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91
DnD Central / Re: The Awesomesauce of the American 2024 Presidential Elections
Last post by ersi -
What you mean is that you have no idea about anything. Russia welcomes Trump. Russia contributed to Trump's election campaign in 2016, significantly so, if not outright decisively. Trump and Putin are best buddies. Not as best as Trump and Epstein, but almost.

CCP also warmly welcomes an erratic American leader once again. The status of the war in Ukraine conveys the following message to the Far East: Westerners don't help even those of their own race, so they definitely won't help Asians. Meaning that Taiwan is entirely on its own, absolutely helpless in case USA gets a pact-ignoring Nato-demolishing president who has no idea about geopolitics, no idea about global trade and does not care to get an idea. For CCP this means: If Trump wins, we have Taiwan in our pocket. Foreseeing this, Japan has decided to remilitarise.

The EU is divided. Ever since the end of Cold War, the western half spearheaded by Germany and France has been working to undermine Nato (as a defence alliance against Russia) and USA's role on the continent. The western half of the EU has been working to approach Russia economically and politically, envisioning Russia's membership for the EU. A part of this policy has been to divest the new members of their voting rights with every new renegotiation of the EU constitution, and the next such step is right now on the lips of all western EU leaders, including Scholz, Macron, and Leyen.

The eastern half has no use for this kind of the EU. The eastern half of the EU sees Russia as an existential threat. They joined Nato and the EU (and Nato first) in order to counterbalance and counteract this existential threat. The current status of the war in Ukraine conveys the following message: Despite all treaties, alliances and memberships, the West does not do anything to hold itself to their declared values and signed commitments. The West sees no problem giving up the eastern countries to Russia. The following action by the eastern EU countries depends on how fast they are able to take this message in and reorient themselves. The fastest one to correctly foresee this coming was Orban who already reoriented Hungary pre-emptively. Hungary is best positioned for the post-Ukraine-war situation by having operable relations both with Russia and the EU biggies and also with USA, whoever the president there be. Hardly anyone else will (be able to) reorient themselves this radically, but at least nobody has any reason to hold to their commitments to the West any longer, since the West has by now clearly dropped all commitments (and even pretension of fairness) to the East which, for the East, held existential value, the most important value of all. The betrayal from the West has been absolutely total and thus reorientation is forced, inescapable. So, even though nobody in the eastern half of the EU welcomes a Nato-demolishing president in USA, realistically nobody can expect any president in USA be capable of saving Nato's reputation either. As a result, nobody in the eastern half of the EU gives a damn who becomes the president of USA. But the western half would welcome a reasonably polished diplomatic figure who would not look too bad to take a photo together with. Trump is not welcome for that reason.

And what is your reason to favour Trump for president, OakdaleFTL? I get it: He is the treasonous nepotist election-denying dictator wannabe with no morals, no principles, and no professionalism. He represents everything near and dear to yourself.
92
DnD Central / Re: The Awesomesauce of the American 2024 Presidential Elections
Last post by OakdaleFTL -
What you really mean is: The EU, Russia and the CCP don't want this... :)
 I understand your point of view: Bureaucratic power is the most important thing to maintain!
The U.S. must be cobbled... if it won't accede to its bureaucracy.
Good luck with that!

What you want is something that you can't deal with...  A United States that adheres to its original principles.                                                               
93
DnD Central / Re: Philosophy, Logic, Formal Systems
Last post by OakdaleFTL -
Quote from: ersi on
Arithmetic never was my strong suit.
Nor was logic, despite your pretensions! :)

There's much to be said in favor of the logistic thesis — but nothing that requires or forbids the grade-school learning of abilities, such as basic arithmetic! If you have difficulties with such, it's a matter of memory and apperception... Since you claim to be a philosopher of sorts, shouldn't you recognize and explicate your weird reasoning for rejecting modern logic?

Choosing a base for arithmetic is trivially inconsequential. Unless one is -shall we say- idiosyncratic?  (I mean, of course, idiopathic!)

I'd not have commented here but for your recent post! But dear ersi I stand by my inane verse!

But you've given me yet another chance to post this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6OaYPVueW4


I'd agree that one needn't be a wiz at arithmetic to deal with dollars and cents. But innumeracy is indeed a debilitation...
94
DnD Central / Re: Maps-Maps-Maps! ?
Last post by Frenzie -
Incidentally noise data does seem to be fairly readily available for some cities.

https://gemeente.groningen.nl/geluidkaarten-voor-omgevingslawaai-inzien in the PDF file "Vaststelling geluidskaarten 2021"

Also available more dynamically on http://www.icinity.nl/ but that's a bit harder to navigate.

Compared to the Irish map, also available at https://gis.epa.ie/EPAMaps/ which is somehow even harder to use, it looks to me like it has many more roads at over 70 dB while it seems their equivalents in Groningen are mostly at 65-70 dB, with slightly fewer at that level.

While I'm at it, here are the noise maps for Flanders:
https://omgeving.vlaanderen.be/nl/klimaat-en-milieu/gezonde-veilige-en-aantrekkelijke-leefomgeving/geluid/geluidsbelastingskaarten

And here's one for North-Holland:
https://geoapps.noord-holland.nl/app/geluidsbelasting/
95
DnD Central / Re: Philosophy, Logic, Formal Systems
Last post by ersi -
This video is a review and critique of Misali's seximal system, which according to Misali is the best way to count. The video argues that the binary system is far better. After watching it, I am convinced.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rDDaEVcwIJM

What I find most impressive about the video is that it even makes the binary system palatable as a human-language system (Chapter 6 at 1:00:15). However, at this point I slightly disagree because I got inspired to invent a slightly modified system that would work better in my opinion, even though my system would not match the notation as neatly as the system proposed in the video. I will probably spend the weekend testing my system out.

Arithmetic never was my strong suit. This is exactly why I went to work at a bank: I heard they have computers for counting so that I don't have to do any of it. Unfortunately we are in civilisational decline and crappy Microsoft products are increasingly not up to the simple tasks of counting and computing. A few years ago I had to buy a soroban to physically start practising arithmetic in order to be able to get work done.

By the way, soroban computing is a fantastic skill to possess. It can be easily adapted to any base.
96
DnD Central / Re: Maps-Maps-Maps! ?
Last post by ersi -
Quote from: Frenzie on
For example Dublin shows up as people being very satisfied with the noise level. From personal experience I can say that Groningen, ranked slightly lower on that list, is tremendously quieter than Dublin. It's been over a decade since I visited, but this noise map doesn't suggest it's become any quieter: https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/2023/03/18/tyres-road-surfaces-and-speed-being-considered-in-noise-reduction-plans/ Similar notes clearly apply to many of the categories.
Yes, this is the point that I am making. The method we (you and I) apply here is anecdotal, but let's not underestimate this, because it *is* objective. We want a city to be objectively livable, on your example quieter, not quiet in the opinion of locals who have suffered noise for so long that they don't notice it any longer and it does not occur to them to complain about it. In some places the polled people may think à la, "Oh, this is the EU asking questions. I better make my home town look fantastic" just like Russians who see on TV that their economy is doing brilliant, so it is not worth a mention that they have to burn their boots and pieces of old furniture to warm up their home.

This is a report on the regional policy website of the EU, so definitely some EU regional policy kommissar looks at it and decides, "Romanians are catching up nicely. Good job!" This is the important reason to have objective measures, to get from our anecdotal observations to more adequate auditing, so that EU's regional policy would not be as terrible a systemic failure as its geopolitics is. But alas, they are shooting themselves in the foot with a machine gun in both areas.
97
DnD Central / Re: Maps-Maps-Maps! ?
Last post by Frenzie -
Quote from: ersi on
It's based on polling, asking what people think. Isn't livability objectively measurable, such as number of kindergartens/schools per parents etc?
I partially disagree with that. At best you might leave things on the table, at worst you'd risk measuring in the wrong direction. Asking people could act as a sanity check for whether something like the number of kindergartens/schools per parents actually does what you think it does.

But I see where you're coming from of course. For example Dublin shows up as people being very satisfied with the noise level. From personal experience I can say that Groningen, ranked slightly lower on that list, is tremendously quieter than Dublin. It's been over a decade since I visited, but this noise map doesn't suggest it's become any quieter: https://www.irishtimes.com/environment/2023/03/18/tyres-road-surfaces-and-speed-being-considered-in-noise-reduction-plans/ Similar notes clearly apply to many of the categories.
98
DnD Central / Re: Maps-Maps-Maps! ?
Last post by ersi -
Quote from: jax on
This particularly applies to the Russian minority, which is relatively much larger in Estonia and Latvia than in Lithuania.
This is the correct answer. (Everything else is rather irrelevant.)

Estonia and Latvia have to deal with a sizeable bunch of actual Russians inside our own borders. This particular issue is sharply dividing the country along ethnic lines.

I find polling in the EU, by the EU, pretty atrocious. Now, this Ukraine issue is of course appropriate material for polling, but the other day a report about the livability of cities was published. The obvious problems:
- It's based on polling, asking what people think. Isn't livability objectively measurable, such as number of kindergartens/schools per parents etc?
- It is a weird selection of cities. From Nothern Europe nd Baltics they take just the bare ridiculous minimum, i.e. the capitals, while there are many cities from Central and Southern Europe, and also cities from countries outside the EU, from countries that will never become the EU (Turkey).
- The results are very off. Number ten in overall ranking is Cluj-Napoca. I have been there. I know what kind of city it is. Number one is Zürich. I have been there. I know what kind of city it is. There are subjectively (since this report is subjective) easily better, nicer, prettier, cleaner, better-managed cities with denser amenities in both countries. There must have been a weird slice of population who got polled, such as EU interns' own kitchen pals or such.

When making an objective report, it should be possible to measure all cities (of the EU), or all cities starting with a certain size. In this case apparently the goal was not to get an objective report out, to learn something from the data, but just to conjure up some nonsense regardless of the damage it causes in those who stumble on the nonsense that has an official stamp on it.

When you do a report, stupid EU, do it thoroughly and properly, fairly and objectively. But clearly you are not able to do it, so get replaced by ChatGPT.
100
DnD Central / Re: The Awesomesauce of the American 2024 Presidential Elections
Last post by jax -
Trump was a self-inflicted wound. But now it is like "it felt so good when we shot ourselves in the foot, so it must feel so much better if we shoot ourselves in the head".  It's beyond parody. Because of the consequences even if he isn't elected, this leans much further into tragedy than farce, but there is plenty of both.

USA is broken, hopefully not beyond repair.