Tree
22hr ago
Before 1990, their marginal economy was possibly propped up by the US against soviet afghanistan and soviet ally india.
With the china trade war and the war in ukraine, everyone’s talking about rare earths these days, but imo they are insignificant. The entire global market is 12 billion dollars, that’s like 20 times less than the copper market, 250 times less than the oil market. People have a strategy game view of resources, where if you don’t have them in your territory in the beginning, you’re screwed. In reality, if their price rose to significance, everyone would dig in their garden and find rare earths.
FYI, your link doesn’t work in “It's so overt that Pakistan's defense minister almost let the mask slip off. “
Tree
2d ago
You’ve banned many people who did not deserve it. Of all stripes. Censorship trespasses against your fellow man, and it harms you. I suppose it’s common enough in the new internet, people don’t have the right to express themselves anymore. But I still hold a grudge.
You‘ve even banned what you called a major influence, a friend. Then judas gave a tearful eulogy. It was the most craven, two-faced, pathetic display of regret I ever saw.
Tree
2d ago
You’re lacking in morals, and not above using your mod powers for debates, so I will.
Tree
2d ago
Just above there’s a thread about karmelo anthony. Where does his murderous rage come from? What ancestral wisdom was passed down through murders like these?
When you find yourself defending murderers, take a step back .
Do you pine for the life of gesualdo, who murdered his adulterous wife and spent the rest of his life asking his servants to beat him and god to forgive him?
Tree
2d ago
You use, excuse and legitimise an extreme minority of rage-fueled murderers to condemn everyone’s harmless daily desires. You've catastrophically misidentified who the healthy humans are.
Tree
3d ago
The religious mind may consider harm and sinfulness to be inversely correlated (smoking vs promiscuity). The latter is particularly unfair to the believers and offensive to the gods precisely because the sinners are having fun without repercussions. The greater the temptation, the stronger the smell of sulfur.
Tree
3d ago
It’s a minefield. Just this weekend I saw a couple of relatives, they have a baby, and they have looked completely exhausted for the better part of two years now. The light has gone out of their eyes. When I suggested the same thing as above, that maybe they should ignore him at night and wean him off, a grandmother rudely told me that as a childless man I had no right to an opinion. Fine, it's not my business, but if I'm right, who is going to tell them? I'm sure that the father too would be told off because it's seen as the mother's domain and her prerogative, and it would be 'selfish' for him to complain when she likely does a bigger share of the (useless) night work. There is no debate, and so they keep suffering.
Tree
3d ago
I heard that before the late middle ages, there were no real witchhunts, because the official position of the church was that only god had true ‘magical powers’ – the devil, or other gods, could only create an illusion, make it appear a certain way, not actually change the world. Therefore, witches were incapable of siccing an illness-curse on a mule, or making it rain, despite their best efforts, and so they had to be let go. It is only later, in the course of the fight against heresies like the waldensian and albigensian, that the dominican preachers sent to reconvert them imputed these powers to heretics (famously, the first-ever representation of a woman on a broom was not a witch, but a waldensian heretic). Do you know anything about this change in doctrine?
Tree
3d ago
I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but why can't you just ignore a crying baby at night? Call it ferberizing, call it self-preservation, whatever.
Tree
5d ago
Put in other terms, as the war continued, the Soviet logistical situation got better, and the German logistical situation got worse.
afaik the shortening of the lines of communication brought on by the german retreat considerably improved german logistics.
Tree
5d ago
Wanting to win is not a sufficient condition for conflict. Someone’s wrong, someone’s making a mistake. Else the parties would agree on the end-state of the war and save themselves the costs of war.
It is true that they have both made fancy claims. How then do you tell a Tough Negotiator from a Delusional Man? The former makes optimistic claims as an anchoring, negotiating tactic, while the latter actually believes his own bullshit. One way to tell them apart is getting a mediator, and when he presents his relatively unbiased, fair compromise, one will accept it, the other will reject it.
Tariff digression: @Dean thinks Trump is a tough negotiator, I think he is a delusional man (on tariffs specifically). He wants to be paid for buying stuff. That’s not how buying works. The phones aren’t ringing, and his trade partners aren’t going to hand over the crown jewels because he threatened to blow up the economic bridges. Trump is sincere, he has been proclaiming his love of tariffs for decades, way before it could have been a negotiating tactic. The lack of progress on tariff negotiations will be evidence of incompatible views on reality between trump and partners, therefore of trump as the delusional man. And vice versa of course, quick tariff relief based on partners' concessions will be evidence of compatible views, therefore of trump as the tough negotiator.
Tree
5d ago
Tree
6d ago
You would think that avoiding the deaths of tens of thousands of your people would be incentive enough. But the decision lies with a man whose interests are not aligned with his people. His regime, and his person, are a lot more secure with the war on, when there is still hope to win (until you sell, it's not a loss), hope that all of those young russians did not die for nothing. Plus, as a long-isolated and increasingly megalomaniacal dictator, he has a less realistic assessment of the situation than your average ukrainian war spectator, of either side. I think he actually believes nato troops may leave ex-warsaw pact countries if he plays his cards right, as he demanded before he invaded ukraine.
Tree
6d ago
Does anyone believe Putin will actually sign a peace deal? From what I can tell, the pro-russian side thinks they just have to continue eating through ukraine until just-around-the-corner total victory because obviously the lamb won’t voluntarily sign off on being dinner. And the pragmatic pro-ukrainian side recommended that zelensky just wave through any of trump’s harebrained peace schemes to let putin take the blame when he inevitably says no, which is happening now.
Tree
6d ago
I mean, mollie the mare has 200 comments, it's not a dormant troll. And two accounts posting within 2 minutes of each other is well within the realm of innocent events. The worst troll here, post-nazi-insider-spat-and-delete-guy, uses new accounts that date from the time his last one was banned, so if he ever used them, he's out of prime dormants.
Tree
7d ago
No. What would be the purpose of this conspiracy? You can't just throw these aspersions into the wind, make it interesting.
And I'm gonna go with the basement dweller. I had almost the exact hypothetical situation happen to me last month. My brother had received a small, remotely controlled airplane toy, but he couldn't keep it in the air for more than 15 seconds, even though he can jump higher than me. Thanks to my extensive experience watching youtube videos on airplane crashes, I just leveled the wings and stopped giving it gas when the AoA was too high, and voila, stall averted and everyone saved.
Tree
7d ago
There’s enough ambiguity in the chain of causality that anyone can be said to ultimately pay for something. Trump also said mexico will pay for the wall. The people love to hear the tale of the paying foreigner, it really gets them going.
Tree
8d ago
Let's summon the expert: What's the situation like in american rural areas, oh @grendel-khan ?
Tree
8d ago
Nimby because it's a village, it's surrounded by empty fields. A building license in a village should not be worth 300k euros (the destroyed house).
Another thing I remember: In my grandparent's village (pop 2000, in the middle of nowhere), the one time in their life where they felt rich was when the village council declared some of their land constructible, which they immediately sold for like 100k, when it was worth almost nothing before.
Tree
8d ago
You're saying you don’t see the evidence of european nimbyism. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the continent known for regulations and environment protections has three times the housing price to income ratio of the country with the more libertarian bent. We don’t have the yimby/nimby distinction here because it’s all nimby, all the time, to a level that an american couldn’t comprehend. In my ~10,000 pop. home village they routinely raze perfectly good, newish houses to replace them with 3-story, 6-small-apartments buildings. It's nuts the wealth that gets destroyed because people can't get a building license.
Tree
8d ago
The only time I hear a connection between immigration and house prices is in a positive context, from home owners: ‘with all these immigrants, the prices can’t go down!’.
It’s not : We have immigration => we should build more to meet the demand.
It’s : We need high prices, therefore unmet demand => let’s build nothing and have immigration on top of it.
Instead of solving one problem, homeowners’ financial incentives are creating two.
As far as I can tell there's a historical center (and I mean actually historical) in most cities that they like to preserve, and otherwise there isn't much of a fuss to build anywhere else.
I know for a fact there’s a shit ton of red tape, plus the greens consider any new constructible land to be ‘a loss for nature’.
Tree
8d ago
That’s the conflict theory view, which doubles as a zero-sum, ‘cosmic balance’, perfect information narrative. The stock market and the “elites” lose money, while the regular man will likely prosper in all the new tinsel factories. The ‘debate’, if it can be called that, is the vocalization of each side’s interest.
The mistake theory perspective is that people are often wrong and so act against their interests. The stock market is just a reflection. Trump was wrong about the effect of his tariffs on the stock and bond market, and on his trade partners and allies, and soon he will be wrong about its effects on the economy.
Tree
10d ago
Of course it’s not, it’s an ugly thing, this ongoing defection by russia. To encourage cooperation, defection has to be punished. Basic morality.
You refuse the ukrainians the aid they ask for. You do not consider them friends. So don’t pretend you care what happens to them. You want to act in a purely self-interested manner, do it without the sentimality.
Even in their own fantasy, they cast themselves not as the hero, not even as the villain, but as the disloyal servant of the villain.
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