marinuso
1yr ago
HBD isn't ever the only factor. North and South Korea are a great example of that. (But note that almost all Americans are recently descended from adventurers, while Europeans on the other hand are descended from the people who didn't go on adventure.)
The EU's economic (and to a point also social) policy is basically corporatism (in the old sense). That makes sense, because that's what Germany has always been like since the Kaiserreich, and France is ultimately quite similar even though it got there via a different route. It's better than communism as an economic system, but it's not going to get you the raw economic performance of USA-style capitalism. (Proponents will defend it on other grounds.) There's been some movement away from it - it was much, much more intensely so as late as the 90s - but only slowly and carefully.
More community cohesion might actually have a drawback as well. People are less independent. If you have to worry about what the neighbours will think, you're less likely to go and try something. The social response to ambition is often: "who does he think he is?". You're not supposed to rise above your station. If you try it you earn the ire of your peers; if you succeed then doubly so, and also your new peers won't quickly accept you.
The USA's quasi-libertarian foundation, though marred as it is by now, helps a lot. You're allowed to be ambitious. The system won't usually actively try to prevent you from succeeding. Worse average human capital - if that even is the case - is mitigated by the fact that the variance is allowed to be a lot higher. The people at the top of the bell curve get to invent things that improve the whole society, and become filthy rich in the process.
Your old friends will generally be proud, not envious. Your new peers will respect you for having managed to climb up, not look down on you for not having 1000 years of nobility behind you. The government won't - at least not nearly as much as in Europe - kick you right back down for interfering with the profits of the 1000 years of nobility.
The ghettos in the cities don't impede that process much. They could, if the problem gets too bad, but the USA is no South Africa yet.
marinuso
1yr ago
Well, I doubt that.
The editors aren't there of their own accord, even the chief editor isn't there on his own behalf. They're people doing jobs. Of course any of them could go rogue and maybe manage to get something published once or twice, but they would be swiftly removed from their positions. If their loyalty was in question they wouldn't have been hired in the first place.
The owners could reposition the paper, but then again, no one doubts that the Sulzbergers are anything but elite.
marinuso
1yr ago
I mean, you can't, really, it's not for sale.
The USA could've used its might to pressure Denmark into selling it, if it really wanted to and was willing to take off its diplomatic mask entirely over Greenland of all places. But given that, it could've just as well used its might to pressure Denmark into simply giving it up, or done a Crimea on it.
Or it could've done what it usually does, and put its money and weight behind an "independence" movement (that it could astroturf out of whole cloth if need be), and then simply occasionally remind the new Supreme Leader of Greenland who put him there, who keeps him there, and why.
But it doesn't even need to do that, since the Danish government is already de facto the USA's pet poodle, so there is nothing to be gained.
I wouldn't say the New York Times editor is all that elite as an individual.
He's part of a powerful group, certainly, but the only power he exercises is on behalf of the group and in conjunction with the rest of the group. He has little individual decision making power and is not a mover or shaker in his own right. If he goes against the group, he's out. And he's unlikely to have significant pull within the group on his own either. He may have DoJ officials on speed dial, but he certainly can't call in favours on his own personal behalf and he will be in trouble if he attempts. He's a cog in a machine.
This is in fact reflected in their income which is ~$76k a year on average. That's certainly not nothing, but it certainly isn't fuck-you money either. It's enough to live comfortably, but it's not going to allow you to build a serious buffer so you can pick fights later.
The car dealer may be further removed from national power in a 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon' sense, but he has more money. If he, as an individual, wants to try and get something done, he has more money to try it with. If someone picks a fight with him, he has more money to defend himself. As an individual, he is in a better position than the NYT editor.
On a national scale neither is elite, their individual influence can both be rounded down to zero. But don't forget that in small towns, people like this successful car dealer are often the ones who rule the roost. The car dealer's words will have measurable weight there, if he wants them to.
marinuso
1yr ago
raising everyone to as close to the maximum intelligence possible
You don't want that anyway.
Someone's got to clean the toilets, and it would be better if that person weren't an 150 IQ would-be rocket surgeon who only isn't a rocket surgeon because he lost a politics game. After all, only so many people can be rocket surgeons, and if everyone is smart then the losers will have to lose for a different reason.
It wouldn't even be a good reason. Then you have a mass of 150-IQ angry losers on your hands, all of them applying their smarts to remedying the problem of not being on top. You think it's bad now, you just wait.
marinuso
1yr ago
It is a luxury to be able to avoid spontaneous human connection, to only have it when you specifically want it and shut it out otherwise. Americans are so rich that this luxury is available to most.
Public transport is a great example. It's true you won't get stabbed or robbed on the bus in most of Europe (though with all the migration this is starting to change in places). But there's still the teenagers with the obnoxious music, the people yelling at their cell phones, the loud and messy eaters, the couples all but having sex, the other couples fighting, the screaming little children, the occasional beggar. And the people who won't take showers, and of course the fat guy who insists on sitting next to you even though there's an empty bench available. It's a lot of spontaneous human connection, and all of it negative.
And if you can afford a car you can avoid it all. What you're really buying is isolation, and it's worth quite a lot. (Well, that, speed, and reliability.)
There are times when you need it, of course, especially when you still need to establish yourself and need to get into contact with a lot of people to find openings. Americans have college campuses, which of course have their own problems. Europeans tend to just use the city as a whole for that purpose. But once you've established yourself, mostly the negatives remain, especially since should you need something you can draw on your existing circle. The commenter above has a wife and a kid. What does he need to find out in the wild, another wife?
Europe has its suburbs too. They don't always look like American ones because people can't afford McMansions (rowhouses and apartments are more common), but they serve the same purpose. To be far enough away from it all to offer its denizens some isolation.
marinuso
1yr ago
After all that programming meetup was hosted in an LGBT space.. which might just answer your question
This would be plenty of reason for me not to attend an event I otherwise might. Not even out of 'hatred' or whatever. Foremost I'd feel like an intruder in another's place.
marinuso
1yr ago
Ukraine is not generally valuable in-and-of-itself to ANYONE but the Ukrainians. Neither the U.S. nor Russia stands to achieve much economic gains from merely controlling the territory, so in that sense broad destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure is acceptable to both parties.
They found a bunch of large natural gas deposits in Eastern Ukraine and in the sea off Crimea, in the early 2010s right before everything kicked off.
marinuso
1yr ago
I don't think the high rates of gay and trans identification among Zoomers is at all the result of indoctrination (though I think at times policy can reinforce it), I think it's the result of teenagers being teenagers and doing the I'm trying to find myself, maaaaaan thing that many of the now-conservative Boomers did before them, which is what happens in a world focused on consooming and defining oneself.
There is a difference between teenagers now and the Boomers in their time.
As far as I can tell (though I haven't been a teenager for a while so I could of course simply be missing it), there's pretty much no real teenage rebellion. I don't see them doing much that the powers that be aren't supporting and encouraging. E.g. declaring yourself to be something LGBT-esque is supported and encouraged, becoming a climate activist is supported and encouraged, etc etc. It leads me to believe that if the establishment were supporting and encouraging different things, they'd be doing those things instead.
marinuso
1yr ago
The tyrant isn't equal to everyone else under the law, otherwise he's not a tyrant. I'd say the tyrant's ability to decide on a personal basis who to oppress and who to favor is what makes him a tyrant in the first place.
If littering is punished by summary execution, and the law is enforced in a fair manner, it would be a very harsh law but not necessarily tyranny. In principle a democracy could have such a law if the populace voted for it.
marinuso
1yr ago
They're nowhere near as screwed as us yet. The EPA is part of the executive branch. The next president can simply order them to change it back.
As for the EU, decision making has been moved pretty much entirely out of the remit of anyone who is elected, and the only legal, democratic way to put a halt to it at this point is if everyone all at once were to vote to install national governments that leave the EU.
marinuso
1yr ago
I'm sure that rich people will still be allowed to drive. So in some picky technical sense it will not be a outright ban
It's even a little more nuanced than that, as with electric vehicles you have to pay more for more range.
The masses will go on buses. Managers may be able to buy a car that fits their commute, but the range and charging limitations mean it's only good for the commute, you can't do anything else besides. So you've bought a more comfortable commute, but no freedom.
Upper management can get 50km range on top of that. A little freedom. And so on, and for the real rich we'll keep ICE vehicles that can just go wherever, whenever.
marinuso
1yr ago
It's not a surprise to me, which is why I can't but assume that it isn't a surprise to the policymakers either.
Therefore, importing "fungible economic units" can't be the real reason.
Western governments see the way out as importing foreign 'fungible economic units'; young tax payers that their source countries have paid the cost in educating that they can brain drain off to grow the tax base and act as workers to prop up the economy and service the aging population.
Here's a graph from a report from the Netherlands. (Here's the full report, but it's in Dutch.)
The Y axis is how likely an immigrant is to leave again within 10 years, the X axis is how likely an immigrant is primarily on welfare after 2 years. There is an obvious relationship: people who want to build what we'd call a proper life, don't want to stay here.
And honestly who can blame them. You'll get taxed half to death, and harassed and robbed in the street by the people your tax money is going to. If you're not born here, why would you put up with that? If you're already moving, you may as well move to a nice place. It's only the people with ill intent, who intend on becoming the harassers and robbers, who'd want to stay here long term. They lead decent enough lives, better than any honest members of the working class.
Of course, this means that immigration is a net drain on the tax base, as every report has shown and every policymaker must by now know. I'm sure it's the same in the rest of Northern and Western Europe. Bringing people in because it's good for the economy is not even a good excuse anymore.
marinuso
1yr ago
If anything, this shows Trump must really be quite clean, if this is all they can throw at him.
After all, he was a real estate developer in New York in the 1970s and 80s. I would have expected way worse.
marinuso
1yr ago
I don't know how we do that either.
That'll happen by itself when anyone can create a fake scandal with little effort. "That's fake" won't just be a believable excuse, but everyone's default assumption.
marinuso
1yr ago
Low on make-up, rather tomboyish
Note that you have to dress in a practical manner for these jobs. If you do any kind of physical work you can't dress up much, it'll just get ruined and get in the way of your work. You don't know what they look like when they're out on a date.
marinuso
1yr ago
That activist, by himself, isn't powerful at all. Maybe the movement he's is powerful, but its goals are set by the people at the top - who don't live off $24k a year. In fact, if the activist wants to remain in the movement, he has to make sure his opinions change when those of the leaders do.
The doctor is likely more powerful, albeit just a little, because he has more money to spend.
marinuso
1yr ago
Critical theory and postmodernism are products of France and Germany,
Kind of, but not really.
They got their start in France and Germany, but were further developed in the US, gained traction in the US, are now being exported from the US, and by the time it gets back to France and Germany they don't recognize it. When you see any critical theory or postmodernism pushed in Europe, it's the US version. Often even using the English words for the concepts, either directly or as literal, mechanical translations.
marinuso
1yr ago
This causes everyone's cars to rust.
It'd be legitimately better to just dump the salt in a hole, should they really need to waste it.
marinuso
1yr ago
A hospital might have huge margins because competitors are barred by law from entering the marketplace.
It's even called a CON.
marinuso
1yr ago
Is English your mother tongue?
It isn't mine, and I don't know how to spell English words. I'm somehow capable of it, but I don't remember how I learned (it must've been at school but I don't remember anything about the method other than that they had us copy words a lot), and I could not describe the rules.
Dutch spelling is regular. The method of teaching kids to read essentially hasn't changed in over a century. It involves learning the sounds that letters make and then sounding them out, but that's a lot easier when it's pretty much always the same except for loanwords.
I'm confident I could teach a kid to read without any pre-made teaching materials at all, even though I have no training other than my own literacy - in Dutch. Not in English though, even though I'm personally just as literate in English. I couldn't teach a cooperative English-speaking adult to read. I have no conscious idea what I'm doing when I write in English.
marinuso
1yr ago
This is pretty much the definition of a coup-complete problem though. Whatever new payment technologies anyone may come up with, they will need to interface with the existing infrastructure to be of any use, and the people controlling the existing infrastructure can just decide not to allow it.
Everything can be faked. That's not necessarily bad, seen from the side of the movement.
In Havel's Czechoslovakia, by the time he wrote his 'Power of the Powerless', probably few of the Communist Party members were "real communists". That wasn't really the point, the power of the organization called the "Communist Party" over society was the point. In a sense there was a political test, that everyone was faking, from the greengrocers up. It didn't matter that you faked it, all that mattered is that a) you were aware enough that you knew you were supposed to at least fake it, and b) you were willing to fake it - even just for the sake of personal advancement - rather than insist on honesty. In doing so you were both submitting to the system, and contributing to empowering the system.
Every man who shows up and claims to be nonbinary to get a job is doing something similar. They don't say, this is an unfair way to hire people. They say, I'm an enby so I should get a job too. They legitimize it and empower it and in doing so chain themselves to it. They become part of it.
For all that it looks like undermining the stated goals of the movement, the workers of the world never really did unite either. I doubt that bothered the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia (or the other communist countries) one bit.
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