wlxd
1yr ago
Thiel did not get a “sweetheart deals on private company stock and bought small amounts”. He created this stock by founding a company, and made it a lot more valuable through his efforts.
wlxd
1yr ago
This is a much more reasonable comment.
A private company that doesn't make a formal disclosure can't commit securities fraud by making a false one.
Yes, but this is precisely why I phrased my comment as such:
if you take investor’s money, claiming that you’ll use it for building a shipping business, but then lose it all in Vegas
I simply don’t see how you can argue that spending all funds on gambling in Vegas is just a business decision, anymore than you could argue that spending all investor funds on buying yourself a villa and a Lambo is just a business decision.
wlxd
1yr ago
Securities law applies to private companies as well, if you take investments and issue equity. That you make a distinction between public and private companies here suggests to me that you don’t have much idea what you are talking about.
wlxd
1yr ago
I am quite sure that if you take investor’s money, claiming that you’ll use it for building a shipping business, but then lose it all in Vegas, that counts as a breach of fiduciary duty.
wlxd
1yr ago
Yeah, they signed agreements, and then didn’t keep to them. That’s not how you conduct diplomacy.
wlxd
1yr ago
Peace was never offered to Ukraine. Their choice was subjugation and cultural genocide at a minimum or war.
Peace with concessions is still peace, regardless of how much you insist it is not. As it is, they chose cultural and literal genocide in place of a risk of just cultural genocide. The Ukrainians are being killed by tens, likely even hundreds of thousands. With so many emigres, it is highly likely that even after cessation of hostilities, whatever remains of Ukraine will be permanently demographically crippled. It is ridiculous to argue that Ukraine being completely subjugated by Russia would mean more demographic damage than the war has caused: nothing of the sort happened to other nations subjugated by Russians (in fact, Russian nationalists today routinely complain about how often the Russian Federation acts more in the interest of the minority ethnicities than ethnic Russians).
wlxd
1yr ago
The person I replied to suggested that Ukraine should take western weapons and win the war, and gave Poland as an example of this as a successful strategy. I pointed out that Poland achieved success by peaceful diplomatic means. If the West pushed weapons into Polish hands at that time, that would have been clear warmongering, because history proved that peaceful solution was possible. I did not refer to the recent events in Ukraine as western warmongering, only the hypothetical scenario where west pushes citizens of Polish People’s Republic to war with Soviet Union.
Now, let me explicitly say here that the current western strategy of funding Ukrainian military with the explicit, openly repeated goal of weakening Russian state and military, under the assumption of good ROI in terms of monetary spend/materiel relative to achieved damage to Russia, and with zero concern for Ukrainian blood being spilled to achieve these goals, and disregard for ultimate likelihood of Ukrainian victory, very much is warmongering.
Without the western “support”, the (stupid and evil) Russian invasion would be over with by now, and much less blood would have been spilled, and wealth and livelihoods destroyed, for pretty much the same ultimate geopolitical outcome. However, the West has clearly chosen strategy of slow trickle of support to pull in and attrit Russians as much as possible.
wlxd
1yr ago
I specifically mentioned the Russian puppet state of Belarus to point out that you can do much better than Ukraine while remaining in Russian orbit. My point was that if Ukraine experienced decades of stagnation while in Russian orbit while Belarus grew, why expect much different outcomes in western orbit?
Poland well the breakup of the USSR made it not possible for them to do war so they had an easier route.
Poland left the Communist Bloc years before USSR broke up. They managed that through diplomacy and negotiations, not western warmongering. Ukraine should try the same.
wlxd
1yr ago
Can you make your clear? Are you suggesting that the person you are replying to might genuinely not be aware of that, or are you just engaging in petty language policing?
wlxd
1yr ago
What weapons the west gave to Poland that allowed it to beat Soviet military and throw their shackles? What military strategy was used?
(4) provides the option to have a large successful family. The EV is much much higher.
Why wasn’t Ukraine on this path before the war? Poland started off around where Ukraine was in early 1990s. It failed to thrive, to put it mildly, and the pre-war trajectory was not optimistic. The neighboring puppet state of Russia, Belarus, has done much better for itself.
If the plan is to build stronger ties with the West, join EU etc similarly to what Poland did, isn’t better strategy to cut the losses, stop the bleed, and negotiate peace with Russia, where you cede some territories in exchange for Russia acceding to your western strategy in future?
wlxd
1yr ago
But so is England, though maybe in not so recent memory, so it might have lost the emotional impact.
wlxd
1yr ago
Makes sense, but new genetic evidence makes it rather hard to sustain. Eg from what I remember, the Turks (or maybe just the non-peasant ones) are something like half Greek by ancestry, due to many centuries of Greek settlements.
Westerners are indeed not so much into purity, but that might be just a result of decades of extremely relentless anti-Nazi indoctrination.
wlxd
1yr ago
Why are Hindus so touchy about this? Brita, for example, do not care much that they are a result of a number of wholesale population replacements.
wlxd
1yr ago
Soviet Union had reintroduced free market economy in early 20s, because of a total carnage of the actual communism as practiced in the early years during of the Russian Civil War and after it. Before that, the commies would seize the food from peasants, who as a result stopped bothering to grow much. The shortage of food in early 20s was extremely severe.
By the end of NEP in 1928, the agricultural production has recovered to pre WWI levels, though the Soviet Union food exports throughout its history have never been even close to the Imperial Russia exports in 1913.
wlxd
1yr ago
My point was, in case you actually missed it (which I doubt), was that
the difference (…) is between individual-level advice and society-levels policies
is an entirely post-hoc justification, invented to excuse the activists who just want to attack anyone who ascribed any degree of agency to a victim of one particular kind of crime. Your whole post makes an argument that’s simply entirely irrelevant in any instance of alleged victim blaming and their denouncing.
wlxd
1yr ago
I am pretty certain that you will be unable to provide even a single example where the activists, before accusing someone of victim blaming, check if the person alleged to do so, does nothing else to address the problem.
wlxd
1yr ago
The Spider-Man one is particularly egregious, because the modder just combined the textures from the Saudi Arabian release of the game with English text. As it turns out, the game makers are totally happy to make and profit from LGBT-free version of the game, as long as it’s not Americans who enjoy it.
wlxd
1yr ago
WD-40 is not even a lubricant, and I wish people stopped calling it that, because some people will take it to mean that it can be used to lubricate moving parts, when in fact the opposite is true: what it will do is that it will strip any lubricant that might have lingers there, and then evaporate, leaving dry surfaces behind.
wlxd
1yr ago
Strange for you to, in response to /u/the_nybbler predicting that the Feds will use overwhelming force to roll over any state resistance, bring up Waco siege as an example of Feds having trouble with serving warrants. Yeah, next time they have troubles, they do another Waco, why not?
wlxd
1yr ago
Yes, only majority of homeless have on-demand internet access wherever they go, it is no longer overwhelming. That’s why many of them hang out around free wi-fi, yes. But so what? What does it have to do with the argument you were making? Here, let me helpfully quote you:
who obviously will not have regular access to Internet or cellular connection, due to lack of affordability of a mobile plan, let alone a mobile phone.
Observe that the quote from the study you just gave clearly and explicitly contradicts what you said earlier, and supports what I replied to you with.
As a bonus point, observe that out of the homeless who are interested in using internet at all (66%, I assume that the third which didn’t use internet at all within past 3 months simply does not want to do it), more than three quarters do have it on their phone on demand.
wlxd
1yr ago
Is your response really “sure, the overwhelming majority of homeless might indeed have mobile phones, but large fraction of them just carry non-functional phones with no plan or data, for no useful purpose”? Is this really the point you are trying to make here?
wlxd
1yr ago
Further, it's very easy to lose contact with the homeless, who obviously will not have regular access to Internet or cellular connection, due to lack of affordability of a mobile plan, let alone a mobile phone.
This is super wrong. Overwhelming majority of the homeless have mobile phones, with surveys ranging between 80% and 95% penetration. This is because the Feds, local municipalities and charities have special programs to equip them with phones.
Given the above, why would I put any stock in your critique of the critique of scientific paper?
wlxd
1yr ago
First punishing recividism more seems silly. Because a lot of people do age out of crime.
That’s only more reason to punish recidivists harshly: if you identify someone as a recidivist type, you want to hold them in jail until they age out of crime. Third criminal conviction at 24, we keep you in jail until 40 (of course, for three felonies we keep the life sentence).
Internet actually brought enormous amount of consumer surplus, which simply is not reflected in GDP. If you tried to value the stuff that we today get for effectively free, like ability to stream any movie you want for peanuts, or free long-distance video calls, or free mailing, or play sophisticated video games etc according to how much these costed in, say, 1970, you’d observe that we consume thousands of dollars worth of services for free.
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