1. Pension bomb — as you see, is about to go off in Europe.
Honestly, I would expect it to go off first in the US. They rely heavily on the stock-markets and have much higher payouts. Many employee funds may just implode (e.g. Illinois teachers fund)
3. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.
This is not how it works in China. But Xi will unlikely be still in power in 10 years. His successor will be younger, so not a big prediction.
5. Chinese-American co-dependency crumbles like a bitter divorce
This is a 50/50 chance.
6. Brexit — no comments needed
Well, the verdict is still open (I am skeptical)
Aside:
"Quick" can mean "alive" - I think that was its original meaning. We should also note that schnell is often translated as "quick" but I think "faster" is better in general. Using a simple dictionary approach to translate mordsschnell into English might come unstuck pretty quickly. With these clues we could arrive at living dead or zombie! I don't know but given how fast the above comment got downvoted that word has some history.
Exactly. To say that you're unhappy is frowned upon. I'd assume in China it's both politically and also socially steming from confucianism, (i.e. against upsetting the harmony).
I mean, yeah, being against those in power isn't a good idea in authoritarian regimes. At the same time, people describe living in former east germany as the most easy-going / carefree time of their life. Being taken care of as long as you do as your told isn't all bad and probably was the default state of the smaller communities in the past. Whish we would find ways to achieve this without the authoritarian aspects.
People made the best of the situation they had. There is a reason the links above happened, though, and it wasn't because the system people lived in was easy-going and carefree. Keep in mind that the transitional years, after the governmental collapse, but before western institutions stepped in, were worse than regular life when the eastern systems were functional. Balance that against the thought that the eastern system was unsustainable, and had the west not been able to step in when it did, the results would have been far worse. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine for an example of what happened in a centralized system that didn't have outside assistance when things collapsed.
> Keep in mind that the transitional years, after the governmental collapse, but before western institutions stepped in, were worse than regular life when the eastern systems were functional.
Are you talking about the post war years? Yeah, those generally were pretty hard, especially with the east not having a Marshall Plan. Lots of political change necessarily did make a lot of people unhappy. But I'd be surprised if you'd find many stories of people emigrating in the latter years cause they couldn't make ends meet.
Or do you mean the reunification years? Cause I hardly remember "western institutions stepping in and saving the day" ever mentioned when the days of the Treuhand are brought up. The more common narrative is "west stepped in, destroyed all our industry and left us with little prospects to these days" or some more grounded version of that.
But yeah, while a good king might be the best form of government, the necessity to get rid of the bad ones (=worst possible gov) makes authoritarian systems not very desirable. At the same time is it a good idea to non the less find ways to integrate the strengths of those societies into our own as well.
>Or do you mean the reunification years? Cause I hardly remember "western institutions stepping in and saving the day" ever mentioned when the days of the Treuhand are brought up. The more common narrative is "west stepped in, destroyed all our industry and left us with little prospects to these days" or some more grounded version of that.
It's a convenient narrative, but it isn't, IMO, a correct one. Yes, the Treuhand had to decide quite literally which businesses got to live, and which didn't. Never before had an entire country been converted from a planned economy to a market one. There was no road map to follow. Decades of land and property seizure by both the Nazis & the Soviets made untangling actual ownership rights a Sisyphean task.
But at the same time this transition was occuring, billions and billions of Marks/Euros were and are invested in bringing the East up to the same levels of development. What do you think would have happened with the same governmental collapse, if the Treuhandanstalt hadn't existed? Honest question.
I imagine that if English is not your first language, it would be easy to miss this, since the joke plays on multiple meanings for the phrase "can't complain".
Usually, in this context, "Can't complain" means "life is good".
However, in this joke, the secondary meaning of "Can't complain" indicates that "You can't complain about life in soviet Russia, because if you do complain, you get in big trouble".
Basically, this indicates that life in soviet Russia was NOT good.
You can roughly divide the Chinese population into the well educated and the rest; the boundary of course is fluid. It doesn't mean the latter category isn't smart or doesn't have college education. It means that those people didn't know the kinds of freedom (speech, assembly, etc) that Westerners think are the pillars of democracy. They didn't live through or have memories of a China on the verge of having a beginnings of a real democracy in the 1980s before the massacre killed it. They didn't know there is a vast Internet outside China so tightly controlled by the government as to be unusable. They didn't know President Xi had been increasingly instituting "red" policies that were worryingly similar to the 1960s. Those are the people who had newly gained wealth and didn't know any better. They could very well equate material wealth with happiness without yet realizing anything more.
>We will see an economic depression, also caused by energy problems. The current quantitative easing is actually the first sign of the problems with energy:
One of the only realistic takes in this thread. The current, generationally low price of oil is built entirely upon the output of North American fracking. Fracking is the most capital intensive business on earth at the moment and most players are actually losing money. They are bouyed by the current, generationally low interest rates which are built upon politicized central banking policy. When interest rates rise, fracking grinds to a halt. When fracking stops, the price of oil shoots to 2008 or greater levels and the global economy grinds to a halt. The century scale economic depression that will result entirely invalidates each and every prediction made by the author of the article we're discussing.
america has an interest in making fracking viable, since it's a technology that not many nations can employ (without the involvement of american firms anyway).
Fracking also allows america to place economic pressure to some countries like Russian (by lowering the price of their primary export).
Given the above, it will be unlikely for interest rates to grow in the next decade - since doing so has no advantages (except inflation, which is kept under control by the dollar's reserve status), and has many dis-advantages (such as causing a shock to businesses borrowing, which can precipitate a depression).
"I don't care if people sell clean, safe, reasonable things that are gleaned from a dumpster. That's waste reduction and a net good."
I could agree with that but I am worried about foot items. Do you know why a Pharmacy NEVER takes back any medicine for resale? Too much risk that the product has been tampered with.
"This should not be a surprise, as this supports the NIST's revised recommendations (from June 2017!) that passwords should not expire [0], because it actually leads to less-secure passwords for this exact reason."
THIS. 10 Times This.
Would somebody be so kind to tell this to the eRA Commons website maintainer of the NIH?
And when you are one it, please tell eBay I don't want to change my PW if they think someone else tried to log into my account based on their shitty Tracking metrics. I mostly switched from Amazon to eBay but the constant PW change request really annoy me. I have one plain vanilla browser with no anti track plug-ins only for eBay.
I once send them a message, that I consider their security guy an idiot, told them to forward him my cell phone number and ask him to give me a call to discuss this PW policy. He never called. :-)
"An account of the “epic human tragedy” that unfolded when Allied troops landed on the shores of Normandy on D-Day"
Stopped reading there. Google:
"By the end of the first day, none of the assault forces had secured their first-day objectives. Allied casualties on June 6 have been estimated at 10,000 killed, wounded, and missing in action: 6,603 Americans, 2,700 British, and 946 Canadians."
10k killed on your worst day? "an epic loss"?
The Soviet Union lost like 15k people. Per day. Over a week, a month, a year, in the end, over 5 years. It was a German-Russian war in Europe and the "Omaha Beach" looks more like a birthday party for children.
GP may have been doing some strange one-upsmanship, but Russia sure did have a worse time than the U.S. in WWII. I also think that extant Russian culture still suffers from PTSD over the trauma of the entire 20th century.
Suicide rates and alcoholism are high over there. If you act cheerful, many Russians think you must be stupid. Not a happy place to be.
Soviet Union planned WWII with Nazis well ahead of it. They were well aware of Nazi beliefs and motives. Stalin killed most of SUs senior cadre for his own political reasons leaving SU almost defenseless.
Meanwhile, in the late-twentieth-century phase of the arms race, the role of unpredictable chance increased. When hours (or days) and miles (or hundreds of miles) separate defeat from victory, and therefore an error of command can be remedied by throwing in reserves, or retreating, or counterattacking, then there is room to reduce the element of chance. But when micromillimeters and nanoseconds determine the outcome, then chance enters like a god of war, deciding victory or defeat; it is magnified and lifted out of the microscopic scale of atomic physics. The fastest, best weapons system comes up against the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which nothing can overcome, because that principle is a basic property of matter in the Universe. It need not be a computer breakdown in satellite reconnaissance or in missiles whose warheads parry defenses with laser beams; if a series of electronic defensive impulses is even a billionth of a second slow in meeting a similar series of offensive impulses, that is enough for a toss of the dice to decide the outcome of the Final Encounter.
Unaware of this state of affairs, the major antagonists of the planet devised two opposite strategies. One can call them the "scalpel" and the "hammer." The constant escalation of pay-load megatonnage was the hammer; the improvement of detection and swift destruction in flight was the scalpel. They also reckoned on the deterrent of the "dead man's revenge": the enemy would realize that even in winning he would perish, since a totally obliterated country would still respond -- automatically and posthumously -- with a strike that would make defeat universal. Such was the direction the arms race was taking, and such was its destination, which no one wanted but no one knew how to avoid.
How does the engineer minimize error in a very large, very complex system? He does trial runs to test it; he looks for weak spots, weak links. But there was no way of testing a system designed to wage global nuclear war, a system made up of surface, submarine, air-launched, and satellite missiles, antimissiles, and multiple centers of command and communications, ready to loose gigantic destructive forces in wave on wave of reciprocal atomic strikes. No maneuvers, no computer simulation, could re-create the actual conditions of such a battle.
Increasing speed of operation marked each new weapons system, particularly the decision-making function (to strike or not to strike, where, how, with what force held in reserve, at what risk, etc.), and this increasing speed also brought the incalculable factor of chance into play. Lightning-fast systems made lightning-fast mistakes. When a fraction of a second determined the safety or destruction of a region, a great metropolis, an industrial complex, or a large fleet, it was impossible to achieve military certainty. One could even say that victory had ceased to be distinguishable from defeat. In a word, the arms race was heading toward a Pyrrhic situation.
It seems really concerning that Startpage is still recommended on privacytools.io. Instead the forum post discussing the delisting is hung up on getting a statement from the new CEO and giving them a chance, which seems insane to me. Either being owned by an advertising company is a problem for all privacy-focused services or it isn’t a problem for any of them. In which case they might as well redo the entire site. I don’t see why this CEOs word would be worth any more than nothing nor why he should be treated any differently from the owners or CEOs of other questionable businesses/services/addons/programs/etc.
This questionable judgment on their part seriously puts their reputation at risk in my eyes.
Are you aware of any way to bundle setting for Firefox (or whatever) that include these kinds of changes?
I know you can export the about:config and share that, but I have always wanted a kind of ansible for setting up a browser with plugins and other changes for my personal use.
Additionally, If I could tell my friends and family: Hey just use my Firefox Playbook and feel safe on the internet, thereby reducing the cognitive load of figuring out how to do that, I'd probably have a lot more success helping curious but busy people take control of their privacy.
You don't want your family to use my setup. I breaks many things.
A person not in IT is probably just fine if you install ublock Origin.
Or you would have to train your family to use different browsers for different things and you want to have at least one "vanilla" browser on your system. Just recently my US CC website stopped working with my browser. For such things you want to have one major browser without any plug ins.
e.g.
1. Google Chrome (Vanilla, no plug ins). Used when needed (recently to pay my CC).
2. Chromium: Facebook, Gmail
3. Firefox: buying tickets etc.
3. Vivali Browsing the internet
Again my setup does not work so well against fingerprinting. My plug-in combination is so unique that I can be tracked via my plug ins.
Honestly, I would expect it to go off first in the US. They rely heavily on the stock-markets and have much higher payouts. Many employee funds may just implode (e.g. Illinois teachers fund)
3. A younger/more populist group of politicians will assume power in China.
This is not how it works in China. But Xi will unlikely be still in power in 10 years. His successor will be younger, so not a big prediction.
5. Chinese-American co-dependency crumbles like a bitter divorce This is a 50/50 chance.
6. Brexit — no comments needed Well, the verdict is still open (I am skeptical)