There are a few topics that illicit this kind of response. I've lived in apartments/condos ever since I moved out of my parents' home, and living through Covid in an apartment was the nail in the coffin. My wife and I decided we would not live in a shared building again - at minimum, we'd only look for places that have a private entrance.
Based on the behavior of real estate in our area (high density suburbs of NYC), I don't think we're the only ones? Condo prices have either fallen or remained static while SFH have skyrocketed.
There is a conspiracy theory amongst the Korean far-right that Trump's recent tariff threats on Korea are because of his supposed affinity towards former impeached president Yoon and the Korean far-right in general. In other words, these recent tariff threats are in punishment for the current Lee Jae Myung administration's treatment of Yoon and the Korean right-wing in general.
So far I have seen no convincing evidence that this is true, especially considering Trump tends not to be very nuanced about stuff like this. Despite the Korean far-right's very vocal appeal for Trump to come and rescue Yoon or even do a Venezuela-style intervention, Trump seems to have more or less ignored them, and hasn't given Yoon much sympathy or attention either.
The Korean far-right has also made similar appeals to Elon Musk, but Elon too, seems to be ignoring them, unlike the support he's given to European far-right parties.
Based on my rather limited knowledge of French politics, isn’t Macron and his coalition supremely unpopular and just one election away from losing the country to factions that have a distinctly different vision of Europe and France’s role within? Including distancing itself from any pan-European entities and presenting a friendlier face to Russia?
Seems like the current French government and many decisions they make between now and then would be lame-ducky and be taken with a grain of salt.
There are naive people with good intentions that feel that war is absolutely never justified and it would be better for everyone if Ukraine just rolled over and surrendered. Nevermind who the aggressor is. Note, this is not my own opinion.
Others that think a nation should turn isolationist and focus on domestic problems instead of helping other European countries.
Regarding Meloni, yes, people feared how she’d end up like, and many vilified her leading up to the election. But not to the degree that say, the National Rally or the Le Pens have always been. Or at least, that is what I observed as an outsider who is neither French, Italian, or European.
Plus, you can argue that many people believed “oh, Trump couldn’t possibly really be like that”, and, well, here we are.
> isn’t Macron and his coalition supremely unpopular and just one election away from losing the country to factions that have a distinctly different vision of Europe and France’s role within
That's been just as true of all their politicians for as long as I can remember. Multiparty system, after a few rounds the vote for president comes down to someone sane but unpopular vs. some equivalent of the Tea Party, the French population put clothespegs on their noses and votes for the sane option.
(Dunno about the rest of their electoral system besides president).
So far yes. But hasn’t it been the trend that the not-so-sane factions been getting closer and closer every election, to the point that they’re realistically on the cusp of siezing victory?
I remember the last election Macron’s coalition had to use some kind of creative trickery to keep National Rally and their friends from winning; after which the latter called foul.
Edit: digging deeper, said “trickery” appears to be a tactic that has been used in the past like you said. But it also seems like it’s never been this close down to the wire too.
He is unpopular because he did the right thing on many topics such as rising the age of pensions in a country that cannot sustain the current system anymore, especially with the demographic downfall.
Honestly, Macron is one of the few politicians in Europe that has consistently understood the importance of pan-Europeanism and has called for strengthening of European armies or giving birth to an EU army for a long time.
I understand he's unpopular, but as a non-French I cannot see how he's been wrong on so many topics, especially when it comes to international relations.
And to finish, with the recent world events I highly doubt that Trump-like politicians can win elections, especially in countries like France. Sadly, a Trumpist did win elections in Poland just recently though.
All eastern European countries are plagued by this insanity of electing presidents, which makes it very easy to fall into this anti democratic insanities we see from Russia to Belarus and now US.
Internally maybe, but Trump has a way to trigger large political movements within countries.
Canada was supposed to have a large (historically large) conservative government 3 months before the latest elections, but with Trump in the white house people suddenly want to move away from the right, it's a very interesting effect.
As recently reported on politico.eu, the absolute stupidity of Trump's desire for Canada, Greenland, Venezuela play, his foul ignorant mouth on NATO, and criticism of Euro countries has made him too risky to be associated with. He's becoming radioactive skank on parade bad.
For those in the US like me: Trump will be the single largest reason for the rise of popularist left politics here, which we don't need either.
Granted like the Marshal Tucker song "I heard it in a love song" ... "can't be wrong" Trump isn't actually popular right. Trump is about vanity and self enrichment.
My wife’s uncle took in a man into his home, gave him a room to live in, and a job as a cook at his restaurant. This man would otherwise have been homeless on the streets.
The man doesn’t seem to be fully mentally well, but apparently he does his job diligently, has no inclination towards being violent, doesn’t do drugs, and keeps his problems mostly to himself.
That said, he has an extreme gambling addiction (he blows all his paychecks at casinos) and having seen his room once, it looked and smelled like a biohazard disaster.
He seems like a poor fellow that had some bad luck and now lives to just gamble the rest of his life away.
I give my uncle in law huge respect for taking this guy in, and also my aunt in law for also putting up with him living in their home. I don’t think my wife or I could have done the same.
The two of them are workaholics though and their home is just a space for them to sleep between work shifts at their restaurant. Which is why I don’t think they care too much about this man’s room’s condition.
> While they admitted the dynamic had its difficulties, including battling Ronnie's gambling addiction for 20 years, they couldn't imagine their lives without him.
One unfortunate aspect about their relationship is that my uncle in law also likes to gamble - but in strict moderation.
However this means the two of them sometimes end up going to the casinos together. I don’t think these trips are helping this man’s gambling addiction.
That's one reason I don't like to drink. I can moderate myself (I don't like being inebriated at all), but some around me are active or recovering alcoholics. So why drink in front of them?
A recovering family member told me the location of every bottle of booze in the family home where we were, their type, and how full they were. In the fridge, the back of the cupboard, and in the basement under the laundry rack. Even though he'd stopped drinking! So, I don't even like keeping alcohol in the house anymore, especially if it's not locked up.
Proponents of public transportation often say how they love to be able to use it as peaceful downtime to read, work, meditate, etc.
All my experience with public transportation is having to roll the dice and more often than not losing - having to stand while packed liked sardines into a bus or subway.
Controversial and possibly politically incorrect take, but the People's Republic of China sends many, many, of its citizens to study at top universities and work at top companies all over the world. I'm sure even at sensitive defense related orgs too.
While I am sure that the vast majority of them are just regular people, I'm also pretty sure there are True Believers amongst them whose mission is to go out into the world and enrich themselves with the skills and knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals. Some of them might even attain citizenship in the country they go to while inwardly retaining full allegiance to the PRC.
Heck, I know people from other, friendly/allied countries who obtain US citizenship who, if you pose the hypothetical question "If your former country and the US got into a shooting war, who would you fight for?", they would pick their former country without hestitation.
And despite public policy and rhetoric sometimes stating how the PRC is becoming a rival or even existential threat to the Liberal Democratic World Order (TM), the Western democracies don't do anything to secure things. And quite frankly, I don't know if there is anything that could be done, short of getting into... highly controversial territory. Which if the situation were reversed, the CCP would probably not bat an eye to do.
Controversial take: Democracy and the US are awful at keeping secrets, and are incapable of winning by an information delta, if we followed your strategy we would surely be doomed. Our greatest advantages come when we work in the open, and share knowledge and empower ordinary people and the world with technology. As things stand, we are funneling our brightest minds into creating proprietary (secret) technologies... And it turns out the only people for whom the technology is uncopyable or secret are... American citizens. The "proprietary" technology is trivial to steal, and legal protections don't matter outside of our borders, the legal protections and subsidies afforded to those building proprietary (secret) technologies only deprives Americans of the ability to innovate, while in peer nations like China, individuals and startups are totally free to use and enjoy American technology without any restrictions.
But that only works if China reciprocates, which they show no sign of doing.
I’d imagine a Chinese citizen living, studying, or working in the US has access to a lot more advanced knowledge than a US citizen trying to do so in China.
Up to this point, the US has been the one with the advanced knowledge. We now face a world where the opposite might become true.
But using the previous example, I’d imagine a future hypothetical American going to China to study or work would face a lot more roadblocks to obtaining and extracting any advanced knowledge, especially anything with strategic importance.
It doesn't require reciprocation because it is a generalized version of the rebasing problem in software.
Over a big round table with cigar smoke in the air it's natural to come to the conclusion that the closed party can always outpace any set of open parties since it can take the public work and extend it with an advance that it keeps a secret.
In reality, we observe that open parties tend to win, or at minimum, if they lose, the closed party tends to have an entirely disconnected line of research that rarely incorporates ideas from the open party. In the rebasing metaphor, the reason for this is the free coordination an open party gets with other open parties. The closed party never gets to insert its advance into the shared state-of-the-art, so it loses all of the free maintenance of coordination, and it has to choose between paying the maintenance cost of integrating its secret advance with the public SOTA, dropping the secret advance and going back to parity with the public SOTA, or disconnecting from the public SOTA and going all hands in on its own ideas. The maintenance burden of integrating your ideas with the constantly moving SOTA may sound trivial but in practice it is usually prohibitively expensive if there are a lot of parties collaborating on the public SOTA and doesn't leave you with much time/budget to find new secret advances.
Right now in the US, we have all of the disadvantages of the open model: the closed parties of the world can cheaply take ideas they like from Meta, Google, OpenAI and mix them with private advances, and all of the disadvantages of the closed model: our domestic tech industry keeps all of its technology a secret from other domestic competitors, and gets none of the coordination benefits of open research / technology, independents and startups are not only unable to access information about the SOTA, but they are actively attacked by the existing monopoly players with any means available when they approach it independently, including using their access to massive capital to drain the talent pool, or being bought outright. And, as we are all too familiar with, the entrenched players don't even care that much about whether or not they can even use the talent efficiently, denying it to competitors is worth more.
> In reality, we observe that open parties tend to win, or at minimum, if they lose, the closed party tends to have an entirely disconnected line of research that rarely incorporates ideas from the open party
An obvious counter-example to this is the NSA/GCHQ and cryptography. They've repeatedly shown that they're a good 5-15 years ahead of everyone else.
Is this still true? I feel like I haven't heard of any crazy cryptography revelations for a while now. My assumption was that cryptography was a bit of a special case because it was only government/defense entities putting significant work into it, up until the Internet/digital telecommunications became prominent enough that there was great individual and private-sector demand for crypto. (Plus the whole mess with it being export-controlled, obviously)
Aside from doubts about whether or not this is actually the case the pertinent question that comes from my point is:
If cryptography researchers were keeping their results secret to within their institution / research circle, instead of sharing with academic community / public, would that advantage or disadvantage the NSA relative to the researchers? I think the answer is obvious, and it's a pretty excellent analogy for the US-China situation.
We haven't always been awful at keeping secrets, see the actual Manhattan Project. I like the optimism of your proposal, but how would those US companies continue the same level of R&D investment without those extra profits? If the government just directly invests, then you've just become the enemy.
In late 2022 our telco soft eng team got purged and everyone who was even friends with people who might be Chinese were removed from the project. That included the original architect and product owner, both Americans but with Chinese roots. So there that!
I wonder if there would be more outrage if this was done to those with Israeli connections? Yes, Israel is an ally but they have been known to spy on us and share our secrets with other nations, like China.
I don't like this. Feels like easily become racist. E.g. people from Southeast Asia, Japan, or Korea who might not even speak Chinese but getting fired because they "look Chinese"
I don’t like this either. It falls under what I referred to as “highly controversial” choices.
But I also don’t doubt that if the coin was flipped, China would not hesitate at all to fire any non-Chinese person from such sensitive projects, and all without any outcry you would see in the West.
> knowledge to bring back to China and further the CCP's goals
You're forgetting to mention that they're also getting paid a lot of money. Quite a lot of people will sell out, given the right conditions, for that amount of money especially in lower CoL areas. To be honest, I'm sure Western governments and companies could do the same if they wanted to bring in the expertise from China.
Is there any other way to see it than just we are too divided and 50% of our own people just think we are the bad guys? What you describe is so obvious but one political side in the US at least pretends this isn't happening and actively does anything they can to hamper any response to it. I would love to be convinced otherwise because I am also part of the division, I truly don't understand the other side at all.
I think there was a time when the other side truly believed globalization and economic progress would turn the CCP into a democratic ally. Maybe both sides believed that for a while. What you see now is just the fragmented and incoherent remains of a failed philosophy that hasn’t yet come up with a coherent replacement, so we’re left adrift with no rational foreign policy from either side (in my opinion).
Why is China not an ally to the US other than the fact that it is a growing economy may be too big for US? What happens if US does not want to contain China any more? Are there fundamental issues which will put China and US as enemies?
China is communist and systemically atheist. That's basically it. Americans have always (or at least always since WW2) viewed communism as an existential evil and themselves as chosen by God to eradicate it from the world by any means necessary.
Well, they first saw the opportunity of cheap manufacturing. Then they saw the democratic ally. But let's say...at the very bottom of the top 1000 reasons to do what they did.
For me many Western politicians don't see past 5-10 years. Short-term China was Heaven (for big corp), so they used all the resources they had to justify what they did. Many called BS on that, but were treated like right wing, populists, old conservatives, naive, fear-mongering, etc. Almost a dejavu.
Another unique thing about IBO is that they mostly use old fashioned projectile weapons (ok, there are railguns) and physical melee weapons. Beam weapons are rare and no longer really used, and it’s the only Gundam subfranchise that doesn’t have beam sabers.
I’m Christian, and believe in the afterlife. Supposedly heaven will be incomprehensible awesome.
However I feel nonetheless there is so much awesomeness to experience here on this earthly realm too, and too little time even in a perfectly “good” life to take it all in. Even if someone’s life starting from birth to death at a ripe old age happens to fall perfectly min-maxed in place served with a silver spoon.
I started my career in tech as helpdesk. I recall the office printer was always broken or throwing a fit, and we’d be called in to troubleshoot. Or someone’s PC for whatever reason would not be able to connect to the printer. Almost felt like a conspiracy that printers were so unreliable.
Fast forward to today and my retired dad still insists he needs to print out paper documents to read even though he can perfectly see his 30” monitor or his iPad. His printer is always broken for some reason or another and every time I visit my parents’ home I’m troubleshooting his printer again.
My wife has been without a desktop or laptop for more than a decade. Her primary computing devices are her phone and iPad.
For doing tasks like online banking or booking plane tickets, I find the mobile experience frustrating and therefore do it on my laptop. She finds the laptop clunky and finds mobile much easier.
Based on the behavior of real estate in our area (high density suburbs of NYC), I don't think we're the only ones? Condo prices have either fallen or remained static while SFH have skyrocketed.
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