by ben_w | 2026-01-16 14:56:07+00:00
> WHich question did I not answer?

pick policies with the unfair benefit of hindsight (while staying somewhat democratically acceptable), what would a "perfect" government have done differently in the last twenty years

So, they'd have to be things that were democratically acceptable at the time.

For example: Germany in that period was never no way going to accept nuclear power. Their leadership regrets it in hindsight, but at the time, forcing it on the people would have been undemocratic.

> They're fuckign EU farmers and makign us dependet on foreign food imports.

20 years ago the biggest problem with the EU's farming system was massive overproduction.

Like, "newsworthy scandal" levels of overproduction.

> Poland's economy has been growing like crazy so IT IS doable to grow your economy without importing illegal migration and associated issues.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-gdp-growth?tab=lin...

It mainly missed out on the downside of the global financial crisis, rather than being special. Few percent difference between Poland, Germany, Japan, Europe collectively, and the USA all around the same level.

> is not fucked due to not importing millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare like Europe did

Europe did not in fact import millions of uneducated third worlders to live on welfare. This would have been a self-evidently stupid thing to do, which is why that is not what happened.

Europe did take around two million asylum seekers in total. Important thing about asylum: they get sent back as soon as their homes stop being warzones, or sooner if they're deemed to have been taking the piss.

Economic migrants, who are important for the economy, are a bigger group. Mixing up asylum seekers and economic migrants because they're both "migrants" is as much of an error as declaring that all Canadians and Mexicans are "Americans" because they're from the continent of America.

> Depressing economic situations is what leads people to stop having kids, not the other way around.

If this were so, even royal families would not have had any kids before 1850, there certainly wouldn't be a massive population boom in e.g. India where they've only recently connected everyone to the electricity grid.

> Ever since the 1980s, Germany and other European models already knew population trends were gonna be fucked in the future, all the way back then. Did they take any measures and do anything to help the European population have more kids and prevent this?

I was born in 1983. I remember being warned of overpopulation, there was literally zero public concern about a demographic crisis by the time I reached pension age.

I also remember ongoing press campaigns in the UK demonising single mothers.

> instead of fixing the local issues preventing the locals from having kids, then introduce speech control laws for anyone who criticizes this.

That's a new one.

You think there's a law banning people from criticising the lack of support for families? Have you seen, like, any election campaign ever? One reliable theme throughout, no matter how effective the policy would be if examined closely, is at least one party saying they support families.

> EU has made to combat climate change, are being absorbed by US, CHina and India to grow their economies, so the planet is still getting more fucked like before except now we made ourselves poorer for it.

China's also going green. India… isn't, but the pain point hits them much sooner than we expect it to hit us, so they probably will.

The US was going green, then Trump happened. He's against renewables and doesn't believe in climate change, while also wanting to invade Greenland for reasons that only make sense if one or both of those are good bets; he insists on keeping coal plants open when the owners of those plants don't want that because gas is cheaper; he's lying a lot in general, but specifically by saying China doesn't use the renewables they're exporting. He's all over the place, wildly incoherent, and may lead to WW3 where none of this matters anyway.