Your contradicter is right. You’re basically describing the list system, which is the purest form of PR and pretty common in Europe. You vote for a platform and a list, not for individuals.

They knew this in ancient Greece, and yet we have to keep re-learning the lesson the hard way, over and over again.

Time to rinse off and get out of the shower.

You’re thinking of ARM

Sweden and Finland, to take just two nearby examples, are roughly as wealthy as the Netherlands. Neither had an empire. Portugal, the world’s first superpower, with colonies on three continents, is far poorer than any of those three countries.

Russia is currently trying to re-establish its empire, and impoverishing itself in the process.

Imperialism is a red herring.

The Netherlands is absolutely not wealthy because of its natural gas. The Netherlands is a manufacturing center, a farming powerhouse (it’s literally the world’s number 2 food exporter). It was Europe’s original trading empire. Today it contains the closest thing Europe has to Silicon Valley, with world-class universities and the super-high-tech ASML. It’s been a wealthy country for centuries because it has invested in its people. The natural gas is an anecdote.

But it doesn’t work like that. Wealth is a status symbol, and status symbols are comparative. Millionaires compare themselves to slightly richer millionaires, and billionaires to slightly richer billionaires. Everyone else is irrelevant to them.

Almost every single country with an extraction-based economy is either a dictatorship or a failed state. The single exception is Norway, which discovered oil after it was already an advanced democracy. A country with natural resources does not need to invest in its human capital, or worry about democracy.

Russia’s natural resources are its curse.

But a very, very credible voice on this subject. Let’s not fall into the easy trap of tribalism.

Good to know.

Useful. I hate shorts and portrait-format video in general.

NB for those who don’t know: a server is not needed to make Youtube RSS feeds, they exist natively: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxxxxxxxxxx. You just have to find the channel_id buried in the page source, which admittedly is a bit of a PITA. But no native way to exclude shorts, though.

And so what? Why are you so bothered by it? I’m a Linux user of 20 years and I couldn’t give a fig that someone is running a forum called LinuxSucks which, not unsurprisingly, contains little “positivity or praise” for Linux.

So: you posted a serious contribution in an unserious community, and got treated unseriously. It’s not very newsworthy.

As for that community’s existence, why is that even up for discussion? As a Linux user I’m happy for people to say what they like about Linux. If the jokes are funny, all the better.

I use Ubuntu btw and it doesn’t suck. Well, not that much.

What you think about them, they think about you. They’re not evil, they’re not idiots. If they lived nextdoor you would probably find each other very pleasant.

I just don’t know how we come back from where we are.

It looks pretty simple from where I’m standing. You talk to them. You listen to them. You find things you agree on, beginning with the smaller things. They’re not automatons, they’re people.

Update. This avalanche of supposedly tolerant progressives who are openly against the idea of talking to their fellow citizens proves to me that America deserves everything it gets. Good luck.

To the many people here saying (apparently with pride), “I just cut them all out”: You are making the problem worse.

Honestly, if this is really your attitude to your fellow citizens, you deserve what you get. They have a vote.

That’s understandable. It’s also, in microcosm, the reason your country is so divided. If you want to continue living in a democracy, you’re all going to have to talk - and listen - to each other.

This is the best answer. Most of the others jump straight in at the deep end. The entirely predictable outcome of asking this question to a bunch of earnest geeks.

Yet there have never been less “drapes”, curtains and carpets than in a modern home. And oddly humanity got by just fine without vacuum cleaners until - pure coincidence, no doubt - postwar consumer capitalism instructed us that we “needed” these things.

Most of the world’s cities look a bit like your putative utopia. Almost everyone works in low-skilled jobs: market vendors, barbers, cafe owners, “baristas” in fake Starbucks. And most of these cities are not places you would choose to live in.

The Atlantic. Because of its magazine heritage, there’s the perfect number of new articles per day (5 or 10), all top notch journalism and beautifully written. I look forward to reading a few of them each evening.