You might think that but you would be wrong.
What has happened is very limited construction, large population growth and a massive credit expansion, leading to a price spiral. Cost increases in housing almost all exclusively comes from increases in land prices. Building is relatively cheap.
The vast majority are living in housing that was built before the 35 year price rally, not a single subway station has been added during that entire period.
Some people, like my family, have won big and are now (dollar)multimillionaires, due to no effort of our own. Others, like people from out of town or their children are just fucked.
Mostly cut spending leading to less generous benefits in a whole swathe of areas, pensions among them. Eventually economic growth allowed for lowering taxes, the initial decreases of which were likely a Pareto improvement due to their high level.
The point is that this wasn't the end of the world. The welfare state could still exist and be fairly generous (and shoulder the burden of ill-advised immigration) despite being balanced.
Ioper
5mo ago
Yeah, they're kind of shit and samey. You start to recognise everything about them, the way they're composed, how humans and animals look, the lighting, the contrast, which facial expressions they use etc.
That said, Corporate Memphis and generic stock photos were at least as bad or worse, and this tech seems to be rapidly improving. Maybe in a few years we'll actually have something spectacular and truly democratise visual art generation. We're almost there.
Ioper
6mo ago
Or take the Vikings. "Viking" means both to go on a raid or a trading mission. The Norse were renouned for both.
Ioper
6mo ago
Also you can easily find reluctant heroes/leaders. Moses, King Arthur, Brutus in Caesar etc.
I don't think it as common as it is today but it's hardly unheard of either.
Ioper
6mo ago
It's a bit funny to me that the general decrease in quality of writing in video games has somehow happened at the same time as a greatly increased focus on narrative and dialogue.
It will be interesting to see how GTAVI will do without Houser and in a much more high-strung social environment.
Ioper
16d ago
Inflation adjusted housing costs in Stockholm have risen +500% in the last 30 years, and its not like it was some thirdie shithole before.
Ioper
1mo ago
Supporting Palestine and hating Palestinians aren't mutually exclusive positions. If I was Egypt and I hated Palestinians I would very much be pro Palestine because that means the Palestinians stay the fuck away and you have somewhere to expel palestinians in your land to.
Ioper
3mo ago
Everything doesn't have solve root causes. Sometime you just need some pain relief and be reminded of what having fun is like.
Obviously you shouldn't rely on alcohol as your long-term solution having fun.
I'm a bit curious, how are the rest of you stacking up against that chart?
I've never been above a 2 and I'm a bit of a slob. I don't even think I've been in a home that's at a 4 and I can count the number of threes on one hand.
I think you have to consider what was happening in Japan, I don't think what Hitler did or thought affected this much at all. They lost decisively at Khalkhin Dol in '39, which lead to them focusing on going south instead of into Russia. If they had won or drawn there they might have chosen to go north instead of south.
Or maybe what if they just went into Russia rather getting bogged down in China and subsequently getting into a war with the entire west? If that happened it's harder to see the US cutting them off from oil and the USSR would likely have been fucked. The Chinese communists would likely also have lost the civil war and we might have had a second massive war after ww2 between an aggressive nationalist Japan and an aggressive nationalist China.
It would have been a very different world.
Owning a home really changes the incentive structure.
Sure, it leads to rent seeking.
because it turns out you can just vote yourself other people's wealth.
Indeed. We in the big cities vote ourselves the provincials wealth by limiting housing construction. Very good for me personally but hardly good for the economy overall.
My impression is that people are discovering just how bad the real productivity of the median Indian consultant is so they're moving away from using them. Hire the real elite, sure, but even the above average are mostly not worth the effort, at any price.
The people you are interacting with in America are an extremely filtered sample, even by the standards of Indian émigrés.
That criminologist can say whatever she wants, it has little to no bearing on what the ruling rightwing coalition is doing or what the social democratic opposition says they want to do.
Don't read the guardian, it's not worth the paper it's printed on.
Ioper
6mo ago
Try to get it to depict an average American... It refuses because its a perpetuates harmful stereotypes! LMAO
Ioper
6mo ago
Paying a small fee for a service you use a lot doesn't sound like being a sucker.
Ioper
10mo ago
I'm thinking that this whole strike is a massive opportunity for improvement from the pov of consumers and studios.
The quality of the output of Hollywood is abysmal and the system is corrupt and dysfunctional enough that reform is very hard. What can conceivably force improvement? Competition.
There are competing production centers in both europe and Asia but they lack the American financial and production resources to truly compete. This strike provides the perfect opportunity for studios to expand the capacity of their oversea's production centers and for these centers to grow into more full competitors to Hollywood. The distribution pipelines are already there and audiences seem increasingly willing to consume content from other markets, especially younger people. A lot of English language things can probably be sourced through the UK and produced in Europe (as is often already the case).
Downsize and diversify.
This seems like win for everyone except maybe the inbred Hollywood system.
Ioper
11mo ago
Lots is underselling it. The overwhelming majority, like 90%+, "have to tell their kids" that they're not going to be able to go to any remotely prestigious college and that the upper middleclass is almost certainly out of reach, nevermind things like being an astronaut.
Ioper
11mo ago
Conjuring up a bunch of sources for literally anything was trivial before LLMs and now it's easier than ever and shouldn't be weighed heavily either.
I'd even go so far as to say that having having more citations than absolutely necessary is a signal of bad faith, as they work as a form Gish gallop etc.
Ioper
1mo ago
Making up for lost time and brighter expectations of the future I'd imagine.
It's not like the war period was good to Sweden or free of stress and worry, Sweden was both economically depressed and cut off from much trade. It was the post war period with intact industry and great demand for both raw materials and goods that was good.
All status isn't relative to the people around you at a given moment but also to what people have previously experienced. If tides are rising quickly then almost everyone is going to be perceived as higher status than before.
I don't know. To me the vast majority of this seems like sarcastic jokes which I perceive as undermining the appeal of Islam to both westerners and middle eastern adherents. It makes islam both less mysterious, less serious and less scary. It isn't great for your religion when people wear it as a costume and make fun of it.
It seems similar to the early stages of how people secularised from Christianity in the west.
To me this sounds a bit backwards. Much of the working class has it better than ever and their skills are increasingly in demand and paid better and better.
It's the lower rung of office workers (and some service workers) that have precarious situations and are struggling to keep up.
If you're actually ready to work in the industry, construction or in a trade things are really good. Farming seems like a pretty raw deal though, I agree.
Considering just Europe for a minute, the theory doesn't work very well either.
Northern Europeans are easily the largest and strongest European subgroup (outside of tiny Balkan groups that are taller), it's also the group that civilization came to last and despite all this it's also the most domesticated.
To me it seems that there are many ways to select for behaviour and various types of capacity.
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