They’re entirely separate governments ruling over different countries.
There’s no reason for people outside of politics to pretend otherwise. It always comes off as childish, really.
938 karma · joined April 12, 2021
There’s no reason for people outside of politics to pretend otherwise. It always comes off as childish, really.
Those governments may be distasteful and do things you don’t like, but they’re very real and have been for nearly a century now.
And just dumping billions of tons of salt on a mountainside is no different from what humanity has been doing for centuries now. Destroying an environment that currently has no economic benefits and leaving the next generation to deal with the disaster that it becomes. We’ve done it with deforestation, fossil fuels, excessive and mismanaged farming (see: dust bowl), growth hormones and excessive antibiotics in livestock, excessive ground water usage, excessive fertilizers and their runoff, etc. All those were great in small amounts, then people realized they could pretend there were no consequences to milk even more gains now. Now we have rising sea levels and countless other environmental problems, all because people previously avoided accepting consequences later on.
Growth has consequences. People who optimize for economic gain are paid in part to conceal negative consequences to keep their short term gains from being inhibited.
If you can attain exponential growth without consequence, you’ve found a way to simply create matter or violate some law of physics, and honestly, that’s a bigger scientific achievement than economic.
One day around age 26 it just went away after having been a problem since early high school. No clue why. If you're still young, your "problem" may simply be youth.
If China goes hard on chip manufacturing, they could economically crush Taiwan.
That said, I’ve thought Make America Great Again hats were hilarious since day one. I’ve wanted to get one and wear it, but I know that doing that is taken as a strong sign of endorsement for him and various other things, and it sets some people off into a rage.
Can’t wait until a decade from now when it hopefully settles down and they’re just goofy pieces of vintage wear.
Mid-90s to very early 2000s was nonstop AOL commercials and CDs in the mail. Chat rooms were booming and you couldn't watch a single TV show without a "You've got mail!" reference.
Like, I get it, they’re going for the whales who’ll waste loads of cash on “games” that just swallow coins. But leave at least one floor with some variation and some games that average people will want to play.
This would be great. Poisons become ineffective against their intended targets pretty quickly after a few generations, but evolving resistance against being zapped is a bigger hurdle to overcome.
If this really is Saigon 2.0, 20 years from now Afghanistan will be a peaceful country with active tourism. With the Taliban seemingly making efforts to appease China for economic gain, who knows, it just might happen.
When it comes to emissions, poor countries are generally way lower than wealthy countries per capita. If we readjusted these charts to be plastic pollution per dollar, the Philippines would be several orders of magnitude higher than anywhere in the west.
This skips over the context of why people absolutely feared the idea of slaves gaining freedom after the Haitian Revolution.
The reason for that was the genocide carried out against non-black Haitians. [1] Even those people who actively opposed slavery, including children, were murdered. Americans feared that if slaves were freed, they'd all be raped and murdered as well
I'm not here to justify slavery or anything. But people 200 years ago didn't consider all races equal, and they were especially put off by the events that transpired in Haiti and wanted to actively prevent anything similar from happening in their own hometown.
When you consider cost of living, wealth distribution, money controlled by trillion dollar corporations (mostly in the US), infrastructure, health care, etc, dollars become an unequal scale. The bottom 20% of British society probably does much better than the bottom 20% of Americans. The difference is likely more stark with the bottom 10%.
The UK might have a average lower household income than West Virginia, but virtually nobody could really say West Virginia is better off than the UK.
We're pretty much at a point where any hacker/leaker anywhere on earth is "found" to have committed sex crimes or have 300 gigabytes of child abuse on their computers.
Eventually Disney will be getting their hands in it to detect copyrighted content and then it's all over.
So they have unnecessary wealth just sitting around that they don't need.
That's an artist problem. Not a programmer problem.
I've used Lua for gamedev before. I've also used C#, C++, Python, and Javascript. Nothing was more fun to work with than Lua. If Unity announced they were dropping C# support and switching over to Lua, I'd probably buy a bottle of top shelf champagne to celebrate.
Wikipedia says the top 1% possesses precisely 38.5% of the country's wealth, so it's more than reasonable that they shoulder at least 38.5% of the taxes. [1] This stat is also from 2016. That divide has grown immensely these past few years.
The stat the Tax Foundation presents is made to make us sympathetic towards people who control basically the entire nation's wealth and pay, frankly, very little. There's a reason they're not putting their wealth in the EU or developed Asian countries--they'd be paying more.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealth_inequality_in_the_Unite...
There are kidnapped children being locked inside homes. If you don't open your doors and accept weekly full home inspections, I think it's safe to say you support offenders and hate victims if you oppose this. I mean, we're all against people kidnapping and abusing children.
There's a small number of victims, a small number of offenders (but much more than "a handful"), and hundreds of millions of other home owners. This change is in the direct interest of victims, direct opposition to offenders.
I've always used it as a way of testing my internet connection there since HN loads quickly and has been ignored by basically every filter everywhere. I haven't been to China since borders were shut down, but HN worked there last January.
And to address everything else, I wouldn't say China is Norway-level, but they're definitely on a very clear upward path of development and accelerating. I think a lot of other countries have gotten comfortable with their place somewhere near the top and assume it's an intrinsic trait their country holds, and not something they need to work for.
e.g., As an American, loads of people I know say America is the absolute greatest place on earth (maybe it is in some aspects). But mention that it's falling behind in some ways (crumbling infrastructure, etc) and some people refuse to acknowledge it. Say some countries (especially any country in Asia and particularly China) do any single thing better than the US, and a large number of people get absolutely enraged. It's wild. Even people who a couple years ago would've proudly shouted about how much they hate nationalism and especially jingoism seem to be falling into that trap.
It's hard to improve your country when people think country development is an immutable trait, and not something you need to constantly work for.