The capacity is 12,600 cubic metres (440,000 cu ft),[1] amounting, in other words, to 12.6 million litres (3.33 million US gallons) of water, or roughly the size of 5 Olympic-size swimming pools.

Amazing. And yet that civilization still collapsed. Beware.

Arrête. La situation est bien plus simple que ce récit fantasque sorti du Kremlin.

Le monde se compose d’Etats indépendants réunis aux Nations unies. Ils se reconnaissant entre eux et ils sont libres de leurs politiques étrangères à condition de ne pas vouloir changer des frontières par la force. Ils ont tout droit de rejoindre d’autres Etats indépendants au sein des associations telle l’Otan.

Or, c’est bien l’Ukraine qui a demandé de rejoindre l’Otan. Et c’est bien la Russie qui a envahi l’Ukraine. Apparemment par une volonté de reconstituer un empire.

N’en déplaisent à ceux qui cherchent à imposer un récit alternatif, les faits sont clairs comme l’eau.

They want everything and its opposite. They want rising incomes, big cars, houses full of junk, meat 'n dairy on the table every day, regular holidays by airplane - oh, and also to fix climate change and save the environment.

Bruegel is helpfully focusing politicians’ attention on the latter. But the real problem is not the politicians, it’s the voters.

Yes, your theory about inevitable concentration sounds like the one of Thomas Piketty (where war functions to keep a lid on the concentration). Depressingly persuasive.

Personally, I find it hard to deny that capitalism has been incredibly successful at creating abundance seemingly out of nothing. I see it as a kind of ingenious roaring engine, the whole question is how to somehow harness it to good purposes.

And also how to turn it off. Because I think that the abundance does not come magically out of nowhere, as orthodox economics seem to believe. It comes from plundering the natural world, which the human economy sits on top of.

Vive l’Europe indépendante ! A ce rythme-là on va finir par devoir ériger une statue en l’honneur de ce méprisable individu.

Another word is needed, this one has become so baggy as to be meaningless. Capitalism has been the predominant economic system across the world for centuries now. It just means the accumulation of surpluses, creating economic growth. It has no a-priori about what’s done with the surpluses.

Just as the Gilded Age and today’s broligarchy were underpinned by capitalism, so were New Deal liberalism and 1980s Swedish social democracy. That last model in particular created a society that was freer and fairer (so: less evil) than any ostensibly “non-capitalist” one has ever been.

True, but it still gives the Malian government an ultimate authority over the domain, which just seems completely dumb to me. The also-semi-failed Libya has ultimate authority over ly domains (like bit.ly) and has actually used its power to shut down domains for being against Libyan law. Domain hacks are not just ugly, they’re dumb.

Rant completely justified! They are on the wrong side of history and you are on the right side.

I emailed my city to voice my concern

This is what good citizens do, at least to kick things off (and what I, for example, have been too lazy to do). We all depend on people like you. So don’t be discouraged, keep at it. In the end you will win and that lane will be converted.

This seems to be missing Mali, the home of .ml. It’s in West Africa and since the French soldiers left it’s been an authoritarian client state of Russia. Very appropriate.

Useful. I hate shorts and portrait-format video in general.

NB for those who don’t know: a server is not needed to make Youtube RSS feeds, they exist natively: https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCxxxxxxxxxx. You just have to find the channel_id buried in the page source, which admittedly is a bit of a PITA. But no native way to exclude shorts, though.