Hence, the weak spot in Russia‘s age old decrying of „NATO-encroachment“: It is Russia‘s neighboring countries themselves that immediately sought NATO-membership
Pretty certain, that if you would have lived in West-Berlin at that time you would have chosen any place over living next to that wall. The reason the western side of the wall is covered in graffiti, is because all areas next to it were considered a dump.
I was a graffiti „artist“ for 15 years and it almost ruined my life. The people, the physical danger and of course the large claims against me for property damages. Over the course of my „career“ I of course came across the same theories the author presents and I can wholeheartedly say with confidence that it is all naive garbage. If you think that some Roman scratching something into a bench 500 BC has anything in common with a teenager spraypainting a subway car, high on drugs, at risk of getting disfigured by an approaching train or getting fried by thousands of volts I lose all respect for you. This graffiti-romantization is usually done by bystanders, and almost always by upper class people. Yeah, you can feel all edgy and stuff about your views, but it has real consequences for kids from those parts of societies that can’t get a lawyer to bail them out. Kids die from this, let alone exposing them to all sorts of hazardous lifestyles.
Well in hindsight, that „Don’t be evil“ turned out to be such a blatant in-your-face lie shouldn’t come as a surprise when dealing with Epstein vicinity enjoyers.
hehehe, this made me chuckle. 25 years of hard-core socialists running the show, and all of a sudden its the conservatives that ruined Berlin. that is rich. It's even funnier when considering the Länderfinanzausgleich (Equalization payments between federal states): Basically within those 25 years Berlin, under those financially savvy and responsible leftists, amassed 95 B € in payments from all other German Federal States. [0]
Yeah but I think advanced economies can figure out to produce the same things if there's a strategic need - and absorb the cost - you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody, so China doesn't really have that much political leverage in how you use it.
There's also huge internal competition inside China between companies, so they have a harder time fixing prices.
Nope. A defining mechanism in energy markets is the cost to extract it. There's a reason Saudi Arabia dominates oil, if you can extract it with a shovel. And directly counter to your point, there's a reason, say, Germany can't just kick start a shell gas/oil industry even if it does have the deposits underneath.
> harder time fixing prices
Eh, it's not like the CCP didn't do heavy handed market interventions before, right? I mean some would even argue "fixing prices" is already embedded with the ruling party's name.
> you also can't just close the pipes and starve everybody,
What is this even suppose to mean? Of course you can. That is the whole point of having geopolitical leverage.
There were similar comments on HN. The argument goes that since it takes energy to produce PV panels and wind turbines, China effectively is an energy exporting country. What’s even better is some of the PV and turbines are produced with renewable energy. And unlike oil and gas, which are used only once, PV panels and wind turbines generate power for many years.
The argument also has a geopolitical component: PV panels wear down, and by the time yours have too, the energy infrastructure around you will have shifted towards PVs. I.e. your (country’s) energy will be dependent on China.
That is another aspect of “the Saudia-Arabia of PVs”
These movies also had less intention to be political correct. No one would have spent those blockbuster budgets on stories that were constructed around an ideological narrative instead of good storytelling.
> I was rewatching silence of the lambs and something hit me hard
That the villain‘s sexual orientation is now unthinkable to be portrayed like this? I give this movie a decade until the studio’s employees, its owners and the whole movie-ecosystem will alter the movie via AI to be more compliant with the „current thing“.
You can also call it undemocratic, not just because blue states are actively subverting them, but because the intent of the subversion is to create new voters and shift demographics into their favor.
I actually don’t think that’s relevant. I don’t think people vote for one party or another because of their race or ethnicity. I think assuming people vote along ethnic lines is honestly pretty idiotic, and I think the last two elections have demonstrated this as being entirely sensible.
Interesting that you imply I said anything about race. I didn’t.
Never mind that the reason people point out the last two elections is that they show statistical anomalies - which is by itself proving my point. The data is clear on this.
But further it runs counter to simple game theory.
If a Country, governed by Party A, enacts a law, prohibiting Nazis from immigrating, but Party B undermines that law in municipalities they rule in (by providing „sanctuary cities“, stopping law enforcement on such matters entirely, providing services including legal help for naturalization, and more things) basically stretching the timeframe as long as possible for illegal Nazis to be present in the country, so that they either become eligible Nazi voters locally (by residence status), naturalized Nazi citizens eventually or at least have Nazi offspring with a citizenship title – then obviously the Nazis are going to vote for the party that allowed that to happen (Party B), and against that party that tried to stop this (Party A).
And this will (decreasingly with each generation) be true for their Nazi offspring as well.
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