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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • You mistake me completely. I’m not advertising the virtues of this system at all. I’m just pointing out that there is nothing Korean or American about declining birth rates. This is a universal phenomenon of a society’s transition from agrarianism where more hands = more wealth to an educated, skilled labor force where each child requires a significant investment.

    The US and, for example, Germany use immigration to offset this and keep their population growing. That’s simply a fact you can look up. Japan for example doesn’t want to do this and they’re dealing with the consequences of population decline. This is all over the news for years now.

    I’m not saying this is good or bad or anything. This is just the way things are.

    Your bit about Ancient Rome is a good laugh because it was hardly a developed society by today’s standards and it did indeed run on imported labor, except they called them slaves. So you are at once off base and also wrong.



  • Regulations were put in place to prevent manufacturers from opening their own stores right next to the dealers they worked with. Dealers assume some risk when they take on inventory. Apparently it’s not like a bookstore where any unsold copies just go back to the publisher. It’s still a flimsy justification though and enshrined these middlemen who then enshittified everything. Worse, in some cases manufacturers are entirely prevented from selling direct, even if they don’t work with dealerships. It’s too much.



  • I think of it like housework. No one should be compelled by the law to do housework. But if one person in the house is doing no housework, the others have a real and justified complaint. It’s not legal grounds for eviction, but it should be a material point against them in any dispute mediation that takes place.

    To translate that: if one party in a marriage is withholding sex, they don’t get to claim a full 50% right to all the assets in the marriage. I’m not saying zero, but…







  • These numbers are just off Wikipedia but I wanted to refresh my sense of the proportions of America’s losses in the Vietnam War:

    2,709,918 Americans served in Vietnam total with a peak of 543,400 at once, in April 1969.

    Casualties:

    58,281 dead, with 47,434 dead from combat (which means over 10k poor bastards lost their lives to illness and accidents - war is fucking ridiculous).

    303,644 wounded (including 150,341 not requiring hospital care).

    So if these numbers are accurate, Russia now has as many dead as America had wounded in all the Vietnam war. And remember, Russia is less than half the size of the US.

    And they aren’t making any signs of quitting. It’s like they need to dispose of a whole lot of able bodied young men for some reason. How miserable.

    It’s hard to fathom that Russians are just putting up with this.