BahRamYou
2mo ago
Romney portrays himself as a man of dignity and kindness
That feels like political jockeying to me. He didn't portray himself that way when he ran for president in 2012, or at least it wasn't a major part of his campaign. That was more like "Romney the capitalist vs Obama the socialist" or something. He's rebranded himself recently to try to make a brand that's distinct from Trump without directly opposing him. But it's all kayfabe- in the end they're not that far apart on actual policy issues.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
But a lot of them are still doing the same old grindfest. "good grades, good test scores especially in math. No extracurriculars except violin, piano, and helping in the family business." It really causes a lot of them to punch below their weight.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
well, you could find some other way to work the system. Start a "service club" where you do volunteer work in the ghetto, rather than practicing violin. Something like that. The volunteer work could be anything, it doesn't even have to be real.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
This sounds hilarious, but also raises a genuine question. Why aren't the tiger moms already doing this? It seems like a lot of striving asian families are still doing things the old-fashioned way, sending their kids off for piano and violin classes. They seem smart enough to realize that the system is rigged against them (hence the lawsuit), but not smart enough to work the system and send their kids to the ghetto.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
very good comment, reported for quality.
I think an actually effective sex ed class would involve trying on different condoms to see how they feel and find one that you like. But admittedly that's not possible with the low-trust world we live in. So instead we get a gym coach screaming at us about STDs and maybe, if we're lucky, putting one on a banana.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Probably not many, but at least a few i guess. This election is so close you never know what might be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
nah this is just a standard political debate in US politics these days.
The Biden v Trump one made me feel a lot more "doomed."
BahRamYou
2mo ago
OK this is just silly now.
Harris: "the central park 5!"
Trump: "the economy!"
Harris: "I have a plan!"
I don't know what's even going on anymore.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
are the Japanese blaming Americans/western powers for their financial situation
I really don't think so. I mean, maybe there's a few reactionaries on the internet who think that way, but it's not normal. Americans didn't wreck their economy, that was just the natural effect of the 80s/90s bubble bursting. Maybe some people are annoyed that certain areas are getting flooded with tourists, most notably Kyoto, but that's about it.
what are the Japanese going to do in response, etc.
Probably nothing. their political system is heavily controlled by one party full of very old men who don't want anything to change. But they did raise interest rates slightly.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I mean, I don't really know what it was like to live back then. but there were some interesting advantages. eg:
Were the goods available in a day really comparable to those in a modern grocery
They had a million varieties of cheese and baked goods that have been lost to time since the people making them died in WW1. And old-growth french wines that are now changed, for similar reasons. A wide variety of things that would now be considered "artisinal" compared to the highly processed fructose and tasteless GMO vegetables available at a standard american big-box grocery store.
Or, in poem form:
"Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by a mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any color I please, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknel, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under the balloons."
So they definitely weren't lacking for fun shopping options.
The appliances, sure, I'll grant you that one. Though I'll point out that since we're just talking about the upper-middle class here, they would have all had a servant or housewife to take care of that stuff for you. Watson wasn't washing his own laundry or cooking his own food, he had "help" for that.
It’s unlikely that their entertainment was better. Not just for the meme reasons, either, but because we kept almost all the good stuff.
Well, not exactly. So much of their entertainment back then was live. Live theater (shakespeare!), live opera, live musicals, live discussion in the social clubs. We have to pay out the nose for a trip to Broadway to get that kind of experience. I'll grant you that their movies haven't exactly aged well, but they were thrilling for the people of their time.
Medicine... well yeah, it's certainly improved. But from everything I've read, it hasn't actually improved that much for most people. It's mostly been the decrease in child mortality that really moved the needle. People still lived well into old age, just like they do now. And being able to quickly and affordably get a housecall from a doctor means you can treat simple stuff fast, and avoid getting infected from someone else at the hospital, which really does make a difference.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
Noah Smith had a good article about Japan's currency crisis: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/is-japan-having-a-currency-crisis. The TLDR is yes, it's a very serious issue that with no clear solution. But for what it's worth, the yen has gone up recently in value since they hiked interest rates.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I see lots of people downvoted you, but I'm right there with you. At least in spirit, although I'd to see a longer effort-post acknowledging the pros and cons of this. I hate how so much of our American society is engineered towards convenience, and people treat aeshetics as if it doesn't matter at all. I think that's part of the reason so many tourists fly to Europe or Japan, is just so they can bask in the aesthetics of walking around a low-car city that looks nice.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
What I was trying to say is that it isn't lack of talent, but lack of training. Playing QB in college is obviously tough, but they're still just amateurs who are have only been playing competively for a few years. It's a totally different job being QB there, versus playing against top-tier adult professional in the big league. In college they can kind of coast on talent and instinct, but playing in the NFL requires specialized training that most people just don't get until they're already in the league, which is why you often see 1-st round draft picks flame out while later round picks require years to develop before eventually becoming ready for prime time.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
It's obviously propaganda. I don't know how you look at the guy on the left or right and think "yep, that's what an average typical American/South Korean looks like."
BahRamYou
2mo ago
If you could get enough land to be a commercial farmer for relatively cheap
In that case you wouldn't be considered poor by 1900s standards. The "dream" for a lot of people back then was to own land and be a farmer. The reality for most working poor was being a factory worker, a household servant, or a tenant farmer on someone else's farm. And that's assuming they could get a job at all and weren't just unemployed, like many were, leading to a lot of surplus men looking to sign up for the army.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I mean, what exactly are you missing? Be specific. They had coal and gas to keep themselves warm, not that different from today. They could get stuff delivered literally the same day, actually faster than today. They had books, newspapers, comics, movies, and West End musicals to keep themselves entertained, often in much higher quality than what we have today. They had doctors who could come pay you a house call at a moment's notice. They had police who would take on a serious, lengthy investigation to solve a burglary, let alone a murder. They had a trustworthy news service to keep them up-to-date on world events. They had a stock ticker to let them make real-time stock trades for the sort of thing that any normal, non-day trader needs to do. It was a very comfortable middle-class life!
The only thing I'll grant you was that life for the lower classes was much worse then, since so much of their life was built on the backs of the working poor. But it's not like a normal, middle-class professional really needed to think about how the Royal Navy did their signalling.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I think Vienna, Paris, and New York were all pretty good places around 1900, no? Or really any capital city of a western nation. I don't think London had any exclusive technology that the other countries didn't have. Instead there was a big effort to connect the world, via telegram, steamship, and zeppelin.
That feels like a market failure. It shouldnt be that hard, in a country of 350 million people, to turn up a few good QBs each year. I suspect the problem is that most non-pro teams are focused on a weird combination of "good sportsmanship" and "we need to win right now, so lets just run it every play." There's no youth development systen like the big pro Soccer clubs have in Europe.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
I was mostly going off of SSCs infamous neoreactionary post, which claims it was about 100x lower back then. Maybe different sources say different things?
This depended a lot on where you were living, no? Keynes describes pre-ww1 London as an oddly modern place:
“The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth ... he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world.”
They had most of the things we take for granted like electricity, flush toilets, fancy clothes, subways, cars (for the rich) or fast horse-drawn taxis for the not-so-rich. They also had things that would be considered luxurious even today, like multiple mail deliveries per day, or (briefly) an underground pneumatic tube delivery system . And of course, vastly higher trust and social capital than we have today.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
The problem there is the Japanese oil crunch. With Britain, the Netherlands and the USA all embargoing Japan and guaranteeing each other's colonies, there weren't really a lot of good options for the Japanese.
Well, the oil they wanted was in the Dutch east indies, not the American Phillippines. So they could have just gone for that without attacking the USA. I do agree that the US would have likely gotten involved eventually, but just delaying that a bit could have made a difference. Notably, it was Germany that declared war on the US, not the other way around- Hitler wanted to show support for his new ally.
If. Historians are split on whether the logistics could be stretched far enough to let Rommel reach the Suez, even with ~unlimited troops due to no Barbarossa.
Well, there's no way to know for sure of course. But Malta is a small island. In 1940 it was defended by a grand total of 3 biplanes. So if the Italians had gone for it they probably could have taken it. Or Germany could have taken it in 1942 with greater numbers. Then with Malta gone, Axis shipping in the Meditteranean becomes much safer. Plus with no Barbarossa they'd have the entire air force at their disposal for support, and could focus more resources on building ships, so logistics overall would be better. There's also the option to go after Turkey and/or Spain, opening another land route.
I'm not trying to see this would be easy or guaranteed. But I do think it was possible.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
no ICBMs yet, but nuclear bombers are still almost unstoppable
Bear in mind that 1940s fission bombs were not all that powerful. They were devastating to Hiroshima because that was a densely packed city of thin wood and paper. The brick/cement buildings of Germany were actually pretty resistant to bombing, which was part of why the strategic bombing campaign never worked as well as the allies hoped. So it's plausible we could have gotten a 1984 style world where they are regularly getting hit by nuclear bombs, but people survive and life goes on.
The most plausible scenario i've seen is where Germany simply avoids declaring war on the USSR, and coordinates better with Japan to avoid provoking the US. Instead they focus on the Mediterranean and taking apart the British Empire. If they could take Malta, Gibralter, and the Suez, that would pretty much lock up the entire med, protecting their southern flank and forcing the British to reroute shipping around Africa. Then they offer to come "liberate" Iraq, Iran, and India, which were all sympathetic to the Axis. At that point it's no longer a "world" war, it's simply a war against the British being fought in the middle east, so there's no particular need for the US or USSR to get involved, and the logistics for the Uk become nightmarish. No need to invade Britain, you can just ignore them, or build up a huge fleet of next-gen type XXI submarines to strangle them.
I feel like Trump is just too old and tired now. Not as much as Biden, but he's clearly lost a step compared to what he had before. There's no energy, no zingers, no new ideas, nothing but repeats of his old slogans.
On the other hand Harris is also just... a shockingly bad candidate. She was terrible in the 2020 primary debates. She didn't understand the issues, she didn't have any charisma, and her most memorable moment was... attacking Biden for being racist. I couldn't believe that he still chose her after that, and then now basically gave her the nomination. She would have been destroyed in a proper primary.
So this is a weird election where most of the focus is on the VP picks, because they're a lot more articulate than the actual presidential candidates. I guess the strategy will be for both candidates to just limit their appearances as much as possible. Very odd.
I won't vote because I hate the stupid charade that my one vote is supposed to matter, and because politics is the mind killer, so not voting keeps me sane. But if you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose one of them I'd pick Trump.
BahRamYou
2mo ago
That's just reddit, it's where misanthropic nerds go to hang out. The compassionate people are still there in real life local government meetings, spending hours arguing fiercely for why the homeless should be allowed to do whatever they want and the rest of us just have to take it.
it'll be interesting to see if this story sticks around and gets more attention, leading to more investigation, or if the media can just quietly sweep it away. Trump might have accidentally stumbled upon a winning move in that debate by bringing it up, even as clumsily as he did.
It's honestly a classic Trump move. He starts off by making a ridiculous claim "they're in here eating cats!" but then when you try to debunk that claim, it ends up looking almost as bad. "OK, they do eat cats in Haiti, but not here." "Oh, they're just eating waterfowl." "All 20k of them are peaceful, lawabiding folks who have perfectly adapted to American culture." "Yeah btw we dumped 20k migrants in this one random town in the midwest, but it'll be fine."
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