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Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • Thanks for the name. I skimmed through it and tbh, I’m not seeing why no additional context/doubt could be provided. They might have internal guidelines to not do so, but the charter itself does not seem to stop journalists from providing additional context outside of official statements/reports. It seems to me that this sentence was a choice by the editor/journalist.

    I just searched for some keywords, “fact” landed me on the paragraph that seemed most applicable: “duly accurate and impartial news, current affairs and factual programming”. The other paragraphs I found, that could have been applicable, were about being impartial when UK politics were involved.



  • Sausages outside a refrigerator are pretty normal in most of Europe I think. In butcher shops most sausage types are stored in boxes or on hooks at room temperature. I hang my dry sausages on a hook at home. Once you start cutting them up and then not eat them all at once, most are best stored cooled though.

    Cheese should be stored in a cool + dark + ventilated spot imo, like a cellar or a non heated room in pre global warming France ;). But if you don’t have such a spot, then most cheese should really be put in a refrigerator imo. It would really surprise me if this was a taboo in France.



  • USA aid is very important to Ukraine, but even without it they would continue fighting. Ukraine has been without USA material aid for months already in the past, when the republican party was blocking it. And as it turned out, Ukraine sustained higher casualties and had less offensive power than with USA aid, but they were never close to folding.

    Ukrainians + their supporting neighbours are very motivated to not be occupied by Russia, so they’re not going to just give up if Putin’s stooges come to power in the USA.



  • I consider as most effective, the system that is most effective for the whole market in the long term, not the system that only works best for a few in that market. And yes, I realize that authoritarian market intervention is great for maximizing short term profits for those few companies/persons, but if the rest of the market suffers in the long term because of it (and they are), then we’re dealing with rent seeking and that’s pretty commonly accepted to be bad in the long term. Bad for society, but also bad for wealth creation. And if it’s bad for wealth creation, then it’s definitely not effective capitalism. This is why I consider authoritarian capitalism to not be the most effective form of capitalism.

    And yeah, I’m aware that the USA is on this trajectory. Other western democracies are too, but of those that are, I think it’s still mostly to a lesser extent than the USA.

    About China: China’s competiveness has significantly regressed in the last few years. Xi Jinping’s authoritarian and imperialistic policies have not been good for business. Under Xi Jinping guanxi is also much more important again than it was under Hun Jintao: companies have no real rights, they too are dependant on maintaining relations and obeying the government. If they fail to maintain relations or if they bet on the wrong political horse, then the company leadership will be gone pretty fast.


  • Authoritarian capitalism is not the most effective form of capitalism. It is the most effective for those that are already on top, but for the market as a whole (and especially for the society around that market), it’s going to be worse in the long run.

    Companies that are protected from competition by an authoritarian government will be able to extract higher profits in the short term, but their products and services will become worse in the long term, which not only harms their customers, but also the company’s chances of selling their products on actually competitive markets. The American car makers are a good example of this imo.

    Companies that are protected from having to pay fair wages and/or providing good working conditions, will be faced with labor shortages if the workers have alternatives, or with a depressed consumer market because the people have less money/time to spend on consuming things.





  • Hey, thanks for taking the time to answer.

    Afaik, high internet speed requires higher frequencies and high frequencies reach less far + have less penetration through/around obstacles. That’s what makes providing “4g” virtually everywhere easy (good enough for phone calls at least), but if they want to provide actual high speeds everywhere, then it suddenly becomes not so easy (nor cheap).

    That the USA and Canada don’t provide proper high speed internet access/choice to many of their rural citizens is caused by the rent-seeking mentality of their network companies + the governments that enable this. Most of those rural citizens live in places where there are more than enough people for it to make economic sense to invest, but investing would lower short term profits, so they don’t. Instead those customers are stuck with the choice between a single provider who is offering bad service, or no service at all. And as we’ve seen with the Boobies American, they’ve got enough of their dumb citizens convinced that they are oh so exceptional that this is the best that they could ever expect.