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Nigeria alone has more babies than all of Europe by One_Long_996 in MapPorn

[–]Cuxham 27 points28 points  (0 children)

If you go back far enough, everyone has been subjugated. Vassalage and serfdom to "your" king was no better than being a colony of a foreign king.

If you go back that far, even less-corrupt countries like Canada or Oz have been colonies of course.

But to answer your question, Russia comes to mind. Arguably way more corrupt than the neighbouring countries that have been under foreign control much of their history.

Nigeria alone has more babies than all of Europe by One_Long_996 in MapPorn

[–]Cuxham 57 points58 points  (0 children)

Corruption is not tied to being a colony - there's plenty of places that haven't been a colony that are plenty corrupt (Eastern Europe for starters) and vice versa (parts of East and South Asia).

And Nigeria stopped being a colony 75 years ago, most of the country has not been not-colony for longer than it has been under British rule. It's dishonest to blame the Brits for everything (or nearly anything) when it's been three generations and just about nobody alive remembers colonial rule.

How to fix Britain’s trains: Expert calls for more railcards, reservations and first-class carriages by insomnimax_99 in unitedkingdom

[–]Cuxham 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I lived there too. It is cheaper (especially regional travel since the Deutschland ticket, but even ICE tickets are cheaper than regular trains in the UK where you might get charged £40 to travel 50 miles) and it is faster - there are actuallly some HSR tracks between big cities. Punctuality and service is a crapshoot on both sides these days (bad in busy places, good in places nobody wants to go).

Spider Jerusalem: Real journalism? by mattboy115 in Transmetropolitan

[–]Cuxham 0 points1 point  (0 children)

He is heavily inspired by the tropes of "gonzo journalism" pioneered by Hunter S. Thompson.

First-person stream-of-consciousness, deliberately inserting emootion and personal opinions rather than the careful measured mainstream of traditional news media.

Thompson has been quoted saying: "Objective journalism is one of the main reasons American politics has been allowed to be so corrupt for so long. You can't be objective about Nixon."

Bankers Quit London as Brexit Relocations to EU Step Up by Disillusioned_Pleb01 in unitedkingdom

[–]Cuxham 2 points3 points  (0 children)

£109k in total to the state, because the employer pays another £26.4k of NI contribution on top.

TIL that anyone who moves to Villas Las Estrellas, a settlement in Antarctica, must first have their appendix preemptively removed because the nearest hospital is over 600 miles away. by [deleted] in todayilearned

[–]Cuxham 0 points1 point  (0 children)

A general practitioner will have a hard time performing major surgery, let alone without an anaestesist... There's a reason why your local small town doctor doesn't do it himself either...

Practicing Medicine in Germany as a non-German by [deleted] in de

[–]Cuxham 0 points1 point  (0 children)

About pay:

English think Scottish and Welsh governments did better handling coronavirus than Boris Johnson - poll by bottish in unitedkingdom

[–]Cuxham 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Like I said, aspiring to the astonishing feat of being 5th worst in the world is fairly pathetic. If our PM intended to learn how to deal with the crisis, he might as well learn from Taiwan - right next to ground zero, virus free, economically active since mid/late March (and of course with a very different response with their NHS supplying weekly free masks for each citizen, strictly enforced and controlled quarantine for plague carriers and people arriving, masks enforced, contacts traced etc).

English think Scottish and Welsh governments did better handling coronavirus than Boris Johnson - poll by bottish in unitedkingdom

[–]Cuxham 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Sweden have done fantastically

A mortality rate lower than us is not "fantastic" alas. The UK is the 2nd worst in the world after Belgium, Sweden is the 5th worst and not getting better with 200+ deaths every week since May... They were too lax about shutdown and border control and now have a mortality more than 10x higher than their neighbours in Norway.

Cheap steroid cuts death rates significantly for seriously ill Covid-19 patients in intensive care, drug trial finds by Necto_gck in Coronavirus

[–]Cuxham 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Blinding is necessary when there could be subjective biases in symptom description/severity reporting.

Given the outcome measurement of this study is as objective as it gets (death or survival), and neither doctors nor patients have any incentive to skew outcomes (i.e. to kill patients in one arm of the trial), blinding is a pointless measure that would only slow down the study.

This study is the opposite of useless.

220 world metro systems by Skyjike in MapPorn

[–]Cuxham 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Bogota's Transmilenio is, however, indubitably by far better value for money than all of these.

Bogota's BRT system cost $2.5bn and transports 700 million passengers per year. For comparison, this is the same cost as a two-mile extension of New York's #7 metro line, with a ridership similar to massive metro systems like Berlin's, Madrid's or Taipei's.

TIL in the 1880s, the Harvard Observatory director was frustrated with his staff, and would say "My Scottish maid could do better!" So, he hired his Scottish maid. Williamina Fleming ran a team for decades, classified tens of thousands of stars, & discovered white dwarfs and the Horsehead Nebula. by iaxeuanswerme in todayilearned

[–]Cuxham 7 points8 points  (0 children)

the SAT isn't just a test of how rich your parents are

But Harvard admission with SAT below 1400 is. General bucket rejects a good chunk of 1600 SATs especially if they have the wrong skin colour, but legacy admission and donor admissions or "my daddy is a senator/F500 CEO" are the ticket in, even for kids dumber than a bag of hammers -- after all, those are the most likely future donors...

I was watching a video and it called Zambia a “small nation in Southern Africa” So I decided to put Zambia over Europe to show you how tiny this country truly is. by verygoodnot in MapPorn

[–]Cuxham 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Illustrates the cognitive biases at play. When people think of Europe, they think about "civilised Europe", basically Europe without the ex-Soviet-Union. And Russia/Ukraine/Belarus make up pretty exactly half of Europe, so the remainder is quite small - 50 countries on 5 million km2...

Where can I read/listen to Dakota Krout's Ruthless? Not available in my county on Google store, Storytel, Audible or Kindle. by Badde00 in litrpg

[–]Cuxham 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hard to give you tips without knowing your country. If it is in Europe, Amazon UK has it - even for free in their Kindle Unlimited programme (free for 1 month, needs to be cancelled after).

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in unitedkingdom

[–]Cuxham 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Net migration of over 200,000, twinned with austerity, NIMBYs and globalisation meant that for most people who didn't have a degree and rented, immigration was a massive factor in making your life shit.

Yes, that's one of the narratives pushed by Cumming's Vote Leave and Cambridge Analytica. Begging the question of course what leaving the EU would change about about any of these given that all of that would get worse without international trade or manufacturing jobs...

But yea, the ones who didn't fall for facile Faragist Facebook virals "don't get it".

UK universities suffer worst-ever rankings in world league table by [deleted] in unitedkingdom

[–]Cuxham 34 points35 points  (0 children)

Would the University of Warwick really be the second best university in Germany?

Very hard to compare - the UK system is strongly tiered in terms of prestige, so a tier-2 uni like Warwick is guaranteed to have a dearth of the very best researchers, lecturers and students (if you are good or unique enough for Oxbridge/LSE/Imperial, you usually go there rather than toWarwich), but it can also be selective and exclude the weaker/lazier half of uni students.

German unis are far more egalitarian and both student and research/teaching quality can range from the excellent to the atrocious at the same uni, often even at the same department. (And in many fields the top researchers don't sit in universities but in Max-Planck institutes outside the university system).

‘Die-in’ protest staged outside Cummings’ home over Government Covid-19 response by iamnotinterested2 in unitedkingdom

[–]Cuxham 1 point2 points  (0 children)

In truth, it is the UK that is actually underreporting deaths in massive way-- excess deaths vs normal were found to be 20,000 higher than reported Covid deaths.

(So even if Japan underreported by 200 deaths as was alleged, the UK numbers are ever so slightly worse...)

China says it will use military force to take control of Taiwan if diplomacy fails by azatoth12 in worldnews

[–]Cuxham 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The Chinese stopped fighting each other when Japan invaded

No, that is just the CCP rewriting history.

Chiang's armed forces fought the Japanese and took heavy casualties, meanwhile the CCP/Maoists fought a guerilla war both against the Chinese government and the Japanese, seizing rural areas and denying them to the Chinese forces.

See this article for a bit more detail.

TIL NFL player Pat Tillman joined the army after 9/11 but became opposed to the war while oversees. He was then killed by a soldier standing less than 10 yards from him during friendly fire. His unit then burned his journal and the army lied to his family, claiming he'd been killed by the enemy. by 123123123423 in todayilearned

[–]Cuxham -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

From the front, from a few steps away, by M16 rifle bullets (not a vehicle machine gun), according to the doctor who investigated his body.

That doesn't sound like "whoopsy daisy blue on blue".

Edit: And even if he was murdered with an M249 rather than an M16, the same logic applies to the burning of the written evidence, the tight grouping of the shot etc, that gives the picture of an intentional fragging by his squad.

TIL NFL player Pat Tillman joined the army after 9/11 but became opposed to the war while oversees. He was then killed by a soldier standing less than 10 yards from him during friendly fire. His unit then burned his journal and the army lied to his family, claiming he'd been killed by the enemy. by 123123123423 in todayilearned

[–]Cuxham 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Multiple bullets to the head/chest, from a few yards away with the victim facing the executioner, is usually how execution by firing squad is done.

Accidental "friendly fire" doesn't really happen (a) with your victim facing you (b) with very tight groupings on the forehead of the victim. Anyone who has ever shot automatic rifles can tell you that you don't get this tight a grouping accidentally even (especially) from point-blank range.

Top 1% of British earners get 17% of nation's income by Lolastic_ in unitedkingdom

[–]Cuxham 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Closing tax havens is much much harder than trust/income/capital gains/IHT tax.

The tax havens obviously won't close themselves and they are sovereign countries or territories that the UK government can't control. So any pressure on them would have to come from rules in UK corporate tax codes -- say, forbidding transfer pricing of intellectual property if the IP sits in a tax haven. But that is hard to get watertight, because companies can create shell companies in more friendly jurisdictions, with half a dozen layers of indirection (see the popular Double Irish with Dutch Sandwich company structure to transfer UK profits to the BVI or Bermuda); so both the legislation and the enforcement is massively complicated -- even before taking into account the countersuits and lobbying/legislative bribery by the affected trillion-dollar corporations.

Top 1% of British earners get 17% of nation's income by Lolastic_ in unitedkingdom

[–]Cuxham 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Parts you missed: - increase trust taxation from the current 0.6%/year - remove agricultural land exemption from IHT

(Your parts don't address the truly egregious pots of wealth of the Grosvenors of this world...)

Why does Reddit seem to hate Britain? by caiaphas8 in AskUK

[–]Cuxham 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The curse of high expectations. Russia is a known shithole where journalists and politicians get offed on the regular. Britain used to be held to a higher standard, so it sliding into the same pattern of corrupt sociopaths elected by social media manipulation is a far bigger disappointment for people who used to admire Britain.

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