- For decades trusting the US was no problem at all. The relationship was mutually beneficial. Cooperation and trust among nations is possible and Juche (completely self-reliance) is not a worthwhile goal at all. So, sure, cooperation is great and should always be a goal – it also secures peace (people who are economically intertwined are less likely to go to war with each other).
The issue is the US burning up that earned mutual trust. And at some point you have to sadly abandon ship. Cooperation is great, trade is great, but not under all circumstances and all the time.
- Your central claim is that scholarly academic (mainstream) work ist disconnected from fine arts and as such outside of it, no fit to give meaningful answers.
That seems like a wild and weird take to me, contradiction everything I know about how the world works. But if that is your hypothesis then I don’t know how you can answer ist without actually engaging closely with those who you say are disconnected.
- How do you think public discourse spaces are created? By approaching and talking to people when you write about them! That doesn’t just magically happen …
I merely would have expected some humility when you characterize the work of other scholars from the outside without even talking to them. (Outside here is relative. Whenever you talk about scientific of scholarly work without talking to the people who do the work you are on the outside.)
If those scholars don’t want to talk to you, fair enough, probably no humility needed. If you don’t want to talk to them (which, fair enough, not everyone is cut out or wants to do journalistic work) you better be humble and maximally charitable, though.
- To get closer to an answer to this you should still talk to the people doing the actual work?
I know that many scholars have an uncomfortable relationship to the PR work their research institutions are doing, but they themselves don’t strike me as unapproachable or closed to nuanced discussion. Seems weird to ignore that perspective and wildly speculate from the outside.
- Did he talk to people who make those reconstructions?
Why speculate from that outside perspective when you could talk to people who worked on them and the decisions they made. I think that would be very interesting. As is that‘s completely missing and it feels a bit like aimless speculation and stuff that could be answered by just talking to the people making those reconstructions. My experience is that people doing scientific work love talking about it and all the difficult nuances and trade offs there are.
- It takes a village to raise a kid.
You cannot parent in isolation and outside of society. How society is structured has an huge impact on parenting. It is delusional to think of parenting as some kind of thing that exists in isolation separate from and not influenced by the rest of society. Parents often can only have little influence themselves.
This is a value neutral description. Though I do think total parental autonomy in parenting is not a worthwhile goal and also not at all realistic. As parents you have to deal with society.
What does that mean for social media bans? To me mostly: network effects are wicked strong and fighting against them as an individual parent is basically impossible. This can lead to parents only having bad choices available to them (ban social media use and exclude them from their friends, allow social media use and fry their brains). Are bans that right solution? Don’t know. I’m really not sure. But I do know that it‘s not as simple as „parent better“.
- The peace prize is often given to people still working on something, not having achieved something. In that way it is different from the science prizes.
I think that is a understandable approach (providing support), though it can lead to giving the prize to people who never achieve any of their goals. Whether that’s a worthy trade off I do not know.
- Why dwell on the past? Currently per capita electricity consumption is higher in China than in Germany (6.5 MWh vs 6 MWh).
However, it is true that even in light of this current situation China is building out solar a bit faster (on a per capita basis, even if adjusted for consumption) than Germany. In Germany it‘s about 1 GW added each month, which adjusted for population and energy consumption is about a factor of 1.5 compared to Chinas 25 GW per month.
Wind is lagging behind in Germany but, to be honest, looking at numbers from 2024 compared to China it’s about the same factor 1.5 difference when adjusted for population (3 GW compared to 87 GW).
Germany should be and could be as fast as China – but there aren’t humongous differences between the two countries.
- This is a nonsensical generalization.
This is the observation: we massively overshoot in terms of the role (space, infrastructure) we assign to cars, especially in densely populated areas.
If we can create viable alternatives to driving we can make these places much, much more enjoyable. Quieter, nicer to be around, more human scale, more convenient.
That’s all. Nowhere in there is any claim that cars aren’t immensely useful. In less densely populated people. For people with disabilities. Etc.
Why can’t we have the nice things? And yeah, the nice things do include walkable cities like we had them in 19th century. Sometimes and in some places to a very limited extent the past with some modern conveniences (like trams, modern bicycles) was better.
- US post pandemic economic recovery has been astonishingly great measured against other major economies.
Obviously (real) wages did take a hit like everywhere but have been recovering, too.
My working theory is that noticeable inflations makes people go crazy and trumps anything else. Completely closes people off to rational thought and that’s what sunk Biden. Despite awesome economic recovery given the circumstances.
- It’s worse than that. Everything leading up to this and this reversion right now is a perfect demonstration that the current US administration cannot be trusted and behaves in irrational ways. You cannot expect consistency and enduring policies. It’s all fickle and capricious. How are you supposed to do any planning with this?
This is all so obviously dumb and I’m frankly astounded by so many people (especially here on HN) playing devils advocate or, I don’t know, honestly believing that this all makes sense.
Even if you agree with the stated (also somewhat incoherent, by the way) goals why do you think this implementation can achieve any of that?
- This is some weird American version of Juche, not reducing dependency on China. Can you explain the dependency reduction mechanism to me?
Just as an analogy: If you were to detonate all nuclear weapons in the US inside the US you would also reduce dependency on China. Doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The path matters.
- The allies actually did create a just peace through strength in Europe during and after WWII. So I’m not sure why you are so offended by that thought? Would there have been a better way to create a peace that all in all has been lasting for more than three quarters of a century now? Would it have been better to further appease the facists?(Obviously not a perfect or complete peace. Obviously the Cold War also sucked. Not disputing any of that.)
Also, obviously I hope that this time around it’s not too late to prevent facists from burning Europe to the ground before we can defeat them.
Do you dispute that showing strength is an element to peace? (I’m not talking about killing people or invading other countries. I’m talking about a demonstrated and credible willingness to defend your values and alliances.)
- I don’t think re-armament is the only or the best solution. It’s just that with the US having left the picture Europe does have to show strength if it has to have any hope of keeping Russia at bay. That‘s not just arms, that’s also credible deterrence. How can Europe achieve that absent the US without spending on arms?
I do think that Ukraine is instructive in terms of Russia not being as almighty as they might seem, but in terms of outcome Putin is scary close to achieving practically all of his war aims short of Ukraine ceasing to exist. I learned that Putin is patient. He can take it step by step. He does not value human life. And that’s dangerous.
At great cost to the Russian people, sure, but does Putin care? Another five to ten years and he can give something else a go. And suddenly he is in the Baltcis or at the Polish border.
- Sure. Might be. But you are here asking for Europe to preemptively roll over and give in to Russian wars of aggression.
From a game theory point of view how is that supposed to bring peace? That just shows Russia that they can do whatever they want and reach their goals. We already had the Minsk agreement Russia violated. Why should Russia stop when we give in to their demands? What‘s the logic there?
At some point you have to show strength. And earlier is probably better if you want to prevent WWIII
- Based on the way Russia has been gradually pushing more and more. Step by step. Slowly.
They take what they want. They are appeased. A couple years nothing happens. They take what they want. They are appeased … etc.
Invading Ukraine should be a clear warning that Russia will not just stop. For appeasement to end and for Europe to seriously look for viable paths to peace. Not just yearlong pauses in fighting that allow Russia to regain strength. That is not peace.
- You went into women only spaces with the obvious intent to troll.
Quote: „Deshalb ist der Chaos Computer Club nach seiner Satzung und nach dem Willen der Mitglieder eine galaktische Gemeinschaft für alle Lebensformen. Als solche wollen wir allen Teilnehmenden eine sichere und schöne Erfahrung auf unseren Veranstaltungen bieten, unabhängig von Alter, geschlechtlicher und sexueller Identität, körperlichen und geistigen Voraussetzungen, ethnischer, regionaler und/oder religiöser Zugehörigkeit bzw. Herkunft, äußerlicher Erscheinung oder sozioökonomischer Stellung.
Wer sich dieser Offenheit nicht verpflichtet fühlt, hat bei uns nichts zu suchen.“
Translation: “That is why the Chaos Computer Club, according to its constitution and the will of its members, is a galactic community for all life forms. As such, we want to offer all participants a safe and enjoyable experience at our events, regardless of age, gender and sexual identity, physical and mental abilities, ethnic, regional and/or religious affiliation or origin, physical appearance or socio-economic status.
Anyone who does not feel committed to this openness has no place with us.”
Anyone who goes into protected spaces with the intent to troll and score political points is an obvious (metaphorical) bomb thrower who should have no place in any events that want to provide all participants a “safe and enjoyable experience”.
“Open to all creatures” does obviously not mean anyone can come. Anyone who themselves cannot be open to all creatures has to be aggressively excluded from such events. That is the only way to defend openness.
- It is perfectly possible that a given company performance can be reached by different paths, some better for employees, some worse.
In fact, I think that even seems like a very plausible hypothesis, given that treating your employees worse can have advantages (reduction in costs and headcount) and disadvantages (less motived and potentially productive employees, worse retention, difficulties attracting people) for the employer, so those two may roughly cancel out under a whole lot of different conditions.
So for the employer there may be no benefit (but also not really a downside) to treating employees better, but add to the mix this strong cultural idea in US business circles that unions are the worst and you get this taboo against unions and no market pressure to change that.
Obviously this is a quite horrific situation to be in because we get worse outcomes for employees and unchanged outcomes for employers. So no one benefits and most people have worse outcomes. Bad all around.
- Don’t underestimate the power of status quo. Also, how unpopular it is to criminalize things.
Also, Germany has coalition governments. As long as there is no CDU/CSU and AfD coalition (and then Germany would have worse problems than recreational marijuana) at least one of the currently governing parties will be part of the next coalition.
Given that together with how hard the status quo is to change I’m relatively optimistic. Even though the conservative highly irrational, science and fact denying course is deeply worrying. So they might be ready to govern with fascists. But then, as I said, recreational marijuana is not my most pressing worry.
- Euro NCAP is not a regulator. It tests the safety of cars and scores them in a way that‘s readable to potential buyers of cars.
Since potential buyers of cars can’t themselves test the safety of cars (they have neither the expertise nor the resources) this is pretty much the only way that exists to independently test the safety of cars in markets.
- Simple: expansion. Seems like he can get to that goal since western support for Ukraine is shriveling up pathetically.
There will be no peace with Putin but a military defeat may be enough to get rid of him. So I don’t really understand at all why Europe and the US are so hesitant when this is a way to obviously damage Putin.
- Saying “this is wrong” is very different from saying “this is fraud”. Why is it so hard for you to tell the difference?
You never even need to engage with the question of whether something is fraud when disputing something.
If you say that there are 75 million people living in Germany I don’t need to call you a lier or a fraud to say that you are wrong and dispute your statement. That‘s just not necessary. I can just point at this website https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Popula... and say you are wrong. What do I care whether you simply misremembered, go wrong information from someone else and believed them or are actively lying.
This does not apply to opinion questions that show huge differences (not single digit percentage point differences), though there validity, not reliability is a bigger concern, especially since there exists no voting benchmark you can measure against.
Still: I think it’s awfully convenient to just wholly discount actual empirical evidence whenever you feel like it because it might not be perfect. Why exactly do you think your gut feeling is better?