420stalin69 [he/him]

Spend 42 hours making a professional quality message queue and entity component system then shelve the project because you got bored.

There is no Nordic model. The Nordics have substantially different economic histories and have developed in different ways at different times. Finland was poor until really very recently, Denmark was and still is a colonial exploiter, Norway got oil rich, Iceland was a haven for bankers and tax cheats, and Sweden only saw a recent blip of social progress from the 40s into the 70s and then destroyed the labor movement that built those gains over the previous 20 years with the impressive equality achieved in that period rapidly eroding back to the 1920s when you look at disparate investment in education and other ways of funneling public benefits to the already wealthy. And don’t forget that Sweden are colonial bastards towards the Sami as well, and still are looting their way through those spoils for resource wealth.

Anyone who tells you there even is a Nordic model is a fucking idiot.

It’s because in a capitalist or other market driven system, economic planning is decentralized.

Let’s say trucks become really popular. There’s a lot of demand for trucks, so you can charge a higher price and make more profit. People want to buy 1000 trucks a day but only 500 are being built per day. Demand exceed supply. You’re making bank.

Other people see that profit and want a piece so they decide to build a truck factory of their own. Let’s say 10 people decide to make a factory and each factory is capable of making 100 trucks a day.

You’ll note this increases the total supply of trucks to 1500, the original 500 plus additional capacity of 1000.

But these factories take some time to build so for a while everyone is happy. Slowly and gradually supply catches up to demand but only slowly. At first we reach 600 trucks per day, then 700, then 800… demand still exceeds supply so the economy is growing and we are all making profit.

But then the rest of the factories get finished. Now we are making 1500 trucks per day which exceeds demand. Now we have a problem. Now supply exceeds demand and the price of trucks crash which means we can’t pay back the loan we took to fund our factory.

We overinvested in the capacity to build trucks because we all wanted a piece of that profit, and as a result of over investing we have now crashed the market for trucks because we are simply making too many trucks.

This creates a cascading effect in the economy since now the market needs to “correct” this imbalance, which is economics-speak for some of us need to go bankrupt and shut down our factories since the market only supports 1000 trucks per day but we are making 1500.

As some factories start losing money, we lay off staff, some of us start going bankrupt which means the banks (we got a loan from to build our factories) have to take a loss. The economy is now in recession because in our earlier exuberance to chase that amazing profit we built too much capacity and over invested creating a “bubble” in the market. Bubbles have to pop to restore equilibrium.

You don’t get this dynamic in a centrally planned economy because in a centrally planned economy we can make a more straightforward investment decision: there is demand for 1000 trucks but we are only making 500, so only create capacity for 500 more trucks. Since our centralized planning allows for a coordinated investment decision with access to full economic data, we don’t over-invest meaning we don’t create excess capacity meaning there is no need for a “correction”.

A market based system is decentralized. Every corporation is making their own investment decisions, each corporation is trying to make and sell as many trucks as they can. A corporation doesn’t care if the economy as a whole is making too many trucks, their sole interest is to sell as many of their trucks as possible which is why a market system results of cycles of over- and under- supply.

It’s a cycle. Capital chases profit and invests in production, leading to first a boom as production soars but then inevitably leading to a bust as capital keeps piling in chasing that profit result in over-investment and excess capacity.

Markets are decentralized. A socialist system is centralized meaning it can make decisions that take the entire economy into consideration instead of only the immediate interests of a single corporation.

Obviously this pretty idealized and all actually existing socialist systems have had at least some degree of internal markets and all have had exposure to markets in the form of international trade so you still see ups and downs in centrally planned economies since an economy is never fully centralized or fully decentralized.

Also in socialist systems there is still the risk of over-investment due to bad decision making or inaccurate economic data, or eg in the USSR the economic interests of the collective farms were over-protected which resulted in something analogous to overinvestment in agriculture so there is also political risk, etc.

So you still saw periods of economic stagnation in socialist systems but the swings are massively dampened. Also with centralized planning the state can more easily intervene to correct these issues when they arise (assuming the political will exists) which makes it easier to reboot the economy when things go awry - eg the socialist economies recovered more rapidly following WW2.

The main drawback is that a socialist economy can be less responsive to demand. Like, if blue jeans suddenly become very fashionable, in a socialist system the economic planners might be worried that denim is a passing fashion trend and averse to the risk of over investing in denim production, whereas in a market system the corporations will say fuck it let’s make money today and let the future worry about excess supply issues not my problem I’ll already be rich.

So the benefit of central planning is that growth is more stable and sustained at the cost of being potentially less responsive, whereas a market economy can be very responsive but at the cost of boom-bust cycles, and at the cost of concentrating enormous political and economic power into the hands of the individuals who own the factories.

China for example seeks to get the benefit of both in a partially mixed system where consumer products and growth industries that are more likely to see rapid shifts in demand are left to private industry while the backbone of the economy that is more stable (eg mining, energy generation, etc) are subject to planning directives.

It was a fringe position in the Polish far-right before the election and now that the libs have won it’s even less likely to happen.

The Polish far-right are a dominant political force.

And it’s under the relatively lib coalition that relations have reached their lowest point.

I think if Ukraine comes out of this with borders that roughly resemble the current front lines then they’ll keep Lviv but there’s a real possibility of political collapse in Ukraine, if things get worse and if the currently cooperating power centers turn on each other, and in that collapse scenario it becomes pretty plausible.

probably still less likely to happen than not but it’s definitely plausible and there are multiple plausible-to-likely pathways where you can see the political situation in Ukraine deteriorating to the point of collapse.

I don’t think I buy the current Russian narrative that the military camp are about to coup Zelenskyy but he’s definitely under enormous pressure right now, and even if a coup likely isn’t about to happen you can nonetheless see Zelenskyy and the military camp making political defense lines between each other, and the number of high level aides, spouses, and the like opening boxes that accidentally contained a grenade or suffered an unfortunate food poisoning incident is pretty eyebrow raising.

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I think it’s a game of diminishing returns.

Let’s say 6 minutes gives you perfect 100% cleaning.

Well 30 seconds probably already gets you 50% or more of the total benefit just by getting fluoride on your teeth and rinsing your mouth a bit so getting people to 3 minutes is probably approaching perfection anyway and if you start asking people to do 6 minutes then they’ll say fuck it I won’t bother at all so settle for the 80% win.

I assume.

I have a SpaceX joke. It’s a blast.

Also Brave allows for background playback of YouTube videos on mobile, iOS at least

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Writing prompts or some kind of creative writing exercise

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Well I appreciate your perspective. Perhaps in your community there was activism on this issue before it reached the halls of power.

Seeing it as your right, having an expectation that it should be a right, isn’t the same as being a legal right though.

You could have said you disagreed with the court but unless you’re sitting on that court you can disagree all you want and it actually just doesn’t mean anything in terms of changing the reality that it’s not up to you what legal rights are or how the constitution is interpreted because that’s what the Supreme Court is for - and it says so in the constitution.

A legal right is a constructed and formal concept. A legal right simply does not exist unless the courts say it does even if you strongly feel it should exist. That’s what I’m saying.

And since 2008 that legal right has existed but before then it simply didn’t.

And I’m not a liberal man. I’m not even anti-guns.

I am a progressive and you probably view the terms progressive and liberal as synonyms but they aren’t.

In fact youre the one who is appealing to an idealism here, and in that sense you’re more of a liberal than I am even if I’m closer to them in the sense or being a progressive. You’re pointing to a right existing in some almost metaphysical sense, ie you’re saying that because people felt it should be a right you’re saying it in some sense existed. Which is liberal idealism.

Look, we probably aren’t actually very far in terms of what we think sensible gun policy should be since I think if you’re in Montana or whatever then yeah sure a rifle makes a lot of sense and can be a lot of fun and you pointed to the more modern and moderate 2a types which probably places you actually not far from me in terms of what we would agree sensible gun laws could be.

What I said is that the legal right to own a gun was created in 2008 and that is a straightforward fact. It’s DC vs. Heller. 2008. Look it up if you want to. Going on about how some people really felt it should be a right before then doesn’t change that, and it is also a fact that if you were to ask a mainstream legal scholar in the 80s or early to mid 90s you would have to look into some pretty partisan political camps to find someone who would have advocated the current interpretation that was established recently in 2008.

But of course since the late 90s and certainly in the late 2000s you can find a lot of them. That’s also a fact.

I didn’t say anything about Reagan. If you are saying “Fuck Reagan” then we don’t disagree about anything important so far as Reagan is concerned.

As for it not being a legal right in the USA that’s a straightforward fact. It was DC vs. Heller, a 2008 case where a Washington DC law was found to be unconstitutional which is the first case where such a law restricting access to handguns was found to be unconstitutional. There were plenty such laws prior to 2008 that survived legal challenges which is what proves the legal right to own a gun didn’t exist prior. But in 2008 the Supreme Court stated the law was unconstitutional at the federal level (DC being a federal district) establishing an individualized right to guns for the first time.

And it was in 2010 that this was extended to additionally restrict the law making power of states, in addition to the federal government, since by default the constitution is understood to restrict the federal government and not the states, but the poorly defined legal doctrine of “incorporation” basically says some bits are applied to restrict states as well.

In the sense of having an individualized legal right to own a gun, prior to 2008 it didn’t exist.

As for ruby ridge types saying shall not be infringed sure, I’m sure many of them advocated the maximalist interpretation way back when that the courts later adopted in 2008, but up until at least the late 90s the idea that weapons could be regulated wasn’t even controversial and the maximalist position could then be called mostly fringe and was only just beginning to emerge as a position a suit wearing serious legal professional would advocate. Bill Clinton banned a bunch of them in 1994 and no one really blinked an eye at the constitutionality of it and the federal assault weapon ban of 1994 survived legal challenges that it definitely would not have survived after 2008 and DC vs. Heller.

The NRA became a lot more activist in the 80s and 90s and really it was their activism that pushed the once-fringe idea that the constitution required largely unrestricted access to weapons into the mainstream.

Which requires editing out an entire sentence by calling it a prefatory clause, a preamble, which flies in the face of the fundamentals of constitutional interpretation which requires the assumption that each word was written for a reason.

The 2a doesn’t, or didn’t until 2010, make reasonable gun control outside government legislation.

It was a sharp shift to the constitution first in 2008 at the federal level and then applied to the states under the doctrine of incorporation in 2010.

Gun nuts like to pretend it is some eternal constant, or more likely most of them simply don’t know the law here and are just parroting the gun lobby take on things, but it’s a straightforward fact that the individualized right to own guns didn’t even really exist until 2008 and the near complete inability to pass any gun laws didn’t exist until 2010.

The 2a was reinterpreted very recently. Before 2008 it wasn’t well defined and most assumed the bit about militias had something to do with it. Scalia basically is the one who decided to edit out that part of the constitution by calling it a preamble, which is extremely against the fundamental principles of constitutional interpretation which is to assume every word was written for a reason.

And for the record I like guns and am for gun policies that allow sane and healthy adults to have guns.

You have a drink in your hand, you go “oh hey it’s Alex how have you been man?”

Alex tells you about his new hobby.

You gesture to your friend “hey Alex have you met Jamie?”

Alex and Jamie get to know each other.

Rinse and repeat.

Jamie meets a friend and starts chatting. You awkwardly stand beside Jamie taking sips of your beer until Jamie says “hey Andrea have you met my friend 420?”

You introduce yourself.

After a while everyone has met and had a few drinks and some good music starts playing and you start dancing in the dance floor. At first it’s very self conscious but after several songs and another drink you start vibing.

Asking for evidence is unreasonable, you fucking tankies