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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 8th, 2023

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  • yeah in europe (obviosly it varies a lot cross-country and rural/urban) but lots of places with high safety standards , and high emissions taxes. Still lots of small cars around .
    Mostly due to parking in big-dense-cities though probably.

    US does come out badly on deaths per billion pax-km: 8 ish vs 3-5 for most euro countries

    So on the face of it small cars dont sem to correlate - but these data look a bit hodge podge, so not sure to read too much into it without knowing the underlying sources.

    Other factors like the “stroad” thing might be an issue.
    And a lot of European municipalities give the elderly free public transport, and have ok bus service, so many doddery old coots have a viable option.

    I remember that southpark episode about senior drivers, with the jaws music . . .
    Maybe not as funny when you look at that US death rate. To quoe Father Maxi: “No god needs complex irony and subtle farcical twists that seem macabre to you and me, all that we can hope for is that god got his laughs . . .”



  • Yep, capitalism is at direct odds with competetive markets almost by definition.
    “free” is the non-specific term tht they use rhetorically. “Competition” is the market feature that might theoretically benefit consumers in some circumstances - and they don’t often include that word in their rhetoric.

    It’s always been about acquisition of market power, this is sort of opposite of a free market.
    If any threat of consumer rights / anti-trust / labour rights or balancing of market power arises, their incentive is to acquire political power and influence to defend their power.

    It was the same story in western Europe before industry and “capitalism”, just the landed class monopolising land vs peasantry (and/or enslaved/indentured labour). Landowners monopolised all the votes and even when suffrage expanded it was usually top down. Until maybe 1789 when something else happened to the top.

    Unfortunately I think many of the major progressive changes of the past (that benefit people in general rather than the elites - again in “the West”) have mostly followed catastrophic events or political upheaval, or martyrdom.
    Peasants revolts, black death, aftermath/stress of major wars, civil war, workers uprisings, race riots, 1929, ww2.

    I guess the 1929 and all the FDR stuff and strengthened social policies in western Europe was all widely democratically backed (honourable mention to the banks’ major incompetence , to hitler for being such a massive c*nt and a decent 50-or-so years of European imperial decline) .

    So maybe there’s some hope for the democratic or the MLK/Gandhi type approach - not that it worked out too well for those two individuals.




  • Either way, assuming I can find a large stick or rock, I’d have enough patience to do a manual physical uninstall and get back to my solitude. So I think I’d be pretty ambivalent.
    I guess smashing the shit out of windows would be slightly more satisfying - but that’s not really the main reason I’m alone in the woods.

    And yes - before you ask the obvious follow-up - I have smashed the shit out of a thinkpad in the past, they’re not as tough as people say they are; it’s mostly false bravado. Don’t be afraid to stand up to the bully (ymmv).






  • As i understand it it (somewhere between barely and not at all) the idea is not that It’s “expanding” in the sense of a balloon inflating into the space around it.
    Its more stretching internally.

    So the distance (or time it would take at constant speed) between any 2 points is geting bigger.
    You could maybe also say it’d take more energy to move between the points in a set time.

    There’s probably nothing outside, but the distances inside get longer.

    It’s probably something to go with gravity, momentum and entropy. The actual concept of “distance” between things might not be what we think.

    But all these theories give rise to the concet of large amounts ob unobserved ‘dark’ mattter and evergy, so the actual basis of currently observable fact (i.e. energy / mass) is a small fraction of what is needed for these theories to work.



  • widdows 2000 was the pinnacle for me, beat XP until i wanted to go to 64 bit.

    Apart from having 64-bit, XP was a step back; even if I don’t count the fucking dog thing.
    XP was a fair bit harder to de-bloat than win 2000 and they were hell-bent on forcing internet exploder on the world.

    XP was also at a time when Linux was becoming pretty easily usable and mac osx was impressive too - I remember using those imac coloured egg things at university in 2000. They were good apart from the mouse, and ran MS office pretty well.
    StarOffice was already better than MS-Word at dealing with .doc format across versions.
    and ancient version of Wordperfect were miles better for WP anyway (“reveal codes”).

    windows XP was already down to gaming, adobe and CAD/other specialist apps, plus maybe MS Excel that just weren’t as good or not available on linux.





  • Wow, they’re dumber than I thought if they think this makes their point.

    Although then again, their general ideals have swayed the more mainstream of many large western governments and international financial institutions for 40-50 years.
    So there must be something to this tactic of making a hotch-potch of random graphs.


  • yeah, Bretton-Woods - was so much more about a broader scope of bank regulation - to try control and stabilise investment and capital creation for the good of domestic businesses (ideally small businesses) across all international members of B-W.

    Throwing all that regulation away - essentially led to over-concentration of unregulated financial power with little to no incentive (or requirement) for them to work in the domestic interests - all the great stuff that comes from that (and it really is great - for some people).
    Couple that with the small govt-ism that came in in the late 70s and there’s not even a state investment sector to prop up growth during recessions.

    Its one of those things where they experiment with something really important and before it’s even been tested for long enough, they whip out the safety net.
    “We won’t need that anyway once the banks are deregulated - they’ll fly in and catch us when we fall - they’re very fine people .” At least they’ll catch us for long enough to sort out foreclosure/eviction and make sure borrowers take all the risk of asset price movement.

    Pretty much jack-all to do with gold - that was done with in the 20s pretty much in all but name.