I suspect this is an example of us seeing history through a mdoern lens and making false assumptions. For example, the idea that a nation project or an empire is genetically homogenous is a relatively modern concept. The truth is that empires incorporated various ethnic groups and those ethnic groups survived for long periods of time.
The Roman Empire at times extended all the way from England to the Persian Gulf. It included various Celtic people, North Africans, people from the Balkans, Turkic people and people from the Middle East. At no point did these people become ethnically homogenous but they all very much Romanized.
The British Empire spanned the globe.
In more modern times the Austro-Hungarian Empire included a dozen or more ethnic groups and languages.
Would we describe being Roman, a Briton or an Austro-Hungarian as a "job"? I don't think so.
The entire point of the article is that they called themselves collectively Norsemen. Going 'viking' (raiding) was an activity done by 'vikings' (raiders).
For 20+ years World of Warcraft has dominated the MMORPG genre. There have been a host of challengers and they've all miserably failed. In fact, there have only been a handful of successes (eg UO, EQ, FF14).
And what do almost all of these challengers have in common? Some version of "the PvP is going to be amazing". Why do these companies like PVP? Because it's essentially user-generated content. It increases time spent in game without having to create content, which is expensive.
Thing is, players of this genre don't want PVP. Even in WoW, I'd be surprised if 10% of the playerbase actively engages in PVP activity. So, by focusing on PVP, you're actually cut your potential market by 90%. Before you've written a single line of code or created any artwork. Put another way, you're spending valuable development effort on features only a tiny minority of players care about or even want.
I'm reminded of this whenever somebody on HN talks about federation. The only people who care about federation are... other people on HN. It does literally nothing for users. It greatly complicates the implementation. The last successes of federation are POTS and Email. It's quite literally never succeeded since. And the problems with federation that POTS and Email continue to have to this day should be an object lesson in why it's a bad idea.
Choosing federation from the start is choosing to lose. I'm sorry but it's true.
Great analogy, especially considering the extent to which people play social media (especially Twitter, and derivatives) as a PvP game. Which has the "Trammel problem", from Ultima Online: nobody wants to be on the losing side.
What we're witnessing isn't just an issue of localizing policy failure or even state policy failure but systemic failure. And we just need to look at China for how to do this correctly.
China treats housing primarily as providing a place for people to live, not a speculative asset. In the West, housing is largely a speculative asset where everyone from investor companies to individual homeowners become incentivized to make housing scarcer and more expensive at every level. China, on the other hand, makes it more expensive and more difficult to own second and third homes.
Now you might be tempted to object and point to things like the Evergrande bubble. And that's actually evidence of success not failure. Xi Jinping quietly changed China's policy, starting around 2014 to focus on living not investment, and Evergrande was essentially allowed to default because housing access is a priority over investors.
You really see this plays out with trains.
Chengdu has the 5th largest (by rail length) metro system in the world. It didn't exist before 2010. China standardized rolling stock so there's no time-consuming and expensive procurement process and there are economies of scale.
China has spent less than $1 trillion building ~50,000km of high speed rail. They initially bought high speed trains from Germany and Japan (IIRC) but now they make their own. To compare, the California HSR, if it ever happens, is estimated to cost in excess of $130B.
The point I'm getting to is that in the West every aspect and level of this is treated as a profit opportunity, which ultimately is a wealth transfer from the government to some company. Procurement, maintenance, track building, land acquisition, track maintenance, station building and so on. These are all state enterprises.
Back to housing, IMHO nothing will solve this problem so long as housing remains a speculative asset. There'll simply bee too much resistance to change.
> China treats housing primarily as providing a place for people to live, not a speculative asset.
Where and who did you get this idea from? Speculation in China makes speculation in the USA look like child’s play. Speculation is such a huge part of China’s housing economy that the government has to constantly fight against it, or for it when they fight too hard and the economy starts to teeter, and then fight hard against it again when normal people can’t compete in a market full if Wenzhou housewives. I mean, that even Wenzhou housewife is still a meme for property speculator should give you a clue. The government only ever tolerated speculation in the first place because it used housing as a jobs program for a huge under employed rural population.
Whatever the USA does to fix its problem, copying China’s problems isn’t going to help, and will actually make things worse.
HSR isn’t used for commuting in China like the Shinkansen is used for commuting in Japan. It just isn’t very viable to transit from an HSR station to your job, HSR stations aren’t very central even in tier one cities. Example: you work in Beijing chaoyang and want to live in cheaper hebei, let’s say right on the HSR line so let’s not count commute times on your home end. But just getting from Beijing South to…anywhere let alone chaoyang (and chaoyang is huge, let’s say the CBD just for kicks), is going to take an hour or two even with the subway in place.
What we need to copy from China is there ability to get projects done on time and on budget. But everything else…china has its own problems that it’s still working on.
> Where and who did you get this idea from? Speculation in China makes speculation in the USA look like child’s play.
This information is so out of date it borders on misinformation. China's real estate market "crashed" at least 5 years ago at this point. And it didn't just crash in the same way that, say, the Toronto condo market has crashed. It crashed because the government burst the bubble, deliberately, to make housing a priority not an investment. Put another way, like I said above, housing people was made a priority over investor returns.
> HSR isn’t used for commuting in China
China's HSR now has over 4 billion passenger movements a year [1]. It's largely an alternative to short=to-medium distance air travel eg Beijing to Shanghai is ~1200km, roughly equivalent to Chicago to NYC. What's commuting got to do with it? Are you comparing to Japan where people might live 2 hours commute away from work for various reasons?
Second, this is a good thing. It is a success not a failure. I mean it's bad for the investors but China has decided people having affordable housing is more important than the investors. The investors aren't being bailed out.
Why is this a good thing? Because the only way we can correct Western housing markets at this point is by doing what China has already done. That is, crashing the housing market. And that is political suicide so we are where we are and it's not going to get better anytime soon.
How is “speculation leads to crashing” mean that China is over their speculation phase? It took Japan a decade after their bubble to pop for them to completely detach from property speculation. China is basically Japan 2.0+ in this regard. Hopefully it lands at a Japanese equilibrium where property is priced more sanely, but they are definitely not there yet. My family owns a villa in a tier 88 (at least it has a HSR station and an airport now) so I have skin in this game.
Do you think the housing market can crash on its own?
Here is my crazy theory: After only one year of the second Trump admin, the US now seems to have damaged one of its greatest assets: namely attracting the cream of the crop. One second order effect of this is now we are entering population decline. If it becomes terminal, who is going to take out a 30 years mortgage on the overpriced houses? As boomers die off, we might see a collapse. There might be a scenario where a future Trump like character fumbles the bailout(or refuses to do it) and the housing market finally is allowed to burst.
Half right. I’d use Singapore or Vienna as the ideal housing model instead. China started off using housing as a financial instrument. People were pouring their life savings into 2nd and 3rd apartments because the stock market was unreliable & capital controls prevented investing abroad. Prices skyrocketed. Now the bubble has burst, and the state is desperately trying to pivot to the Singapore/Vienna model, where local governments buy and own unsold inventory. It’s not going so well.
Of course none of this matters to the US or to this thread. Half this country won’t even wear a simple mask to save their neighbors lives. Forget about coordinating public housing.
"Sanctions" are just a sanitized way of saying "forced starvation" and "denying basic medical care" because that's what happens. For Cuba, this has been going on so long that the CIA documents about the effect of sanctions and a blockade itself has been declassified (in 2005) [1]. When faced with a UN report that estimated 500,000 children had been killed by US sanctions in 1996, then UN Ambassador and later US Secretary of State Madeline Albright famously said "the price was worth it" [2].
And sanctions don't actually work. Not against enemies anyway. Just like Cuba has endured 60+ years of sanctions and Russia has endured Ukraine-related sanctions, enemies have or build an economy to be resilient to the sanctions to the point that the regime survives, even thrives in the face of perceived exteranl threats.
Probably the only successful use of sanctions was South Africa. Why? Because apartheid South Africa was an ally so the BDS movement crippled the economy.
And most of the time sanctions have no other reason than the affected country dared to not be exploited by the West and Western companies.
Facebook in particular, and social media in general, is an excellent example of making short-term decisions ultimately leading to your doom.
FB of course started as a way for college kids to follow each other and see what's going on. Then rather than a chronological feed we got the newsfeed. This was hugely controversial, actually. Apparently ~10% of the user base threatened to quit over it [1].
But why did they do it? Because it increased engagement. And every social media platform since has followed the newsfeed model.
But the big thing (IMHO) that led to FB's destruction was sharing links. I bet this too increased engagement but it ultimately leads to your feed being flooded with your weird uncle posting conspiracy theories.
All social media platforms have moved away from this idea of following your friends and family. They're all now a way of disseminating "news" and following celebrities. How social groups keep in touch now is group chats.
I firmly believe this recommendation model is headed for a reckoning with governments around the world. We have the Meta trial going on now, the EU investigating platforms for addictive practices (where is this same smoke for sports betting and crypto gambling I wonder?) and so on.
In the US, this comes back to Section 230, a law established in the 1990s that created legal cover for user generated content because it shielded platforms from legal liability as long as they met certain requirements (eg moderation, legal takedowns). The alternative is to be a publisher (eg a newspaper) who are responsible for their content.
I believe that the algorithmic newsfeed has created a way to let social media platforms act as publishers but enjoy thei protections of being a platform.
Let me put it this way: if, for example, you as a publisher make endless posts about the evils of Cuba, how is that different from having user-generated content where you promote anti-Cuba content and suppress pro-Cuba content? In my opinion, it isn't, functionally. This will ultimately come to a head.
Anyway, back to Facebook, I know some still use groups but really who uses FB anymore? For awhile, Meta had the golden goose with IG but even that seems to be in decline. Twitter has declined way from its peak and was never mainstream. Snapchat enjoyed a very young audience for ephemeral messaging. I have no idea what the current state is. It seems like Tiktok is the only platform still enjoying growth.
Remember when the Biden administration massively increased IRS funding and the Right collectively lost their minds? They fairly successfully pushed the idea that these agents were going to go after average citizens. They never were and you're way too gullible if you ever believed that.
Every $1 spent on the IRS returns roughly $12 in revenue [1]. This revenue doesn't come from W2 employees. It comes from exposing tax fraud from complicated tax schemes used by the very wealthy and corporations. That's why the Right lost their minds about it.
The idea that you save money by cutting IRS funding in the budget is just so laughably false that I'm surprised anybody believes it.
When are they not collectively losing their minds over something? It's like their one consistent characteristic. Jumping from one made up moral panic to the next. Somehow the "average" person cannot see the clear line of what conservatives have supported since the foundation of this country. They lost their minds over the idea that black people could be free citizens of the country. They lost their minds when women got the right to vote. They lost their minds when their objectively racist Jim Crow laws were struck down. They lost their minds when gay people were allowed to get married. They are losing their minds over immigrants and trans folk now. There is always some "other" holding them back and making everything worse. This from the party of "personal responsibility".
Um, colonialism never left. It just morphed. The most common form is the economic colonialism/imperialism by the United States.
The World Bank and IMF are tools of colonialism. We extract resources and exploit cheap labor from the Global South. We kidnap heads of state and seize that country’s oil.
We may not send settlers like we did in the colonial era. We’ve just found a more efficient method.
Famines are political. They happen because one population is happy to starve another. The Mughals ruled themselves. The British stole harvests for themselves and let the local population starve.
The potato famine in Ireland is treated as some kind of unavoidable, natural event. No, the British just stole the harvest. And this continued right up until Churchill in India.
So the Mughals might’ve been effective but the big difference is they weren’t being exploited as an imperial subject.
So, counterpoint: genocide aim to destroy the culture of a group, either by killing the women and children alongside to fighters during a conquest/repression, or by forcefully moving them to make them mix with a new dominant culture (Crimean Tatars are an example). This almost always end in streamlining the language and destroying language diversity, often reducing it to a single one for all the survivors/moved. While not even close to the SEA level, India is one of the subcontinent with the most different spoken languages, which would indicate that it might not have been that bad. At least, not genocide-bad.
I have been taught the exact same verbose propaganda (invented maths, science, military, astronomy, chemistry, medicine, won this and that war blah blah) written by people from the middle east.
I honestly had no idea about the French fascination with the Mongols. People tend to admire people who have traits they aspire to. I wonder if this stems from France, being a major imperial power at the time, admiring the Mongols as an imperial power.
This timeline coincides with the Crusades with, which the article talks about at length. I find the Crusades fascinating because they've shaped the modern world in so many ways.
Dan Carlin (of Hardcore History fame) once said that why he cares about military history is it shapes the world. If you look at the lightbulb, it doesn't really matter who invented it. Somebody would've. But take the Battle of Marathon, which shaped the entire history of Western Europe as the Greeks repelled the Persians. History would've been completely different. Or how Cyrus II (IIRC) essentially saved Judaism by rebuilding the Temple. Without that, Judaism may well have died out and, with it, all the Abrahamic religions may never have existed.
So the Crusades are fascinating because they've often portrayed as a religious war but they were anything but. Religion was simply the excuse. Instead medieval powers wanted to control the Levant to enrich themselves.
The Crusades essentially created international banking, making the Knights Templar incredibly wealthy [1]. One wonders if this was a necessary condition to the rise of the mercantile class that eventually displaced feudalism and brought on capitalism.
But back to the French. It's interesting that they were fascinated with the Mongols with everything else that was going on. During this same period, the Eastern Roman Empire still existed and the Moors occupied the Iberian peninsula. In many ways, the Mongols were more distant whereas the Arab "threat" was closer and more real. So why the Mongols?
Why the Mongols? Because they were distant. You can't afford to admire the people next door; you're either fighting them or preparing for when fighting breaks out again.
I disagree. It's very hard to admire a direct enemy, even if you can see their strengths, you'll rationalize them in your head as being the evil sort of strength, which comes not from virtue but from their total lack of morality or whatever you can conjure up. We see that everywhere in history and even in contemporary conflicts.
France was not a major imperial power at the time. It was much smaller than today, lacking Savoy and much of Burgundy for start, with Normandy and many other areas only nominally part of it and technically under control of English king (who was just a duke in France, but that changed only a very little on the battlefield).
Crusades in middle east started as an attempt of Eastern Roman empire (although they just called it Roman empire / Basileia Romaion) to recover from recent advances of Muslim invaders in Anatolia (modern Turkey). But turned into an overwhelmingly religious effort in the west. The first crusade especially was largely ill organized and chaotic affair. Where on one end of the spectrum you had nobles arriving with somewhat well equipped forces and idea of what to do, and on the other you had pilgrims, with whatever they just picked up in their hands and not answering commands of anyone, but their priest.
The economic side of things came into play after the process started and gradually became dominant. But it didn't start like it.
Finally. Interest of France in Mongols can be easily explained precisely by the influence crusades had on French and other Christian elites in Europe. The initial victory of 1st Crusade was followed by a series of setbacks. Muslims gradually begun to push crusaders out, the fact that crusaders started to fight amongst themselves helped a lot.
And then mongols arrived, almost from nowhere, crushed one of most powerful Muslim states at the time, and didn't stop there. It did seem like an immense opportunity, and in a way it was. If French, or someone else in Christendom, could convince khans that some form of cooperation is possible, or even better, if Mongols converted to Christianity, there would be a decent chance to not only save Jerusalem, but to move on to Egypt (still majority Christian).
By the time of William the Conqueror, which I think is the sixth generation of Rollo's line in Normandy, they were just French (with a cultural memory of North Sea origins). The tapestry of Bayeux, which was made in England, calls them that.
Its a mess. Vikings (mostly danes) did "move" there by conquering and being given lands as bribes. William conquered England but was still a vassal to the king of France due to still being the Duke of Normandy. So for example when France got a new king the king of England would need to go and swear loyalty and such, which would become a problem later.
Through marriages and such the Duke of Normandy took over large parts of France and it became the Angevin Empire, but still just a puny vassal to the King of France.
The 100 year war was fought over this essentially and England would end up losing all French land and thus the problem was solved forever.
yes, but when they moved to England, the Normand duke made himself king of England, so he (and his heirs) had the crown of England and the ducky of Normandy.
The arabs were broken into smaller kingdoms for a long time when it came to the XIII century. The Eastern Roman Empire had been in decline since the fall of Constantinople in 1204 and even before that it was only a regional power. Compared to those, the mongols managed to build an empire spreading on millions of square kilometers. There is no base for comparison. It is like comparing the UK and the US 20 years after WWII.
So this is a fallacy of seeing historical events through a modern lens.
We know how far the Mongols spread and we have accurate maps but in no way am I convinced that France could possibly conceive of the size and scope of Central Asia in the 11th century.
They could conceive that you can go across France in a couple of weeks and that you might need a few months to reach China. What's more, they could see how rich the khan is and that it is much more than their king. And that he has much bigger army. Surprisingly, they were not idiots.
Disliking them doesn't make their empire smaller and success is a virtue of its own according to many. They were successful and people noticed, the rest is commentary.
They also smelled and had a big rich empire. What I can say? Won't bother you with the guy who supposedly planted trees so that merchants can travel and rest in their shadows, nor should I tell you stories how those extractive people facilitated trade between Europe and China.
PS: The russians got lots of things from the eastern roman empire, just not the humanistic renaissance, but let's not go there.
I blame Google for a lot of this. Why? Because they more than anyone else succedded in spreading the propaganda that "the algorithm" was like some unbiased even all-knowing black box with no human influence whatsoever. They did this for obvious self-serving reasons to defend how Google properties ranked in search results.
But now people seem to think newsfeeds, which increase the influence of "the algorithm", are just a result of engagement and (IMHO) nothing could be further from the truth.
Factually accurate and provable statements get labelled "misinformation" (either by human intervention or by other AI systems ostensibly created to fight misinformation) and thus get lower distribution. All while conspiracy theories get broad distribution.
Even ignoring "misinformation", certain platforms will label some content as "political" and other content as not when a "political" label often comes down to whether or not you agree with it.
One of the most laughable incidents of putting a thumb on the scale was when Grok started complaining about white genocide in South Africa in completely unrelated posts [1].
I predict a coming showdown over Section 230 about all this. Briefly, S230 establishes a distinction between being a publisher (eg a newspaper) and a platform (eg Twitter) and gave broad immunity from prosecution for the platform for user-generated content. This was, at the time (the 1990s), a good thing.
But now we have a third option: social media platforms have become de facto publishers while pretending to be platforms. How? Ranking algorithms, recommendations and newsfeeds.
Think about it this way: imagine you had a million people in an auditorium and you were taking audience questions. What if you only selected questions that were supportive of the government or a particular policy? Are you really a platform? Or are you selecting user questions to pretend something has broad consensus or to push a message compatible with the views of the "platform's" owner?
My stance is that if you, as a platform, actively suppresses and promotoes content based on politics (as IMHO they all do), you are a publisher not a platform in the Section 230 sense.
The Roman Empire at times extended all the way from England to the Persian Gulf. It included various Celtic people, North Africans, people from the Balkans, Turkic people and people from the Middle East. At no point did these people become ethnically homogenous but they all very much Romanized.
The British Empire spanned the globe.
In more modern times the Austro-Hungarian Empire included a dozen or more ethnic groups and languages.
Would we describe being Roman, a Briton or an Austro-Hungarian as a "job"? I don't think so.
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