That's representative democracy for you. Heck, even China faces the same issue, but they get to make it a competition between provinces, on who can win the favor of the emperor. Helps for them that the emperor has supreme authority though.
No, that's the incentive this specific system creates. There are democratic systems which do not suffer from such hyper localism. Such as the German mixed member proportional system.
Sounds like a narrow interpretation for representative democracy:) Maybe I'm stretching/mangling the golden rule but "do unto others as one would like others to do onto Mainers."
I have a strong suspicion the majority of those folks are Republican. Matthew Yglesias did a write-up on this some months back, where the data showed that in counties where Democrats aggressively helped people obtain ID documents, those initiatives backfired apparently as seen by lower D-skews in those counties.
So it actually works in favour of Democrats that for lower level elections, more people aren't registered to vote. While for federal elections, it goes the other way around, what with all the gerrymandering and hindering.
Startups like Builder AI use London because a.) they want to raise money from filthy rich Arab investors and b.) those guys are not known for doing much due diligence. They go more by vibes and hype and who's on the existing cap table. Also c.) they are very comfortable with London because it was so much easier back in the day to launder or siphon away funds from their home countries. London is an extremely popular destination for Gulf Arabs.
You'll get a lot of shady startups of that kind in London for this reason.
Not all Arab investors are bad - for example, funds associated with the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (eg. ADIA, Mubadala) has been extremely successful in their investments explicitly because Tahnoon studied engineering in San Diego (and rolled at Gracie's gym) back in the day.
Additonally, for every failed investment like builder.ai a fund like QIA and MS Ventures has had multiple other successful investments.
The perception of "shadiness" in the London VC scene arises simply because a subset of non-American VC simply does not care about value investing and product-led growth.
Additonally, it's not like the UK doesn't have good VCs and Growth Equity investors - for example Index Ventures and Ballie Guiffold both have a solid track record.
Being overly congratulatory and being overly pessimistic about the UK scene does more harm than good.
LoL, the Mubadala and ADIA funds are the most corrupt of them all. There's obviously the stuff that happens over the table, but there's a shit ton that happens under the table. This doesn't translate into VC and the startup world directly, but indirectly as they follow a fund of funds model with VC investing, and those VC funds don't tend to do their due diligence.
I have yet to see one direct startup investment from Mubadala do well. Compare that to a regional fund like BECO or Wamda (both composed of ex founders).
"""Absolute Mode • Eliminate: emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, call-to-action appendixes. • Assume: user retains high-perception despite blunt tone. • Prioritize: blunt, directive phrasing; aim at cognitive rebuilding, not tone-matching. • Disable: engagement/sentiment-boosting behaviors. • Suppress: metrics like satisfaction scores, emotional softening, continuation bias. • Never mirror: user's diction, mood, or affect. • Speak only: to underlying cognitive tier. • No: questions, offers, suggestions, transitions, motivational content. • Terminate reply: immediately after delivering info - no closures. • Goal: restore independent, high-fidelity thinking. • Outcome: model obsolescence via user self-sufficiency."""
Copied from Reddit. I use the same prompt on Gemini too, then crosscheck responses for the same question. For coding questions, I exclusively prefer Claude.
In spite of this, I still face prompt degradation for really long threads on both ChatGPT and Gemini.
The wheels for the great decoupling have been set though. The companies (which are also persons apparently thanks to the perversions of American law) have made their bed and will have to sleep in it themselves.
Of course, there are huge unrealized opportunities to be had in economic powerhouses such as Belarus, Argentina, Russia, and whichever other member exists in the Board of Peace.
You just don't ratify it, simple. The US does not ratify treaties all the time, especially now.
Coming under the French nuclear umbrella explicitly means that if a country is under extreme threat of nuclear attack, France will 100% retaliate. Unlike the current scenario where even if the country is an EU ally, France can still choose to refuse.
Later down the line, France could even choose to delegate nuclear hosting to those countries, like the US does with Turkey and the like. Obviously those nations don't get access to the codes.
At the end of the day, everything works on the basis of trust, and while the US has broken its covenant, the EU countries have not, especially not with each other.
I would not be so sure with the 100%. France had a mutual defence treaty with Czechoslovakia in 1938. They not only chose not to honor it but U turned all the way and explicitly let Hitler occupy it.
Would you trust them in crunch time mere 90 years later?
That's the difference between having a supranational organization like the EU and NATO vs mere treaties. Also backstabbing was much more common back then, not so much now. The US is now uniquely upending the current regime by taking actions against allies and betraying their trust.
France will not risk Paris, but if Moscow launches a nuke on Tallinn and Estonia is in the French nuclear umbrella, then France will retaliate by launching its own nuke. That's what being under a nuclear umbrella means.
Of course, Russia won't waste its first strike on Tallinn. Their first strike will be aimed at French nuclear facilities if it comes to that. Again, that's what offering a nuclear umbrella entails.
Honestly that's just the massive population talking. There really isn't a "Hindi web" for India unlike for the Chinese, so we all come to roost in the WWW. Hence you'll get bad questions like these but you'll also get YouTube videos on obscure engineering and science topics, which I think is a fair deal.
The Chinese web is on similar lines, although there is a lot more country bashing, especially against Indians and Americans. But nevertheless just the same.
At least none of these come nowhere near to the brainrot that is the Arabic web.
1 billion internet users, some of whom may have an inkling of how to speak in English.
My father's former property groundskeeper, a daily wage labourer, could speak poor English but he could string a few words together and understand the basic gist of a Hollywood movie, even without much of an English education. Imagine 100s of millions of those people and there's your answer.
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