pasabagi

58 ms·

571.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Rethink taxation so people living in suburbs pay proportionately to the cost of running services to them, and you'd very quickly see a denser city. Dense habitation is just way more efficient, more ecologically friendly, and more cost
572.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Generally I agree, but thinktanks exist to produce studies that strengthen a pre-established political position. Taking them as an objective source is misunderstanding what a thinktank is for.
573.
by pasabagi 5y ago
It really depends. When that quote of yours was first being said, essentially the only way for states to expand their power was to invade and occupy more territory. So states that did a lot of that tended to become more powerful, leading to
574.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I think it's more likely that WW1 and WW2 collectively persuaded even the most thick-headed of western elites that great power conflicts are bad for everyone, even the winners. There's a reason why the french and the british were
575.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Well, the bet you're making is that the side effects after 5 or 10 years of Coronavirus, a disease that causes literal brain damage, are better than the side effects of the vaccine. I was also pretty unenthusiastic about taking an expe
576.
by pasabagi 5y ago
> shoe string budget > Revenue (2018) $412,233,508[0] I don't know what shoestrings you're buying, but I suggest shopping around. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association
577.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Because it's nonsense. Until the 60's, Algeria was literally part of France. It's an extremely diverse country.
578.
by pasabagi 5y ago
> strike a quiet deal with your employer. I guess the question is, is it the worst your employer will ever get? Sometimes, if you want to win, the opponent just has to lose more . It might not be a good strategy for improving your own l
579.
by pasabagi 5y ago
It would be pretty easy to offer a tax rebate for people who use a van for work.
580.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I would actually really like it if a public-health approach was taken to household choices. Driving a car is simply expensive for society at large, because it has all sorts of negative effects on air quality, pedestrian safety, even stuff
581.
by pasabagi 5y ago
It depends, actually. Container prices are very volatile. If you're in the middle of a crash, a container house can be cheap. GP was correct however in pointing out they aren't particularly good for building houses that are actual
582.
by pasabagi 5y ago
>China could presumably influence to NK to not launch missiles at neighbors. Very questionable. If you read about the Rangoon bombing[0] the short of it is the Chinese passed on a note from the NKs to the Americans requesting trilateral
583.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Mmmm - I thought the problem was that the risk profile is it's not linear? So like, if enough people have it, they swamp emergency rooms, and suddenly, a lot more people are dying than would be dying at a lower incidence rate. So from
584.
by pasabagi 5y ago
You sound more a lot more outraged than me. I thought the Heinlein quote is kind of gross because it sits on the idea that the high point of a woman's life is to be 18. I'd feel similarly it if you replaced 'girl' with &
585.
by pasabagi 5y ago
> He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart...no matter what the merciless hours have done to her." - Yeesh. I'm glad I've met a lot of
586.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Not very good writing, and a not particularly insightful take. The comparison they make with 9/11 is somewhat instructive: coronavirus has killed multiple orders of magnitude more US citizens, even killed multiple orders of magnitude m
587.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I think also, in the case of somebody like Greenwald, it doesn't really matter how many people he reaches because he's essentially an empty envelope - he doesn't really hold substantive opinions. For example, he supported the
588.
by pasabagi 5y ago
To be honest, even if that was official policy, I would totally tick that box. You're much better off avoiding the kind of extreme intervention to prolong life that makes scrapping your corpse for parts seem like a good idea to a docto
589.
by pasabagi 5y ago
I think with lawyers, the problem is basically GUIs. Because most computer users, even very high-skilled computer users like lawyers, are used to consuming software in the form of GUIs, you tend to get these kind of all-encompassing WYSIWYG
590.
by pasabagi 5y ago
> You're describing things in a misleadingly mundane way again. I take your point, but why don't we turn this framing on its head? 'Two soviet spies sentenced to the death penalty for espionage', is less mundane, but
591.
by pasabagi 5y ago
They were a young couple with infant children and they were both electrocuted to death, in Ethel's case, for typing out her husband's letters. There's no collection of acronyms and russian names you can add to that that makes
592.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Eh, they sent the USSR a couple of drawings of circles, and Ethel Rosenberg apparently did some typing. They were, loosely, spies for a foreign power, but their impact was absolutely negligible and their execution was essentially a lynching
593.
by pasabagi 5y ago
> Those reparations figures are wildly overestimated I feel like I'm understating them. I'm getting my overview of the amounts from this paper[0], but in principle, even getting paid a part of the costs of a war is a very goo
594.
by pasabagi 5y ago
P 1. A policy is a set of procedures a state employs to get a desired reaction from a population. P 2. An empire is a state that employs some policies across its entire territory. P 3. Multi-ethnic empires with strong cohesion have existed.
595.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Sure - the basic concept of a multi-ethnic social organization presupposes that ethnicity doesn't affect how you react on social conditions. In the 19th century and early 20th century, it became fashionable to say that only nations of
596.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Consider something like the role of courage in military tactics. If you had some populations who were simply less courageous than others, you'd have a different baseline for stuff like, does a phalanx work? Is a phalanx even necessary?
597.
by pasabagi 5y ago
> “That people from different parts of the world have wildly different distributions on many different attributes” is, as you say, obvious. Is this obvious? I can't imagine what kinds of attributes you're talking about. I think
598.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Sure. That almost became the mandatory policy where I live.
599.
by pasabagi 5y ago
Until 1945 (later?) women didn't have the vote in France, so I think a situation where one local government has 69% women is very clearly progress. I seriously doubt that women make a majority of civil servants in general. When women
600.
by pasabagi 5y ago
First, I think comparing our concept of democracies with athenian democracy is rarely a good idea. They didn't go for elected officials in the way we do - even our most extreme concept of direct democracy would be, for the athenians, a

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