cpcallen
3mo ago
You're right that Tories are a failure on their own terms, and because of that the idea that the neoliberal wing of Labour will be some sort of an improvement is absurd to me.
I disagree. Specifically, I think that Labour is considerably more likely to be good at growing the economy and reducing the deficit for several reasons:
- Labour is much more likely to spend money on services (and in particular on public sector salaries), rather than on tax cuts for the wealthiest, and this is likely to be better for overall economic growth.
- The Conservatives dedication to austerity, Brexit and lettuce-brained tax cutting has been so appallingly damaging that it would be difficult to do worse.
- Labour has not suffered from the purge of competence and expertise that the Conservatives inflicted upon themselves in an effort to get Brexit through. There has certainly been a purge of Corbynites from the party at large, but the parliamentary party was mostly dead set against him from the beginning so this was much less costly of experience and expertise what the Tories did to themselves.
There is also historical data to suggest that Labour tends to do better on economic growth than the Conservaives, which fits with the pattern that I have repeatedly observed: that, at least in my lifetime in the US, Canada, and the UK, the centre left party (Democrats / Liberals / Labour) has typically done better on some of the key measures, such as deficit reduction, than the centre right party (Republicans / Conservatives / Tories) usually try to lay claim to. (I recall some years ago finding a nice set of graphs looking at defecits in particular; alas I can't quickly relocate them, so consider this more my stating my priors than making a specific claim.)
cpcallen
4mo ago
I have frequently quipped that "the [only significant] difference between American culture and Canadian culture is that Americans are very proud of being American, while Canadians are very proud of not being American."
I grant that, with the emergence of Trumpism, it seems increasingly clear that there are in fact aspects of US culture to which we have no good answer–but you are correct that I am much happier with mediocre but universal healthcare (in Canada or my adopted homeland of Britain) and would not trade it for the America alternative.
cpcallen
8mo ago
To me the most plausible claim you make is that all is all internal feedback would have been deflected. (I'd also give you the claim that all would have been forgotten after the PM got a promotion, except that unfortunately for then the promo cycle is a lot slower than the media cycle...)
cpcallen
10mo ago
I'm under the impression that parental (or in loco parents) supervision of children has been more or less steadily increasing since at least the 1930s, hence why kids are driven everywhere, parents get arrested for letting their teenage kids play in the park I'm unsupervised and "free range parenting" hads emerged as an effort to counter this insanity.
At what point do you think supervision decreased?
cpcallen
1yr ago
Ahh, I'd read only the article about the court cases. The article about Schmeister does read rather more like a hagiography.
It is interesting to realise that I have higher expectations for internal consistency if Wikipedia articles than I do for inter-article consistency.
cpcallen
1yr ago
Wow I keep forgetting how extortionate US phone plans are. Here in the UK £8/month will get you a perfectly good SIM-only plan with 10+ GB of data, and unlimited data starts at £15/month.
cpcallen
1yr ago
Is it standard, though? I've never presented any ID to court in any Canadian or UK election—and I have voted in many. I understand that the UK will now be requiring ID in future elections, but this is a novel development that the current government seems to have cribbed (like many of their more dubious electoral engineering projects) from the US Republicans.
cpcallen
1yr ago
Nominally, yes. But would they care about his open rejection of feminist ideology so much if he were stronger? In my observation the answer is usually either "yes, but not nearly so much" or "possibly, but they'd keep their opinions to themselves, at least around him", which amounts to the same thing from his point of view.
Attractive people (of both sexes) just get cut a lot more slack for their opinions and treatment of others.
cpcallen
1yr ago
Why would any government subsidize the creation of a colony with no expectation of ultimately realising the profits?
cpcallen
1yr ago
Can you elaborate about how some make folding impossible? Are you speaking only about the difficulty of avoiding taxation, or do you posit other ways that opting out, MGTOW-style, is insufficient/impossible?
(As to taxation: I can see some might the on average unequal contributions/disbursements for men and women a source of resentment, but I hardly think this is universal amongst unsuccessful men—consider that at least some are socialist—while plenty of successful men object to taxation on grounds unrelated to the disparate impact between men and women.)
cpcallen
1yr ago
For me the upvote/downvote mechanism did a lot better job of surfacing the most interesting things to read (posts and comments) that previous systems like Slashdot's moderation system.
cpcallen
1yr ago
Corporations benefitting at the expense of the public purse is not exactly a new idea. Indeed, it is one of the more compelling arguments against unfettered capitalism.
I would absolutely expect that corporations would like more cheap labour that is ultimately subsidised by taxpayers, especially in places where corporations are not themselves especially highly taxed. It's the same principle as Walmart workers on food stamps, writ large.
The likelihood that the general public would not buy the economic arguments in favour of immigration if they were more familiar with the numbers (at least in Denmark) may explain why those numbers do not seem to be particularly well reported.
cpcallen
1yr ago
I'm interested in knowing more about this. Growing up fairly poor it seemed like hand tools were ubiquitous but power tools were reserved for professionals and maybe rich hobbyists. I guess like horses and automobiles the ever-cheaper tech has reversed this dynamic?
Where do hand tool woodworking hobbyists congregate? Is Fine Woodworking magazine still relevant, or does it have too many power tools?
cpcallen
1yr ago
Not OP but: Perhaps to imply that there is much less mobility between them than the average American reader might expect had the word "class" been used instead? (And also to imply that birth remains disproportionately important in determining one's class despite increasing social and financial mobility.)
cpcallen
1yr ago
Notably the Japanese are reported to judge facial expressions much more on the eyes than other parts of the face, as compared to westerners. This is probably also why Japanese emoticons are eyes and nose laid out horizontally like so: O>O rather than full face like so: :-)
cpcallen
1yr ago
This talking point has been repeated ad nauseum but is it really true, though? I contend not: his candidateship brought an enormous influx of new members to the Labor party, resulting in it becoming the single largest political party by membership in Europe. The parliamentary Labor party evidently believed him to be unelectable—and did everything in their power to make sure that would be a self-fulfilling prophecy—but nevertheless under his leadership the Labor party made gains against the Tories in a snap election that Teresa May had opportunistically called to try to capitalize on Labour's supposedly weak leadership and Brexit position.
Corbyn was certainly deeply polarising, and in the end not an effective leader, but "unelectable" is not plausible except insofar as as his own party was willing to shoot themselves in the foot rather than risk finding out.
cpcallen
1yr ago
Hey, hands off: British Columbia is ours (or maybe the First Nations people's—though that's a culture war for another day) ;-)
cpcallen
1yr ago
This is interesting (but probably rather more so to those with at least a passing knowledge of football), but I admit that I'm not entirely clear what the culture war angle is. Just that the fans are NOT really taking sides, when they might ordinarily?
cpcallen
1yr ago
I don't know if the post is fake or not, but I do know that
know he should use a cutesy throwaway called "throwRA"
is not evidence one way or another: using a username with that prefix was previously a rule in that subreddit, that rule was promulgated vigorously enough that even people like me who do not regularly browse that sub knew about it, and it created a sufficiently strong convention that 12 of the current top 25 posts (sorted by hot, as of this moment) adhere to it.
cpcallen
1yr ago
I think it can go not only either but indeed both ways:
During university years I found myself living in a very strongly communitarian, church-oriented subculture, which made me excited about the idea of having kids of my own one day: I was surrounded by good models of strong families and the kind of "village" that makes raising kids seem not too daunting. Alas, things didn't work out as I might have hoped, due to my poor social skills and atheist (or at least strongly agnostic) views disqualifying me as a partner for essentially my entire peer group.
Latterly, during the pandemic, I had front row seats to my sibling's family; I still love my nephew and niece a great deal but seeing the day-to-day reality of raising a family absent a strongly family-positive community—and the strain it put upon the parent's relationship, which eventually dissolved—makes me now terribly reluctant to consider that path for myself.
cpcallen
1yr ago
I assume you've exhausted the list of Caldecott Medal books (older than 19xx)? That would seem like a place to start.
cpcallen
1yr ago
That is a valid question and of course the answer is "yes", but that doesn't mean that that is necessarily what is actually going on in this case, or that the "plausible justification" isn't a good enough argument to deserve to win on its own merits.
I was dimly aware that there was controversy about the naming, but everything I'd heard was about the ignominy of naming the telescope after a mere bureaucrat instead of an actual astronomer; this is actually the first time I've heard a "woke" objection to Webb, and so from my perspective it looks like the astronomers realised that they weren't going to win the day arguing tradition and merit and decided to try using progressive politics instead.
Given the current climate I'd have expected that approach to be much more successful (regardless of whether truth was on their side or not); alas it seems not.
Perhaps that's unsurprising: changing the nameplate on a spacecraft at L2 is not currently within NASA's capability...
I believe you correctly describe the general feeling about this, but even this UK centrist cannot help but notice how much more likely it is than an over–70 voter will already posess an acceptable piece of ID than an under-25 voter will. For example: why are travel passes for older persons accepted, but not ones for younger persons? Perhaps there is a good technocratric reason for the difference (maybe issuing of Freedom passes is more carefully regulated?) but I do expect that the incoming government to correct this apparent disparity rather than scrap the ID requirement altogether.
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