Wow i never thought of that! I love this reasoning (no sarcasm intended!). Based on supply/demand, the lack of social acceptance leads to low supply which in turn makes sure the price matches the moral cost.
I honestly wished it was not (considered) degrading and just as acceptable as any hospitality service, although in my culture it is indeed immoral to take or provide sex services. Even so if it still is degrading indeed there should be a matching cost, but damn economics is a tricky one.
not treating sex workers like crap doesnt mean they'll make lesser. one must also consider the monetary equivalents of the mental health of the worker. and the demand will increase by a lot too.
I also believe that. People locally are quite more wary understandably so, given history, but I also believe Poland, a EU and NATO country would not be invaded as lightly. Even from the logistical point of view, Poland has borders with many friendly countries and shipments of weapons and personnel would be to easy for the relatively weak Russian conventional forces. All this unless a Ribbentrop-Molotov happens again but I dont see it.
Right. And I totally understand why the people of Poland would not just blindly assume NATO would keep them safe. Nobody should leave their security to others.
It’s just strange to me when people act like it isn’t a huge part of the calculus, or that invading a NATO nation is an obvious next move for Russia, when 70 years of history indicates otherwise.
Honestly Poland already has a sever labor shortage and the natives have one of the worst birth rates of Europe[1]. This is actually one of the major sources of domestic inflation compared to the European block. If not for the inflow of Ukrainians labor shortages would cripple the economy, much more the growth. Also the newer generation is very very different from the older ones, even Millenials->GenZ, but this I have good hopes.
Even so i disagree with the article author that claims Poland has not left the middle income trap. On the contrary, with the recent huge increases in minimum wage and still strong dependency on manufacturing, the moment to check is actually now. Of course there is a lot of inertia in DFI but in my surroundings I hear of big corporations leaving for cheaper places. Volvo for example just left and 3M will have a local restructuring. There has been an inflection point on IT wages a well. Maybe it is a blip, but I think there is reason to worry.
All in all, Poland is a great place to live, and you kind of can see progress as time goes by. Something that cannot be said of many other developed places.
> Even so i disagree with the article author that claims Poland has not left the middle income trap.
You're being downvoted but you aren't wrong.
A lot can go wrong in a decade.
In 2024, Poland (and Hungary) are at the same comparative level of development they were in 2014 (using distance from the WB High Income GDP per Capita threshold as a proxy), yet their 2014 peer Slovakia was able to significantly increase it's GDP per Capita to near Czechia levels (tbf Slovakia was also able to leverage Czechia's development).
Historically poorer Romania has also started catching up to both Poland and Hungary recently due to significant FDI inflows due to political instability in both countries in the late 2010s.
Both Poland and Hungary are at a precipice - if they can conduct lasting reforms within their administrative system over the next decade, then they are absolutely on track to becoming a developed country. Medium case, they could end up like their 2014 peer Uruguay and Panama - stuck with laggard growth. Worst case, they could end up like their 2014 peer Argentina (but stuff would have to go seriously wrong).
> If not for the inflow of Ukrainians labor shortages would cripple the economy
And Belarusians and Russians - Poland and much of the CEE became nations of immigrants by 2016 as labor and capital inflows from Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia began due to the start of the Ukraine War in 2014, and the subsequent sanctions regimes.
> There has been an inflection point on IT wages a well. Maybe it is a blip, but I think there is reason to worry
I think T1 salaries are around $30-60k now across the CEE, which is largely comparable to similar talent in every country excluding the US and Canada.
The hard work for Poland is to now leverage it's existing talent (both domestically and in the diaspora) to build strong global players. Historically poorer Romania is following this path with companies like UIPath and BitDefender, and Czechia did something similar with Avast and JetBrains.
Aside from Allegro and CD Projekt, I can't think of a major multinational Polish tech company.
In fact, almost every major Polish company is either entirely owned by a foreign investor or state owned. I think Eurocash is the only notable exception.
There is some benefit to having a single large scale power plant vs many small engines/generators - a large turbine that runs relatively constantly can be made far more efficient than a smaller diesel generator that spins up and down regularly. It also allows electrification of down the line outputs, which instantly get the benefit from replacing the coal plant with something more efficient when German lawmakers finally wake up and get their act together.
the right way to solve this problem is to start building nuclear. And to throw to jail previous crop of German politicians who sold out its energy independence to russia and fossil fuel lobby
> The X-12's unique reactor would be a six-sided, double-walled vessel of stainless steel, only three feet high and wide and one foot thick. Inside it would be 64 gallons of "soup" — uranyl sulfate (a yellowish compound of uranium) dissolved in water. The 20 pounds of uranium in the uranyl sulfate would mostly be of the fissionable U-235 variety.
> How would passengers, crew, even people standing on station platforms be protected from the deadly rays generated in the core? Most reactors have tremendous concrete walls surrounding them, but such a shield could not possibly be squeezed onto a locomotive frame. The X-12 shielding would weigh 200 tons, measure 10 by 15 by 15 feet, and be four feet thick. It would consist of several steel tanks nestling one inside another. The steel would stop the X-ray-like gamma radiation. To confine neutrons, the spaces between steel tanks would be filled with hydrogen-rich material like water, paraffin, or plastic.
> The big gain from atomic fuel, as Dr. Borst sees it, is likely to be an economic one. Despite the high cost of an engine like the X-12 — around $1,200,000, twice the price of a comparable diesel — its almost negligible fuel requirement (eleven pounds of uranium per year) could make it cheap to operate. This would be particularly true if it could be kept in operation nearly continuously, pulling high-speed expresses over long hauls and wasting little time turning around for the return trip. And in due course, the comparatively high cost of making these engines would likely be reduced as the actual problems of design, manufacture, and operation were further researched.
I read this, and yesterday I read about Malcolm X shooting and the lives of blacks in America (and i fear elsewhere), and i get so sad that people can be so mean to another fellow human being for being of a different, skin color or genetic origin?
Come on! Why would you go out of the way to burn somebody's house down, or beat up a person so bad the person get permanent injury[1]? I dont even try to understand how the state ignores the law breaking, states are complex, but a common man doing such things? I can't understand how a person looks in the mirror and not think of himself as a wretch and a demon(?).
I am from Portugal and I am sorry we lost ultramarine territories because i consider the peoples from Angola, Guinea and Mozambique as kindred. But we definitely deserved to lose them with prejudice. What was done to those citizens has no name, and as such I condone their right to arm against their oppressors the same as I would if any other citizen was singled out like they were. I also think all ex-Portuguese peoples(except Brazil) should have the right to claim Portuguese citizenship if they wish to.
All this to say I am very scarred of these events, because if they were so prevalent, it must be very easy to become a monster. I am just ignorant of how, yet.
> All this to say I am very scarred of these events, because if they were so prevalent, it must be very easy to become a monster. I am just ignorant of how, yet.
Divisive rhetoric that creates "us" vs "them" groups. Then comes the dehumanization and rationalization of violence against the othered group. I recall people calling for violence against people who refused to wear masks during covid, as the most recent example that comes to mind. An environment where neighbors are incited to turn against their neighbor breeds monsters.
Ironically, the actual violence was the people negligently spreading a disease that harmed the innocent people around them.
There's a funny spectrum between like, someone intentionally infecting the water supply of a city with a disease as bioterrorism which is obviously a crime which society at large agrees the police to use violence against the perpetrator to stop the act from happening, arrest the perpetrator and put them in jail. And then at the other end of the spectrum is things like spreading HIV, herpes or Covid which different people have varying opinions on whether that's acceptable, bad but non-criminal or criminally harmful to the people being infected.
Humans have very natural intuition around some types of harm or violence - directly observable things like punching or stabbing someone. But if the harm is more indirect and not directly observable, things like pollution or spreading disease, we don't have the same immediate fight-or-flight activation type of recognition and so we are often more lenient towards the perpetrators of those types of harm.
> I recall people calling for violence against people who refused to wear masks during covid
Not comparable. There is "us vs them" based on identity attributes someone is born with, that they have no control over, like their skin color, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and then there is "us vs them" based on someone's deliberate choice to be anti-social, belligerent, and put others at needless risk.
Neither justifies violence threats, but they are not the same thing.
There's been a lot of unjustified poor behaviour in history, some relatively recent history.
Jill¹, who I've known since we were both quite young, is barely a generation removed from the Australian frontier wars, massacres for a century+ prior to 1930², something her parents lived through.
It is not about about skin color or genetic origin. Whether we exploit a group or not simply depends on whether we can get away with it or not.
If humanity came across a group of purple aliens, how we would treat them would depend on how advanced they are.
If they were on the level of advanced animals, we might trap them and exhibit them. Keep them in cages and "study" them.
If they were much more advanced than us (maybe the can communicate with us, or zap one of us to death with lasers) we would submit and seek cooperation, and humble ourselves before them.
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