HN user
put others in a low income country shantytown with no access to any facilities, coaches, with poor nutrition …
When we actually do do that, we seem to get world-beating Kenyan and Ethiopian athletes.
Not so many affluent, well-fed Swiss ones though.
Genuine question: why as a HN reader - so probably quite scientific - why is it "striking" to you that after learning on this very forum of referendum where you found out that 30% voted to maintain Apartheid, a mere FOUR years later a poll finds 40% holding a similar position?
a) surely you are familiar with error bars?
b) where did you think that 30% went?
I would be astonished if the poll said otherwise.
I never know what the next step in these conversations is meant to be: a nation of people did a really bad thing. They - or their children their grandchildren clearly changed their mind when first given a real, unrigged vote.
Now it only happened because the evil party told them to and the world was forcing them to? So what ? They haven't really changed deep down? And the proof is somehow the absolute strangers in the minority who didn't change their mind?
I am going to have to call a halt to my participation here as: to quote teachrdan - is absurd.
Well, sort of, except the National Party was campaigning for a 'Yes' [to end apartheid] vote.
I'm not sure how that minimised anyone who then voted "yes, I'm glad you are finally proposing that - its what I want"? Odd line to take.
But the Apartheid National Party did a lot stranger things than that - after a quick rebrand - they decided to merge with the ANC!
As I said - a complicated place.
Hi techrdan - can you lighten up on the insults. I'm really trying to discuss a topic with a teeny, tiny Overton window and I don't deserve you continued efforts to caricature me as a racist.
Then how could the system have persisted for decades?
- surely I have explained at least one mechanism - in your words - "in distracting long detail";
- another one was to make sure no white kid ever learnt a black language. Most kids in the areas I spoke about above learnt French as a third language - not Zulu or even Hindi. This was deliberate;
- they went to enormous lengths to destroy any common knowledge of Sofiatown and it was a rejection of that the races could never live together. To show you what it meant: they renamed it "Triuph";
- they high-jacked the dominant protestant religion (ask Reverend Beyers Naude)
- in the mid 1980s the imposed a state of emergency that controlled all TV and news.
- any yes, like many places in the early mid 20th century - there were indeed a lot of racists.
But I suspect form the tone of your comments you aren't really asking in some good faith pursuit of knowledge of a complex place. I suspect you are rather employing a common rhetorical device to actually assert there "there other is no possible explanation - other than simple pure evil bigotry - for how it could continue for so long. And anyone who I feel doesn't agree with this is a bigot".
Its not cool and its not consistent with the site guidelines.
So let's discuss briefly the other Apartheid state - Northern Rhodesia. Here the whites-only voting was first-past-the-post as per the UK mother ship.
In all of the elections about 40% of the white population regularly voted against Ian Smith in just about all the districts. They won exactly ZERO seats in parliament.
40% is not "a few" people.
Voting structures matter and they get high-jacked. Look after yours.
s/1990/1992/ - thanks.
Of course a hell of a lot of people supported it - most of them now long dead. [This mandatory prelude is so tedious]
However, as I have shown, clearly not enough that the ruling National Party were prepared to trust their own people with continuing to vote for it. An the 1992 referendum proved their suspicions to be correct!
Hence the outrageous - from the start - manipulation.
If you think banal voting manipulation isn't as big a deal as the evil that lurks in mens' hearts then ask yourself - now that Iran has an Islamic democracy (they do hold elections) how does the current/next generation ever return to a secular democracy via the ballot - if that is what they want?
As as in Apartheid South Africa, enormous effort has been made by the initial true believers to prevent it from ever happening.
I could be wrong.
Not only that, but the National Party were so rabid that in 1948 D.F Malan - their new prime minister - proposed in an actual parliament speech to deprive white English-speaking citizens of the vote.
God alone knows how they were going to enforce that in a completely multi-lingual society.
Strange times. A warning to us all.
At the risk of exposing myself to some more sanctimonious insults, let me complete the half-told story here by showing - with the requested sources [1] that when white South Africans were actually offered a truly level-field, one-man-one-vote referendum as to whether to end Apartheid in 1990…
the vast majority (> 80%) of eligible whites turned out and voted 68% in favour - with the gerry-mandered districts in my original post voting 85% in favour.
Thus supporting my original explanation that a cynically engineered voting system is incredibly advantageous to the incumbent and needs far fewer supporters than is often believed to maintain the status quo over a long period.
Sadly, some people just stopped thinking after the Spitting Image jingle.
And since its a mandatory part of the weird I-never-thought-I'd-see kubuki theatre on HN: to remove all possible doubt, Apartheid had no redeeming characteristics, was a completely evil idea, and only a fucking moron would defend it. Sigh
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_South_African_apartheid_r...
I never thought I'd see an impassioned defense of apartheid South Africa on Hacker News. But here we are.
Good news mate - you still haven't.
But nice try
It takes a lot of people contributing to uphold it [Apartheid].
Actually it really, really didn't.
Students of history will know that National Party (which assembled Grand Apartheid and ruled from 1948 to 1994) merrily gerrymandered the entire country on a scale seldom seem.
1. liberal (more English) areas like those near Durban were magically made part of conservative (more Afrikaans) farming areas hundreds of kilometres away. A good example is the affluent enclaves of Kloof and Hillcrest in Durban were somehow part of the [at the time] extremely conservative Voortrekker town of Greytown a mere 150km away;
2. a further law deemed that the rural votes in each such Frankenstein voting district counted 100%, the distant urban votes a mere 75%
3. this happened everywhere and ensured a massive majority for the National Party in every province;
4. there was by design - and in the most literal sense - no way for the white population to vote themselves out of Apartheid. It was so successful that for many years their was only ONE liberal opposition member of parliament [Houghton, Johannesburg].
I understand details are tough and cloud the cartoon good-vs-evil polemic you were no doubt exposed to. I guess one does get more dopamine from wild sweeping statements that reinforce and display your own ignorance and bigotry. I wouldn't use my real name either in posts like yours.
For the casual observer: let this be a cautionary tale when gerrymandering is attempted in your own democracy.
[PS. Southern Rhodesia - now Zimbabwe - had a different, but equally effective voting mechanism to suppress the growth of a liberal opposition. For another day ]
about 1200 GW of capacity
Since 1GWa* ≈ 8 million tonnes of CO₂ †, this is about a billion tonnes saved every year.
Sadly, we're about 3,000 Gt of CO₂ in excess in the atmosphere.
*: GWa: 1 GW 24h/d, every day, for a year
†: or about 1 Giza pyramid
Your mistake is weighing superstition vs tangible harm.
Care to share which of the thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's website, you have:
a) read
b) understood
c) found errors in
d) brought to the world's attention?
500, 10, 1, ? I thought not.
And yes, of course it sucks - no one wants this. You seem to think the unpleasantness of the diagnosis and remedy gives you and yours an out.
Framing the differences here as disrespecting other people's culture is a bit of a stretch, though.
What would you call the insulting hysteria that occurs when an English speaker doesn't change his language and culture to use some foreign-language word for a place?
You'll notice no one goes around demanding a billion Chinese change from 'Měiguó' to the 'USA'. Hell, even the Germans get away with calling 'Beijing' Peking.
Its just the poor, down-drodden Anglos. :)
The dogy bit is knowing that a large institutional order is coming.
The uses of advanced laser networking kit is to to gain an advantage in front-running.
Which is to say, to get your brokerage's orders in ahead of a large institutional order.
IOW: Legally-sanitised insider trading.
Nonsense, there is no legitimate way another language can tell English (or another language FWIW) what its name for a place must be.
Examples:
Deutchland - Germany, Allemagne, Doitsu
Nederland - Niederland, Pays-Bas, Netherlands
Zhōngguó - China,
Nippon - Japan, Iapana
Munchen - Munich, Monaco
I can go on, but this phenomenon of prescribing the English word for a proper noun is very recent, and disrespectful of the long, native English (and very much world-wide) culture.
English is not common property any more than Persian is.
So, no: its Kiev [ and Ayers Rock :) ] when speaking English- that's if other people's cultures matter.
I disagree.
I think you'll find high-income finance/law/medicine/entrepeneur types are even more time and energy constrained. Yet, I doubt the poster would be bleating about them.
There is a nasty polemic (especially prevalent on HN) that any possible advice about personal choices must be from some racially-narrow, empathy-lacking urbane perspective.
And the poster also suggests that coloured folk can neither perceive, nor possibly comment that that a group of largely overweight, sedentary, reasonably affluent people stuck to 70" TVs shouldn't perhaps just go for a walk.
Occasionally, on the weekend.
Sorry mate, the fact that you could ever consider a consistent $100/day wage to be poverty trumps the OP for the most spoilt, uninformed comment - on any forum - I have ever seen.
Get out more.
The Monroe Doctrine doesn't count?
What do they teach at MIT ?
Hope is not a strategy.
My daughter has spent nearly half her life wearing a mask 50 hours a week for a disease less risky to her than the Flu or RSV
Aw, shamples. Good. Because it is deadly my parents and me.
You can fix your kids mood with an ice cream; You cannot fix dead people.
The vaccines have only ever been effective at reduction of symptoms. They have never prevented transmission and never promised to.
Sigh,
https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/mounting-evidence-suggests...
[Even delta]
1. electric razor
2. 15% body fat (20% if you are tall)
2. six-back abs.
All of the above is under your control.
go straight to green energy can they not?
No they cannot.
We cannot even get Switzerland - small, rich, smart, friendly, good infrastructure, top class law, surrounded by mountains and water, etc. etc. to renewables in a decade.
… getting people out of poverty.
We have only ever managed to get people out of poverty by increasing their per-capita energy usage.
Any once we do, their families demand to maintain said standard of living that can only be met with enormous amounts of concentrated energy.
We have - and continue - to do this using fossil fuels.
Do you have another, secret, method?
Cozying up to bad actors like North Korea and Iran?
You'll probably feel a need to shit on a flag when you realise that an allied Swiss company (ABB) sold North Korea a two nuclear power plants when Rumsfeld was on the board of directors.
https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/rumsfeld-was-on-abb-board-durin...
When these cars enter places like the US market, they are going to decimate the competition.
Surely they will then become national security threats?
The Taliban tried to surrender 2-3 months after we first attacked them IIRC, and we said no.
The problem with fighting people who may have wronged you but have not seized any of your territories, yet whose values and principles are far from your own is that you can only accept unconditional surrender.
Otherwise, why fight.
I couldn't agree with you more - I'm not an American either.
Perhaps you could take 5 minutes to ponder the assumptions you make about the nationality op anonymous posters.
I checked gov.cn, and see it using "Mr. Xi" and "President".
Yip, mainstream media gets it wrong. :)
Here you go: https://qz.com/1112638/xi-jinping-title-xi-jinping-is-not-th...
But yeah, its not a big point to squabble over.