Is this accurate or overstated? I was under the impression the Nordic Model is more predicated on fossil fuel exports than straight-up slave labor (as compared to, say, economic success of The Philippines or India or Israel or Saudi Arabia, where dirt cheap labor from neighboring states is essential to operations). Nords would be poorer without fossil fuel exports, but they’d still function within the EU trade network and enjoy a basic post-industrial standard of life with high quality education, health care, and mass transit.
By comparison, the Pacific Rim satraps are all ruled by folks who make their money entirely off of an export market powered by dirt cheap human labor. The shipping and vacation industries through the Pacific Islands are entirely a function of indentured labor. The agricultural industry is entirely plantation labor. Its a very different beast.
The whole western economy runs on cheap labour and resource extraction from the colonized countries
A great deal of the western economy runs on cheap imports from industrial rivals, like China and India. But Chinese standard of living has been improving by leaps and bounds, approaching (and in cases exceeding) their western peers. I don’t think it is fair or accurate to say that a Nordish person working in the O&G sector and using an Apple phone is somehow profiting off the back of Chinese labor any more than a Chinese person using a fossil-fuel powered device while working in a phone assembly plant is profiting off Nordic extracted labor.
Scandinavian social democracy only seems to work because of the imperialism they practice on third world countries
The articles you’re citing largely focus on the weapons export industry, the knock-on-effects of fossil fuels, and the relationship between economies as a whole. They fail to discuss either the scope or benefit afforded to individual Scandinavians, relative to the handful of senior executives and majority stakeholders in these industries.
To say the US democratic model or the Middle Eastern monarchy model are predicated on imperialism would be far more accurate. But, again, the flow of trade is heavily biased towards a minority of residents. The real benefit of Scandinavian socialism isn’t that it grants access to cheap consumer goods. You can get that anywhere - from Qatar to Haiti to Taiwan - without any regard to the social system. The benefit of the Scandinavian model is in how it delivers professional health care and education labor. That’s the primary appeal of the system and it has nothing to do with cheap foreign imports.
Success of social democracy is not possible without inflicting inhumane suffering and oppression upon people in the global south
Success of social democracy is not predicated on the success of a consumerist market economy. Cuba is an excellent counterexample. It implements a raft of policies that are comparable to Scandinavian social services and reaps enormous economic benefits despite being entirely cut off from imperialist trade and cheap labor.
The real benefits of the consumer economy are the capitalist brokers, not the Scandinavian social democrats.
A great deal of western economy runs on exploitation of Latin America and Africa where western companies commit crimes against humanity on the daily basis.
Undeniably. But the benefit of this exploitation accrues first and foremost to the ownership class.
Scandinavian companies are directly involved in exploitation happening in developing countries
US cut-outs in Scandinavia function in much the same way as the 50-state strategy for the domestic arms industry. This secures political patronage by way of kickbacks and sinesures to elites within the Scandinavian domestic polity. But it does not benefit Scandinavians writ large. The beneficiaries are entirely within the foreign rooted patronage network and have contracted over time as the network grows more efficient.
Scandinavia is not a closed economy
The economic benefits of Scandinavian socialism are geographically and linguistically limited. Traveling overseas for medical care and education is a luxury, particularly when your conditions are chronic or time-critical. And the labor for these services is primarily sourced from the Scandinavian polity. They’re not importing a bunch of Global South doctors and teachers to get the cost of their socialized programs down.
the labor needed to make Scandinavia run happens in the countries the empire subjugates
The labor needed to make the Scandinavian Treats Network flow is a consequence of colonialism. But Treats trade through the privatized economy. There is no publicly financed cheap TVs, cars, and textiles service. And the benefits of these industries accrue primarily to the bourgeois not the proletariat. That is why they’re the focus of intensive advertising and other consumerist propaganda. Nobody in Scandinavia needs to spend millions during the local soccer tournament to promote the public mail service or the local judiciary in order to garner support for it. Its the newest FIFA title and scammy financial products and the fanciest luxury watch brands and clothing styles that get the lion’s share of promotion. None of those are consequences of Democratic Socialism.
Cuba is indeed a far more principled example of socialist policies in action.
Cuba isn’t “principled”, its “embargoed”. Cubans would be more than happy to get the Scandinavian tier of treats if they were on offer.
But my point is that Cuba can still deliver public services despite being cut off from treats networks. These are distinct systems of trade.
the conditions of the working class are also improved by imperialism
I think that’s highly debatable. If nothing else, imperialism undermines domestic labor power, as domestic workers are devalued at the industrial level and shuttled off into police/military industries where they are more easily controlled from the top. But my main focus is on the industries where democratic socialism have the biggest impact. Health care, education, mass transit, and other service-sector work isn’t easily exported and won’t directly benefit from generically “cheaper” cost of living for a functionally poorer working class cohort.
many of the stable goods consumed by the people in Scandinavia are either partially or entirely sourced in colonized countries
These consumer goods exist within the private market. Imports undermine domestic labor and retail work is almost entirely privatized. There is no notable distinction between a Swedish democratic socialist shopping at ICA and a British constitutional monarchist shopping at Tesco. They both receive the same capitalist-driven benefits. Neither system is predicated on imperially supplied imports.
people in western countries enjoy a higher standard of living because of it
People in China enjoy a comparable (sometimes superior) standard of living despite it. People outside of western countries - particularly those in the Global South - can experience democratic socialism without any of the horrors of imperialism tacked on.
Democratic socialism and imperial economic expansionism are two independent political phenomena. One does not contribute to the other, save in contradiction. I might argue that Scandinavian democratic socialism is actively being undermined by imperialist political arrangements, as in the case of Finland joining NATO and ceding a large chunk of its surplus to militarization. Alternatively, one might look at how Worst Korea, the UK, and India have suffered sever living quality declines as neoliberal economic policy cannibalizes their public sector services.
The benefits of imperialism - particularly in the wake of the 21st century - do not appear to accrue to lay residents of these nations. They are entirely bound up in aristocratic cadres who can reinvest the surplus into imperial expansion. This pattern isn’t unique to the modern moment, either. It is the same story told during the Dutch post-30-years-War Era, the post-Civil War period, and the WW1-WW2 period.
Cuba would not exploit other countries if it wasn’t embargoed because exploitation isn’t inherent in Cuban economic system as it is under capitalism.
If you showed up in Havana with a cargo ship full of H&M clothing and electronics produced in a Samsung sweatshop and cosmetics tested on adorable animals and gold jewelry mined out of a West African slave pit, plenty of Cubans would receive them happily. This is commodity fetishism in action. Nobody understands the blood and toil that made these surplus goods appear and relatively few people are able to reconcile the information with how they live their lives.
Cubans who leave the island have absolutely no compunction at consuming right alongside their American peers. Americans who visit are never turned away because their money comes from a nation full of rapacious barbarians. There is nothing inherent to the Cuban economy that prevents it from absorbing the surplus labor of their neighbors. This is entirely a consequence of US foreign policy, executed with the belief that Cuban socialism cannot exist absent the cheap labor of their neighbors.
The Americans were wrong in the 1960s and again in the late 90s when they predicted the embargo would topple the Castro government. You’re wrong now. Democratic Socialism has nothing to do with Imperialist looting and plundering.
the short term overall standard of living is raised
But we’re no longer in the short term. Scandinavian social democracy has been ongoing since the 60s. That’s three generations worth of living standards which have largely leveled off and even begun to decline relative to their Eastern peers as neoliberal trade chews into proletariat standards of living. Scandinavian states were explicitly neutral during the Cold War and avoided the imperialist impulses of their southern peers. THIS is the windfall they reaped into the end of the 20th century.
However, people in the west enjoyed a far higher standard of living than people in the countries the west has been subjugating
This has been less and less true since the 90s, as the western states become heavily dependent on fossil fuel exports. It is the Middle Eastern bloc that’s seen all the real material benefits of imperial subjugation. Dubai and Riyahd and Amman and even Tehran have seen enormous windfalls. Folks in London and Boston and Berlin have not. Standards of living in Scandinavian states are slipping and poverty is rising (abet marginally).
If you look at the supply chains for practically any goods, such as cell phones, you’ll see that most of the resources needed to produce these goods are extracted in places like Africa using slave labor.
Scandinavian social democracy has nothing to do with American / East Asian materials extraction patterns. What’s more, as Chinese business interests take over traditionally western owned-and-operated enterprises along the African coastline, quality of life is improving. We saw this first in South Africa, as it joined the BRICS block and pivoted away from reliance exclusively on US/UK monetary policy. But we’re seeing it in Somalia, Kenya, Madagascar, and the DRC as well.
Should we laud Scandinavians because their purchase of electronics is finally becoming a boon for African miners? Should we laud democratic socialism for this transition? Of course not. Neither should we defame it for the atrocities committed by American, English, French, and Spanish post-colonial corporate thugs. No more than we should blame a shopper at an American grocery store for the crimes committed by the United Fruit Company.
I’m talking about how Cuba behaves as a nation and we can also look at how USSR behaved.
Cuba’s trade practices are strictly regulated by the American Navy and Coast Guard. Meanwhile, their retail markets and agricultural/biotech exports are what would inevitably draw in the exact same criminally sourced consumer goods. This isn’t a problem of Cuban (or Nordic) social democracy. It is a problem of foreign monopolistic exporters in occupied regions of the global south. And the Scandinavians, at least, lack a meaningful contribution to that project. The citations you link to are token at best. Akin to blaming Poland for the invasion of Iraq in '03.
USSR did not subjugate other nations the way the west does, and when it collapsed the standard of living in places like Cuba, Vietnam, and Korea also collapsed because they had a mutually beneficial relationship with USSR.
At which point they had to reorganize and reestablish new trade ties in order to rebuild their living standards. But this had to do with access to developed industrial capital, not the exploitation of labor through imperial expansion.
Democratic Socialism is just a the sheep’s clothing of imperialism.
Implementing public professional services in the domestic market (or not) has no impact on your foreign policy.
The difference is that there were stronger social safety nets erected at the peak
Which were rooted in domestic industry and professional services, not extractionary practices targeting populations abroad. The erosion of these social safety nets has matched the erosion of labor unions, socialist organization, and left-wing party activity within the Scandinavian states.
the west has continued to dominate the global south
Western state control of the Global South has eroded with the outsourcing of US domestic industry abroad - particularly in the wake of the 1980s, when industry transplanted itself to the South Pacific. Latin American states are no longer dominated by western military juntas. African states are increasingly free of colonial and apartheidist regimes. South Pacific states are operating at parity with their western peers, rather than as occupied subordinates.
But even outside of this fact, the Scandinavian states are nearly non-existent in western foreign policy. Finland only just joined NATO, for instance. And only thanks to a collapse in European-Russian foreign policy relations, which I’d count as a mark against imperial domination rather than one in its favor.
USSR was not under these restrictions and did not behave in the way you suggest
The US actively embargoed Soviet States starting with the Mutual Defense Assistance Act of 1951. These sanctions continued into the 1990s and were slowly repealed under Clinton and then Bush in exchange for concessions by the United Russia government of Yeltsin and then Putin. What trade did occur was not inhibited by any some moral compunction of Soviet leaders. Exxon did business with the Soviets well into the 1980s, for instance.
USSR was able to have positive mutually beneficial relations with their partners as opposed to exploitative ones
That’s simply not true. The USSR had strategic partnerships with a host of left-leaning governments. But these were driven by tactical considerations, not ethical ones. The Soviets were happy enough to trade with the Israelis all through the Cold War period and with both England and France for most of its history. Meanwhile, the Sino-Soviet split persisted for decades despite the mutual benefit a Russia/China alliance would have had both for the region and for international communism broadly.
Soviets would routinely aid domestic revolutionary forces against colonial governments if it suited their needs, but were happy enough to back Syrian military dictators and Romanian dipshit demagogues entirely out of Realpolitik.
It’s not possible to have any meaningful democracy when the means of production are owned privately.
Social democracy creates public institutions that control the means of production within their fields. But the public institutions tend to be confined to education, health care, transport and other civil services. They don’t extend out to the industrial wing of the economy.
So if you want meaningful democracy, you’re going to be doing some social democracy at some point in your transition. Freaking out at people who organize towards publicly financed colleges and hospitals and calling them evil imperialists will do nothing to advance the cause of public ownership in the industrial sector.
That is not the reality, unless you’re going to explain how public education and biotech are extractionary. And if that’s your game, you’re going to have to explain Cuba.
That’s just a false narrative.
The US system of empire is failing, from the industrial bedrock of the Chinese cities to the farmlands of Ukraine to the mountains of Bolivia. Maybe Blinken (or the next guy) will turn things around, but we’ve been losing traction since the end of the Bush Era pretty much globally.
Scandinavian states participate in the plunder
The Scandinavian state services responsible for education, health care, and transportation had no discernible role in the occupation of Iraq or Afghanistan, the bulk fabrication of arms and armor in Ukraine, the string of failed coups in Latin America, or the ongoing occupation of Japan, Korea, Indonesia, and the Philippines in the Mid-Atlantic. They weren’t even NATO members until very recently.
This as dick-all to do with democratic socialism and singling these countries out as responsible fully whitewashes the conflict.
the benefits however are never permanent and end up being rolled back in times of regular capitalist crises
The benefits are only rolled back when the democracies themselves are curtailed, as the states are bombarded with fascist propaganda via foreign media. A compelling argument for a Scandinavian Firewall, but a piss poor criticism of the democratic institutions themselves.
Social democracy isn’t part of any transition, it’s a mechanism that props up current capitalist relations.
Capital relations are degraded through the imposition of social democratic reforms. And as residents rely on these reforms to sustain themselves, they become intractable. Only by unleashing fascist media, shock doctrine economics, and foreign coercion on a country do you curb the transitionary process. That’s exactly what western political strategy has been for the last 60 years.
Not sure what that’s referring to even.
What nascent leftists and left-liberals find appealing about the Scandinavian states are the high quality low cost public services.
I’m not talking about things Nordic countries are producing. I’m talking about the basic necessities of life Nordic countries import that are produced by effective slave labour using resources extracted from the global south.
This has absolutely dick-all to do with their political configuration. It is a consequence of supply and trade routes wholly outside their command. Social Democracy as an organizing principle functions to create and administer domestic civil services and is, if anything, undermined by the process of outsourcing capital and labor demand. The quippy “Nords Bad Because Social Democracy” mischaracterized milquetoast liberalism on the periphery as the kind of expansionist imperialism that Scandinavian states have neither the capacity nor the interest in mustering.
These countries piggy back on US imperialism
Because of their geographic position and ethnic sympathies, not because of their political organization. Were Sweden positioned off the coast of West Africa or deep within the Amazon, it would have a completely different set of social relations. Bolivians and Senegalese socialists do not enjoy parallel social relations, despite desiring much the same in terms of housing, health care, education, and transportation as their Baltic peers.
Scandinavian companies get to plunder the global south along with the rest of the west, Scandinavians enjoy commodities extracted from the global south by the empire.
A select group of Scandinavian business interests get a minority stake in the imperial projects of wealthier and more well-armed western nations, on the condition that they police and corral their native populations. The end result is a deteriorating public sector in Scandinavian states, as the profits of imperialism are plowed into neoliberal privatization at home. The benefits of social democracy are not defended by imperialism but clawed back. The institutions of social democracy are not girded but undermined.
Imperial tendency is adversarial to social democratic institutions and policies, as the profits go not to improved standards of living but greater degrees of surveillance, incarceration, coercion, and media-instigated hysteria.
That’s the wages of empire. Not cheaper commodities and greater social comforts but grander delusions and more entrenched phobias.
The Swedish economy got off to a flying start after the end of World War II, a conflict in which Sweden had remained neutral. Sweden benefited from the three-decade-long postwar economic boom, the so-called Trente Glorieuses. As the historian Eric Hobsbawn pointed out, it is perfectly justifiable to characterize the quarter-century between 1950 and 1975 as the period during “which the most dramatic, the fastest, and the most wide-reaching revolution in people’s everyday lives” took place. There was a sort of symbiosis between the capitalists’ demand for mass production and the people’s demand for mass democracy. Fordist welfare societies were created on the foundation of economic growth.
The case in Sweden showed the bounty of neutrality in the wake of a continent-wide obliteration of domestic capital.
What’s more…
Sweden was strongly affected by the radicalization of the 1960s. As in most other countries, it began with youth solidarity with the Third World. Swedish opposition to the Vietnam war was broad and influential. Swedish students joined others in demonstrations and in occupations. This new left contributed to pushing socialism further up on the agenda.
This would posit a distinctly contrary view to what you’re stating above. Far from sympathizing and allying with imperialist states, the Swedes continued their commitment to the non-aligned movement and to independent sovereignty both for themselves and for their Third World peers.
In 1976, the social democrats lost control of the government. This was not — as many in Sweden claim today — because welfare had become too extensive or taxes too high. On the contrary: at the time, no party challenged the solidaristic welfare state, and the new bourgeois government continued to raise taxes. Social democracy’s loss might have been the result of a protest vote against a party that, after ruling for 44 years, had become overly autocratic. (The most important reason for the 1976 electoral loss, however, was the social democrats’ support for an expansion of Swedish nuclear power. This brought it into conflict with the radical environmentalist movement.) By the time the party regained control over the government in 1982, its leaders had accepted the basic principles of neoliberal politics.
Since then, the welfare state had been successively weakened. Increasingly large parts of the public sector have been privatized. The pension system has been fundamentally revised, and today Sweden has growing numbers of poor pensioners. Large sections of the public-owned housing stock have been sold. Today, Sweden is among those European countries whose economic and social divides are increasing most rapidly. This is most notable in increased segregation within the educational sector, which has become increasingly privatized. Bourgeois governments have led the way in this development, but social democrats have accepted the reforms afterward. They have not attempted to launch alternative political platforms.
So, far from the narrative of imperialist calf-fattening, we’re entering the 80s (a period of consumerist glut) and social democrats are falling out thanks to the conflict between public demand for cheap energy and local environmental activism. They’re embracing neoliberal policies not out of hunger for foreign imports but due to a sag in the post-war boom.
At the same time, despite the political consensus among the leaderships of the different parties, this development is deeply unpopular among Swedish citizens; discontent extends deep within the bourgeois parties’ own core troops. A large majority of the population still supports a commonly owned public sector and is prepared to pay the taxes necessary to finance it. This fact comes as confirmation that the solidaristic welfare state of the 1970s represented a series of collective conquests by broad layers of the Swedish people.
When people in the rest of the world point to Sweden as a prototype, it is these conquests they mean — not the increasingly hollow welfare state that has survived to today.
These are not conquests of foreign territory but conquests within the Swedish economy of Swedish residents in opposition to foreign investors and military powers.
The Swedes yearn not for their own foreign feudal lands but for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Politics are inherently inseparable from economics.
That doesn’t get you from “Democratic Socialism” to “Imperialism”, as evidenced by your own linked article.
They absolutely align with the US because of their political organization.
Per your own linked article, they remained neutral even after the end of WW2 and sympathized more with the Non-Aligned states than either of the two Superpowers.
Nowhere have I argued that socialist structures benefit from imperialism.
Genuinely love to break up a combat/dungeon-crawl heavy game with some light-hearted day-in-the-life-of gameplay once in a while. Having the DM describe the lazy cat stretched across the alchemist’s countertop, while some mischievious pickpocket tries to nick the rogue’s enchanted dagger and the knight errant helps an elderly woman cross the street can add a lot of color to a very number-crunchy game. Picking through a flea market of random niche nebulously useful magic items, while a merchant drops hints about the next sidequest, gives you a real adventurer’s vibe.
Genuinely hate having long, drawn out arguments over whether the shopkeep would have the principle material component for my most import spells or basic equipment (there’s no bat guano, one swayback horse, and only sixteen arrows in a fantasy city of 50,000 people? god damn, dude). Or digging through spreadsheets to figure out how many javelins the local economy can absorb. Or bickering over whether the Charm Person spell gets us in fight with town guards. Genuinely do not want anyone consulting a series of random charts and tables to determine why we can’t get a full night’s rest in the town’s nicest inn.
Please just make this a fun story to enjoy and not a pedantic fight over the future prospective mathematical efficiency of my stat block in the next combat.
Old 2e game back in middle school. My DM introduced a weapon common to goblins called a “Herculean Club”. It did d10 damage and could be used by a small creature, but it would break in two if you rolled less than a 3.
Our ranger loved them, because they were ideal for two-weapon fighting (big oopsey on the DM’s part). But his rolls were shit, so he was always breaking them. At one point, he went through six different clubs in an encounter, and the DM demanded to see his character sheet. Dude had, like, 30 of these on there. But also an 18/70 strength score, so… shrug
I’m sorry, but that’s just bullshit. The rule was implemented as a patch in to deal with the fact that Strength is the most efficient stat in 2e. Everyone wanted to max out their strength score and Gygax didn’t want everyone coming to the table with near-identical stat blocks. So, for one value - 18 - in one stat - strength - he created a secondary rule that stratified characters that much further.
RPGs are games, not art, and I don’t give myself airs.
Don’t forget Kobold Press’s Black Flag and FoundryVTT’s Crucible.
Palladium also decided to re-release their TMNT modern adventure line, very recently.
I think its really shaken up the industry from top to bottom. So much of the last twenty-five years of TTRPGs has leveraged the OGL. WotC effectively killed GURPs, WoD, and Rolemaster when they put everyone on the d20 standard. And with every new iteration of their core franchise - from 3.0 to D&D One - they’ve been promising fully integrated software support that… never shows up (which has been a huge boon for Bioware and now Lauren Studios, as D&D-adjacent video games thrived in the absence of a real VTT system).
I don’t think we’re going to see how badly Matel screwed the pooch on this for another decade, at least. But they punched a huge hole in the community that was churning out half of their franchise’s best content.
Its broadly fantasy, although the real focus is on building a system that naturally integrates with a VTT rather than one that’s patched in under tabletop rules. Still in pre-alpha development, too. So don’t hold your breath. But it looks promising.
It was such an enjoyable piece of cinema. So nice I saw it twice. Breaks my heart that Zack Snyder will be allowed to continue to make over-hyped flops while these folks are stuck in limbo.
Hey fuck it, in all seriousness. If you see someone outside in the cold freezing, bring them in. If you’re cold, they’re cold.
At the same time, its infuriating to see some smugface on Twitter tell randos that they’ve somehow made a personal decision to shuttle billions to the Bezos Klan and murder a few thousand lumpen proletariat on the back end. We might be indoors, but we are as much under the gun of capitalism as everyone else.
The TrueAnon Crew did a great interview with a couple of homelessness activists in the Sacramento Area. And they’ll give you an earful about how city leadership and police goons make villainizing and harassing anyone bold enough help too many people at once. In my hometown of Houston, I’ve seen first hand the amazing folks at Food Not Bombs eat tens of thousands of dollars in citations for daring to feed hungry people on my city streets.
We aren’t participants in this holocaust. We are simply prisoners in marginally better cells. The existential horror of homelessness is that it is a weapon directed at each and every one of us. Our commitment to our unhoused neighbors should come as much out of a sense of self-preservation as charity or guilt. It cannot be seen as a consumer choice, but a revolutionary act. In the end, we stay warm together or we all freeze separately.
Europeans: “Those perfidious Russians and the nefarious Chinese are the two single biggest threats to our domestic security. Why… they’ll just hack into any old thing and fill it full of evil communist propaganda. They’ll shut down our critical infrastructure, hijack our data services, and spam us so full of phishing attempts that you won’t know what’s safe to click on! And all just to watch us fail, then laugh at us. The fiends!!!”
Also Europeans: “Google’s CEO said we need to dismantle the last ten years of digital safety standards so we can undermine the YouTube adblocker. Make this our top priority.”
Its so easy to forget all the garbage games that got churned out 20 years ago. Even the good games - your FF7s and Warcraft 2s - had their share of notorious glitches.
The ability to patch a game after release has definitely not improved first-iteration releases. But you can go out and get a copy of Skyrim or Resident Evil 7 or Dragon Quest 9 and play it with a very reasonable degree of confidence that it will work end-to-end as intended. You can’t say the same thing about Super Mario 64 or Mortal Kombat 3. Hell, the whole speedrunning community has to distinguish between “glitched” and “glitchless” runs, precisely because finding glitches in classic games is such a pivotal part of beating them in record times.
I hate these takes, because they always open with “What would happen if a large volume of matter vanish?!” And yes, removing anything on the scale of “All the salt in all the oceans instantaneously” would be catastrophic entirely on the grounds that any instant movement of enormous mass is going to destabilize natural systems.
But the question that people are looking to answer is “What would the world look like if the Atlantic was a bigger version of Lake Michigan?” Not “what would hitting the oceans with a Star Trek teleporter do?”
Kinda grazes at the edges of this, but doesn’t really seek to distinguish what a fully-desalinated ocean system would look like relative to a salty one. It just describes a transitional period in which freshwater life migrates out to the ocean. But it doesn’t discuss what a deep-sea fresh water world would look like.
Also, the “eventually the sea would re-salinate” gets us to a more fundamental question “Why is the sea salty to begin with?” And that gives us insight into where salts come from and why they are fundamental to the ocean ecosystem.
On arrival the 302 Germans were split into several groups. A large group of 99 specialists from the Zentralwerke was installed in Podlipki in the north east section of Moscow as part of Korolev’s NII-88, 76 design engineers were transferred to Gorodomlya Island, and 23 specialists to Khimki as part of Glushko’s OKB-456 for the development of rocket engines.
But once the Germans had been pumped for info, they fell by the wayside. The difference between Russians and Americans was that the Russians didn’t put German scientists in administrative positions. They just squeezed them for their findings and retired them. The scientists didn’t end up running the fucking departments.
It’s a bit like saying “I wonder how the dinosaurs died?” in the early '00s, a few years before meteor theory really got nailed down. Like, ignore the last century of postulation. We just knocked this out real quick.
yeah, the comic describes it as “the virtually impossible”
We are a lot better at it now than we were, say, ten years ago. But it is nearly trivial to outwit a “bird detecting algorithm” by holding up a vague facsimile of a bird. That gets us back to the old TrashFuture line about AI just being “some dude at a computer filling out captchas”.
I’m not saying we aren’t building on centuries of work, i’m saying the rate of recent progress is remarkable.
The recent progress is heavily overstated. More often than not, what a computer does today to recognize a bird is to pull on a large library of data labeled “birds” and ask if there’s a close-enough match. But that large library is not AI driven. Its the consequence of a bunch of manual labeling done by humans with eyes and brains. A novel or rare species of bird, or a bird that’s camouflaged, or even just a bird that’s out-of-focus or badly rendered, will still consistently fail the “Is this a bird?” test.
But yes, our senior leadership aging out of any ability to comprehend their surroundings is definitely not good news for all the deputies and lieutenants that are supposed to get marching orders from them.
Ah, well. Its a problem every scloratic dying empire has. You’ll get used to it.
Isn’t the whole gripe with Pumpkin Spiced whatever the same with Christmas decorations popping up in mid-October? Like, its not fucking special if you’re putting nutmeg in my coffee in June.
Same with the D&D / Marvel / Roblox / Whatever fandom of choice. It was fine twenty years ago when it was the New Thing. Now we’re pushing 100+ hours of Disneyfied extended universe content on Marvel alone. Half my “recommended” podcast feed is six C-list celebrities making the soy face in front of a pair of crossed battle axes. And my street is lined with shitty faux-bakery corporate cafeterias trying to sell a piece of rye bread covered in guacamole for $15/slice.
Who actually enjoys this shit anymore? It feels like I’m being sealed into Disneyland, like a Pharaoh buried alive in his pyramid. It stopped being fun ages ago. Now I’m torn between boredom and horror.
What if they’re just getting caught up in the oppressive frenzy of hype culture, getting bombarded with ad-induced anxiety, or simply trying to fit in with whatever they’re told is “normal”? What if the emperor has no clothes but we’re all told its rude to point?
Am I allowed to make fun of Morbius? Or is that haram under the Let People Enjoy Things rubric?
If they get enjoyment out of these products, does that really negatively affect you?
If its getting injected into every webpage, spamming up my email, blaring across the radio, on billboards along every mile of road, and natively included in every other media venue I visit?
I’ve heard people who get tattoos often enough begin to enjoy the feel of the needle on their skin. So who are you to say tattooing bar codes on everyone’s necks is a bad thing? Don’t yuck my yum!
Could be fun though (ttrpg.network)
Looking at you Ionic, Tauri, ... (lemmy.kde.social)
The Nordic Model (lemmy.ml)
We need to stop attempts to normalize grind/hustle lifestyle (literature.cafe)
Most people are killing their selves with third jobs to share apartments.
This is the fun part (startrek.website)
With enough strength, encumberance isn't an issue. (ttrpg.network)
Stanley Kubrick is a magician (pixelfed.social)
How Many RPG's Are Being Made Because of the WotC OGL Debacle?
I just discovered Kobold Press’s Black Flag Role Playing system and Tales of the Valorant game being made. I had no idea that was a thing....
As long as everyone is having fun (startrek.website)
And like D&D sessions, rooting for it to happen (ttrpg.network)
Capitalism is a death cult (lemmy.ml)
In a different timeline (startrek.website)
(not mine - this and some of the others I’ve posted here recently have been from cursedtrekedits on tumblr)
at the trilogue meeting, secretly negotiating legislation to reduce web browser security (lemmy.ml)
context
Sometimes you just gotta an unstoppable force and go through some very movable objects. (ttrpg.network)
Bankman-Fried says he knew 'basically nothing' about cryptocurrency (www.theguardian.com)
Games Now vs Back Then (imgur.com)
Syria says Israeli airstrikes hit airports in Damascus and Aleppo, damaging their runways (apnews.com)
Double standards or something, I don't know... (lemmy.ml)
Everything authenticated by Microsoft is tainted. (graz.social)
cloudfare bad (lemmy.ml)
Get pranked, losers. (startrek.website)
Well let's not do anything hasty (startrek.website)
Kinda sus (lemmy.zip)
This comic was published less than ten years ago, and it's wild how obsolete it is (xkcd.com)
We can get a computer to tag the birds, answer questions about them, and generate new pictures of them.
first they push for us to get icloud storage and now this. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
uninstall Apple Store, which comes pre-installed in iOS, to stop getting these notifications...
Pentagon-Funded Study Warns Dementia Among U.S. Officials Poses National Security Threat (theintercept.com)
Can we please (lemmy.zip)
edit: now it’s a meme and we can all hug in the comments.