How do you verify a fact? Do you travel to the location and interview the locals? Or read scientific papers in various fields, including their own references, to validate summaries published by news sources? At some point you need to just trust that someone is telling the truth.
It's probably for the best that chat interfaces avoid making direct HTTP calls to sources at run-time to confirm that they don't 404 - imagine how much extra traffic that could add to an internet ecosystem which is suffering from badly written crawlers already.
(Not to mention plenty of sites have added robots.txt rules deliberately excluding known AI user-agents now.)
In 1000 years Sweden went from a Viking culture to an egalitarian, tolerant, multicultural society. Just imagine how much change you can have in the next 1000 years. 50 years ago you guys had basically an apartheid and women’s place was the kitchen.
35 years ago South Africa had the apartheid, and now they outrank the US on a The Economist's Democracy Index [1]. So yeah, things move fast.
Nitpick: The US Voting Rights Act became law in 1965 [2], which is more like 60 years ago. Not sure if that's what you were getting at with "basically an apartheid" but it was the closest concrete landmark near your 50 year timeline.
The problems with that argument are that first, the Viking culture was mostly rural and agricultural, the raiding and pillaging was a tiny side-effect that mostly happened during times of economic hardship, not as a way of life ... and that today's Sweden is rapidly recessing back to a less-tolerant, anti-multicultural society for many reasons. You also conveniently ignore the much more bloody 'military superpower' phase in the 1600s.
It’s not Ragnar Lodbrok turning into ABBA. It’s a mostly peaceful peasant society getting tossed around by history until it became a mostly peaceful service economy - and the shaking never really stopped.
History is not a straight progress line. Ask the Romans.
If you really want to be accurate about history in what is now Sweden, let’s also mention the horrific mass graves discovered in Birka and surroundings which seems to imply that massacring whole villages, women and children included , was commonplace even before Viking times. The later imperialist period seems less brutal to me.
Pre-agricultural societies are generally much more brutal because you need a lot of territory to feed relatively few people. Agriculturalists can conquer other people and make them work for them in a way that doesn't scale for hunters-gatherers. The consequence is that the combatant/noncombatant distinction is much more blurry, and genocide is often an explicit goal of the war.
Yes! It annoys me to no end when people pretend that time is developing us into a perfect image - we're just the latest generation in a long string of improvements. Making it seem like development is predetermined.
Ask a medieval peasant and he wouldnt even be able to describe how his life is different from his father's.
Yeah I think I should have been more clear that countries change a lot and sometimes even revert back to a much earlier state … it just sounds funny to me how the country of bloody thirsty warriors that pillaged faraway countries is now maybe the most peaceful place on Earth… at least if you ignore the bombings and gang culture that has developed in the last decade or so, but those are imported from elsewhere, which of course doesn’t mean it won’t become a feature of the country for decades ahead which may bring back some of the image of ruthlessness associated with the old times.
I agree with you. The main problem is that we don't have many politicians that want to tackle immigration in a serious and responsible way. So people end up giving votes to the far right.
> rules do not apply to war, Geneva Convention notwithstanding.
I don't know what so-called international law says, but if you're going to try to apply rules to war, it seems pretty essential that they apply to all sides or no sides, otherwise you create an exploitable situation that's ripe for abuse. The reward for following the rules should be that the other parties in the conflict follow them, too. The punishment for breaking them should be that the other parties no longer follow them.
The rules allow for wars. They don't prevent killing every combatant the other side has. The two sides agree to have a war, then their combatants kill one another until one side gives up or runs out of people to draft as combatants. The rules prohibit killing various classes of noncombatants, with some situational exceptions.
The supposed force behind the Geneva Convention is the threat of being tried for war crimes after the dust settles.
If you are Putin, and can accept never traveling to a list of western countries again, that threat is toothless.
But if you are literally defeated (as opposed to being forced to retreat from Ukraine, the most anyone could hope for in the invasion), it could weigh heavily on you. Or not. Politics are stupid.
that’s a very manichean view. War ist all shades of (horrible) gray and you can have rules, a lot, none, everything is possible. Don’t know what you mean with “Geneva Convention notwithstanding” here, it’s exactly the kind of rules that _can_ exist in times of war – or be completely ignored on both sides.
It’s not because it’s war time that one should just resign, shrug and accept any atrocities. The less atrocities during war time, that more chances for a stable peace afterward.
Most of those buildings are so poor you probably wouldn’t even consider one outside the top 10% of the world for free assuming you want a first world kind of accommodation. Source: I’ve seen the world.
You can get to 70k USD in India?? That’s approaching European salaries for a Senior Dev. Lots of Indians seem to come to Europe for far lower salaries.
well I was saying if you are working for 10 years sure.
I can only speak for my brother's company in that sense that if he works there for many years, their chain of ranking would make him a partner in the company (sort of like how layer firms get) and then he would get a flat huge commission on every project he takes and there are some 10 lakhs inr or 12 grand usd as an example and so like it isn't hard to get some really juicy money later down the pipeline.
Though like what I am saying 70k is for like genuinely the most top like 0.0001% or almost never unless for the extremely top official with shit ton of experience like 10-15-20 years
On the other hand, its rather comparatively easy to take a remote job from US and do it from india to get the same 70k which I have seen a hella lot more people do/ is the more practical approach for many.
I don't know but internally speaking 12 grand a year and even 60 grand seems small but its shit boat ton of money but still my mind compared it to the 120k salary guys of the beautiful united states and maybe that's why I overinflated some numbers.
if you have any questions, feel free to ask, I can uh refer to you to my brother if you have any doubts since I am currently in high school.
The EU has been like this for a long time. If it was going to become unaffordable to sustain it that would have happened years ago. Of course in the longer term anything could happen but I find it hard to believe it would happen because of the EU labor laws.
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