marinuso
1yr 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.
marinuso
1yr ago
No one fought him when he took over Crimea. Not the Crimeans, not the other Ukrainians, not Washington or Brussels either. The Crimeans seemed to be fine with it. In the Donbass he got more resistance, but still not a lot. (Of course, this was all just after a Western-backed coup that was unpopular in the south and east.)
He clearly thought he could do the same to all Ukraine. He was wrong, but you can see how such an error might be made.
marinuso
30d ago
A big reason for mass immigration is ease of travel and mass media.
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.
marinuso
6mo 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
6mo 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
1yr ago
If anything, this shows Trump must really be quite clean, if this is all they can throw at him.
After all, he was a real estate developer in New York in the 1970s and 80s. I would have expected way worse.
marinuso
6mo 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
1yr ago
They're nowhere near as screwed as us yet. The EPA is part of the executive branch. The next president can simply order them to change it back.
As for the EU, decision making has been moved pretty much entirely out of the remit of anyone who is elected, and the only legal, democratic way to put a halt to it at this point is if everyone all at once were to vote to install national governments that leave the EU.
They got a bunch of Vietnamese, whose descendants are still there today. The equivalent of the Turks in West Germany, though fewer and better-behaved, which is why you don't hear about them much. The same is true of some other ex-Eastern Bloc countries like Czechia.
But no, individuals couldn't just go and move of their own accord. (The exception to that was Yugoslavia, at least at some times, but given the choice, they'd rather go to West Germany obviously.)
marinuso
30d 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
1yr ago
I don't know how we do that either.
That'll happen by itself when anyone can create a fake scandal with little effort. "That's fake" won't just be a believable excuse, but everyone's default assumption.
marinuso
1yr ago
A hospital might have huge margins because competitors are barred by law from entering the marketplace.
It's even called a CON.
marinuso
1yr ago
Is English your mother tongue?
It isn't mine, and I don't know how to spell English words. I'm somehow capable of it, but I don't remember how I learned (it must've been at school but I don't remember anything about the method other than that they had us copy words a lot), and I could not describe the rules.
Dutch spelling is regular. The method of teaching kids to read essentially hasn't changed in over a century. It involves learning the sounds that letters make and then sounding them out, but that's a lot easier when it's pretty much always the same except for loanwords.
I'm confident I could teach a kid to read without any pre-made teaching materials at all, even though I have no training other than my own literacy - in Dutch. Not in English though, even though I'm personally just as literate in English. I couldn't teach a cooperative English-speaking adult to read. I have no conscious idea what I'm doing when I write in English.
marinuso
1yr ago
Instead the racially diverse, hopelessly disorganized (IE decentralized), and utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere proved far more capable of cooperation, innovation, and stacking enemy dead like corde-wood than their ostensibly superior and racially homogenous opponents.
They didn't. Losses on the Allied side were way, way, way higher. Especially on the Eastern front, where the Russians eventually won because they quite simply had more peasants than the Germans had bullets.
Germany and Japan are relatively tiny, with few natural resources. The Russians had essentially limitless cannon fodder, while the US and the British Empire combined had essentially limitless natural resources. Any war becomes a war of attrition if it goes on long enough. As the Finns also found when fighting the Russians, you can kill the enemy ten to one, but that's no good if the enemy always has an eleventh man.
As far as HBD is concerned, Germany's biggest blunder was an anti-IQ move. The persecution of the Jews caused a huge brain drain, both of e.g. Jewish professors and intellectuals themselves and of their colleagues, long before the Holocaust proper started. The Nazis kicked out people like Albert Einstein, who went over to the US. It's thanks to the smarts of people like those, that the US managed to develop the nuclear bomb and force Japan to surrender. Without it, it would certainly have taken a lot longer.
marinuso
1yr ago
On the other hand, if there's ever a time to do something like that it's now. The used car market has gone mad. I could literally sell my car for more than I paid for it.
marinuso
1yr ago
Authoritarian survival is crucially dependent on tracking any signals, threatening your position
On the other hand, people don't make blunders until they do.
The fact that Putin has managed to stay in power until now means he's decent at staying in power, sure, but it doesn't make him infallible. And if you become paranoid and get rid of any possible threats around you, you also get rid of anyone who might correct you when you do make a mistake.
marinuso
1yr ago
I really wonder how long it will be until these fights make it to the other utilities. After all, if a network provider is responsible for what flows down their tubes now, why shouldn't the power companies be similarly "held accountable" for what's done with their power?
marinuso
1yr ago
State capacity has increased a lot. The Congolese tribesman wouldn't have cared much either way 200 years ago, because his life wasn't impacted.
But once the government starts inserting itself into your life, you start caring. When they come to your village, and fence off your pastures, and make you learn a different language just so you can fill in the form for the grazing permit just so you can hopefully put your cows where they've always been, you'll start caring. Or when they forcibly send your kids to government school, and tell them to spit on everything you hold sacred, and then make you utterly dependent on them because they've learnt the language and can fill in form whereas you can't, you'll start caring. The King of Mbanza couldn't have done any of that if he wanted.
Case in point: the US-backed government in Afghanistan tried to push gender stuff on the locals to the point that it literally caused rebellions (archive link).
Of course this is true of all governments, not just colonial governments. The expansion of state power caused plenty of strife in Europe too. On the other hand it was worse in the colonies, because in Europe it was developed gradually, and then in the colonies it was imposed all at once.
marinuso
5d ago
Will Elon throttle me if he finds out I’m short Tesla stock?
You probably meant this as a joke, but I'd be wary of buying a car from a tech company. What happens in X years when they shut the servers down that it wants to connect to? Or what happens if your account gets banned?
Tesla employees have been caught sharing videos from the cameras on the cars. That tells me that a) they can access whatever you can, and b) there isn't much stopping even individual employees screwing around with people's cars, neither in terms of IT security or company culture.
marinuso
1yr ago
Also we don't use Adaptive beam headlights whilst Europe does.
I'm in the Netherlands. Southkraut is in Germany, it apparently doesn't help.
No surprise: nothing is going to be sensitive and accurate enough for that to ever work well. The manufacturers don't really even have to care, after all, it's not their customers who are blinded, it's the other guys. And it's always going to err on the side of not dimming, since that's what the customer would want - and on the other hand, thank God for that, imagine driving along and your car turns your headlights off all of a sudden because it has somehow decided someone's coming.
This so-called driver assistance technology never works well. I've never seen any work well. Even the self-canceling turn signals only ever self-cancel when you don't want them to. But that's another rant for another time.
marinuso
1yr ago
It's fairly predictable which neighbourhoods vote for whom. The return address is plenty of information on its own. A rogue mailman could make the votes disappear before they even formally make it into the system.
On top of that, even normal letters get lost or delayed in the mail all the time. It doesn't even need to be malice. If there were only postal votes, pure standard negligence operating procedure would likely cause a fair bit of difference all on its own.
Not least because the UK barely allows you to change your own lightbulbs...
The UK is notorious for its health and safety nannying (even though they left the EU). In the Netherlands everything beyond the meter is in principle yours to fuck with as you please, though if it's not up to code and your house burns down, the insurance won't pay out.
That said, the UK is special in another way, because it uses ring circuits. Instead of running individual wires from the boxes to the outlets, they run a wire from outlet to outlet and back to the breaker again in the end. Because in that way, every socket is principally wired twice, letting them get away with pretty much doubling the load. This is why the UK has 32-amp breakers instead of the 16-amp ones on the continent. You can put more sockets on the same wires.
Of course, with a radial circuit, if the wire breaks or comes loose the power goes out and you'll notice. With a ring circuit, if the wire breaks on one end, the other end is now theoretically overloaded, but everything will keep working until you actually put a big load on it, and then it'll catch fire. And the breaker won't trip because it's sized for two wires. DIY Dad is going to have a much worse time if he fucks up.
Western governments see the way out as importing foreign 'fungible economic units'; young tax payers that their source countries have paid the cost in educating that they can brain drain off to grow the tax base and act as workers to prop up the economy and service the aging population.
Here's a graph from a report from the Netherlands. (Here's the full report, but it's in Dutch.)
The Y axis is how likely an immigrant is to leave again within 10 years, the X axis is how likely an immigrant is primarily on welfare after 2 years. There is an obvious relationship: people who want to build what we'd call a proper life, don't want to stay here.
And honestly who can blame them. You'll get taxed half to death, and harassed and robbed in the street by the people your tax money is going to. If you're not born here, why would you put up with that? If you're already moving, you may as well move to a nice place. It's only the people with ill intent, who intend on becoming the harassers and robbers, who'd want to stay here long term. They lead decent enough lives, better than any honest members of the working class.
Of course, this means that immigration is a net drain on the tax base, as every report has shown and every policymaker must by now know. I'm sure it's the same in the rest of Northern and Western Europe. Bringing people in because it's good for the economy is not even a good excuse anymore.
You don't accept the crown in Britain. He was next in line, he got it automatically the moment Queen Elizabeth died. They're never without a monarch. If he wants to give it to his son, he'll have to abdicate.
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