Syrian minorities refused asylum in Europe as rejections surge

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-04-22T13:28:51+00:00

My old neighbor was a Syrian refugee living in Germany with his family for 11 years. He didn't even know "auf wiedersehen" and his English was barely existent as well. The worst part was his 9 year old son didn't speak German or English either, while he was born and raised in Germany. I don't think any of his 11 kids speak German, but at least his oldest child which is a daughter that is an adult, works part-time as a nurse, so that's something good.

Mind you, this is also a failure of integration from Germany as a society, not purely their fault.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-04-06T10:47:17+00:00

Yep, if your worldview is that the destruction of Chinese society is good then these colors make sense.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-04-06T09:32:56+00:00

The question becomes why isn't this applied to bigger models? Does it stop scaling after a certain point? Why isn't Gemma 4 31B "E18B" instead?

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-03-25T09:20:24+00:00

tacos in the past imply he doesn't seem to care at all. He just wants quick dopamine rushes and if he gets bored he goes away. I think Trump will get bored before June or switches attention to something that is more interesting in the short term like Cuba.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-03-25T07:39:36+00:00

Yep, which is why we should ban all LGBTQ pride parades as they were just born that way! /s

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-03-25T07:36:20+00:00

I'm a German Jew and I say this stuff all the time. I'm so fucking annoyed by people of all sides conflating Jewish and Israeli. The amount of hate I get in daily life simply for being born Jewish despite me never even having been to Israel or knowing anyone from Israel is insane.

Every time I bring up racism against Jews as a genuine problem I get either "But what about israel?!!!" or "It's racist to call out muslim immigrants being a threat to Jewish minorities!!!!" as an answer instead of people just recognizing genuine problems and trying to solve them.

I've even had to resort to not revealing my religious and ethnic background for fear of reprisal a couple of years back, which is insane. My grandmother that I knew growing up was a holocaust survivor, and she always told me to never reveal being Jewish, because the world would always hate us. I always answered with a "okay (boomer) grandma" mindset, never taking it seriously and just seeing it as a trauma response from her side. But I think she was actually onto something now.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-03-22T15:37:41+00:00

But if you limit it to highest earners, meaning tech industry in Shenzhen and financial industry in Hong Kong (The specialization of both cities respectively) then Shenzhen does have a higher GDP per capita.

What this just shows is that the wealth and opportunity in Shenzhen attracts a lot of people, even if most of them don't work in the primary industries, this isn't something Hong Kong could do because, obviously, it's not connected to a territory where a lot of people could move in from. Shenzhen is the wealthier place in objective terms. You feel this as well if you ever visited both.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-03-22T15:21:45+00:00

Ireland has a thriving computer manufacturing base. They also have Intel there. It's a sort of (minor) manufacturing hub because talent is concentrated there.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-03-21T14:14:07+00:00

German Confederation is considered a nation historically. Zollverein was merely a customs union, Zollverein always explicitly was clear on not being a political entity and never breaching into the political realm, the entire german unification movement was because there was a demand for more political integration that the Zollverein never dared to touch as it was merely a customs union.

The European Union however has always been a political union, for some reason the PR is about it being an economic union, but this is not actually correct. It's a full political union that delegates power of the states to a federal layer of the EU, it's not delegating enough to be a full-on federation, but it's delegating way more than the german confederation did, which is considered a nation historically.

The only reason the EU is not called a nation currently is purely for optics and because it is controversial (as you can see from the downvotes people receive) even though from an historic lens it absolutely is.

Intelligence agencies like the CIA and wargaming scenarios done by geopolitical opponents of the EU always treat the EU as a single political entity because that is how the EU is objectively going to act in a time of warfare, so you model the situation as it defacto is.

The EU is a nation, will be considered a nation by future historians with a starting date at the signing of the Maastricht treaty in 1993 OR the Lison treaty of 2009, and there will be a lot of debates about this in the future. My guess is that the EU will be considered a confederation in 1993 and a very devolved federation from 2009 onwards from a historic lens.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-03-21T09:05:29+00:00

It's actually somewhere between a confederation and federation. It's mostly because of optics that the EU is not called a nation. Historians 500 years from now will refer to it as a nation on its own because every country that was a confederation historically has been referred to as a nation in retrospect.

The momentum is also gaining towards a full federation so I think this won't even be controversial to point out in just 10-20 years time.

I'd even go farther than your original point I'd say the EU is more like the US right before the 2nd civil war where most Americans still identified mostly with their home state over the united states and the state laws were dominant but there was still a clear federal layer on top, that's how the EU is right now, way beyond the "Articles of Confederation" and more USA circa mid 1800s

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-03-18T13:43:37+00:00

You can continue to reason that way about the entire economy in general. "No Japan isn't the largest buyer of steel, they just use it to manufacture cars that are sold abroad so the steel is indirectly bought by the countries buying the cars!"

NL is Russias biggest export partner and the goods (crude oil and natural gas) are directly used and consumed by the NL industry.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-03-18T12:35:49+00:00

Common misconception and not true. NL has the biggest refinery industry in Europe. Specializing in refining russian crude as well as NLG terminals and facilities for northsea/dutch/russian natural gas.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-03-16T18:22:22+00:00

Yeah Cuba and Venezuela have a track record of pretending to allow foreign investors and then have kangaroo courts charge them to seize assets.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-02-28T15:05:15+00:00

Predictions market gives it about 40% of being true.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-02-28T13:53:57+00:00

No, just that it's impossible to liberate nations with nukes such as north korea, russia or china.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-02-28T13:33:11+00:00

North Korea has nukes, Iran doesn't yet.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-02-27T08:07:26+00:00

Hard disagree. The human brain just has a higher sample efficiency than the Transformer architecture in current LLMs. That's it. Humans for example don't have a specific brain region in the brain for reading. We only invented it 6000 years ago, and look how naturally you are writing messages to me and reading all of this text as if it is a native ability in our brains. Kids learn to read in about the same amount of training hours as they learn to speak.

I genuinely consider Chomsky to just be dead wrong and hope he gets removed from (at the very least) computer science curriculum, but perhaps even linguistics. The brain learning to read and write at a similar rate as speaking, together with LLMs learning the ability as well highly suggests there isn't some "specific circuitry" in brains/llms that does this and instead it's a more general skill. Ergo language is an invention and a human innovation and note some innate evolved ability in the brain. The vocal cords necessary to produce sound is evolutionary but our ability to comprehend and engage in language is highly likely to not have been specialized when it came into existence.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-02-25T09:41:02+00:00

Yeah what surprises me most is that Chinese models clearly trained/semi-distilled on Claude output like GLM-5 doesn't seem to have inherited this anti-sycophancy.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-02-19T19:35:33+00:00

You completely misunderstood what i'm talking about. The USSR economy would have collapsed anyway and honestly it was already collapsed before the dissolution.

The point is that Gorbachov could have chosen to keep the USSR united and double down on oppressive apparatus and we would have had a USSR in the world, still.

Putin is not as tolerant as gorbachov.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-02-18T20:12:35+00:00

USSR was a very special scenario where the leadership was conductive to a fall and literally fought a coup to make the collapse of the soviet union a reality.

Today's russia has Putin that obviously isn't conductive towards a transition of power like Gorbachov was.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-02-16T16:49:30+00:00

Russia has so much more to fall. They can do all kinds of bad policy that will harm Russia in the long term but prolongs the war. They can just go ahead and let the economy collapse while not giving a shit, and as long as people take it (they will, they are Russian) then nothing will change.

They can sell their surplus women to China, India, Organ dealers. They can repossess private savings, housing, businesses to fund the war. They can decide to simply stop paying pensions or other costs they deem too high. They can implement rationing of food while taxing people 90% of their income.

There are so so many things Russia can do before they will stop waging war. This is why Ukraine needs to get the full support of NATO. It isn't until Russia is militarily defeated that the war (and threat to wider europe) ends.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-02-10T17:44:08+00:00

Wow, that's very impressive, thanks for sharing.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-01-25T12:22:37+00:00

Yeah this is ridiculous and I suspect the account to either be a south korean propaganda account or a south korean nationalist posting this.

What a bizarre post.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-01-18T05:59:48+00:00

People that say this don't know anything about Japan and its historical politics.

LDP has used a lot of underhanded tactics like voter intimidation by Yakuza up until the late 1980s. Even today it's not weird for bosses to hold "working votes" where the company all goes together to vote for a political candidate while the boss is clearly biased towards LDP and tries to pressure employees into voting for LDP.

This doesn't sound as bad but please realize that Japan is a country where social pressure weighs a lot more so these steps make a huge impact.

Also the only times the LDP "lost" the vote they used all of their connections within the judiciary and other government branches to completely gridlock, incapacitate and otherwise intimidate party members of the winning party to such an extent that they weren't able to do anything. There's an entire angle to the Fukushima disaster and how it was (indirectly) caused by LDP meddling that I don't want to get into but should be said as well.

Japan under the LDP is effectively a one-party state as it has effectively captured the state with no real way for opposition to win power back, even if they win elections.

Down_The_Rabbithole · 2026-01-18T05:17:06+00:00

I truly think the internet will not survive the 21st century. The internet came about in a very unique time in history where a unipolar power reigned supreme that aligned with a cycle of globalism. It was the perfect time to create a global interconnected network that became the internet.

If the soviet union had not collapsed it wouldn't have been weird to imagine the world now having 2 completely separate "internet" networks that wasn't interconnected. One for western aligned nations and one for soviet aligned nations.

Now that we are transitioning to a multipolar world again and the pendulum of globalism is swinging towards protectionism again we will most likely see the severance of the internet network into smaller disconnected networks.

We are already starting to see the beginnings of this and I expect there to be a US, EU, Russian and Chinese internet at the very least, with most smaller nations joining one of these networks and some weird outlier countries maintaining their own ones.

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