zifnab25 [he/him, any]

If voting isn’t enough (I didn’t think it is) then do more. Go knock on doors for the candidate that you like. There are a million ways to participate in democracy.

Love to door knock for Heinrich Himmler.

These “both choices bad. Better to not vote” people really don’t make any kind of sense to me.

Hey, listen. I vote every year. This year, 90% of my ballot is going to be blank, because so many of the candidates are absolutely abhorrent. But when I am presented with the Himmler / Hitler choice, I will be firmly bubbling in © None of the Above. I might even knock a few doors and tell my neighbors about how great © None of the Above would be. If I could figure out where to send my money, I could even see myself donating.

Image being unhealthy and saying “it’s going to take more than a 20 minute walk once a week to get in shape. Better not even do that then cuz what would be the point?”

Its funny, because I’m picturing you trying to recover from a broken leg with that mentality.

We will be more like China

We won’t be like China. We’ll be more insulated and divorced from Chinese media, culture, and conversation.

That’s the stated end goal. Bringing up sharp walls between nationalities in order to control the flow of information between people.

If we keep TikTok open, we risk exposing American young people to Chinese norms, ideals, and social standards. We might even be exposed directly to Chinese mass media (ie, propaganda).

This is a real security risk, as it raises a possibility that younger Americans won’t accept American mass media at face value.

Nintendo gets to do this (the Yuzu shit) because so many other developers have stopped making anything except slot machines.

A great deal of western economy runs on exploitation of Latin America and Africa where western companies commit crimes against humanity on the daily basis.

Undeniably. But the benefit of this exploitation accrues first and foremost to the ownership class.

Scandinavian companies are directly involved in exploitation happening in developing countries

US cut-outs in Scandinavia function in much the same way as the 50-state strategy for the domestic arms industry. This secures political patronage by way of kickbacks and sinesures to elites within the Scandinavian domestic polity. But it does not benefit Scandinavians writ large. The beneficiaries are entirely within the foreign rooted patronage network and have contracted over time as the network grows more efficient.

Scandinavia is not a closed economy

The economic benefits of Scandinavian socialism are geographically and linguistically limited. Traveling overseas for medical care and education is a luxury, particularly when your conditions are chronic or time-critical. And the labor for these services is primarily sourced from the Scandinavian polity. They’re not importing a bunch of Global South doctors and teachers to get the cost of their socialized programs down.

the labor needed to make Scandinavia run happens in the countries the empire subjugates

The labor needed to make the Scandinavian Treats Network flow is a consequence of colonialism. But Treats trade through the privatized economy. There is no publicly financed cheap TVs, cars, and textiles service. And the benefits of these industries accrue primarily to the bourgeois not the proletariat. That is why they’re the focus of intensive advertising and other consumerist propaganda. Nobody in Scandinavia needs to spend millions during the local soccer tournament to promote the public mail service or the local judiciary in order to garner support for it. Its the newest FIFA title and scammy financial products and the fanciest luxury watch brands and clothing styles that get the lion’s share of promotion. None of those are consequences of Democratic Socialism.

Cuba is indeed a far more principled example of socialist policies in action.

Cuba isn’t “principled”, its “embargoed”. Cubans would be more than happy to get the Scandinavian tier of treats if they were on offer.

But my point is that Cuba can still deliver public services despite being cut off from treats networks. These are distinct systems of trade.

The whole western economy runs on cheap labour and resource extraction from the colonized countries

A great deal of the western economy runs on cheap imports from industrial rivals, like China and India. But Chinese standard of living has been improving by leaps and bounds, approaching (and in cases exceeding) their western peers. I don’t think it is fair or accurate to say that a Nordish person working in the O&G sector and using an Apple phone is somehow profiting off the back of Chinese labor any more than a Chinese person using a fossil-fuel powered device while working in a phone assembly plant is profiting off Nordic extracted labor.

Scandinavian social democracy only seems to work because of the imperialism they practice on third world countries

The articles you’re citing largely focus on the weapons export industry, the knock-on-effects of fossil fuels, and the relationship between economies as a whole. They fail to discuss either the scope or benefit afforded to individual Scandinavians, relative to the handful of senior executives and majority stakeholders in these industries.

To say the US democratic model or the Middle Eastern monarchy model are predicated on imperialism would be far more accurate. But, again, the flow of trade is heavily biased towards a minority of residents. The real benefit of Scandinavian socialism isn’t that it grants access to cheap consumer goods. You can get that anywhere - from Qatar to Haiti to Taiwan - without any regard to the social system. The benefit of the Scandinavian model is in how it delivers professional health care and education labor. That’s the primary appeal of the system and it has nothing to do with cheap foreign imports.

Success of social democracy is not possible without inflicting inhumane suffering and oppression upon people in the global south

Success of social democracy is not predicated on the success of a consumerist market economy. Cuba is an excellent counterexample. It implements a raft of policies that are comparable to Scandinavian social services and reaps enormous economic benefits despite being entirely cut off from imperialist trade and cheap labor.

The real benefits of the consumer economy are the capitalist brokers, not the Scandinavian social democrats.

Is this accurate or overstated? I was under the impression the Nordic Model is more predicated on fossil fuel exports than straight-up slave labor (as compared to, say, economic success of The Philippines or India or Israel or Saudi Arabia, where dirt cheap labor from neighboring states is essential to operations). Nords would be poorer without fossil fuel exports, but they’d still function within the EU trade network and enjoy a basic post-industrial standard of life with high quality education, health care, and mass transit.

By comparison, the Pacific Rim satraps are all ruled by folks who make their money entirely off of an export market powered by dirt cheap human labor. The shipping and vacation industries through the Pacific Islands are entirely a function of indentured labor. The agricultural industry is entirely plantation labor. Its a very different beast.

That’s why 25 year olds in software are making 250k in the US

I know a few folks in software in the US, and the lion’s share aren’t making $250k/year. The ones that are all have Masters/PhDs and are leads/specialists in the Top 20 industry leaders. I don’t know who you’re working for that pays a quarter million per code-monkey flailing at python, but if there’s a job opening that pays this well please let me know. I’ve got over 15 years experience doing big boy shit for a Fortune 500, and I’d love an extra $100k/year.

The best way to get promoted is to change jobs every 3-6 years.

Europeans: “Those perfidious Russians and the nefarious Chinese are the two single biggest threats to our domestic security. Why… they’ll just hack into any old thing and fill it full of evil communist propaganda. They’ll shut down our critical infrastructure, hijack our data services, and spam us so full of phishing attempts that you won’t know what’s safe to click on! And all just to watch us fail, then laugh at us. The fiends!!!”

Also Europeans: “Google’s CEO said we need to dismantle the last ten years of digital safety standards so we can undermine the YouTube adblocker. Make this our top priority.”

https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/what-would-happen-if-all-the-salt-in-the-oceans-suddenly-disappeared

I hate these takes, because they always open with “What would happen if a large volume of matter vanish?!” And yes, removing anything on the scale of “All the salt in all the oceans instantaneously” would be catastrophic entirely on the grounds that any instant movement of enormous mass is going to destabilize natural systems.

But the question that people are looking to answer is “What would the world look like if the Atlantic was a bigger version of Lake Michigan?” Not “what would hitting the oceans with a Star Trek teleporter do?”

https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/questions/50834/what-if-the-oceans-salt-level-decreased-by-50

Kinda grazes at the edges of this, but doesn’t really seek to distinguish what a fully-desalinated ocean system would look like relative to a salty one. It just describes a transitional period in which freshwater life migrates out to the ocean. But it doesn’t discuss what a deep-sea fresh water world would look like.

Also, the “eventually the sea would re-salinate” gets us to a more fundamental question “Why is the sea salty to begin with?” And that gives us insight into where salts come from and why they are fundamental to the ocean ecosystem.

“Skills Issue”

Demonstrably so, given the success of Russian industry.

In fairness, the Russians had one big advantage the Americans didn’t…

Russian scientists.

But my point is more that they had no compunction over taking German scientists when presented with the opportunity.

I mean, if we’re going to be serious, the USSR had its own version of Operation Paperclip. Operation Osoaviakhim

In 1945 and 1946 the use of German expertise was invaluable in reducing the time needed to master the intricacies of the V-2 rocket, establishing production of the R-1 rocket and enable a base for further developments.

…

On arrival the 302 Germans were split into several groups. A large group of 99 specialists from the Zentralwerke was installed in Podlipki in the north east section of Moscow as part of Korolev’s NII-88, 76 design engineers were transferred to Gorodomlya Island, and 23 specialists to Khimki as part of Glushko’s OKB-456 for the development of rocket engines.

But once the Germans had been pumped for info, they fell by the wayside. The difference between Russians and Americans was that the Russians didn’t put German scientists in administrative positions. They just squeezed them for their findings and retired them. The scientists didn’t end up running the fucking departments.

Staring at a bunch of empty tissue boxes

Doesn’t look like anything to me.

yeah, the comic describes it as “the virtually impossible”

We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a “bird detecting algorithm” by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being “some dude at a computer filling out captchas”.

I’m not saying we aren’t building on centuries of work, i’m saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable.

The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled “birds” and ask if there’s a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that’s camouflaged, or even just a bird that’s out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the “Is this a bird?” test.

The original problem was posited… 60 years ago?

It’s a bit like saying “I wonder how the dinosaurs died?” in the early '00s, a few years before meteor theory really got nailed down. Like, ignore the last century of postulation. We just knocked this out real quick.