georgioz
11hr ago
Maybe you jest, but there was a ministorm in my country where foreign media reported it as Slovak government banned running by limiting limit for pedestrians to 6km/h.
Of course all they did was that they defined the value of "walking speed" in the law, but that speed only applies to vehicles, especially electric bikes or scooters who are driving on the sidewalks among pedestrian traffic.
By the way it was a funny thing as many people in Slovakia scratched their heads and saw first hand how sensationalist many "respectable" media were. It was Gell-Mann Amnesia effect on large scale, as domestically it was considered a good law or at least good intent aimed at a real problem of people driving around on the sidewalks with scooters going 40km/h.
georgioz
1d ago
This is nothing controversial, you can find many articles regarding this. For instance here is the article about how government cuts disproportionally affect women and especially black women
Actually there was the New Stateman article recently that found such a radical shift. It is paywalled but the shift even between Millennial and Gen Z women was staggering when it came to basic attitude of women toward men. I think 21% of women said they have strongly negative attitude toward men compared to 7% of men saying the same. It is hard to imagine that there will be meaningful pairbonding between these groups.
I do think that individually you can get away from it - what else is there. But there is a strong trend that is hard to overcome. Women attitudes and political leanings are shifting en masse, it will have macro impact on society, there is no ifs or buts about that. Maybe it will be passport bros or some other shift, but there will be one.
You had these ideas all the time, in fact this shift to nationalism is how the original socialism evolved right after Lenin's death. This is how it worked everywhere since the beginning - be it Stalinism or Maoism, or different strains of socialism with nationalistic characteristics including Chavismo, Pol Potism etc. Some of them were also more pragmatic and more friendly toward capital such as Titoism or Dengism or Đổi Mới in Vietnam. You also have extremes such as in North Korea with outright ultranationalist Juche ideology and cult of personality which looks closer to absolute monarchy. This is the horseshoe theory in practice - socialist states evolve into fascist states by market reforms and fascist states sometimes evolve toward more outright socialism such as with Peronism or Ba'athism. They all gravitate toward this petty corrupt tyranny.
All of them to the single one are unable to solve shit, not to even talk about issues you are pointing out. This is the feature, not a bug of all the socialist systems. It is in their DNA that they will never achieve their purported goals.
Women have fewer viable non-degree paths to stability. As the economy has shifted away from industrial and physical labor toward knowledge and service work, many of the historically male-dominated “no degree required” paths (e.g., trades, manufacturing) haven’t translated as easily for women at scale. That makes higher education a more central route to security.
I think that the issue with women and jobs is even more pronounced. For instance in USA women are overrepresented among government and government adjacent workforce such as education or healthcare. We are talking 70% of government workforce being women, with government employing close to 50% of all working women. Another chunk of women work for various NGOs, often also financed by government - NGOs have 75% female employees - although there is of course significant overlap between healthcare and education there. But there is also a lot of activism and lobbying for women to keep it all going.
As for the rest, there is also huge transfer from men to women through welfare and pension systems and other benefits. In the British study, men contribute twice as much as women toward social welfare with women drawing a lot more being net beneficiaries. It is now a meme of women being married to the state, but I do think that it is hugely important. It is not only that women who are employed by the government & adjacent sectors, they are also major beneficiaries of taxes & welfae, but they also benefit from private arrangements as child support, alimony and other wealth transfers related to divorce.
In a sense a lot of the problems are at the same time insanely complex but also very easy to solve. Just limit the welfare state, gut the government, stop government from meddling in marriages and divorces in terms of wealth transfers. You will find that as soon as men and women touch the grass without government forced adult kindergartens indulging fantasies, you can improve the situation quite a lot. Absent government, people turn toward family as basic unit for social welfare. Of course good luck with that in current populist democracies that know only how to increase welfare and public spending. In France, the government distributes 57% of all production and it is still not enough. Marxists have it correct, destroying family and state redistribution goes hand-in-hand.
I think this whole thing is on the precipice of collapse. I see a lot more people outright refusing to participate - the tax system got so bad that even high-earners find it hard to rationalize certain purchases. When it starts to make more sense for a professional to do basic work such as cooking as opposed to go for a lunch in restaurant, you have a problem. But this is inevitability with insane taxes especially facing private sector people. It reminds me how toward the end of Western Roman Empire people just turned into private villas and surrounding villages creating protofeudal autarkic economies, as the taxes for trade got insanely bad to the extent that economic exchange made no sense with so many parasites sucking the lifeblood of the few productive people left.
georgioz
6d ago
I think that in a sense pro-war side achieved some stuff already:
- Delay of nuclear program by destroying more infrastructure and killing scientists.
- Calling Iran's bluff on Hormuz, restoring credibility to threats of force on personal and strategic level
- Aligning at least some Gulf states toward USA. At least Saudis and UAE are calling for more "conclusive action" vis-a-vis Iran.
- Chaos for Iran proxies such as Hezbollah and Houthis. This is double edged sword of course, it is hard to see.
- Chaos in Iran by fragmenting leadership between Iranian Guards, civilian governments and the rest of it. Again, double edged sword.
In a sense Iran also shot itself into a foot by claiming to shadow mine the strait as well as by damaging refineries, so it is impossible to return to pre-war oil supply. This makes it hard to negotiate but it also relieves all sides from blame. I think it also means a very good position for Democrats as they may lay into Trump without actually doing anything notably wrong. There is not much more Trump can do at this point, a lot of options are out of his hand.
Humans make decisions under uncertainty all the time. Sure, it would help to know "if I hesitate, the robber will shoot a 9mm JHP through my left eye" for certain instead of being unsure if the gun is even loaded, if the robber has the willingness to kill and so on. But even a rough estimate of the damages (he will probably shoot someone, but is unlikely to reach a double digit body count) is usually enough to narrow down courses of action.
Sure, the problem is that actions have costs. In case of climate change the costs are astronomical in terms of money but also opportunity cost and culture. To use your example, somebody will ask cashiers to buy bulletproof vest and helmets and wear it to work every day. Is it a reasonable ask for cashiers or not?
By contrast, "Climate change in the next 100 years will significantly contribute to the early deaths of at least 100M people" seems likely. "If LLMs can be scaled up to ASI, they will be unaligned" seems also very plausible.
Excellent. According to EA, the global cost of life is between $3,000 - $7,000. Lets round it up to $10,000. So The climate change is a problem on a scale of let's say $1 Trillion over 100 years, if we use insurance, we are getting somewhere around $10 billion a year problem. Even if we scaled it up to level of let's say workplace safety level of $100,000 invested to prevent one fatal accident, we are talking $100 billion a year problem. According to global climate finance the current investment is around $2 trillion a year and it is not enough, we have to invest $10 trillion a year. And it is assuming that it will actually help and completely prevent or at least cover such a loss.
When has a country of this size been bombed to submission in purely an air war?
Come on, are you going to play this game of "your analogy is not perfect copy of my situation so it is not valid"? If such a thing hypothetically existed then what, will you update your example request to a country of this size but which is also mountainous, speaks Farsi and it happened during last ten years? Okay, it never happened, you are correct and you win this battle of analogies.
Plus again: just hold your horses, I was literally reacting to a claim that
- More bombing. Not only a horrific humanitarian crisis to bomb a country to submission but air wars are inefficient.
I put it as a quote in my original post. I did not claim that air war in "country the size of Iran" is always efficient or this specific air campaign is efficient. I posit that the claim about inefficient air war is a myth. That is all.
Sure, of course current war in Iran is different from any other war. That is the nature of analogy and examples. I specifically responded to claim, that air wars are inefficient. And I just pointed out that it is a myth, air wars can be and historically were very efficient.
In the end Trump will be more screwed as selling that he won a war in the middle east by killing large numbers of people will never impress the voters as much as pancaking the economy.
I don't know why not, it already happened for instance with the Gulf War. USA caused massive number of casualties - tens of thousands of killed and over hundred thousand injured Iraqis. And still it caused massive spike of patriotism and pride about how USA is technologically and militarily light years ahead of everybody. In fact it was the point of large number of articles about how Gulf War was the first real time televised war, where people saw fireworks from tomahawks and gun cameras from bombers. It did not cause any major pushback, it was received with cynical glee, something like current videos of Ukrainian drones destroying Russian tanks.
And it was even without the actual objective of Gulf War being something super important or moral - most people did not know where Kuwait was or why it was necessary to go to war for it. They just vaguely knew that USA flexed her muscles in oil region and won easily or something like that.
More bombing. Not only a horrific humanitarian crisis to bomb a country to submission but air wars are inefficient.
This is often repeated, but not necessarily true. Even in the context of Middle-East, you had six day war of 1967 that was predominantly about air attack and that resulted in Israel victory. First Gulf War can also be recognized as such - it was a military operation conceived and brought to action within 6 month of Iraq occupying Kuwait, so between August 1990 - January 1991. The air campaign was so decisive that it took only 100 hours for land forces to bring Iraq and its fourth largest army in the world at the time to their knees. First Gulf War was considered as unmitigated success, even most optimists did not conceive of so few casualties and such a smooth ride. General Schwarzkopf projected 5,000 casualties, Pentagon expected up to 30k. The actual number was 292 dead (145 of those were nonhostile deaths mostly vehicle accidents, plane crashes and even 30 heart attacks) and 776 wounded (467 wounded in action).
There were also other precedents, such as bombing of Serbia which resulted in peace from Milosevic or operations in Libya, which resulted in its narrow goal of removing Gaddafi regime from power. There is also Operation Inherent Resolve that resulted in defeat of ISIS without boots on the ground just by using local forces and strategically helping them with air strikes, economic blockades, intelligence operations etc.
The problem is that nations are not games of civilization with some benevolent player moving things around. Totalitarian states solve for one thing and one thing only: accumulation and protection of power. The power is then exercised mainly in these self-centered ways and sometimes on insane projects like Ceaușescu’s Palace of the Parliament or Castro’s "Ubre Blanca" icecream parlor and related diary projects or of course Deng's One Child policy in China.
Yes, I actually would posit such an argument. In a sense even modern democracies are much, much more authoritarian than even medieval states. The level of taxation and control over information and communities is absolutely insane, there never was such a domination before even in dreams of absolutist monarch such as Louis the XIV, where his orders took weeks or months to get somewhere, often only in distorted manner that was implemented only partially.
By the way something similar happens also in socialist and fascist countries, but the distortion is more deliberate corruption
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