nickpp

There are countries that decided against compulsory helmet laws for bikers on the basis that biking health benefits outweigh the risks.

When you raise barriers to an activity, even if for a good cause, you may end up losing more than you gain.

There are other regulations making entrepreneurship quasi-impossible in the EU, not just GDPR.

For example employment laws are thought for big, ossified companies, not lean and agile startups.

> sane working hours

So it's "unfair" when others work harder than us?!

> right to express discontent against the government

Last time I checked, the USA had "freer" speech than the EU.

Except here we’re talking about data connections beamed from outer space to our phones anywhere on Earth by a private enterprise, not some gigantic bureaucracy starving its citizens to build a bigger monument to its ideology in a dick-measuring contest with another State.

What do you think those sellers on the secondary markets do with the money they get?

At the end of the investing chain it’s always jobs, products and services - or bank deposits.

Any money not physically hidden in a cash vault or under a mattress takes part in the economy.

I remember during communism, how The Party was loudly condemning anything coming from the “decadent capitalism”. Meanwhile, the youth was busy wearing bluejeans and listening to rock and roll.

People are always able to recognize those providing value versus the ideologues…

Saved money are also injected back into the economy. They aren’t stored under the mattress. They are in banks, where they are lent out, spent and invested, creating jobs, buying goods and services.

The exact same argument, that Trump voters were “influenced” by algos, can be made that anti-Trump voters were influenced by mainstream media or whatever.

So you either believe that people have agency and actually decide for themselves, or that they are puppets and democracy is a sham.

I have triple-pane windows since 2014. No leaks, no fog. Superb comfort. Same with countless friends, colleagues and neighbors.

Almost nobody has been installing single-pane windows around here since early 00s. Double pane is the default. Location is Eastern Europe, if that matters.

Sounds like lots of ideas and principles copied over from the much-maligned X?!

You can look closer, if you want. The EU is cheaper and cheaper for the American tourists.

And please make sure to visit some of the Eastern European countries, like Romania or Bulgaria too. They are part of the EU as well.

But said income would've been much lower - like in Europe.

Europe "solved" inequality by effectively limiting the upper range. Meanwhile the lower tier is just as low (or lower) than in the US.

People would still rather emigrate to the poorest state of the USA than Bulgaria or Romania.

Also, Russia is sabotaging European satellites:

https://nltimes.nl/2024/11/15/dutch-childrens-channel-outage...

... so... your answer to my question is "no"?

I thought so. I use Twitter daily and, for all its flaws, I think the "community notes" feature is pretty awesome. In fact, I like it so much I would enjoy having in on pretty much any information stream I receive.

Maybe I could even start following and possibly trusting legacy media again - if they would bother adding it.

> Twitters community notes reflect the received wisdom of a mob. Not the truth.

Do you have an example of such flawed community notes? The ones I encountered were pretty sane and middle of the road, often correcting Elon himself.

Please do feel free to point us to those stories from “refugees from Donbas”. Also, the Russian cities leveled, Russian families obliterated and Russian children kidnapped - by the Ukrainians. They must be some amazing stories to keep the war going since Donbas is currently pretty much all Russian - controlled.

I see Russian propaganda efforts are still going strong but so easily disproven in this day and age.

So what's your message for the Ukrainians being bombed, their homes destroyed and families killed? What should they do?

Pack up and leave, take refuge in other countries? Just give up and stay under the Russian boot, obey when taken to fight in meat waves against their neighbors?

What would you do in their place?

> under Russian occupation since 2022

Which is not Russia advancing and occupying Eastern Europe at all. Nope. Just friendly neighboring acts.

As someone who lives in a country neighboring Ukraine, hosted Ukrainian refugees and heard the stories about what is happening in occupied territories directly from escaped friends and relatives, (some of the older ones still remembering stories about nazi occupants), let me tell you one thing: you are massively underestimating Putin. And that is a fact.

Russian conquest wars in the last 30 years: Chechnya 1994–1996 and 1999–2009, Georgia 2008 (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) & Ukraine (2014 - today).

If Putin ever gets tired of war, he seems to quicky recover and start again.

No.

Government was overthrown in February 2014, the Ukrainian parliament renounced Ukraine's non-aligned status in December 2014 while Russia annexed Crimea in February/March 2014 and attacked Donbas in April 2014 - all while while Ukraine was still neutral and non-aligned.

> US regime change operation

I haven't seen any actual proof for that, only speculation like what you are linking to.

LE:

And you'd need some strong proof considering that everything that happened afterwards completely vindicated Ukrainian people's fear of Russia and their desire to get closer to the West.

As someone who lives in Eastern Europe and who also lived through a bloody revolution to get out from under the Russian boot - let me tell you: we don't need external influences to desire to live in peace and freedom, to pursue our happiness and prosperity. We are just like you, people of the West, in that regard. We don't want to live under Russian occupation any more than you do and we are willing to pay the blood price for the privilege.

I can see and hear its rockets every time Russia decide to target cities in Eastern Ukraine.

> It is completely disconnected from reality.

Russian conquest wars in the last 30 years: Chechnya 1994–1996 and 1999–2009, Georgia 2008 (Abkhazia and South Ossetia) & Ukraine (2014 - today).

> Ukrainian neutrality lead to peace.

When Russians invaded Donbas in 2014, Ukraine actually had a non-aligned, neutral status. It only invited the Russians as they perceived it as weakness. Ukriaine's effort to join NATO was in hope of gaining a defense umbrella.

> Donbas and Crimea is the price of avoiding Nuclear war

On the contrary, the risk of nuclear war increases when Putin gets Donbas and Crimea. Because what he wants next will be even more valuable to nations with nukes.

Appeasing sounds great but at some point you run out of other people's countries.

I think the base configuration recently jumped from 8GB to 16GB while keeping the same price.

So the 16GBx256GB Mac Minis are discounted?

> literally nobody else has in the history of the planet

Literally every single western country who embraced free markets in the last 100 years did. Conversely their growth slowed the more they adopted leftist measures.

> zero reason to ascribe 100% of this to our socioeconomic system

My favorite A/B test was when Eastern Europe switched from communism to capitalism: we went from starving to plenty literally overnight.

> life of the median person is demonstrably worse

Please demonstrate it then. Statistics tell us the opposite.

> happiness in life. And isn’t that the metric we should actually give a shit about?

That is probably one of the worst metrics I can think about. How do you define it? How do you measure it? When do you measure it? How do you account for fluctuations? Delayed gratification? How to you account for the long-term vs short-term discrepancies? How to you account for self-induced unhappiness? Or artificial happiness through pills and other drugs?

The only worse metric I can think of is pleasure. Pursuit of either is a highly debatable individual strategy but for a society - it's deadly.

Yes. All he has to do is walk into a hospital or detox center and he’ll have access to medical care King Henry VIII could not buy with all his riches.

> opiate addict

Indeed, we don’t have the technology to save people from themselves, yet. I am sure kings of old didn’t either and addicts of their time fared even worse.

The poorest people of today's developed countries are countless times richer than the kings of old - in terms of the products and services they have access to. Medicine, communication, transportation, entertainment - we can't even compare.

> You can't equivocate the USA to Venezuela

Many other socialist experiments happened in the world during the last 100 years. Take your pick - they all failed miserably compared to the amazing increase in prosperity of the USA.

> The USA wouldn't suddenly turn into Venezuela

I never said that, please re-read my post.

> Netherlands, Finland, Norway [...] haven't turned into Venezuela

They haven't turn into the economic power house the US is right now either. In fact, the whole EU is waking up to the fact that they're being left behind.

And they haven't "taxed the hell out of rich people", just slightly more. But coupled with just slightly more regulation, turns out the more socialism you impose on your economy, the less competitive it is.

And we're talking about much smaller countries, too - but not that flat actually. Sweden is ahead and Norway is just 3 spots behind USA in the billionaires-per-capita ranking, with Finland and Netherlands not that far behind.