Formerly u/CanadaPlus101 on Reddit.

  • 68 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • See, that just seems like “it’s ideology, but also billionaires are there”. European businesses don’t want tariffs, but there’s still European tariffs. The simplest explanation would just be that it wasn’t their call.

    It feels like you’re starting with your conclusion and then building a story about it to end at whichever facts are appropriate for the instance. It’d be more convincing if you could put it in a form agnostic of where and when it’s being applied. Like, when do billionaires want tariffs, and when don’t they? Then, does it actually predict policy decision?


  • Yeah, there’s estimates going both ways for conditions of ordinary people in the European Medieval period. There’s probably more than one truth - it was non-uniform and lasted a millennium. It was also a pretty poor region after the collapse of Rome, so even the rich could only be so rich. Stone age hunter-gatherers would have a pretty much perfect Gini for the same reason.

    For richer premodern regions like the India and China estimates are much higher (here’s a really recent analysis on some of them). Ditto for societies before the Medieval period, although usually they just go off of house sizes for that and the results can be so high they seem impossible. It’s also worth mentioning Gini has some problems for this kind of thing - the paper I link emphasises other metrics more as a result.

    Looking at modern dictatorships, Russia is said to have most of the world’s billionaires, and their official 2021 value is up at 0.880. Unofficially it’s probably worse. Other dictatorships report lower values, but anyone connected to the third world knows they’re bullshit and the elites own absolutely everything. The US is also an outlier; Canada is 0.726, Iceland is down at 0.649.

    There was only more inequality after the renaissance. Much of that time was democratic.

    No? The first modern thing that people will even claim as democracy is the US at the the end of the 18th century, and it was very rich, male and whites-only. Before that you had the age of absolutism, and before that you had various republics like Florence or classical Athens, but imagine voting bodies at least as exclusive as the early US and pretty unstable, with periods of effective dictatorship. Ordinary male citizens gradually got rights over the 19th century, and the first unrestricted, universal suffrage appeared in New Zealand in 1893.

    TBF inequality kept increasing in the democratic US, but then it went down in the postwar era, which is unprecedented in history. Being equal before the law doesn’t mean equal in practice, but it’s just kind of common sense that it would be closer.




  • Taking in Africans is political poison right now in Europe, and outsourcing local industries has never been super popular even if it makes sense.

    I’m sure it will happen, Africa will develop and start taking on lots of low-end manufacturing and similar, and Europe will probably be a very good customer. But, in terms of a strategic alliance for the EU, most African nations are not a contender. South Africa maybe.










  • Maybe the latest discovery by Dragonfly.

    Far fewer people will be able to read it, without doing something illicit and maybe expensive, although certain countries will still be free enough. On the other hand, it (or PieFed or a future version) could be endorsed by the remaining nations, or just have had some more exoduses of users come in.

    Slight chance the AI winter we’re going into is short and some specific fusion with classical algorithms succeeds at AGI, so singularity stuff is going on and being posted about. 2038 problem, as someone else mentioned.

    Edit: Q-day stuff could be done, coming soon or ongoing. If it’s done - which I kinda expect - it’s still a massive source of both breaches and fun mods on old, locked software and hardware.