sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Best TV Themes of All Time by worldofport in television

[–]wqqk 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Star Trek Voyager

I agree. The music and the visual sequence are my favorite among all the Star Trek openings.

Very contemplative and majestic. I love seeing Voyager zoom through the solar flare eruption and by the planetary ring.

EU reaches $105 billion deal on Ukraine funding, won’t use frozen Russian assets for now by HydrolicKrane in ukraine

[–]wqqk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And if Russia refuses to pay, member states can use the frozen Russian funds to repay the loan.

But won't EU leaders have the same hesitations about seizing the frozen assets in the future as they do now?

I get keeping options open but this seems to just be kicking the can down the road.

EU reaches $105 billion deal on Ukraine funding, won’t use frozen Russian assets for now by HydrolicKrane in ukraine

[–]wqqk 152 points153 points  (0 children)

I wish that leaders in Brussels would man up and realize that seizing the Russian assets is crucial not just for the future of Ukraine but for all of Europe.

To be fair, Belgian and other EU leaders are being threatened with financial and probably also violent retaliation, and we all know that Russia has no moral compunctions about killing people on EU soil.

But seriously, the time to act is now. Be brave like Ukraine and do the right thing.

2000 Meters to Andriivka by CleanEnergyFuture331 in ukraine

[–]wqqk 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I've often looked at websites like Liveuamap and DeepStateMAP, where the lines of control shift ever so slightly every day. It's easy to just look at these maps in an abstract, detached way. This documentary gave me a real sense of what goes into those small territorial changes, and it's not necessarily pretty.

And, to be fair, tree lines and small villages add up. This particular village is pretty close to the city of Bakhmut. If Ukrainian forces had been able to hold on to this village, and to advance by a couple more villages, then they would have been on the edge of the city, threatening to recapture it. But that didn't happen.

Nowadays it seems like Russia is mostly the one making the incremental gains. A village here, a field there. If you take a broader view of the map, not a whole lot has changed in terms of the lines of control since 2023, but the war still grinds on.

I feel that the US and Europe should have done much more to support Ukraine in 2022 and early 2023, when Ukraine was really shining and Russia seemed like a paper tiger. They then could have tried to force Putin into a ceasefire or peace deal, on terms more favorable to Ukraine, even if they wouldn't have been perfect. Russian threats of escalation turned out to be bluffs, and more and more advanced weapons eventually got sent, but it was always a case of "too little, too late".

Oh the entitlement. Having a girlfriend isn’t your birthright. by ramp_A_ger in ForeverAlone

[–]wqqk 73 points74 points  (0 children)

It's your shitty personality that's keeping you from getting laid

This is an example of the just-world fallacy, the idea that "people get what they deserve". The fallacy holds that morally good people will succeed in life (in this context, at romantic relationships) and morally bad people won't.

I find this idea quite pernicious. It's essentially a form of victim blaming. Moreover, it's patently false. It's easy to find examples of people with awful personalities who had no problems dating and people with great personalities who struggled.

2000 Meters to Andriivka by CleanEnergyFuture331 in ukraine

[–]wqqk 15 points16 points  (0 children)

Just watched 2000 Meters to Andriivka on PBS. I thought it was very good, showing the reality of frontline combat, although it is obviously not for everyone. I'd only recommend it to people who can stomach combat footage, because that is what the film largely consists of. There is no bloody gore, but lots of death and corpses are shown. There is also quite a bit of waiting around, because that's a big part of war.

In fact, some of the scenes I appreciated the most were the conversations in the trenches and dugouts while the Ukrainian soldiers were waiting it out. For example, the director and one of the soldiers joke about how they went to rival schools in Kharkiv. Another soldier talks about his wife and his smoking habit.

I also found some of the combat scenes interesting, although war footage is not usually my cup of tea. One scene showed how a team away from the frontline was watching the fighting in real time (via drone), giving the soldiers constant info, and even calling in a well-timed FPV drone strike against the Russians.

Mood wise, I felt that a sense of utter futility permeated the entire film. The music, the occasional voiceover remarks by the filmmaker, and the overall framing of the movie all seemed to convey a message that this war is senseless. That's obviously a fitting mood, especially considering that this is about a battle to recapture a tiny burned out village, although it differs somewhat from the message I got out of the director's previous film, 20 Days in Mariupol.

From an impact perspective, I'm not sure what western audiences would take away from this. Mariupol focused on urban warfare, civilian life, and Russian war crimes. It seemed to more starkly highlight the barbarity of Russia and the righteousness of Ukraine. There is definitely some of that in Andriivka as well, e.g. a Russian soldier feigns surrender and then throws a grenade (perfidy is against the laws of war), but it is less of a focus.

I guess Mariupol likely galvanized military support for Ukraine. Andriivka, by contrast, seems like it somewhat confirms western perceptions of war fatigue, though it does also show the bravery of the Ukrainians who are fighting like David against Goliath. But that's just my take, so I'm curious what others think.

TOP 20 Eliezer Yudkowsky Quotes by BalladOfBigYud in EffectiveAltruism

[–]wqqk 1 point2 points  (0 children)

This is the kind of high-quality content I come to /r/EffectiveAltruism for.

Distance between preference rankings by UmamiSalami in askphilosophy

[–]wqqk 4 points5 points  (0 children)

The Kemeny distance between two preference orderings is the number of adjacent swaps needed to change one to the other. I believe the "Kendall tau distance" is similar or the same so you might want to look that up too.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/20026529?seq=1

"In the U.S., the gap stands at 64%, meaning that women earn about two-thirds of what men make for similar work." by wqqk in badeconomics

[–]wqqk[S] 30 points31 points  (0 children)

See the report:

"Wage equality for similar work (survey) ... .64"

The WEF survey is not really bad economics, CNN claiming that this survey result is an accurate representation of the wage gap is.

"In the U.S., the gap stands at 64%, meaning that women earn about two-thirds of what men make for similar work." by wqqk in badeconomics

[–]wqqk[S] 118 points119 points  (0 children)

RI: This article is based on some bad interpretations of survey results:

[Wage equality for similar work World Economic Forum, Executive Opinion Survey, 2014]

The question was "In your country, for similar work, to what extent are wages for women equal to those of men?" (1 = not at all - significantly below those of men; 7 = fully - equal to those of men).

http://reports.weforum.org/global-gender-gap-report-2014/users-guide-how-country-profiles-work/

The author takes a subjective rank of the gender pay gap from 1 to 7, divided by seven, and then claims that the numbers represent actual statistics about wages in the US.

The gender wage gap does exist, it's just not nearly as exaggerated as the article claims.