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Comment Re:Bean counter economics (Score 1) 138

The really bonkers part of this is that much of the economic planning in the west is allegedly Keynesian, but that would involve this kind of counter-cyclial approach where you build and spend more during a recession, then slow building and start saving during growth periods. But of course we've ended up doing neither of these with predictably poor results

Comment Re:NATO expansion my ass (Score 1) 203

Putin actually asked if he might join NATO one day (informally), and Bush entertained it. Then spooks, MIC, and Euorocrats got wind and shut it down.

No, Russia asked, and NATO said "sure, here are the requirements before you can join" and Russia weren't happy that the entrance requirements applied to them so it went nowhere.

Comment Re:It's sad. This award used to mean something. (Score 1) 69

How much Heinlein have you read? Stranger in a Strange Land was very controversial. Heinlein is much more complex than a one dimensional reading of Starship Troopers would suggest. It's one of the reasons that his writing is so enduring. Much of his writing is exploring the potential impacts of politics or technology on people and veers wildly from Libertarian (The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), authoritarian-democratic (Starship Troopers), to communalist (Stranger in a Strange Land) and explored transhumanism, isolation, post-apocalyptic, techonological collapse settings, and did it both in long-form novel and YA. If he was writing today, conservative commentators would not like him at all.

Comment Re: Real question (Score 1) 202

It's the usual trap that the civil union and the religious union are both called marriage so they get conflated. In Europe and the US/Canada it is possible to be in a civil union called "marriage" and not be in a religious union called "marriage". From the civil perspective, it's irrelevant if you are married in a religious ceremony, "marriage" is a civil contract. The involvement of the State is as the ultimate arbiter of contracts, which is the most basic form of government. In Ireland, for instance, religious ministers are also registered civil witnesses, so can witness the contract legally. But the paperwork still has to be submitted to the state.

If the language was more precise separating the two I think that the conversation about things would be easier.

Comment The problem is... (Score 1) 152

Less the phone itself, and more that a lot of the content is (as designed) quite compulsive, and that the phone notifies you when there's new content, which is all the time.

To make your smartphone life easier, just turn off all the notifications. And if you find yourself compulsively checking an app (TikTok, imgur, Instagram, whatever), remove it for a while to break the habit.

Comment Re: And with that (Score 1) 151

The problem is that treating drugs as criminal exacerbates the underlying social issues, plus adds an incentive for criminals to get involved and greatly increases their revenues which in turns increases their power and influence. So you end up with a negative feedback loop.

If you legalize you can mitigate some of the problems and by taxing the sources (the drugs) you can also defray the costs of dealing with the social consequences, and reduce some of the negative health side-effects by ensuring quality of supply. You also impact the spread because by removing incentives for criminals to expand demand (the first hit is free kind of stuff, or active pushing) you have an opportunity to manage demand better.

Bascially people will always use drugs and prohibition does not work. As with alcohol the side effects of prohibition are significantly worse than the problems caused by legal supply, and you can defray the costs of dealing with those problems with tax income from the supply.

Comment Re:Lipstick on a pig (Score 2) 302

The Irish times (may be paywalled, I'm a subscriber). Some choice excerpts

The Rings of Power, ... features a race of simpleton proto-hobbits, rosy of cheek, slathered in muck, wearing twigs in their hair and speaking in stage-Irish accents ... Twenty minutes in, I’m having flashbacks to that 1997 EastEnders episode with the fightin’ villagers and donkeys walking the streets.

the Harfoots are ancestors of the hobbits. If they don’t quite keep livestock in the livingroom, they are otherwise a laundry list of 19th-century Hibernophobic caricatures.

There’s an early scene in which we see the Harfoots, wearing filthy rags, scrabble in the ground for food. What is this, Famine cosplay?

The Scots get it ... Stand-ins for the dwarfs, they are portrayed as aggressive and argumentative... I expect Durin, prince of Khazad-dûm, to whip out a deep-fried Mars bar. Every other “mad Jock” cliche has already been ticked off.

This all tracks with JRR Tolkien’s disdain for Celtic culture. “They have bright colours,” he said of Irish and Welsh mythology, “but are like a broken stained glass window reassembled without design”.

Perhaps he protested too much. Many scholars today draw a line between Tolkien’s elves – willowy immortals from across the sea – and the Irish Tuatha Dé Danann, a semidivine race immune to sickness or age. The parallels between the Irish mythological figure Balor of the Evil Eye and Sauron, the flaming-red iris of Barad-dûr, are similarly obvious. And Tolkien’s great romantic tragedy, Beren and Lúthien (which was inspired in part by the author’s own romance with his wife, Edith Bratt), carries echoes of the old Gaelic epic The Pursuit of Diarmuid and Gráinne.

So if anyone should sound “Irish” it is the elves. They even have a high king. Instead, and of course, these noble sophisticates have upper-class English accents. The grubbier humans sound like Lancashire mill workers – not as cultured as the elves but a long way ahead of the O’Harfoots in the pecking order. Somehow the Victorian caste system has been smuggled into a 21st-century American fantasy series.

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