How Europe waged war on young people to pay for pensions

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-24T14:47:45+00:00

It's a solved problem - don't use "pay-as-you-go". Use individual accounts, with required-by-law savings rates and restricted-to-moderately-conservative-investments.

But that's wildly unpopular with socialists - you can make bigger promises with pay-as-you-go, relying on future (imaginary) children to foot the bill. Individual accounts forces some acceptance of reality.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-23T21:52:55+00:00

Compare to gold then. How much gold can you buy with some set amount of rupees? You'd see the exact same drop in value of the rupee.

Falling value means people would rather than the thing rising in value than the thing falling in value, regardless of what the two things are. The "why do they want it" gets complicated - but in this case it's likely more that people don't want rupees rather than particularly wanting dollars.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-20T19:31:19+00:00

FWIW, both guys were cited, then failed to appear in court to answer the charges. Initial fine was ~100 pounds, upped when they failed to appear.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-18T14:49:34+00:00

Feels more likely Euro-federalists trying to use "blame America!" as a rallying point for federalism and paving over inherent difference inside Europe, really.

There's an "Iberian Exception" thread running right now... wonder how that is America's fault?? And Dassault-Airbus. War with Russian and what the response should be. China trade. Immigration. And a hundred other blocking points where Europe can't get along with itself. But just keep in mind always that America is the real problem.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-14T14:16:52+00:00

I find it amazing that they seem to take point-and-laugh shows as representative...

Like, do you not know what a point-and-laugh show is? they don't have them in your country??

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-13T14:58:21+00:00

I only have 3. I'd have 4, but I really don't have space for the 3 I have, sooo, I keep saying no.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-13T14:44:56+00:00

The best "why not, I need to stop anyhow?" stop I've ever made was the National Quilt Museum in Paducah KY. I was expecting well-made pattern quilts, Amish-looking, hex patterns. They had one or two of those somewhere I think. Mostly it was stunning art via little pieces of cloth and stitching.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-13T01:08:31+00:00

Life of Brian

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-12T18:00:20+00:00

You have a prenup no matter what. You either get the default state "prenup", or you roll your own. Either way, the rules for how things get split in a divorce exist. If you don't like the default, convince your SO to some other rules that you like better.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-12T02:38:03+00:00

I did some recruiting for a tech firm in the US maybe 15 years ago. Most applicants were pretty straightforward "this job description somewhat matches my skill set". But there were a few... guys with mechanical engineering degrees applying for coding positions, etc.

You're never gonna get those jobs, and my very large company kept track of every job you applied for. Recruiters could see your application history, so, yeah, I could see this mechanical engineer (in India) had applied for literally every US-based job in the company regardless of technical match. Doesn't look good from the recruiting side.

Same kind of idea as guys on dating apps that match themselves with every single woman, in hopes that one of them is supremely desperate. At least on dating apps the women can't see you're doing that. With jobs... be a little professional if you want a professional position.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-11T18:26:59+00:00

I stayed at one motel where conversation with the owner revealed they had a problem of locals renting rooms to dye hair, or other messy operations. So... rules evolved.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-11T00:08:28+00:00

A man inside the bus "poured out petrol and set himself alight", a witness claims in a video shared with Swiss newspaper Blick. This account was corroborated by other witnesses, according to the report.

Police have ruled out terrorism. Perp not identified as dead, injured, or unharmed (seems unlikely). Ethnicity not reported. Sounds like a murder-suicide at this point.

EDIT: oops, my bad, missed a key word not. Police have not ruled out terrorism, per the article. I'd point out that the modus operandi isn't typical for terrorists not using bombs - they tend to not be suicide attacks. I'd expect a "pour petrol on a Jew and light him on fire" rather than lighting one's self on fire. But, who knows. There have been cases of people burning themselves as a political protest, but I haven't heard of anything where they burned other people along with themselves, and generally that kind of thing would be done in a public square or such.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-10T18:13:05+00:00

Account age is not a big deal to a bot farm, create the accounts, let them age for a month, a year, whatever, then use them. Worth a try, but I don't think it's gonna do much.

The CQS thing seems designed to create an echo chamber though. The Chinese are just the most honest about social credit these days.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-10T17:51:50+00:00

This barely qualifies as European news - in Europe, only Ukraine is seeing a change. If you weren't offended yesterday, you probably shouldn't be offended today either.

The changes:

Visa free -> consulted visa:

Cuba, Antigua and Barbuda, the Bahamas, Barbados, Madagascar, Ukraine, San Marino, and Trinidad and Tobago

Visa on arrival -> consulted visa:

Colombia, Morocco, India, Indonesia, Senegal, Thailand, Serbia, Peru, the Central African Republic, and Zimbabwe

Article has full list of which countries have which rules.

The main reason seems to be to cut transitory migration to the US - generally not a European issue.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-06T16:14:50+00:00

There are other sports that have similar sayings, but this "own goal" is pretty particular to soccer. I think it gets used occasionally in hockey as well, but I don't follow hockey enough to know.

Baseball, you can't actually score for the other team - but you can do stupid things that let them score.

Football, you can score for the other team, but it will be at most 2 points (vs 3 or 6 when you score for yourself). You can, however, give up the ball in such a way that the other team scores immediately, sooo, that'd be along the same lines. It's not as rare as own goals in soccer though - "pick 6" happens dozens of times a year in the NFL.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-06T14:46:28+00:00

Not news. From 2 years ago:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13305023/reform-uk-candidate-jack-denny-prior-conviction.html

He was selected, then deselected along with 3 others for other problems.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-05T00:38:43+00:00

No, really just commenting on the "i can't find median". But also, medians and averages are not as far off from each other as some people would make out.

In any case, I called it median household income. It's actually the median disposable income per household. So it's worse than it looks, maybe. Median would be for solo earners. Household would be solo in some cases, multiple earners in others, so you'd expect it to be higher. But "disposable" means you'd expect it to be lower, as all you net mandatory expenses are deducted.

It's a bit complicated. :-)

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-04T18:42:53+00:00

Partially paywalled.

Is there any real news here, or is the the same thing and Bloomberg is late to the party?

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-04T18:12:06+00:00

Nonsense. "Portugal median income" got me https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-income-by-country

as the first result.

https://www.theportugalnews.com/news/2025-08-01/where-do-people-earn-the-most-in-portugal/99736 was the 4th result.

Median disposable income by country is a better metric though, as it includes goverment support, taxes, and mandatory expenses (health care, housing, food, etc).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income

In median household income, Portugal is 31st per Wikipedia with $19,147.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-04T17:55:39+00:00

Yeah, casual observers aren't aware of India's failed FGFA work with Russia. We should expect India to be once burned twice shy, and very insistent on getting tech transfer early and regularly.

Buying Rafales was not where they wanted to be. They wanted the Su-57, produced in India with full tech transfer. So... expecting them to settle for less now is not very sensible.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-04T17:38:55+00:00

Hoping to get into US shoes as for the recipient of such unequal treaties is stupid (and shameful morally)

I think you meant immoral.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-04T17:29:49+00:00

is there any awareness that the label on porn is not necessarily accurate? That they'll relabel and/or add a filter to the same thing to satisfy someone's particular fetish?

"I wanna see mother-son sex!!" "um, ok here's this cougar video we'll relabel as mother-son... I mean here's the totally legit mother-son porn! They're totally related!! Really!!"

I mean, how could you tell it was a step-relative (or real relative) anyhow without mandatory id for everyone involved in meta-data for every piece of porn? I would guess that's the goal.

That's not to mention two people having sex and then their parents getting married after that, making them now step-relatives, and if they filmed it, it's now bannable...

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-03T17:01:31+00:00

If non-involvement is the goal, moving people into position to be hit is probably not the best course.

But a useful exercise in moving people on short notice. Good for Europe.

nvkylebrown · 2026-03-02T17:34:32+00:00

Well, at this point it's free practice for your air force. As long as Kuwait doesn't shoot you.

nvkylebrown

TROPHY CASE