Hapankaali
@Hapankaali@lemmy.world
- Comment on Always funny to hear the young try to figure out stuff from the past. 1 week ago:
The kid’s name? Albert Einstein.
- Comment on Iran's shitposts were obliterated, too! 2 weeks ago:
Einstein might be good at physics, but he is the last person you would ask on ecology.
Einstein was no expert on ecology, but he was well-informed about general matters. Trump is profoundly ignorant when it comes to basic knowledge you’d expect the average 12-year old to know. Like, who doesn’t know what health insurance is?
That’s fair enough. But Trump’s Project 2025 buddies have the intention to undermine Europe. Unfortunately, when America sneezes, everyone catches the cold.
Yeah, they’ve been at it even today, with JD Vance cheerleading for Orbán Viktor.
- Comment on Iran's shitposts were obliterated, too! 2 weeks ago:
If Trump and Musk are stupid, they would be poor
This type of thinking is known as the just-world fallacy. It’s very tempting, because people prefer to believe that things happen “for a reason” and not just randomly. Yet there is no basis in reality for this type of thinking. Trump is stupid, and many of his comments can’t be explained by mere showmanship and playing to his base. The only reasonable explanation for forest raking, or negative GDP, or look, having nuclear etc. etc. is that he is a clueless idiot, and he is.
Musk is evil, and certainly no genius, but also not stupid. He has an undergraduate degree in physics, whereas Trump merely has an MBA of negligible academic standard, which certifies basic literacy at best.
The existence of markets naturally leads to an upward flow of capital from the have-nots to the haves. One of the interesting things researchers have found is that simulations with identical agents (i.e. all equally smart) and simple market mechanics lead to the emergence of extreme inequality. You can find the details in the economic literature if you’re interested.
Plenty of famous intergenerational wealthy families eventually lose their status because their descendants squander the fortunes handed to them.
As it happens, Trump did squander his inheritance, but managed to claw back his fortune, first by money laundering for Russian mobsters, then by using his political office for personal gain. Fake it until you make it very much applies here.
You may not be politically active, but they know already that you’re possibly anti-Trump because they took your social security details and other public records, and fed it into their surveillance system.
Well, call me naïve, but they are pretty cautious around this kind of stuff in Germany, I doubt the US government has access to these kinds of records.
- Comment on Iran's shitposts were obliterated, too! 2 weeks ago:
Putin wasn’t the only KGB colonel before he became the president of Russia. He had peers and were given equal footing as him. But he had proven to be more cunning and ruthless than them so he gained power.
Putin isn’t in the category I mentioned. Even so, Putin rapidly rose up the political ranks and in the chaos of the later Yeltsin presidency ended up prime minister largely by chance.
Those low level conning salesmen you mentioned, they probably weren’t savvy enough.
The numbers don’t add up. Suppose there are a million savvy conmen. How can they all become major players on the international business and political scene? There just aren’t enough of those positions.
However, if they had been as savvy as the most successful con salesman, Elon Musk, then their fates would have been different otherwise.
Elon Musk started with a heap of money (as did Trump), in an oligarchic system heavily favouring those with money.
And well, who lived until the ripe old age of 70, while the other was murdered in cold blood with an icepick?
Not Lenin, who died of an unknown illness. I think you mean Trotsky.
Never underestimate the opposition.
My opposition, personally? That would be practically all politicians, ideologically, to some degree or other. I am not a member of any political organization.
One should also not overestimate them.
- Comment on Iran's shitposts were obliterated, too! 2 weeks ago:
On the one hand, I think it is true that a certain kind of skill is required to read and manipulate people - the same kind of skill a conman or used car salesman needs to do their work, and that kind of skill obviously doesn’t need knowledge of quantum physics or even a rudimentary understanding of how the world in general works.
On the other hand, one shouldn’t give people like Trump, Berlusconi and Idi Amin too much credit. They ended up where they did largely due to historical happenstance, and millions of other conmen and used car salespeople stayed small-time.
- Comment on The difference is real 4 weeks ago:
The logic is a bit weird though. Like picking up smoking out of solidarity because your buddy died of lung cancer.
- Comment on They cannot imagine that you actually have a life when you leave your place of work 1 month ago:
Funny, I have to ask permission to work on weekends since they have to pay me more for it.
(Not USA obviously.)
- Comment on It is 2003, I am playing a new expansion for Diablo 2 as the US starts a war in the Middle East. It is 2026, I am playing a new expansion for Diablo 2 (!) as the US starts a war in the Middle East. 1 month ago:
First as tragedy, then as farce.
- Comment on The meaning of life? 1 month ago:
Life expectancy globally is around 71 years. Only a handful of countries (Afghanistan and a few sub-Saharan countries) have a life expectancy below 60.
- Comment on What's "email"? 1 month ago:
The amount (usually much less - unless there was some marauding army nearby) aside, it was more complicated than that. Taxation was delegated across a hierarchy of various stages; at each stage a mixture of negotiation, deception and coercion would be used to determine the taxation amount. The lowest-level tax collectors typically worked akin to a mob protection racket, and their own livelihood depended on extracting a surplus above what their employer (typically some noble) demanded.
Certainly substantially less transparent and simple than clicking through an online form in a few minutes.
- Comment on What's "email"? 1 month ago:
Pretty sure filing taxes (taking all of 5 minutes) is a heck of a lot simpler for me than for any medieval peasant or minor nobility.
- Comment on Is £70 becoming harder to justify? The rise of cheaper blockbuster games 1 month ago:
$100 today is about $40 in 1990. In those days games were made by a handful of people or even a single individual in one of two years of development. Chris Sawyer started work on the 1994 classic Transport Tycoon in 1992 and wrote the entire codebase in x86 Assembly. The price isn’t really that crazy considering the comparatively massive undertaking that is GTA6 development.
Having said that, it’s rare nowadays for any AAA game to release anywhere near its best state, so it tends to be worth it to wait even if money isn’t the concern.
- Comment on Video Games Need to Be Cheaper to Buy 2 months ago:
AAA games are significantly cheaper in real terms than they were in the 90s.
30 CAD in 1993 is about 58 CAD today, and those weren’t even the most expensive games in the flyer you saw then.
Especially console titles were expensive by modern standards, the main titles like Mario games retailed for something like 150 USD in 2026 dollars.
- Comment on Retro StarCraft prizes 2 months ago:
The thought “I shouldn’t mine Bitcoin because it is an immoral activity that destroys the environment and facilitates crime while not producing anything of value” never crossed your mind?
- Comment on Just a few 2 months ago:
It isn’t accurate anyway, the Bible certainly supports living together with people while not married in certain situations, for example with (sex) slaves.
- Comment on halal paintball 2 months ago:
No, that’s just an ad-hoc rationalization. Before refrigeration, people didn’t just leave fresh meat lying around. Either it was consumed immediately after cooking it, or it was smoked, cured or dried right away after butchering (people used much more salt than they do nowadays for e.g. modern hams to make sure the meat lasted a long time). The climate doesn’t really matter - in temperate climates fresh meat goes bad rapidly as well.
- Comment on halal paintball 2 months ago:
The origin of Abrahamic dietary laws is not certain. There is no obvious benefit in terms of hygiene, also not in ancient times (they long predate “medieval” times). Keep in mind that poultry carries a significant risk of salmonella poisoning.
It has been suggested that the origin might have simply been that pigs are viewed as unclean due to their own diet including carrion. Another speculated reason is that rulers might have wanted to promote poultry due to it being a more economical way of raising livestock.
- Comment on Can anyone explain why? 2 months ago:
Drug use, and especially problematic drug use, has low price elasticity and the US is a relatively high-income country. The cost of living is almost certainly a negligible factor in the decline of alcohol consumption.
Although most of the gains have gone to top earners, US real median household income has trended slightly upwards over time and is not “way [down].”
Moreover, high-income European countries where even fewer people are budget-constrained when it comes to drug use have also seen dramatic declines in alcohol consumption.
- Comment on Ubisoft Randomly Gives Far Cry 3 A 60FPS Current-Gen Upgrade 2 months ago:
The definition of insanity: continuing to run your game company horribly and expecting different results.
- Comment on We all took foreign languages in school and none of us can actually speak those languages 3 months ago:
English is one of the easiest languages in the world to learn.
- Comment on Do you have to deal with this during your morning commute? 3 months ago:
I have never commuted by car, but I plan to get a car when I retire so I can drive around in the mornings.