By that definition anyone with a bank balance above zero is saving money, but that's not the normal definition of the term. Saving money does normally mean the accumulation of money.
811 karma · joined November 14, 2019
Where is this British establishment trying to ban discussion of the British Empire?
a. Haven't done
b. Are strongly against
... on the belief that wokeness and cancel culture is nothing beyond generic "fear of change", despite the fact that they were on air less than 72 hours before a malicious radical left organization started trying to destroy them completely by lying to their advertisers. IKEA has by the way now recognized that they were lied to.
That seems like a pretty large mis-understanding of the situation. When people rail against wokeness and cancel culture, they mean things like this.
"Special emphasis must be placed on the harm of excluding trials data supporting ivermectin in the prevention of COVID-19. If the preventive efficacy of ivermectin were to be known or accepted, this would allow deployment in regions without vaccines."
The EU is controlled on a day to day basis by the President of the Commission. Yes, the Council theoretically selects the head of the Commission although because we have no idea how they do that, and because the outcome always seems to be some stitchup between France and Germany, it's very hard to say to what extent the Council really does control that process.
And as for the Parliament, please. It cannot actually change the law, which means it's not a Parliament at all. It just calls itself that. It can only rubber stamp whatever the Commission wants to do, which it always does because the only people who want to take part in a fake Parliament are groupies who think the EU shits rainbows. And even then, the Commission can and usually does just bypass it. None of the changes to "equivalence" I've talked about required the Parliament to do anything, to pick just one example. The Commission just announces it, and it's done. It's by far the world's most powerful executive and there are basically no working controls on its behaviour, even by Treaty, which is often ignored when convenient.
But there were lots of tech firms founded in Europe in the 1980s. ARM is the descendent of Acorn Computers which was the UK's attempt to compete with Apple, and that was just one of many examples. Acorn developed its own computers, its own RISC OS and so on.
If you look at the history of Acorn and the interviews with its founders, one of the things that killed them off was a small home market, very limited ability to sell into Europe and it being too difficult/slow to expand into the USA due to a variety of factors. So a lot of what you see discussed elsewhere on this thread.
And obviously Finland produced Nokia which ruled the roost for a long time in mobile, but again, most Americans don't realize that because Nokia managed to dominate everywhere except the USA, where a variety of structural barriers hindered growth.
SAP dates to that time too, I think. Possibly even earlier.
Once it became clear that ads were a bit more profitable than that, the success of Google/FB led to a tidal wave of VC capital searching for opportunities that looked just like those. So suddenly everyone is trying to give their service away for free and make it up on {ads, volume}.
I guess I feel very mixed about this, being a European who is now starting his own software company (taking a break from coding for a few mins at the moment). I remember when I was in my early 20s, before YouTube was acquired, my mother pointed at it and said, "Why couldn't you have made that?". My response was to laugh and say, mum, look, you can't pay for video streaming using banner ads. Streaming is expensive and banner ads don't earn much money.
Was I right? Wrong? I still am not sure. YouTube may or may not be profitable. It was extremely ambiguous to what extent Google's businesses outside of web and content ads made money when I was working there, although that was years ago, so of course it may be very different now. Obviously the YouTube founders did very well out of it, but their business model was basically "sell the company to someone who can save us, or die trying". Whether it's European culture or parental expectations I don't know, but deep down I didn't and still don't feel like that is a truly honourable way to create and run a business. I would feel guilty and bad if I were hiring people to a company without having the foggiest idea of how to ever pay their salaries, nor would I feel comfortable pitching to investors a firm whose business model was clearly unworkable. Yet, this is the standard business strategy in the Valley.
Years later I found myself in the offices of a16z. I wasn't there to pitch, although the receptionist assumed I was. I'd been invited to discuss an app I'd written that had attracted their attention. I told them the app was open source and I wouldn't take their money because I had no idea what its business model could be.
A mistake? Maybe. European? Very.
I could now go raise funds for my new venture, and maybe at some point I will. Plenty of investors have expressed interest. But, fundamentally, I still don't want to. It feels somehow like "cheating" to create a business that doesn't really make money. Or if not cheating then at least somehow not quite something you can be proud of. Certainly, the American way of creating a startup that loses money for years would not at all impress my friends, family or fiancé. They would in fact see that as failure, not success.
And I'm OK with that. So I'm probably destined to create another small European software company that may or may not one day sell to a bigger US firm. Don't get me wrong. I dream big. But deep down I know that if I attract too much attention I'll always be at risk of being steamrollered by a "success is failure" US VC backed company that has no idea how to become sustainable, but might somehow stumble onto a plan anyway and if it doesn't, well the VCs will force one of their other investments to make an acquihire and somehow it'll work out so that everyone can save face. Bankruptcy is after all, basically unheard of in the Valley, and spending other people's money for a decade is lionized.
Well, that's fairly straightforward. All European co-operation and regulatory is implemented through the EU. It didn't used to be like that, there used to be quite a lot of separate organizations that coordinated countries and helped them work together, but over time they were all absorbed into the EU power structures.
That's a problem because the EU agenda is extremely dominated by France and Germany to the extent that the priorities of the other members don't matter much. The German economy is of course famously driven by export of goods, so not surprisingly, the EU has spent great effort on ensuring that goods can flow freely throughout the EU. There was also a big economy that was services driven - the UK. Equally unsurprisingly the EU never cared about creating the single market in services, despite sometimes promising to do so, largely because it would mean requiring France and Germany to open their markets to British companies, something they saw no reason to do.
In later years another problem emerged, which is that the EU developed a taste for power and began using whatever limited control it had over services markets to try and control neighbouring states. In particular trade in financial services is (somewhat) controlled by the EU which has a concept it calls "regulatory equivalence". We must call this a concept and not a real thing because designation of a nation as having "equivalent" regulations has nothing to do with the actual regulations or how similar they are to the EU's own, it is an entirely political and ideological matter that's used as a negotiating lever by the Commission, which can and does declare countries "equivalent" or "not equivalent" at any time, without any changes to actual financial regulations being required.
For example, despite the UK having 100% aligned financial regulations because it only just left the EU, the Commission has declared its financial services regulations to be not "equivalent" to the EU's. That is obviously a lie, but when you understand that the bureaucracy doesn't really care what words mean and treat it as an arbitrary label or tool, then it makes more sense: the EU wants to hurt the British economy so bans its services from its own markets by claiming the identical regulations somehow aren't the same.
This problem is not specific to the UK or Brexit. Financial equivalence was being used as a bartering tool in trade negotiations for years before that. The EU also likes to ban the Swiss financial firms from EU markets from time to time as part of trying to force Switzerland to accept EU rules in unrelated areas like how trade unions are handled.
Thus the lack of any unified services market in Europe can be understood as having three inter-related origins:
1. All international cooperation in Europe is controlled by the EU which means ultimately by the agenda of just one person (Currently von der Leyen).
2. That persons is appointed via presumably complex back-room deals of which little is publicly known, but which appear to usually be the result of some kind of horse trading between France and Germany. For example von der Leyen is a notoriously incompetent aristocrat famous mostly for screwing up the German military - nobody knows on what basis she got the job of Commission president, beyond some vague comments from people close to the process that the next Commission President had to be a woman, but we can assume she was placed there due to her political acceptability to Merkel and Macron and her willingness to prioritize their interests. The same can be seen for how Christine LaGarde (a French woman) ended up running the European Central Bank. Certainly, the views of other nations had little to do with it, given their track records.
3. The EU then not only fails to prioritize services integration but actively abuses service markets as part of waging trade wars, in particular, to try and force non-member states to effectively become pseudo-members in which they obey the EU in unrelated areas without actual full membership.
Sometimes I'm not sure they actually can't be labelled, and sometimes the difficulty in labelling them comes from an overall lack of coherency rather than a truly uncategorisable position, but, I don't know anyone who calls themselves a centrist and could talk about politics in any depth. Centrism seems mostly, at least where I live, to be what people call themselves when they just support the status quo and wish politics would go away.
It doesn't mean that's the case here, but it's certainly possible. The suppression of discussion of it means it's hard to really know.
You aren't aware of these things because Ivermectin has been the target of a massive campaign of information suppression, exactly of the type that is being reported on here. In contrast vaccines have been given emergency approval without finishing their trials, despite being based on entirely new technology, despite absolute risk reductions of less than 1% and despite that giving any medical treatment to an entire population including healthy people must always raise the question of side effects vs disease severity - questions that are also being suppressed.
For example, here is an open letter written by some doctors who have run out of patience with medical authorities and their refusal to talk about early drug-based treatment:
https://covid19criticalcare.com/videos-and-press/flccc-relea...
a. Illegitimate
b. Foolish
If collective expertise itself sounds oppressive to you, wait until you try the oppression from giving authority to collective ignorance.
That's exactly what has happened here. The actual expertise is being oppressed by YouTube moderators, who are themselves responding to instructions decided by Susan Wojcicki, a woman with no scientific or medical expertise whatsoever, who isn't even a software engineer, in fact a woman who is famous primarily for losing against YouTube in the market when she had to compete against them. An outcome that occurred largely because YouTube bet on user generated content, whilst Wojcicki became obsessed with professionally produced movies and TV shows.
Now, in a display of extraordinary hubris, arrogance and a mind-blowing inability to learn from mistakes, she has again decided that the whole user-generated content thing isn't the right way to go and that the only content allowed on the platform should be whatever institutions with "World" in their title approve of. She does this despite the fact that she lost the video war last time because of the same elitist views, despite that the WHO is not run by a doctor or medical specialist of any kind, despite that the WHO constantly changes its mind and is by now totally discredited, and despite many other factors that should have led to this policy being scrapped within minutes of being proposed.
- The reproducibility crisis in social sciences
- The floods of BS coming out of public health research, a crisis for which we don't even have a name yet
- The journals who only care about impact and not about scientific integrity
- Politicians who appear to be completely controlled by modellers who never validate their models and whose predictions are always wrong
- People who are instinctively loyal to that whole set of power structures and rituals, such that they dismiss any claim of scientific misconduct as conspiracy theories, as ignorance, etc.
and so on. The fact that certain fields of study and other parts of society have been able to use the scientific method to produce concrete things doesn't automatically imply that all (so-called) scientists do so, and given the proliferation of scientific fields that produce nothing concrete, doesn't even imply the majority do.
Perhaps you're interpreting it differently as: he broke a rule, which happens to only be enforced against people named Donald Trump. Well, most people wouldn't recognize such things as genuine rules, which is probably why the oversight board had such difficulty with it.
As for stoking up division via divide-and-rule, that's a very subjective claim of the sort we should treat with suspicion. Clearly, the tensions didn't decrease once British rule ended, they ramped up drastically.
Neither Switzerland nor Britain have ever reneged on anything. The problem is the exact opposite: Brussels has been changing, in big and important ways. The nature of the EU is that less and less is subject to veto over time, and the EU institutions never cared much what the treaties said anyway. Thus the "rules", such as they are, are constantly changing and often in ways that nobody agreed to.
Indeed the whole blowup with Switzerland is due exactly to that: the EU wants to keep changing the rules without getting the Swiss to agree and has been trying to force them to drop the previous separate bilateral agreements in favour of "dynamic alignment" i.e. accepting whatever the EU changes the rules to be at any time, without any pesky referendums.
And in the UK, a constant source of frustration in London is due to the impression that the UK argues against bad rules when they're being proposed but when passed it follows them, whereas other EU countries agree with the rules (easy) and then ignore them when they are inconvenient. See: Germany deciding that EU law isn't actually superior over their constitutional law, despite that being a supposedly inviolable aspect of EU membership. It's easy to find people who voted to stay in the EU (or EC as it was then), in the original Brexit referendum in the 70s, but who voted to leave in the 2016 referendum with a justification of "this isn't what I voted for back then, I was misled". The EU changed the rules of the game but people weren't consulted until much, much later.
The Partition is what happened after the British Empire left. The British were very much NOT in favour of it, and it was a policy created and implemented entirely by the local population and their leaders. Hindu vs Muslim animosity was a long term problem, very deep seated and something the Empire worked hard to keep the peace around. Even as the British implemented independence, they were encouraging the two sides to form a united India and were brokering what were effectively 'peace' conferences to try and ensure that outcome.
However, it didn't work. Once independence was granted the two sides immediately went to war to create the partition.
Thus describing that event as being caused by the British Empire seems doesn't seem fair. The British were the ones suppressing it during the time of Empire and arguing against it even as they granted independence to engage in it.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India:
In early 1946, new elections were held in India. With the announcement of the polls, the line had been drawn for Muslim voters to choose between a united Indian State or partition ... The negotiations between the Congress and the Muslim League, however, stumbled over the issue of partition ... Recovering from its performance in the 1937 elections, the Muslim League was finally able to make good on the claim that it and Jinnah alone represented India's Muslims[66] and Jinnah quickly interpreted this vote as a popular demand for a separate homeland ...
Britain had wanted India and its army to remain united to keep India in its system of 'imperial defence' ... Even though the unity of India would have been preserved, the Congress leaders, especially Nehru, believed it would leave the Center weak. On 10 July 1946, Nehru gave a "provocative speech," rejected the idea of grouping the provinces and "effectively torpedoed" both the Cabinet mission plan and the prospect of a United India ...
That very evening, in Calcutta, Hindus were attacked by returning Muslim celebrants, who carried pamphlets distributed earlier which showed a clear connection between violence and the demand for Pakistan, and directly implicated the celebration of Direct Action Day with the outbreak of the cycle of violence that would later be called the "Great Calcutta Killing of August 1946"
Fundamentally, trying to blame the British for religious sectarian violence that occurred the moment independence was granted looks like the standard attempt by certain viewpoints to blame westerners for all the world's problems.
Most obviously, one way to create positive energy is to never criticize or fire anyone. But that leads to dysfunctional organizations.
Also, the worst abuses of inheritance I've seen were all from supposedly senior engineers. And inheritance seems to be attacked a lot lately for questionable reasons. There are many places where it's a natural fit.