nerdspeak

Of course genetics really matters, although which genes switch on depends a lot on environment. Which you or your parents or the society can influence to a big extent.

I enjoy that my rent is 900 euros in the city center, that going to the doctor costs 3 euros a visit, and that I can do my chosen career here, which would be impossible in the US without inherited money. If you want to try making tens of millions of dollars with low taxes, by all means move to the US or Dubai. But I was moderately successful in the US — paper millionaire with a startup in my early 20s — and it’s a much tougher and less fun game than the business gurus make it out to be.

Business for the most part is about buying labor for x and selling it at a markup of 1.5x or 2x. Even tech is basically arbitraging software development hours. So yes, the US, where labor is kept cheap, is better for this, since base costs are lower. I’m from the US and moved to Belgium years ago, and my drive to make money at all costs is basically gone. Of course I still work, but only on things I want to do.

Really? I live in Belgium now and it’s the same capitalism except everyone’s basic needs are guaranteed by the state, and magically everyone is way more chill and less violent. I think it’s pretty simple, make healthcare and education close to free plus a guaranteed minimum income that is enough to scrape by so people can turn down bad jobs. The only difference is that restaurants and cleaners are more expensive so more people cook at home and clean their own toilets instead of hiring it out to impoverished people…

I agree. We need to treat the US at arm's length, be much more careful about our involvement with them. Europe innovating more is just a function of investing more in science. For 17 years--and especially since the Ukraine war--there's been continual downward pressure on funding for research. That needs to be reversed, which means we need to get over the fixation with balanced budgets. That doesn't mean to go crazy and cause runaway inflation, but a bit of strategic investment using fiat currency (you can call it debt if you want) is what we need. The good news is, we have a lot of space for more of that, unlike the US.

I live in Europe. The main problem is underinvestment, not the welfare state. The causes are pretty complex, but can be boiled down to German hegemony, and the Germans’ decision to run highly deflationary policy because it makes their exports competitive. You could then say, well the problem is your inability to unite to counter Germany hegemony, and I would say, touché. But it’s got very little to do with lack of entrepreneurialism or whatever, countries like the Netherlands, Sweden, and even France (albeit confined to Paris region) do quite well in the startup world relative to their population size. The macro stuff is just macro stuff, as in, China and the US run massive deficits to create demand in their economies, and in Europe that’s not allowed because of Maastricht.

A lot of leftists try to draw an analogy between Hamas and the Viet Cong. The problem with that is that the Viet Cong had the DRV and the USSR and China all funneling weapons to them. The strategic situation was much more favorable. Hamas did succeed in putting Gaza back in the center of public discourse, though. Which, I think was their goal. If they had succeeded in provoking Israel and the US into a regional war with Iran, that could have been a step towards weakening US/Israeli power in the region, because it would have been a debacle worse than Iraq or Vietnam. But it looks like the US avoided falling into that trap. To be clear, I am a leftist, but I don't support Hamas.

I was able to do something similar with organic DMT (yopo). Which kinda makes sense, a lot of people with “powers” use plant medicine. I’m a bit talented with stuff like this already but don’t have these abilities without psychedelics.

The Salisbury Poisonings were targeting a former FSB double agent. Putin cares way more about maintaining fear and escalation dominance within his state security apparatus than he does about a YouTuber who hasn't lived in Russia for thirty years.

You think the Dems can be pushed to the left on this though? The centrist Democrats like Schumer seem to prefer Trump to Sanders. Which makes sense, since Schumer’s donors are the banks.

Short answer The disagreement about diagnosis would be that Vlad believes the decline in democratic institutions is a sui generis problem, caused by a multiple factors -- technological changes, the GFC and its aftermath, etc. Whereas my view is that democratic political institutions in an undemocratic economy is inherently unstable. Moreover, his periodization is very different from mine. He has stated that democratic decline began in ~2005. Whereas I would put the starting point a lot earlier, in the late 1960s or early 1970s, when capitalist elites in the West started to think maybe they had offered too many concessions to workers in the postwar era, and it was undermining their power over production. So, they dropped the goal of full employment and decided they needed to use the threat of the sack to get their power back. Longer answer I think you could characterize Vlad’s views in two ways, both seriously flawed from my perspective. The uncharitable view of Vlad is that he’s a neoliberal. Vlad has said Western democratic institutions are presently in “decline” relative to the ~2005 period. This suggests that things were healthy during the War on Terror, and while the banks were fueling a huge speculative bubble. I disagree and think there was just as much corruption then, but it’s become more visible in recent years. For various reasons capital has had to take a harsher stance with people and cut their living standards, and this has provoked a revolt. Although, unfortunately that revolt has been co-opted by skillful propagandists who are using it to impose an even harsher neoliberal/authoritarian regime. The more charitable view of Vlad is that this statement about 2005 was an anomaly, and that he’s a social democrat. He believes it is sustainable to have a capitalist economic system but with certain public goods, like healthcare, education, a media sector dedicated to actual journalism, and basic housing rights guaranteed to all citizens by the state. I disagree. Not because I don’t think such a society is unappealing. However, my view is that social democracy will always fall apart. The major capitalists will find ways to rebuild their societal domination by removing those social rights. This is because those rights threaten their power, particularly in the workplace. Bosses don’t like it if workers can easily walk out of the factory and still meet their basic needs. It increases wages and workers’ demands for better conditions, including control over the workplace. When these conflicts reach a certain level, the capitalists will move their capital abroad and/or plot to take over the government to weaken the workers' power (usually some combination). This has happened a lot of times. The collapse of Swedish social democracy, Thatcherism in the UK, the threatened capital strike under the Mitterand government in France, etc. This has been written about a lot, by Leo Panitch in "Impasse of Social Democratic Politics," by Pontusson specifically on the Swedish case, by Peter Frase. The instability of full employment welfare states was predicted by Kalecki in the 1940s, in "Political Aspects of Full Employment." As a result of this fundamental disagreement about the sustainability of social democracy, we have very different ideas about what is to be done. Social democrats think you can protect social rights through careful attention to institutions. Democratic socialists are more pessimistic about the power of institutions to control big asymmetries in economic power, and that the only way to guarantee social rights long-term is to use the state to make economic power more equally distributed. That doesn’t mean you can’t have people owning their own houses or small businesses under democratic socialism, but huge intergenerational fortunes and private control over hospitals, banks, etc., need to be prohibited, because that kind of economic power inherently translates into political power.

He thinks the problem is populism, I think the problem is the capitalist state. He thinks the rise of populism is due to “democratic decline” in the West. I disagree, and think the last fifteen years of crises have exposed just how illiberal supposedly democratic states are when capitalism gets put under stress. See what French and German banks did to Greece during the Eurozone crisis, Obama’s decision to bail out the banks without conditions but evict the homeowners, etc. I don’t think real democracy is possible under capitalism. Both because you cannot have true democracy if your workplace is under the authoritarian control of the owners, and because the capitalists will capture the state and the media and manipulate conditions to serve their interests, even if the institutions are nominally democratic.

I like some of Vlad’s political commentary (but not his political theory). However, he has a tendency towards grandiose self-referential victim narratives. That he is promoting this theory is not surprising given other statements he’s made.

Realistically you should just get decent at app-driven dating, which requires a big market, ie, a big city as others have said (it’s like any kind of online advertising). Get good photos and buy boosts. I found Berlin to be okay for online dating. France was much better, especially Lille for some reason. Brussels and Amsterdam were also good.

Two resources I used to recommend: https://shamik.net/teaching/materials/dasgupta a brief guide to argument mapping.pdf https://www.academia.edu/2247188/Dont_Panic_The_Procrastinators_Guide_to_Writing_an_Effective_Term_Paper