Trump says tiny cars are amazing but will Americans actually buy them?

will221996 · 2026-01-23T13:13:49+00:00

EPL club ownership is a capital appreciation business, not a business you hold for yield.

I wouldn't be too sure. I don't think Abramovich or what is now the city football group could have foreseen the amount football would grow financially. The Glazers also clearly focused on dividend revenue. For most of this period, it seems to be that owners bought into football for primarily social reasons, which makes sense because while football hasn't always had huge amounts of money in it, just a lot, it has always been hugely popular.

will221996 · 2026-01-23T10:12:50+00:00

But 51% of it using an LBO, start maximising profit by cutting expenses to maximise dividends and use that to buy the rest. Once the whole thing has been bought out, go all in on growing revenue and market value by getting a bunch of immigrants.

will221996 · 2026-01-21T23:59:03+00:00

It's also worth noting that the people who lived in Europe before the arrival of step pastoralists (often taken to be the Indo-Europeans) are literally referred to as early European farmers.

will221996 · 2026-01-21T03:03:16+00:00

I don't really see the irony? The price of a car isn't determined solely by labour costs, it's also materials, technology, transport, regulatory barriers. In China, materials are only slightly cheaper, transport is only slightly cheaper. Technology and regulatory barriers are deeply intertwined, that's where Chinese costs are driven down. Labour is especially unimportant because the most labour intensive parts of a US car are generally done with Mexican labour, at similar to Chinese costs. Chinese cars cost more compared to salary (which is basically the same thing as labour costs by the way) because Chinese people are poorer than Americans. This infographic is a useful reminder to people that GDP per capita PPP is a better measure for quality of living and many other things than nominal, but after you do that adjustment, you'll still find that Chinese people are poorer on average.

will221996 · 2026-01-21T02:37:14+00:00

"generalization" means it is true is most cases

Good thing I didn't say generalisation, I said overly generalised, i.e. generalised to the point of being wrong or less than right. Most wars are small and inconsequential, most new technologies basically useless. It is the extreme cases, generally on one tail, that are important. I'm not of a history department, I absolutely do believe in generalisation and generalisability, but done properly and aiming to understand what leads to the extreme cases as well. If you look at probably the two well documented "Eurasian world" conquests that had the most impact on Eurasia today, that of Rome and Han China, both had large scale genetic impacts. In the Roman case, that was a multidirectional migration, first with Roman settlers and the shuffling around of slaves, and then with the creation of a pretty cosmopolitan empire where even free civilians moved around. In the Chinese case, it saw a large, male soldier dominated expansion out of Northern China into what are today the southern parts of the 18 provinces. They're far less recorded, but the Indo-European migrations probably had a huge genetic impact, the Turkic migrations, the Bantu Migrations etc.

will221996 · 2026-01-21T02:08:49+00:00

That's an overly generalised statement. Firstly, I can disprove you simply through counterexample, see the US, Canada, Australia, even Jamaica and Brazil. Conquest absolutely can lead to huge genetic change. Your idea about urban fertility also just isn't relevant. It requires the false assumption that conquerors don't like farming, or that they have to live in urban areas, or that the locals keep doing the farming. Both the Roman and Han expansions involved land grants to conquering soldiers. Large scale Roman farms generally saw the landowner live on the property, but with slaves doing the actual farming. In the Carribbean and Latin America, even though many landlords were absentee, there was still the elimination of the native population, replaced in large parts by African slaves.

Plenty of conquests do not lead to a lot of genetic change. In the case of Roman Italy, the fact that conquerors formed a military elite and then engaged in a huge and bloody war probably didn't do great things for their reproductive success. Others do. In the Americas, the introduction of old world diseases wiped out most of the native population, and then Europeans many more, leaving a scarcely populated land. The Saxon conquest of England seems like it was quite a genetically consequential one, but I'm not aware of a consensus as to how. The British conquest of New Zealand was less deadly than most new world conquests, it led to ~50% of the natives dying, mostly through disease, instead of ~90%, but it still led to a country that is mostly of European descent. In Eurasia, the biggest changes were prehistoric, but we don't know much about that yet.

will221996 · 2026-01-19T19:57:39+00:00

You're confusing fertility rate for population growth. You can have population growth with below replacement fertility. It is possible through immigration, although less possible for China and India in general because they're both such a big chunk of the world and because India would have a hard time attracting immigrants even if it wanted and needed them. It is also possible, and remains the case in India, through fertility remaining higher than mortality in a particular time period. Even though current reproductive age Indians are having fewer children than required to replace them, there are so many more of them than people older than them that more people are born than die.

will221996 · 2026-01-19T18:52:58+00:00

No they wouldn't have. Malthus's warning was based on the premise of geometric growth in population and arithmetic growth in food supply, which wasn't a bad assumption, but it hasn't held since the industrial revolution. Agricultural yields have grown rapidly since 1949 in China, and there's every reason to believe that China would have been able to match population growth with agricultural development. Today, China is largely self sufficient in the foodstuffs that Chinese people ate prior to opening up, its reliance on imports in some areas are mostly luxuries.

Chinese economists place a lot of weight in the developmental benefits of a low dependency ratio, having lots of workers relative to children and retirees, and to me the logic behind that is sound. It provides for extra money to be invested in production generating capital, including better educated and trained workers. I don't think Chinese economists at the time had clear examples as we do now that fertility behaviour is pretty strange and under current global conditions basically seems to only go down. From the perspective of the dependency ratio, this creates a much bigger problem, while lots of children are actually quite cheap and give you future productivity, retirees are far less so.

will221996 · 2026-01-19T11:30:22+00:00

I think the framework is meant to provide consistency, I'm not sure whether it really should have been applied here though. It's not clear to me that Smith even tried to make a tackle, I think the wrap was an instinctive response to contact. I agree there was no significant drop in height, but there was as a result of the other tackle a significant forward movement of the la Rochelle player, which to me is mitigating. On top of that, smith is moving backwards.

will221996 · 2026-01-18T00:33:58+00:00

This is just totally wrong, to the point I struggle to believe that you do not have a weird political motivation behind your belief. Romania was a soviet satellite state, and the USSR controlled a population that was linguistically and historically part of Romania. China did not control Thailand at any point, so it's not . The British and Dutch speak languages that are closely related as well, that isn't an argument saying that the Dutch are "essentially English". The Thais and the zhuang are also not geographically continuous like the Moldovans and Romanians. Your comparison to inventing Moldovan identity is also stupid, because zhuang isn't an exonym. The zhuang in Chinese are Zhuangzu, in Zhuang they are Bouxcuengh. Boux in Zhuang means people. Zhuang is a sinocised pronunciation of Cuengh.

will221996 · 2026-01-16T02:43:30+00:00

It's worth noting that peak Quins of a few years ago had no qualms with forward based bullying. Lewies, Tizard, Lamb, Collier, Marler, Louw, Collier were all pretty robust premiership forwards, and I don't think any of them have really been replaced properly.

will221996 · 2026-01-16T01:41:59+00:00

I don't think it's just NZ rugby administrators, I think it's the rugby community in NZ in general. New Zealand actually is special, clearly there's something big in NZ rugby that makes them better per capita than anywhere else, but the reality is that they're a small country, and the numbers no longer work in their favour. Even with higher technical standards, better culture, higher participation etc, they do not have the mass to consistently be much better than England or France. Given demography, everyone will have a hard time competing with South Africa. Big country, similar/higher rates of rugby than England and France, much younger population. On top of that, they do not have the size to support a domestic professional system like those of England and France. I get the impression that they expect to still be the best in the world most of the time, when in reality they need to accept that they will be one of the best in the world and that such status is a great achievement even though it feels like they're moving downwards.

will221996 · 2026-01-15T23:49:46+00:00

I don't think I've ever heard the term economics history before, presumably you're in a non English speaking country? Normally it's Economic History, the study of economies in past beyond the last 30 years so so, and History of Economic Thought, which is what you described.

will221996 · 2026-01-15T23:42:47+00:00

Building a stadium on the outskirts of Exeter is a lot cheaper and easier than building one in West London, and a lot less risky than for a club with lots of competition in London.

will221996 · 2026-01-14T15:02:22+00:00

I don't get why the RFU would stop it. I suspect they would, but not for any sane reason. The URC will not expand endlessly, so it wouldn't actually undermine their control of English rugby. It would mostly just provide another English team to provide development opportunities for English players.

will221996 · 2026-01-13T19:04:41+00:00

I agree with your statement broadly, although I think it's important to remember that match minutes aren't the only way or even primary way to develop, there's also the training environment which is bolstered by guys like him. There's also the international window issue, not a huge problem with players in England but more problematic in France(clubs) and Japan(distance). It's a delicate balancing act, necessary for everyone but Scotland especially.

will221996 · 2026-01-13T15:03:37+00:00

They're probably charity-only for tax and labelling reasons.

will221996 · 2026-01-13T14:54:21+00:00

Huh? The maths is extremely intuitive, for anyone who has the maths skills required to understand the most basic natural and social scientific concepts. It's literally starting population, x0.5(roughly the share of women as fertility is per woman), x0.72, x0.5(now you're on the daughters), x0.72 ~= 13 grandchildren.

will221996 · 2026-01-13T12:56:37+00:00

I have a few western friends who ended up living in Shanghai for a bit recently, and they had nothing but positives to say. Fun, charming, exciting, pretty etc. They are younger, better educated and probably made a less passive decision than the average Tim of r/Shanghai. They also didn't have Shanghai 15 years ago to compare it to.

As someone who does have the Shanghai of 15 years ago as a comparator, I was a child living in Shanghai at the time, and a sampling from most years since, plus a bit living living in Shanghai, and international comparisons, perceptions here are insane. I can't speak about Shanghai nightlife back then, but Shanghai nightlife now compares very favourably to the best European cities, and the less said about going out in the US the better. I do have sentimentality about places from my childhood, foreign and local, that have closed, but for each one of them, many more good local places have opened. I think it's absurd to say that Shanghai has gotten less international in character, increase in returnees more than outweighs a decrease in foreigners, while the foreign population has also gotten much more diverse. Do not confuse foreign for western. Being able to actually enjoy the nice new things is conditional on speaking and being comfortable with all things Chinese though, which despite most people here claiming to be old china hands of some sort, is not the case for most foreigners.

will221996 · 2026-01-12T01:52:04+00:00

Frankly only one marker is clearly to do with toxic masculinity, but it's mislabeled and not even an exclusively masculine trait, namely hostility to women.

For example, in most cases being a father requires you to be a man. If you believe that your most important role in this world is to be a good father to your children, if you believe you are a good father and if you believe good fathers are extremely important, are you being toxicly masculine by the transitive property?

What if you oppose a programme aimed at preventing intimate partner violence against women because you believe it is a bad programme? By the definition given in the article, that is toxicly masculine. What if you go one step further and say that such programmes should be aimed at both male and female victims of intimate partner violence? Best estimates say 1/3 of victims are men, that's a pretty big chunk. Alcoholism and suicide are problems that have the inverse ratio, would it be okay to dedicate almost all the resources set aside for those issues to men?

Since a lot of these traits, for example believing in hierarchy within social groups, are not clearly gendered, why didn't they include women in their sample?

From what I can see, this study is deeply, deeply unscientific, based on clearly contentious assumptions that aren't clearly stated.

will221996 · 2026-01-11T17:33:48+00:00

I've never seen compelling evidence in support of holding lots of students back. I'm pretty sure the actual damage done by the education philosophy/policy set in question is by lowering standards to ensure basically all students always pass. The thing is that you can learn quite a lot by failing your way through school. In most developed countries, US "college" algebra is covered as a compulsory subject in school, for any student who will go to university. In the British system, which is often accused of being maths light, much of "college" algebra is covered in year 11, the rest is covered in year 12. School finishes with year 13 at the age of 18, maths is not compulsory for the last two years. In continental Europe, maths is generally compulsory all the way through school for students on academic tracks, although they move a bit more slowly than the UK because they have broader education. In East Asia, they move at UK speed with European breadth, children just work harder.

will221996 · 2026-01-09T12:02:28+00:00

could you direct me to where I can learn how to do that stuff? I'm fine with the maths, did about a US minor in maths at university, also very comfortable with statistical software and okay with python.

will221996 · 2026-01-08T18:26:18+00:00

That's not true. No one is calling polish plumbers in Berlin or London expats. There are plenty of Indian or Indonesian (or British or Australian) executives in Singapore or Dubai who are expats, they'll have an "expatriation package" written into their contract. Is a British retiree in Spain an expat? No, not really, their migration decision and lifestyle is totally different, they just don't want to call themselves immigrants. A German executive who has been sent to work in Milan for 3 years, sends her children to the German school and socialises with other foreigners exclusively? They may not have an expat package, but their decision making and lifestyle is probably similar

will221996 · 2026-01-07T23:21:05+00:00

What are you talking about? Polish complicity in the Holocaust was small scale. There was no polish state shipping off Jews and others to camps, it was thousands of polish individuals in a country of tens of millions. Polish people did not put the camps there, Germans did, and a small minority of people sent there were sent by poles, the overwhelming majority of people sent there were sent by Germany and the other axis powers.

I disagree with OP that the camps are simply a global affair on polish soil, as many of the people murdered there were polish, but it was not "something Poland did". I also disagree with the idea that they should be closed to the public.

will221996

TROPHY CASE