Perhaps.. but part of the reason plants "lack efficiency" compared to our solid state electronics is that they need respiration to exchange input and output products with the environment and the entire plant needs to be laid out in such a way that it can maintain a root structure while being advantaged with respect to competing vegetation.
The two problem spaces are similar in that they use light, but exceptionally different in almost every other respect.
The Crown Estate is not the private property of the Windsor family though. It is more akin to the wealth of a parallel state. One could speculate that in the event of the abolition of the monarchy the Crown Estate would be taken over by the government (at the very least not become Windsor family private property), in effect making it the taxpayers' property.
I think it's totally fair to feel that they have a life of immense luxury and privilege off of wealth that belongs to the people, while so many people in this country are wondering if they'll have heating this winter.
Again this is something I assume that must have been very frustrating too. She couldn’t just say “that’s not right” and intervene because that’s not within her remit in a democratic system.
I can’t begin to imagine how many times she must have had to bite her tongue over the last 73 years.
No, they actively lobbied over the years of her reign to preserve their economic benefits. They enjoyed this luxury and made attempts at preserving and expending it. Elizabeth was not a passive victim of her birth circumstances.
>Elizabeth was not a passive victim of her birth circumstances.
It's so strange that this even needs to be said out loud. It's not edgy to say that someone born into her position has benefitted from it. For a place that claims to be a meritocracy, the UK has some strangely dissonant beliefs.
The "war on terror", like the "war on drugs", is a misnomer though; it's not really a war (although a couple of wars were waged as part of it, or alongside it).
Another interesting point is Switzerland after 1848.
They had a very small-scale civil war which made them rethink their political structure.
Or the Austrian empire in 1866, which lost a major war against Prussia and was forced to reform itself into a dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Which was somewhat more competitive and liberal than its predecessor and if it avoided other wars, it might in some form survive until today.
Neither Germany or Japan stand out as being societies with minimal bureaucracy and unnecessary/intrusive regulation. Singapore (as a state that had to rebuild considerably after war) is arguably an even more extreme example.
They were post-WW2. The German Miracle in particular came about when Germany went full free market as a way to recover from the economy being burned to the ground. This boom lasted until 1970 when the socialists were voted into power, and on came the taxes and hamstringing. The Japanese economy immediately after WW2 was run by American leftist academics, who refused to allow big business to operate. The economy flatlined. Until that was rescinded, and the Japanese free market economic boom began and ran up into the 80s.
That sounds very much like a conveniently right-wing potted history. I'd be willing to bet the truth is rather more subtle*. Either way, they were both examples of economies that only got off the ground because of massive government spending.
(*) a quick read of a wikipedia article about the Japanese economic miracle - which undoubtedly you'll consider leftist propaganda - certainly confirms this. At best relaxing anti-monopoly laws was an example of legislation reform that helped further boost the already impressive recovery that had occurred during the 50s.
Um, where did Germany get "massive government spending"? If you say "the Marshall Plan", look up the MP on wikipedia. Germany did get MP money, but far less than Britain and France did. The latter two did not have a "British Miracle" or "French Miracle".
I didn't claim the spending was the prime cause of any "miracle", but it's fairly certain it wouldn't have happened without it. France and the UK did have impressive recoveries too, that would have been impossible without the MP etc.
FWIW I would actually expect the fact that because the priority at the time was economic recovery before everything else, red tape wasn't allowed to get in the way to the degree it often seems to once prosperity had been restored. I'd even say that's probably a reasonable trade off, though it certainly doesn't justify governments letting growing businesses get away with whatever they feel like. Nobody likes bureaucracy or red tape, but almost always it's what we end up with as a result of repeated cases of corporate behaviour that's widely agreed to be unacceptable.
Leftists always mis-attribute the causes of prosperity. The wikipedia article cites causes that are commonplace in other countries that had no miracle.
Nobody here is arguing a fully socialist command-and-control economy is a better choice.
But you haven't made any sort of case that the German or Japanese "miracles" were largely due to raw unrestrained capitalism. There are way too many factors that made those particular countries special cases at the time to pinpoint all the primary causes, let alone tease out various secondary factors some of which probably tempered rather than accelerated growth.
German ordoliberalism and the social market economy are certainly not full free market, i.e., Germany never went full free market after WW2 and there also would have been no political support for such a move (from the left or right). The boom then ended in the 2nd half of the 1960s.
A country does not have to be "full" free market to enjoy the benefits of the free market. The more free market it is, the better the results. It's one of the beauties of the free market.
German industry was very interconnected with limited domestic competition in those days - a free market it was not by a long shot.
Edit: It's fine to make broad claims about free market and growth, but please provide some citations to back up sweeping statements (and also to allow to go deeper into definitions).
Do I really need citations for free market growth? Every country that tries it gets good results - the more free market, the better.
Communist economies always wind up facing famine.
Communist China, for example, switched from a communist economy to a free market one. Look at the results. Korea split in two, one communist, one free market. Which one prospered? East vs West Germany, same story.
The US tried central economic planning for gasoline in the 1970's (repealed by Reagan as his first EO). Disaster. The US tried central economic planning for airline routes, fares, and schedules up until Reagan ended that. The result was a huge increase in efficiency and low fares.
Of course you do! Statements like "The more free market it is, the better the results" are not just about things at the ends of the spectrum, so that needs proper backing not handwaving about communist vs. capitalist economies. For example, is Norway more free market than Iceland? What are the criteria?
Perhaps but war was posited of a method of "clearing the books" and allowing significant reform. If that were true you'd expect such societies to be less weighed down by bureaucracy than others that had no such opportunity.
Germany and Japan have had reputations as being somewhat bureaucractic for decades though, which says to me war had no lasting impact, if any at all. I.e. a very expensive way to achieve nothing.
You'll encounter two kinds in most Security Engineer roles:
1) reviewing and advising on engineering work carried by other engineers, so you need to understand what they're doing, why they're doing it that way, and what the more secure alternatives could be, all while taking into account any limitations (time, budget, developer experience). This may include pairing sessions with Software or Platform Engineers when it comes to implementing security-critical bits.
2) building, deploying and maintaining your own solutions to security problems your company is facing. This could be security automation, threat detection engineering, secure-by-default infrastructure-as-code modules etc.
In general you need to be a high-breadth, medium-depth well-rounded engineer to pull your weight as a Security Engineer in a decent tech company.
>largely as a result of radical Islamist Palestinians who had left Palestine and wanted an Islamic state in Lebanon
Not accurate.
Until the early 90s and the rise of Hamas the most active Palestinian militant groups were secular, some were even Marxist/Leninist (as in, officially areligious).
Fatah, in control of the PLO, has always been secular and the second most active Palestinian militant group during the 1970s was the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist organisation led by a Palestinian Christian.
Political Islam as a force in Palestinian politics started in the 90s and only really became a big thing during the second intifada in the early 2000s.
The Wikipedia page [1] makes for an interesting read if you want to understand more about the Lebanese Civil War and the many groups and foreign interests involved in this tragic conflict. As for the Palestinians, they had a large refugee population established in Lebanon and the PLO leadership wanted a base for their militias; the Lebanese state understandably didn't want a parallel state operating with militias within their borders; this lit the fuse on a country with an already fragile sectarian balance and dozens of sizeable minorities that had grief with the state and each other.
While the PLO tried to distinguish itself from Hamas by claiming to be more secular, make no mistake that they were clearly a muslim force.
I was too young to remember the civil war, but at least in the collective retelling of the story, it's commonly accepted that PLO tried to topple the Beirut government to install their own. There are many claims that Arafat wanted Lebanon to be an alternative for their "stolen" Palestine. If it's the first time you hear that, then I think it's likely you never talked to Lebanese people about the war and the PLO.
Arafat, the leader of the PLO, wasn't christian. That's ... weird you claim this. His name is Mohammed Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf al-Qudwa al-Husseini. That's as Muslim as it gets. He was even a member (or a close ally I don't know) of the Muslim Brotherhood.
It's tough to convey to non arabic speakers, but several politicians, PLO front and center, use the terms "Arabs" and "muslims" almost interchangeably.
The Lebanon "civil war" is a misnomer. For the majority of the time, it was a war between lebanese christian militias and palestinian invaders that were tolerated by the lebanese muslim groups.
Lebanon's history and the civil war are complex and I'm not doing a good job of explaining then in a HN comment. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that islam has become more strict in the palestinian ranks after the 90s. This may be true. But I assure you that from the late 50s to the late 80s, they were trying to kick the non-muslims out of Lebanon by force.
> PLO tried to distinguish itself from Hamas by claiming to be more secular
Hamas was founded in 1989, a bit late for participation in the Lebanese civil war.
> Arafat, the leader of the PLO, wasn't christian. That's ... weird you claim this.
I'm talking about the leader of the PFLP, George Habash, which was the second largest Palestinian force at the time and operating in Lebanon during the civil war.
> they were trying to kick the non-muslims out of Lebanon by force.
I'm not disputing that the intention of the PLO was to anchor themselves in Lebanon (out of the control of the Lebanese state, even if that meant toppling it) and use it as a base, but I'm going to need some sources for the claim that the PLO wanted to "kick the non-muslims out of Lebanon".
Fair, not Hamas, the Islamic Jihad that came before it. It's not nearly the point of my reply, but good gotcha.
As for sources of how the PLO treated non-muslims during the civil war of lebanon, it's tough to find what you want. The whole civil war was about the christian factions vs the palestinian factions, with different entites in between with rapid shifting alliances.
There was no "Islamic Jihad" in Palestinian groups before the 90s. Religion wasn't a factor in Palestinian politics or militancy before Hamas, and Hamas only became a big player during the second intifada in the 2000s.
I understand you are from Lebanon and from a sectarian background, but that's maybe partly why you have a biased understanding of the groups, ideologies and foreign players involved. You may want to read some background on the history and the conflict from some other sources maybe starting with [1]. Palestinian militancy played a big role, but their religion did not and they were not trying to ethnically cleanse Lebanon or establish a theocracy.
That's what I get for revealing my identity and sharing my stories. I'm told by strangers hiding behind their anonymous username that my views are "biased". Well, yeah, all views are "biased". Does it mean that those stories are not true?
Lebanon was divided around ethnic lines all throughout the war. On one hand, christian militias. On the other hand, palestinian militias. I know what they said about each other. I know how they killed and assassinated each other. I know how impossible it was to cross the line. I grew up there, I don't full remember the last years of the war, but I definitely remember the after-war and what people did afterwards.
Maybe it "just happens" that the Lebanese muslims sided with the 90+% muslim-palestians. But judged from living there for my whole life I might know that this isn't what they say. Not how they saw each other. The Lebanese muslims sided with the palestinians because of a percieved shared identity. Call it pan-arabism, call it whatever fancy term you want.
I am NOT saying that middle eastern christians are perpetually persecuted or that coexistence with muslims isn't possible. I'm not saying that the situation is the same today in 2022. I'm saying that at one specific moment in history, in one specific country in the middle east, the muslims have attempted (and succeeded at) toppling a non-muslim government that was seen as pro-west-anti-arab.
And to be clear, I agree with you that Lebanon was not a solid nation, was gonna implode anyway, and was dealing with internal conflict long before Palestine was a thing.
> There was no "Islamic Jihad" in Palestinian groups before the 90s.
You didn't even check your own link I guess. That group's first attack was in 1984 when they operated out of Egypt and in the south of Israel/Palestine. Not a single one of their attacks happened in Lebanon during the civil war. Their presence in Lebanon starts in 1989, at the end of the civil war, and they have to this day not attacked a Lebanese target.
This confirms the point I've been communicating this entire thread that religion only became a driving force in Palestinian politics and militancy in the 1990s and Palestinian Islamism was not a factor in the Lebanese civil war.
> radical Islamist Palestinians who had left Palestine and wanted an Islamic state in Lebanon
This is false and misrepresents Palestinian movements in the pre-1990s era and their objectives in Lebanon. That is all I wanted to point out.
I understand now what you are saying. I don't agree or disagree. Honestly I don't know enough about the topic.
See, for middle eastern, words like "muslim" or "chrisitans" or "jews" doesn't represent your spiritual beliefs. It represents ethnic belonging. To put it in a western perspective, your religion is not a mutable characteristic. I'm born "christian", but my level of belief in Jesus Christ has nothing to do with it.
You're saying the factions that fought in Lebanon didn't emphasize a islamist rhetoric until the 90s. From what I know from the earlier days of the war, there was a lot of talk of pan-arabism and arabic identity, not talk of an Islam nation, so what you're saying sounds plausible.
But from our middle eastern perspective, lebanese muslims allied themselves to other muslims from syria and palestine to topple the christian-led government. I was communicating the point that the factions involved were based on ethnicity.
People picture "wars" like soldiers in battlefields and there was some of that. But a LOT of the Lebanese war was undisciplined militiamen mass killing villages based on ethnic lines. On both sides. Plenty of massacres in christian villages because they were christians. Plenty of massacres in muslim villages because they were muslim. From our point of view, we saw was christian and muslims killing each other.
> radical Islamist Palestinians who had left Palestine and wanted an Islamic state in Lebanon
The first time I read that quote, I didn't react to the words "radical Islamist", but read "palestinians had left palestine and wanted a state in lebanon". I guess this shows my bias after all :D
Now I'm curious what caused the change in the palestinian rhetoric. I'll try to read some more about it. Thanks for opening my eyes to this.
I would say the trend started before the 90s but it became apparent in the 90s.
It started in the 70s, before that all the islamist political groups were heavily repressed by Nasser and different nationalist leaders in the region, Sadat realignment, the Islamic revolution in Iran, and the commercialization of oil in the gulf countries opened the Pandora box for the different(and sometimes warring) groups inspired by different interpretations of Islam.
And didn't the House of Saud invest heavily in Islamist groups as a counterweight to the Arab Nationalists and to Iranian-style Islamic revolutionary influence?
> Late capitalism is certainly bad enough, with its explosive cocktail of climate change, inequality, police brutality and the deadly pandemic.
To me this says "we're at the late capitalism stage, and we're dealing with a cocktail of ..."
Regarding police brutality specifically, it's not hard for me to believe that's a symptom of what they're labelling neo-feudalism. Police aren't going around beating up the ruling class. There's probably a direct correlation between where you are on the social ladder and your chances of being a victim of police brutality. That's what you'd expect of a feudal society.
I think the sentence is just sloppy and the author himself doesn't quite know if he's talking about characteristics of late capitalism or just current events which happen to be occurring in the context of late capitalism.
Software Engineers are generally intelligent people.
Intelligent animals need stimulation or they get bored and depressed.
I think collectively, "let's move to Rust" is at least partially because we're not challenged enough by writing the same CRUD app for the 20th time in the same language we've been using for the last 5-10 years, and we want to leave our mark in a new ecosystem by implementing whatever is missing.
Some people want to optimise for "fun/exciting/different" while others seem to be aiming for "known/just works, incidentally boring".
We probably need to find the right middle; how do we keep it fun and challenging while keeping it simple and maintainable.
On the web backend side, I find that rust has a nice future in support of other backend. considering the difficulty to manage websocket in PHP or memory with NodeJs.
