibilities, turning it to shit.
When a setting is designed in a way that doesn't conflict with woke sensibilities then there is no issue. Having a diverse cast in a story about colonisation of the solar system is very different from forcing it into a story about medieval Bohemia or Sengoku Japan.
Something that surprised and amused me slightly was my secular progressive parents apprehension of me dating a mostly secular Jewish girl, visually and culturally largely indistinguishable from other Swedes.
I can't imagine a much closer "interracial" marriage and yet they got nervous. I wonder what would have happened had I married someone from an actually different race, culture and religion like one of my best friends that married a Japanese woman.
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