Now, it was obviously reasonably for the ministry of health to acquire some face masks even at inflated prices common for medical equipment -- at least for people working in hospitals, but he overestimated the amount required by orders of magnitude. Per WP, he bought 5.8 billion masks for an average price of about an Euro per mask. That is 70 masks per person in Germany, most of which were later destroyed when they expired.
To be fair, as far as I know this may have even been on the lower end of necessity. FFP2 and N95 masks were always supposed to be one-use, for maybe 4 to 8 hours of continuous usage, the filter stops being functional as it gets dirty. After that, the mask becomes just a dirty rag without any filtration functionality, as well as a health risk with bacteria and mold making breathing through them hazardous. Of course the reality had nothing to do with medical advice, people used the same mask for months often having it somewhere in a car or dirty jacket pocket to use while shopping or whatnot. All in all, it probably caused more damage than good.
georgioz
4d ago
For example, consider the game Wolfenstein 3D, which has you killing Nazis. Is this video game immoral?
Forget Wolfenstein 3D, you have to play Alex Jones: NWO Wars.
People still use bedlam as idiom for craziness even in USA, it actually comes from the name of mental asylum outside of London. Sending to Coventry to me seems much more horrific than simple ghosting.
Maybe. And maybe aggressively punching the clock served as therapeutic way to express your hatred towards your employer, scars from bruised knuckles were badge of honor proudly displayed in front of your colleagues in factory canteen. Kids these days do not even know how to properly hate their job anymore, they just quit quietly like rats they are.
Again, this is nothing new. There actually was something called software crisis of 1960s. Shitty programmers made costly errors, delivered faulty code with years long delay, causing immense damage in terms of wasted time of expensive mainframes. It was direct effect of the early thinking that software is a work for "calculators", akin to clerical and administrative jobs. All the really talented people focused on hardware. If you have a software company that thinks software is a job for low paid foreign labor, the results will be the same.
I actually think this is only half truth. The issue here is with the welfare state and rise of taxation. The tax as percent of GDP was remarkably low in 19th century: between 1-3% of GDP. This changed after WW1 and The New Deal rising to 15% and 20% GDP, peaking at 30% by 1960s.
This is however artificial incentive. For instance today the average cost of elementary school student in USA is $17k a year. Imagine if family with three children can decide: wife stays at home, maybe creates a pod with other mothers and manages schooling and the government gives them $51k tax credit a year and they spend it as they want. Maybe children have to pass a test on par with at least with second lowest decile results compared to local public school. On top of that the wife can cook, she can take care of household chores and to other management such as driving and so forth. Also she could easily sell her surplus of cakes or jams on market or outside of house without constant government meddling with endless regulation. Her net contribution toward household could easily approach $100k a year.
This is the tragedy of the current situation. Women still take care of children, do the laundry, they do bring beer and sandwich to men, they still take care of elderly and sick as they used to do it in the past - in capacity such as teachers, maids, waitresses, cooks and nurses. Only they do it for strangers and not for their own family, losing value in the process. It is all just and illusion and scam.
Like others said, it is a real concept. I think even you would put the line somewhere - maybe directly beseeching your audience for somebody to do the killing, with a promise of fame and eternal gratitude? If not that, setting up a monetary account similar to what actual terrorist groups do for suicide bombers? There has to be a line. Stochastic terrorism is just the level bellow that. "Please can somebody kill that motherfucker already? In Minecraft of course". Just thinly veiled plausible deniability.
Maybe somebody has a problem with the word itself - stochastic terrorism may look like some manipulation, using the scary word terrorism to astroturf a concept creep. But it is nothing new, this is just an annoying modern trend of noticing age old issue and inventing new word for it, there are hundreds of those such as "quiet quitting" being a hot new trend of age old "punching the clock", the same for other things such as ghosting, gatekeeping, gaslighting and many more.
Going back to stochastic terrorism, there are similar old parallels. Just to name one - the wave of anarchist assassinations across the globe toward the end of 19th century. The response by governments across the democratic west was swift and decisive: banning of anarchist newspapers, persecution of anarchist instigators, forming new counterterrorist forces by governments infiltrating anarchist cells and more. It actually happened in USA after McKinley assassination, you had Anarchist Exclusion Act of 1903 targeting immigrants with anarchist background, you had Criminal Anarchy act of 1902. You had famous cases such as Emma Goldman who was arrested many times until she was stripped of citizenship and deported to Russia in 1919 together with almost 250 other radicals. Anarchism and especially its propaganda of the deed died, the freedom of speech survived.
By the way this is something that happened in IT since the beginning. Programming evolved from hardware level binary programming to assembler programming to structured programming to object oriented programming to todays Agentic AI programming. The same fear existed before - from programmers forgetting how to get most of the hardware, to bloatware memory hogs that loaded useless libraries to todays agentic AI which just moves it one step further.
I think it is inevitable, there will be some niche space for old school thinking, but it will resolve itself in time. For instance knowing some basic coding in Assembly from university is a good exercise and knowledge, but you will probably never use it outside of specific niches such as cybersecurity or firmware coding. Future good programmer will probably look quite differently from you now, but your skills would also be considered useless for programming Apollo 11 guidance system in 1969.
Yes and no. There is almost no contract freedom, even prenups are heavily limited. Marriage is more akin to legal status such as citizenship - as opposed to commercial contract. Which is kind of the point. If the law was changed so that spouses could add clauses such as "baby with genetic defect has to be aborted by my wife or she pays for emotional damage" into marriage contract, OP would probably also call that as revulsive interference in marriage.
georgioz
6d ago
Communists and the far left tend to believe that people need to be forced to do good things. I suspect they lack personal experience with communities that are more communal.
They literally subverted the word as usual: there is LGBT community and BIPOC community and Disability community and Neurodivergent community etc. This permeated the language even into mundane things like knitting community or running community etc. Literally everything is a community including people who don't want to be in that "community", except for an actual community. In an interesting paradox, community encompasses large collective, but at its core it is just an individual and often forced label.
Football is a sport where there is effectively no barrier to those without money. Many of the game’s biggest stars come from dizzying, grinding poverty that has no genuine parallel in western countries. The academy system incentivizes teams to find and nurture potential stars from a young age. If you are good enough, there are no obstacles in your way. This tilts the balance decisively to those areas where kids play lots and lots of unorganized and semi-organized football without a large focus on academics or other distractions. In most western countries, that is generally the children of economically worse-off ethnic minority groups. The Paris suburbs produced more players than any other single country for this World Cup.
The alternative, seen in capable teams like Norway or Croatia that manage to field teams that punch above their weight while maintaining a more accurate demographic makeup, is to create a society that values and funds participation in youth sports as part of a healthy outlet for children. Treating athletics as meaningless, or worse, primarily an opportunity for profit, is a way to handicap your national sports teams for decades into the future.
I think this is mutually reinforced thing. You are correct, that children are trained in sport from early age. In many countries in Europe you have dedicated sport classes since the elementary school, you have more PhysED in curriculum, it is expected to move forward toward local youth sports clubs from there. Now in modern day and age of let's say Germany, this probably means that your child will be there together with predominantly immigrant population in soccer class while it will be predominantly native or at least white in ice hockey class. You mentioned Norway, but there is already problem like that especially with children post 2014 immigrant crisis wave - parents are reluctant to drop their 10 year old into a soccer club with 70% players of immigrant background with all the problems it entails. Just imagine Caitlin Clark example but on steroids.
For now parents just take their children from ghettos and drive them to different soccer class. But I think it will be only matter of time when we will see the overall change. Croatia is safer in that regard.
Many of the formal fallacies - if not all of them - can be actually useful. Just go through them. Genetic fallacy of discounting argument based on source. Yeah, because nobody believes in arguments of their good friends over some randos. Fallacies of Tu Quoque specifically but also Ad Hominem generally: yeah, because it is so irrational not to invest into this otherwise sound looking investment opportunity, if the seller himself did not do it. Or why should I not discount schizo meth addict's opinion on almost anything.
In real life you have limited capacity to evaluate information, you don't know what you don't know, many decision are probabilistic and not exactly provable by formal logic, so you just use various heuristics when it comes to practical decision making including informal fallacies. Knowing of them fallacies is still good, but it is not some stone-etched principle that should railroad you. In fact, they are often used by skilled people for pure rhetoric - blaming somebody of committing fallacies left-and -right is by itself used as ad hominem, attacking their person as trustworthy source.
georgioz
6d ago
There is also a literal horror story of gay couple - including public school teacher - who tortured 13 month old adopted boy to death in UK. Be warned, my wife who is otherwise cynical attorney was crying and had trouble sleeping after reading that shit. My blood boils even thinking about it. The whole chain ranging from how the boy was taken from his incarcerated mother, how his grandma was denied adoption for no reason, through how UK CPS, doctors and even colleagues of gay teacher ignored obvious signs of child abuse, down to literal satanic shit that these monsters did to the boy. It vindicates social conservatives in every step. Do yourself a favor and don't read it, just believe it is a horrific shit.
It is often use as a rhetorical trick to shift the burden of proof on the counterparty. Imagine somebody saying: just because I did not pay the last small $100 debt does not mean that I will not pay this $1000 debt that I am asking for now. This is just slippery slope - prove that I will not pay it!
So again, it is a rhetorical trick to selectively turn off deduction, risk assessment by switching burden of proof. In fact in these CW discussions the other side also relies on deduction and risk assessment, just the other way around: "Ah, the excesses will be curtailed by institutions and law." One can also say: "Really? Give me a proof that the brakes will work."
Agreed, Epstein was also involved in financial laundering and weapon smuggling with dealers such as Douglas Leese and Adnan Khashoggi. Human trafficking was only one of the arms of the whole criminal enterprise.
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