Dode Dahroug

Ancient sources described Helen as tall, luminous, pale-skinned, bright-haired, and so goddess-like that Trojan elders said she was worth a decade of war just to look at. Lupita Nyong'o is a talented actress. She is also about as far from that description as casting could get. Nolan built his reputation on authenticity, but this one is a hard sell.

@Sierra_rak Sure. But why should the profits - and therefore political power - of all that collective effort pool with one person?

People hate billionaires but somehow think civilization, electricity, global infrastructure, smartphones, aerospace, modern medicine, and the internet could’ve been built from cozy little mom-and-pop shops. Scale requires scale. You do not get massive systems, coordination, innovation, manufacturing, logistics, and technological acceleration without enormous concentrations of capital, labor, and ambition.

@LibertarianLars Individualistic amoral Darwinism.

Define Capitalism in 3 words.

@christodangler @Mtmoelle @julianHjessop My point is more that while people had their reasons for voting Reform at the last council elections, the thought of joining the EU was probably at the back of a very long queue of complaints.

@DodeDahroug @Mtmoelle @julianHjessop Even the very basic concept of emptying bins successfully Labour fail at. This explains why they try to cancel elections. As for them persuading ppl to chain the country to a failing autocracy, with loss of sovereignty as the price to pay. That will be potholed too. 😁

For those suggesting Labour should just put #rejoinEU in their next manifesto and get a mandate that way... 🤔 A General Election which might be won with just a third of the votes cast simply cannot trump a (single issue) Referendum where more than half wanted to leave the EU!

@ClimateWarrior7 Averages without variance are meaningless when assessing population-level behaviour.

People in the UK see a doctor, on average 5-6 times a year. In Italy 9-10 times a year. Right, I know there's an element of luck in this and luck can run out, but I haven't seen a doctor since 2016, when I got my ears syringed. You can't tell me people in the UK get so seriously ill 5-6 times a year that they need a doctor! WTF are you people doing at the doctor? Do you just go to hang out or what? Are you all George out of Seinfeld, asking what happens if you've swallowed a fly? No wonder the NHS is collapsing! Someone explain this to me!

@Mtmoelle @julianHjessop You think council elections are about Brexit? My friend, they are about potholes and bins.

@DodeDahroug @julianHjessop So why did UK vote Reform 10 days ago? You know the party founded on Brexit

@hypnodron @Osinttechnical @JamesRaxz There's a small delay between seats going to reduce the chances of them hitting each other. Normally it's a command eject (one pulls, both go), but there are various settings on it which determine exactly how it works.

@Osinttechnical @JamesRaxz so in two seat jets do they eject individually or both at once

Footage of the mid air collision between a pair of Navy Super Hornets/Growlers during the Gunfighter Skies Air Show at Mountain Home Air Force Base moments ago.

@_Credible_Hulk That's fair. Even if limiting extreme fortunes reduced aggregate wealth, I'd still favour preserving democratic equality over allowing wealth to purchase disproportionate political power.

@DodeDahroug Sure. But you made the supporting claim “Somewhat more seriously, reducing extreme fortunes doesn't necessarily make society poorer.” While invalidating that doesn’t necessarily invalidate your thesis, I think it would force you to defend democracy over SOL

An implication of “progressives don’t believe in progress. They believe in stopping progress and redistributing what we have now” is that progressives don’t want to make poor people less poor. They only want to make rich people less rich.

@_Credible_Hulk You're still measuring the wrong thing. The issue isn't whether billionaires exist. It's whether their wealth translates into disproportionate political power.

@DodeDahroug This gets to a similar question I was asking earlier. What country without billionaires or even hundred millionaires has average people that are well off?

@_Credible_Hulk Somewhat more seriously, reducing extreme fortunes doesn't necessarily make society poorer. It may simply mean that fewer resources are concentrated in the hands of the individuals extracting the most from it.

@_Credible_Hulk So we got there in the end.

@_Credible_Hulk It may not be. The difference is that my principle is democratic equality, not hostility to billionaires as such. If no one can become a billionaire without accumulating disproportionate political power, then billionaires may simply be incompatible with democracy.

@DodeDahroug How is this different than there shouldn’t be billionaires?

@Leophilius Your claim was "you can prove negatives." My point is that modus tollens proves some negative claims, not every negative claim. That's the distinction, and it's worth making.

@DodeDahroug This makes no sense. I think you're lost and don't know what you're doing here in the comments.

You absolutely can prove negatives. Here's a rule of inference for doing just that: (1) If p, then q. (2) ~q C. Therefore ~p.

@Leophilius No, but I was bounding the claim you did make. Just like modus tollens is bounded.

@DodeDahroug I never made that claim.

@_Credible_Hulk It means no individual should be wealthy enough that their money gives them materially more political influence than ordinary citizens. We could look no further than the owner of this site for an example.

@DodeDahroug "...no one should be rich enough to buy disproportionate political power." And what does that mean?

@_Credible_Hulk You're arguing with a position I didn't take. My point isn't that billionaires can't exist; it's that no one should be rich enough to buy disproportionate political power.

@DodeDahroug Okay. So which country without billionaires would you like the US to emulate?

@BiankaB12 Foundations matter, but execution matters too. Inventing key technologies doesn't guarantee you'll lead in commercialising them.

That’s not what I’m saying. The U.S. is heavily reliant on 1) European intellectual capital; 2) European physical infrastructure; 3) European talent pool - engineers, researchers, etc.; 4) European market; 5) the rest of the world subsidizing them with US treasuries. Bringing confidence and a money printer is not the flex they think it is. Remove one of the above and it’s game over. Europe’s approach is more cautious, and rightly so. The U.S. bet its entire econ growth on AI. Meanwhile, we can just buy it off when it becomes cheap again, like we’ve been doing with tons of their other businesses (and what the Chinese did to their manufacturing).

Every other week, this remarkably low-IQ take makes the rounds. What Europe has, you ask? 1) The mathematical bedrock that made AI possible to conceive in a first place: Bayesian probability, Gaussian distributions, Markov chains, Computability theory, Universal computation + AI concept (Turing), the foundations of Information theory - ALL European. 2) Deep core learning: Backpropagation, LSTM networks, the freaking World Wide Web, DeepMind / AlphaFold - ALL European. 3) The hardware (you know, the actual physical part which makes the theory and software possible to begin with): EUV lithography - 100% monopoly (ASML, Netherlands), EUV optics - the mirrors (Carl Zeiss AG, Germany), CPU architecture for everything else (ARM Holdings, UK, Cambridge), Semiconductor R&D (IMEC, Belgium) All of these low-IQ people can only list ChatGPT, Grok, Claude, Gemini as "American" but they omit either on purpose or because they are low-IQ that every single one of those runs on chips made with Dutch machines, containing German optics, on British CPU architectures, trained on data from a Swiss-invented internet, using algorithms pioneered by European researchers. Are Americans superior at productising? Yes. The civilisational infrastructure underneath them is largely European. So to answer that stupid question, what Europe has? Everything. It literally has everything.

@_Credible_Hulk I'd rather stop my country selling its democracy to billionaires. I have as much right to live here as they do, and if protecting democracy means taxing concentrated power away, so be it.

@DodeDahroug That’s not an answer to my question

@julianHjessop And it was delivered. We left the EU. I would hope that someone with a Graduate Diploma in Law would understand that comparing an advisory referendum with a future general election has no constitutional significance.

@DodeDahroug Again, I'm not saying the referendum was legally binding (I have a Post-Graduate Diploma in Law, so do know this stuff!). But it is important that when someone promises something then they should deliver...

@_Credible_Hulk So you think protecting the ability of individuals to hoard power matters more than democracy?

@DodeDahroug Why don’t you move to a country without billionaires??