pqtyw

50 ms·

421.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> Isn't US military well independent? Is it? I mean I don't think they could legally refuse (if use of force was authorized by the president and congress)? So it would still effectively be a military "coup" and those
422.
by pqtyw 2y ago
You forget that Britain and Canada also directly participated in the Manhattan project. Then they were locked out by Truman in 1945 and it took them another 7 years to develop their own nukes. It's just not that simple or straightforwa
423.
by pqtyw 2y ago
Technically the Budapest Memorandum was a "political agreement" between the governments of US/UK/Russia at the time. It wasn't an actual treaty like NATO that was ratified by congress. Of course you do have a point
424.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> The US convinced Ukraine to scrap their nukes To be fair Ukraine didn't really have nukes. I mean they technically had nukes in their territory and maybe could have kept them if they really wanted to but it's a bit like e.g.
425.
by pqtyw 2y ago
Why do you think France or Britain would nuke New York? And there isn't that much point for Russia to nuke their new ally either.
426.
by pqtyw 2y ago
Those benchmarks seem to be more GPU based as well. e.g. something like Geekbench (not that it's necessarily that representative either) is just 2-3x faster. https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-apple_m4-vs-in
427.
by pqtyw 2y ago
Well yeah, I understand that this is based on some specific benchmark. Yet it's still some random arbitrary number effectively picked to mislead consumers. Especially when for the M1 (2x faster) they decided to use an entirely differen
428.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> these days, well, a fully-configured Mac Studio is $14,099 Not surprising considering the CPU in the fastest "desktop" Mac before today was slower than an old Intel chips you can buy for ~$350 (e.g. the 14700k).
429.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> Apple is marketing to people who have devices that are old, because they are old. It still makes claims like that arbitrary and meaningless. What does "23x faster" even mean, it's not like there are that many people who
430.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> Money simply isn't as big a differentiator It seems by your standards nothing is. Yet if you add it all together instead of looking at a single indicator money is inarguably (if you have any arguments or data please share them) st
431.
by pqtyw 2y ago
Legally (according to their constitution) USSR was also a democracy. But that hardly meant much in practice. Of course the Chinese society is probably much "freer" than than the Soviet one was prior to Gorbachev's reforms but
432.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> The difference in life expectancy is 15%. Which is huge. Life expectancy in the US increased by ~15% between 1955 and now. Surely you would be entirely content with receiving the same level of care as was available back then and inhali
433.
by pqtyw 2y ago
I'm sure Novo Nordisk would survive even with slightly lower margins. Also what proportion of that $1,000 goes to the manufacturer? From what I understand various middlemen and such get a significant proportion of that without providin
434.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> net worth is a bad proxy for consumption and lived experience Because it's simply not. It's a very good proxy. I understand what you said and only think you are somewhat right if talking about people who are at the very tail
435.
by pqtyw 2y ago
Perhaps. Then you can use something else instead of Gini. e.g. comparing wealth 10th, 50th, 90th, 99th percentiles. That would exclude Bezos & co. e.g. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/
436.
by pqtyw 2y ago
How exactly do your subsequent claims prove: > Piketty is a hack. Generally those IOUs are real as a ton of gold bars or dollar bills somebody might be hoarding in their vault.
437.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> is of zero consequence to the lives of the lowest-wealth individuals That wouldn't be the case if those at the top were taxed and more of their wealth transferred to those at the bottom.
438.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> 1900 had invested passively in the stockmarket, spent 2% of their wealth How is that possible, though? e.g. according to https://ofdollarsanddata.com/sp500-calculator/ adjusted by inflation the stock market only g
439.
by pqtyw 2y ago
No. It decreased massively and then went up again so now we're back at where it was back in 1900. This significantly challenges the "if America’s rich families in 1900 had invested passively in the stockmarket" e.g. the equiv
440.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> it should be taxing land heavily, and income less. Wouldn't that inflate housing prices even more? Which disproportionally affect those in the bottom 90% or so.
441.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> poorest are still getting richer in real terms Perhaps. So what? Their wealth/incomes were increasing much slower than worker productivity. Technological progress compensates for the massively increasing inequality to some extent.
442.
by pqtyw 2y ago
Not really. The entire Tibet Autonomous Region has less than 4 million people living in it. Xinjiang is 26 million which is of course a lot but still insignificant compared to China's total population (and almost half the people living
443.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> develop such an enormous landmass Why would that matter? Australia and Canada are doing reasonably well regardless of the overwhelming majority of their territories being empty "wasteland" (economically). If anything relative
444.
by pqtyw 2y ago
That's really funny.
445.
by pqtyw 2y ago
Unlike the Soviets US didn't try to impose a "colonial" style administration in Afghanistan. They had no long-term plan and the local Afghan government they were propping up was exceptionally corrupt and incompetent. Militari
446.
by pqtyw 2y ago
I'm not sure if most African countries that were friendly with the Soviets did that well either.
447.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> into a demicracy a-okay Well considering that Yeltsin had to order the army to shell the Russian parliament less than 2 years after the USSR was dissolved that somewhat arguable.
448.
by pqtyw 2y ago
> seems possible that Russia now might look more like a northern European Probably not. Kerensky and most other moderates were still reactionary imperialists by modern standards and wanted to keep the empire together. And the divergence
449.
by pqtyw 2y ago
Same reason the Warsaw pact and communism in all East/Central European countries collapsed at the same time. It could only survive as long as there was a credible threat of Soviet invasion. Same applied to almost all of the national &q
450.
by pqtyw 2y ago
It wasn't a "nation" though. It was an empire that could only be held together by force and oppression.

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