Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
I've argued since at least 2015 that the US government should invest, on the behalf of its citizens, in AI and automation companies.
You don't want a government that can do this. There is no incentive for politicians to do a good job with the investments, and every incentive for them to channel these investments to favored constituencies. You would get stakes in Solyndra, not Nvidia.
And it would help unify US citizens, who would feel pride of ownership in their country rather than a beggar for handouts.
What about modern politics gives you the impression that something as simple as objective truth can cut through partisan affect?
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
One thing he told me was that the very hard and industrious working Mongolians frequently emigrate out of the country leaving the more complacent and indolent workers who are content to sit around and do whatever their thing is from within the country. He never told me where they ones who moved often went to, but a preferential policy of selecting for and seeking the best and brightest who are willing to work should at the very least be given priority in that regard.
This is absolutely not a significant numerical draw, but for a while Mongolians have been absolutely killing it in Japanese Sumo.
Supah_Schmendrick
21d ago
There have been talking filibusters within the last decade, most notably by Ted Cruz...
Supah_Schmendrick
27d ago
Something I've always wondered about academic inquiry into immigration is how much of 'immigrants make economies more successful' could equally be influenced by 'ambitious immigrants will attempt to join successful societies'
Not necessarily already-successful societies, but rather societies where there is opportunity. 19th c. America and Argentina were places where there was a lot of land for the taking, and where the economy was growing. They weren't already successful by the standards of major European countries.
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
They also let the bowmen get set up and deploy their stakes, didn't bother to think ahead about the effect the churned-up muddy field would have on successive charges, were dumb enough to run down their own missile troops out of impatience and malice, and didn't bother to vary their axis of advance substantively. Just an absolute disaster from the jump.
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
Teddy was wise in this. GK Chesterton wrote similarly...
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
Kinda like the Longbow hard-countering the armored knight.
It really didn't. It meant "charging straight at the enemy's prepared across a muddy field and relying on your glittering form to terrify them into running away" was even MORE stupid than it might otherwise have been, but that kind of thing also failed against armies without longbows.
It just meant that the knights had to get a bit more sophisticated with their tactics. Speed and aggression, as at the battle of Patay, or use of pinning and flanking maneuvers, such as at Formigny, saw thousands of English longbowmen cut down by French chivalry.
Now some illiterate peasant with overdeveloped back muscles can one-shot you after a couple days instruction.
Other people have covered how the longbow takes a lifetime to master - and English Longbowmen were capable melee fighters themselves, with coats of brigandine and rondel daggers specifically designed to get at the weak joints of plate armor.
But also, the Longbow did not "one-shot" a man in armor. The advantage of the longbow came from (1) its ability to loose arrows in a ballistic arc instead of just the flat trajectory of crossbow bolts, (2) the incredible rate of fire that seasoned longbowmen could muster for brief periods of time, and (3) the longbow's effective range.
Individual longbow arrows were nuisances to a man in full-plate. But shoot 150 arrows at him and one will likely find a joint or seam, or just ring his bell hard enough that he'll fall down (and in plate, a man on the ground is essentially dead, either to a swarming enemy or to getting trampled by his own side). Also, those arrows were murder on enemy horses.
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
But at least many conflicts of that era got settled with a basic handful of battles and the occasional siege.
The horror of medieval sieges is not to be underestimated. Plenty of death to be had there as well, between starvation, disease, rudimentary artillery, disease, undermining attempts, starvation, wall-defenses (pouring boiling oil down on attackers, etc.), disease, and, of course, night-time sallies/raids.
Also, look up the word "chevauchee" sometime if you want to have your stomach turned.
Supah_Schmendrick
28d ago
This paper shows that having big time diversity - you know, mixing all those crazy Poles, Irish, French, Germans, English, Welsh, Czech, Slovak, Greek, hell even a few Italians and Spanish in there - was a massive reason the USA was such a technologically innovative place!
The HBDers are going to love this one.
I see and grant your point. However, what I think this actually shows is a remarkable social technology for taking small cultural differences which, in many other contexts would actively hinder cooperation and productivity, and sanding down the sharp edges enough to allow the positive aspects of cream-skimming and viewpoint diversity to take hold.
Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, and Bosniaks are extremely closely related from an HBD perspective. But you can't just shove them all together in a lab in Belgrade and expect them to get along - interethnic/intercommunal rivalries would instantly doom that. You can tell the same story with closely-related-but-highly-rivalrous subgroups in many other regions of the world as well.
The fact that the U.S was able to suppress those intercommunal rivalries and, yes, assimilate and to a certain extent dissolve those communities into a broader "Americanness" (or, to put the racial spin on it that both the far left and far right like these days - "whiteness"), is a wonderful thing that I think does deserve celebration despite all the buzzwords and cant that surround it these days.
Supah_Schmendrick
29d ago
Correct me if I'm wrong but Spain proper always had a low population density, at least through the spanish golden age.
Spanish armies weren't huge, but spanish tactics, on the other hand, were top notch, as was their equipment.
Spanish military exploits were more like a random third-world dictatorship striking oil and suddenly buying top of the line military kit for long running wars in their near abroad than anything else. The Spanish army wasn't even mostly actual Spaniards.
The Spanish armies were forged in the reconquista, not conjured ex nihilo out of Peruvian silver.
they could easily have been a normal conquering empire, just give us tribute type thing.
This is how the empire originally worked in many cases, with native polities giving tribute to spanish conquistadors. However, the Crown back in Spain didn't want rogue adventurers setting up their own kingdoms, and so set up administrations to take more direct control, including settlement of more europeans. Because the church had been partly nationalized during the reconquista, this included a lot of church officials getting secular power and control as well.
Supah_Schmendrick
29d ago
The inquisition was a monarchist attempt at gentling, centralizing, and regulating the series of irregular popular riots and local parish manias which had previously characterized concerns about false conversions and other anti-jewish sentiments. Ironically, the papal attitude was that even these efforts were far too harsh, and that the spaniards were just targeting people in order to seize their wealth rather than out of any actual proof of heresy/insincerity.
The Inquisition coincided with the Spanish Golden Age, the height of the Spanish Empire, the height of Spanish music and art, and the expansion of Spain into the New World where now hundreds of millions are Spanish-descended Catholics.
Well, yes, that's what happens when you've just finished a century-long process of reconquest of some of the richest lands in Europe, and then just-so-happen to have oodles of now-unoccupied fighting men laying around right when an explorer bumps into a whole new civilization sitting on some of the biggest silver mines in the world, and who has no resistance to any of the diseases that you're accustomed to. The inquisition had nothing to do with any of that.
Would there have been a flourishing of Catholic Spain if a larger percent of the rich were Sephardic Jews?
Yes, because increasing the percentage of wealthy spaniards which were jewish wouldn't have changed anything about the quality of Toledo steel, the tactics of the proto-Tercios, or the susceptibility of Aztecs, Maya, and Incas to old world diseases. Nor would jews have done anything to decrease the quality or output of the mines at Potosi.
This is already happening with regularity.
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