Through a postcolonialist lens this is pretty clever. Use of civilized as a term to excuse the racist and expansionist actions of one’s own country, expansion which happens to have coincided with railways being central to industrial power. Now the colonized are civilized, are we the barbarians?

Unironically thinking like that is the real ape-brained behavior.

This reads different if the woman is an economist.

Like, for example, we could assume that it should be a space with discrete topology of some relevant cardinality. […] Not sure what you mean by that, as each vote x_i is generally not a function or a similar structure

Yeah that was badly written, sorry. I was taking the x_i’s as well-defined preference-based utility functions, so “i is x_i important”. That’s not even continuous unless one could say “how much of our resources will be spent on i,” which is a simplification itself. Maybe instead of issues having functions k_i describing all possible choices regarding an issue? By limit I meant someone saying “i is infinitely important.”

Anyway, I think it’s possible to build a reasonable, continuous, preference model, depending on what the set of topics/issues looks like. Whether the properties required of the set of issues would be reasonable… I think not. I think one would end up with something maybe not discrete but certainly not continuous. Hence the second paragraph in my previous comment.

Arrow’s theorem

I’ve never heard of this. Just off the first sentence on Wikipedia, I’d question the existence of independent alternatives. It looks like non-dictatorship is defined to be ordering invariant?

I feel like the preference space assumption was reasonable? Effectively asking “how important is x_i” for every issue i and then normalizing the result. Works at the limits, too, if something is considered infinitely important.

It does depend on how one asks about the preferences. Given a different question one might get a non-complete or non-transitive preference function. Also I think that if there were dependent preferences (e.g. more roads, but only if work-from-home isn’t available) then that wouldn’t be continuous? Cause the preference for one would jump with the sign change of the other. Continuity might even be harmful.

Honestly I just hate it because it’s a rather unmathematical approach to say “voting is the problem” and not “our definition of fair voting is flawed.”

Or you could read the article and see that’s not even remotely the issue, and the title is as per usual misleading.

Germany planned 8 billion eur financial support for Ukraine this year. That’s been used up. So, no more monetary (!) aid unless they find some spare change in the budget, which they won’t.

And to preempt the next headline: Germany’s spending next year on Ukraine will be halved, yes… Because there’re plans for an international fund.

Also while “Olaf” is the one naying further spending, he’s not doing so independently of the ruling coalition. He has little agency.

Obligatory fuck Lindner and fuck the FDP.

They phrased it as “NATO allies are prosecuting a war they would like to win, while Russia is prosecuting a war it believes that it has to win” but yeah pretty much.

It’s wild that they’re spinning this as an economic failure for the west. Anything else - humanitarian, political? I’d totally agree with. But even the article gives the impression of an adult holding a flailing child at arm’s length. How blindly anti-west does one have to be to see that as a win for the child.

Online dating in 2001? What was that like?