pasabagi

48 ms·

541.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I don't know if they are so much more hostile towards privacy - I moved from the UK to Germany, and while overt data collection is much more limited here, the tendency is still there for government agencies (especially the police) to c
542.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Well, yeah. He's clearly not a particularly technically-minded or diligent kind of person. I don't think anybody thinks he is, Dominic Cummings said that BJ is actually pretty conscious and self-aware about this. I think the UK wa
543.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I sympathise with your desire to separate the private and the public, but where somebody is a deadbeat dad to the point that they seem genuinely unsure how many kids they have, you would question whether they are responsible enough for the
544.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I'm pretty sure parent is being sarcastic. Boris Johnson is the guy who literally goes 'uh, I think' when asked how many children he has[0]. He's not big on commitments of any kind. [0]: for the record, it's suppose
545.
by pasabagi 5y ago
> Romans (as in the etymology Roman Empire) originally referred to a specific cultural and ethnic group - italic, latin speaking people in Rome and Italy. Those were the only people that called themselves that at the time. It's my u
546.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Sorry, that was bad writing on my part. I meant that this was the distinction . In Byzantine history, transitions between one sovereign to another always consisted of a new sovereign seizing the control of the Roman state. In the example o
547.
by pasabagi 5y ago
There was no such thing as a roman ethnicity or language (perhaps latin for law? The byzantines kept latin for a very long time in this context). Rome itself was a backwater long before the western empire fell. The difference between Byzant
548.
by pasabagi 5y ago
It's a misunderstanding of what the house of cards is about, though. One of the first empires to use fiat currency was the Yuan dynasty, and it worked, because if your currency is backed by the mongols, you're absolutely going to
549.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Airburst rounds existed in WW1 too. The point is, you hide in a bunker until the shelling is over, then you come up and man positions before the enemy can reach your trenches, or failing that, counterattack while they are cut off from suppl
550.
by pasabagi 5y ago
He sort of has a point in that there are some products (plastics, etc) that are only produced from crude oil. The problem is it's pretty doubtful that fracking would be worthwhile if that was the only demand - there's more than en
551.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Absent from your analysis is the risk presented by global warming. Obviously, transitioning the energy sources for an entire group of nations is risky and absolutely the kind of thing you expect to be a bumpy ride. On the other hand, uncont
552.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I think the counterargument is basically that trying to apply ethics to the royal family is like trying to apply orbital dynamics to a whale. Everything about how the whale lives and looks references its formative environment, and I guess y
553.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I feel the opposite. The more computer interfacing takes place in software, the better for disabled users. If you have a device that expects a keyboard scancode to respond, then you need to build a physical keyboard to talk to it. Building
554.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I don't think rust is particularly weird. If you want, you can pretty much write in an imperative style, with objects, etc. It's just got some practical thinking thrown on ontop of that: i.e. make everything immutable by default,
555.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Sounds nice. One of the things I've been dwelling on recently is the degree to which economic geography creates the conditions for an effective press. Germany and France are both really regional, in the sense that you have loads of com
556.
by pasabagi 5y ago
It's not really opposites, though. Private media is highly centralized, and the people involved are also highly involved in politics (Rupert Murdoch, for instance). In China, high up party members are generally very wealthy, and wealth
557.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I have the same feeling (am also an ex UK guy). It's a feeling v. much borne out by the statistics - there's been a slump in wages and living standards in the last fifteen years or so that's been unevenly distributed, both ge
558.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Depends on the Germans? It's just more polarized here than where I've lived in the UK. The closest reference point I can think of is the UK in the 80s. There's an active far-right (the AfD got 27% of the vote in Saschen recen
559.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Yeah, it is creepy, and you're right, it does clash. What I'm getting at here is there's a dominant culture, which is essentially based on the idea that national unity is important, and that unity comes from people being on t
560.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Moved to Germany from the UK. In practical terms, Germany is so far ahead it's not comparable. The quality of life here is better making minimum wage here than it is if you're on a decent wage in the UK. A lot of the difference is
561.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Do you think if he hadn't had those restrictions available he wouldn't have kidnapped Sarah Everard? Surely he'd have just used something else?
562.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Well, I think the argument goes that these liberal countries are a vital part of a broader international system, that has no privacy laws, is not doing anything about climate change, and is at war all the time: in fact, a system that's
563.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Is that actually because SK is corrupt, or because SK is really keen on rectitude in politicians? I think there are more than a few UK politicians who could definitely serve time for corruption, and it's even been occasionally (recentl
564.
by pasabagi 5y ago
> another dangerous nuclear thing I think this really understates the case against nuclear power. The problem with nuclear power stations is they are prone to the same kind of industrial accidents all large plants are prone to, and they
565.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I guess the kind of immersion he's talking about doesn't give me much confidence. If you imagine party propaganda is like the most peripheral part of the entire discourse, and there's this gigantic machinery of ideas that mak
566.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I think the problem is a bit like when you're reading western accademic's take on what some USSR marxist, or some Chinese marxist is saying. There's a good chance the accademic has read a bit of marx, maybe even most of marx,
567.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I think France has a particularly bad record in this regard, having both pretty lively politics, and Napoleon's 'whiff of grapeshot' in its DNA. Still, this is more or less the basic pattern of how nations and armies work tog
568.
by pasabagi 5y ago
The annoying thing was, my position on first lockdown was: 1. Covid doesn't generally disable young and healthy people, so there will be no supply shortage. 2. It will be nice to have a reason to go out if I'm cooped up inside all
569.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Yeah, definitely the rhine-ruhr area has some suburbs, but it's still way more dense than the UK. I get the feeling there's a big divide between west and east basically because of ideology: in the west, the state encouraged women
570.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Leipzig has a pretty sharp divide, for example. If you walk west, you hit platenbau, then it's a bunch of farms. I figured a lot of east cities are like this (Gera, for instance, Halle, etc). It could be a matter of perspective - in Lo

More ›