astreus

@astreus@lemmy.ml

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astreus, (edited )

It’s not just America though.

Where I’m from:

UK average income before tax) £34,963 - £27,911 after tax (assuming NO student loan and NO pension) (for context: a band 3 nurse with 3 years experience makes £24,336 before tax or £20,631.51 after with no pension)

England average house price: £375,131

Approx ratio after tax: 13:1

Minimum deposit: 5% - £18,756.55

Tax: 0% on first time buyers

Fees: about £1,000 - £5,000

Total cost to get going: Approx £21,750 - nearly a years wage.

Now let’s look where I live: Spain!

Turns out Spain really is a load of countries wearing a hat so getting unified stats is not easy. Let’s try Barcelona:

Average income before tax: €33,837 - €25,470 after tax

Average house price: €376,399

Approx ratio after tax: 15:1

Minimum deposit: 10% - €37,639.90

Purchase tax: 10% - €37,639.90 (plus 1.5% for new builds)

Fees: 2 - 5% - 7,527.98 - 18,819.95

Total cost to get going: €82,807.78 - €94,099.75

Turns out treating housing as a market to speculate on might just be the problem all along.

astreus,

“We invented a new kind of calculator. It usually returns the correct value for the mathematics you asked it to evaluate! But sometimes it makes up wrong answers for reasons we don’t understand. So if it’s important to you that you know the actual answer, you should always use a second, better calculator to check our work.”

Then what is the point of this new calculator?

Fantastic comment, from the article.

astreus, (edited )

Fun fact! Cuba has a vaccine for lung cancer - yes, it works and has been independently verified. No, you can’t have it because embargo.

EDIT: vaccine here isn’t actually what I thought. In this case it is a treatment to be used for certain kinds of lung cancer, not a preventative measure as we are used to thinking of Vaccine. Thanks to the comment below for going through it and pushing me to do proper research.

While my initial take was a glib link to a wikipedia page and not thoroughly researched, I do sill believe that the embargo has directly caused this treatment to come to market in the west as the levels of cooperation are non-existent. It has been used for 7 years in Cuba but is only now entering Stage 3 trials in the US.

Cuba have also became the first country to have 0 mother-child transmissions of HIV.

But the US has decided that working with Cuba to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths each year (in the States alone) is less important than causing “economic dissatisfaction and hardship” to the Cuban people.

‘In the US they think we’re communists!’ The 70,000 workers showing the world another way to earn a living (www.theguardian.com)

When Marisa Fernández lost her husband to cancer a few years ago, her employers at the Eroski hypermarket went, she says, “above and beyond to help me through the dark days afterwards, rejigging my timetable and giving me time off when I couldn’t face coming in.”...

astreus,

The rise of the worker co-op is definitely something to watch! I’m currently exploring a worker co-op for a tech start up. Biggest problem? Funding. No investors want to touch a co-op.

astreus,

The idea that a government can instruct the courts to ignore human rights legislation shows how fundamentally broken the liberal “democracy” system is.

This from the government that just made saying “I am intolerant towards the idea of liberal parliamentary democracy” an example of extremism but saying “foreigners don’t deserve human rights” is not extremism.

astreus,

weak aptitude for language learning

This is such bullshit. As a Brit abroad, our problem is weak language education. We are taught to such a poor degree and we are not taught how to learn a language. It’s been the biggest struggle of my adult life trying to get conversational and after a year I am still way behind my cohorts - it’s not some genetic predisposition to being bad at language learning, but a lack of language infrastructure in childhood.

astreus,

US: Let’s send weapons to our allies that are at war! Iran: We’ll do the same! US: shocked Pikachu face

astreus,

Tired of writing this, the hand wringing over university property being compared to ~30k lives and ~600k starving people has to stop.

This painting is not some culturally important piece of art. It’s a little over 100 years old (literally painted the same year my Granddad was born), hanging in a university, of a man that was responsible for massacres in Ireland (Mitchelstown Massacre) which got him the name “Bloody Balfour”, openly said that black people should be treated worse than white people, and was a known anti-semite that brought about the Aliens Act of 1905 to try and keep Jewish people out of Britain & Ireland.

Imagine a group of Princeton students cutting up a minor painting of Jefferson Davies hanging in their halls and you get roughly the same amount of “cultural loss”.

astreus, (edited )

Not…really. The racial hierarchy and the self-loathing are really Spain’s doing via the Church.

Spain was in control for 400 years and had clear racial caste system. They brought a new religion and used it to justify an incredibly evil rule. Lain America had governors, the Philippines had Friars (read Touch Me Not or Noli Me Tángere).

Compared with America, which in control for around 50 years and about 10% of that was the Japanese invasion. They are seen as liberators and saviours because of how utterly horrific the Japanese were (wasn’t just Korea with comfort women). In the early 20th century, a lot of the reforms in the Philippines by America were based around giving land to the farm workers and laying ground work for independence via the Insular government (so the cheap sugar supply could be blocked from entering the US market).

astreus, (edited )

Man in 30s married to a half-Filipina woman here. When we went to visit for our honeymoon it was really gross. LOTS of very, very old men with teenage girls.

I had women falling out of their chairs to look at me.

I had a woman literally fall over while trying to ogle me while walking down the street.

For our goodbye dinner, her Ate toasted us by saying “You have fulfilled all our dreams: you’ve married a white man.”

I had several people say how ugly they were because they were Filipino.

EVERY convenience store and super market had skin whitening creams.

It was my first experience of the Philippines and the first experience I had of racial fetishism. My wife got preferential treatment for being Mestizos.

The Spanish did a real number over there with their racial hierarchy bullshit.

astreus,

Your title made me wonder: would NASA get more funding if they strapped AR-15s onto the rovers and called it a liberation mission…

astreus,

We have to learn from Germany’s mistakes: armed resistance is legitimate in the face of fascism.

astreus,

As an immigrant living in Spain: Vox make election day terrifying. I just don’t leave the house (immigrants can’t vote in Spain).

I’m not a small guy, ex-competitve weight lifter and 6’2, but those people are nuts and it isn’t worth the risk.

Liquidation of Wikimedia RU [Wikipedia Signpost] (en.wikipedia.org)

Briefly: Stanislav Kozlovsky, the director of Russian Wikimedia project (which supports the Russian Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikisource, etc.), has been declared a “foreign agent” by Russia. He has been forced to resign from his job at the Moscow State University. Following the event, Russian Wikimedia has decided to dissolve...

astreus,

The privileged Russians, you mean. I know a few people in Russia, good people, that have no prospects of ever getting out.

Being able to pick a country to reside in is a privilege most people can’t afford, and that’s before you factor in only 5% of Russians can speak English and that’s makes up 80% of the foreign language speakers in Russia and you’ve got yourself a very immobile population.

astreus,

Yeah but Charles is suffering from a short reign penalty. He should really execute some prisoners; high dread means fewer factions.

Source: I play a lot of Crusader Kings

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