letrowekwel

It's not xenophobia to point out that a nation's migration policy is failing, when it obviously is. It's a systemic issue, not some cultures or people being better or worse.

I fully agree. Globally highly multicultural countries tend to be less stable on average, and it makes perfect sense if we consider basic human biology. We are tribal animals, it's hard to get around that.

Places like Sweden will have it even worse than the US, because migrants need to learn a fully new language to fully integrate, while most migrants to the US have at least some English skills to begin with.

It's not a good idea to take in massive amounts of poor and uneducated refugees from distant cultures, give them free money and housing, and then just leave them be. That's not a real migration policy, it's just a recipe for creating a segregated society. The Swedish welfare state has certainly taken care of the basic needs of the migrants, but it hasn't really worked well at actual integration, and creating social mobility. Poorly integrated youths who see no future prospects through honest work are prime material for crime gangs to recruit.

I still haven't figured out whether Swedish politicians and voters didn't realize this, or simply didn't care. What's happening has seemed inevitable to me for well over a decade.

I fully agree. It's all about meeting enough potential partners with similar interests. Shared-activities with healthy gender balance (at least for heterosexual relationships) are the best bet for most people. Many such activities also don't require long-term commitment or hanging out with same people all the time, so rejection isn't as awkward as in workplace for example.

Of all things I tried shared activities worked the best, Tinder the worst.

The boomers are retiring, and the US economy is strong. Here in EU boomers are also retiring, but many countries still have high youth unemployment, and there is no real worker shortage even if businesses like to complain about one.

These devices do have their value, but most users would be better off cycling or walking. From public health point of view replacing cars with these is only a minor improvement.

Wow, I had zero idea Brazil is doing so good in that front. I agree with you completely. EU's biggest economy shuts down nuclear plants in favor of coal, I think that tells us all enough about how much those in charge really care about the environment. Votes from irrational, brainwashed German population seems to be more important.

Yes, people with decent education are almost never causing trouble, no matter the country of origin. They can find legal paths to improving their lives, while migrants with difficult background (and their children) have very difficult time doing that. Sweden isn't like the USA in the 1800's, you need education and decent language skills for any good jobs. Free education is no silver bullet that suddenly turns masses of illiterate people into doctors and economists, because even under such system there's competition for university spots.

Sweden quite simply took in way too many people who would have required a lot of help to integrate, stuffed them into bad neighbourhoods and gave them free money. I'm sure many companies have benefited from this supply of slave labour, but for the society as a whole it has been a disaster.

Integration is exponentially harder if you're a (potentially traumatized) and uneducated asylum seeker from a poor country, compared to someone who migrates for work and already holds some qualifications. So, in that sense Sweden's migration policies are to be blamed, since the country has received way more asylum seekers per capita than most other EU countries.

Apparently Sweden has the highest gap between employment rate of citizen and non-EU citizen in the whole European Union. I think it's mainly because so many migrants arrived to seek asylum rather than work. But yes, city planning and ineffective legal system do not exactly help either.

No it won't. Once the economy starts booming again, RTO'd people who like remote work and have the choice will look for new jobs.

Yeah it all depends from how much you actually use the machine, My old i7 gaming system runs maybe 7 hours a week on average. I drive barely 10k kilometers a year with my old ICE car. Upgrading to a new gaming PC and Tesla would make neither economic or environmental sense.

Similarly I've never bothered to upgrade from my from old i7-2600k gaming build from 2011, and will likely use it for many years to come. Paired with GTX1070, more RAM, and a larger SSD, it still delivers good enough performance for anything I want (and have time) to play, including AAA games from few years ago.

Lumber is widely used in Nordic and other Northern European countries, precisely because they have lots of forests. It's most common in houses, but even apartment locks are being built from wood these days. Fire safety is not much of an issue if you do it right.

Using more wood would make a lot of sense, since it's essentially a long-term carbon sink. Concrete production on the other hand causes massive carbon emissions. After spending some time in a house with lumber from 1800s, I can only admire the quality and craftmanship.

At least in my country, there are three types of "labor shortages".

1. Pay and/or working conditions suck so much people aren't interested. Think of nurses, various staff (restaurant, cleaning etc) that are often employed through third-party companies that offer you limited hours on weekly basis.

2. Labor limited through artificial constraints on supply. Doctors are a good example of this here - doctors associations successfully lobby to keep medical school student intake low, which means lower supply and better pay for those who make it.

3. Positions that require just too much experience, knowledge or talent to be obtained simply through right education. Think of top senior software engineers for example.

Nope, most people don't borrow a strong sense of identity from their jobs. They just do them so they can afford to eat. With UBI they could actually choose to do something which gives them a sense of purpose and identity. Doesn't even have to be art. Personally I enjoy gardening and growing food much more than my job. With UBI I could fully concentrate on that, instead of wasting my time on stuff I don't enjoy.

In fact it would be much more healthy for call-center workers to spend their time outdoors growing potatoes, instead of sitting indoors just to afford said potatoes. Lots of underpaid jobs like this are inherently unhealthy for humans.

IMO the main problem is the arbitrary way borders were drawn in Africa by colonialists. Too many ethnicities that didn't get along very well suddenly shared a common state, while others were split between many countries. When even much richer and educated areas have problems with multiculturalism of much smaller scale (the Balkans, Spain, Belgium for example), it's not surprising that countries like DR Congo with over 200 languages spoken are basically ungovernable through democratic means. The border situation isn't anywhere near as bad in South America and most of Asia - and even there countries which lack common national identity tend to be less stable than others.

Peaceful coexistence of many cultures within the same society is a nice idea, but in reality it's very hard to do right due to the tribal nature of our specie. Highly successful multicultural countries appear to be an exception, rather than a norm.

Depends on how you define quality. A car that feels nice to sit on and drive may not be the most reliable way to get you from point A to point B consistently. The reliability of many (at least older) Toyota models is impressive, while German reliability has been mostly a myth in the 2000's.

Admissions are easy to do right. Just give anyone with a valid educational background (like college/high school completed) a chance to participate in a strictly observed live exam, which is then graded anonymously. 100% fair, leaves no place for discrimination. This is how many countries do it in Europe and it just works.

But what about economically disadvantaged minority groups? That's easy to fix too. Just give schools in poorer areas lots of extra funding and resources, and their skills should improve, so that they do well in exams without any ridiculous "positive discrimination" based on skin color or ethnicity. As a bonus you also help poor people who may not belong to a disadvantaged ethnic minority, but still suffer from same lack of opportunities.

Of course all this requires money, which the 1% isn't willing to give. But from anyone else's perspective it's plain stupid that the system first fails to give people of poorer background proper education, and then tries to fix this by discriminating based on ethnicity, which only partially correlates with poverty and bad schooling.

Moodle seems to be good enough to cover the needs of vast majority of university courses I've encountered - ones where you read some materials, watch some vids, discuss and write essays. However, I feel that there are better options for ones which benefit from more interactivity, like maths or coding, even if Moodle supports it through plugins.

Why exactly would people change batteries that don't need to be changed? Phones do have battery health indicators, and buying one costs money. There's no logical reason to change one, until they have degraded significantly. The only difference is that now you can change it more easily yourself, rather than having someone else do it for money, which they will happily do regardless of battery health.

When combined with requirement for longer support with updates, this change in legislation will help creating a healthy second-hand market for more devices. Cheap, non-serviceable Android phones that get updates and are used only for a year or two are the real source of waste, we need a proper second-hand marker for those similar to expensive Apple devices.

I think CS major makes lots of sense if you want to go really deep into research of some advanced field inside it. But otherwise I feel like there's more benefit from minoring in it, self-studying the more practical aspects, and majoring somewhere that gives you field-specific knowledge, which in combination with CS & programming skills makes you rare and valuable.

I guess you last tried Linux on desktop in XP era. Choose the right distro and it's perfectly fine, much better than Win 10 / 11 and fairly similar to XP.

Not as unsafe as using coal instead of nuclear, and pushing the world towards a climate disaster.

Climate change has already done much more damage to Europe than Chernobyl.

"So many would say that it’s really convenient NOW we want to help all poor people, whereas in the past we made it difficult to help poor black people. It’s like, why do “all lives matter” now?"

Does historical injustice make it right to behave unjust in the present, almost as if it were a revenge? I don't think so.

I agree about importance of defining poverty though. Both income and wealth should be taken into account and taxed appropriately. It's not only a class issue, but also generational issue with lots of old people sitting on super-expensive property, while young families can't afford a home.

I agree. Old school leftists were smart enough to understand that being rich is the ultimate privilege, nothing else comes close. Help the poor, and you will also help minorities which are poor due to historical racism, slavery and so on. Help people based on their skin colour/ethnicity, and you'll unnecessarily make all the poor, unprivileged people not included very bitter, increasing political divisions, racism and people like Donald Trump voted into the office.

It's not even that hard. Make taxation more progressive, and give extra funding to neighbourhoods and schools in poorer parts of the country/cities. I don't see any reason why European style model couldn't work well also in the US.

It all depends very much from social context. In my country stricter gun control has absolutely saved lives, simply because it has effectively prevented random mentally ill people from committing school shootings. It didn't make our government or police forces any more oppressive.

It should be still common sense to limit access to guns, so that people who are likely to harm themselves or others can't just go and buy one easily. Works very well in most of Europe.

The law should not force anything. Western feminists should focus on improving women's rights in migrant communities, rather than calling people who point out real problems racist. Then more women actually do have the choice to wear what they want.

"Power to choose" in the eyes of law and general society, as advocated by feminists, is not much use if women's family, relatives and other close community strongly disapprove and don't respect that law.

Wood is renewable, burning it for heating houses in countryside full of forests is perfectly sustainable.

Not caring about social status is only smart, as long as your choices don't hurt others. It should be up to individual to decide what makes them happy within these limits. Instead of hippies I would be worried of consumerist sheep who think buying products/services makes them happy, and who destroy the planet in the process. Amazon, shopping malls full of people spending money just for fun, those are the real evil of our world. I would much rather live in a hut without electricity than be your average city-dwelling consumerist.