Laboratory planner by day, toddler parent by night, enthusiastic everything-hobbyist in the thirty minutes a day I get to myself.
Hard to say. Real estate has been weird in China for years since it’s one of the few investment vehicles available to the masses. A collapse domestically could even push those with the ability to do so to move more of their money into overseas real estate, which could have the opposite effect. Regardless, it’s a bad sign for the Chinese economy generally, especially given that Evergrande is only the first of what’s likely to be a wave of real estate industry bankruptcies.
Even if their military is a cesspool of corruption and incompetence that lacks the real-world capacity to invade a wet paper sack (something that I wouldn’t take for granted even if the rumors and reports about it are true, given the sheer volume of men and materiel China has to throw at an enemy nation regardless of quality), China at war with Taiwan would create a global economic crisis, between shipping disruptions in the Pacific and the knock-on effects of isolating China economically in retaliation.
Really, the best thing for everyone would be for Xi exit stage left somehow and be replaced by someone with less imperialistic ambition, but for the moment he seems fairly secure in power, which is why we’ve seen Western nations making efforts to decouple their economies from China, and more overtly signal their support for Taiwanese independence.
They say the building code is written in blood, and hoo boy did Vlad Tepes leave a mark in that part of the world.
As an architectural professional, I kinda want to skim over Russian building codes on the off-chance that they just have really shitty practice around fall protection at windows, and all of our jokes about it misunderstand the situtation after all.
Brown Christians don’t count. Wish I was joking.
But that’s kinda the problem, right? Piketty’s central thesis is that above a certain amount of critical mass capital has a sort of gravity that almost inevitably attracts more wealth to itself at an exponential rate, and only truly cataclysmic events (either on a personal or societal level) can disrupt that accrual. People like Elon, Trump, and all the other failsons and nepo babies populating the millionaire and billionaire class are walking proof of the theory – even if he wasn’t keeping pace with the larger market, Trump still managed to make Daddy’s money last until now, and he’s self-evidently less intelligent than most small rodents. That wasn’t any special talent on his part growing the family fortune – it’s just (effectively) ambient cash getting caught in the gravity well of his inheritance and falling past the event horizon, in spite of his dumbassery.
I’ve caught a few slips of the tongue and minor errors when Robert touches on things I have particular knowledge of, but not any gross misrepresentations. The warning was more along the lines of “I haven’t gone to primary sources on this” rather than casting aspersions on the podcast.
My understanding (entirely mediated by the Behind the Bastards episodes about him, so take it with a grain of salt) is that he never posted directly to YT; everything of his up there was and continues to be reuploads from his followers. So, regrettably, even though Romania has thrown him into a hole in the earth, Tate-stans will continue to spread the bad word.
Public universities in the United States haven’t been able to subsist primarily on public funds since at least the Great Recession, and in many cases long before that. To the extent that they are able to, they’ve tried to bridge the gap between state funds and budgetary needs by attracting more and higher paying students, but that has lead in turn to a startlingly-expensive arms race between institutions trying to build the cushiest student amenities and hiring vast administrative bureaucracies professing their expertise at wooing and retaining high value (read: out-of-state and international) students… all of which comes at a cost to the student body, in the form of crushing student debt, which paradoxically depresses enrollment – for many institutions, tuition has soared past the pain point for new high school graduates and their families.
Enter the wealthy donor. Likely they’re a successful alumnus or local businessperson, who has more money than they can reasonably spend on their own. They want a legacy now – to have their name live on for decades or centuries after they’re gone. One easy way to do that is to get their name plastered onto the side of a landmark building at their favorite university, so they approach the administration with an offer of some millions of dollars, on the condition that it be used to build a new facility for their college or program of choice, and that it be named after them. This gets the school out of a bind, since they have massive backlogs of deferred maintenance they can’t afford to tackle, and a fresh new building for one program means they can play musical chairs with the others until they’ve vacated their most decrepit building and can just tear it down rather than deal with its problems.
However, as you’ve guessed, this gives donors incredible power over the universities. I know of one donor who enabled his pet dean to act like a spoiled child and run roughshod over the procurement process, kitting his new building out with useless bells and whistles that took budget away from things that could have actually helped students. In another case, a department chair’s actual job became to dote upon an elderly widow of a real estate baron, in order to keep the donations flowing to the department’s endowment. Not to mention the distorting effects that what donors choose to give money to have on both the programs that get attention, and the priorities of universities. There was a real glut of new business schools for a while, as an example, and all of them were really excited about the novel ways their MBAs could financialize things that didn’t need to be financialized. The late Charlie Munger infamously had UCSB over a barrel with his offer to fix their student housing situation, but only if he was allowed to make the design into a dystopian hell cube.. Not to mention all the donors who will only give money for sports facilities, nevermind what the academic needs are.
In short, the lack of sufficient state funds for the last 15-20 years has drastically worsened higher education in the US for everyone, and opened the door for millionaires and billionaires to exert undue influence on public institutions.
Well, if another curbstomping by Britain is what it takes to run this addle-brained right wing moron out of office in short order, then perhaps that’s a silver lining.
I think the book of Joshua is a bit more on the nose, in this case. Gotta blot out those Amalekites, you know?
Israel has one of the most sophisticated military-industrial complexes in the world, with vast expertise in electronics and remote sensing specifically. If they wanted to build a precision-guided kinetic weapon for targeted assassinations of Hamas fighters in dense urban areas, they could have done it without a second thought. Instead they spend their efforts on building an oppressive surveillance apparatus and robotic machine guns to better punish rock-throwing teenagers, and lob bombs into population centers to deal with Hamas in the area.
re: the tunnels… these things tend to happen when you herd millions of people into a walled ghetto, cut off access to resources, and leave it to be run by what is effectively an overgrown prison gang. The fact that Hamas is willing to use civilians – nearly half of them children – as human shields does not excuse the use of indiscriminate force in calling that bluff. Again and again and again, Israel has made it abundantly clear that there is no war crime it will not excuse in the course of these retributive strikes, because the lives of Palestinians are worth less than nothing to Israeli leadership.
I don’t trust an apartheid settler-colonial state run by a wannabe theocratic dictator any farther than I can throw it. Bottom line, you don’t have to trust Hamas either to see that Israel’s response to Hamas actions are both wildly disproportionate and completely indiscriminate in their targeting. Israeli political figures are on record that they don’t believe there is such a thing as an innocent Palestinian civilian and it shows in their willingness to slaughter bystanders by the dozens to get at a handful of suspected Hamas fighters.
I mean, there’s a lot to be criticized about the US and its actions in the “global war on terror,” but we actually built a missile for this exact circumstance, so that you don’t have to blow up an entire goddamn refugee camp to get one or two guys hiding inside it. Israel has the military capability to do something similar, they just don’t care. Palestinians aren’t people as far as they’re concerned.
What’s got me particularly worried this time around is that the Israeli response is going to make the radicalization problem so much worse than it was before… unless Israel intends to complete the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Netanyahu is undeniably evil, but I don’t think he’s stupid, so he must know this too, which can really only mean one thing – but nobody in power in the West seems to be willing to acknowledge that, let alone step in to stop it.
From Vanilla through Wrath I played with a core group of college buddies and we collected more friends as we moved between guilds on our server. Out of that extended group resulted two marriages and a half-dozen or so real-life friendships with people from all over the country and from all walks of life. I struggle to imagine anything like that happening on the Internet as we know it now. Social media seems engineered to promote only passing and often hostile interaction with people outside of your core group, and games have engineered away all of forced social interaction of community servers, clan/party/guild formation in favor of fast and frictionless matchmaking that pairs you up with randoms that you may never see again after one game. The early Internet promised to connect you with people from all over the world, but we’ve collectively decided instead that we just want easy, tokenized interactions with people who we never have to get to know.
Or give me the joy of discovering a webforum dedicated to some niche community you were interested in, and making actual, real-life friends with the people you met there. Can’t say that I’ve made a connection like that since, oh, Burning Crusade-era WoW at the latest.
Look, some of us old farts started on Linux back before nano was included by default, and your options for text editing on the command line were either:
Given those options, most of us chose to learn how to key-chord our way around vim, and old habits die hard.