marinuso
10hr ago
The industrial revolution itself needed everything to align, though.
Even the Romans experimented with steam power, and later on the Ottomans got a bit further (I wrote here about their automatic spit turner once), but nobody ever got anywhere.
Consider the situation in early modern Western Europe, and in Britain in particular.
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Due to the ban on cousin marriage, Western Europe was detribalized and relatively individualist. This ended up enabling cooperation between unrelated strangers on the basis of contracts; the basis of modern capitalism.
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There was very little slavery, and after the Black Death, a manpower shortage. In combination with the proto-capitalism, this encouraged the development and use of machinery. Mills (wind or water-powered) were everywhere, and put to many uses. We still refer to factories as mills sometimes, even in the metaphorical sense, such as in the term "puppy mill".
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Europe was politically divided, and everyone was fighting each other. This caused an arms race where everyone was trying to make more powerful cannons. This spurred development of better metallurgy to make stronger cannons. The exact same development also gets you stronger boilers and cylinders.
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Due to deforestation, Britain had run out of wood for heating. Britain also had abundant surface coal deposits. Coal was disliked because of the pollution you get from burning it, but it is for sure better than nothing, so they switched to coal out of necessity.
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Then they ran out of surface coal too and started digging, but the mines filled up with water which had to be pumped out. At first this was done by horses. But Thomas Newcomen came up with a proto-steam engine. It wasn't that much better than the earlier attempts, but this one had an actual use case: it could pump the water out of the coal mines, and it could run on the coal dust that couldn't be sold, so it was basically free to run in the context of a coal mine, no matter how inefficient it was.
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There now being a commercial use case, proper development of the steam engine commenced. Here's where the cannon metallurgy comes in: more pressure means more powerful engines. Neither the Romans nor the Ottomans could've managed that, for lack of metallurgy alone.
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At the same time, the spinning jenny had been invented. At the same time as that, Britain was expanding its empire, and cotton from India was flowing in faster than it could be spun. At the same time as that, the flying shuttle had been invented, which meant the weavers were weaving so fast they were running out of yarn. All of this can be traced back to the "cooperation between unrelated strangers" bit. Turns out if you hook up a spinning jenny to a steam engine, you can make a whole lot of yarn. If you just so happen to have an oversupply of cotton and there just so happens to be a sudden large demand for yarn, this could make commercial sense.
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Once you have a properly elaborated external combustion engine, the internal combustion engine is just a little development away.
Nothing else will really do. Windmills were perfectly adequate for milling grain. The bottleneck there was the farming. To improve the farming needs tractors. Steam tractors did exist but that's far into the refinement of the steam engine, you're not getting to that point from scratch. A small spinning jenny can be hand-cranked; and it can't really be wind-powered because the power delivery is not regular enough. And again the spinning jenny is constrained by its inputs which have to be farmed, unless you perhaps have a huge world-spanning empire that produces a lot. And before that you need to have a culture that's used to developing machinery, and a culture in which it's usual to work together and pool capital to set up businesses.
Everything happened to line up just so.
marinuso
11hr ago
In the Netherlands, to get a weapons permit you need a good reason, which will be hunting or sport. For hunting you also need a hunting license, which in turn requires you to own land on which you would be allowed to hunt. For sport, you need to be a member of a gun club for at least one year. These are the prerequisites.
To apply for a permit, you need to arrange for safe storage in your house, which means two separate floor-mounted safes, one for the gun and one for the ammo. The police will come and inspect your set-up. You also need three character witnesses, this on top of your hunting license and/or gun club membership (which are themselves similarly restricted). You also need a psychiatric screening, which is expensive and has a long waiting list. Even if you pass all the tests with flying colours, there is no guarantee you'll get your permit. If you do get a permit, the police will visit your house randomly to inspect your gun, ammo and safes. If you are not at home you lose your permit. The permit has to be renewed each year, going through the same procedure, and again with no guarantee you'll get to keep it even if you pass with flying colours.
As for carrying, absolutely not. If you want to transport your gun you have to pack it up into a container, and the ammo goes in a separate container.
The rest of Western Europe is generally very similar to this, though in the East they're a bit more lax.
(It's really much easier to buy a black-market gun. Nobody gives much of a shit, unless you're an upstanding citizen who has something to lose of course. In the bad neighbourhoods half the yoof are packing...)
marinuso
13hr ago
Guns haven't been banned yet, unlike in most of Europe. The vast majority of states allow you to carry a gun, either open or concealed. For sure it's not perfect, but it's much better than the rest of the world. 2A isn't useless.
If you were to get immigration restrictions passed in such a way that they would actually be followed 90% of the way 90% of the time, you really would have immigration restrictions worthy of the term.
The stated reason was that raising the speed limit might have adverse effects on traffic safety and pollution, and that there should be scientific studies into the matter first before changing anything. Otherwise it might hurt people, even if just statistically, and a judge might find it violates their rights under the ECHR, and then the courts would block it.
Of course, with that kind of attitude you can block literally anything if you choose to.
For context, the national highway speed limit was lowered from 80mph to 60mph in 2020, apparently for the environment, and everyone's been ignoring it, there's barely any enforcement. The PVV wanted to change it back to 80mph. There were no problems at all lowering it though, funny that.
I'm reminded of when we had the PVV-led government in the Netherlands. They couldn't even raise the speed limit. The civil servants just blocked it, despite a parliamentary majority. They would've had to start replacing the civil servants, at which point there'd be court cases, at which point they would've had to start to try to pack the courts, for which there isn't even a legal mechanism AFAIK. It would've essentially required a self-coup. To raise the speed limit. Let alone try to do anything of actual importance. I can't help but conclude that the Dutch government is basically more or less fake in much the same way that Iran's elected government is fake. The elections are real but the elected people have no real say in anything if the institutions disagree.
You're right that this doesn't just apply to "the right", but to anything that opposes the globalist institutional consensus, and that old-timey socialists would run into the same problems if any were elected. That doesn't make it any better.
marinuso
6d ago
They build up a profile of you which can be used in many ways, not just to serve you ads. The data can be sold on to third parties. It's also not just websites that track you. E.g. car manufacturers have been caught collecting driving data and selling it to insurers. Web stores (even places like Amazon) have been caught adjusting prices on the fly depending on what they think they can get away with charging the kind of person they think you are. More and more we're living in a panopticon.
marinuso
6d ago
Drag shows at libraries, no. I'd imagine Western rainbow-flag-ism is about as banned as you'd think it'd be.
But they do have medical transition clinics which see some use. The government will recognize the transition and even change your name and sex on your birth certificate. The public isn't too much in favour of it, and these people obviously do see discrimination, but Khomeini himself issued not one but two fatwas explicitly endorsing it.
It's also a way for homosexuals to get out of the punishment for being homosexual (I'm explicitly not saying "gay" here as I am referring to the sexual orientation and not to the whole culture that's been built around it in the West). They'll make you have surgery before they'll recognize it though, so it's your dick or your life, basically.
Minus that last part it's not too far off from how it used to be in Western countries before the 2010s. Gender dysphoria has been a thing for a while, so has transition, it just used to be rare and not politicised.
marinuso
6d ago
Trans is one example where a real Muslim’s response could be nothing less than trans mental people have a mental illness and should be locked up.
Iran has allowed it since the 1980s. Even while homosexuality is still punished severely, including even executions. So I'm not sure this is necessarily true.
marinuso
6d ago
Unless you get into extreme sports, whatever activity you're going to do is pretty much guaranteed to be less dangerous than the drive to get there. Live a little when you get the opportunity to do so. You don't have forever.
Maybe I'm saying this from the viewpoint of someone who lives in the hyper-overregulated EU, but still.
marinuso
9d ago
I mean, in my day we'd be elated to have the house to ourselves for a few days. When I was 14 I knew the basics of how to shop and cook and clean. We had chores you know. Any decently raised 14-year-old can surely be trusted to keep house for a few days. (Or at least to clean up after the party.)
When I was that age, 14-year-olds were driving combine harvesters down the road and serving beer in restaurants. That wasn't strictly speaking legal but no one cared. This isn't even long ago, I am only in my thirties.
marinuso
9d ago
There are ~300 Vietnamese mail-order brides in the Faeroe Islands. As a result, the capital city of Tórshavn (population 14k) now has its very own nail salon.
marinuso
14d ago
The voting age is 16, but voting is only mandatory between the ages of 18 and 70. If you are 16-18 or >70 years old, you can vote but you don't have to.
Additionally, voting is only mandatory if you are literate. If you are illiterate, you can still vote but you don't have to.
Also, voting may be mandatory but the punishment for not voting is a small fine.
marinuso
26d ago
It's open borders, but only for assholes. Not everyone is admitted, the price of admission is lying and cheating. After all, you're not actually a persecuted refugee, if you were, you wouldn't have made it halfway across the world in the first place. Someone who is honest would be denied, or rather, someone who is honest would apply for a work visa and get that denied.
In fact, it fits the rest of the repertoire of left-wing policy, such as easily-scammable social programs or being lenient on crime. All of it rewards assholes at the expense of honest people.
marinuso
27d ago
I mean, they can't. To remotely hijack a car, the engine, brakes, and steering need to be under computer control. Otherwise there's simply nothing to hijack. You can do it with a modern car (mid-2010s or later), but in the early 1990s they still had carburetors and cable-driven throttles.
If the engine is under computer control you could shut it down remotely. You could plausibly do that with an early 2000s car (if it has a modem on board, which it won't, but which I guess the CIA could sneak in there if they wanted), but I wouldn't call shutting it down to be "hijacking". It's only the cars that have things like active braking and lane assist where the computer even has enough control over the car to plausibly be capable of e.g. driving you into a tree on purpose.
marinuso
29d ago
How much would a third world mariner risk to make 6x wages?
tanker captains are earning $100,000 plus a $50,000 per-trip bonus to transit the strait.
Forget third-worlders. I'd take that job for that pay. Let the bombs come.
marinuso
1mo ago
What if some bot joined, made an intentional effort to sound human, became a valuable contributor over a month or two, and then made a sob story about needing help on their real estate project.
That's way too high-effort for a practical spamming operation. It also takes way too long to pay off.
marinuso
1mo ago
If the environment is dense enough for skyscrapers, you'll need a lot less parking. After all, there's a skyscraper full of people right there who can just walk across the street and sustain the businesses. If the area isn't dense enough to have a decent-sized population within walking distance of the businesses, probably the land value won't be that high either.
marinuso
1mo ago
Sure, but at that point you're arguing that the law is wrong, that it shouldn't consider your morally justifiable killing to be murder even though it does. Which is of course perfectly fair, different people can disagree on where that line should be.
Killing enemy soldiers in war is okay. Killing in self-defense is okay. Killing in defense of your property is something that some people think should be acceptable, but other people think it shouldn't be. Killing for fun, however, is something that nobody except a psychopath would think is okay.
But rape is always for "fun", there is no other goal, that's the difference.
marinuso
1mo ago
They can conceive of circumstances in which they might think murder is acceptable or even good (likewise for theft, etc...)
Murder is unjustified killing. There are sometimes acceptable reasons to kill people (e.g. self-defense), but those are by definition not murder. Generally, acceptable reasons to kill people involve either defending yourself or preventing worse violence.
Meanwhile, I can't think of any situation where raping someone is somehow the least bad option out of all the options available.
Dunno. If you can't be arsed to write a description, leave it blank. It's not like we were diligent about it before AI (at least not anywhere I've worked). Don't make me do extra work checking if the generated description makes sense. I've got to review the code anyway.
If you had an AI generate it, I want to be able to tell that you, the human being, personally did at least a first pass over it, not just chuck it over the fence unseen for me to either reject or greenlight. And that does mean go through it and remove the most obvious AI-isms by hand. Not because I care about the AI-isms per se, but because I want to see that you have at least read your own submission.
If I'm to sign off on it then I want to make sure it's OK. I'm taking part of the responsibility for it after all.
It's so easy to have AI generate reams and reams and reams of text, or code, and it is not fair, I think, to have the reviewer be the first real person to read through it to see if it all makes sense. Humans aren't perfect either but at least there's a limit to their output.
marinuso
1mo ago
the batshit-insane, hostile environment that produced a situation IN YOUR OWN CAMP where NOBODY won?
I think someone like Noire thinks he won. He did damage, he exercised power. He must've felt pretty good about himself. We call these people assholes, and you find them everywhere.
One thing about these anarchist-style places is that they're very susceptible to such people. You can apparently just barge in and start making demands and everyone has to at least listen to you. He went eight times? How is he a stakeholder in any way? It works only if everyone is playing in good faith, which requires keeping the circle small and invite-only.
You need proper formal decision-making structures. It doesn't even really matter what kind as long as you have something.
I live in the Netherlands, in a progressive city, and I haven't seen a mask since the mandates were dropped. I haven't even heard of any place voluntarily keeping a mandate in place after the government stopped requiring it.
In fact I remember the relief when Putin invaded Ukraine, because everyone who was gung-ho about Covid restrictions could be gung-ho about waving Ukrainian flags instead and it all went away remarkably quickly after that.
marinuso
1mo ago
You can't rightly call this Western society.
This reads like satire. I'll grant you that such people exist but they're not mainstream. They're not even mainstream among LGBT people. This is the fringe of the fringe. It's like pointing at the Branch Davidians and calling it 'Christianity'.
We have loads of these in the Netherlands and it's basically just a way for parents to avoid the "public" schools. (The Montessori schools are usually also publically funded so technically also "public" schools, but they sure do attract a different audience than the standard "public" schools.)
The kids do fine, but given that their parents are actively involved in their education to the point of caring what school they go to, that is what you'd expect.
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