wlxd
1yr ago
But so is England, though maybe in not so recent memory, so it might have lost the emotional impact.
wlxd
1yr ago
Makes sense, but new genetic evidence makes it rather hard to sustain. Eg from what I remember, the Turks (or maybe just the non-peasant ones) are something like half Greek by ancestry, due to many centuries of Greek settlements.
Westerners are indeed not so much into purity, but that might be just a result of decades of extremely relentless anti-Nazi indoctrination.
wlxd
1yr ago
Why are Hindus so touchy about this? Brita, for example, do not care much that they are a result of a number of wholesale population replacements.
wlxd
1yr ago
Soviet Union had reintroduced free market economy in early 20s, because of a total carnage of the actual communism as practiced in the early years during of the Russian Civil War and after it. Before that, the commies would seize the food from peasants, who as a result stopped bothering to grow much. The shortage of food in early 20s was extremely severe.
By the end of NEP in 1928, the agricultural production has recovered to pre WWI levels, though the Soviet Union food exports throughout its history have never been even close to the Imperial Russia exports in 1913.
wlxd
1yr ago
My point was, in case you actually missed it (which I doubt), was that
the difference (…) is between individual-level advice and society-levels policies
is an entirely post-hoc justification, invented to excuse the activists who just want to attack anyone who ascribed any degree of agency to a victim of one particular kind of crime. Your whole post makes an argument that’s simply entirely irrelevant in any instance of alleged victim blaming and their denouncing.
wlxd
1yr ago
I am pretty certain that you will be unable to provide even a single example where the activists, before accusing someone of victim blaming, check if the person alleged to do so, does nothing else to address the problem.
wlxd
1yr ago
The Spider-Man one is particularly egregious, because the modder just combined the textures from the Saudi Arabian release of the game with English text. As it turns out, the game makers are totally happy to make and profit from LGBT-free version of the game, as long as it’s not Americans who enjoy it.
wlxd
1yr ago
WD-40 is not even a lubricant, and I wish people stopped calling it that, because some people will take it to mean that it can be used to lubricate moving parts, when in fact the opposite is true: what it will do is that it will strip any lubricant that might have lingers there, and then evaporate, leaving dry surfaces behind.
wlxd
1yr ago
Strange for you to, in response to /u/the_nybbler predicting that the Feds will use overwhelming force to roll over any state resistance, bring up Waco siege as an example of Feds having trouble with serving warrants. Yeah, next time they have troubles, they do another Waco, why not?
wlxd
1yr ago
Yes, only majority of homeless have on-demand internet access wherever they go, it is no longer overwhelming. That’s why many of them hang out around free wi-fi, yes. But so what? What does it have to do with the argument you were making? Here, let me helpfully quote you:
who obviously will not have regular access to Internet or cellular connection, due to lack of affordability of a mobile plan, let alone a mobile phone.
Observe that the quote from the study you just gave clearly and explicitly contradicts what you said earlier, and supports what I replied to you with.
As a bonus point, observe that out of the homeless who are interested in using internet at all (66%, I assume that the third which didn’t use internet at all within past 3 months simply does not want to do it), more than three quarters do have it on their phone on demand.
wlxd
1yr ago
Is your response really “sure, the overwhelming majority of homeless might indeed have mobile phones, but large fraction of them just carry non-functional phones with no plan or data, for no useful purpose”? Is this really the point you are trying to make here?
wlxd
1yr ago
Further, it's very easy to lose contact with the homeless, who obviously will not have regular access to Internet or cellular connection, due to lack of affordability of a mobile plan, let alone a mobile phone.
This is super wrong. Overwhelming majority of the homeless have mobile phones, with surveys ranging between 80% and 95% penetration. This is because the Feds, local municipalities and charities have special programs to equip them with phones.
Given the above, why would I put any stock in your critique of the critique of scientific paper?
wlxd
1yr ago
First punishing recividism more seems silly. Because a lot of people do age out of crime.
That’s only more reason to punish recidivists harshly: if you identify someone as a recidivist type, you want to hold them in jail until they age out of crime. Third criminal conviction at 24, we keep you in jail until 40 (of course, for three felonies we keep the life sentence).
wlxd
1yr ago
Indeed, when I lived in an apartment, I have not known a single person living in the same building. I asked my friends about, and this has been everyone else’s experience as well. Now, I know all the people on my SFH suburban street, and regularly hang out with some of them.
When people say things like suburbia being atomizing, I’m really dumbfounded — compared to what? Just because there are a lot of people walking down the street doesn’t mean that it’s easier to socialize, in fact it is the opposite. Humans enter different behavioral modes in different settings. When there are a lot of people around, we naturally tend to detach ourselves mentally, and treat everyone as an irrelevant blob. If, on the other hand, we get bunched together with only a couple of people at a time, it feels more natural to strike the conversation (in fact, sometimes it’s awkward not to). Go to a mass rock concert, and try to make new friends, and then go to a jam session in a hole-in-the-wall bar and try the same. Which is easier?
wlxd
1yr ago
“Grifter looking for cushy consulting and lobbying gigs” is pretty ridiculous accusation, considering that his career before running for president has been much superior than what you suggest he’s after. You might as well accuse Trump of only running because he wanted to make a bit of money by selling his memoir afterwards.
wlxd
1yr ago
all this while ignoring the context of the 1% having stolen all the economic growth of the last 40+ years for themselves
This is a popular claim, but I don’t think it is true at all. People today are more prosperous than similar people 40 years ago, comparing like for like, ie. comparing non-divorced, employed, married people 40 years ago to similar people in same age range today.
See this, for example: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A794RX0Q048SBEA Top 1% of population is physically unable to consume so much.
wlxd
1yr ago
As much as I sympathize with your individual plight, I don’t think it counts into the “homeless problem” in the society’s view. Shelters or non-profits or churches might be interested in helping you, but people like me (normal, well-off, employed people with families and mortgages) do not care about you much. Indeed, there are a lot of poor and struggling people on this planet, and I can’t spare too much energy or emotion on you.
Instead, what I see as an actual problem is crazy, unpredictable, aggressive hobos taking over the commons, and making the city dangerous and unlivable for normal people, while collectively consuming more government resources per capita than the poorest working people actually subsist on. This is the problem for me, because it actually affects me in a substantial and negative way.
My point here is that you are or were not like them, and it is unlikely that any solution that applies to one group will also apply to the other. The hidden homeless are overlooked on purpose, because they are only a problem to themselves, not to anyone else.
wlxd
1yr ago
California mid century population was a third of today’s official population, probably a quarter of actual one. Moreover, during mid-century, there were more people per housing unit on average, and there were far fewer single person or two person households.
This means that the mid century California housing stock is pretty much irrelevant for the discussion of today’s housing woes, because it’s only a small fraction of today’s housing stock. The working class neighborhoods of 1950s California are places like Santa Clara or Fresno today.
wlxd
1yr ago
One can quite easily tell that you’re responding to a woman by the writing style.
wlxd
1yr ago
Yet there was also much more time in general to be devoted to childrearing, since there were clearly more children back then.
You’d think so, but you’d be wrong. US Census has been running time use surveys for many decades now, which give us good data on what people actually spend their time on.
The trend is obvious: people spend much more time on active childcare today than they used to. Today, a mother working full time spends about as much time on childcare as stay at home moms used to 50 years ago. Hard to believe it, but it’s true.
In my personal experience, time spent on childcare doesn’t scale linearly with number of kids, and indeed plateaus pretty quickly. For example, when I visit my friends who also have kids of age similar to hours, I basically don’t need to do any child caring at all, they just play together and don’t need anything from me aside from occasional conflict resolution. This is a huge glaring contrast compared to times when we only had one, and it demanded constant attention, because it simply did not want to be left to play alone. As you get to 4-5+ kids, I imagine the older ones can be very helpful in caring for younger ones.
Yes, you are confirming what I said: Europeans don’t cycle to work a lot. Overall, maybe something like 10% does. Large majority of them drives. Sure, the split between driving and cycling is only slightly less lopsided towards driving, but whether 5% cycles or 10% is not substantial difference.
What weapons the west gave to Poland that allowed it to beat Soviet military and throw their shackles? What military strategy was used?
Why wasn’t Ukraine on this path before the war? Poland started off around where Ukraine was in early 1990s. It failed to thrive, to put it mildly, and the pre-war trajectory was not optimistic. The neighboring puppet state of Russia, Belarus, has done much better for itself.
If the plan is to build stronger ties with the West, join EU etc similarly to what Poland did, isn’t better strategy to cut the losses, stop the bleed, and negotiate peace with Russia, where you cede some territories in exchange for Russia acceding to your western strategy in future?
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