> America also became a major economic engine of the world by exerting control over people's bodies without paying them.
The actual economic data doesn't support that. Slaves were never more than 17% of the population, slavery was only ever legal in certain regions, and use of slaves was mostly relegated to a subset of agricultural labor. Moreover, slavery was outlawed in 1865 and the United States would not be considered an "economic engine of the world" until at least the 1880s, and it would not be considered one for its agricultural output but for its industrialized economy.
Furthermore, countries in the new world (e.g. Haiti, Brazil, that practiced slavery for longer and on a larger scale failed to develop strong economies anywhere to the degree that the United States did, so the line from "had slavery in the past" to "became economically prosperous" is tenuous. In fact, slave labor (and adjacent systems like serfdom) historically tends to hamper economic growth, prevent industrialization, and stifle innovation.
The South was already set back economically before the civil war. The plantation chattel slavery system hampered industrialization in the Southern US very much in the same way that the serf-owning nobility system hampered industrialization in the Russian Empire. The South, in turn, ultimately lost the American civil war because the northern states were far more industrialized.
The listing of every native American group that's ever occupied the place is comical to me.
All of world history involves the push and pull of various groups competing for land and resources. Somehow we're supposed to treat every single one of the hundreds of pre-Columbian peoples who occupied North America with a sort of reverence like they were the only rightful inhabitants of the continent. Even though these hundreds of groups fought amongst each other for land and resources before and after the arrival of Europeans. Every single major conflict in North America since 1492 (including the American civil war) has seen Native groups fighting on both sides - because they were people with agency and not monolithic in their views and interests.
Do people in other parts of the world act like this? When a conference is held in conference in Turkey, is it important to mention that the area was previously controlled by Mongols, Seljuk Turks, Christian Greeks, Romans, Hellenic Greeks, Persians, Assyrians, Luwians, Hittites, Hattians, etc. ?
The performance overhead of multiprocessing is pretty high, to the point that you really have to take care to ensure that whatever problem you're solving with multiprocessing is large and parallel enough to justify it, otherwise your multiprocessing solution may very well be slower than your single-process one.
That's not to say it's useless, it's a nice tool to have in the standard library, but if you're coming from one of the many mainstream programming languages with lightweight threading libraries which make it much easier to take advantage of parallelism it's easy to get frustrated at both python's standard threading and multiprocessing libraries for their respective shortcomings, at least in their CPython implementations.
Interesting. But seeing as the US population in 1910 was about 92 million vs 330 million in 2020, it doesn't say a whole lot about comparative severity of the two pandemics.
No real response but oversimplification/staw-manning will do just fine, huh?
Are you trying to say that the situation in Europe is just "business as usual" or something?
Now I don't know if you've been paying attention these last few years, but in case you're not aware European countries have taken in a pretty unprecedented number of migrants over the last decade. Many of those migrants were/are young men from regions with cultural norms that are fundamentally different from the European countries that they end up in. In addition, many of these migrants lack strong proficiency in the standard language of the host country, and do not possess a level of education that would generally be commensurate with their age in the host country. Note that none of this is meant as a value judgement, it's just the reality of the situation. It's not an easy situation for the migrant or for the administration of the countries taking them in. It's not really any secret that integration/assimilation has failed in many parts of Europe, and this all has consequences.
With regards to gun violence, I don't know about Europe in General but Sweden's rate of gun homicides has risen consistently every year over the last decade. Obviously the numbers are nothing compared to what you'd see in the United States, but if the problem is getting worse, then it's probably worth talking about. Also, for a highly-developed Western country, Sweden experiences a large number of hand-grenade attacks every year in a pattern that also seems to be increasing.
But the main cause of violence tends to be organized crime, and as seen by the murder of Peter R De Vries earlier this year, a lot of European police agencies are simply not cut out to deal with organized crime in their current state.
Europeans discover that the continent is not made of magic dirt that assimilates migrants into your society upon entry.
Europeans also discover that weapons restrictions only go so far when you have active organized criminal groups with the initiative and contacts necessary to smuggle firearms and grenades into Western/Northern Europe from a number of regions (Ex-Yugoslavia, Albania, former Soviet Union, North Africa, etc.) that are only a car-ride or fishing boat trip away.
The earlier comment is conflating general Swiss firearms ownership with the service-weapon take home system in use with Swiss military conscripts.
Swiss gun owners are allowed to buy, own, and use ammunition. They may also use a privately-owned firearm in self-defense situationally, but the legal justification for use of deadly force in Switzerland will obviously be more stringent than it would be in the United States.
Yes, but as a Swiss civilian you're allowed to own a great number of semi-automatic rifles, handguns, and standard capacity (20, 30, or more rounds) magazines as a private citizen, provided that you go through a licensing processes which isn't very tedious or expensive. The whole "Swiss men all have their service weapon in the house" thing is conflation/misunderstanding/ignorance, but in many ways Swiss firearms law is not terribly different from US firearms law in terms of what you're allowed to own and in some cases it's even less restrictive (CH doesn't care about barrel length on shoulder-fired weapons, for example). They key different is the existence of a license system.
The main thing that sets the US apart from other countries is not that civilians can own AR15s or similar weapons, it's that US law for the most part gives any adult the legal right to purchase and own firearms by default, provided that they can pass a background check. The United States and Yemen are basically the only countries that use this system. Basically every other country has some sort of tiered licensing system for firearms ownership, with varying levels of strictness. And as it happens, Switzerland is pretty unrestrictive in this regard. The Swiss "Firearms acquisition permit" looks essentially equivalent to the United State's "Form 4473" which is required for the majority of firearms transactions.
In what way is a RC helicopter with a camera on it in a public place "force"?
And with regards to force it's not "only deployed against a specific political demographic". Tons of the BLM protests over the last year went by without any major intervention from law enforcement. In fact, in plenty of cities the police departments outright stated that they supported the protests and did the whole "kneel in solidarity" thing. Call it an empty gesture if you like but it's a far cry from what you're describing. I watched tons of livestreams during that time. It was usually only when the looting, random assaults, arson, etc. got out of hand that serious riot control measures were put in place. And even then, lots of police departments seemed to think that it was better to just let the city get looted and burned than to risk more bad press for the Police by engaging the perpetrators. Not sure what you mean by "pro-Trump insurgents get treated like gentlemen, and get to take selfies with the police who should be arresting them" - if you're referring to January 6th, then perhaps you're remembering wrong. There was tear gas all over the place and 4 of the pro-Trump rioters were killed by law enforcement.
Seems a bit political to be on HN, but we'll see if it stays up.
On this article (which really says very little aside from "we claim that a lot of complaints contain racial bias, therefore the people complaining are wrong and stupid and we don't have to listen to them"), one of the linked articles in this side bar is this one: