pasabagi

52 ms·

781.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I think alcohol works better as a counter-argument. In Germany, it is not only legal, but it is also legal to sell in 'bubblegum flavour party boxes', obviously aimed at children. It is legal to sell at checkout, so after a recove
782.
by pasabagi 6y ago
> COVID doesn't really respond to political leadership. That's one of the few things we can say about it with certainty. You clearly live in a parallel reality, where east asia does not exist, where there isn't a direct an
783.
by pasabagi 6y ago
> diversity hires Oh dear. I suppose you think Boris Johnson got to where he was by his sharp intellect? Or does he also qualify as a diversity hire, on the basis that his family tree is more a family strongly-connected graph? On the oth
784.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I first thought about the problem when I read about the history of the Kashmir region, but actually, it's pretty universal in history. Ask any Mexican about how it is to be the neighbor of a much more powerful polity. Or a Lebanese per
785.
by pasabagi 6y ago
> None of them are the sorts of people who are anywhere even close to power or influence, Isn't that exactly the point? Brexit happened because of a referendum where normal people got a vote. > That is people's views drive n
786.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I get the argument, but I think if you look at the history of small nations sandwiched between large ones, you draw the opposite conclusion. The UK has essentially walked away from a position of power in a very large nation, to take a posit
787.
by pasabagi 6y ago
Do you live in the UK? It's hard for non-residents to understand the impact of The Sun. It's the most read newspaper by far - having a greater readership than all the other papers you mentioned combined. After the victory of John
788.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I think there are many more cars on the road today, and I suspect they are more dangerous to pedestrians (new cars are generally more powerful, so tend to accelerate to dangerous speeds on small streets. Not to even start on smartphones).
789.
by pasabagi 6y ago
> honest dissatisfaction with the EU in Britain Well, I don't know how honest you'd call The Sun. Obviously, it wasn't Russia - but equally obviously, the whole euro-skepticism thing was hardly an organic phenomenon. I thi
790.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I think the traditional meaning of the word liberal refers to something close to the opinions of The Economist. Socially liberal, economically liberal, and typically moderately imperialist (usually for paternalistic moral reasons). So there
791.
by pasabagi 6y ago
Actually I think the only large warm blooded predator that hunts humans actively is a polar bear. Maybe also leopards? Could be wrong. I think other large mammals typically do it when they're old, infirm, stressed, or otherwise unable
792.
by pasabagi 6y ago
Eh - most predators don't eat new and weird looking stuff. The reason is, if you can't digest something and get sick, you can't hunt, and so you'll probably die. I think sharks are the weird one here - one factor probabl
793.
by pasabagi 6y ago
You might be right - that said, there's no comparison when it comes to poverty between where I live now (east germany) and where I come from (London). Poor people in London are simply far more poor, even though London is far more wealt
794.
by pasabagi 6y ago
You're absolutely right. There are, however, bubbles - I don't know about France, but there are few cities in Germany where you aren't made to feel 'foreign' unless you go to a government office or something. Of cou
795.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I get the impression US salaries usually come out way ahead for software people (in other fields, not so much). The only point where it starts to get questionable is when you consider stuff like, how much would you pay to live in a city tha
796.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I think if a dependency is a perfectly sealed abstraction, where a complex function is reduced to a simple one with no leakage, then there's no reason not to use it. Obviously, in the real world, this basically never happens. Performan
797.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I think rust is kind of a perfect language for being profligate with dependencies, because the safety guarantees, typing, etc make it very hard to misuse a library, and relatively easy to design a library that is hard to misuse. A lot of wh
798.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I read Bernal Diaz's Conquest of New Spain, and got a very similar impression, bolstered by the fact Diaz was a first-hand participant, and very proud of all this stuff. The conquistadors were also pretty horrible to eachother, so I go
799.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I find this inappropriate. Politicians are engaged in political messaging - so it makes sense there - but online, we're engaged in conversation. What you're describing is good at putting a message across - but I don't want to
800.
by pasabagi 6y ago
To be fair, regular meals are far more expensive than a tablet. I think a lot of the weirdness comes from politician's desire to muddy the waters when it comes to poverty in their own nations - many first world, wealthy countries have
801.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I think you're missing out on the network effects of social services. Not having desperate people means you don't have the threat of crime. You don't have police who are one twitch away from shooting you at a traffic stop. Yo
802.
by pasabagi 6y ago
Which is why dictatorship is the absolutely worst form of government. If dictators were always awful, then at least their nations would be united against them. The better the dictator, the more power they and legitimacy they accrue, the mor
803.
by pasabagi 6y ago
"A healthcare system foiled by bears" sounds completely awful. On a more serious note, I think your description of 'libertarian ideas experimented one segment at a time' is a pretty good description of a normal state. Yo
804.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I don't know of one - that's kind of why I'm asking. I don't think it's at all unfeasible (I think ZFS might do it, never tried it out) and I think it would be an amazing development. I think the unix model of one-p
805.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I tried this approach for a while, and the thing I couldn't get my head around, is how do you undo mistakes? Like, you write a messed up sed command - are you supposed to revert your changes to the last git commit? Not make mistakes? I
806.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I don't get this view. Controlling information dissemination is like, half of negotiation strategy. If the counterparty knows everything you know, you're basically always at their mercy. Seems like a lot of trust to give literally
807.
by pasabagi 6y ago
Seems to me like a scenario where a pro-china party moves Taiwan closer to China, until it is essentially re-integrated, is basically inevitable if China continues to grow at its current pace.
808.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I think the USSR was typically very keen to avoid a war for obvious reasons: they had a much smaller economy, exhausted population, significantly smaller military and massively smaller industrial base than the West. America was more keen, b
809.
by pasabagi 6y ago
YMMV. A friend of mine was recently in a fire, and several of her neighbors died because they tried to leave using the stairs, then succumbed to smoke inhalation. Everybody who stayed in their flats survived. I think it's awfully situa
810.
by pasabagi 6y ago
I think the guitar did have a sort of outsize influence and symbolism, due to a few factors that no longer exist, or don't have the same punch. First, it's the quintessential american instrument, and it came to dominate the music

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