unity1001

Its not average for Europe. Aside from Germany, rest of Europe is at around ~10%.

The UK is being singled out because its not able to import the groceries it used to do before Brexit now - there has been a low yield crop season in most parts of Europe and the domestic demand for groceries has literally exhausted the supply that can be exported. Since the UK is out of the Eu, its not possible to access the Eu domestic supply anymore and it has to wait for what remains for export.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/28/british-supermarkets-are-rat...

There isnt such a situation like rationing vegetables anywhere else in Europe.

Circumventing WTO rules by sanctioning countries and companies with the excuse of 'national security' is still a violation of the free trade principle and all the rules that a country has agreed to when it joined the WTO.

At this point, what the US is doing cant be seen as anything else but anti-competitive, protectionist practice and all WTO members would react accordingly.

This is not about the merits of free trade or protectionism. This is about the doublespeak that the US does. Many people dont know that even before this trade war, the US had 'import quotas' that limited the exports of even its closest allies to the US even as the US was incessantly forcing them to open their entire economy up to US companies without any restrictions.

> But, the _planning_ of new construction/reconstruction were similar during that period in both the USA & Europ

That's where you go wrong. There isnt 'urban planning' in Europe because there isnt any space to plan anything. What could be called 'urban planning' in Europe is laying out subway tracks, maybe demolishing a run-down shanty neighborhood to build apartments. Thats it. Naturally there is no way to plan anything around cars. The most you can do is to eat up a little sidewalk in the biggest avenues in the biggest cities to make one more lane for the main street. And that's what was done for ~80 years.

> I think the citations quoted above from multiple sources generously support this

They dont. You moved on to 'urban planning was like that' argument from 'built like that'.

> European urban planning was also, at one time somewhat recently, largely car centric

Repeating it wont make it so. It wasnt, and still isnt. Aside from some part of Germany that rebuilt its destroyed cities and built autobahns, entire Europe was about tiny cars and tiny streets, leave aside any phenomenon like suburbs.

You cannot extrapolate from 'Le Corbusier and his friends liked cars and wanted to demolish cities' to 'city planning was like that'. If city planning was really like that (if it actually existed that is), then Le Corbusier and his friends would get their way and entire cities would have been rebuilt.

> comes from understanding what that code is really doing

It does come from understanding the !business code! that is involved. Not the rarely important features of the underlying language that the stack, the framework or the models handle.

Which makes that argument further moot - you should not be messing with how the models or the framework handle those data types. There is a reason why they were built and deployed.

I dont get it - has the copyright problem with AI generated code trained on other people's repositories been solved yet?

> Over time they lean more and more on that knowledge and the extent of their software development is mostly spotting patterns in the existing codebase and regurgitating those patterns repeatedly.

That's what the majority of all the industries on the planet are doing. Repeating the correct patterns in the right place and right time. The value is knowing the right patterns and repeating them at the right time and place.

And it makes sense - how many different ways are there to iterate and manipulate a given set of data that contains customer/user records, orders, social post meta or whatever is commonly used in modern tech? Aside from very specialized organizations that are working on the cutting edge of the tech in this or that specific sub-specialization, most of what we are doing is juggling data in the same way everyone does. The chances of anybody bringing a totally new way to juggle that data through exemplary and precise knowledge of the language are ultra slim. And if that ever happens, everyone would soon know and start using that method anyway. Which brings us to the point below:

> I'm recruiting problem solvers, and I think it's necessary to understand the tools

The problem solvers would know that we are living in 2023, and not only the abstractions that we use, but also the stacks and languages that we use have evolved to handle as much as they can to make our work easier, including data types and their manipulation. The memory space inside a developer's mind that is allocated to knowing those data types and manipulating them manually is memory space that is wasted and not being used for remembering other things and increasing his or her impact.

If your logic held out, we would still be manually allocating memory in our programs. We dont. Those who need to know allocating memory on a daily basis and needing to not letting that knowledge atrophy are those who work on hardware, low level hardware-softare interfaces, those who build and maintaing languages, packages, or stacks for industry-wide use. Not the developer who solves !business! problems.

> Frankly, I think developers are getting good at combining Google search results into a codebase that reads more like a ransom note of copied-and-pasted snippets than a deliberate engineering effort

Yes. And that's what enables them to take on the ownership of increasingly broader features and systems. In the same way it enables even fewer founders to bootstrap or launch more complex startups. Everything we do in tech is for automating, optimizing and making easier a given level of problems to be able to rely on that automation to move on to the next level.

> Sure, tools and language (e.g. Javascript) often abstracts much of the details away

Yes. They do. Every stack, language, framework does. That's what amplifies productivity. Not holding on to knowledge you will rarely ever use.

...

The difficulty of modern tech is in creating reliable, user-friendly and cheap systems that bring advanced technology to the masses. Anything that prioritizes specialized knowledge on what is already handled by the existing technology stack is more academic than anything practically engineering related. Such approaches could exist inside gigantic old-school organizations like IBM when they had their heyday, and they did exist inside tech gians which literally made themselves a continuation of the colleges which their founders graduated from, fueled and floated by zero-interest investor money, prioritizing only 'growth' without paying attention to the business fundamentals. But in the new, non-zero-interest economy, they can hardly be justified.

> You seem so poisoned with anti-English xenophobia

Even if I was, why would being so anti-French like the English establishment and its followers are be ok, but not being 'anti-English'.

> spreading disinformation

You are not the arbiter of truth. Neither the establishment that you are defending. The one that was called the 'perfidious albion' for 400~ years by now.

This is the first time I see someone talking about 'misinformation' regarding referenced historical material. It comes across extremely funny. Demonstrates how big the gap is in between how the Angloamerican world sees itself and the world and the rest of the world does.

> Denying the existence of The Terror is just weird. It was condemned at the time by fellow Jacobins like Danton/Desmoulins who were then executed themselves as the revolution devoured it's own. Robespierre had lost his mind by this point.

Aside from the charged emotional wordage used in your paragraph giving away the level of ire and propaganda levied against those who you consider to be your 'historic enemy' in line with your establishment's propaganda, nobody denies the existence of executions. ~3000 people were tried and executed in Paris.

What is 'denied' is the delirious, emotionally charged exaggeration that comes from the establishment you stan for - just like your emotional approach, that establishment has portrayed this event as if millions of ordinary French were wrongfully killed. With the judge, jury and executioner of that sentence being the English establishment, the traitorous aristocrats who escaped to England, and those who finally accomplished in destroying the French Revolution. Its like asking Dick Cheney to describe the Iraq War...

> It isn't called la Terreur because of English propaganda but because the revolutionaries openly discussed the concept and deliberate use of terror in the period. You can quibble about what they meant by it and whether or not terror was an official policy or just the reality, but that is where name arises. Robespierre: "The basis of popular government in time of revolution is both virtue and terror".

The word 'terror' had different meanings 300 years ago. Whereas it has been made into something quite different from the usage in the period in the following centuries. Maybe they should have used the word 'fear of god' instead of the more rational-sounding 'terror'. Like how it is in the Anglosaxon literature. Then it would be all good and well.

Regardless of the propaganda subversion of a term from a different language by a hostile establishment, the incident is what it is - the execution of ~3000 people, mostly the aristocrats and their surrogates for conspiracies against their own people.

> The official figures are 17k executed (2-3k in Paris) and 10k died in prison awaiting trial.

The Anglosaxon 'Terror' propaganda is about the executions in Paris. Its about 'blood flowing in the streets'. Guillotines. Not the events that transpired elsewhere in France, during the wars, or in the killings of the revolutionaries by the French aristocrats or the foreign armies that they have called in to murder their own people.

It is very likely that even more people died from both sides in the events during and after the revolution. But the English propaganda is not about that. Its about 'blood flowed in the streets'. Emotional manipulation to demonize. Because otherwise different sides in a civil war executing collaborators of the other faction in court martials across the countryside does not make the same emotional manipulation effect. Even more so because the English history is chock full of such incidents, and the accusation would turn against the propagandists themselves - hence, 'blood flowed in the streets - guillotines!!!'.

...

There is absolutely no difference between how the French Revolution was demonized in this manner through emotional propaganda and how other targets of the English establishment were demonized before and later. All the way from starting the demonization of the Spanish by the Elizabethans to the demonization of Europe during the Brexit process.

Here is an example of the actual terror that existed back in that time:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre

That doesnt count, of course. It was not directed against the aristocrats, but commoners. Who are not 'real people'.

...

Yes, how the French Revolution is viewed outside the Anglosphere and inside the Anglosphere is !starkly! different. For your demographic, this is a vicious football matchup in which you must vilify and demean your opponent even if the arguments are based on lies for emotional manipulation by totally invalidating even the principles that built our modern society by originating from that revolution. For the rest of the world, its one of the most important events in history of the world. An event that permanently destroyed the myth of the god-given rights of the aristocrats to rule, and freed the world from their yoke.

> good person

That's the worst part - the 'good' and 'evil' in such situations are being religiously definded just like how 'the faithful' and 'heretics' were defined back in the earlier ages when religion dominated the society. Everyone is either 'with us' or 'against us', ie, a heretic. And being heretic is so easy - you just need to contradict whatever is the dominant thing at a given moment and you are outcast. Just like how it was in the earlier ages.

Take the Stone case: 80% of the world opposes the American viewpoint on Russia and 'Putin', and 'the West' is isolated in this affair like how various Angloamerican outlets recently noted.

https://www.politico.eu/article/west-more-united-also-isolat...

I actually watched Stone's Putin interviews. What Russian leaders and Putin have communicated in those interviews were quite rational arguments, and actually, their statements about American imperialism, NATO etc are how precisely the rest of the world sees 'the West'.

But, in an amazing case study for social sciences, the public in especially the Angloamerican West are !extremely! enthusiastic in whatever 'current thing' and whichever 'current enemy' that their establishment sells them.

A gigantic gap in how this 'West' sees itself, what it believes what the rest of the world thinks, and what the rest of the world actually thinks. But then again, this is not so different from what was observed in the UK during the Brexit process...

Therefore, his contributions in the field of Open Source and software freedom are null and void, is it. Because, everyone has to be a prophet who we can take as a 'role model'.

...

This obsession with making Jesuses out of everyone to follow as 'role models' in the US is really alien to those of us who live elsewhere in the world.

Its amazing how you people did not 'cancel' literally every. single. prominent figure in near and distant history. All of them had something that would require canceling at this very moment - Washington had dentures made of slaves' teeth, Edison stole inventions and electrocuted elephants, Schweitzer believed that black people were inferior and so on.

...

In this particular topic, what is defined as 'pedophilia' isnt even clear: Is it prepubescent children? Or is it a 16 year old sleeping with an 18 year old? Even as 16 is a legal age for marrying and joining the military and dying in almost everywhere around the world, including various European countries? Or are 25 year olds still 'children' like how some lunatics are trying to popularize?

> I do not know how to best express my gratitude towards gorhill

Them opening a Patreon and you patronizing them would work great. And ensure the continuity of the project.

> democracy to break

As if there is any democracy in the countries that claim to have democracy. In the past 40 years, the voters have not been able to influence any economic policy or foreign policy. 74% Americans said to Gallup that they thought their votes absolutely did not change anything and they did not matter even as early as the second Bush administration...

> techno pseudo-utopian world view belief that Google is a forever day care and a "beloved employer".

The catch is that Google could have made that utopia possible, had all the funds and resources needed to do it, and actually did have that philosophy at the start and publicly so - until the bean counters took over and started minmaxing everything for the sake of absentee shareholders. The 'MBAification' eventually destroyed its mission. Various detailed comments from some long-time Googlers in different threads under TFA tell how that MBAification happened in minute detail.

Its just another case of capitalism destroying things while maximizing profits through 'MBAification'.

Likely because humans have evolved to be able to know, remember and relate with ~150 people. Anything larger than that, requires organization and representation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

Not really. We would know people by proxy and referral through other real people. Like how real life works. And actually, over a large duration of time, the real nature of people eventually surface - even the nature of those who successfully pretend to be someone else that they are not. I dont expect that it would be different in the case of AI - it should actually be easier to tell that an account is an AI in the long run. Real people are rather sticky in their ways and character for large durations of time. Their quirks show. The AI constantly evolves and changes.

> Yet, there are still quibbles around this as many European cities were rebuilt many times.

Thats not correct. Some noticeable percentage of German cities and some cities of the war-affected regions were rebuilt. And most partially. The re-architecting of Paris does not have any relevance to cars since it happened in 19th century.

> Beyond the above, the more extended exerts below I believe make the same point I made

They actually invalidate your argument - including the earlier excerpts: Modernist architects adopting car-centric ideas and high rises does not mean that they got to implement what they wanted to do in Europe. There is no such case of large-scale reconstruction of any European city around cars except the war-affected ones (and most partially), and all your excerpts just confirm that. They talk about how (the part of) a generation of European architects adopted modernist car-centric ideas - not them actually getting around to implement them. Its Le Corbusier proposing to demolish part of Paris in a furtive attempt, or him planning a high rise somewhere and whatnot.

Aside from that the excerpts explicitly demonstrate that car-centric cities were a US phenomenon. Not European.

Normally so. Because even the mere act of buying any zone in an average European city to demolish it would cost !enormous! amounts of money that nobody would be willing to spend. Leave aside the reconstruction. This is why the 19th century reconstruction of parts of Paris is the sole incident of this.

All of this, before the fact that most European cities do not have space - nobody can imagine demolishing an entire city to rebuild it with less density so that more cars could be used in sparse urbanization. Europe does not have that much space.

> he sees CIA coups everywhere in the 60s, murder of jfk, murder of lumumba

Considering how that is the whole business of CIA (aside from drug running to finance those and the paramilitaries, guerillas and islamists they fund), he is not far off. Solely the coups in South America would already flood the list, Africa would need a few more pages. Then there are coups in the Middle East etc. Incidentally, the later Iranian Islamic revolution is the result of the 1953 coup that CIA helped organize in Iran.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9ta...

They even hired the most famous mobsters in Tehran to help with the coup. So I guess the tendency of the CIA to choose the worst type of people to work with did not originate in the 1960s, and instead it was there when it was founded...

...

The murder of JFK is very specific, btw - its very plausible that CIA did it (Dulles) because JFK has sabotaged two CIA projects - the Bay of Pigs push and then the French coup. And that Dulles was a nasty, nasty, nasty man...

We will just learn to follow each other - the actual people - again and we will read each other's content. Just like how it was in the early days of the web.

> Of the cuff, the common vs civil law issue seems more of a formal difference, rather than a difference in outcome

Nope. Its fundamental. Take what happened during the BLM protests: A NY court suspended habeas corpus, the basis of all rights under common law. At that point, the authorities, including the police, could do whatever they wanted to anyone they wanted. It was reinstituted only after a higher NY court overruled it. If the higher court decided that the emergency warranted the suspension, ALL rights in NY would have been gone for the duration. Same goes for the US in general. If in the future, there is a major emergency that can 'justify' the suspension of habeas corpus and the supreme court lets it stay, all rights will be gone for whatever duration decided. In common law, the judges play the role of the sovereign monarch who owns all rights and gives them out as he sees fit. So it can 'reinterpret' everything at any given time and everyone is at the mercy of it.

Now take civil law: No such thing can happen. What rights the citizens, residents and even refugees have are written in concrete in the law, including what rights can be kept and what rights are suspended even in emergencies including global catastrophes, and they can never be taken back by anybody. The only one who can give or take back laws is the society itself, ie the people, they do that through democratic voting and proportional representation, and nothing and nobody can overrule them. Sovereignty belongs to the people.

> And what republic are the french on now? Fifth, sixth?

The majority of the French republics were destroyed by external sources that were trying to eradicate the remnants of the French revolution. Mostly backed by (then) 'the leader of the free world', Britain. We can also include World War II in this, since Britain was trying to use Germany as an attack dog against the Soviets and therefore propping up in any way they could, especially diplomatically. (including preventing an Europe-wide attempt of an anti-Nazi alliance that could totally prevent Ww2).

Outside those cases, the people democratically changing their constitution and calling it a new 'republic' does not really make it a new republic. Its still a republic, with a changed constition. The power still resides in the people and they decide how the 'new' republic will be. There is nothing outside the revolutionary principles there.

Though, one can easily say that the latest republic was also prompted by an external intervention - namely the CIA coup attempt to depose de Gaul to prevent the French from giving independence to Algeria.

http://whowhatwhy.org/2015/10/20/jfk-assassination-plot-mirr...

This is a very hairy affair, by the way - CIA organizing a coup in France using the military in lieu of JFK's policies and opposition, Parisians mobilizing and setting up barricades across Paris to protect the president, JFK being powerless to stop the CIA and leaking info and updates to the French via diplomatic channels to help against the coup...

> My knowledge is that European urban planning was very similar and car centric until the late 60s

There was and is scarce 'city planning' in Europe because there is scarce planning that can be done. The majority of cities have emerged in the middle ages at the latest, and there is nothing that can be done to 'plan' them. Even for the peripheries (as they are called) this is so: They formed around the villages or remote settlements in the peripheries of the cities, so there was no planning there at all.

The closes that can be said to be built 'around cars' would be the urban construction of gated communities or high rises in the peripheries. But they still were not built around cars - those communities can still perfectly live within their own locale by having access to everything. The only difference that requires a car would be those people having jobs in the city and having to drive 20-30 minutes every day to the city and back.

> Though, bottom line, my point is US and EU cities were designed very similarly from 1940 until 1970

That is patently false.

> Thanks for the different perspective.

Indeed - after being on the Internet for a while, I learned that what is taught on this topic in the Anglosphere and the rest of the world !greatly! differ. In high school curriculum, we were taught what the French Revolution did, what were its principles and how it related to our current society. What is incessantly drummed up in the Anglosaxon literature as 'the terror' was just mentioned as a part of the turmoil that was the revolution and the ensuing war. But of course, its no surprise how then-existing Anglosaxon establishment and its modern contunity hated 'the terror so much':

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/989759-there-were-two-reign...

Because 'the terror' was directed against the aristocracy. It did not matter whether hundreds of thousands of French died during the famines in which their aristocrats starved them for maximum profit to keep their luxurious lifestyle. It matters that ~3000 aristocrats and upper class were executed by those very peasants.

> The same case can be made for the american revolution, which was earlier, and which legacy is longer lasting

That is also a proposition of the Anglosaxon literature, and there is a quite different view of it outside that literature for that topic as well:

Whereas the French Revolution totally did away with all the existing political and social norms and brought an egalitarian and meritocratic format into politics and the society, the American Revolution was more a rebellion in which the elite of the colonies broke away from their motherland in a move to protect their privileges and position by incorporating some of the Age of Enlightenment principles. We see total commoners get into positions of power at the end of the French Revolution, whereas the American Revolution (or rather, rebellion) does not disturb the existing power structure in the colonies aside from ousting the parts of the elite who were royalists. There was also large scale land appropriation and land redistribution done at the end of the rebellion.

That is extremely important - because that is the reason why the leaders of the rebellion created an anti-democratic political structure: The American founding fathers thought that this kind of land redistribution could easily target themselves (and there were voices demanding it), and they wanted to protect their holdings and power. Which is why de facto architect of the American constitution, John Adams, openly and contradictorily advocated that the government should protect the society from 'the tyranny of the majority'.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority

The tyranny being democratically voted and enforced land redistribution, obviously. American founding fathers were rather blunt about it in their memoirs, letters and private communication. Some did openly politick against it as well.

This is the reason for the existence of the electoral college, the senate, and the 'checks and balances' in the American system - all of those were devised as ways to enable overriding or controlling the democratic majority so that they wouldnt come with pesky land redistribution schemes. So at the end of the 'revolution', we see the exact American elite occupying the same positions of power and privilege, but with the losing segments of the elite who sided with the crown removed. The actual aristocrats who sided with the rebellion kept their possesions after the rebellion, with the exception that their nobility titles not having a legal basis anymore. Which did not matter since it was the possessions that made the title.

On top of that, the Age of Enlightenment ideals were not fully materialized into their radical forms at that point. So what the nascent American republic did was to mostly copy the earlier Dutch Republic, the oligarchic trade/merchant republic that was seen as the pinnacle of systems at the time. The Dutch Republic had had copied its systems and format from the Venetian Republic in turn. So even from the start, the US was set up as an oligarchy and it shows even today. So if the US looks like a merchant oligarchy in which the merchants, traders and businessmen dominate the entire society, its not a happenstance - it was made to be that way.

Additionally, the nascent republic maintained the medieval feudal common law system that it inherited from Great Britain, which created the hodgepodge of legal mess that exists in the US when the holes of the medieval common law were plastered over with the civil law that originated from the French Revolution later. Its not so surprising that they kept common law since the colonists, including the American founding fathers did not want to break away from Britain at the start and for a long time after that - their demands were representation and/or abolition of the new taxes and being left alone like how it was in the earlier centuries. It took a lot of work by a few founding fathers to agitate for independence and a republic. (reading about Thomas Paine and his activities immediately before and after the rebellion could give some perspective)

So unfortunately, contrary to what is heavily advocated in the Anglosaxon (or rather, mostly American in this case) literature, the American revolution/rebellion was not the paradigm-shattering event that shaped the modern society - it was at most a step in the process, which definitely helped the leaders of the French Revolution to crystallize their ideas after seeing how the incumbent elite was able to protect their power during the process of the American rebellion. Leading to the crystal clear egalitarianism and absolute abolitionism of privileges seen in the Revolution later.

At this point we must note that the entire world uses civil law, a product of the French Revolution, whereas only a few countries (like the UK) and a few small islands still use the common law. Even the US has a mixed common law + civil law environment. Merely the major difference in between these tells how different these two events were and why the French Revolution is the event that shaped modern society:

In common law, the judges still act as the stand-in for the local feudal sovereign with the power to 'interpret' the law and override it with those interpretations, leading to 'precedents' that end up becoming de facto laws themselves.

Whereas in civil law, the judge is just the speaker of the democratic parliament that has written any given law, tasked with communicating and precisely implementing the pre-written law with literally no interpretation. Even in cases in which the existing law does not cover something in the exact manner, the judge is responsible with falling back to a broader law that does cover that specific thing and implementing its articles in an exact manner - he or she can not 'interpret' any law or set any 'precedents'. All the power lies in the people who make the law, and those who implement the law are just their representatives.

...

Of course, these are quite large topics with a lot of reading buried in them, so its a bit difficult to recommend stuff that could bring a different perspective - especially from the Anglosaxon literature. But reading Howard Zinn's A people's history of the world is one shortcut - it would touch a lot of similar subjects as well.

However still, its not difficult to find some articles that were compiled on the matter:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/2141520.pdf

https://www.stratford.org/uploaded/faculty/jjordan/Viewpoint...

> It famously devolved in a terror state

The 'terror' is 'famous' only because of the ~300 years long propaganda of their enemy, the English establishment - the aristocratic establishment that hates anyone or anything that threatens the aristocracy with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. Otherwise, what is called 'the terror' accounts for ~3000 people, and most of them in Paris. And it consists of aristocrats, their surrogates, their servants who aided them with their conspiring with their foreign relatives to come to France and massacre their own people so that they wouldnt lose their privileges and the 'plebs' would 'know their place'.

Conspiring against your own country in wartime in that manner still carries the death penalty even today. Even in the most democratic countries.

> the french revolutionary program traded aristocratic rights for bureaucratic corruption

Corruption existed in all eras and all societies in human history. 'Bureaucrats being corrupt' at or after one point does not invalidate a system. That system worked spectacularly well when it was first instituted, literally reforming the entire continent by removing aristocrats from power and appointing non-nobility to those positions on a meritocratic basis. It worked so well that even after the aristocrats were able to destroy the Napoleonic remnants of the revolution, they kept that 'bureaucratic' system. If it became corrupt, you can tie it to the influence of the aristocrats - not the revolution.

...

No, the French did find the solution to it - the French Revolution is the unique event in human history that destroyed the elitist, aristocratic stranglehold of the minority on the society by invalidating all the historic traditions and trappings that trace back to the Agricultural Revolution and all the norms that those enforced on the people. And it set the standards for our actual modern society. It has basically created the blueprint of how we live today.

With Hetzner VMs and k3s one could run a k8 cluster with amazingly low cost. There are even ready-made repos that make it lighting fast to deploy and easy to maintain...

https://github.com/kube-hetzner/terraform-hcloud-kube-hetzne...

Even Hetzner maintains a few repos for that:

https://github.com/orgs/hetznercloud/repositories?q=kubernet...

> (disclosure, I'm a founder at a cloud-cost management startup)

Isnt it natural that your service gains more users at this time when everyone is trying to cut down on cloud costs... Cloud usage may be declining, but those who are still using it would want to cut costs...

The French, found a very good solution to all of that ~230 years ago...

Best comment in the thread.

> a set of attacks on our society, against which we have little experience and almost no defense... In specific, I believe the 2024 election cycle in the US will be decided by AI

Hell no. You are probably thinking about things like 'misinformation'. Let me tell you that all such concerns are totally unfounded:

People just buy into whatever already fits their existing bias. Even if they are lies or proven lies. They don't care if something was a lie. If there is more stuff that confirms their existing bias, they will shout louder. If there is less, they will shout less. But they will still vote the same way.

So when the 2024 elections happen and there is a lot of misinformation, everyone will just buy into ! whatever ! confirms their existing bias - be it truth or be it a lie - and vote in the exact same manner they were going to do before that misinformation.

While this reduces the concerns about misinformation and/or the effects of the AI, it also suggests that objective politics is difficult because people are not affected by facts, truth, or even their own prior experiences.

> Very interesting point. The other type is people who think they'll be on top after a society-breaking external event

Wait until you see those who want to create a nuclear war somewhere to make an apocalypse happen so that Jesus of Nazareth can come back. Then there are also ones who believe that the nuclear apocalypse must be global for Jesus to return. Have your next shock when you discover that these people actually have politicians among them. Then another one when you discover that the last US Sect. of State himself publicly admitted to be one of those...

> The U.S. is much more socially conservative than Europe, which has to do with being much more religious than Europe

Thats a misconception. The main conservative voting blocs in both locations have the same kind of weight and cloud if reflected in a proportional system.

> A multi-party proportional system would give this segment more independent political power and weaken liberals

Nope. Like the above, the main driving blocs would remain mostly the same in their talking points, while many separate parties would align, cooperate and make coalition with the main drivers.

You are also missing the fact that the reason why people coalesce in such big 'broad umbrellas' in the US is because they have to do it.

> Incorrect. The "east coast old money types" are among the most socially liberal of the subgroups of the U.S., and Harvard and Yale are extremely liberal on social issues.

The recent finance/media cliques can be said to be so. However we were talking about the traditional heritage of the US. And in history, it is as I described.

> Engineering schools like MIT and CalTech are actually more socially conservative than schools like Harvard and Yale. STEM workers in general are more conservative on average: https://scholarworks.unr.edu/handle/11714/2246

We were not talking about social conservatism. We were talking about anti-intellectualism, secularism. A MIT grad being more socially conservative on gay marriage or LGTBT rights does not mean that he or she will be tolerant to anti-intelectualism or will support anti-intellectual, anti-scientific policies of middle America.

> Roe was written by a Nixon appointee

Again, you are getting stuck on peripheral social issues while losing the gist of the argument. Anti-intellectualism is something that has a much bigger scope than the abortion debacle or LGBT rights.

> Not so. In my home country of Bangladesh, there hasn't been much of a "reactionary" movement since Islam was reinstated as the official religion in the 1980s.

My good man, if the islamism has already taken over, it means that you reactionary movements have already won. Which means that they existed way before that, and they were at work to achieve precisely that objective.

Which means that your secular society did not encompass everyone and did not try to bring all the amenities of modern science, technology and social advance to those people through education, social programs, employment and the like. They remained poor and destitute, seeking help from religious groups instead. Which is a perfect fit for Islam since Islam already has such charity/solidarity organizations built into the religion.

Again, its a perfect case that fits the pattern I described.

> You're conveniently forgetting the U.S., which was founded by a bunch of religious fundamentalists that quite consciously distanced themselves from the European enlightenment

That's false. The leaders of the American Rebellion were followers of the Enlightenment, and some even were way beyond just being followers. Thomas Paine even served a few terms in French Revolutionary parliament as a MP. From Washington to Jefferson, the leaders of the rebellion were way too radicals for their time, even in the issue of slavery. The sole reason that the concept 'America is not founded on religion' exists is because of those radicals. And it was one of them who explicitly said that.

> Meanwhile, continental Europe has become so culturally decrepit that they have lost the will to perpetuate their society and are being replaced by Muslims

This sounds like your personal opinion fueled on your personal perceptions without any statistical or historical basis. The percentage of muslims in Europe is 6%, and this includes those who dont practice.

The reason Europe is faltering is precisely because the center-right conservative types are implementing Reaganism for the last 40 years and their projects of privatization, profiteering are finally having their effects visible.

> The reaction to that isn't some Bircher conspiracy, it's a natural cause-and-effect

Anti-intellectualism and gay marriage are not things that are in the same rank. Anti-intellectualism existed before anyone 'forced' anything on anybody and it wanted people to live like the Amish or Mormons then, and it does so even today. If the late 19th century seculars have not forced secular modernism on the society, they would succeed to do so, as can be seen from how backwards the Middle East remained due to rejection of science.

Your personal biases are causing you to make extreme extrapolations and lose sight of the core subject.

> They were still legislated, according to the systems those countries have for enacting legislation

If the US had proportional representation, all of those policies would have been enacted at earlier points through the same mechanic that is in effect in Europe. You seem to think that there is a different kind of distribution of support/opposition to such policies in the US than anywhere else and there is a greater segment of the population that actually opposes these policies. That is not so.

> Yes, I get that liberals think moral regulation is this distinct sphere that should be carved out from the democratic process and entrusted to committees of Harvard and Yale graduates

Harvard and Yale graduates are among the conservative segments of east coast old money types that keep the reactionary traits of the US society going since early 19th century. If you said MIT, Berkeley, Caltech etc, your shaky proposition about 'liberals' could have been more credible. But as it stands it now contradicts itself by proposing that the conservative types of the old aristocracy who spearheaded the Reaganite movement have legislated progressive legislation against their own voter base.

> I’m simply pointing out that doing this makes the proles mad. Quite predictably so. You don’t need some Bircher conspiracy theory to explain what’s happening.

The behavior of far-right nationalist and religious fundamentalist groups anywhere on the planet are identical: If there wasn't these 'issues' that you speak of, they would be mad about something else just like how similar groups elsewhere in the world are.

> some elites had the bright idea to make “secularism” one of the founding pillars of the constitution

I dont know which one is your home country. However even speaking in the context of the US, secularism was and still is one of the fundamental tenets of the Age of Enlightenment that made the modern society, more importantly, the scientific revolution, possible. Before that, religious institutions and the religious elite and power groups were intervening in both politics and science and hampering the scientific progress. Any society that was not able to adopt it before 19th century started, was retarded in development and they either were conquered or made satellites by the countries that did adopt it. Which means that this is an excellent example of how it is necessary for society to prevent such fundamentalism and the fundamentalists that propagate it from sabotaging itself.

> The more straightforward explanation is that the reactionary movement in America is due to the anti-democratic means American liberals have used to achieve social change, which differs markedly from what is the case in other developed countries. For example, Germany and France don’t have as strong of a reactionary anti-abortion movement because they never had anything like Roe that overruled the public opinion on abortion.

That's patently false. The majority of the progressive policies you speak of were legislated by actual left win (not liberals) governments that came to power after Ww II. These governments and coalitions did not have absolute majority. In most cases they did not reach 51% representation even, mostly ~20% to ~30%. In all of these countries there were conservative segments that staunchly opposed these policies and represented ~20% of the population. The rest of the population belonged to other parties that aligned more or less with differing sides of the argument. So considering how the popular opinion was more or less evenly split in these countries at the time, by your proposition they all have legislated those measures anti-democratically.

But this part of your argument requires special attention:

> the reactionary movement in America is due to the anti-democratic means American liberals have used to achieve social change

There is no way to democratically win over those who want to live in 200 years ago with the traditions and practices that belong to two thousand years ago, practicing child labor, segregation, treating women as 2nd class beings, denying actual natural reality and trying to enforce their own false belief as the truth. From conservative American states which just recently legalized child labor to delirious kooks who say that the Earth is flat and dying in the process of launching their own homemade rockets to prove or confirm that belief, the American anti-intellectual religious fundamentalists are exactly the same today like how they were back then. If the society of 19th century did not override them and made progress happen, they would successfully have prevented a lot of the social and even technological progress that you take as normal today. They were openly against technology and they wanted to stop or limit its progress. You can see the heritage of that anti-intellectualism in how Mormons live today. If this feels like an unlikely case, note that the religious fundamentalist segments of the society DID succeed in keeping out or limiting scientific and technological progress in most of the Middle East from 18th century until mid 1950s, and that is the reason why those regions have fallen behind the rest of the world this much.