No_one
Underemployed Slav. Likes playing Factorio.
User ID: 1042
Absolutely not. At least in EU, state capacity is the lowest it's been since 1800.
Everything is wrapped in red tape. Nothing can be done fast. British were recently found to have wasted 500k pages on a planning application. Oh - that was debunked, it was only 63000 pages.. Been 9 years and 260 million pounds though. On a planning application.
Granted, EU is not this bad, that's Britain, but Europe is still pretty screwed and there's no indication the worst offenders - judges, courts and activists that basically decide what the law is are going to be removed. Most salient example is that removing undesirables is impossible in Germany and France, both countries have hundreds of thousands of people ordered to leave who are still there, committing crime and iirc also collecting welfare.
The power structure is currently occupied by declaring its few citizens willing to speak up for their own interests are dangerous far-right radicals. Yes, and as always trying to pass chat-control. New round of that idiocy in december.
No_one
2mo ago
It also radicalized an enormous amount of people who are now extremely pissed off because the covid hysteria was needless, wasted enormous resources and all that. And then there was the jab, which was at the very least pushed onto younger people who could not benefit from it unless they were blobs. I'm unclear on the reports of somewhat elevated cancers, but it's worth looking at in detail.
So whether there's any state capacity left especially for any pandemic measures now is a very open question that's not easy to answer.
No_one
2mo ago
I am legitimately confused. None of this seems to make sense.
On the contrary, it makes perfects sense. If you take people from a chaotic and poor country, and not the best people and send them to a place that's not poor and not chaotic and just let them loose, without close supervision, they're going to behave in a chaotic manner.
They, or a substantial part of them were apparently relocated there as a part of a scheme to provide cheap workforce, but I find it doubtful that most of them even work. We know the statistics, we know they don't know the language and have low ability on average. So low that profitably employing them is a challenge.
Haiti is one of the poorest countries on Earth. You surely know of the observations Scott Alexander made and then deleted off the internet out of fear?.
No_one
2mo ago
Demoralization is saying the community has been destroyed and the place is conquered. That is only so if you believe it is so.
Community in America barely exist because commercial businesses and government has taken over all the functions of community. As government is failing, if you put put people under enough pressure due to lack of security and it's going to form in the absence of active disruption by state agents.
Even deportation is probably going too far for most of them.
The people in the city meetings were desperate. Removing the Haitians somewhere else isn't "too far".
No_one
2mo ago
Counterpoint: maybe a world in which a murderous battle royale for enough arable land ensued would've been preferable, because it'd have removed the less capable races from taking up valuable space. It'd have been a tragedy for anthropologists, but probably a net gain for the species as a whole.
I don't particularly care that I'm alive one way or another and I think this is the right attitude. Human greatness as expressed in technological achievement, energy production and intelligence, in aggregate, is what matters, and I do not see how the entirety of Africa or India is helping anyone or anything.
I don't get the 'knowing about the universe' part at all. Some of the SW games and media are cool- i really liked Dark Forces game and also Tie Fighter, the one game where you could play for the right side, but the closer you look the worse it gets. I used to read the wiki they had to see the lore but it's really ..dire.
These days if I want a decent skiffy game I just play Stellaris some. Real future is just too horrific to contemplate.
No_one
2mo ago
It's kinda.. basic though. And also Rampart's special building (bank) is really nuts. I played them all but although Homm V was the best, mechanically at least.
The best 4x fantasy strategy game I ever played was Age of Wonders 2. They fucked it up with 3, they made it boring somehow. No idea how.
It's kind of like Homm except there's no stacking of units, the magical system is way more fun with domains and domain spells.
No_one
2mo ago
My parents paid cca $80 to have me off their hands for three weeks.
You understand the laboring part was only first five days and then 1/4 of the time ? Each scout patrol would take turns in doing the camp-keeping part.
No_one
2mo ago
I'm very much in agreement with this. Kids need stress, and not just of the exam kind.
One of my less pleasant but ultimately pretty beneficial childhood experience was attending a summer Scouts' camp at age 10. I was a member of the detachment but the summer camps weren't mandatory.
Anyway, it was somewhat unpleasant, mostly because the level of discipline demanded was fairly high, and as a very pre-pubertal kid* I didn't even have any machismo motivation that helped later with unpleasant things like bathing in very cold water.
And of course the labor, cut down dry trees, sawed them for firewood, cooked all the food, carted all the water and we built the camp ourselves. It was nothing dangerous or backbreaking, especially not for the smallest kids, but novel for bookish nerds.
The food wasn't the greatest usually, as you'd expect when the guy who is overseeing it is usually a teenager, and there's no real refrigeration apart from keeping stuff in a cool stream. We only ate meat once during the whole camp. Really helped with fixing my attitude to food too. I stopped being picky.
I remember I cried halfway through when the parents were visiting, but ultimately stayed.
No_one
2mo ago
raising paramilitary groups and murdering people in street fights was not very common
Entire Europe had a wave of revolutionary violence in the 19th century. There was a surely a number of coups. At the very least Serbia had a pretty nasty coup in which the monarch was killed, his wife too and the killers kept her severed breast, later dried, as a souvenir. Those nice guys who did the coup later were a proximate cause to WW1..
Napoleon was an absolute ruler and also almost united Europe.
one form (democracy) to another (dictatorship), I would think most people would call that "abnormal"
Greeks believed it's natural for democracies to decay into dictatorships, and when considering the fate of western liberal democracies - none are actually much democratic anymore insofar as voting doesn't help. (no one voted for immigration, no one voted for more war, Macron lost elections yet he gave the premiership to a party that got 39 seats, down 22 from their last result. Not to the victors - the left coalition, not to his party or to nationalist. The guys who came in fourth, somehow. How's that supposed to even work ? I guess they must have parliament unable to declare no confidence in the cabinet.
Considering the trend of the last hundred years, I'd call it 'normal'.
Democracy means less and less, people can vote on things but not on the things that matter.
No_one
2mo ago
True. I didn't mean to imply other media are good.
It's all so horribly lame at times I almost feel compelled to start translating some of the clever stuff I read into Czech. Not sure where one could post it where it wouldn't be entirely pointless.
No_one
2mo ago
Ultimate eugenic 'melange' is finding the very best genomes and mating these together. It'd probably be a mix of all these, yes.
No_one
2mo ago
I gotta disagree with that. The way things were going, Jews would've died by war's end, and the insistence Germans had in trying to get their allies to give up their Jews was notable.
Here's a pretty funny quote about the Italian attitude to German demands for Jews.
It's quite possible persecution of Slavs would have lessened to making sure they speak good German or language suppression. But not certain at all.
No_one
2mo ago
This is all to say, Hitler was not a normal leader, and whatever priors we have about how "normal countries" work don't apply here.
.. I'm not sure how unprecedented that was. Absolute monarchs were common in Europe until mid 19th century. Hitler was essentially that, no?
No_one
2mo ago
Slovak media are very lame. It's a small country, little talent. No money in media, so only lame people or partisans will do it. I haven't watched TV in decades but the overall level of newspapers is now abysmal, and Ukraine derangement syndrome and war mania made it even worse. Merely overhearing DennikN (probably the best general newspaper) podcasts while visiting my mother makes me cringe.
Fico is likely a psychopath so he's going to 'do the needful' and be as flexible as is required. No idea why he'd sign this, but it's either blackmail or greed. He is believed to have a very finite life expectancy due to heart issues and expected to die within a few years unless he gets a heart transplant, but he's drinking heavily and not a good candidate for one. This I overheard from family who are doctors in the capital.
No_one
2mo ago
far right
literally the only thing that makes them 'far right' is opposition to infinity migration.
further normalization of the German- and by extension European- far right.
Bullshit.
Citizenry never wanted this level of immigration. It was imposed from above by foreign agents in the so-called 'civil society' and by domestic activists who used regulations and humsn rights legislation to do an end run around democracy and majority interests.
'Far right' is code for minimum amount of noticeable political activity by natives in pursuit of their long term interests.
No_one
2mo ago
If the story is true, why is U.S. intelligence leaking the details now?
Ukraine is losing, so they need to look like they deserve it.
No_one
2mo ago
...because tropical diseases and animals are infinitely less lethal than their fellow men ?
You really think you'd rather be exposed to Steppe Nomads than elephants ?
No_one
2mo ago
I have no place to store a bicycle.
You can hang it under a ceiling. There are also foldable ones.
Also, as there are electric unibikes, check whether someone isn't making an e-unicycle.
No_one
2mo ago
Lot of gypsies in Slovakia split up after child benefit was capped at three kids...
No_one
2mo ago
Childhood mortality at 50 % was a good thing because it purged suboptimal genes from the genepool.
They have some cat-eating custom apparently ...
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