The UK upper class is remarkably educated and unintelligent in my opinion. You meet lots of people in the UK in some strata of society who went to Oxford yet have never really been taught how to think.
UK research also appears to have largely fallen behind world leaders - see mRNA research coming from Germany/US yet the UK having no native knowledgebase of mRNA I know of and producing one of the weakest of the COVID vaccines.
Virtually all aspects of western society is being eroded by the “management is a job-skill” type thinking. I expect that eventually we will stop doing this simply because it’s complete nonsense and clearly counter productive.
Look at the difference between Elon Musk’s two companies and their ability to execute vs their rivals. The amount of value that was created because of an engineer led is so vast - it’s hard to even quantify.
Im not sure I agree with you. Yes Germany isn’t Denmark, the distance from US —- German government policy is vast. Even the difference between UK and Germany is vast. What do we call that difference ? Some people might call it socialism, others just more govt intervention. Still the societal dynamics are so different yet “capitalists” and free market folk want to take it all under their wing, while ascribing only genocidal dictatorships to socialist policy.
Capitalists have successfully ejected murderous regimes from their timeline, by saying that capitalism isn’t really real unless it’s got a free democracy associated with it. Thus imperial Japan, Belgium’s atrocious behaviour in the Congo, the behaviour of the British Empire is completely left out of “capitalist history”.
If you did the same trick for socialism you could just count Denmark, Sweden and other successful mixed-but-really-socialist democracies and you could say that socialist guided economies are actually fantastic. Ie if I define socialism as only real socialism when there is a free market democracy but large well funded social programs that keep the society from excessive inequality, I suddenly have the recipe for some of the happiest countries on earth.
And some people, you know reasonable people who actually understand Marx’s critique of capitalism - not as a recipe but as a pretty accurate descriptor of the end result of the natural forces of capitalism - they might say that Denmark style socialism is actually what they would like.
But of course Denmark = Soviet Union in some peoples mind so that’s impossible.
Let’s forget of course that past Stalin’s death, the USSR’s criminal activity was relatively limited. They didn’t invade a country until Afghanistan and that was still without imperialist purpose - they just believed Afghanistan to be in their sphere of influence. In comparison with American military, the Soviet military essentially was used to put down revolts in part so the world the USSR believed has been left to their influence after Yalta. When Portugal was turning red in 1974, the Soviets refused to have anything to do with it.
Vis à vis the crimes of the Soviet Union or Red China past their murderous genocidal creators - Mao and Stalin - were relatively limited. In the same vein you could argue that the US was also founded on genocide, just of Native Americans.
Unfortunately even left wing folks in the UK remember that the coal unions shut down the country regularly in the 70s. I’m not from here, but I know a very left wing crowd and the older ones remember how they would dine in candlelight during the big coal strikes. Tatcher was a reaction to this.
This is one of the top comments and one I 100% agree with.
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Sigh... Idiocy is like a virus. We don't have a vaccine for it, but we used to keep it under control through isolation. Every village might have its idiot, but at least the idiots were in separate villages. Thanks to Facebook and other social media, the idiots now get together all the time in online super spreader events of idiocy. Now the idiocy pandemic is out of control, and we still have no vaccine. Of course a new idiocy variant would be the denial of germ theory during a pandemic of a novel virus. We are so fucked.
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I think we might be going from a genetic to a memetic evolutionary process/society. Right now we’re on the start of something terrible, because memetically we’ve opened the organism and are letting bacteria fester.
The 1930s were similar. We allowed mass psychosis to set in through the new medium of radio. Now we’re letting it set in through the internet. Different kinds but same effect. We’re about to head into a similar mass psychosis event.
There's a difference between knowing you don't understand something and thinking that you do - that's the difference between cargo cult thinking vs actual thinking.
Cargo cults are antivaxx, anti-climate change. Things that are obviously not true, but that many people want to believe so they do. The issue is that this kind of thinking is actually default, which I've grown to understand recently. IE many people who are in favor of good things don't really have a deep understanding of why that is - they've just adopted an opinion that sounds good to them. This is particularly pronounced in ie economics and politics, where understanding is extremely shallow.
Yes that was some of their best work. I believe the flashing lights allow for some sort of 3D reconstruction of your face? And scanning the passport with NFC!
One of them is high-tech DYI solution, the other one is super simple yet not used at all by any other govt service I've interacted with.
the UK has done exactly this - to make all Government Digital Services in house. It's been a blockbuster success in my opinion - they have some of the best UX/UI in the world and their websites are ultralight and downgrade well.
There are a few issues with authentication, but there is support.
Everything that's related to dealing with the UK government btw is all in ONE website, where everything is explained to you in Plain English - gov.uk
Coming from a country where this doesn't exist, I was blown away by every interaction I've had with the system. It's simply amazing.
UK research also appears to have largely fallen behind world leaders - see mRNA research coming from Germany/US yet the UK having no native knowledgebase of mRNA I know of and producing one of the weakest of the COVID vaccines.