domain:firsttoilthenthegrave.substack.com
BurdensomeCount
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31m ago
Some people are better than others. Elite Human Capital is just the stock at the top of the hierarchy.
HereAndGone
39m ago
I genuinely think what will reduce meat eating is the price of meat and other animal products becoming ever more expensive, not vegan sermons about ethics and moralising about the monstrosity of liking roast chicken and burgers.
When we get back to the days of meat being a luxury item for the common man, then we'll all be eating more plants, pulses, and vegetarian/vegan alternatives. It'll be interesting to see how agri-business responds to the need to grow more crops to feed the world - I think the vegans may not like the results of what is needed for mass industrial farming in order to produce enough foodstuffs to feed the West (monoculture, insecticide and pesticide reliance, GMOs, huge fields cleared to be easy to plant, sow, and harvest those crops meaning no hedgerows or ditches or habitats for birds or wild flowers/plants, otherwise known as 'weeds', the demands on water, the problems with pesticide and fertiliser and insecticide run-off into ground water, and a hell of a lot more).
There's seven billion people in the world. We won't feed ourselves on a few herbs grown at home in window boxes.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
40m ago
Doing a similar standard of job for 30% of the price, or even doing the same job to an 80% standard for 30% of the price for almost all jobs is a very valid component to the merits of an individual for a job. Microsoft choosing to recognise and reward this doesn't reflect badly on either them or the person doing the job for cheap, the only person to boo here is the person who wants to extract economic rents by artificially restricting competition.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
51m ago
I'm not really that interested in buying anything. I suppose I'll need to get a helmet eventually, but outside of that this is more of a work with what I have situation.
Though I had an unrelated conversation with my sister recently about "boys" vs "girls" bikes, where I said I never saw the classic female bike design as peculiarly feminine, and outside of a bike that was pink or ribboned, I wouldn't really see a guy on a girls bike and think "fag."
If anything I could easily imagine one of those Traditional™️ masculinity™️ bloggers informing me that it was effeminate for a man to spread his legs to "mount" and "straddle" a men's bicycle.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
5m ago
And yet, somehow the state of Russia is explained by a lack of democratic norms.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
6m ago
Well I hope you voted to acquit or you have some terrible karma.
Sunshine
7m ago
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
9m ago
Dude literally picked the only country in the region that didn't have an authoritarian backslide at the time.
What is this meant to be a reference to please? Czechoslovakia? Because there was no reversion to authoritarianism in that case.
Estonia? Latvia? Lithuania? Poland? Romania? Bulgaria? Hungary? And yes, contrary to what you said below Germany also counts, of course. I'm almost impressed how you put your finger on the single country in the region that did not revert to authoritarianism, and are acting flabbergasted how I could possibly think they're not representative.
The "democratic tradition", the way the term is being used nowadays, of western Europe is more a result of the Cold War and it's alliance with the USA, than it does with anything that happened before the war. Even Spain and Portugal were dictatorships until the 70's.
The Asian Tiger route was a str ictly Southeast Asian (Confucian) phenomenon in the specific context of the Cold War and facilitated by generous and targeted American capital investment and the proto version of offshoring. None of that applied to Eastern Europe after 1989.
Whether or not it would work is another question (and the explanation of why it worked for Asia is a liberal just-so story that they had to scramble for after the fact, as they do with many things), all I'm saying is that it was an idea floated by public intellectuals at the time, although ultimately not attempted.
It was all a long-term consequence of German 'reunification' (the annexation of the former GDR into an unchanged federal state structure) being a complete shitshow which incidentally the Americans played no part in.
First of all it's worth reiterating that the "it" is "people voting the wrong way", something that clearly shows the "democratic traditions" are a cruel joke.
As to the causes, I mean, maybe? I could imagine that if the reunification went well the east Germans could be bread-and-circused into complacency, and would be just fine with brilliant ideas like importing seven zillion Syrians and Afghans, putting people in prison for speech, but locking them in a women's cell after they declare themselves a woman, and fining people €10K for misgendering them, but it's not immediately obvious to me. The psyops ran by the Americans on their western counterparts are legendary, to the point that anyone coming from a country with any amount of healthy patriotism comes away shaken after seeing the end result of they were put through.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
13m ago
That seems to be the face-value meaning of the term, but I have a feeling that there's a meme on the Motte that goes by the "Elite Human Capital" name.
Crowstep
19m ago
Another similar businessman, Elon Musk just tried his hand in politics obviously without the guiding hand of such a woman. Look how that turned out for him
Elon Musk married to a socially competent woman who he actually listens to would be a powerful thing.
Instead he has a weird harem and spends too much time on twitter.
Crowstep
21m ago
Long term I think more expensive food/meat is unlikely. We reached peak farmland in the late 90s. Since then we've been growing more food on less land. Future technologies aren't going to make food more expensive to produce, obviously, but AI and greater use of GMOs can definitely make it less expensive. And the world's population is likely to peak in the 2050s, with declines in the developed world way before then.
Of course, the birth rate and population collapse could also crash the global economy, making us much poorer overall. But I still suspect that food is something that will stay cheap or get cheaper.
Corvos
23m ago
Given that the 30% wages essentially work due to relative purchasing power and / or arbitrage between a Third World childhood and a First World adulthood, isn’t this global laissez faire approach basically poison for long-term economic growth?
If it becomes widely accepted that economic growth means an increased quality of life here and now, but that the window of opportunity only lasts maybe 1.5 generations before your (grand)children are priced out of the global market, that seems to make growth and laissez faire economics a much tougher sell.
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
24m ago
Whoa, whoa, hold your horses. Imperial Germany was absolutely an Obrigkeitsstaat (elite-state?) ruled by a small number of people with very token democratic institutions that were meant to channel republicanism into wearing itself out and discrediting itself via fruitless procedures conducted within a powerless framework. That "democracy" never amounted to anything, wasn't taken very seriously by non-activists, and got absolutely bulldozed over by the actual rulers whenever they didn't jump according to orders. The Prussians in general and Bismarck specifically had a habit of allowing seemingly republican instutions to take the wind out of activists' sails, only to pull the rug out from under them and have riot police beat the shit out of them a few years later. The counterrevolution was still very much going on in Imperial Germany.
So the "legacy of democratic" norms was really the legacy that democracy was a farce. Does that square with your perception of inter-war Germany?
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
30m ago
Genuine applause for taking one for the team. I protest your ban as unjust silencing for stating true facts about the world, with your only crime being that your blade was too sharp and well honed. I stand with you in solidarity. Omnes pro uno.
Corvos
35m ago
An excellent post, I didn’t think of this. Should have taken the female half of the deal more seriously. Mea culpa.
BahRamYou
36m ago
I was thinking earlier like medieval times, where it was less extreme but still gross by modern standards. I agree that most traditional societies are not very sustainable, we just forget about the ones that perish from massive crop failure.
Corvos
42m ago
this is more of a work with what I have situation
Fair enough, though I think renting one for a day would benefit you by giving you a better idea of what difficulties are coming from you vs your bike.
effeminate for a man to spread his legs to "mount" and "straddle" a men's bicycle
I’ll admit that putting a long, hard object between my thighs to get pounded repeatedly isn’t my idea of a fun time ;)
HereAndGone
54m ago
But what if they all make up a group mind and so they have intelligence and sentience? You just don't know! What if yeast have souls? What if yeast are souls, the soul of Gaia? All the individual organisms on the Earth make up one giant mega-organism, just like all the different cells in our bodies make up one mega-organism that we call the self! And besides, humans aren't conscious either, there is no one single unitary "I" or "self". So it's all the same!
(No, I don't believe any of this, but if one gets into the weeds of philosophical explorations of what is life, what is consciousness, why do you think it's not okay to shove the fat man into the path of the trolley, etc., one can easily discard common sense by the way).
There are two glaring problems with that. Imperial Germany had a legacy of democratic norms already - there was a legislative assembly, elections, political parties, political discussions in a free press etc. Also, Germany isn't in Eastern Europe.
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