marinuso
3hr ago
Historically, Christianity presided over the most unequal period in European history.
Is that so? Medieval Europe at least did not have slavery in any great amount. That is actually fairly unique for the time period and for the kind of societies they had. The Roman Empire had chattel slavery of pretty much the same kind that would later be re-introduced to the European colonies in the Americas. It seems to have been an old pan-Mediterranean institution, that died out in Christian Europe and was reintroduced basically by cribbing from the Arabs, who had kept it.
marinuso
5d ago
He'll be 82. There's a very good chance he'll be dead or otherwise incapable. Look at how fast Biden seems to have gone downhill - he seemed completely fine when he was VP during Obama's presidency. It can go quickly at this age.
the guidance and computers are the expensive parts.
Computers aren't at all expensive anymore in the grand scheme of things.
In the 1960s they custom-built a computer to send people to the moon. In the 1980s you could buy a more powerful computer for kids to play games on for a few hundred dollars. By now you can buy a much more powerful computer on a tiny chip for 30-40 cents.
marinuso
1mo ago
Right now it's an annoying popup, same as it has been since Vista. Maybe one day the default behavior is switched to not letting you run it at all. But it's ok, there is a toggle to turn on the old behavior burried deep in the system settings somewhere. Maybe a security submenu.
This is where Mac OS already is. If you find the setting and turn it off, it will automatically turn back on after 30 days. So every month you have to go in and put it back. That wasn't even the government, just plain old fashioned greed. Gotta pay Apple for a developer's license to get a key to sign your executables. And if you're paying for the license anyway, you may as well put it on the App Store too, which means Apple gets 30% of the sales.
The impact on random users has been zero, because they just get their apps from the App Store, so nobody cares.
And iPhones have famously been entirely locked down since the beginning, they started putting it in the desktop OS too when they figured out people would put up with it.
marinuso
1mo ago
Even from a purely economic viewpoint, international trade is great only as long as there are no supply chain disruptions.
Having at least some industry at home makes sense from a strategic viewpoint. Not only are you better able to handle supply chain disruptions in the short term, you also keep the necessary expertise around. As long as you are making cars, you are also teaching people to make cars, to run the factories and so on.
If the US stops manufacturing cars, and in 20 years' time it turns out the US can't import cars anymore for whatever reason, perhaps a war or something, they will have to restart from scratch. Scaling up is one thing, but if nobody remembers how to make a car anymore and has to dig up old books, and if there are no working factories around, it will take a very long time before anything is produced again, let alone anything of acceptable quality.
You pay for this with inefficiency in the here and now, that's true.
marinuso
1mo ago
I'd say it's less bad that one evil parent hurt his own kids, than that the cogs of bureaucracy chew up countless children who would've had loving homes, all the while the evil parents still hurt their own kids too.
Of course neither is perfect, but you're not getting perfection.
marinuso
1mo ago
I got one too. I don't even qualify. I'm not an US resident, I have never even been to the US. They could've figured that out automatically from the IP addresses associated with my account that they're no doubt logging, or they could've looked at the subreddits I post in. Yet they didn't even bother with that bit of obvious filtering. They must've sent it to literally everyone.
marinuso
4mo ago
It would probably be legit less of an escalation if Trump just had an "accident". At least you're not setting precedent that way. And he certainly wouldn't be the first one either.
marinuso
4mo ago
being spontaneous, doing something crazy, means messing up, and that messing up is unrecoverable.
This actually is much more true than it used to be. For example, my grandfather only went to elementary school and worked in a factory. He was considered poor even then, but he didn't have a bad life. He could raise a whole family on his factory wages, in circumstances no worse than many people today.
Today you would need both parents to hold a decent, respectable office job to have a similar quality of life. Anything below that, you're competing with the entire Third World (either through imports or immigration). Add to that things like stringent environmental laws. The mines are gone, the factories are almost all gone, and the EU is currently in the process of de facto outlawing agriculture. What'll even be left for you to do, if you don't get the respectable office job?
There are many more people, and there are fewer opportunities to achieve the living standards of a factory worker 50 years ago. And so, life has turned into a vicious, high-stakes game of musical chairs. There's no room for slip-ups.
We have this in the Netherlands too. When you first get a license you have to fill out a form asking about your health, and if you check 'yes' on any of the questions you have to go for a review process which, given bureaucracy and staff shortages, can easily take more than a year to resolve. It's no wonder that even official examinators will outright tell you to lie on the form. But there are cases of people having their driver's license revoked upon seeking help for a mental illness that has nothing to do with driving, even if they've been driving for 10 years and hundreds of thousands of miles without incident. I've known people to avoid getting even normal healthcare for fear of their license.
marinuso
5mo ago
It seems reasonable that a society that spends more of its time this way isn't spending it on, say, fundamental research and technology.
It isn't really. Fundamental research and technology is hard, and almost nobody can actually meaningfully contribute to it. It's only getting harder as progressively higher-hanging fruit is picked. Meanwhile, almost everyone can help the infirm. It's just manual labour. As long as you're not a psychopath and not disabled, you can do it.
marinuso
5mo ago
Covid wasn't on the order of WW2. It was very overblown, it was presented as a disaster when it was really almost a nothingburger. That kind of thing just lets the bureaucracy grab more power.
A true life-or-death situation like WW2, for all its awfulness, demands that you shape up. Look at the Soviet Union for example, after a few humiliating defeats, Stalin threw out almost all the ideology that had so dominated the 1930s. Poverty was no problem, even famines were no problem, ideology came first, but once the Nazis were threatening to conquer the whole mess, it really was a matter of survival, and Stalin stopped caring about ideology, only about what worked.
That said, you don't want such desperate circumstances instead of what we have now.
marinuso
5mo ago
Really, I can't convince myself any good reason to not "drive like an asshole".
You might get into an accident. The more you demand others react quickly to avoid you, the more likely it is that someone will fail to do so.
marinuso
6mo ago
Well, how about Native American reservations? And as for those: you can't, in general, move there, only the tribe that owns it can; but you can drive through and even stop at a restaurant. Any 'realistic' (for whatever value of that...) Ida-White would need to follow a similar model.
It wouldn't be in their interest to block or harass people who pass through.
marinuso
6mo ago
is to require political tests which can always be faked.
Everything can be faked. That's not necessarily bad, seen from the side of the movement.
In Havel's Czechoslovakia, by the time he wrote his 'Power of the Powerless', probably few of the Communist Party members were "real communists". That wasn't really the point, the power of the organization called the "Communist Party" over society was the point. In a sense there was a political test, that everyone was faking, from the greengrocers up. It didn't matter that you faked it, all that mattered is that a) you were aware enough that you knew you were supposed to at least fake it, and b) you were willing to fake it - even just for the sake of personal advancement - rather than insist on honesty. In doing so you were both submitting to the system, and contributing to empowering the system.
Every man who shows up and claims to be nonbinary to get a job is doing something similar. They don't say, this is an unfair way to hire people. They say, I'm an enby so I should get a job too. They legitimize it and empower it and in doing so chain themselves to it. They become part of it.
For all that it looks like undermining the stated goals of the movement, the workers of the world never really did unite either. I doubt that bothered the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia (or the other communist countries) one bit.
marinuso
8mo ago
HBD isn't ever the only factor. North and South Korea are a great example of that. (But note that almost all Americans are recently descended from adventurers, while Europeans on the other hand are descended from the people who didn't go on adventure.)
The EU's economic (and to a point also social) policy is basically corporatism (in the old sense). That makes sense, because that's what Germany has always been like since the Kaiserreich, and France is ultimately quite similar even though it got there via a different route. It's better than communism as an economic system, but it's not going to get you the raw economic performance of USA-style capitalism. (Proponents will defend it on other grounds.) There's been some movement away from it - it was much, much more intensely so as late as the 90s - but only slowly and carefully.
More community cohesion might actually have a drawback as well. People are less independent. If you have to worry about what the neighbours will think, you're less likely to go and try something. The social response to ambition is often: "who does he think he is?". You're not supposed to rise above your station. If you try it you earn the ire of your peers; if you succeed then doubly so, and also your new peers won't quickly accept you.
The USA's quasi-libertarian foundation, though marred as it is by now, helps a lot. You're allowed to be ambitious. The system won't usually actively try to prevent you from succeeding. Worse average human capital - if that even is the case - is mitigated by the fact that the variance is allowed to be a lot higher. The people at the top of the bell curve get to invent things that improve the whole society, and become filthy rich in the process.
Your old friends will generally be proud, not envious. Your new peers will respect you for having managed to climb up, not look down on you for not having 1000 years of nobility behind you. The government won't - at least not nearly as much as in Europe - kick you right back down for interfering with the profits of the 1000 years of nobility.
The ghettos in the cities don't impede that process much. They could, if the problem gets too bad, but the USA is no South Africa yet.
marinuso
9mo ago
Well, I doubt that.
The editors aren't there of their own accord, even the chief editor isn't there on his own behalf. They're people doing jobs. Of course any of them could go rogue and maybe manage to get something published once or twice, but they would be swiftly removed from their positions. If their loyalty was in question they wouldn't have been hired in the first place.
The owners could reposition the paper, but then again, no one doubts that the Sulzbergers are anything but elite.
marinuso
9mo ago
I mean, you can't, really, it's not for sale.
The USA could've used its might to pressure Denmark into selling it, if it really wanted to and was willing to take off its diplomatic mask entirely over Greenland of all places. But given that, it could've just as well used its might to pressure Denmark into simply giving it up, or done a Crimea on it.
Or it could've done what it usually does, and put its money and weight behind an "independence" movement (that it could astroturf out of whole cloth if need be), and then simply occasionally remind the new Supreme Leader of Greenland who put him there, who keeps him there, and why.
But it doesn't even need to do that, since the Danish government is already de facto the USA's pet poodle, so there is nothing to be gained.
I wouldn't say the New York Times editor is all that elite as an individual.
He's part of a powerful group, certainly, but the only power he exercises is on behalf of the group and in conjunction with the rest of the group. He has little individual decision making power and is not a mover or shaker in his own right. If he goes against the group, he's out. And he's unlikely to have significant pull within the group on his own either. He may have DoJ officials on speed dial, but he certainly can't call in favours on his own personal behalf and he will be in trouble if he attempts. He's a cog in a machine.
This is in fact reflected in their income which is ~$76k a year on average. That's certainly not nothing, but it certainly isn't fuck-you money either. It's enough to live comfortably, but it's not going to allow you to build a serious buffer so you can pick fights later.
The car dealer may be further removed from national power in a 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon' sense, but he has more money. If he, as an individual, wants to try and get something done, he has more money to try it with. If someone picks a fight with him, he has more money to defend himself. As an individual, he is in a better position than the NYT editor.
On a national scale neither is elite, their individual influence can both be rounded down to zero. But don't forget that in small towns, people like this successful car dealer are often the ones who rule the roost. The car dealer's words will have measurable weight there, if he wants them to.
marinuso
9mo ago
raising everyone to as close to the maximum intelligence possible
You don't want that anyway.
Someone's got to clean the toilets, and it would be better if that person weren't an 150 IQ would-be rocket surgeon who only isn't a rocket surgeon because he lost a politics game. After all, only so many people can be rocket surgeons, and if everyone is smart then the losers will have to lose for a different reason.
It wouldn't even be a good reason. Then you have a mass of 150-IQ angry losers on your hands, all of them applying their smarts to remedying the problem of not being on top. You think it's bad now, you just wait.
marinuso
9mo ago
It is a luxury to be able to avoid spontaneous human connection, to only have it when you specifically want it and shut it out otherwise. Americans are so rich that this luxury is available to most.
Public transport is a great example. It's true you won't get stabbed or robbed on the bus in most of Europe (though with all the migration this is starting to change in places). But there's still the teenagers with the obnoxious music, the people yelling at their cell phones, the loud and messy eaters, the couples all but having sex, the other couples fighting, the screaming little children, the occasional beggar. And the people who won't take showers, and of course the fat guy who insists on sitting next to you even though there's an empty bench available. It's a lot of spontaneous human connection, and all of it negative.
And if you can afford a car you can avoid it all. What you're really buying is isolation, and it's worth quite a lot. (Well, that, speed, and reliability.)
There are times when you need it, of course, especially when you still need to establish yourself and need to get into contact with a lot of people to find openings. Americans have college campuses, which of course have their own problems. Europeans tend to just use the city as a whole for that purpose. But once you've established yourself, mostly the negatives remain, especially since should you need something you can draw on your existing circle. The commenter above has a wife and a kid. What does he need to find out in the wild, another wife?
Europe has its suburbs too. They don't always look like American ones because people can't afford McMansions (rowhouses and apartments are more common), but they serve the same purpose. To be far enough away from it all to offer its denizens some isolation.
marinuso
9mo ago
After all that programming meetup was hosted in an LGBT space.. which might just answer your question
This would be plenty of reason for me not to attend an event I otherwise might. Not even out of 'hatred' or whatever. Foremost I'd feel like an intruder in another's place.
marinuso
10mo ago
Ukraine is not generally valuable in-and-of-itself to ANYONE but the Ukrainians. Neither the U.S. nor Russia stands to achieve much economic gains from merely controlling the territory, so in that sense broad destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure is acceptable to both parties.
They found a bunch of large natural gas deposits in Eastern Ukraine and in the sea off Crimea, in the early 2010s right before everything kicked off.
marinuso
11mo ago
I don't think the high rates of gay and trans identification among Zoomers is at all the result of indoctrination (though I think at times policy can reinforce it), I think it's the result of teenagers being teenagers and doing the I'm trying to find myself, maaaaaan thing that many of the now-conservative Boomers did before them, which is what happens in a world focused on consooming and defining oneself.
There is a difference between teenagers now and the Boomers in their time.
As far as I can tell (though I haven't been a teenager for a while so I could of course simply be missing it), there's pretty much no real teenage rebellion. I don't see them doing much that the powers that be aren't supporting and encouraging. E.g. declaring yourself to be something LGBT-esque is supported and encouraged, becoming a climate activist is supported and encouraged, etc etc. It leads me to believe that if the establishment were supporting and encouraging different things, they'd be doing those things instead.
And industrialisation.
Whether you were a peasant in India in 1750 or a peasant in Britain in 1750 didn't matter all that much as far as living standards go. Whether you're a peasant in India in 1980 or even have a minimum wage job in Britain in 1980 however, matters a great deal.
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