>There's a lot of public infrastructure around. The vast majority of it was commissioned by politicians. The vast majority of it is just there, mentioned a few times in the local rag before commission and upon opening and that's it.
>Which you "proved" by carefully selecting a single anecdote?
I CAREFULLY SELECTED a single anecdote... did you miss the part where is detailed why toilets (as in more than one) and other government projects cost so much ant take such a long time to complete? What can I say, keep believing, comrade.
So we are all communists for pointing out that the press only report on public projects gone wrong and not the 1000s of projects that are on budget and on time? Please...
Maybe it's because publicly funded and managed projects have much greater scrutiny, and in many cases are required to respond to information requests. A private company is a black box and can use whatever means they please keep badly managed projects from becoming a story the press would be interested in.
Even the auditing firms are in on the game in the UK, so you really have no chance of knowing the truth until the bankruptcy is announced and the banks are lining up to get whatever assets are left.
Nah, I didn't call you __ALL__ communists because I was replying to a single douche who translated "I wager" to "I proved" while claiming I "carefully selected" a youtube video. In fact, I didn't ever call him a communist because it's not just the communists who call each other comrade, it's a leftist thing in general or least it used to be until the number of comrade run failed states became unbearable. I'm glad you like and trust the politicians so much, I'm sure they appreciate it.
> 1000s of projects that are on budget and on time
Ha, ha, ha, ha... Oh, you're serious :(
> A private company is a black box
That's why it's called a PRIVATE company. Is not your money, it's theirs, if they fuck up, they pay the consequences, it's simple.
Yeah, rules like "wheelchair accessibility" (1:21). Clearly the disabled citizens should just crap at home, so we can save a few bucks. And sustainability? Who needs that?!
Frankly, ReasonTV seems like a left-wing caricature of the libertarians. There's very likely a good case to be made of wastefulness, but that video didn't have it.
>Clearly the disabled citizens should just crap at home
Disabled citizens are clearly better served by waiting for the oversized "Super Commission of Wheelchair Access" that takes three months to put a stamp on a project that has wheelchair access. You clearly didn't even understand the argument.
>And sustainability? Who needs that?!
Buzzword, three months, stamp.
>Frankly, ReasonTV seems like a left-wing caricature of the libertarians. There's very likely a good case to be made of wastefulness, but that video didn't have it.
> Disabled citizens are clearly better served by waiting for the oversized "Super Commission of Wheelchair Access" that takes three months to put a stamp on a project that has wheelchair access.
There is no such commission, no such stamp. What there are, as the video says, is rules (and by the way, the guide shown is for visitors, nothing to do with construction). And yes, maybe disabled citizens are better off with those, because from what I can tell, the so-efficiently-renovated Bryant Park restroom has no wheelchair accessible stalls.
Again: is there waste? Absolutely, and it would have been nice to see some proper journalism covering it.
>If Sweden can evolve from an impoverished hellhole to being the epitome of modern civilization in a century, why can't the same thing happen to Syria? Or Sudan? Or Myanmar? I think it can, and it will.
Except Sweden one hundred years ago was not an impoverished hellhole. In fact, it was one of the richest (maybe the richest) countries on earth, smack in the middle of the most developed, richest and urbanized part of Europe (the Baltic region) already enjoying a booming economy and 100 years of peace.
Sweden in the 1920s was indeed in a comparatively sweet spot, but so was much of Western world before the Great Depression and WW2 hit. However, by modern standards, Sweden was still quite poor and agrarian: life expectancy for both men and women was under 50 years until the 1890s, and it was the last nation in Europe to experience a major natural famine in 1867-9, with ~15% of the population dying.
Ok, how about 150 years ago? Poverty is poverty, famine is famine, illiteracy is illiteracy. For the average Swede - not the rich - life was as bad as it is in nations we considered desperately impoverished today. That's the point. There are people living well in Syria today, too. They're just a tiny sliver of elites, while ordinary people suffer.
But back to my original point. Do you think that there are nations that can't or won't be able to modernize? Are there people or places that are just incapable of achieving peace and independence? Because I don't buy that. China has done it. Iran has done it. Syria can do it, too.
... The rest of the world though? Maybe not caves, but tents or whatever. All the stone-built, permanent settlements you can come up with still leave enough room. I think it might as well be that stark contrast leading to domination (pun intended) rather than war between those cities that's suspect.
I was wondering about Europe specifically, so thanks for the links.
The state may be gone, but the Somali Islamic and clan structures of governance remained in place, and they are deeply tyrannical and anti-freedom to the core.
Right. I remembered that Adobe bought Macromedia, but I thought the acqui-kill was earlier. I was getting the story of Macromedia mixed up with Aldus. And actually, Flash came from FutureWave Software, before Macromedia acquired that company.
But Adobe did not ignore Flash. They may have mismanaged it, but they did invest in it, and tried to push Flash into places it does not belong (AIR, and especially PDF). They also tried to turn ActionScript 3.0 into ECMAscript 4.
Now that the Flash runtime is becoming banned, Adobe renamed the Flash Professional content creation program to Adobe Animate, and made it able to export to some flavor of HTML5. The content creation is where they make the money, after all.
As a person living in a former communist country I find it quite amusing that after the communism was replaced by capitalism population increase went from a steady increase to steady decrease.
But you know while we talk about how many people has communism killed, we never talk how much child labour and slavery has capitalism produced.. Anyway you get the point.
And by the way it's not that I care about communism. I don't. Never liked it although during these years I was a kid so I didn't have adult Experience. But I don't like capitalism any better.
> As a person living in a former communist country I find it quite amusing that after the communism was replaced by capitalism population increase went from a steady increase to steady decrease.
I live in a former communist country too, one that suffered under a North Korean inspired regime in the last decades before communism collapsed in a bloody revolution. And population was increasing at the fastest rate in Europe at the time, despite the miserable living conditions only because abortion and contraception were forbidden because the communist leadership wanted to increase the number of state slaves as fast as possible. Hundreds of thousands of children were abandoned by parents unable to care for them due to lack of food, lack of money and lack of space in the cramped apartment blocks. Countless children ended up in secretive state run orphanages that looked more like concentration camps. Here's a clip of one of those happy places
> But you know while we talk about how many people has communism killed, we never talk how much child labour and slavery has capitalism produced.. Anyway you get the point.
How did capitalism produce child labor and slavery? You must be pretty historically illiterate to not know that it was capitalism that made child and slave labor obsolete through technology advancements and automation. The very concept of childhood as we understand it today is the product of capitalist societies during the industrial revolution. And it was the capitalist societies that birthed the abolitionist movement and also exported it all over the world through various means more or less peaceful. Blaming capitalism for those things is like blaming the cure for the illness it removes.
> And by the way it's not that I care about communism. I don't. Never liked it although during these years I was a kid so I didn't have adult Experience. But I don't like capitalism any better.
Of course you don't like "capitalism", who the hell would like "capitalism" if it would mean what you think it means (that whole slavery and child labor bullshit).
Except Dota is not balanced so that heroes have the same win rate (LOL does that and it's a boring uneventful game for large stretches of time). Dota is balanced also taking into account the map, hero synergies, item builds, match progression etc, and it takes a genius like Icefrog to make everything fun and interesting at the same time.
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