DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
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User ID: 180
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
4d ago
In my particular European country, 2008 threw the entire political system into permanent disarray. Societal trust never recovered, and the infrastructure-debt incurred by the austerity of the 2010s was never paid back.
I have honestly never gotten the feeling that we properly recovered from 2008, despite many economic indicators showing otherwise. The Southern European countries by and large don't even have those.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
No magnetosphere
Oh boy, you hit a pet peeve of mine.
There are plenty of nigh-insurmountable obstacles to terraforming Mars, but the lack of a magnetic field is really not one of them. Solar wind needed hundreds of millions of years to erode Mars' atmosphere to its current levels, you might as well say the Suez Canal was a waste of resources because plate tectonics will close the Straits of Gibraltar and dry up the Mediterranean 600 thousand years in the future.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Read through a textbook that covers the grammatical basics, install Anki and use it to memorize the most common ~1-2k words (this can be done at work), and read/watch a ton every day.
I've spent some time now looking for the data, and it's quite a lot harder to parse than I expected. There's undeniably been a huge drop in the asylum flow, but the effects of the 2019 socdem crackdown are obscured by the natural drop from the absurd mid-2010s highs, Covid, and now Ukraine. Although it's striking to me that even with Ukraine, the acceptance rates dropped from 85% in 2015 to 59% in 2022.
As for the secret sauce... my pet theory is that when the socdem's focus shifted leading up to 2019, they were uniquely positioned as having neither the ideology nor the monetary incentives (socdems are generally not liked in the circles that benefit from cheap labor) propping up the migration-friendly stance of their government.
The issue here is that in Europe this is impossible to do on the national level anymore.
Not true. Denmark's Social Democrats, of all people, pulled it off.
Talk about channeling Nixon going to China.
This is nonsense and you completely lack perspective. I've never owned a car in my life, which is completely normal here, coming from a small European city.
We are at Rome in 410 right now
If we're doing Rome analogies, I find the Crisis of the Third Century to be more apt.
The warrior emperors did not really have a great time in the Dominate era of Rome. Emperor Aurelian took back the seceding provinces in the 270s, sure, but then he was assassinated by the political system he left festering, and Rome was right back into crisis. If you're really intent on sticking to the 5th century, Emperor Majorian was another one of these types. He did basically the same thing as Aurelian in the 450s, and then got assassinated by one of those Gothic warlords you were pining for. So be careful what you wish for.
What truly saves a declining empire is not the great warrior and his army, it's the great reformer who cleans his room. The empire was lucky that Diocletian saved the empire with his pen after Aurelian failed with his sword. Nobody like that came after Majorian.
In anime and manga there are entire genres, most obviously slice-of-life comedies, where it is typical to have nearly 100% female casts (and a 50% or higher male audience).
Many of these are even written by women, with Bocchi the Rock being a recent prime example. Given that, I lean towards ideological distortion in media companies being the big culprit here.
I wouldn't. When I was a kid and my parents took me to buy school accessories, I always went out of my way to find the least colorful and most boring-looking stuff on the shelf to avoid attention from my classmates.
Still today, my smartphone case is transparent-gray, and my keyboard RGB is off at all times.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Depleted weapons stocks go both ways. China has reduced capacity to invade Taiwan because they won't be able to count on Russian military aid. The same goes for China's other allies (North Korea, Iran) because their stockpiles are also being tapped by the Russian war effort.
I find this "give up Ukraine to secure Taiwan" sentiment unconvincing. Had the West floundered on Ukraine, China would likely have launched their invasion of Taiwan months ago.
I posit that aiding Ukraine is in fact the anti-war position, just as handing a weapon to a man who's being mugged is "anti-mugging".
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I'm not seeing this discussed much so far, so I'd like to add that the global licensing clusterfuck routinely leaves hundreds of millions (if not billions) of people in the dark. Even living in a wealthy (but small) Western European country, the hand-wringing over piracy has never held any sway with me simply because services often don't reach my location, so this whole discussion often feels redundant.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
One particularly egregious example is that subtitles are under this umbrella.
So you're a pirate if you download .srt files.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I live among Nordic leftists, and I can tell you with certainty that they legitimately don't believe that mass immigration comes with problems.
Also, Sweden does have a historically-oppressed minority group, the Sami.
IIRC the leading explanation is that kids generally are productive enough on low-tech farms to be at least net-neutral on the farm's balance sheet. Even in the days of kids sweeping chimneys in Victorian England, that just doesn't work in cities. Probably not on high-tech farms, either.
Urbanization is what pulls fertility rates from 8 to 2.
There's no contest here, it's just urbanization. Looking at anything else is penny-pinching over decimals, while the elephant in the room is right there.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Low birth rates are caused by urbanization, this has been well understood for at least a century.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I find it hard to believe that there won't be a population equilibrium somewhere beyond the decline. The jury is still out on what exactly the fifth stage of the demographic transition looks like.
Has peak oil come about yet?
This is only a half tongue-in-cheek response. I haven't been able to find exact numbers for 2022. Though I did find this, suggesting the 2019 peak is still unsurpassed.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
I should amend my statement, as it's no doubt true that there were plenty of bad arguments made by atheists back in the day. I was more getting at that the core thesis they presented (something akin to "the existence of deities has not been demonstrated and therefore I don't believe") stood its ground as a viable position.
OP seems to see things differently.
But atheism on The Motte is usually not met with accusations that it is as absurd
The simplest explanation is that this forum is full of atheists.
I always got the impression that the arguments the New Atheist made were never successfully refuted and the whole thing ended with godless heathenry effectively being adopted into the Overton Window of acceptable opinions by the early-2010s, in exchange for them shutting the fuck up about it. But I'm an agnostic atheist myself, so hardly a neutral observer.
Regardless, if you or anyone else wants to take off the kid-gloves and rehash the existential arguments people were mired in 15 years ago, I'll probably be there to respond. I'm one of the few people left who still has some leftover interest in the topic.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
Our ability to throw objects is unmatched in the animal kingdom, and it's not even close.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
there does appear to be a wide scale attempt to infiltrate and subvert Christianity
They said this about the Arians, and the Waldensians, and the Lutherans, and the Fourth Congregation Southern Baptist Communion Restorationists.
Surely this time, though.
DingleberrySoup
Stool Mastication Enthusiast
1yr ago
This reads to me like a nation-scale version of the broken window fallacy.
Investment into infrastructure that's needed, but has yet to happen. In other words, it's what is "owed" to your country's infrastructure to keep everything functional at the desired level.
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