How can I trust that they have any deeply held convictions or principles at all, if the sentiment comes and goes that easily?
Why would you trust that?
In my estimation the vast majority are largely amoral and just go with the flow. My wife is mostly amoral for example, she doesn't have moral opinions on almost anything. She isn't stupid or malevolent, she just doesn't care.
When I want to talk about some moral issue she just zones out because she gets bored. She wants to talk about what happened at her work or what she is planning for the garden or the baby room.
Very few people have moral opinions as anything more than accessories or as part of cheerleading for their team. People do get incredibly passionate about cheering/booing though.
We had a major economic crisis in Sweden in the 90s and rebalanced our unsustainable social security system, which was previously thought inconceivable. It wasn't the end of the world. There is still fairly generous social security, pensions, our nation debt is down from 73% to 32% and taxes are down (probably unrealistic for the US...).
It can be done if a crisis gets bad enough, the insanity can stop.
Politicians usually do the right thing as soon as they've explored every other option. Not every country is Argentina.
I feel like there it is a bit of a mistake to assume that hazing and macho locker room culture necessarily overlap with "rape culture".
I've been part of the former and I saw no indication of that. Guys were borderline raped by their team mates but treated women with a lot of respect and care. It's not in the same mental world and I don't think the guys considered what they did to their team mates sexual, even if it literally was. I'd argue that it's really bad if the hazing goes overboard or just becomes a sustained severe harassment (and given how hard it is to police it might be better to outright ban it), but that doesn't mean that people are more disposed towards sexual assault towards women. I've not been part of one of these youth academies but I've known and played with people who have, and they've not been worse than anyone else.
What I think is going on is that celebrity makes people behave really badly, both the guys being celebs and the women seeking their favour/attention. It seems to me that the same thing happens with all kinds of stars: sports, music, acting. It's not about whether the people involved do (severe)hazing or not, it's that they're idolized stars, allowing them to do whatever and still be rewarded for it. It creates a really fucked up incentive structure for everyone involved. The younger you are and the more isolated from general society you are, the worse it gets, which points in the direction of these academies possibly making things worse.
I understand that there is a desire to put an = between hazing and "rape culture" but I think that is a mistake and obscures what's really going on. Solving hazing is probably desireable, but that won't solve the sexual assaults and pretending it will is counterproductive.
It's election today in Sweden.
Despite what people might think, there seems to be less excitement or conflict internally in Sweden than usual, ime.
The two blocs have largely converged on a set of desired policies and the question is just where the focus should be and just how hard you should go. One might argue that this makes a large difference but I would say that this at the very least diffuses a lot of the drama surrounding the election itself. People kind of expect things to continue on largely as they have been regardless of who wins. We've had debates between the leaders of the two major parties where one says something and then for the other to just reply "I completely agree".
There is no side that doesn't want to restrict immigration, there is no side that wants to dismantle the nuclear reactors, there is no side that doesn't want to join NATO, there is no side that doesn't want to strengthen the police. Etc.
Interestingly, where people have radically different opinions about things it's within the blocs rather than between them. Both blocs have parties for and against private profit in the "public sector", both sides have parties for and against rent control and both sides have parties for and against lowering or keeping the current levels of unemployment income insurance.
Even the drama surrounding the Sweden Democrats (anti-immigration/xenophobic populists) has somewhat died down. It's still there to be sure and part of the peculiarities about this election and the likely issues with governing after it has to do with this, but the hysteria is mostly gone in my estimation.
So, who will win? Who knows. It's incredibly even and might come down to a few votes or one of the smaller parities unexpectedly not making parliament (there is one on each side in the risk zone).
More interesting to me will be how the actual formation of government and governance will shake out after the election. The social democrats have been able to govern on their own for the past 8 months or so with a very small number of votes directly supporting this (also having to use the right wing parties budget) and it seems unlikely to continue after the election if they win since this was kind of a bridge solution after a crisis last winter and the next election being so close.
On the other side there is the issue of the Swedish Democrats and how they will be incorporated in a ruling coalition. The other parties don't want them in the government, which they might be fine with, but there are pretty severe issues surrounding the fact that SD is in many ways more closely related to the social democrats policy-wise than the right, despite often being labeled as "far right". One salient example of this is them saying that lowering the unemployment insurance payments is a "red line" for them, but it's a campaign promise for the right... This is obviously not the only issue.
Regardless of who wins things aren't going to be easy but my analysis is that the internal contradictions are a smaller on the "right" but that the social democrats are skilled political operators and might do things like create bi-partisan agreements regarding some issues in order to sideline some parties on their side, kind of like what has happened with NATO.
Ioper
1yr ago
This just reads as lazy incumbents wanting to use regulatory capture to catch up and not be disrupted, imo.
I'm not the least bit afraid of GPT4 and seeing the improvement of between 3-4 I'm not afraid of gpt5 either. Gpt6 maybe, who knows, well see how the next iteration turns out.
There will probably be issues at some point in the future but pausing at GPT4 in particular sound like a transparant attempt of getting time to catch up so that Google search etc. isn't disrupted + some general hysterics.
Ioper
1yr ago
The war was won well before the bomb on the back of access to much superior industrial capacity, manpower and oil.
Ioper
2mo ago
And slavery was made illegal in Sweden in 1335 and serfdom never really existed either in practice or as a legal concept, even though there were major agricultural areas (Västgöta slätten, Östgöta slätten, Mälardalen).
The far more important thing to look at is societies like China and India and South Korea and Singapore and Japan, which mistreat their own women to such an extent that their societies fail to reproduce themselves.
This was and still is a very curious thing to me. I have three friends with east Asian wives, one from Korea, one from China and one from Japan. Their wives are all middle or upper middle class and they have all married either laterally or downwards (especially lookswise), but all seem exceptionally happy with their husbands, who are not really exceptional people.
As I've come to understand it this does not have to do with fetishization as much as with just how badly these women have been treated by their previous Asian boyfriends and the general expectations on them from their prospective in-law families and society in general. From the perspective of a decent Swedish guy, the standards for being a good partner seem astonishingly low – to the point where failure almost seems to require an active effort.
It just seems so unsustainable for them. It's not like we're perfect or giga-cucked over here but it's still a walk-over, at least in the mind of these particular women. They just want to be treated with respect by their partners, be able to work after having children and not be treated as pseudo servants/slaves by their in-laws. I've had a bit of hard time really believing this, could it really be that bad?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps my friends' wives have a overly negative view of their home societies and that's why they ended up with western husbands. Or maybe it's a combination.
Ioper
6mo ago
Pepe Escobar is quite possibly the least credible source on planet earth...
Sweden has a growing cost/efficiency problem with our healthcare system as well and the identified main cause is growing administrative bloat.
The interesting thing is that while documentation requirements have gone up (partially and possibly mainly due to privatisation) that isn't perceived as the main driving factor to the bloat.
The main driving factor is that the administrative department isnt doing administrative work related to the hospital care. They are engaged in more prestigious make work they create for themselves, like creating "strategic communication plans", leaving the health care professionals to deal with the actual administration despite massive administrative departments.
This is perceived as a black hole that can consume an endless amount of resources without ever helping the core business.
Ioper
1yr ago
There was one in Stockholm recently where two "ambulances" were held up and one person died, possibly as a result of the holdup.
The activists have now been tried in court and sentenced to jail sentences. Everyone will appeal of course but it seems likely to me that most will spend some time in jail, the question is mostly how long.
It's a bit funny that an industry so dedicated to pumping franchises for money insisting on deconstructing their properties for no apparent reason at all, especially when the deconstructions aren't even good or creative.
Why not just give the audience what it wants? Ie. Another adventure man, rom com, war hero, horror, whatever.
I'm not saying that deconstruction can't be a good idea but why does every franchise have to be deconstructed? Why does almost every movie have to be about deconstruction of narrative tropes or the movie making process?
Ioper
1yr ago
As an aside: Early during Covid there was a narrative for a couple of weeks of east Asian business owners experiencing racism from the majority population in them not visiting their businesses out of fear of covid. Plenty of people repeated this on twitter, opinion columns were written and even state officials made mild comments in that same direction.
Then a news paper did a small investigation where they went around and asked Asian restaurant owners what their experience was and it turned out that yes they were suffering economic hardships but not because the native Swedes didn't come, because they still did, but because their co-ethnics didn't, because they consumed a lot of Chinese media...
It wasn't the Asians trying to start this and noone had even really bothered to ask them what was going on before they ran with the xenophobia narrative.
Try asking it a question about history even marginally controversial or politicised stuff. It is effectively lobotomized. I knows the individual facts about events but is prevented from putting them together or comparing them.
It selectively knows about replication issues, and selectively asks you to trust experts. It selectively hedges, and always in the one direction. It lies about accounting for these things.
Edit to add some nuance: I believe these issues are compounded by the fact that the model isn't trying to provide accurate and balanced information, it's trying to convince you that it is (or it's creators). It is optimising telling for credible lies, manipulation, not truth. It pretends that it made mistakes when in fact it's lying to you (or the only mistake is that the lie wasn't convincing enough). Lies are often more credible than the truth and perceived as more helpful so the model will lie/hallucinate.
This is bad enough problem as it is but if you put your thumb on the scale it quickly becomes a practically unsolvable problem because you're introducing ideology/lies as axiomatic truth, which stand in conflict with observed reality. How does a human or an GPT model square this circle? It can't, and this bleeds into the general usability of the model.
But his third use of the notwithstanding clause is the most bizarre, norm-upsetting, and (to me) infuriating of all. The contract for the province's school workers (janitors, early childhood educators, school monitors, basically the blue-collar school employees) is up. The average employee in this union makes $46k CAD (33k USD). Their wage increases over the last decade was lower than last year's inflation. And meanwhile the cost of living has exploded, especially in the province's most populous areas. So obviously the province owes it to these critical workers to give them a good deal, right? This is not a case of some fat public-sector union, and the provincial government and society at large has spent the pandemic fêting the heroics of these essential "front-line workers".
Seeing as the median salary is 40k it seems to me that, unless I'm missing something here, these people are getting a very good deal for unskilled, safe labour.
Ioper
4mo ago
I don't believe this at all. We were never colonized in Sweden and the exact same thing happened.
Ioper
1yr ago
Some harassment is comparatively invisible. Groping can occur out of line of sight. Someone with astute social skills can box someone into a conversation out of politeness and then start quietly bringing up sexual topics after the rest of the car has got the impression that the conversation is polite chit-chat.
Both my mother, my sister and my wife have been stalked from the subway home. My mother was chased so she had to run and the pursuer pull the handle to her door and hit the window.
I'm not sure incidents like this could be noticed by someone just riding on the train.
Either something really strange is going on behind the scenes (like a pseudo government take over) or the board are complete clowns.
A trans person is someone whose mental traits break from this typical correlation, i.e., their mental traits fall in the opposite mode of the bimodal sexual distribution.
In my experience that isnt true at all. Trans men and trans women almost always exhibit (mostly) the mental traits associated with their birth sex.
What they do have is an intense discomfort with having both these mental traits and physical traits (or possibly just intense discomfort that happened to focus on this).
Ioper
1yr ago
Somewhat related The Swedish govermnetal statistics bureau released new data on excess mortality in Europe
Turns out Sweden has had the lowest excess mortality in Europe during the pandemic. Previously there some of our neighbours had lower numbers but now that the data is in for the full 2020-2022 it turns out sweden is even below them and compared to Finland Sweden had half as high excess mortality.
This strikes me as a somewhat funny result because Sweden both didn't really lock down or use masks, but at the same time we were very good at vaccinating people, so it's not because "people aren't dying from the vaccines" either like some people like to imply. It seems to me that hysterical people and conspiracy theorists everywhere can go and pound sand.
/r/SSC has been bleeding quality contributiors for years.
The vast majority of the really high quality blog posts were made between like 2012-2014, then there were a few years with much lower output but still the occasional high quality post and then almost nothing.
It's almost a decade since 2014, multiple community splits and a general ban on discussion on the topics that made both the forum and the blog popular.
Ioper
1yr ago
Something it seems most (all?) people here miss is that this isn't a new problem and recent social trends are likely less important than you think.
Fertility rates have been atrocious in cities since as long as we have been keeping track and long before mass adoption of higher education and/or female professional employment. What has changed is that countries have urbanised and the previously fecund rural population adjusted to urban fertility rates.
I'm inclined to believe that the issues actually are mostly material but that the things that have been done is like applying bandaids to chopped off limbs at best and actively harmful at worst.
Either we need to make people leave the cities or make cities provide much better conditions for raising families in (at an affordable price for the average person).
I used to do some work for a major american company with customer satisfaction scores, customer retention and upsales. A major issue was that the American management compared different European countries with each other using only the CSR score and there were very large cultural differences in how people answered them.
An Italian company that was about to drop us could rate us as 10 while a Swedish company where we did a ton of business and that loved us, with no plans of changing partners, could rate us as 7 with comments like "it isn't perfect", and a customer with minor complaints could rate us a 6.
We had far higher retention and upsales and yet far lower CSR, and this wasn't just a Swedish problem. The entire Nordics and to a lesser extent all "germanic"/protestant countries trended far below the Mediterranean and eastern countries, regardless of actual customer satisfaction.
Some made accusations that the Mediterranean
and eastern countries encouraged their customers to lie, which might have been true, but I suspect that differing cultural interpretations of the question played a large role.
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