The interfaces are relatively modern too, with VGA and a PS/2 keyboard.

Yeah, you’re right. It looks like there’s a consensus now that the population in the Gulag was way lower than I thought. Fair play. There’s also a chart year by year, in the “history” section, which I missed.

If it was 2.4 million in 1953, out of total population of 179 million, that’s 1,340 in detention per 100k. The modern US is only 40% as bad as the literal Gulag at its peak. Fuckin hooray.

Yeah; that’s probably why there is such a lack of data. The period for which there are estimates vary by a factor of 20 between low and high estimates. 🙁

Ah, got it. I was talking about USSR, not modern Russia. Modern Russia is its own thing and its own brand of horror but not the same as OG Communist USSR which was more what I was trying to highlight.

Yeah. I’m taking the high side of the widely varying estimates of the Gulag population, which in the period of the 1940s range from 3.5 million to 17.6 million depending on who’s doing the estimating.

The Gulag at the peak housed about 7,500 (edit: 1,340) per 100k of the Soviet population.

(And yes, the US’s 531 is still also an atrocity.)

Where did you get 329? I actually couldn’t find any post-Kruschev numbers, but I know after privatization, Russia was pretty competitive with the US’s dystopian nightmare.

Edit: I was way wrong about the size of the Gulag

Ha, that is fair. I was just poking fun at dessalines’s habit of giving a free pass to any country that is openly mauling and torturing its citizens as long as they wear the right color hat. But yes, it is fully accurate that the US’s prison system is an authoritarian nightmare that preys on its minority population without rest or mercy. And, comparing the US against countries which don’t even make the claim of being “democratic” and finding it competitive with the worst of the open tyrannies is maybe fair.

Also, I just looked, and I don’t think these numbers are accurate. I think they’re straight-up ignoring some countries with millions of people, and I think the numbers are about 8 years out of date. The US incarceration rate has been falling back down to merely horrifying levels after the Stalinist peak it rose to after Reagan+Clinton teamed up to ruin the world.

US Incarceration Rate

List of Countries by Incarceration Rate

The majority of states in our land of wonderful freedoms are newly competitive with such beacons of hope as El Salvador, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. The march of progress!

Cool now do USSR

Also, export your DBs first, and snapshot the export instead of the raw DB files

borg

I like how organized North and Central America are

I once watched a depression era family member of mine dismantle a Chinese take out container, flatten and wash the cardboard part of it and then put it in the paper recycling, and straighten out the wire handle to put into a little jar with other wires and bits of metal.

Same family member once showed me a stack of paper grocery bags she had taken into her place from her building’s paper recycling, upset that someone had thrown away perfectly good paper bags.

A lot of the best communities to be in have a barrier to entry

The community of pilots, the people who work in medicine or on floor X, the people who are proud of what they can accomplish and recognize automatically that the value of the interactions they have are not worthless.

Idk how you bring that to the online space. But it is missing, yes. I like this essay.

Quick question, what do you think has happened to working class wages in the last 4 years, and what to income inequality?

At the time that Carlin was saying this, it was probably a lot more accurate than today. The parties were pretty indistinguishable for a lot of the 80s and 90s, and then after that the Democrats got significantly better in some cases, and the Republicans went straight off the edge into wanting to kill anyone different than them or who wanted to stand in their way.

I like my democracy and I don’t like bullshit designed to undermine it

Sorry

List a jurisdiction where you say it happened, and I’ll link you to the court records of what the Republicans actually said happened, once they were in court and would have to back up their wild and outlandish lies

The asterisk is explained up top, and they only indicate who won when it is backwards from the popular vote total.

7% is enough to swing any election in history (the part of it that is shown on the chart)

Look how happy