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InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)SU
Posts
23
Comments
1,024
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Free market economics are going to slurp any extra watt as long as it's capable of making a modicum of profit, unless it is just told "no". The private sector is going to have to pay far more for their power, or else we'll never reach NET zero emissions.

  • Plenty of different reasons.

    Historically, Greece was a poor country in Europe because it was the periphery of the Ottoman empire and therefore barely received investment.

    Through the 20th century, the country went through pretty corrupt governments (one of them being a dictatorship).

    When they joined the European market, it was already a very unproductive country in relative terms, which tends to force you into remaining in the periphery under normal market conditions; and their most educated citizens saw a very easy and profitable opportunity in just migrating out.

    On top of that, the only sector of the Greek economy that had any sort of strength was tourism, which very rarely provides good wages.

    By the 2007 crisis, they already had a dangerously high debt. Because they were, again, a tourism-focused economy, when the countries that had the most tourists going to Greece entered into recession, Greece's income plumetted as well, and the debt just soared.

    A little bit later, Greeks elected Syriza, which had simply accepted that they were in a debt spiral that would ultimately crush the country. Syriza's leaders told the other European governments that their debt had to be renegotiated (annoying for Greece's creditors, but at least it would be possible for them to pay in some capacity), or they'd leave the Euro-zone and just declare bankruptcy (thus they wouldn't pay back anything) (terrible for Greece, but perhaps not as terrible as the alternative).

    The rest of Europe told them to fuck off for a variety of reasons (plenty of German newspapers had chosen Greece as their sacrificial lamb, often calling the people of Southern European countries lazy, the Spanish president back then wanted to crush Syriza because they had been associated with a growing Spanish opposition party, generally a lot of them were into fanatical fiscal conservatism).

    Then Syriza chose not to leave the Euro-zone anyway (which provoked Varoufakis to leave the government, out of principle), and just stick to managing the country's misery. It has only been shit year after shit year for Greece since then, as any possibility of steering into a different direction was shot dead. It's just a country without hope at this point.

  • The general laws of physics, sure, I have no solid reason to think they'll be forever out of reach (only doubt), but in order to determine if there was intelligent life (even moreso civilizations) in galaxies that have already stranded away from our field of vision, we would need to have immense luck for physics to allow us to cheat the limits we know about today.

  • Man, NGT gets so much bullshit thrown his way. Sure, he's an annoying shitposter on Twitter, but the vast majority of the time he makes a public discussion with someone he's either one of or the voice of reason, and that sentence does definitely throw all nuance he has out of the window.

  • Even if we were beings of implacable logic, there would also be the issue that we aren't omniscient. We are never going to reach the full truth of everything because we aren't going to be able to gather all the data.

  • I'll have you know, I have pretty high standards to consider someone an expert.

    I’ve been there on tour once, and I just looked at an online map to make sure I didn’t misremember. I also follow a guy on YouTube that talks about geology and has been focused on Iceland lately, so I think that makes me a complete expert.

    Oh, no! You're meeting all of them!

  • By "crossing the red lines" do you mean ex-Eastern block countries joining NATO? Those countries joined out of their own free will BECAUSE they feared Russia might want to attack them. And, oh surprise, Russia did attack the one country not sucking up to them that didn't join NATO. Why should Russia's security be sacred above that of all its neighbours?

    If by red lines you don't mean that, then they've clearly not been crossed. Russia and US or EU troops have not directly fought each other, and no country has used nuclear weapons so far.

  • I took a good look at Skyrim's Creation Club content after getting the latest release on Steam. I will, in an extremely polite manner, just say that it was underwhelming. I could accept paid mods if it was passion projects of people making DLC-sized content, such as Beyond Reach or Enderal. But that's obviously not what this is all about. It's just about further privatizing and exploiting whatever spaces of free community efforts do exist in an increasingly commodified world.

  • Do you recognize being invaded by a foreign country is a legitimate problem a country might have to face? If you do, and you oppose private military industry, that means you support public military industry, right?

  • To anyone acquantinced with Iceland: What kind of logistical issues does this actually provoke? What measures do you typically (or exceptionally) take to make sure that no location runs unsupplied for too long?