guard-of-terra

From creating jobs, taking people off welfare and making them pair their taxes, albeit reduced.

However, we probably should withhold paying obviously unsustainable pensions to current generation of retired citizens.

There's this desperate feeling that despite paying a large chunk of money into pension fund, my generation won't get any pensions at all, because of population ageing there just won't be any money for that. But brace yourself. And have a nice mood. (c)

We're just giving those money to aged people without hopes of getting anything back.

And no, immigration won't solve this, because every immigrant you bring today will retire (or try to), too.

Relevant - Number of seats in the national parliament by country in Europe

https://jakubmarian.com/number-of-seats-in-the-national-parl...

If only they had scatter plot!

Explanation doesn't seem to make sense:

"Equality is deeply ingrained in a society that resents individuality and success", therefore they would oppose smaller taxes for the poor (same taxes for more affluent).

"Danes treasure their welfare state", therefore they would oppose measures to decrease load on said welfare state while giving unemployed a job.

Somethig is amiss here.

s/6.9/6.0

It's weird that we don't have a profile page for every official on a web site, detailing this official's performance, and for their supervisor, also a list of spendings overseen by this official and a button 'open a case for persecution'.

I mean, seriously? We have such things in commercial enterprises don't we?

Economies of scale have failed. It's official.

Huge retailers today offer worse prices, lower quality and lousy service because they can get away with this, being the only game in town.

At the same time, rent in cities skyrocketed, making low-density and rural places much more affordable.

We now know that economy of scale peters off at some fixed scale.

> We tried BASIC, and could write some simple loops, use conditionals, and print to the screen, but never figured out how to do anything fun or useful.

Luckily my BASIC books had most of their examples starting with SCREEN 1. Drawing images programmatically happened to be fun and useful, I learned the hard way by retyping examples and then somehow began modifying those.

My own bummer was Windows epoch. I could do VB but never otherwise grasp Windows programming because any program will have so many IDE-generated boilerplate that was totally meaningless to me and I could not work with that.

I could only resume when I learned proper WinAPI later as an University course, but then again I switched to Linux, which is a best IDE there is.

UPD: meaningLESS

But he's not going around curating your reading lists, does he? That's the point.

In your own P2P Facebook, you'll be your own dang.

> There's no way a priori to determine whether I want content without looking at it

This is plain false. HN does it, for example.

> At best I can delegate this up to a moderator to look at it for me

It's an algorithm, not a moderator. Moderators are currently employed for two things: a) censorship, b) influencing opinions. Everything else algorithms do just fine.

I don't see why do you think such system will force you to experience content you don't want.

It's just when your tastes diverge from what's forced on us as acceptable, you shouldn't let in the dark.

This addresses the second Main Russian Question but not the first one:

"Who's there to blame" but not "What's there to do".

What's there to do with Zimbabwe now? And other post-decolonization failed states?

Would you call Zimbabwe a success?

"He’d fought against Communist-backed insurgencies in Cyprus from 1957 to 1960, and in Rhodesia from 1960 to 1963."

Are there any reasons to think Communist influence was deciding in either case?

UPD: After reading Wikipedia, to me it seems to be the case of "Let's call our opponents communist, make Captain America do whatever pleases us".

uptick in demand should be met with uptick in supply.

First of all, what's "prevailing rent" now would be "ridiculously expensive" few years back. That's lack of supply skewing market.

There should be other options than building in your backyard. Find underused places and build up there. The biggest problem is what to build and how: it's amazingly easy to screw this one up (too sparse? too dense? too high? too low?)

Why is it an issue? Why not let people live where they want to live and just build up?

Cities only take a small fraction of land. Growing population doesn't really matters here; (un)willingless to build does.

Nope, I definitely don't think so. Direct electronic democracy could be a step forward. Basic Income could be a step forward. Green energy could catch up finally.

(That's country level, right. My expectations on international politics are bearish)

Things becoming better are not impossible, but improbable. The outlook isn't bright. Too many things to be fixed and no popular will to do so. The situation with global Muslim migration (and disregard of social progress) is especially dangerous and can ruin everything quick.

It seems that you're arguing that zoning can fix some problems created by zoning in the first place.

When the real solution to this problem, as to many others, is increasing supply.

"why there are no flats of reasonable size, for a reasonable price!"

If there's demand, won't there be supply eventually?

If people will start paying premium for reasonable size flats while leaving some smaller units unoccupied, market will surely correct itself. It's true that for some time market might be skewed toward wrong sizes, but you don't have to ban anything outright to prevent it, some soft regulations might be sufficient.

WRT WTO: Everybody got there before Russia. Even the most peculiar and closed off economies. It shows that everybody were cut some slack but Russia was boned. That's what I'm talking about. Judging purely from results.

I think that Putin's long term goals is sitting on the throne and avoiding violence against himself and his buddies. Everything else is "nice to have". Futhermore, there's two Eastern Europes that are no longer smart to compound (Russia is Eastern Europe too for that matter, makes it three):

- Non-USSR non-Russian-speaking ex-socialist countries, who're already consumed by EU. - Ex-USSR mostly-Russian-speaking ex-communist republics, who are/were in CIS.

Baltic states are somewhat in-between.

I think that since 1991 the West did not care about Russia. They looted the corpse basically. And they didn't give a shit about Russia until the corpse in question began moving.

They definitely didn't lift too many fingers towards "Russia to be democratic, independent, and prosperous".

As for "poor, weak, and subservient", that's the default state of things on planet Earth (entropy?) so you don't need master plan to attain it.

I actually think that communities might sponsor your moving on their turf as this will mean you'll spend your BI there for prolonged time.

> can afford to move

Basic income is precisely about "afford" part.

Those who won't move will benefit too because landlords will have to work on retention.

> the simple solution to that is immigration. That doesn't work so well in Japan, which while perfectly polite to visitors is in many places extremely homogeneous and they like to keep it that way

In many countries we're seeking to repel this "simple solution" that is destroying us but are not allowed to.

Japan seems to be the only country in charge of themself.

Why would people stay in expensive slums when they can e.g. move to countryside and live there for a fraction of those money on basic income?

I think predatory practices will decrease because people will be voting with their feet, no longer constrained by where they live.

Private donations can help those who need it the most.

They'll have much less work anyway now that nobody is starving or homeless by lack of money, might as well focus.

But what percentage of country's youth?

I imagine it will turn into something like 3%.

What I like about rock songs is that you can put arbitrary content in them. Like good books, they have no blind spots. And indeed there's all kinds of bands with all kinds of messages.

Other music like Blues is more like narrow genre books, like detective fiction. You know what you'll find in a detective book and where the borders are. Challenge these borders and you're on post-modernist grounds, outside the genre.

Of course, rock used to be rooted in some things, just like sf&f used to be rooted in some things. But it turned out that using the method you can uproot it and tell about anything you want.

That's how IT closes skills gap, and pretty efficient at that.