I assume we don’t teach kids to be like psychopaths because the system only can take so many. Unlike the image portrayed by propaganda, even American life doesn’t mainly consist of competition but of cooperation. There is competition to fill roles in companies, sure. But once in a role one is supposed to cooperate with coworkers to achieve something larger than one could alone.

If everybody saw life through the lens of a psychopath I guess we’d end up in a Mad Max scenario. Modern cooperative society with a system of division of labour simply wouldn’t work anymore.

On the other hand I’m morbidly curious how a society entirely without psychopaths would look like. Would it be better or worse? (And for wich definitions of “better” and “worse”). I can only assume we’d have much less wars, for one.

Sounds like they are reinventing the main frame, just without the specialized hardware support that guarantees things go right.

Any IT device can be hacked. We completely missed the evolutionary opportunity to have secure computing devices. Proper object capability machines would make it possible. But quick and dirty and by Friday is what we got instead.

Huh, good job they developed that Rusty Dagger for Ukraine then. They could make a few for themselves on the quick.

And this I believe is where public and corporate interests diverge.

Corps like the current situation of boutique production. Nice margins, easy to manage processes and they can selfimportantly hobnob with politicians and military brass. Apparently a lower cost to produce patriot variant was cancelled. I can’t see how corporations want something like that.

I believe easy and cheaply mass producible munitions need to be engineered differently. But why develop such munitions, if the old paradigm produces so much gravy and influence?

Next Monday.

If he’s found dead or unable to conduct his duties before then, there’s a special election. If that happens after Monday, the seat simply remains vacant until it’s filled January with whomever wins the regular election.

But it very much depends on what you count as a language. German used to be a dialect continuum. People could understand their neighbors and a village or two over, but became mutually unintelligible pretty quickly. Transportation was slow, so populations just didn’t mix as much and language was more local. Latin used to mostly be the language of a single city.

Most of this entire discussion is missing the point. On the one hand a variety of views and/or options for political representation are needed. This is where first past the post utterly fails. It devolves mostly to a two choice system, as is becoming painfully obvious in the US. Or it might become unstable/unpredictable as seen in the UK where alternative parties are emerging, but probably to the detriment of the old parties. In the end it might well devolve back to a two party system, just two other parties. This is where some form of proportional representation system comes in. More than two parties are viable. But at the cost of stability. Back in schooly politics teacher liked to present Italy as the poster child for why (simple) PR doesn’t work well. Though in recent years the Italian government has proven quite stable. Also, in Italys Case I’d love to run the experiment how they did with nothing changed except for organized crime being eradicated. Alas, in humanities controlled experiments like that aren’t possible. But I’d not be surprised if spectacular corruption wasn’t the bigger problem.

So what could the solution be? First I’d like to see corruption stomped out completely. I know, that’s almost like wishing for world peace, and come to think about it, it’s mostly the same characters that are in the way. Second, the solution is likely to be neither a simple majority system nor a simple proportional system. Ranked choice? My teacher was taken by the German system (a mixture of both), but that has it’s own problems. Or something entirely different, like completely independent publicly funded media. Print, audio and audiovisual. And that media could run regular polls to publicly show which topics are important to people.

I think our problems stem more from the influence on populations rather than the actual modality in which our representation is formed. In Israel you have the corruptive influence of ultra-orthodox and nationalist hardliners mixed with some run if the mill corruption, in Italy you have a gigantic organized crime problem, with some rich people problem, in Germany the Springer group is trying to set up a Fox news situation and in the US you have the Fox/Heritage Foundation/billionaires and general corruption through money problem.

They have for decades been at the forefront of cheating. Which party broke into their competitors offices to so on them? Who used the supreme court to stop the count in Florida, where after the fact it was found out they would have (narrowly) lost?

They know they cheat at every opportunity, so they need to accuse their opponents of the same.

More combined starches: Verheiratete (German, something like “married couple”) are a kind of dumplings with potatoes together with diced fried bacon. One of my favourite local foods.

It’s not really even about being a democracy. Kommunist East Germany with one of the most formidable surveillance systems to date could only look on when a sufficient percentage of the population rose peacefully.

I believe the plumbing for democratic change is still present in the US. What is preventing change is people doom scrolling on the couch.

Fun Fact: what killed communism wasn’t so much the ownership details of the means of production, but the fact they chose a command economy instead of a market economy. Planned or command economies are bad, no matter what political ideology is behind it.

Also: the way politicians world wide allowed conentration of mega corporations, I feel we are moving much more towards a command economy than a market economy.

We were talking office suites, but yeah. Though M$ should have lost the OS wars not against Linux (it was a fledgling OS at the time) but other systems of the day. OS/2 was what a stable win3 should have been. VMS or true64 Unix could do stuff windows server could only dream of. Yet marketing to pointy haired bosses brought MS the victory, not technical merit.

I upvoted you, because by and large you are right. As a caveat though some people do have office tied up in automated workflows with scripting in some sort of M$-language. In that case you would have technical hurdles in addition to lobbying and politics.

The only thing that makes them “left” is that they are not Republicans and that Republicans keep calling them left.

Establishment Democrats would fit right in with traditional conservative parties throughout Europe. I could easily see Merkel of the CDU being to the left of quite a number of Establishment Democrats.

Exactly! There is even still defense equipment in use that uses 8inch floppies!

Not entirely. Generally of course people who don’t have to labour for their livelyhood have more time and certainly more resources to influence politics. But the common man can make their voices heard. -you can vote in your interest. Be careful of what people try to tell you is your interest -you can protest (peacefully); look at France to see a populace that doesn’t just take what is rammed down their throats -you can talk to your neighbours; discuss things with them to form an opinion; don’t just parrot talking points from media; -you can write to representatives; sure, your letter won’t be directly shown to then, unlike one from Koch or someone. But it won’t go unnoticed. -participate at town halls -participate in polls A fortune 500 CEO or Forbes billionaire list name will have more impact than a single voice from the population. But organised, the voices of the population make a difference. Organisation, participation and critical engagement can make a difference.

Conquerors are worthless. They come and go. What makes a realm/an empire stick around and last, is if the leader is a good administrator. What set the Romans aside was not so much military ability, though they had that. What set them aside was their ability to organise, plan and administer.

I think a significant number of states will now want to develop their own nuclear weapons. The US has been teaching people for the last 20 years that there is a significant difference in how they will treat countries that have the bomb like North Korea and those that haven’t, like Irak, Iran, Afganistan, Denmark and other NATO countries.

NATO countries I believe will mostly ralley around the UK and France. But even among them, in the medium run, I believe there might be some wanting their own. Turkey has just recently announced a missile that basically only makes sense as a nuklear weapon.

The rules based international relations was something making countries believe they don’t need nuclear weapons of their own. This premise doesn’t hold in the same way anymore. We’ll probably end up with 30-40 countries with nuclear weapons.

That last part is essential. People learn much more habits from observing people than from being told. Best one can do is be a good role model.