Recent submissions

Comment · 8 years ago
Germany and Switzerland do also have homeless people. Normalized to the population they're fewer though (about 39'000/80mio population for Germany compared to 550'000/300mio in the US, or 335'000/80mio for germany if you count people who are wohnungslos [=homeless, but sometimes can sleep on a friends couch, a trailer or something])

Additionally low-skill people are hurting here as well and the government makes the issue worse by allowing mass immigration of low skill labor: in 2017 alone 88'000 immigrants from EU-17 countries (a record low figure) arrived, 80% of them are low skill workers. There are many more frontier commuters. Switzerland has 8mio inhabitants out of which 25% are immigrants that have not yet been naturalized. So yeah, for low skill citizens the real wages have not kept up with cost of living (obviously rent prices go up with mass immigration since government doesn't make it easy to build upwards or outwards) and in quite a few places taxes had to be increased to pay welfare for jobless migrants which has lead to quite a bit of discontent among low skill citizens. Saddest thing about this whole thing is probably the mainstream left-wing reaction to the whole issue: they want to increase or keep the current levels of low-skill immigration and at the same time tell low-skill citizens that they're voting against their own interests by voting for a right-wing anti-low-skill immigration party.

Sources: Been to Germany many times and live in Switzerland. I see them at least 5 days a week. 39k figure http://www.zeit.de/gesellschaft/zeitgeschehen/2015-10/deutsc... 335k figure http://www.deutschlandfunk.de/sozialstatistik-immer-mehr-obd... 550k figure https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/16/homeless-cou... 88k figure https://www.sem.admin.ch/dam/data/sem/publiservice/statistik... 80% are low skill figure https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/studie-zum-arbeitsmarkt-vier-von-...

Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 8 years ago
Comment · 9 years ago
Maybe to give a concrete example:

When /r/anarchism (left leaning sub about anarchism, antifa, communism, ...) mods refused to enforce reddit's rules relating to the incitement to violence, reddit only removed the mods in question instead of closing the sub.

When /r/physical_removal (right leaning sub about pinochet 'memes') mods refused to enforce reddit's rules relating to the incitement to violence, the sub was removed.

When /r/nazi (third position leaning sub about national socialism) - well, I don't actually know whether the mods there refused to enforce reddit's rules. It's been removed.

Comment · 9 years ago
I dug up the study by Stone Temple to see what kind of questions were asked (eg: are the questions really trivial or not) and they provide a few exampled in their write up. I am actually seriously impressed by how well those "personal assistants" work compared to what I would expect. Kudos to the engineers who built those things!

(Disclosure: I never worked on any of those, nor do I work for any of the companies making them)

Comment · 9 years ago
It's been done before by the UN: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambodia#Vietnamese_occupation...

TL;DR: Regime in cambodia genocides about 1/4 of its population between 1975-79, is removed from power by Vietnam. UN helps recovery from destruction of society by previous govt & transition to new govt which after some initial chaos stabilizes. It's still not a proper democracy, but at least it isn't genocidal.

Considering the extremely difficult circumstances (a genocide so bad that it destabilized society & vietnam being an authoritarian regime), I am actually impressed by what the UN managed to pull off.

Comment · 9 years ago
I suppose that's one of the UNs weakness in that they lack the ability to enforce a lot of conventions.
Comment · 9 years ago
Shouldn't he have been removed quite some time ago for violating the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide?
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Comment · 9 years ago
Such is the nature of trying new stuff. Fairly often it fails and the effort is at least partially wasted.
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Comment · 9 years ago
Especially the post-hoc rationalizing they did in that blog post - that was just insulting. I just couldn't help but get the impression that whoever wrote it thinks that the readers are either ignorant or stupid. It's probably just that whoever had written it wasn't experienced in cleaning up a mess and never intended it to be that way though.

I would have hoped that their answer to impulsive decisions would be 'checks and balances' to prevent it from happening again.

Comment · 9 years ago
Out of interest: what is the reason/are the reasons that made you switch?

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