Pasha
Defend Kebab
No bio...
User ID: 481
Pasha
Defend Kebab
9d ago
I think you should subtly start showing your wife some European news. Granted, almost every single Western European country's main media channels are state owned/controlled so bad stuff gets memory-holed or ignored a lot easier here. And often things just don't get translated to English by any reputable sources so can be conveniently ignored by right-minded English speakers. But still it doesn't take much to convey to her that a sizable portion of teenage girls in the English speaking country have been gang-raped rather recently with almost no intervention.
And just spend an afternoon investigating the average net salaries you could earn in a couple Euro capitals and browse websites for properties you could rent/buy with that money as other posters mentioned.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
9d ago
Anki is one of those things that I get excited for about 3 weeks every 3 years, start going over my abandoned vocabulary desks only to quickly give up again. I find the the mental effort simply too much and the whole thing rather too boring unfortunately.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
14d ago
Yes I am aware of that but one country having a slightly higher rate of a single metric really doesn’t indicate an evolutionary process
Pasha
Defend Kebab
14d ago
A lot of this doom rhetoric just assumes things like democracy (olds controlling politics), welfare state (olds sucking up resources) or even high life expectancies (olds living long beyond retirement) will keep up. If even a fraction of the predicted problems hit these countries, world will change way beyond our current comprehension and most of these things likely will stop being problems in the currently predicted ways.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
14d ago
I keep seeing this heritability of fertility argument repeated especially with respect to France but is there any real evidence for it at all?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
25d ago
Legacy of Ashes: History of the CIA. While I am not super convinced the book gets every detail right, still a very interesting look into how total institutional failure and incompetence works when you also have almost total power to hide it and resist any correction efforts and infinite funds. I get out of it the impression that almost every successful CIA action either involves bribing allied country politicians or spying on Americans illegally
Pasha
Defend Kebab
25d ago
I always assumed the career prospects weren’t that good since you often end up getting tied to one highly specialised machine/procedure of one company and then they have no incentive to pay you. Is this correct?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Border police is what happens when you have police with almost no checks. It’s often pure anarcho-tyranny for its own sake. You can wave through literal millions of third world immigrants enough to cause total demographic change. But as long as the police makes one random English backpacker suffer for minor procedural violations (and often not even that), everyone feels good.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
This is a strange statement. German armies of 1914-45 were massive military overperformers who fought much better than almost all their enemies. The problem was that they kept taking on very powerful enemies and failed to sustain the military industrial base.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
I see the logic behind the other three but what does the depression have to do with it?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Soviet Union was a military behemoth that expressed constant interest in taking over Europe and Asia as well as projecting power into Africa and Latin America. A very substantial chunk of western intellectual classes and almost entirety of the new world third world leaders were sympathetic to its ideology to some degree. It was ruled by people who were capable of sanctioning deaths on the order of tens of millions and had almost total political control of their population.
NATO existed to defend the remaining tiny stretch of capitalist Europe against this.
In comparison what’s Russia? A rump state that staged a couple half failed interventions in its generally pretty messed up barely seceded neighbours, and spent the last 3 decades trying to integrate with neoliberal global markets.
England, Italy, France, Germany or even Turkey feels no serious threat from modern Russia. Therefore the “alliance” just lingers on as a braindead useless entity.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
Certain European countries might, but I seriously doubt “Europe” will arm “itself” anytime soon. Without overwhelming American power to bind the continent it’s clear that European countries have wildly different interests. Besides the threat isn’t really that serious as modern Russia isn’t a particularly strong or aggressive country. Besides European countries already spend quite a bit on defense. The main bottleneck is a lack of fighting spirit and social cohesion.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1mo ago
The same bizarre situation is going on in entire Western Europe. People talking about the need to decouple from the US, so we can defend Taiwan?? I think we are living through one of those periods confusion in history that will be sandpapered by near-term historians in accordance with the developments that takes place by then, only for some guy to open some dusty archives in 70 years and realize "wait a minute actual people 2025 had wildly idiosyncratic ideas that didn't fit at all into the 2039 galactic federation council's ideological splits!!"
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
I remember the people dropping dead videos as well. Was one of the first things I have ever seen mentioning Covid when a friend shared one of those in a group chat. Entirely forgotten and memory holed
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
I can’t imagine that with the current pace of development at cheap conversational LLMs, soon we won’t start seeing RPGs that are truly open world with actually intelligent NPCs or strategy games where the AI controlled opponents are truly strategising and conspiring etc.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
This is a fair haired blue eyed German guy who used contact lenses fake mustache and hair dye to disguise himself as a Turkish migrant worker for literally years in Germany to write a book about the life of those workers. I don’t think it takes that much to disguise yourself. Besides you don’t have to keep it up all the time like the journalist did. Only when you interact with the state
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Imagine you are a German who has some troubles and needs a second identity to escape the law or whatever. It’s 2015. What stops him from dying his hair black, putting on some shabby clothes, and presenting himself as a newly arrived refugee with no documents? He can even draw quite a bit of money from social welfare and after half a decade he gets a brand new German passport not attached to a real person which can be extremely valuable in right circumstances. What stops him from doing this 10 times with 10 different disguises? Or a gang doing this with real refugees at scale?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
In the third world the difference between countries with lots of homelessness and little homelessness is typically how easy it is to squat land around the cities. Even in the poorest places you won't see that many homeless people if anyone can go 20km in the direction of the poorest urban settlement and build a shack right after the last round of shacks. Much wealthier third world countries that restricts such settlement will have lots of visible homelessness.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
To me it sounds like all 4 types of work you list here are rather...similar?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
I don't have any advise sorry but how automatable do you think this job is by some combinations of OCR/LLM/GUI to keep humans in the loop when needed?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
Is this all over Turkey paying rather measly sums of money to this guy because we struggle to bribe anyone of actual importance?
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2mo ago
If you bother to follow the actual thread, you will see that my comment was written on October 11t 2023 and describes a future hypothetical based on the statements of Israeli politicians at the time. That hypothetical turned out to be more correct than not.
Stop masturbating with words. If you want to mass murder people have the courage to actually say so.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-10934703/amp/Russian-woman-21-babies-Turkish-millionaire-devastated-arrest.html
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