marinuso
1yr ago
OTOH, I almost hit a cyclist when going home today because I didn't see him because all I saw was lights in the darkness.
If the bots manage to get something done about the megawatt floodlights on rich people's cars nowadays, then I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords.
marinuso
2yr ago
On the other hand, if there's ever a time to do something like that it's now. The used car market has gone mad. I could literally sell my car for more than I paid for it.
marinuso
2yr ago
Most people were very panicked about Covid until early 2022. And even though this fear was largely unfounded
This is due to the media hyping it up. If Trump had been a Covid maximalist, the media would've been on the other side.
marinuso
2yr ago
It's fairly predictable which neighbourhoods vote for whom. The return address is plenty of information on its own. A rogue mailman could make the votes disappear before they even formally make it into the system.
On top of that, even normal letters get lost or delayed in the mail all the time. It doesn't even need to be malice. If there were only postal votes, pure standard negligence operating procedure would likely cause a fair bit of difference all on its own.
marinuso
2yr ago
If this were in any other country, the UN's election monitors would cry foul. And not entirely unreasonably. Even assuming that the election is entirely legit and no one involved at all means badly, with a process like this, what reason does anyone have to believe that?
Ultimately, you can't have a functioning democracy if you can't convince the losers that they lost a fair game. In order to do that, it is imperative not to have procedural problems during the elections, let alone systematic procedural problems.
marinuso
2yr ago
If the police did their jobs , events like 2020 would have not happened at all (probably blame the media, lawyers, and politicians for that).
Over 200 black people are killed by police each year in the US. (Though they seem to have stopped recording race recently.) It follows that George Floyd-style protests aren't actually caused by cops killing black people. There would be several riots per week.
The media are much more of a causative factor here. They're the ones who decide when and onto what to focus attention.
It also follows that better policing won't solve it. Police will always remain human. The number will never be zero. Even the number of dumb mistakes like grabbing a gun thinking it's a taser will never be zero. And even one is enough in principle.
You could cut police violence across the board by 7/8ths (imagine that), and there'd still be room for two George Floyds a month, whenever the media should desire another. There isn't the desire for that many, so cutting the police violence by 7/8ths would probably not change the frequency of large scale protests/riots at all.
marinuso
2yr ago
State capacity has increased a lot. The Congolese tribesman wouldn't have cared much either way 200 years ago, because his life wasn't impacted.
But once the government starts inserting itself into your life, you start caring. When they come to your village, and fence off your pastures, and make you learn a different language just so you can fill in the form for the grazing permit just so you can hopefully put your cows where they've always been, you'll start caring. Or when they forcibly send your kids to government school, and tell them to spit on everything you hold sacred, and then make you utterly dependent on them because they've learnt the language and can fill in form whereas you can't, you'll start caring. The King of Mbanza couldn't have done any of that if he wanted.
Case in point: the US-backed government in Afghanistan tried to push gender stuff on the locals to the point that it literally caused rebellions (archive link).
Of course this is true of all governments, not just colonial governments. The expansion of state power caused plenty of strife in Europe too. On the other hand it was worse in the colonies, because in Europe it was developed gradually, and then in the colonies it was imposed all at once.
marinuso
2yr ago
Except that Germany's "fortified democracy" is in practice just the officially institutionalized defense of the established (political, media, business, and otherwise) elite against any would-be upstarts, even though the system is nominally democratic (and capitalist).
marinuso
2yr ago
They 'pedestrianized' the area. It's been a few years, I don't recall any reason being given apart from the usual platitudes about safety and livability. The place does get thronged on the weekends - or did, prior to the Covid lockdowns bankrupting half the shops.
Official taxis being exempt is a citywide thing, they also get to go on bus lanes, and it's been that way since forever.
marinuso
2yr ago
A good road diet increases the throughput of human beings going where they want to go because an inefficient use of street space is replaced by a more efficient one.
This is of course a functionally equivalent statement to "good policies have benefits that outweigh the harms". Yes, that's the definition. But that presumes the people who are making the policies are competent and well-meaning, and they never seem to be even one. I would expect a 'road diet' (especially when explicitly named so) to be done by politicians who are at best following a fad, at worst intending to hurt people they think are their enemies.
In the city where I live they banned bicycles out of the (old medieval) city center. Technically cars too, but already nobody drove there (who in their right mind would even try). But the American Democrats are hampering transport so we should also hamper transport, it's cargo cult blue-tribe-ism. To top it all of, official taxis can still go in. So the local hoity-toities can still be ferried to and from their subsidized cultural events in style. To their credit (?) I haven't seen much actual enforcement.
marinuso
2yr ago
Drunks and children tell the truth.
OTOH, if you're practiced and can hold your drink better than the other party, now you have the advantage over them.
Not least because the UK barely allows you to change your own lightbulbs...
The UK is notorious for its health and safety nannying (even though they left the EU). In the Netherlands everything beyond the meter is in principle yours to fuck with as you please, though if it's not up to code and your house burns down, the insurance won't pay out.
That said, the UK is special in another way, because it uses ring circuits. Instead of running individual wires from the boxes to the outlets, they run a wire from outlet to outlet and back to the breaker again in the end. Because in that way, every socket is principally wired twice, letting them get away with pretty much doubling the load. This is why the UK has 32-amp breakers instead of the 16-amp ones on the continent. You can put more sockets on the same wires.
Of course, with a radial circuit, if the wire breaks or comes loose the power goes out and you'll notice. With a ring circuit, if the wire breaks on one end, the other end is now theoretically overloaded, but everything will keep working until you actually put a big load on it, and then it'll catch fire. And the breaker won't trip because it's sized for two wires. DIY Dad is going to have a much worse time if he fucks up.
marinuso
2yr ago
No one fought him when he took over Crimea. Not the Crimeans, not the other Ukrainians, not Washington or Brussels either. The Crimeans seemed to be fine with it. In the Donbass he got more resistance, but still not a lot. (Of course, this was all just after a Western-backed coup that was unpopular in the south and east.)
He clearly thought he could do the same to all Ukraine. He was wrong, but you can see how such an error might be made.
marinuso
2yr ago
Instead the racially diverse, hopelessly disorganized (IE decentralized), and utterly lacking in warrior spirit/tradition armies of the Aglosphere proved far more capable of cooperation, innovation, and stacking enemy dead like corde-wood than their ostensibly superior and racially homogenous opponents.
They didn't. Losses on the Allied side were way, way, way higher. Especially on the Eastern front, where the Russians eventually won because they quite simply had more peasants than the Germans had bullets.
Germany and Japan are relatively tiny, with few natural resources. The Russians had essentially limitless cannon fodder, while the US and the British Empire combined had essentially limitless natural resources. Any war becomes a war of attrition if it goes on long enough. As the Finns also found when fighting the Russians, you can kill the enemy ten to one, but that's no good if the enemy always has an eleventh man.
As far as HBD is concerned, Germany's biggest blunder was an anti-IQ move. The persecution of the Jews caused a huge brain drain, both of e.g. Jewish professors and intellectuals themselves and of their colleagues, long before the Holocaust proper started. The Nazis kicked out people like Albert Einstein, who went over to the US. It's thanks to the smarts of people like those, that the US managed to develop the nuclear bomb and force Japan to surrender. Without it, it would certainly have taken a lot longer.
marinuso
2yr ago
Authoritarian survival is crucially dependent on tracking any signals, threatening your position
On the other hand, people don't make blunders until they do.
The fact that Putin has managed to stay in power until now means he's decent at staying in power, sure, but it doesn't make him infallible. And if you become paranoid and get rid of any possible threats around you, you also get rid of anyone who might correct you when you do make a mistake.
marinuso
2yr ago
OTOH, owning India or most of Africa doesn't set you ahead in terms of natural resources per person, in the way owning Siberia might.
marinuso
2yr ago
You don't accept the crown in Britain. He was next in line, he got it automatically the moment Queen Elizabeth died. They're never without a monarch. If he wants to give it to his son, he'll have to abdicate.
I'm in the Netherlands. Southkraut is in Germany, it apparently doesn't help.
No surprise: nothing is going to be sensitive and accurate enough for that to ever work well. The manufacturers don't really even have to care, after all, it's not their customers who are blinded, it's the other guys. And it's always going to err on the side of not dimming, since that's what the customer would want - and on the other hand, thank God for that, imagine driving along and your car turns your headlights off all of a sudden because it has somehow decided someone's coming.
This so-called driver assistance technology never works well. I've never seen any work well. Even the self-canceling turn signals only ever self-cancel when you don't want them to. But that's another rant for another time.
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