Nitramp

> You could make a similar argument that the Soviets supported the emancipation of women far more than the west in the mid 20th century, and that women in the USSR had more right to work. > That framing of course is absurd because women in the USSR also had more chance of their brothers being disappeared, etc.

I don't think that's absurd? Both can be true at the same time, a government can stop discriminating you for one thing, while starting to repress you for another. Whether that's a net negative for any individual depends on circumstance and detail.

It's obvious if you reduce it to the absurd: e.g. if a government decides the abolish slavery (terrible discrimination for a specific group) while also disallowing chewing gum for everyone. Similarly you can construct examples for the inverse (a minor reduction of discrimination vs a great loss of freedom for everyone).

History is pretty clear in its opinion on the (lack of) merits of Stalinism, but I don't think you can construct a general principle in the phrasing you chose.

> If you look at Germany, Michael Ballweg is sitting in jail (without trial) for tax evasion accusations. The fact that the government didn't like his movement that protested against unconstitutional anti-covid measures was not enough reason to put him there.

I think you have that backwards.

Ballweg is in jail because allegedly he took in donations to support a cause, but then (ab)used them for himself personally, defrauding the donors and evading taxation. That's illegal, and thus he's in jail.

Indeed protesting Covid is not enough to put you in jail, because that's not actually illegal. You're insinuating the government chose to persecute him for his political views. That's a pretty bold claim that I think would need substantiation.

Without commenting on the other issues, but something that struck me as very odd living in the USA, was how people in California appeared fully disenfranchised during presidential elections.

Yes, as a Californian you can vote, but your vote is near guaranteed to have no effect, and as a result, neither of the sides cares to address your interests, solicit your opinion, advertise for your vote.

It struck me as really bizarre.

The message absolutely depended on time. But that's because the virus mutated, and the vaccine went from preventing illness and lowering spread rates to only preventing severe illness.

SQL does express relational algebra, but OP is arguing it expresses it poorly, in a cumbersome way. There's nothing foundational about how exactly SQL chooses to express relational algebra, you could imagine many different syntaxes and specific semantics.

I concur, SQL is a liability in many ways.

If you're interested in this topic, the thing to Google for is "constitutional theory".

Constitutions do not just limit power. They prescribe how a society organizes itself, including how to exert power (not just how to limit it). A major goal for democratic constitutions is enabling a society to make collective decisions.

E.g. the US congress is famously struggling to make decisions. An interesting question then is how the US constitution prescribes decisions must be made, and whether that framework of decision making is successful along certain criteria (e.g. representing voter will, protecting fundamental rights).

If you're interested in comparing to other constitutions, a good way might be researching countries that "score well", e.g. that have stable governments, non-violent transitions of power, successful decision making, score well on the human development index, etc. - or countries where things are going particularly poor. I find that the positive example is often more interesting, because the poor outcomes often have major negative factors that might not apply in other countries and might not relate to their respective constitution.

Countries that come to mind would be the likes of Sweden, Japan, Botswana, New Zealand, but your mileage may vary depending on what you consider to be positive outcomes for a society.

> This is an extremely narrow perspective on contemporary issues.

Do you have specific reasons why you think that's the case? I did give concrete examples, some of which are indeed recent events, but all of these seem to hold in general outside the context of recent events.

> Still, the US constitution is pretty great. I don't know of one that is better.

What countries do you compare to here? And what would be the dimensions you're comparing them on?

> I don't believe the current political climate could improve it significantly.

I think that's true, but that might speak more to the political climate in the US than the inherent quality of the constitution.

> It isn't perfect at all and maybe fallen out of time a bit, but it is better than that of any other country I know (I am not for the US).

That's a very surprising take to me.

Some more obvious problems with the US constitution are highly ambiguous clauses (right to bear arms vs militias), unclear powers assigned to parts of the government (could Pence have legally decided on the electors to make Trump win? what's the exact succession of powers?), an election system causing imbalanced voting power (how many senators per state vs population, first-past-the-post vote), important rights left undefined (right to privacy vs the abortion issue), and many many more issues. These really are just the recent things that come to mind. These problems also don't seem scholarly, they appear to have substantial impact on political reality.

The US constitution was certainly a huge achievement for the 18th century. There's - unsurprisingly - been a lot of progress in constitutional theory in the 235 years after though, and it seems like it is a massive liability for the US by now.

I think an interesting meta take is the question why payment processors employ these draconic fraud protection mechanisms in the first place.

I think it boils down to the prevalence of using simple magnetic stripe credit card payments. While chip-and-PIN or Google/Apple pay are of course also subject to fraud, not having even a first factor (pin/password/fingerprint) makes card copying and theft viable in the first place.

I have no data, but I'd bet that you get substantially less fraud if you only process transactions with a first security factor, and you can probably still improve on that with a second factor (e.g. text message to authorize).

As a consumer, I have to deal with declined transaction frequently (I moved which creates a mess for ZIP based "auth", another cause is using cards outside my home country); I find the whole situation hugely frustrating.

I think you're referring to Communism-the-abstract-concept, whereas Orwell and OP are referring the Communism-what-actually-happened-everywhere-we-tried-it. The former is a utopic ruler-less society, the latter ends up being a totalitarian terror state brutalizing its impoverished citizens.

The very point of Orwell was recognizing this, and the fundamental similarity across totalitarian ideologies.

Only in the most abstract sense, if you're willing to ignore actual installed capacity (and thus reality to some degree).

There are around 350k heat pumps in Germany right now, of 40 million households (ignoring offices, ignoring multi family homes etc).

There is no way Germany could install enough heatpumps to counteract the Russia induced gas crisis, not even over a timeframe of a decade or more. Optimistically you could fix this by 2050.

So yes, there's a heating crisis, not an electricity crisis.

I think the only way we can move forward in Europe is to commemorate this past together, accept responsibility, and build a future where that cannot happen again. I think that has worked quite well so far (war between the European countries is unimaginable).

Think about where we would be if we hadn't gone down this path. We can all help move things forward if we meet each other with an open mind, and steer clear of the resentment and national chauvinism of the past.