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The most chilling is that this also inflicts the military.

Lieutenant Colonel Heffington on West Point, published in 2017:

> Academic standards are also nonexistent. I believe this trend started 10 years ago, and it has continued to get worse. West Point has stated standards for academic expectations and performance, but they're ignored. Cadets routinely fail multiple classes, only to be thrown back into the mix. The faculty is expected to somehow drag them through the academic program until they manage to earn a passing grade. As a result, professors have lost hope and faith in the entire Academic Board process

And this is supposed to be the most prestigious institution in the armed forces, the people who will have nuclear weapons in their hands...Chilling. That's how the West ends up with leaders who do not know how to lead, reporters who do not report, officers who are clueless about real war, and diplomats who are incapable of being diplomatic

While that was a rhetorical point in the Brexit campaign, in reality the nameless unelected bureaucrats in Brussels were simply replaced by nameless unelected bureaucrats in London

Every Western "democracy" suffers from the same fundamental problem - entrenched deep state, and a lack of feedback loop towards it. It's extremely hazy where, how and by whom decisions are truly made, and as a consequence, nobody ever faces any consequences if those decisions flop. People like Biden, Harris, Johnson or Truss are so glaringly incompetent that nobody even suspects them to have any input into the decision process, they're simple announcers. Elections allow us to change the announcers, but change nothing about the deep state that ultimately dictates the policies. Brussels works the same way, it's just makes the fundamental problem more obvious

To add one more data point - Olkiluoto 3, started 2005, was expected to finish in 2009. Completed late 2021, 12 years late

Cherry on top - after producing electricity for about a week, it had to shut down for another 3 months. Then, after ramping up to about 30% of the capacity, it encountered another problem, delaying it for another 5 months. Here we are in June 2022, 17 years later, Olkiluoto 3 provides exactly 0 MW to the Finnish grid

Tesla pulls all sorts of accounting tricks to make gross margin appear higher than it actually is. Warranty repairs are apparently done by pixies for free, so is R&D, factory amortization, or service centers

A like-to-like comparison would have Tesla's gross margin at ~18%, which is decent, bu not all that unusual for a premium car brand. Ford and GM tend to have much lower gross margins than VW or Toyota. The latter two are usually in the mid-to-high-teens, while competing in a cutthroat mass-market

Notice who is pushing the narrative of Russia bogged down - journalists, politicians and their nominees, economists, and people with an active career in the military. There are also some dissidents in the West pushing the opposite narrative - ex-marine, retired intelligence officer, weapons inspector, colonel from a neutral country. Which group knows more about how a modern war is waged? Which group has a better track record so far? Which group openly admits they're releasing unverified claims in order to shape the public opinion?

> How much would it cost to continuously occupy a country of 48 million largely hostile people

If Russia limits the territorial acquisition to Russian-speaking regions, they'll be fine. Minorities are almost always strongly in support of unification with their nation-state. Some historical examples - 77% of Sudeten Germans voted for Nazi Sudetendeutsche Partei. 99.7% of Austrians voted for unification with Germany in 1938 referendum. 95.6% of Crimeans voted for unification with Russia. 95.7% of Cypriots voted for unification with Greece in 1950

> BRF system in Sweden

To expand on this point, and a similar system in Finland called asumisoikeus:

Municipalities have a pool of housing units. The tenants do not buy the house itself, they buy a right to live in that house, which usually costs about 10% of the price of the house, reimbursed when they move out. They also pay a rent that takes care of the energies and depreciation of the house. Socio-economic status is taken into account when figuring out who's eligible

Now, there are some criticisms of the system, mainly that the rents aren't that much lower than commercial properties. However, it does keep house prices in check. 100m^2 (~1100 sqft) house in the capital region is about 9 years of average take-home income - or 5 years for a couple

On a societal level, once heating, industry, public services and transportation are accounted for, we consume around 500-1000W per person. Saving a few Watts per family is a rounding error. We're talking about the power output of a solar panel the size of an A4 paper

This is a failure of state's energy policy, trying to pass the blame on regular citizens

Correct, and the difference is not even close - anything to do with temperature manipulation consumes orders of magnitude more. Literally, not figuratively

The laptop I'm writing this on consumes around 10W. Kettle 2100W

Making one coffee in the morning consumes enough electricity to power the laptop for the whole workday

The idle power consumption of my home is dominated by the fridge and freezer (around 150W combined). Idle mode of any other devices is a rounding error

That's close to the way things work in Europe

Pricing for the next day is decided on the spot market, around 2-3 PM. All large consumers and producers place bids on one-hour slots until the market clears. Prices do not fluctuate minute-to-minute, but hour-to-hour. Consumers might opt in to electricity resellers selling spot prices, or get a fixed but usually higher guaranteed price per kWh. All that changes for the end consumer is that your electricity meter readings will be forwarded to a different company

My past three workplaces let me choose between a high-end Windows laptop, or a Macbook. I always opted for Windows, due to some tooling I'm used to, but ended up regretting it on every occasion

The problems with non-Apple laptops are manifold. Surprisingly, there's very little practical difference between $1k and $4k laptop. System integrators don't spend their budget wisely - they cheap out on some parts, while overspending on other parts purely to drive benchmark numbers, without affecting overall user experience in meaningful ways. Windows laptops get about half the battery life of Macbooks at comparable prices, and Linux is even worse than that. Every Windows laptop I've ever had experienced some problems with drivers after Windows updates (usually Wifi, Bluetooth, webcam or audio) - Linux is even worse. Issues with sleeping, hibernating, or waking up for no discernible reason. Intel Turbo/SpeedStep screwing up thermals and battery life. And more

As much as I dislike Apple, when it comes to laptops, the competition is woefully behind

It goes both ways - China claims Taiwan as theirs, but also Taiwan claims China as theirs

Due to some obscure legalities, Taiwan dropping the claim would amount to declaration of war

> Furthermore China prefers peaceful solutions where it can

In this case, the blind spot of western liberalism - demography. Taiwanese fertility rates are below 1.3 for nearly two decades now, some years even dipping below 1. All China has to do is wait for 30 years - half of the island's population will perish of old age by then, the remaining 2/3 will be retirees

Good faith communication is maladaptive on large scale

Imagine the war scenario. The honest, good-faith communication would be like: If we capitulate outright, the worst thing that happens is paying taxes to somewhere else, and the set of faces on TV news will change to a different set of faces. Anyway, please go and die to prevent that from happening, while the people who have the most at stake hide in safety

It's not difficult to see why bad-faith war propaganda beats that every time

Zelenskiy's #1 campaign promise was to negotiate peace with Russia - meaning fulfilling Ukraine's part of the Minsk accords, perhaps with some concessions. Overall, about 65% of the votes went to parties supporting it. ~72% if Donbas is included. There was a clear democratic mandate to do it

To his credit, he did try to set things in motion. Mere days after, ultra-nationalist right-wing militias threw violent protests, in which they tossed grenades at police, killing three, calling Zelenskiy a traitor and threatening to take his life if peace is enacted. The peace negotiator was arrested for treason. Zelenskiy backed down, reneged on his #1 campaign promise, and started ramping up the tensions. As a result, the polling results for his party dropped from ~50% to mere 17% at the onset of the war. We don't know what happened behind the doors to cause such a 180 turn, but it sure wasn't pretty