377 karma · joined October 19, 2022
> The proper word is "reunite", as it was agreed with the US
So the US and the PRC had some milquetoast diplomatic correspondence which did not include Taiwan. If the PRC now occupies Taiwan against the will of its people and population, presumably under fire from the Taiwanese army, it' just a "reunification"?
This attitude and its variants with different scapegoats really irks me. Let's say that in 1980 all the world's governments and businesses conspired and implemented measures to get close to 0 carbon emissions by 2010.
For the moment let's ignore the most dire issues[0] and just focus on the economic cycle. Do you honestly think that they could have stayed in power in the face of a severe economic depression with no end in sight? Even in non-democracies such policies would be political suicide.
[0]: lack of fertilizer, labor demand of non-mechanized agriculture, breakdown of the food supply chain
In return anyone leaving the island stays gone and can never publicly talk about degrowth and their dreams of ending civilization. Also, you must tell your children the truth about all the accomplishments of industrial society.
I agree that our prehistoric ancestors were the most stable populations when looking at them from very far away. You seem to actually want to return to their brutal and ignorant lives. Well go ahead, put some skin in the game before publicly advocating for the death of billions.
If you do mean summer tires that seems almost unbelievable to me. I have some experience both on the roads as well as skidpans with both.
With actual summer tires on even non-icy light snow cover you:
- have almost no braking
- get nothing but wheelspin on any sort of hill
- start spinning out in corners if you go >10mph.
The worse the winter weather gets, the more stuck you become if there has been no salting for an hour.
Meanwhile with winter tires you can safely go up to 60mph on compacted snow and actually get to a stop within a mile.
Hell, even just the fact that summer tires are hard as rocks in cold temps would make me wanna at least buy all-seasons.
Just how aggressively and how often do they salt in WI, considering the climate?
disclaimer: grew up in a country with mild-ish winters where winter tires are mandatory, never spent much time in the parts of NA that do get winters.
- the energy required for moving in a fluid grows sub-linear with the vessel's volume
- larger motors tend to be more efficient
- your autonomous swarm will be a gigantic waste of steel and batteries.
Not to mention the problems around the autonomous part, without which you'd also have a huge waste of manpower.
See also https://engineering.stackexchange.com/questions/38252/why-on... for some points by people I assume know a bit more than me.
- parsing the unstructured email body and looking for quote levels, html formatting and printed email heads
- parsing certain headers like message-id, in-reply-to, dkim sig
- looking for sections of the message body in the inbox
This is done because there is nothing in the protocol to cleanly accomplish what you want. Even if there was, you could not rely on it at all. Doing anything with email is a gigantic PITA, you sometimes get emails where the msg-encoding header doesnt match the body's encoding, html in the plaintext section and other fun things.
Since nobody really cares about the RFC and just does their own thing, there is no chance at improvement.
Was it though? Your second paragraph is written in a way that it can easily be interpreted as "all critics of DEI hiring are racists". Is that a more sophisticated statement than "all minorities are incompetent"? Is being a racist the only reason someone might be opposed to quota-based hiring?
Just to clarify, I do mean what I say. Even if the corporation produces for the most reprehensible people you can imagine, how is that worse than everything ending for no reason?
In the same way that people living in Chaos yearn for a Franco or an old King because they symbolize order, regardless of the realities of their reign. Just a projection space that is sufficiently ill-defined that it becomes a canvas.
If all vehicles were subject to the same regulations the size increases would have been in line with normal cars. If there was a lot less regulation and people weren't demanding so many gimmicks, you could probably get a very basic work truck, about as big as a Hiluxe, for $5k.
Impossible. The world is too urbanized, there simply is no space to do this for more than a few % of the population.
> Way too-many of the problems plaguing society atm can be solved by reducing transport and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps [...]
Maybe some problems can be solved, many more will be unsolved. Reducing our transport capacity of food increases the vulnerability to crop failures. De-centralizing processing will make it harder (read: more expensive) to test for pathogens, nutrients and ensure hygiene.
> we'll be be contributing less to AGI/automation and creating actual valuable jobs
No, we would be shrinking the GDP by moving labour from highly productive sectors into agriculture. At the same time food will become much more expensive, even more so if those new employees are paid minimum wage.
> and eliminating all the huge intermediate steps between our food (other other food-related products) and ourselves
How? You're simply replacing one set of steps for another, more labor-intensive one. I encourage you to visit one of those museums where people demonstrate how people in the 18th century lived for some perspective.
> we'll be reducing the amount of plastic, fuel and electricity used for transport, storage, processing, packaging,
You didn't quite state the full conditions to achieve this reduction, so I'll do it for you. Basically we have to completely change our diets. Fresh food can only be eaten in season, and only what is locally available. We can only store food that does not need climate control to keep, so in winter there are only conserved vegetables and fruits. Not using any modern packaging and storage methods means that even in season things have to be eaten really quickly.
On the whole, your insinuation that our food distribution is some kind of unnecessary luxury that we can do away with just rubs me the wrong way. It is the reason the amount of people in famine has been dropping every decade despite a population explosion. It ensures that there are no mass-scale outbreaks of botulism, moulds and other pathogens that used to kill lots of people and waste huge quantities of food. Its efficiency (along with high productivity) guarantees that almost everyone can afford to eat sufficient nutrients even through winter.
Sure we could get some of those benefits in your agrarian fantasy, but the cost would be enormous.
You are probably talking about Norway's sovereign wealth fund[0] (funded by oil revenues); the actual pension fund is only for government employees and structured almost exactly like any non-government pension fund.
There are of course many financing models that are some combination of the two, but these models have the exact same problem to the degree that they invest in the stock market. Also, there are very few countries in the world that invest their oil surplus as wisely as Norway. Most democracies would just use the funds to hand out election presents to their voters.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Nor...
The alternatives to investment-based pensions do have some trade-offs. Both the tax-based and "public insurance" (current payers finance current pensioners) model are vulnerable to demographic shifts and economic depressions. In many countries with bad demography, the payout you get per income-month has been reduced and the age of retirement increased, because the system threatened to collapse. Since most of the world is now aging rapidly and living longer, these systems are under severe strain.
A significant advantage of pension funds is that they can invest abroad to spread the risk, but in a public system this is impossible.
small nitpick: Pension funds invest only tiny percentages into actual private companies, like the PE firms TFA is referring to.
The really sad thing is that public broadcasters operate in the same way with regard to content quality. Sure, they have (almost) no ads, a lot less complete garbage ("reality" TV, voyeuristic game shows), but on the whole they make the same clinic dramas, soap operas (and sometimes spend billions for the rights to sport).
For-profit media companies cut shows because they're unprofitable, public broadcasters cut them because of a "lack of demand by the public". Media companies make terrible programming choices because they think it will be profitable, public broadcasters make them for political reasons (no matter their structure, they cannot actually be independent of their funding source, the sovereign that organizes their funding).
It would have been nice to read an analysis like that in TFA, but alas it was published in jacobinmag.
Analogously, how long did the Shire last against a motivated attacker with comparatively little resources?
Are these businesses actually private? Does the fact they all started teaching Xi Jinping Thought (TM) to their executives at the exact same time indicate who ultimately controls them?
> and their state owned companies are run for profit with said profit retained by both private and state own companies within themselves
If the central government can mandate those companies to invest that profit in <currently important sector>, can you really say it's theirs to keep?
> rather than being distributed among the population in a social dividend or similar scheme, which is what people usually think of when they think of a socialist market economy.
Which people? This redistribution has never happened in any socialist system that calls itself as such, only in systems like the West which one might call a "primarily private market economy with a large socialist appendage" (socialist as in social/public ownership).
> there is not widespread self-management or workplace democracy among companies.
There has not been widespread self-management in any socialist system and certainly no workplace democracy in any real sense.
> Thus I argue they are state capitalism, since they do not actually have socialist policies and instead clearly are some form of capitalism with heavy government intervention.
Why would you say their policies are not socialist? The lack of a social safety net and absence of human rights is exactly like other socialist governments. If you want to say such policies are not actually socialist, that's your prerogative. I cannot think of any Socialist government that actually existed which did things radically differently.
Why 100 years? I'd say we haven't fixed those in 10000 years and will never fix them, unless some divine intervention changes human nature.
> Why nobody is working on a replacement society and economics system?
People are working on it, but the last time revolutionaries got into power on a large scale, 60 million of us were killed or starved. People became quite cautious of revolutions after that. But don't worry, the memory has almost faded and a new generation is waiting in the wings, ready to bring about utopia through mass murder.