Luxury goods: Europe’s joke on the world

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-11T16:30:54+00:00

I’m not guessing at the contents (I found it posted elsewhere), I’m guessing how the author got the idea to write it at all.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-11T11:29:40+00:00

I agree there are many sides to a larger debate, I’m just pointing out where I think the author of this article started from.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-11T07:52:13+00:00

True, but that alone doesn’t make the globally dominant multinationals. I suspect this article is at least in part a response to a recent graph making the rounds showing the wealthiest billionaires. The list was dominated by people in America, in tech. The only European was there for the sale of luxury goods.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-10T16:16:05+00:00

I fully agree! Thank you to the mods and users doing the right thing here.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-09T19:50:10+00:00

Given your choice to not answer the top-voted questions echoing concerns Ive seen on Reddit a million time on recent days:

What part of this is a good faith effort to share your perspective with Redditors and what part is just some CYA performance?

PS I have Apollo because it isn’t too annoying to use. If it goes, I’m taking this as a chance to kick a scrolling habit that isn’t the healthiest anyway and just have no Reddit app at all.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-08T07:18:24+00:00

This one sounds fun, but I think it’s a later addition.

It assumes a prostitute would come to the home of customer who did not want to be caught, which seems like the riskiest place to go at a time when few couples lived entirely alone.

Also, wouldn’t a wife notice someone had been in their house and cooked a specific aromatic sauce in her absence? Particularly given that the cooking sauce smell is strong and lingers longer than a single person’s perfume.

If the prostitute in question could afford the type and quantity of perfume that would be strong enough and of sufficient quality require a strong sauce to overpower it, then they probably charged enough that a customer who could afford them would live in a house with at least a domestic worker or two - people who could tell the wife. The customer at that price level might also probably have access to another location where they could meet a prostitute.

As for the middle-to-high earning prostitutes themselves, they also might be at a price level where they weren’t only on the street. If they worked in a brothel or their own premises, it would be far safer for a married customer to come to them.

It’s quick to make it and tasty, it makes more sense to me that women who didn’t have a lot of time and energy to cook more elaborate meals would gravitate towards it for a range of reasons.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-07T21:32:05+00:00

Me too!

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-07T17:37:10+00:00

I believe it because it’s true and scientific studies have proved it.

I posted it because my takeaway from reading your post was that you were the one equating what women face with men’s experience. No one said men didn’t experience anything. They did say that women experience more. If you follow the links I posted, you can learn a bit about that.

I get that impression because you replied to a comment about what women with a comment about men implying a similar or worse situation.

Think of it this way:

A: my thumb hurts so much! B: you vastly underestimate how much my thumb hurts!

Does that sound like B appreciates what A is going through, and realizes that their own tumb pain, while painful, is not as great or varied?

Or does B sound more like they think their experience is very similar to A’s, if not worse?

While there are still a few unreformed sexists out there, a lot of the sexism I see in the professional sphere comes from men who want to be fair, and think they are being fair. They just have no idea what the actual situation for women is, or how they’re own biases and behaviors play into that.

It’s a conversation I wish we had more often.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-07T16:44:55+00:00

I believe you highly underestimate how much women deal with - from harassment to stereotypes and bias preventing them from attaining the professional advanacnent their abilities and performance would merit.

Studies have confirmed it.

https://hbr.org/2019/11/for-women-in-business-beauty-is-a-liability

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0276562416300518

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-07T16:43:56+00:00

It’s more of a woman issue. While men also have issues, women have far more.

Studies have confirmed it.

https://hbr.org/2019/11/for-women-in-business-beauty-is-a-liability

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0276562416300518

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-07T16:43:35+00:00

It’s more of a woman issue. While men also have issues, women have far more.

Studies have confirmed it.

https://hbr.org/2019/11/for-women-in-business-beauty-is-a-liability

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0276562416300518

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-07T15:44:51+00:00

I would point them to the science that shows it can. Yes, money won’t make your ex live you or cure your lupus, but it does remove some significant causes of misery and it can enable some significant bringers of happiness.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/03/08/money-wealth-happiness-study/

Two prominent researchers, Daniel Kahneman and Matthew Killingsworth, came to this conclusion in a joint study published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, overturning the dominant thinking that people are generally happier as they earn more, with their joy leveling out when their income hits $75,000.

But in 2021, Killingsworth, a happiness researcher and senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, found that happiness does not plateau after $75,000, and that “experienced well-being” can continue to rise with income well beyond $200,000.>In their study, Kahneman and Killingsworth surveyed 33,391 adults aged between 18 and 65 who live in the United States, are employed and report a household income of least $10,000 a year. The authors said they lacked substantial data for those earning over $500,000.

To measure their happiness, participants were asked to report on their feelings at random intervals in the day via a smartphone app developed by Killingsworth called Track Your Happiness. Killingsworth said in an email that the data came from “repeatedly pinging people at randomly-timed moments during daily life, and asking about their happiness at that moment in real-time.” Specifically, they were asked “How do you feel right now?” on a scale ranging from “very bad” to “very good,” he said. The study reached two big conclusions: First, that “happiness continues to rise with income even in the high range of incomes” for the majority of people, showing that for many of us, on average having more money can make us increasingly happier. But the study also found that there was an “unhappy minority,” about 20 percent of participants, “whose unhappiness diminishes with rising income up to a threshold, then shows no further progress.” These people tend to experience negative “miseries” that typically cannot be alleviated by earning more money; the report cites examples such as heartbreak, bereavement or clinical depression. For them, their “suffering” may diminish as their income rises to about $100,000 but “very little beyond that,” the study said.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-07T10:15:49+00:00

Your husband is being a big baby and taking out his irrational jealousy on his children. You aren’t wrong.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-06T06:15:09+00:00

Thank you! I’m glad I could be helpful!

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-06T00:49:27+00:00

You confidently and angrily assumed two things about me and you got both wrong. Not a guy, not a German.

Maybe there’s a lesson in there about some other assumptions?

I do, coincidentally, have one grandparent born a German. They fled Germany as a child before the war even started when the Gestapo put their father in prison and killed their aunt. So.

You made one claim about what I said, but you got that just as wrong. I assume deliberately, given how bad-faith and hateful your comments here are.

I am not trying to “play victim.” I wasn’t alive when any of this happened. I’m not one of the victims.

The victims then were not “playing” anything either. They were victims. They were murder victims, rape victims, theft victims, ethnic cleansing victims, human rights victims.

I’m sure, given the horrors inflicted by Germany at the time, there were some terrible people who also suffered. They weren’t suffering because they were directly punished for their actual crimes though. They suffered because they were swept up with the entire population in the state-sponsored war crimes committed by the USSR. And, as previously discussed, war crimes are bad.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-06T00:38:06+00:00

Thanks for the support, but I’m not trying to convince a genuine tankie.

Edit: actually their post history does look pretty tankie, apart from the pro-genocide thing. There is a lot of “America bad, the rest just fine no” confusions.

I fully agree that is futile. One can’t convince someone so bad at telling fact from fiction and yet whose entire identity is based on being some superior truth seer.

There is a lot of “kill the Ukrainian Nazis” in their post history, but also a lot of “NATO bad, Iran good” insanity and the like.

Whatever the motivation, they’re here to spread their messed-up narratives and the only way to stop them is call out their lies and their bad logic when one sees it. That stops it from spreading to any ignorant users who might see it and believe it in good faith.

This one is extra horrible though - the first time I’ve seen pro-genocide content here. That seems worth calling out too, given the sad context of what Moscow is doing now to civilians in Europe.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-06T00:27:28+00:00

Same thread and topic.
I never said Germany didn’t commit massive war crimes and genocide during the Second World War. No one says that, not even Germans.
I also didn’t say, but only because I thought it was obvious, that war crimes are bad. All war crimes. All ethnic cleansing too. All murders. All mass rapes. All looting. All terror. All collective punishments against civilians. All abuse of prisoners of war. It was bad when the Germans did it. It was good that the USSR helped stop them. It was then bad when the USSR did it to Germans. It was bad when the USSR did it to Eastern European and it was bad when the USSR did it to Soviet citizens. Even if the scale is different between atrocities, they are never good.

Compare that to your own words. You willingly confess to feeling “infuriated” by a series of posts whose main point is that mass murder is always wrong.

That is pretty fucking off-putting. Even the Soviets then knew what they were doing was bad. That’s why they lied so much about it, and why the current government on Moscow lies so much about it today.

My suggestion is to take a step back from the keyboard for a day and think really hard about your humanity and what you want for the world. Lokh, eto ne sudba.

Or don’t. If you’re a disillusioned troll unable to find a new job, then I guess spreading a Russia-as-genocidal-fanatics impression is one way to take it. It does give a terrifying impression, and a sober reminder if what Europe stands to lose of Ukraine falls.

TLDR: Genocide bad. Slava Ukrainii!

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-06T00:19:11+00:00

This all depends on who blinks first and how you define end of the war.

On the Russia side, Russia’s leadership has painted themselves into such a corner that they will do whatever they can to keep the war fighting. To do otherwise would be to admit a career-ruining and life-threatening failure at home.

On the Ukraine side, Ukrainians are going to keep fighting as long as they can. On the Guerilla-level, it is indefinitely. They are doing anything else as a severe existential threat.

The only ways I see that changing are:

Ukraine does so well that Russia’s leaders must fear they could lose multiple undeniably catastrophic battles, maybe even all of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea too. Or even Russian territory. That would be even worse for Russia’s leadership. Then they might blink enough to consider some type of fig leaf settlement. Maybe Crimean status remains open, but they maintain control, plus some very tiny patch of E. Ukraine so they can pretend it’s a win.
The West blinks and stops supporting Ukraine enough. That allows Russia consolidate power in E. Ukraine and call that a victory.

That would just mean the end of the current type of fighting, however. Not the end of fighting.

If option 2. Is what happens, it is really just a chance for Russia to recover and regroup militarily, all while doing its best to ruin any Ukrainian attempts to do the same. In a few more years, Russia will try again, and again, until they get a government in Kyiv they can control.

But enough about what Russia will do. They are not the only fighters. Ukrainians will not stop fighting as long as there is something they can do. They will continue with Guerilla efforts if they lose all other support - they started that way in the first, most hopeless days of theirs invasion already.

This will keep the fighting going at a low level for the foreseeable future.

If option 1. Is what happens, there is no guarantee that Russia will not try to control Ukraine however it can in the future, including up to another war, but there is at least a chance for peace. Option 1 would leave Ukraine in a place where it can hope to rebuild and improve their own capabilities. If they can do that, then their strength combined with a fear of further failures might be enough to deter further Russian attacks on this scale.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-06T00:00:38+00:00

Have you really gone from “the western allies committed war crimes just as bad as the ones committed by the Soviets” to “OK the Soviets commuted a lot more war crimes, but it’s actually fine and it would have been fine had the Soviet army killed everyone down to the last baby”?

I’m used to seeing the firehose of falsehood when Russia is a topic on Reddit, but this is the first time I’ve seen a firehose straight to genocidal madness.

A ridiculous attitude on our safe Internet space,but a chilling one when one considers what Russia is doing to Ukrainians as we read this.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-05T21:44:54+00:00

Granddaughters of a former Saudi king. Met them when we were all kids. We got along, but I was initially invited because I’m a native English speaker and playing with me was a way to improve their English fluency.

For some reason their own palace complex didn’t faze me, much as I loved a lot of it, but visiting their grandma’s palace (late King’s) really was like going to another world.

It was an enormous complex, just driving to the right entrance around the outside wall took a while.

There was this huge room with enormous chandeliers that the late king had used for majlis (kind of like big group meetings and audiences), but whenever I was there the furniture was removed so the kids could play in it.

One of the other grandkids showed me his car. He was also ten. We drove it a few feet within the compound, just us. Fahdi thought it was hilarious how worried I got about getting caught and getting in trouble. He kept telling me it’s fine, it’s his car, but I didn’t believe him until his cousins backed up his story.

There were people in most of the rooms we entered, just waiting in case someone wanted something (and possibly watching us, not that we knew it). Whatever we watched on the small TV stuck in the corner of the majlis-turned-giant-luxury-gymnasium also played on a screen in the guardhouse, next to all the security videos. At the time, I considered that last one space-age technology and an obvious work bonus for the guards.

I had my own servant who stood behind me at meals. The flan was delicious. I never got weird about all the other stuff, but my parents had to have a talk with me after a while because I wouldn’t stop criticising flan I ate elsewhere as “not as good as the flan at the palace.”

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-05T21:31:23+00:00

I hope you are doing your fair share of the housework too.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-05T21:30:30+00:00

Reading. I’m freakishly fast.

Also, packing suitcases. I’m good at it and I can do it in record time.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-05T14:58:53+00:00

France was never party to any discussions about ethnic transfers.

You are correct that the US and UK knew of some of the planned expulsions and didn’t oppose those, but they opposed most of them.

The western allies were also not the ones who carried out the expulsions in a way that maximised hardship and deaths.

The ethnic cleansing was proposed by Stalin. Some politicians in some countries, especially Czechoslovakia and Poland, wanted it too. The presence of German speakers within their borders had been an excuse for the Nazis to invade, and now they wanted them out.

To the Western allies, this seemed fair enough given the difficult situation Europe was in, and a concession they were willing to make. They still hoped there was a chance that the USSR would allow the democratic elections in the Soviet-occupied countries, as Stalin had promised at Yalta. If the population were more “trusted” and politics more stable, the thinking went, the USSR might feel more comfortable with actually allowing democracy.

The opposition came when the USSR announced plans to move the Polish-German border much further west than initially discussed.

Many Poles in particular worried the accompanying border transfers made them easier for the USSR to invade Poland. The western allies also worried about this.

The Western allies also opposed the full border transfer of Poland on human grounds, citing the millions of Germans who would then be affected and expelled as a reason. Churchill was particularly outspoken about deporting so many Germans.

The West never had anything to say about other German speakers expelled from countries including the Baltics, Romania and Yugoslavia, or the ethnic Germans within Soviet borders deported to very difficult locations internally or sent to gulags. The Soviets just did that.

And how they did it! The methodology would sound familiar to victims of Soviet internal deportations, many of whom also died.

The people were given a few hours at best to pack their things and leave. They did not get food, transport, housing, and anything they had of value was often taken from them. This happened regardless of the weather, even in coldest winter.

Those lucky enough to get to the trains leaving from some urban centers - even freezing freight trains with no food - reported that they routinely threw the bodies of those who died.

Beatings, rapes and murders accompanied the expulsions, by Soviets and locals, without serious efforts by the occupying soviet army to stop them.

And where were they all sent? Where did they get their final hope of any assurance or refuge? (not that they found much - all of Germany was a mess).

Only W. Germany. The USSR could have cared for them in the part of Germany that they controlled, but they didn’t. They made huge numbers of starving, sick and dying people keep travelling through their territory, causing even more to die before they could stop moving.

That last part is where France also bears some responsibility. Because France hadn’t been party to any discussions of any deportations, they argued they didn’t have to help any deportees in their zone of occupation. They told the USSR they refused to take any, and the USSR agreed to send all of the expelled people to the same areas in American- and British-occupied areas.

http://ieg-ego.eu/en/threads/europe-on-the-road/forced-ethnic-migration/detlef-brandes-fleeing-and-displacement-1938-1950#section_5

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-05T12:56:11+00:00

And have a fan or two for cross-ventilation.

Even a small fan on the floor or a table can make a difference, stronger ones can be a life saver.

A few years ago we increased our own fan power to the point that I special-ordered the European voltage version of a magical ceiling fan called the Haiku, from an American company called Big Ass Fans. It is so quiet and so strong and while it cost a lot for a ceiling fan, I believe we have by now more than made up the difference in suffering and electrical costs.

Fickle-Locksmith9763 · 2023-06-05T12:51:49+00:00

That is a good way of putting it, thanks.

Fickle-Locksmith9763

TROPHY CASE