yeah lowering the standard of living is not popular. i don’t think complete self-sufficiency is necessarily the goal i’m thinking of, as much as minimising logistics costs. there’s also the resiliency factor; every european nation being self-sufficient in crucial areas like food, medicine, electricity etc and trading the surplus would make for a very strong continent.

there’s a lot of talk here about buying local now, like i’d imagine there is in most of europe. we still have local farms, but buying meat from brazil of all places is still marginally cheaper because they produce so much and have more lax standards for, say, how much antibiotics can be used on the animals (here that makes the meat prohibited to sell). i’m not saying to artificially modify pricing to privilege local production but i feel like there must be… something.

i think the finns did a ubi experiment pretty recently. the execution was a bit flawed, but the results were positive.

i think technically “juche” is the north korean model, which specifically lists what industries are allowed and not. doesn’t seem like a good idea.

good answer.

i think the main point i’m disagreeing with people on is where to draw the line on self-reliance. it may be naive of me but i’m for a “put on your own mask before helping others” approach where countries trade for what they cannot make. a country is not a single subsistence farmer, it’s a huge collection of people.

i think what i meant was a fine idea was what people believed would happen rather than what was actually said and done. and i don’t mean the racist bits, that was obviously part of it. my other reply goes into that more.

okay fair, brexit as presented was always a lie and their numbers were not only wrong, but about things that didn’t actually affect anyone. but i’ve talked to people in england who are still pro. not because of what was promised, but because what they saw was an opportunity to get stuff made locally again. and i get that.

maybe it’s a background thing. i grew up surrounded by old shuttered industry that used to make genuinely useful stuff only to be out-priced by imports, and that has continued into the 2020’s. i used to live close to the world’s most advanced paper mill of its type, but it closed and production was moved to a worse mill with lower output in another country as an economic decision. that place had been there for 200 years, the company owned its own hydro power dam and all the forests used for the pulp, the mill had its own rail connection… it was basically printing money, but dismantling it meant being able to sell the machinery for a quick buck.

like, sweden is exceptional at iron and steel. but we used to be exceptional at a lot more. turbines and jet engines. high-voltage transformers. copper. grains. cheap but safe cars. textiles. power tools. wood products. all very useful stuff that could be made entirely “in-house”. now most of that (or the constituent parts) is made elsewhere, and almost purely for economic reasons. there was no need to close that paper mill, but it was done to get the numbers to look good. when the economy goes international it feels like the people get left behind.

the way i see it is, if you black-box a country to just look at imports and exports, the lower the ratio between the two the more money the country makes. yes the salary and living situation may differ from place to place but that’s all internal, funded by those exports in some way or another. moving towards that is, in my mind, a laudable goal. and doing so in a free trade union is obviously better.

the problem is of course that it was never the goal of brexit.

of brexit, absolutely. it was insane. and of course you need to export stuff to keep your economy going. but the basic idea that countries should be self-reliant so that the entire market is more robust is good. they were just blinded by imperialism.

Edit: i want to hear alternative perspectives on this, because it seems i’m in a minority here and i’ve always taken it as self-evident. so if anyone feels like it, please explain.

honestly the hl2 model posed in gmod would probably have looked funnier

is that an ai pillowcase?

it’s an interesting case study of a fine idea gone horribly wrong. shoring up the domestic market is good, making sure people don’t lose their jobs because of foreign labor is good. but when you’ve got the history of an empire, that stuff was already taken care of, so they platformed on hate.

Edit: thanks for the good replies on this. valuable discussion to have.

they actually thought of that when designing the volt. the tank is pressurised to stop evaporation (which causes the concentration of additives to change so they fall out of solution), and the engine runs for a minute or so every month (or if you haven’t started it in a while) to make sure there’s no bad gas in the lines.

if only it had a proper stats screen, came in hatchback form factor, used a type 2 plug in europe, and had five seats, it would have been a perfect car. oh and the battery range is a bit too small, but i think there’s probably someone who can fix that. after all, the batteries are twelve to thirteen years old at this point.

i cleaned my inbox a few weeks ago. i now have five emails total in there, which is just the stuff i haven’t done something about yet. it feels amazing everytime i look at it.

i also got new medication around that time. i’m sure that’s a coincidence.

a class can be inherited from, a struct can not.

for some, yeah. depends on your use case.

for what it’s worth matrix has worked well for us. it’s apparently a bitch to set up though.

now do the other ones

soundn like a problem with your friends then. who doesn’t love a stoat?

you mean unlike the tools discord has replaced, such as “mumble”, “ventrilo”, “roger wilco” and “trillian”?

not that way round, no

Among Us is a 2018 video game with hidden roles, reminiscent of the party game mafia/werewolf. one or two players are “impostors” and their goal is to kill the other players, whose goal is to finish a set of tasks before everyone is killed.

the first line is a chat message, the second is a player indicator. the smaller heads next to it shows who voted for that player to be thrown out.

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