Universal Basic Income is a capitalist concept, not a communist one. All universal basic income models require a market economy that can then be taxed accordingly to pay for the income. This is not viable in a centralist, communist-economy á la the USSR or others. If capitalists want to keep making money by selling goods and services they need a consumer base with disposable income. However the more automation and AI are pushed, the less jobs there will be especially for people with little to no education.
Already in basically all western nations the government provides funds via taxation to unemployed citizens so they can acquire basic goods and services needed to live. This money is taken from corporations essentially (as it's the corporations paying people's wages) and re-distributed to those who're unemployed. Universal basic income models merely simplify and modernize this process: as the amount of wage-earners in advanced economies is projected to plummet as more and more job descriptions are automated partially or entirely, the amount of people in need of income transfers will rise, and universal basic income models are a capitalist, market-oriented solution to this that seek to maintain domestic demand (and hence keep the consumer economy running).
A communist solution would be to have essentially everyone work for the state in a planned, centralized economy. We know that doesn't work. However that does not mean that any and all income transfer policies are communism, lest every single western country is already 'communist' as these policies in the form of social security, public health care (either single payer or an option of public insurance) and public education are already a mainstay of pretty much all first world economies, even though the US is slightly behind the rest especially when it comes to health care for example.
It's simply a fact of the way the free market works that the market does not magically optimize itself for full-employment and all western states have long since recognized this fact and implemented measures to avoid creating a permanent underclass of people in absolute poverty, because it is beneficial for the societies overall as well as for the companies.
Calling this communism is missing the point by several miles. If you actually read modern day communists, they oppose universal basic income models precisely because they see it as a capitalist response, which is what it is.
Did you time travel here from the 1800s or something? Is your next argument going to be 'look at the shape(s) of their skulls, this proves they're primitive savages?'
Look, the following things are true globally speaking about crime: people with lower socio-economic status commit more crimes. Pretty much universally most violence, especially gang-violence, is committed by young, disenfranchised males. Got no job and no access to education? Why not join a gang or a criminal organization. I mean, people prefer not being poor to being poor, but if you've no means of entering the education system (for example due to higher education being too expensive) often criminal activity is seen by young males as the best/most efficient route upwards in terms of social mobility and wealth.
Look at developing countries and countries with higher murder rates than the West or the US. Southern america has a lot of problems. Do you think it's black people killing each other in the cartel wars in central and southern america? Do you think a high amount of black people is the reason for example Russia, and a lot of the other former Soviet states have such high violent crime statistics? Or could it possibly be that these are regions with extremely high poverty rates and income/wealth inequality which is fertile ground for social problems and organized violent crime and those who benefit from it?
However, I have read in the past that in the US the poverty level alone does not explain the differences in stats, because the black population is over-represented in the stats even when controlling for income. Now I'm not American and by no means a criminologist, but as someone who works with data, I'm always interested in a data-driven approach, so I did some googling about racial crime data and economics and came across this post titled racial differences in homicide rates are poorly explained by economics, lets have a read shall we?
Although it’s clear that poverty predicts homicide quite independently of black, it’s also clear that black predicts independently of the poverty. Moreover, if you look closely at the distribution and other analysis I present here it’ll be clear that poverty doesn’t come close to closing these racial differences.
Single-motherhood is also a strong predictor.
Although the data are somewhat noisy and single-motherhood is quite strongly associated with the black population (r=0.76 at the county level), it seems to me that:
there is a non-linear relationship between single-motherhood and homicide (which may be throwing off the linear model estimates somewhat) counties with very high rates of single-motherhood have very high homicide rates even with negligible black populations blacker counties with low-rates of single-motherhood seem to have homicide rates much closer to the national average (the same cannot be said for other covariates) Based on the other evidence I have seen, I have come to view the single-motherhood being at least a very strong proxy for community health is and, in many respects, a stronger predictor of inter-racial differences than other measures like poverty rates. It does not entirely explain the observed racial differences here, but it mediates much of the relationship and does so more effectively than other common measures.
Controlling for single-motherhood rates with an unweighted loess regression I find little evidence to suggest that percent black adds much in the way of predictive validity. - -
Conclusion
To summarize:
1. There are vast differences in homicide rates between groups. * This “effect” is found consistently in aggregated and (racially) disaggregated data.
their language is quite distinct from other Scandinavian and Germanic (and, for that matter European) languages.
Yup, the only relative languages being spoken really are Estonian and Hungarian, and only Estonian is close enough that it's (relatively) easy to learn for us Finns. I've spent some time in Estonia, and although I still can't really speak it well, I can understand basic sentences if they slow down the rate of speech a bit.
Some history about the language and its importance to the whole nation for those who may be interested:
The language is also what's kept the culture different from the other nordic countries and enabled the rise of Finnish nationalism. We're a part of Sweden for a long time and you really had to be able to speak Swedish during that time to be anything other than common folk. So Swedish was the language of the ruling class and the state for the longest time. Finnish didn't even have a system of grammar and hence could not be written at all prior to 1500s. Curiously enough, we've largely the Russians to thank for changing that: after we moved to be a part of the Russian empire in 1809 the Russians realized that actions had to be taken so as to try and solidify the status of Finland as part of the empire and lower sympathies towards Sweden that were still really strong. So they did a lot of things, including letting us have a high amount of political autonomy (we had our own parliament making laws long before we became independent), moving the capital from the western coast to Helsinki to move it away from Stockholm and closer to st. Petersburg, we even had our own money and a customs border with Russia. Finnish was used alongside Russian, even in matters of state, and schools operated in Finnish. and we had our army separate from the Russian army that operated in Finnish. They allowed the rise of Finnish nationalism because they wanted us to not pine after the days of Swedish rule. And for a long while this worked well. This started to change when the very pro-Finnish emperor Alexander the 2nd was murdered, and the ideology of panslavism started to gain a foothold. Starting from the end of the 1800s they started to roll back of the privileges and try make us more Russian, and again the language played a critical part: they tried phasing out Finnish as the official language of governance and make us into Russian speakers. This was met with widespread resistance, culminating to the assassination of the general-governor of Finland (the highest Russian official in the land) Nikolai Bobrikov in 1904, when he was shot on the stairs of the Senate by a Finnish nationalist. The seed of distrust against the Russian rule had been planted.
When the revolution hit Russia, we saw out chance and declared independence, figuring the Lenin would not risk having a war in Finland with everything else going on. Lenin looked at what's going on in Finland, saw the high amount of tension between the working class and the better educated and figured we're about to enter a civil war soon anyway, so he actually let us go. And he was correct, in 1918 the rift between the Reds and the Whites exploded and we had our civil war within a year of becoming independent. Where he was wrong though was the winning side. Lenin figured the communists would win and Finland would seek to re-join the then still-forming soviet Union, but they did not win, and we remained independent.
There's a famous phrase from the time of Russian rule, supposedly coined by the Finnish (writer, journalist and a politician, Adolf Ivar Arwidsson: 'We are not Swedes, and we do not want to become Russians. Let us then be Finns.' The Russians and later on the Soviets had some trouble accepting this and tried to change it later on during the second world war but as the time of the Russian rule was still very much in the national memory at that time we said no and fought back.
Though we're on the losing side (we eventually had to align ourselves with the Nazis in the beginning of the
Yeah, because Switzerland and Norway are such poverty-stricken counties...
The problem is, the UK (at the moment at least) doesn't seem to want either of those models either. Norway has adopted about 75 % of EU regulations as part of its trade agreements with the EU, maintains an open border and pays about 2/3rds of what the UK does no to the Union.
In essence, Norway (and Switzlerland) are basically pretty much quasi-members of the EU: the pay slightly less than they would were they full members but that comes at the cost of them not having any say in EU policies.
The UK is trying to have their cake and eat it too, by maintaining access to the single market without having to follow any of the rules or paying anything for that benefit. It makes zero sense for the Union to give any kind of special treatment to the UK, because that'd be unfair to both Norway and Switzerland (and others), but the UK still does not seem to get this.
The 1.5 degrees C goal is an arbitrary line that humans drew
Yes.
it doesn't come from any science.
Wrong. The limit was chosen based on modelling climate change and estimating its effects with different amounts of warming. We know for a fact thanks to climate related sciences that 1,5 degrees of warming is better for us and the planetary ecosystem as whole than say 2 or more degrees, and we also know that if rapid action is taken, the 1,5 degrees is still attainable.
That's why it was chosen. It represents the best-case scenario with the data we currently have. It's still not great, but it's the least bad alternative going forwards, and that's an estimate based entirely on science(s) and what we know 2+ degrees will do to the planet/us.
Or for socially engineering people to to have completely ridiculous expectations?
Modern Japanese culture is a weird mix of ancient tradition and rapid post-world western influences. They work-culture westernized fast after the war, and since hard work has always been appreciated, Japan's economy boomed as people dedicated their time and careers to companies, working long days with little to no vacation time.
Westerners don't often understand the kind of pressure this puts on the workers. They're still heavily career-oriented: you're not expected to go 'shopping around' for a job that you find suitable, you're expected to pick a company once you graduate and then dedicate yourself and your career to that company. Due to age old concepts of honor, resigning from a position is seen as disgraceful, it's a sign of personal failure, and stain on your reputation. Same actually goes for firing people. Weirdly enough, many Japanese companies don't want to fire people unless they absolutely have to, as that reflects badly on the company, so instead they often just move the person or persons to do something trivial, in the hopes that they'd one day resign themselves and take the shame off the company. But since this doesn't often happen, you've got people showing up to work in many large companies doing tasks they really don't want or need to be doing, but they keep doing it,
The same attitude largely permeates the entire Japanese society. Their legal system is (in)famous for having an over 99 % conviction rate. That's right, if your case ends up in court you're going to be found guilty with 99 % certainty. This is because the prosecutors abhoar the idea of defeat (again, dishonorable) so only cases where the evidence is extremely strong will even be taken up by the prosecutors. This also means that a lot of the crime that happens goes unsolved because neither the investigators nor the prosecutors want to take up cases that will end up in failures, thus tarnishing their reputation and honor.
And the same is true ont he social side of things. Something like a third of the Japanese under 30 are virgins. It's not because they don't have sexual drives (anyone who knows anything about the Japanese porn industry will know this) but because again, ancient traditions combined with the insane expectations of the work-life (company first, always company first) and little spare time has created a situation in which the Japanese don't have a dating culture. It's not really a custom for people to go out on a lot of dates to try and find a suitable partner, because again, going through several different partners without marrying them and settling down is a shameful thing. You're expected to pick a partner, marry them and setup a family. This creates immense social pressure, and many people simply opt to stay single because they lack the skills and the mechanisms to choose a partner, especially since the social norms in Japan are such that approaching a random stranger say at a bar for example is extremely unlikely to happen.
These are all generalizations obviously, I am not Japanese nor have I been there but I know people who've worked and lived there. Obviously not everyone conforms to the aforementioned ideals, but the general point I'm trying to make is that Japan, defeated by the US suffered a massive national disgrace, to which they responded by embracing the ideals of their victors with zeal and dedication of Bushido, and that has created a very prosperous economy with a high-standard of living, but it's come at the cost of the social lives and mental well-being of its inhabitants. Economies can change and adapt fast, but cultural conditioning set forth by thousands of years of customs and history doesn't.
All that matters is having single-minded purpose ( ichinen), in the here and now. Life is an ongoing succession of ‘one will’ at a time, each and every moment. A man who realizes this truth need not hurry to do, or seek, anything else
This has ALREADY HAPPENED in much of the world. 150 years ago, 70% of Americans worked on farms. Today 2% do. The world didn't end.
This is true, but look a where those people went: the people freed up from agricultural work found new jobs in factories, warehouses, offices and the like. Now, even those fields are being automated at a fast pace. You're correct when you say:
You should start by reading a history book. For the last two centuries, moving a country's labor force off the farm and into the cities has be the key to prosperity, economic development, and higher living standards. It happened in the developed world long ago, and it is happening in China now.
Believing that agricultural automation somehow causes poverty, is astoundingly ignorant.
But the problem scenario we're facing is different. Automation as its currently being developed takes jobs away not just from agriculture, but from the people who've moved to the cities as well. China is automating production at a rapid pace, replacing massive factories of hundreds of people working in assembly-lines and warehouses with semi-automated facilities staffed by few dozen engineers and programmers. In 20-30 years it's likely for example that nearly all warehouses will be almost completely automated, as will most production, this change has already begun. There are obviously new job description that have and will be created by this, but the general problem is that those positions generally require high education, and are not as abundant as the current low-skill jobs in manufacturing or logistics.
Cities have been the driving force of an increasing standard of living for the last century throughout the world as you pointed out. Here in Finland we were still heavily an agricultural society post WWII, after which we stared a rapid catch-up as people started flocking to the cities fast, as the rebuilding effort after the war created a lot of demand for labor in all kinds of industries. It was possible for someone from the countryside with very little existing education to move to a city and and find a job that, albeit monotonous, paid better than work in the countryside and allowed fast upward mobility, moving people from poverty or near-poverty to the lower middle-class.
We currently have about 200 000 more unemployed (mostly educated as we have a universal education system) people than open positions, because we've experienced a radical shift in the economy during the late 90s and 2000s: we stopped being an industrialized society and moved to a post-industrialized service and knowledge economy. Heavy industry is mostly gonei to countries with cheaper labor and what remains of it is highly automated and doesn't provide nearly as many jobs as it used to. The fall of Nokia was massive shock to the entire economy because its significance as an employer and a driver of growth was immense, even though most of the phones weren't even manufactured here. So we know have plenty of unemployed former industrial workers, engineers and so on that have had their jobs eliminated by the changes that have occurred.
The economy is not doing too bad though, we've got new companies mostly in software, like games companies (think Rovio (Angry birds etc) and Supercell (Clash of Clans)) and others that have done well and benefited the economy a lot, but the kicker is here: these companies employ nowhere near the amount of people that industrial positions used to offer, and competition for those positions is fierce. Even on the office side automation is cutting into many tasks like data entry that still employs a lot of people, but that is already changing. Programming and related fields are in high demand, naturally, but for the people whose jobs have disappeared, it's not feasible for all of them to retrain themselves as programmers, especially as even the ones who do will end up competing with a high number of younger people who're often more experienced in the field tha
What once made Sweden great and wealthy was proper incentives for economic productivity and high trust between people. '
Bullshit.
The Nordic countries are all very wealthy (in the 25 in purchasing power adjusted GDP per capita, Sweden is 16th 5 places behind the US and one of the highest in Europe, and Norway is actually ahead of the US) and productive (with the exception of Iceland, all in the top 13 in terms of GDP per hours worked., with Denmark being pretty much equal to the US and Norway again being ahead of the US).
Then the socialists took over and for a while restrained themselves in milking the productive portion of the population dry.
Erm what? You do realize the exact opposite is true? Finland became independent after first 800 years of rule under the Swedish kingdom and then another 100+ years as an autonomous part of the Russian Empire in 1917 (we kinda slipped loose after the revolution happened, and had our own civil war in 1918 during which the communists that wanted us to join the then still emerging soviet union lost). A 100 years ago we were one of the poorest countries in Europe, with low overall education and literacy rates and a massive issue with poverty. We started the slow climb up and then the 2nd world war came. After the war and the rebuilding effort the foundations of the modern democratic socialism that combines a market economy with progressive taxation were laid out, copied from Sweden in large parts due to their successes there. The schools system was rehauled and unified, universities are tuition free, tax-funded health care etc. All of these are things that are now in our constitution. And what has happened? As already showcased we sprinted forwards to be among the top economies of Europe. Now does that mean that there are no issues and this is a perfect Utopia? No, absolutely not. The '08 crisis hit us here in Finland extremely hard because it also happened to coincide with the implosion of Nokia which was like almost a third of our export sector that basically disappeared, and we've spent the last decade recovering from that, and that's still an ongoing process, partially hampered by the fact that the current center-right (in Finnish terms, even the rightmost party here is to the left of the democratic mainstream in the US in their support for the existing universal systems) hasn't been very effective in tackling some of the structural issues, but nevertheless, we're still doing very well.
But to say that the socialists 'ruined everything' is just utter BS. Without the social policies that we've put in place, we'd likely still be a very backwater nation instead of a global first world economy,
Now the situation is so bad that I've heard a swede say he would rather not work because that would give tax money to his government that is ruining everything!
Oh so you heard 1 Swede say that did you? Well that proves the whole system is ruined then doesn't it? C'mon man.
Sweden took in a lot of refugees, way more than any other compared to the size of the population and that has obviously become a heated issue, as they have had problems with their immigration system previously as well. This has been made worse by the fact that Sweden changed its elementary school system away from the model they used to have (and that we still use) and allowed the creaton of privatized elementary schools, which has lead in parts of the large suburbs to rapid segregation creating schools for well-off natives and left the public schools in those areas to be heavily for immigrants. This obviously creates problems as it hampers those kids from learning the language for example, making integration and thus employment harder which creates a host of issues, the most prevalent of which is the rise of organized crime in those suburban are
I'm not sure when Marijuana was introduced to the West, I'll have to investigate
The plant itself has been familiar in the west for hundreds of years, as hemp has several other uses besides the intoxicating effects, which have also been known for a long time. An interesting anecdote from the wiki article of the history of cannabis::
During Napoléon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798, alcohol was not available per Egypt being an Islamic country.[29] In lieu of alcohol, Bonaparte's troops resorted to trying hashish, which they found to their liking.[29] Following an 1836–1840 travel in North Africa and the Middle East, French physician Jacques-Joseph Moreau wrote on the psychological effects of cannabis use; Moreau was a member of Paris' Club des Hashischins (founded in 1844). In 1842, Irish physician William Brooke O'Shaughnessy, who had studied the drug while working as a medical officer in Bengal with the East India company, brought a quantity of cannabis with him on his return to Britain, provoking renewed interest in the West.[30] Examples of classic literature of the period featuring cannabis include Les paradis artificiels (1860) by Charles Baudelaire and The Hasheesh Eater (1857) by Fitz Hugh Ludlow.
As for this:
but it has never been part of mainstream society
I think this statement was true 50 or maybe even 30 years ago, but trends are changing fast across the West. With legalization proceeding in many places, the social status of weed has changed considerably in the past decade and a half. Roughly about half of the people I know (most of them under 30 with some exceptions) smoke occasionally, one even as an alternative to alcohol as he cannot drink due to issues with migraine. And this is in a country where the plant is still illegal (for now, although legalization is pretty much unavoidable in the coming 10-20 years as attitudes are changing even among the politicians as more and more data is coming in about the failures of a total ban on drugs and the benefits of decriminalization or legalization).
While it may not be exactly 'mainstream', with use increasing even among the older populations ("According to data gathered from the latest survey done by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the number of people age 65 and up who said they use marijuana grew 250 percent between 2006 and 2013') as they read news about how it's become legal in more and more places, I'd say it's fast on track for becoming a mainstream alternative.
Keep in mind also that it's been more common than most people think throughout the last decades. It's true that alcohol has a way longer history in the West, but the statistics are also heavily slanted by the prohibition approach to cannabis which understandably makes people less likely to admit to using it, thereby creating an image of it as more marginalized than it actually is.
If Mueller had actual evidence of actual collusion, we would have seen it a year ago
This statement is based on absolutely nothing, it's just an assertion you throw out about a large on-going investigation without anything to back it up. 'Because the investigation is taking so long it cannot lead to anything' is some of the worst logic possible.
However you're missing the point I was making entirely. I'm not American, I'm Finnish. My point in the comment was not to take on side over the other as to the result of the investigation. Whether or not there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian information warfare campaign is another matter that remains to be seen once the investigation completes, but that was not my point. It may be that there was no collusion, but that does not negate the fact that the Russians are actively posing as western citizens and pumping out propaganda to influence elections and sow political discontent throughout the West and not just in the US. That was my point, and there's plenty of evidence of that that's not coming from Mueller & al, including from your own intelligence agencies as well as other non-governmental researchers (see for example the report about the interference in Europe).
Bugger all happened in 2016, that is the actual evidence. Trolling advertisements, click bait got quite corruptly called political, when it fact it most definitely is not. It simply targets politics to get you to click it, to take you to the actual ad.
The Mueller indictment permanently demolishes the idea that the scale of the Russian campaign was not significant enough to have any impact on the American public. We are no longer talking about approximately $100,000 (paid in rubles, no less) of advertising grudgingly disclosed by Facebook, but tens of millions of dollars spent over several years to build a broad, sophisticated system that can influence American opinion.
The Russian efforts described in the indictment focused on establishing deep, authenticated, long-term identities for individuals and groups within specific communities. This was underlaid by the establishment of servers and VPNs based in the US to mask the location of the individuals involved. US-based email accounts linked to fake or stolen US identity documents (driver licenses, social security numbers, and more) were used to back the online identities. These identities were also used to launder payments through PayPal and cryptocurrency accounts. All of this deception was designed to make it appear that these activities were being carried out by Americans.
Additionally, the indictment mentions that the IRA* had a department whose job was gaming algorithms. This is important because information warfare—the term used in the indictment itself—is not about "fake news" and “bots." It is about creating an information environment and a narrative—specific storytelling vehicles used to achieve goals of subversion and activation, amplified and promoted through a variety of means.
2. What kind of content did it rely on?
As the indictment lays out in thorough detail, the content pumped out by the Russians was not paid or promoted ads; it was so-called native content—including video, visual, memetic, and text elements designed to push narrative themes, conspiracies, and character attacks. All of it was designed to look like it was coming from authentic American voices and interest groups. And the IRA wasn’t just guessing about what worked. They used data-driven targeting and analysis to assess how the content was received, and they used that information to refine their messages and make them more effective.
3. Who or what was the operation targeting, and what did it aim to achieve?
The indictment mentions that the Russian accounts were meant to embed with and emulate “radical” groups. The content was not designed to persuade people to change their views, but to harden those views. Confirmation bias is powerful and commonly employed in these kinds of psychological operations (a related Soviet concept is “reflexive control”—applying pressure in ways to elicit a specific, known response). The intention of these campaigns was to activate—or suppress—target groups. Not to change their views, but to change their behavior.
4. What impact did it have?
We’re only at the beginning of having an answer to this question because we’ve only just begun to ask some of the right questions. But Mueller’s indictment shows that Russian accounts and agents accomplished more than just stoking divisions and tensions with sloppy propaganda memes. The messaging was more sophisticated, and some Americans took action. For example, the indictment recounts a number of instances where events and demonstrations were organized by Russians posing as Americans on social media. These accounts aimed to get people to do specific thing
You guys haven't started construction of new nuclear power plants since the 1980s, so saying this is somehow a partisan issue that's entirely to be blamed on one side or the other is completely nonsensical.
Fact is, even though Chernobyl was the result of both defective reactor design as well as incredibly bad oversight (the plant was undergoing testing prior to the operation and some safety-measures were disabled etc, overall mismanagement), the accident (together with three mile island which was small in scale) ruined nuclear power's reputation in many western countries, even though to date (even including Fukushima victims) nuclear power is the safest energy source per amount of electricity produced and also far superior for the climate. But because of the association with Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and nuclear explosions, people are scared because they don't understand it.
This is why neither side has really wanted to push nuclear power in the States. Because the majority of the voterbase is misinformed about nuclear safety it's been easier to just avoid the topic. Add to this the fact that Democrats are heavily for reneweables, while the republicans tend to come from oil/coal producing areas, and it's not hard to see why nuclear power has not been an attractive topic for either side from an optics perspective.
But sure, it's always the other guys right?
From an outsiders perspective rhe red team vs. blue team BS is getting rather comedic these days on Slashdot.
Thunderf00t has done a great job debunking all of Teslas terrible ideas, and he has already started on the Boring company and how terrible their plans are.
Thunderf00t has not actually criticized Tesla itself. He's done a lot of videos in the absurdity of the Hyperloop as a non-viable thing due to the enginerring (and cost) problems for example here, here (a video where he actually traveled to the Hyperloop test-site to showcase the sub-par engineering work done with the track (it's already rusted through for example)) and here (a video he made in response to the backlash to the previous video). And he also did an video earlier this year about this tunnel stuff and its problems here as well as a video on the absurdity of Musk's idea of using rockets to travel 'Earth to Earth' here.
Musk's thing is that he has a lot of ideas as well as the capital to try and test some of them. Sometimes they're successful, sometimes they're not, but thanks to Tesla and SpaceX the man is now treated in the media as if he is Midas and everything coming from him must be 'the way of the future', but that's not really the case. Personally I don't expect the Hyperloop to become a reality ever just due to the cost-factors involved, that is, it's not that with enough money you couldn't potentially build a Hyperloop that worked,. but that building and securely maintaining one would likely be so costly that it'd make no sense, and the same problems are faced by this tunnel idea. With Musk the question is not primarily whether it's it's possible technically, it's whether or not it's economically feasible as a solution.
It's the vertical access shafts that they've not talked much about, and which seem to be the trickiest part. So here's to hoping for more info about their approach here.
Yup agreed. The elevators will be the part of the system that gets congested most easily and I've yet to see any info as to how they're planning to avoid having long lines of cars waiting to be taken up/down on the entrance/exit points while also keeping the costs reasonable.
This is where the whole project stands or falls. It doesn't matter how well the tunnel infrastructure below is set up if accessing said infrastructure and getting away from there involves a ton of waiting. The placement of the elevator access-points on the surface is also a bit of a question mark: how do they plan to place these things such that the cars waiting to get in and getting out of these will not cause problems for the surface traffic?
So please, don't say our system is better than in the US. People are not dying in the streets up here, but when you have a condition, you better be patient.
Because these systems are always partially or entirely tax-funded this obviously means that wait times for some non-critical operations can be higher, because people in immediate risk take priority but this is true in the states as well. If you actually compare waiting times for a specialist for example, you'll note that US is pretty much on par with the UK, and that Canada is on the slower side of other universal model countries (which, is all advanced countries other than the US). I work for the largest health care district of the Finnish single payer health care system with about a million people under it, I can quote you some numbers (these are from 2015 because they're publicly available (Finnish only though), can't access the current stats from home). Of the 27 most common types of surgery, we had altogether 26 658 people in queue in 2015, of which 19,5 % waited for more than 6 months. The median wait time was 87 days. For the 2 heart-related surgery-types on the list (bypass and percutaneous coronary intervention the median was below 30 days). The question here is: would it be better for the uninsured in the US to wait a bit to get good health care from the existing system with public money, or wait til' they die or go bankrupt? Is it beneficial for the US economy as a whole to remain the only country where people have to go into debt due to medical problems?
Thing to realize is that this is about availability, not quality. Quality-wise the US model is not significantly better nor is it worse. In fact, quality-wise the system is just fine for the people who're insured, the main difference is that the lack of universal public insurance leaves some people outside of the system driving up deaths. And the far more commercialised nature of the systems drives up margins and administrative costs (which is a large part of the huge spending difference (about twice the average spending of comparable countries) between the US and the rest of the world. In fact, medicare for example is already cheaper (per head covered) costs-wise than private options, largely cause it has better costs-management and lower administrative costs).
The are plenty of universal models out there which aren't single payer like Canada or here. All the US would have to do to implement such would essentially be to allow medicare/medicaid like option for all , and it would likely bring total costs down in the long term and better care for everyone.
But sure, keep posting anecdotal stuff about wait times instead of the larger picture., that's always constructive!
I've been saying this for a long time: this is the kind of result one expects to see when most of the people who vote in EU elections are over 50. I mean, voter turnout has been low in EU elections consistently (43 % in the last elections, pathetic really) because people would rather nitpick about the Union than do anything to affect it, but it's especially low among the younger generations. (source. "Turnout was again highest among the oldest respondents. Some 51% of the 55+ group voted in the European elections, while only 28% did in the 18-24 age group.") Is it any wonder that when most of the people sitting in the parliament have little to no understanding of what the internet actually is, the lobbyists are able to spoonfeed them all kinds of bullshit and we end up with sub-par legislation like this?
Obviously we're still a long way from implementation, from the article:
Clearly, this confusing back-and-forth hasn't instilled much hope in those the directive affects. Speaking to The Verge, executive director of digital rights association EDRi Joe McNamee said, "The system is so complicated that last Friday the [European Parliament] legal affairs committee tweeted an incorrect assessment of what's happening. If they don't understand the rules, what hope the rest of us?"
Despite today's outcome, though, we're still a long way from actual legislation. Today's decision will be subject to even more negotiations between politicians and member states, with a final vote by the EU Parliament in January. Individual member states can then interpret the directive as they see fit before turning it into law. If these provisions make it through the next round of debates, though, the internet could soon look like a very different place."
So whatever impact this will or will not have is still to be seen, and I personally hope the coming debates and negotiations will make it clear just how absurd the law in its current shape is and how hard (if not impossible) actual implementation and enforcement would be and reason will win, but we'll see.
We've got slightly over half a year to next EU elections people. To paraphrase Obama's recent speech to anyone else here in Europe who doesn't like it: 'If this pisses you off, don't hashtag, vote!"
So? Mining a coin in South Korea does not cost $20k... with a little bit of thinking that would have been obvious to you.
From your very own link:
The electricity bill is composed of basic charge and energy charge. Both depend on the amount of electricity consumed during the billing period as they are divided into three consumption levels: 0-200 kWh, 201-400 kWh, above 400 per month. In both charges, every following level has a higher price.
I was going with the numbers used in the report (here) which they claim to have gotten from governmental sources.
Wiki uses numbers from 2016, so they're outdated now, but back then using more than 1001 kWh a month caused the price to hike up to 24 cents, or as much as 64 cents during peak demand times in the year (summer and midwinter). At those kinds of prices you're talking about more than 20 grand a coin.
It looks like they may have calculated the value by using the peak demand price for the whole of the year, so the entire number maybe off a bit still, but the general point made still stands.
if you want to mine cheap, get a solar panel, mine in north africa or in asia or australia,
Again, I know there are places where mining is cheaper, I said so out right. It doesn't change the nature of the problem with BC's design as a 'currency'.
And that is just what a cryptocurrency lacks: Stability. That is also what makes it unusable as a currency.
Exactly.
In fact, many cryptocurrencies are designed to be anything but stable. Bitcoin is a prime example of this: since the total amount of coins that will be created is capped, and since the creation/mining of new coins gets more complex with time as the math required to do the mining gets more difficult, it means the cost of creating a bitcoin (as well as transaction cost) goes up with time, on its own. Bitcoin is deflationary by design, which is a property you absolutely do not want your currency to have.
This also creates a deathstar level weakness in Bitcoin. People like to talk about it being decentralized, but in reality it's not. The current cost of creating one bitcoin is varies highly based on local prices of electricity and equipment from around 530 dollars in Venezuela (the only country that you can mine it at under a thousand bucks, and that's only because energy is one of the few remaining things one can get cheaply in Venezuela as it's heavily subsidized by the government) to over 10 000 in advanced economies, with South Korea taking the first place at over 26 000 dollars a coin..This means that the actual mining and thus the whole core infrastructure that Bitcoin's continued operation relies on is actually heavily centralized to the hands of (mostly) commercial operators in countries with cheaper operational costs, mainly in Asia/China (china used to control about 70 % of all the mining, I don't have recent data on how much that's changed after the government banned Bitcoin exchanges). In other words: Bitcoin is running because people are making money running it, for now.
The thermal exhaust port of this death star is here: The moment the cost of mining rises above the the price of the coin, mining will be stop. It's safe to say for example that no-one in their right mind is doing Bitcoin mining in South Korea, because at the current prices you're losing about 20 grand per coin mined. If the price of a coin drops below the cheapest possible mining cost (currently the 530 bucks in Venezuela) it will become unprofitable for anyone to be running bitcoin mining, at which point the entire 'decentralized' network will collapse, and the value will plummet to zero, as no means of transacting the coins will exist, and the currency will become useless.
Combining the fact that the design of BC makes the continued rise of the mining costs an unavoidable fact (meaning that the point of failure will keep creeping up in dollar terms) with the market price of a Bitcoin being highly volatile and affected by a whole host of things including regulation of exchanges and other cryptocurrencies and their popularity, the whole BC infrastructure is definitely a game of chairs where you can make money as a miner or an investor up to a point but when the music stops you better hope you're not left with several coins that are now suddenly worth nothing.
So a potentially good investment? Sure. A safe and secure store of value or a functional currency? Absolutely not.
I learned to observe the pain with equanimity, and my obsession with the pain dissipated. The pain was very much still there, but it didn't both me.
The experience of pain is definitely something one can practice to deal with. I've been operated several times in my youth due to cerebral palsy and a couple of those surgeries were quite extensive and had a long recovery process which wasn't completely painless. I learned rather quickly that trying to ignore the pain will make it feel worse, whereas acknowledging it and concentrating on it can help with its management. The worst thing about pain is if it surprises you. If however you know to expect it and go with the mindset of 'I know taking this step will come with some pain, and I know where the pain will be located at' then at least I felt much less stress about it all. The sensory experience was still there as you said, but it was much more bearable: instead of trying to be overly careful with each motion to avoid the (un)avoidable pain I just accepted it as a kind of background noise. I had no notion of meditation or mindfulness or Buddhism at the time but semi-accidentally I still developed a personal mantra that I kept coming back to; since I've always been a nerd I found myself often thinking about a quote from the Warhammer 40 000 tabletop game's lore: 'Pain is an illusion of the senses, despair an illusion of the mind'.
It's been over a decade since my last operation and my condition is very stable now. Regular physical therapy allows me to live nearly totally pain free, but when the temperatures drop radically as winter hits I experience the occasional muscle spasms and some pain but it's all very much something I'm able to handle without the need for pain medication, using the same tricks as before as well as going to the sauna (heat is a friend).
"I'm a Bernie Bro who's butthurt that not enough primary voters voted for *MY* favorite candidate for him to win the nomination. I'm going to support trump now. And I'm happy to see the whole country burn, because I didn't get my way."
Fixed that for you.
This is what the Russians were going for with their information warfare campaign, although they were not necessarily interested in getting Bernie voters to flip for Trump (that's hard to achieve) as they were to get those voters to stay home and not vote at all (easier to achieve). Quoting the link:
The indictment mentions that the Russian accounts were meant to embed with and emulate “radical” groups. The content was not designed to persuade people to change their views, but to harden those views. Confirmation bias is powerful and commonly employed in these kinds of psychological operations (a related Soviet concept is “reflexive control”—applying pressure in ways to elicit a specific, known response). The intention of these campaigns was to activate—or suppress—target groups. Not to change their views, but to change their behavior
By the radical groups there they mean both the Trump and Bernie camps, both because those groups had the largest existing online reach (and thus, were they easiest to target) but also because you could pretty effectively use the same kind of anti-Clinton messaging to target both. So they wanted at the same time to get people who don't usually vote but are pissed at the status quo ('Drain the swamp', 'Lock her up', etc.) to go out and vote for Trump and to get people who usually vote for the democrats to stay home ('Bernie or bust', 'Walk away', etc,).
Whether or not it made a definitive difference to the election results is not really knowable at this point, because the effectiveness of such campaigns is hard to measure, but keeping in mind that the amount of votes in the key states that flipped the result to Trump was what, around 30 000 it's definitely a possibility.
I never understood why they had given $40m to the company without bothering to get any independent input about the technology. It was hard to escape the conclusion that "cyber", "security" and a lot of waffling and some pretty slides were more important than getting answers to hard questions.
This is indeed a good question. I think it may have to do with a sense of urgency. That is (some) VC firms may think they have to make decisions fast or they might lose a good investment to someone else, so they don't do their homework and essentially just gamble in hopes of a big win.
It was Victoria Nuland, former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State, who said "fuck the EU." [youtu.be] She was nominated by Obama
So you contrast a phone call on Youtube that I cannot even in any way verify to be from the actual people you claim it to be from, to the sitting president of the US openly calling the European Union an enemy. How the hell does that make any sense? The Union and the US have had their disagreements in the past as well and no-one is denying that, but geopolitically speaking the alliance between the continents has been strong ever since the 2nd world war, and the Trump era marks a clear shift in this policy. This is obvious to anyone who follows global politics even at a cursory level.
What do you call people who rip you off on trade to the tune of $150 billion every year?
Uhm.... people that the Americans like buying stuff from? I mean, no-one's forcing Americans to buy European cars and other stuff, but you guys seem to like it. I thought you of all people would understand this, since you've been the nr. 1 proponent of free trade for decades, and are the world's second largest export economy after China.
The idea that everyone needs to be trading the exact same amount with everyone else lest someone is getting 'ripped off' is ridiculous. It's called trade because your exchanging money for goods and services that you want-
The EU is a security free-rider that exploits American generosity to run a massive trade surplus.
I agree that European defense spending overall is too low. The collapse of the soviet union lulled many into a false sense of security and defense spending was cut in many places. However at the same time calling it 'exploitation' as if the US did not have their own interests in mind with their defense spending here is misleading to say the least. That is, to say that the US is doing this out of sheer generosity and not because global stability is something you also benefit from is twisting the truth. You have troops and based all over the world because of this, and no-one's forced you to do that, you've done it out of your own volition after the last world war presumably because you don't fancy a new one, and neither do we.
Moreover, 150 billion represents ~1/rth of the total US defense spending. I did some googling and according to this your defense spending in Europe is about 5 % of your total defense budget, which comes down to about 30 billion. That's still a lot obviously, but even if that were to be eliminated entirely we'd still be running a surplus.
That being said, European defense spending has been on the rise for a few years now, since before Trump.
For a continent flush with cash and a large budget surplus, every member should be able to spend an adequate amount on its own defense.
Agreed. This is also why we're not in NATO and are actually paying for our own defense. However note that this does not mean NATO should be done away with. Defense spending needs to be increased, for numerous reasons of which Russia is only one but that still doesn't mean we shouldn't be allied with the US, because of all the major players out there in the field of geopolitics, the US is far closer to EU in terms of values and policies than say, China or Russia.
The EU needs to create its own collective defense treaty without US involvement.
Agreed again, and that's now beginning. You must understand that since the EU is a trade zone and not a federation, EU-wide defense co-operation has been a difficult subject because any notion of an 'EU army' is often perceived as a step towards federalization and that's something that the majority of people do not like, s
Ahahahah... You know Ivan, your propaganda shitposting would be far more effective if your Finnish didn't sound like it came from a 40s black and white movie (no-one in modern Finnish uses the words 'sinjoore' or 'madame' for example) and riddled with typos (you're missing almost every single ä and ö there, and ryssä is written with a y and not a ü which is not even used in the entire language at all you dimwit).
But ladies and gentlemen of Slashdot: if you had any doubts prior to this point that the Russian trollboys are patrolling this site actively, I give you exhibit A: a dude writing about the Clintons in archaic and misspelled Finnish that clearly does not come through Google translate to try and pass as a native..I mean, A for effort, F for execution man.
These guys reply to me as ACs almost every single time I mention Putin in any way here, it's almost kinda endearing, like having a sort of pet. You know Ivan, I don't blame you. Work is hard to find in the current shit economy of Russia, and at least you get an indoors work-environment, hopefully decent pay and bonus points for being an obedient little trooper in the Motherlands fight against 'The West. If you ever end up in here, we can go and have a cup of coffee or tea, and don't worry, I'll bring my own Geiger counter.;)
To fix the problem, your statement would need to be "we want to find out why workers are afraid to acknowledge errors and fix the organizational culture so that errors can be acknowledged and fixed properly, rather than hidden."
As a Finn with a couple Russian friends who've left their country because of 'organisational culture' let me give you some perspective. This is Putin's ' Novorossiya' where transparency is nonexistent and those who fail to satisfy the powers that be are thrown into jail in the best case, get into mysterious accidents or commit 'suicides' in the worst case. The space program is a key component in the cold war (which never really ended, it's just changed its nature to be less about armed conflict and more about information warfare) propaganda just as it was in the past, and as such it is of great importance to Kremlin. Whoever made the mistake is not afraid of getting fired, because getting fired is the least of your concerns in this situation. If I were him, I'd already be on my way out of the country and never drink any tea I haven't prepared myself..
The problem is not the the organisational culture of Roscosmos, the problem is the organisational culture of the entire State Meet the new boss, same as the old boss:
"Enemies are right in front of you, you are at war with them, then you make an armistice with them, and all is clear. A traitor must be destroyed, crushed." -Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin in 2001, speaking to journalist Aleksei Venediktov, to whom he added “You know, Aleksei, you are not a traitor. You are an enemy.” (source: David Remnick, “Echo in the Dark,” in The New Yorker, September 22, 2008)
This is why seeing Trump act like Vlad's obedient little lapdog earlier in the summer here in Helsinki was one of the most absurd things I have ever witnessed in my life. Had you told me ten years ago that you're from the future where the fucking president of the US of A bows down to kiss the ring of Putin and call the European Union a foe, I'd have told you to go get your head checked. Yet here we are. My grandfather who's in his 80s said to me after the press conference that he thinks the Russians are winning, because 'one of the guys is a former KGB agent, and the other is a clueless goof.' Although grandpa is no political scientist, I have a hard time disagreeing with him here.
Reddit is just one monkey ego war where opinions no matter how dumb are fought and defended by drive by upvoting and downvoting of whatever subgroup is most dominant on the sub unfortunately for our species .
The whole thing thrives off putting people of various ages and education backgrounds together and watching them go at it. It's just a battle royal, to a large extent.
The whole thing thrives off putting people of various ages and education backgrounds together and watching them go at it. It's just a battle royal, to a large extent.
This is perhaps true, but at the same time this describes most of the conversations on the internet between strangers. At least to Reddit's credit the possibility of downvoting eliminates the most obvious cases of trolling and flaming. Look at some other platforms like Facebook that do not allow downvoting at all and the discussion culture is many times more toxic because no matter how stupid a statement is there will always be a bunch of fools that like it and this feeds the trolls and the morons.
Reddit isn't perfect by any means, but it's a small step in the right direction. Keep in mind that the vast majority of online users have been discussing online for 10-20 years, and during that time both the number of platforms and the number of people have grown immensely. The internet and the culture that comes wth it is still very much a work in progress, even though we don't tend to think of it like that.
I like the moderation system of Slashdot over simple votes (in fact it was the main thing that got me to register here almost a decade ago precisely because I was fed up with the level and moderation of discussion elsewhere), although I admit I'm not sure if something like this would work on the scale of Reddit and the amount of content being posted there. If anyone is aware of other platforms doing interesting things with discussion moderation that's not just a simple free-for-all, I'd be interested to hear about them.
Slashdot Mirror
Universal Basic Income is a capitalist concept, not a communist one. All universal basic income models require a market economy that can then be taxed accordingly to pay for the income. This is not viable in a centralist, communist-economy á la the USSR or others. If capitalists want to keep making money by selling goods and services they need a consumer base with disposable income. However the more automation and AI are pushed, the less jobs there will be especially for people with little to no education.
Already in basically all western nations the government provides funds via taxation to unemployed citizens so they can acquire basic goods and services needed to live. This money is taken from corporations essentially (as it's the corporations paying people's wages) and re-distributed to those who're unemployed. Universal basic income models merely simplify and modernize this process: as the amount of wage-earners in advanced economies is projected to plummet as more and more job descriptions are automated partially or entirely, the amount of people in need of income transfers will rise, and universal basic income models are a capitalist, market-oriented solution to this that seek to maintain domestic demand (and hence keep the consumer economy running).
A communist solution would be to have essentially everyone work for the state in a planned, centralized economy. We know that doesn't work. However that does not mean that any and all income transfer policies are communism, lest every single western country is already 'communist' as these policies in the form of social security, public health care (either single payer or an option of public insurance) and public education are already a mainstay of pretty much all first world economies, even though the US is slightly behind the rest especially when it comes to health care for example.
It's simply a fact of the way the free market works that the market does not magically optimize itself for full-employment and all western states have long since recognized this fact and implemented measures to avoid creating a permanent underclass of people in absolute poverty, because it is beneficial for the societies overall as well as for the companies.
Calling this communism is missing the point by several miles. If you actually read modern day communists, they oppose universal basic income models precisely because they see it as a capitalist response, which is what it is.
Did you time travel here from the 1800s or something? Is your next argument going to be 'look at the shape(s) of their skulls, this proves they're primitive savages?'
Look, the following things are true globally speaking about crime: people with lower socio-economic status commit more crimes. Pretty much universally most violence, especially gang-violence, is committed by young, disenfranchised males. Got no job and no access to education? Why not join a gang or a criminal organization. I mean, people prefer not being poor to being poor, but if you've no means of entering the education system (for example due to higher education being too expensive) often criminal activity is seen by young males as the best/most efficient route upwards in terms of social mobility and wealth.
Look at developing countries and countries with higher murder rates than the West or the US. Southern america has a lot of problems. Do you think it's black people killing each other in the cartel wars in central and southern america? Do you think a high amount of black people is the reason for example Russia, and a lot of the other former Soviet states have such high violent crime statistics? Or could it possibly be that these are regions with extremely high poverty rates and income/wealth inequality which is fertile ground for social problems and organized violent crime and those who benefit from it?
However, I have read in the past that in the US the poverty level alone does not explain the differences in stats, because the black population is over-represented in the stats even when controlling for income. Now I'm not American and by no means a criminologist, but as someone who works with data, I'm always interested in a data-driven approach, so I did some googling about racial crime data and economics and came across this post titled racial differences in homicide rates are poorly explained by economics, lets have a read shall we?
Yup, the only relative languages being spoken really are Estonian and Hungarian, and only Estonian is close enough that it's (relatively) easy to learn for us Finns. I've spent some time in Estonia, and although I still can't really speak it well, I can understand basic sentences if they slow down the rate of speech a bit.
Some history about the language and its importance to the whole nation for those who may be interested:
The language is also what's kept the culture different from the other nordic countries and enabled the rise of Finnish nationalism. We're a part of Sweden for a long time and you really had to be able to speak Swedish during that time to be anything other than common folk. So Swedish was the language of the ruling class and the state for the longest time. Finnish didn't even have a system of grammar and hence could not be written at all prior to 1500s. Curiously enough, we've largely the Russians to thank for changing that: after we moved to be a part of the Russian empire in 1809 the Russians realized that actions had to be taken so as to try and solidify the status of Finland as part of the empire and lower sympathies towards Sweden that were still really strong. So they did a lot of things, including letting us have a high amount of political autonomy (we had our own parliament making laws long before we became independent), moving the capital from the western coast to Helsinki to move it away from Stockholm and closer to st. Petersburg, we even had our own money and a customs border with Russia. Finnish was used alongside Russian, even in matters of state, and schools operated in Finnish. and we had our army separate from the Russian army that operated in Finnish. They allowed the rise of Finnish nationalism because they wanted us to not pine after the days of Swedish rule. And for a long while this worked well. This started to change when the very pro-Finnish emperor Alexander the 2nd was murdered, and the ideology of panslavism started to gain a foothold. Starting from the end of the 1800s they started to roll back of the privileges and try make us more Russian, and again the language played a critical part: they tried phasing out Finnish as the official language of governance and make us into Russian speakers. This was met with widespread resistance, culminating to the assassination of the general-governor of Finland (the highest Russian official in the land) Nikolai Bobrikov in 1904, when he was shot on the stairs of the Senate by a Finnish nationalist. The seed of distrust against the Russian rule had been planted.
When the revolution hit Russia, we saw out chance and declared independence, figuring the Lenin would not risk having a war in Finland with everything else going on. Lenin looked at what's going on in Finland, saw the high amount of tension between the working class and the better educated and figured we're about to enter a civil war soon anyway, so he actually let us go. And he was correct, in 1918 the rift between the Reds and the Whites exploded and we had our civil war within a year of becoming independent. Where he was wrong though was the winning side. Lenin figured the communists would win and Finland would seek to re-join the then still-forming soviet Union, but they did not win, and we remained independent.
There's a famous phrase from the time of Russian rule, supposedly coined by the Finnish (writer, journalist and a politician, Adolf Ivar Arwidsson: 'We are not Swedes, and we do not want to become Russians. Let us then be Finns.' The Russians and later on the Soviets had some trouble accepting this and tried to change it later on during the second world war but as the time of the Russian rule was still very much in the national memory at that time we said no and fought back.
Though we're on the losing side (we eventually had to align ourselves with the Nazis in the beginning of the
The problem is, the UK (at the moment at least) doesn't seem to want either of those models either. Norway has adopted about 75 % of EU regulations as part of its trade agreements with the EU, maintains an open border and pays about 2/3rds of what the UK does no to the Union.
In essence, Norway (and Switzlerland) are basically pretty much quasi-members of the EU: the pay slightly less than they would were they full members but that comes at the cost of them not having any say in EU policies.
The UK is trying to have their cake and eat it too, by maintaining access to the single market without having to follow any of the rules or paying anything for that benefit. It makes zero sense for the Union to give any kind of special treatment to the UK, because that'd be unfair to both Norway and Switzerland (and others), but the UK still does not seem to get this.
Yes.
Wrong. The limit was chosen based on modelling climate change and estimating its effects with different amounts of warming. We know for a fact thanks to climate related sciences that 1,5 degrees of warming is better for us and the planetary ecosystem as whole than say 2 or more degrees, and we also know that if rapid action is taken, the 1,5 degrees is still attainable.
That's why it was chosen. It represents the best-case scenario with the data we currently have. It's still not great, but it's the least bad alternative going forwards, and that's an estimate based entirely on science(s) and what we know 2+ degrees will do to the planet/us.
Modern Japanese culture is a weird mix of ancient tradition and rapid post-world western influences. They work-culture westernized fast after the war, and since hard work has always been appreciated, Japan's economy boomed as people dedicated their time and careers to companies, working long days with little to no vacation time.
Westerners don't often understand the kind of pressure this puts on the workers. They're still heavily career-oriented: you're not expected to go 'shopping around' for a job that you find suitable, you're expected to pick a company once you graduate and then dedicate yourself and your career to that company. Due to age old concepts of honor, resigning from a position is seen as disgraceful, it's a sign of personal failure, and stain on your reputation. Same actually goes for firing people. Weirdly enough, many Japanese companies don't want to fire people unless they absolutely have to, as that reflects badly on the company, so instead they often just move the person or persons to do something trivial, in the hopes that they'd one day resign themselves and take the shame off the company. But since this doesn't often happen, you've got people showing up to work in many large companies doing tasks they really don't want or need to be doing, but they keep doing it,
The same attitude largely permeates the entire Japanese society. Their legal system is (in)famous for having an over 99 % conviction rate. That's right, if your case ends up in court you're going to be found guilty with 99 % certainty. This is because the prosecutors abhoar the idea of defeat (again, dishonorable) so only cases where the evidence is extremely strong will even be taken up by the prosecutors. This also means that a lot of the crime that happens goes unsolved because neither the investigators nor the prosecutors want to take up cases that will end up in failures, thus tarnishing their reputation and honor.
And the same is true ont he social side of things. Something like a third of the Japanese under 30 are virgins. It's not because they don't have sexual drives (anyone who knows anything about the Japanese porn industry will know this) but because again, ancient traditions combined with the insane expectations of the work-life (company first, always company first) and little spare time has created a situation in which the Japanese don't have a dating culture. It's not really a custom for people to go out on a lot of dates to try and find a suitable partner, because again, going through several different partners without marrying them and settling down is a shameful thing. You're expected to pick a partner, marry them and setup a family. This creates immense social pressure, and many people simply opt to stay single because they lack the skills and the mechanisms to choose a partner, especially since the social norms in Japan are such that approaching a random stranger say at a bar for example is extremely unlikely to happen.
These are all generalizations obviously, I am not Japanese nor have I been there but I know people who've worked and lived there. Obviously not everyone conforms to the aforementioned ideals, but the general point I'm trying to make is that Japan, defeated by the US suffered a massive national disgrace, to which they responded by embracing the ideals of their victors with zeal and dedication of Bushido, and that has created a very prosperous economy with a high-standard of living, but it's come at the cost of the social lives and mental well-being of its inhabitants. Economies can change and adapt fast, but cultural conditioning set forth by thousands of years of customs and history doesn't.
This is true, but look a where those people went: the people freed up from agricultural work found new jobs in factories, warehouses, offices and the like. Now, even those fields are being automated at a fast pace. You're correct when you say:
But the problem scenario we're facing is different. Automation as its currently being developed takes jobs away not just from agriculture, but from the people who've moved to the cities as well. China is automating production at a rapid pace, replacing massive factories of hundreds of people working in assembly-lines and warehouses with semi-automated facilities staffed by few dozen engineers and programmers. In 20-30 years it's likely for example that nearly all warehouses will be almost completely automated, as will most production, this change has already begun. There are obviously new job description that have and will be created by this, but the general problem is that those positions generally require high education, and are not as abundant as the current low-skill jobs in manufacturing or logistics.
Cities have been the driving force of an increasing standard of living for the last century throughout the world as you pointed out. Here in Finland we were still heavily an agricultural society post WWII, after which we stared a rapid catch-up as people started flocking to the cities fast, as the rebuilding effort after the war created a lot of demand for labor in all kinds of industries. It was possible for someone from the countryside with very little existing education to move to a city and and find a job that, albeit monotonous, paid better than work in the countryside and allowed fast upward mobility, moving people from poverty or near-poverty to the lower middle-class.
We currently have about 200 000 more unemployed (mostly educated as we have a universal education system) people than open positions, because we've experienced a radical shift in the economy during the late 90s and 2000s: we stopped being an industrialized society and moved to a post-industrialized service and knowledge economy. Heavy industry is mostly gonei to countries with cheaper labor and what remains of it is highly automated and doesn't provide nearly as many jobs as it used to. The fall of Nokia was massive shock to the entire economy because its significance as an employer and a driver of growth was immense, even though most of the phones weren't even manufactured here. So we know have plenty of unemployed former industrial workers, engineers and so on that have had their jobs eliminated by the changes that have occurred.
The economy is not doing too bad though, we've got new companies mostly in software, like games companies (think Rovio (Angry birds etc) and Supercell (Clash of Clans)) and others that have done well and benefited the economy a lot, but the kicker is here: these companies employ nowhere near the amount of people that industrial positions used to offer, and competition for those positions is fierce. Even on the office side automation is cutting into many tasks like data entry that still employs a lot of people, but that is already changing. Programming and related fields are in high demand, naturally, but for the people whose jobs have disappeared, it's not feasible for all of them to retrain themselves as programmers, especially as even the ones who do will end up competing with a high number of younger people who're often more experienced in the field tha
Bullshit.
The Nordic countries are all very wealthy (in the 25 in purchasing power adjusted GDP per capita, Sweden is 16th 5 places behind the US and one of the highest in Europe, and Norway is actually ahead of the US) and productive (with the exception of Iceland, all in the top 13 in terms of GDP per hours worked., with Denmark being pretty much equal to the US and Norway again being ahead of the US).
Then the socialists took over and for a while restrained themselves in milking the productive portion of the population dry.
Erm what? You do realize the exact opposite is true? Finland became independent after first 800 years of rule under the Swedish kingdom and then another 100+ years as an autonomous part of the Russian Empire in 1917 (we kinda slipped loose after the revolution happened, and had our own civil war in 1918 during which the communists that wanted us to join the then still emerging soviet union lost). A 100 years ago we were one of the poorest countries in Europe, with low overall education and literacy rates and a massive issue with poverty. We started the slow climb up and then the 2nd world war came. After the war and the rebuilding effort the foundations of the modern democratic socialism that combines a market economy with progressive taxation were laid out, copied from Sweden in large parts due to their successes there. The schools system was rehauled and unified, universities are tuition free, tax-funded health care etc. All of these are things that are now in our constitution. And what has happened? As already showcased we sprinted forwards to be among the top economies of Europe. Now does that mean that there are no issues and this is a perfect Utopia? No, absolutely not. The '08 crisis hit us here in Finland extremely hard because it also happened to coincide with the implosion of Nokia which was like almost a third of our export sector that basically disappeared, and we've spent the last decade recovering from that, and that's still an ongoing process, partially hampered by the fact that the current center-right (in Finnish terms, even the rightmost party here is to the left of the democratic mainstream in the US in their support for the existing universal systems) hasn't been very effective in tackling some of the structural issues, but nevertheless, we're still doing very well.
But to say that the socialists 'ruined everything' is just utter BS. Without the social policies that we've put in place, we'd likely still be a very backwater nation instead of a global first world economy,
Oh so you heard 1 Swede say that did you? Well that proves the whole system is ruined then doesn't it? C'mon man.
Sweden took in a lot of refugees, way more than any other compared to the size of the population and that has obviously become a heated issue, as they have had problems with their immigration system previously as well. This has been made worse by the fact that Sweden changed its elementary school system away from the model they used to have (and that we still use) and allowed the creaton of privatized elementary schools, which has lead in parts of the large suburbs to rapid segregation creating schools for well-off natives and left the public schools in those areas to be heavily for immigrants. This obviously creates problems as it hampers those kids from learning the language for example, making integration and thus employment harder which creates a host of issues, the most prevalent of which is the rise of organized crime in those suburban are
The plant itself has been familiar in the west for hundreds of years, as hemp has several other uses besides the intoxicating effects, which have also been known for a long time. An interesting anecdote from the wiki article of the history of cannabis::
As for this:
I think this statement was true 50 or maybe even 30 years ago, but trends are changing fast across the West. With legalization proceeding in many places, the social status of weed has changed considerably in the past decade and a half. Roughly about half of the people I know (most of them under 30 with some exceptions) smoke occasionally, one even as an alternative to alcohol as he cannot drink due to issues with migraine. And this is in a country where the plant is still illegal (for now, although legalization is pretty much unavoidable in the coming 10-20 years as attitudes are changing even among the politicians as more and more data is coming in about the failures of a total ban on drugs and the benefits of decriminalization or legalization).
While it may not be exactly 'mainstream', with use increasing even among the older populations ("According to data gathered from the latest survey done by the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, the number of people age 65 and up who said they use marijuana grew 250 percent between 2006 and 2013') as they read news about how it's become legal in more and more places, I'd say it's fast on track for becoming a mainstream alternative.
Keep in mind also that it's been more common than most people think throughout the last decades. It's true that alcohol has a way longer history in the West, but the statistics are also heavily slanted by the prohibition approach to cannabis which understandably makes people less likely to admit to using it, thereby creating an image of it as more marginalized than it actually is.
This statement is based on absolutely nothing, it's just an assertion you throw out about a large on-going investigation without anything to back it up. 'Because the investigation is taking so long it cannot lead to anything' is some of the worst logic possible.
However you're missing the point I was making entirely. I'm not American, I'm Finnish. My point in the comment was not to take on side over the other as to the result of the investigation. Whether or not there was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian information warfare campaign is another matter that remains to be seen once the investigation completes, but that was not my point. It may be that there was no collusion, but that does not negate the fact that the Russians are actively posing as western citizens and pumping out propaganda to influence elections and sow political discontent throughout the West and not just in the US. That was my point, and there's plenty of evidence of that that's not coming from Mueller & al, including from your own intelligence agencies as well as other non-governmental researchers (see for example the report about the interference in Europe).
This is actually far from true. Here's some of what is known to have happened, the political ads themselves are a minor part of the whole thing:
You guys haven't started construction of new nuclear power plants since the 1980s, so saying this is somehow a partisan issue that's entirely to be blamed on one side or the other is completely nonsensical.
Fact is, even though Chernobyl was the result of both defective reactor design as well as incredibly bad oversight (the plant was undergoing testing prior to the operation and some safety-measures were disabled etc, overall mismanagement), the accident (together with three mile island which was small in scale) ruined nuclear power's reputation in many western countries, even though to date (even including Fukushima victims) nuclear power is the safest energy source per amount of electricity produced and also far superior for the climate. But because of the association with Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and nuclear explosions, people are scared because they don't understand it.
This is why neither side has really wanted to push nuclear power in the States. Because the majority of the voterbase is misinformed about nuclear safety it's been easier to just avoid the topic. Add to this the fact that Democrats are heavily for reneweables, while the republicans tend to come from oil/coal producing areas, and it's not hard to see why nuclear power has not been an attractive topic for either side from an optics perspective.
But sure, it's always the other guys right?
From an outsiders perspective rhe red team vs. blue team BS is getting rather comedic these days on Slashdot.
Thunderf00t has not actually criticized Tesla itself. He's done a lot of videos in the absurdity of the Hyperloop as a non-viable thing due to the enginerring (and cost) problems for example here, here (a video where he actually traveled to the Hyperloop test-site to showcase the sub-par engineering work done with the track (it's already rusted through for example)) and here (a video he made in response to the backlash to the previous video). And he also did an video earlier this year about this tunnel stuff and its problems here as well as a video on the absurdity of Musk's idea of using rockets to travel 'Earth to Earth' here.
Musk's thing is that he has a lot of ideas as well as the capital to try and test some of them. Sometimes they're successful, sometimes they're not, but thanks to Tesla and SpaceX the man is now treated in the media as if he is Midas and everything coming from him must be 'the way of the future', but that's not really the case. Personally I don't expect the Hyperloop to become a reality ever just due to the cost-factors involved, that is, it's not that with enough money you couldn't potentially build a Hyperloop that worked,. but that building and securely maintaining one would likely be so costly that it'd make no sense, and the same problems are faced by this tunnel idea. With Musk the question is not primarily whether it's it's possible technically, it's whether or not it's economically feasible as a solution.
Yup agreed. The elevators will be the part of the system that gets congested most easily and I've yet to see any info as to how they're planning to avoid having long lines of cars waiting to be taken up/down on the entrance/exit points while also keeping the costs reasonable.
This is where the whole project stands or falls. It doesn't matter how well the tunnel infrastructure below is set up if accessing said infrastructure and getting away from there involves a ton of waiting. The placement of the elevator access-points on the surface is also a bit of a question mark: how do they plan to place these things such that the cars waiting to get in and getting out of these will not cause problems for the surface traffic?
Because these systems are always partially or entirely tax-funded this obviously means that wait times for some non-critical operations can be higher, because people in immediate risk take priority but this is true in the states as well. If you actually compare waiting times for a specialist for example, you'll note that US is pretty much on par with the UK, and that Canada is on the slower side of other universal model countries (which, is all advanced countries other than the US). I work for the largest health care district of the Finnish single payer health care system with about a million people under it, I can quote you some numbers (these are from 2015 because they're publicly available (Finnish only though), can't access the current stats from home). Of the 27 most common types of surgery, we had altogether 26 658 people in queue in 2015, of which 19,5 % waited for more than 6 months. The median wait time was 87 days. For the 2 heart-related surgery-types on the list (bypass and percutaneous coronary intervention the median was below 30 days). The question here is: would it be better for the uninsured in the US to wait a bit to get good health care from the existing system with public money, or wait til' they die or go bankrupt? Is it beneficial for the US economy as a whole to remain the only country where people have to go into debt due to medical problems?
Thing to realize is that this is about availability, not quality. Quality-wise the US model is not significantly better nor is it worse. In fact, quality-wise the system is just fine for the people who're insured, the main difference is that the lack of universal public insurance leaves some people outside of the system driving up deaths. And the far more commercialised nature of the systems drives up margins and administrative costs (which is a large part of the huge spending difference (about twice the average spending of comparable countries) between the US and the rest of the world. In fact, medicare for example is already cheaper (per head covered) costs-wise than private options, largely cause it has better costs-management and lower administrative costs).
The are plenty of universal models out there which aren't single payer like Canada or here. All the US would have to do to implement such would essentially be to allow medicare/medicaid like option for all , and it would likely bring total costs down in the long term and better care for everyone.
But sure, keep posting anecdotal stuff about wait times instead of the larger picture., that's always constructive!
I've been saying this for a long time: this is the kind of result one expects to see when most of the people who vote in EU elections are over 50. I mean, voter turnout has been low in EU elections consistently (43 % in the last elections, pathetic really) because people would rather nitpick about the Union than do anything to affect it, but it's especially low among the younger generations. (source. "Turnout was again highest among the oldest respondents. Some 51% of the 55+ group voted in the European elections, while only 28% did in the 18-24 age group.") Is it any wonder that when most of the people sitting in the parliament have little to no understanding of what the internet actually is, the lobbyists are able to spoonfeed them all kinds of bullshit and we end up with sub-par legislation like this?
Obviously we're still a long way from implementation, from the article:
So whatever impact this will or will not have is still to be seen, and I personally hope the coming debates and negotiations will make it clear just how absurd the law in its current shape is and how hard (if not impossible) actual implementation and enforcement would be and reason will win, but we'll see.
We've got slightly over half a year to next EU elections people. To paraphrase Obama's recent speech to anyone else here in Europe who doesn't like it: 'If this pisses you off, don't hashtag, vote!"
From your very own link:
I was going with the numbers used in the report (here) which they claim to have gotten from governmental sources.
Wiki uses numbers from 2016, so they're outdated now, but back then using more than 1001 kWh a month caused the price to hike up to 24 cents, or as much as 64 cents during peak demand times in the year (summer and midwinter). At those kinds of prices you're talking about more than 20 grand a coin.
It looks like they may have calculated the value by using the peak demand price for the whole of the year, so the entire number maybe off a bit still, but the general point made still stands.
Again, I know there are places where mining is cheaper, I said so out right. It doesn't change the nature of the problem with BC's design as a 'currency'.
Exactly.
In fact, many cryptocurrencies are designed to be anything but stable. Bitcoin is a prime example of this: since the total amount of coins that will be created is capped, and since the creation/mining of new coins gets more complex with time as the math required to do the mining gets more difficult, it means the cost of creating a bitcoin (as well as transaction cost) goes up with time, on its own. Bitcoin is deflationary by design, which is a property you absolutely do not want your currency to have.
This also creates a deathstar level weakness in Bitcoin. People like to talk about it being decentralized, but in reality it's not. The current cost of creating one bitcoin is varies highly based on local prices of electricity and equipment from around 530 dollars in Venezuela (the only country that you can mine it at under a thousand bucks, and that's only because energy is one of the few remaining things one can get cheaply in Venezuela as it's heavily subsidized by the government) to over 10 000 in advanced economies, with South Korea taking the first place at over 26 000 dollars a coin..This means that the actual mining and thus the whole core infrastructure that Bitcoin's continued operation relies on is actually heavily centralized to the hands of (mostly) commercial operators in countries with cheaper operational costs, mainly in Asia/China (china used to control about 70 % of all the mining, I don't have recent data on how much that's changed after the government banned Bitcoin exchanges). In other words: Bitcoin is running because people are making money running it, for now.
The thermal exhaust port of this death star is here: The moment the cost of mining rises above the the price of the coin, mining will be stop. It's safe to say for example that no-one in their right mind is doing Bitcoin mining in South Korea, because at the current prices you're losing about 20 grand per coin mined. If the price of a coin drops below the cheapest possible mining cost (currently the 530 bucks in Venezuela) it will become unprofitable for anyone to be running bitcoin mining, at which point the entire 'decentralized' network will collapse, and the value will plummet to zero, as no means of transacting the coins will exist, and the currency will become useless.
Combining the fact that the design of BC makes the continued rise of the mining costs an unavoidable fact (meaning that the point of failure will keep creeping up in dollar terms) with the market price of a Bitcoin being highly volatile and affected by a whole host of things including regulation of exchanges and other cryptocurrencies and their popularity, the whole BC infrastructure is definitely a game of chairs where you can make money as a miner or an investor up to a point but when the music stops you better hope you're not left with several coins that are now suddenly worth nothing.
So a potentially good investment? Sure. A safe and secure store of value or a functional currency? Absolutely not.
The experience of pain is definitely something one can practice to deal with. I've been operated several times in my youth due to cerebral palsy and a couple of those surgeries were quite extensive and had a long recovery process which wasn't completely painless. I learned rather quickly that trying to ignore the pain will make it feel worse, whereas acknowledging it and concentrating on it can help with its management. The worst thing about pain is if it surprises you. If however you know to expect it and go with the mindset of 'I know taking this step will come with some pain, and I know where the pain will be located at' then at least I felt much less stress about it all. The sensory experience was still there as you said, but it was much more bearable: instead of trying to be overly careful with each motion to avoid the (un)avoidable pain I just accepted it as a kind of background noise. I had no notion of meditation or mindfulness or Buddhism at the time but semi-accidentally I still developed a personal mantra that I kept coming back to; since I've always been a nerd I found myself often thinking about a quote from the Warhammer 40 000 tabletop game's lore: 'Pain is an illusion of the senses, despair an illusion of the mind'.
It's been over a decade since my last operation and my condition is very stable now. Regular physical therapy allows me to live nearly totally pain free, but when the temperatures drop radically as winter hits I experience the occasional muscle spasms and some pain but it's all very much something I'm able to handle without the need for pain medication, using the same tricks as before as well as going to the sauna (heat is a friend).
This is what the Russians were going for with their information warfare campaign, although they were not necessarily interested in getting Bernie voters to flip for Trump (that's hard to achieve) as they were to get those voters to stay home and not vote at all (easier to achieve). Quoting the link:
By the radical groups there they mean both the Trump and Bernie camps, both because those groups had the largest existing online reach (and thus, were they easiest to target) but also because you could pretty effectively use the same kind of anti-Clinton messaging to target both. So they wanted at the same time to get people who don't usually vote but are pissed at the status quo ('Drain the swamp', 'Lock her up', etc.) to go out and vote for Trump and to get people who usually vote for the democrats to stay home ('Bernie or bust', 'Walk away', etc,).
Whether or not it made a definitive difference to the election results is not really knowable at this point, because the effectiveness of such campaigns is hard to measure, but keeping in mind that the amount of votes in the key states that flipped the result to Trump was what, around 30 000 it's definitely a possibility.
This is indeed a good question. I think it may have to do with a sense of urgency. That is (some) VC firms may think they have to make decisions fast or they might lose a good investment to someone else, so they don't do their homework and essentially just gamble in hopes of a big win.
So you contrast a phone call on Youtube that I cannot even in any way verify to be from the actual people you claim it to be from, to the sitting president of the US openly calling the European Union an enemy. How the hell does that make any sense? The Union and the US have had their disagreements in the past as well and no-one is denying that, but geopolitically speaking the alliance between the continents has been strong ever since the 2nd world war, and the Trump era marks a clear shift in this policy. This is obvious to anyone who follows global politics even at a cursory level.
Uhm.... people that the Americans like buying stuff from? I mean, no-one's forcing Americans to buy European cars and other stuff, but you guys seem to like it. I thought you of all people would understand this, since you've been the nr. 1 proponent of free trade for decades, and are the world's second largest export economy after China.
The idea that everyone needs to be trading the exact same amount with everyone else lest someone is getting 'ripped off' is ridiculous. It's called trade because your exchanging money for goods and services that you want-
I agree that European defense spending overall is too low. The collapse of the soviet union lulled many into a false sense of security and defense spending was cut in many places. However at the same time calling it 'exploitation' as if the US did not have their own interests in mind with their defense spending here is misleading to say the least. That is, to say that the US is doing this out of sheer generosity and not because global stability is something you also benefit from is twisting the truth. You have troops and based all over the world because of this, and no-one's forced you to do that, you've done it out of your own volition after the last world war presumably because you don't fancy a new one, and neither do we.
Moreover, 150 billion represents ~1/rth of the total US defense spending. I did some googling and according to this your defense spending in Europe is about 5 % of your total defense budget, which comes down to about 30 billion. That's still a lot obviously, but even if that were to be eliminated entirely we'd still be running a surplus.
That being said, European defense spending has been on the rise for a few years now, since before Trump.
Agreed. This is also why we're not in NATO and are actually paying for our own defense. However note that this does not mean NATO should be done away with. Defense spending needs to be increased, for numerous reasons of which Russia is only one but that still doesn't mean we shouldn't be allied with the US, because of all the major players out there in the field of geopolitics, the US is far closer to EU in terms of values and policies than say, China or Russia.
Agreed again, and that's now beginning. You must understand that since the EU is a trade zone and not a federation, EU-wide defense co-operation has been a difficult subject because any notion of an 'EU army' is often perceived as a step towards federalization and that's something that the majority of people do not like, s
Ahahahah... You know Ivan, your propaganda shitposting would be far more effective if your Finnish didn't sound like it came from a 40s black and white movie (no-one in modern Finnish uses the words 'sinjoore' or 'madame' for example) and riddled with typos (you're missing almost every single ä and ö there, and ryssä is written with a y and not a ü which is not even used in the entire language at all you dimwit).
But ladies and gentlemen of Slashdot: if you had any doubts prior to this point that the Russian trollboys are patrolling this site actively, I give you exhibit A: a dude writing about the Clintons in archaic and misspelled Finnish that clearly does not come through Google translate to try and pass as a native..I mean, A for effort, F for execution man.
These guys reply to me as ACs almost every single time I mention Putin in any way here, it's almost kinda endearing, like having a sort of pet. You know Ivan, I don't blame you. Work is hard to find in the current shit economy of Russia, and at least you get an indoors work-environment, hopefully decent pay and bonus points for being an obedient little trooper in the Motherlands fight against 'The West. If you ever end up in here, we can go and have a cup of coffee or tea, and don't worry, I'll bring my own Geiger counter. ;)
Until we meet again, comrade!
As a Finn with a couple Russian friends who've left their country because of 'organisational culture' let me give you some perspective. This is Putin's ' Novorossiya' where transparency is nonexistent and those who fail to satisfy the powers that be are thrown into jail in the best case, get into mysterious accidents or commit 'suicides' in the worst case. The space program is a key component in the cold war (which never really ended, it's just changed its nature to be less about armed conflict and more about information warfare) propaganda just as it was in the past, and as such it is of great importance to Kremlin. Whoever made the mistake is not afraid of getting fired, because getting fired is the least of your concerns in this situation. If I were him, I'd already be on my way out of the country and never drink any tea I haven't prepared myself..
The problem is not the the organisational culture of Roscosmos, the problem is the organisational culture of the entire State Meet the new boss, same as the old boss:
"Enemies are right in front of you, you are at war with them, then you make an armistice with them, and all is clear. A traitor must be destroyed, crushed."
-Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin in 2001, speaking to journalist Aleksei Venediktov, to whom he added “You know, Aleksei, you are not a traitor. You are an enemy.” (source: David Remnick, “Echo in the Dark,” in The New Yorker, September 22, 2008)
This is why seeing Trump act like Vlad's obedient little lapdog earlier in the summer here in Helsinki was one of the most absurd things I have ever witnessed in my life. Had you told me ten years ago that you're from the future where the fucking president of the US of A bows down to kiss the ring of Putin and call the European Union a foe, I'd have told you to go get your head checked. Yet here we are. My grandfather who's in his 80s said to me after the press conference that he thinks the Russians are winning, because 'one of the guys is a former KGB agent, and the other is a clueless goof.' Although grandpa is no political scientist, I have a hard time disagreeing with him here.
This is perhaps true, but at the same time this describes most of the conversations on the internet between strangers. At least to Reddit's credit the possibility of downvoting eliminates the most obvious cases of trolling and flaming. Look at some other platforms like Facebook that do not allow downvoting at all and the discussion culture is many times more toxic because no matter how stupid a statement is there will always be a bunch of fools that like it and this feeds the trolls and the morons.
Reddit isn't perfect by any means, but it's a small step in the right direction. Keep in mind that the vast majority of online users have been discussing online for 10-20 years, and during that time both the number of platforms and the number of people have grown immensely. The internet and the culture that comes wth it is still very much a work in progress, even though we don't tend to think of it like that.
I like the moderation system of Slashdot over simple votes (in fact it was the main thing that got me to register here almost a decade ago precisely because I was fed up with the level and moderation of discussion elsewhere), although I admit I'm not sure if something like this would work on the scale of Reddit and the amount of content being posted there. If anyone is aware of other platforms doing interesting things with discussion moderation that's not just a simple free-for-all, I'd be interested to hear about them.