Tree
8d ago
I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but why can't you just ignore a crying baby at night? Call it ferberizing, call it self-preservation, whatever.
Tree
10d ago
Put in other terms, as the war continued, the Soviet logistical situation got better, and the German logistical situation got worse.
afaik the shortening of the lines of communication brought on by the german retreat considerably improved german logistics.
Tree
11d ago
Wanting to win is not a sufficient condition for conflict. Someone’s wrong, someone’s making a mistake. Else the parties would agree on the end-state of the war and save themselves the costs of war.
It is true that they have both made fancy claims. How then do you tell a Tough Negotiator from a Delusional Man? The former makes optimistic claims as an anchoring, negotiating tactic, while the latter actually believes his own bullshit. One way to tell them apart is getting a mediator, and when he presents his relatively unbiased, fair compromise, one will accept it, the other will reject it.
Tariff digression: @Dean thinks Trump is a tough negotiator, I think he is a delusional man (on tariffs specifically). He wants to be paid for buying stuff. That’s not how buying works. The phones aren’t ringing, and his trade partners aren’t going to hand over the crown jewels because he threatened to blow up the economic bridges. Trump is sincere, he has been proclaiming his love of tariffs for decades, way before it could have been a negotiating tactic. The lack of progress on tariff negotiations will be evidence of incompatible views on reality between trump and partners, therefore of trump as the delusional man. And vice versa of course, quick tariff relief based on partners' concessions will be evidence of compatible views, therefore of trump as the tough negotiator.
Tree
11d ago
Tree
11d ago
You would think that avoiding the deaths of tens of thousands of your people would be incentive enough. But the decision lies with a man whose interests are not aligned with his people. His regime, and his person, are a lot more secure with the war on, when there is still hope to win (until you sell, it's not a loss), hope that all of those young russians did not die for nothing. Plus, as a long-isolated and increasingly megalomaniacal dictator, he has a less realistic assessment of the situation than your average ukrainian war spectator, of either side. I think he actually believes nato troops may leave ex-warsaw pact countries if he plays his cards right, as he demanded before he invaded ukraine.
Tree
11d ago
Does anyone believe Putin will actually sign a peace deal? From what I can tell, the pro-russian side thinks they just have to continue eating through ukraine until just-around-the-corner total victory because obviously the lamb won’t voluntarily sign off on being dinner. And the pragmatic pro-ukrainian side recommended that zelensky just wave through any of trump’s harebrained peace schemes to let putin take the blame when he inevitably says no, which is happening now.
Tree
12d ago
I mean, mollie the mare has 200 comments, it's not a dormant troll. And two accounts posting within 2 minutes of each other is well within the realm of innocent events. The worst troll here, post-nazi-insider-spat-and-delete-guy, uses new accounts that date from the time his last one was banned, so if he ever used them, he's out of prime dormants.
Tree
12d ago
No. What would be the purpose of this conspiracy? You can't just throw these aspersions into the wind, make it interesting.
And I'm gonna go with the basement dweller. I had almost the exact hypothetical situation happen to me last month. My brother had received a small, remotely controlled airplane toy, but he couldn't keep it in the air for more than 15 seconds, even though he can jump higher than me. Thanks to my extensive experience watching youtube videos on airplane crashes, I just leveled the wings and stopped giving it gas when the AoA was too high, and voila, stall averted and everyone saved.
Tree
12d ago
There’s enough ambiguity in the chain of causality that anyone can be said to ultimately pay for something. Trump also said mexico will pay for the wall. The people love to hear the tale of the paying foreigner, it really gets them going.
Tree
13d ago
Let's summon the expert: What's the situation like in american rural areas, oh @grendel-khan ?
Tree
13d ago
Nimby because it's a village, it's surrounded by empty fields. A building license in a village should not be worth 300k euros (the destroyed house).
Another thing I remember: In my grandparent's village (pop 2000, in the middle of nowhere), the one time in their life where they felt rich was when the village council declared some of their land constructible, which they immediately sold for like 100k, when it was worth almost nothing before.
Tree
13d ago
You're saying you don’t see the evidence of european nimbyism. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the continent known for regulations and environment protections has three times the housing price to income ratio of the country with the more libertarian bent. We don’t have the yimby/nimby distinction here because it’s all nimby, all the time, to a level that an american couldn’t comprehend. In my ~10,000 pop. home village they routinely raze perfectly good, newish houses to replace them with 3-story, 6-small-apartments buildings. It's nuts the wealth that gets destroyed because people can't get a building license.
Tree
14d ago
The only time I hear a connection between immigration and house prices is in a positive context, from home owners: ‘with all these immigrants, the prices can’t go down!’.
It’s not : We have immigration => we should build more to meet the demand.
It’s : We need high prices, therefore unmet demand => let’s build nothing and have immigration on top of it.
Instead of solving one problem, homeowners’ financial incentives are creating two.
As far as I can tell there's a historical center (and I mean actually historical) in most cities that they like to preserve, and otherwise there isn't much of a fuss to build anywhere else.
I know for a fact there’s a shit ton of red tape, plus the greens consider any new constructible land to be ‘a loss for nature’.
Tree
14d ago
That’s the conflict theory view, which doubles as a zero-sum, ‘cosmic balance’, perfect information narrative. The stock market and the “elites” lose money, while the regular man will likely prosper in all the new tinsel factories. The ‘debate’, if it can be called that, is the vocalization of each side’s interest.
The mistake theory perspective is that people are often wrong and so act against their interests. The stock market is just a reflection. Trump was wrong about the effect of his tariffs on the stock and bond market, and on his trade partners and allies, and soon he will be wrong about its effects on the economy.
Tree
16d ago
Of course it’s not, it’s an ugly thing, this ongoing defection by russia. To encourage cooperation, defection has to be punished. Basic morality.
You refuse the ukrainians the aid they ask for. You do not consider them friends. So don’t pretend you care what happens to them. You want to act in a purely self-interested manner, do it without the sentimality.
Tree
16d ago
Crocodile tears. Helping a friend resist aggression is good, actually. The higher the price russians pay for ukraine, the better the world will be.
Tree
17d ago
Fundamentally, because it’s easier to avoid paying a tariff than to avoid paying a corporate tax.
Why is a corporate tax a better way to raise money than a tax on, for example, jogging? Because if it’s big enough, people will simply stop jogging, and in the end the state will have no money, plus a semi-pleasurable activity will be prohibited. You are strictly worse off than before you started.
In a world where every state tried to finance itself entirely with tariffs, foreign trade and state revenue would drop to near-zero. In contrast, corporate tax world would be similar to our world.
Tree
1mo ago
Don’t brag about blocking people, it’s a shameful thing. Then you can spare us the excruciating story on how you had to remove your own barriers.
Tree
1mo ago
That only works if the right-wing barbarian agrees that there is any value left in those institutions. I’m not sure modern anthropology departments or modern hollywood clear that bar.
Empty museums are depressing. Close most of them, sell all the old coins, keep the mona lisa. If the people then clamor for more museums, just buy the stuff back. And if these so-called ‘public goods’ are only enjoyed by the rich, , like opera, let them pay. The rich and cultured get a perverse kick out of having the poor pay for the very class markers used to exclude them.
Tree
1mo ago
Because it destabilizes any society in which it takes root.
The problem with assertion such as these is that modern society is really its own extraordinary thing. From his food to his health to his habits to his reproduction, man is unlike other animals, and modern man is unlike other men.
Male violence is centered on three things; money (or money producing commodities; drugs), social esteem (or "respect"), and intimate partner exclusivity.
Is this an established theory, or did you come up with that yourself? Either way, my objections are:
-
assumes some rational reason for violence, when there are better ways to get money, respect, intimate partners. In modern society, the only people using interpersonal violence have low self control.
-
It’s missing raw hatred of the other guy as motivation
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those are valid reasons for female killers as well
Adultery ought not be criminalized (and, on the other side of the coin, both divorce and marriage ought not have any financial incentive tied to them), but rampant promiscuity and adultery still ought to face social consequences because that simply means the society in which they occur is aware of the high stakes of promiscuity / adultery's likely outcomes.
This position of ‘no criminal, only social repercussions’, looks like an incoherent compromise to me. You don’t have the heart to beat your daughter and flog her suitors, so you unload the burden of your repressive sexual project onto society. The passive voice will do your dirty work, shunning perhaps. It’s like the woke saying ‘freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences’ – who will administer the consequences, exactly? If it’s you, and it surely won’t be me, then it’s not society.
Tree
1mo ago
I don’t see why the default for promiscuity should be to forbid it rather than allow it. It is a strange kind of ‘control’ that leaves the decision to the ‘controlled’.
Tree
2mo ago
That's bullshit, Dean. You're always long-winded even when you have little to say. They would have taken east germany and showered it with money regardless of the the retirement benefits situation. East germany was full of pensioners anyway, so there was no relative gain to be had from the cheapness of the rest of the labor force. In your theory, east germany is both a cost and a profit, depending on what your theory needs it to be.
You weave these elaborate causal chains which bear no relation to reality. People never believe stuff, they 'have to' believe it, because random cause X is the true cause.
I disagree. They believed in neoliberalism, they believed in the productivity of syrian refugees, they believed that debt is a bad thing. Their opinions, like mine and yours and even the german people's, matter. When they're right, good things tend to happen, when they're wrong, the opposite.
Tree
2mo ago
You’re a pretty knowledgeable guy, Dean. But the problem is, the more one knows, the more spurious relationships one’s brain can come up with. There’s really nothing linking german elites’ mistaken evaluation of islamic third-worlders’ productivity, to the debt ceiling, to german unification. They could easily have rejected any one of those, and keep the others. Those are all independent events.
I heard that before the late middle ages, there were no real witchhunts, because the official position of the church was that only god had true ‘magical powers’ – the devil, or other gods, could only create an illusion, make it appear a certain way, not actually change the world. Therefore, witches were incapable of siccing an illness-curse on a mule, or making it rain, despite their best efforts, and so they had to be let go. It is only later, in the course of the fight against heresies like the waldensian and albigensian, that the dominican preachers sent to reconvert them imputed these powers to heretics (famously, the first-ever representation of a woman on a broom was not a witch, but a waldensian heretic). Do you know anything about this change in doctrine?
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