General CE Chat

This is really interesting. Those questions seem so obvious, but their brains were wired very differently. I think it's a function of literacy/education encouraging a different kind of thinking?\

 


British TV documentary (maybe C4?) about radiation experiments
 
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The HRW report draws from interviews with 38 Ethiopian migrants who tried to cross into Saudi Arabia from Yemen, as well as from satellite imagery, videos and photos posted to social media “or gathered from other sources”.

Interviewees described 28 “explosive weapons incidents” including attacks by mortar projectiles, the report said.


and the replies...
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Our king's grandfather has now irrefutely proven to be a member of Hitler's NSDAP. Go monarchy!
 


Clean Wehrmacht is so out of fashion. First the Waffen SS in Canada, now Hitler himself. All in service of making the current enemy the evil.
 
this guy remains regarded as an important thinker in US media and in the white house

 
I won't post the video but it's horrendous; it's in the link below. Further search took me down a dark hole known as r/accidents, the eyes will never unsee that collective nonsense. This woman just threw her life away, she'll be on her way to prison a few months down the road, potentially for life if one or more dies. I also say charge the imbeciles hanging out the window, send a message to these Darwin nominees around the continent.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...olorado-suv-rollover-stunt-attempt-rcna130469
Video shows 5 teens crushed in Colorado SUV rollover during stunt attempt
The 19-year-old driver, who was arrested on suspicion of vehicular assault, was doing donuts in a Colorado Springs parking lot, police said.
 
I won't post the video but it's horrendous; it's in the link below. Further search took me down a dark hole known as r/accidents, the eyes will never unsee that collective nonsense. This woman just threw her life away, she'll be on her way to prison a few months down the road, potentially for life if one or more dies. I also say charge the imbeciles hanging out the window, send a message to these Darwin nominees around the continent.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...olorado-suv-rollover-stunt-attempt-rcna130469
Video shows 5 teens crushed in Colorado SUV rollover during stunt attempt
The 19-year-old driver, who was arrested on suspicion of vehicular assault, was doing donuts in a Colorado Springs parking lot, police said.
Just can’t muster up much sympathy for such a stupid event. Agree completely with charging those hanging out of the SUV.
 
Watching this series tonight, does anyone remember any of this? I was in my mid-teens around the time this was dominating media but I don't remember hearing of it. The journalist was investigating the Inslaw case which veered into the October Surprise involving conspiracy theories between the Reagan campaign and the Iran hostage crisis.

An interesting take from this is the local police allowed the local coroner to embalm the body before the family had arrived nor had given permission to do such. Subsequent autopsy results didn't yield any hard drugs or stimulants that might lead to a probable homicide investigation. The journalist's death was ruled a suicide, despite some questioning who makes 10-12 deep cuts (collectively) into their wrists, to the point of severing tendons which one man in the first episode said would be near impossible to continue cutting.

https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/mar/05/the-octopus-murders-netflix
‘Extreme power and secrecy’: inside shocking Netflix hit The Octopus Murders
The story of a journalist’s mysterious death while investigating a shadowy conspiracy has become the subject of a twisty new series

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Danny_Casolaro
 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2024/02/15/middle-class-financial-security/
How Americans define a middle-class lifestyle — and why they can’t reach it

Note: I left the graphs out but can be viewed in the link above.

A poll from The Washington Post finds widespread agreement among Americans on what it means to be middle class. But just over a third of U.S. adults have the financial security to meet that definition, according to a Post analysis of data from the Federal Reserve.
Americans also underestimate the income required for that lifestyle, suggesting that the popular image of middle-class security is more of an aspiration than a reality for most Americans.

About 9 in 10 U.S. adults said that six individual indicators of financial security and stability were necessary parts of being middle class in the Post poll. Smaller majorities thought other milestones, such as homeownership and a job with paid sick leave, were necessary.

“Middle class-ness and predictability are very tied in the American imagination,” said Caitlin Zaloom, an anthropology professor at New York University. “Sometimes that is about security in the present, but it also means feeling secure about where life is going.”

Just over a third of Americans met all six markers of a middle-class lifestyle. While about 9 in 10 Americans had health insurance, only three-quarters had health insurance and a steady job. With each added measure of financial security, more Americans slipped away from the middle-class ideal.

Researchers often define the middle class based on income, in part because income data is frequently collected and easy to access. But that income doesn’t guarantee a middle-class lifestyle. One commonly used definition from the Pew Research Center sets a middle-class income between two-thirds and twice the national median income, or $67,819 to $203,458 for a family of four in 2022. Most Americans consider the lower end of that range, $75,000 and $100,000, to be middle class, according to the Post poll.

Even when looking at middle-income Americans using Pew’s more expansive range, the majority did not have the security associated with the middle class.
Those that did tended to be older, had higher incomes and were more likely to have a college education and own their homes. While the Post poll found 60 percent of Americans considered homeownership essential to being middle class, homeowners over age 30 were more likely to be financially secure even when comparing people with similar ages and incomes, according to a Federal Reserve survey.

The most common barrier was a comfortable retirement, something that about half of middle-income Americans over 35 felt they were on track to achieve. Gallup polling last spring found that retirement was Americans’ top financial worry. Even for those who can save, retirement planning requires complicated judgments about how long someone expects to live and the future of government support through programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

“The de facto landscape now for retirement is to save like hell and hope you don’t live too long,” said Ben Harris, vice president and director of economic studies at Brookings. “And that’s a terrible paradigm.”

The shift from defined benefit plans to individual retirement accounts has increased the importance of saving for retirement, at the same time as rising housing and student loan payments are taking up a growing share of income, according to Annamaria Lusardi, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.
“There was a time in which family income was a lot more defining about your life and your financial security,” Lusardi said. “But now you are in charge of much more of your future, particularly in terms of the financial decisions that people have been asked to make.”

While the path to middle-class financial security has become more complicated, the share of people with it hasn’t markedly declined over time.
Since 2017, the earliest year of comparable data, between 32 and 40 percent of Americans met all six measures, with a low in 2017 and a high in 2021.

Another survey, the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, provides a broader view of American financial stability back to the 1980s. More Americans today have $1,000 in liquid savings than they did 40 years ago, after adjusting for inflation. And the share of Americans with money in a retirement or pension account has held steady over the past 40 years.

“The idea that you can have a secure job with predictable wages, with health care and retirement, and being able to pay for your housing — those things are all part of a mid-century vision of the middle-class life trajectory,” said Zaloom, the anthropologist. “Even in the 1960s, the idea that this was a very widespread phenomenon was always kind of a fiction,” she added. The draw of the middle class is rooted in far more than the desire for financial security.

“It’s the perfect model of American identity,” said cultural historian Larry Samuel, author of “The American Middle Class: A Cultural History.” “It fits so well with our ethos of egalitarianism and being a meritocracy. These are all myths, of course, but they’re embedded in how we see ourselves.”

“It’s a club that everyone kind of wants to be a part of,” Samuel said, “regardless of your economic circumstances.”
 
addicted to this: https://red-autumn.itch.io/social-democracy

Controlling the german Social Democratic Party, make decisions (as the party and potentially the government), knowing that the economic crisis and Hitler are on their way.
The centrist coalition hates every good policy and will directly or indirectly help the Nazis, and the commies really don't like you (at least at the start), and the economic crisis explodes really quickly.

My best result, after 5 tries (don't think I can do better)
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Losing options are of course Hitler wins or civil war (got this multiple times). Supposedly it's possible to pull off a United Front with the Communists, but I didn't get that option. Don't know if a single-party SPD government is possible (reached 41% voteshare at the end of this run, by a massive distance the best numbers I got).
 
Not to mention the fact that unlike many other countries (including most European countries providing aid), the "aid" goes directly back into the economy since they produce these things themselves. For the government itself it's still obviously the same amount out, immediately, but for the country it doesn't "cost" that sum.
It's insane how a country that revolves around military adventures doesn't have a nationalized military production. This is nothing but the traditional capitalist transfer of money from the people to big corporations.

That being said, at least in this case of for a good cause.
 
It's insane how a country that revolves around military adventures doesn't have a nationalized military production. This is nothing but the traditional capitalist transfer of money from the people to big corporations.

That being said, at least in this case of for a good cause.

Interestingly Norway does have nationalized military production, though it's obviously much smaller in scale. The Norwegian government owns 50.001% of Kongsberg Gruppen, and also 50% in the ammunition-producing Nammo (the other 50% is owned by the company Patria, which is 50.001% owned by the Finnish government, and the rest by Kongsberg Gruppen, essentially giving the Norwegian government control of that as well). This is not a specific sign of Norwegian militarism or anything though, it's just how important industries have been treated here in general.
 
It's insane how a country that revolves around military adventures doesn't have a nationalized military production. This is nothing but the traditional capitalist transfer of money from the people to big corporations.

That being said, at least in this case of for a good cause.
That would be 'communism or socialism' - if the US can't have that for Healthcare then there's zero chance of it anywhere else!
 
It's insane how a country that revolves around military adventures doesn't have a nationalized military production. This is nothing but the traditional capitalist transfer of money from the people to big corporations.

That being said, at least in this case of for a good cause.

Its probably because the US is obviously a capitalist country, and unlike autocratic China and Russia whose dictators can easily nationalize their defense industrial bases by ordering it so, the US has to rely on the private sector to get it done. All of the innovation is happening in the private sector, so the government is largely dependent on working with companies.
 
Because probably those weapons would be as shit as Russia's are, who have a nationalised military production.

Caf is Caf, but at times need a reminder that governments suck at innovation. And yep, you need good innovation to make top military hardware.
Does government really suck though? Aren't many inventions in the 20th century done through (partially) government-owned agencies like DARPA?
 
Not very recently though. Governments were not that much directly involved with innovations in computers, AI, pharma, modern weapons in the west, electric vehicles etc. There were posts here over the years in the same topic, how much better Russia is at this cause they do not waste money to capitalists but have nationalized military production, and well, it is clear now that Russia weapons are 30 years or so behind the US. Government sectors tend to be corrupted and usually do not pay as well as private sector, which is why private sector bring the innovation.

Now obviously there are some things that you need the government to be involved instead of leaving it entirely to the market, stuff like police, healthcare, education and infrastructure. But in many, like military weapons, I do not see how it would be a good idea to have the government itself producing them.
One area that the Government could run is the dumb munitions, bullets, artillery shells and such like, there's not really much in the way of innovation that I'm aware of needed for these