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Kingsbury just really, really hates Finland. In all seriousness, I'm trying to find a pattern and it's driving me crazy.
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May 19, 2013 05:30
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VogeGandire posted:Yeah, the reason I've heard was the large Jewish population in Poland, and their regular bathing. I don't get how that would have saved the native population.  Surely not everyone involved in trading was Jewish. Good personal hygiene doesn't necessarily make you immune to flea bites, either. The Middle East suffered very heavily from the Black Death. This particular explanation sounds kind of like a Victorian-era urban legend that was meant to illustrate just how backwards and stinky medieval Europeans were. This part in particular:quote:Poland had a large Jewish community and accepted Jewish refugees who were scapegoated by other nations during the plague. Accepting refugees from plague-ridden areas was generally not a very good strategy to avoid the outbreak of plague in your own territory. It is intriguing, though. I'd also like to find out more about why Poland apparently managed to dodge the bullet.
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May 20, 2013 21:43
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I'm also fairly sure that neither Ireland nor Scotland have ten million inhabitants. On the other hand, it's good to see Greater Flanders! They gave us Brussels, too? Sure, why not. Edit: just noticed how they made sure to exclude Chechnya and Dagestan from 'United Europe'. Not sure if Russia is going to be cool with that, guys. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Jun 2, 2013 |
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Jun 2, 2013 12:08
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De Nomolos posted:Also weird that "Coke" spills over some into New Mexico. I always just thought of the "Coke" thing as being in the Deep South (partly b/c Coke is from Atlanta). So do they distinguish between coke and cola? It would get a little confusing otherwise. PrinceRandom posted:Edit: I think that joke someone made about Hungarian Revanchism being a flashpoint for Europe is kind of a fear( maybe not to the extent of war, but Hungary has wanted their "ethnic lands" back for a while, and Romania is becoming a mid-size power in Europe). Are they worried about their rapidly declining population at all? You'd think they'd focus on that first. From Statistics Explained, which is basically Eurostat's wiki:  Also, look at Germany. It's really weird that you don't hear more about this, maybe their social security system is organized in such a way as to lessen the impact of an aging population. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 14:24 on Jun 6, 2013 |
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Jun 6, 2013 14:16
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Riso posted:About 600k ethnic Hungarians live in surrounding countries so you could argue they do At this rate, 600K would only last them a decade at most. Current demographic trends aren't set in stone, though. I can see Eastern European fertility rates going back up in the near future, which is what happened for native Western Europeans in the past two decades (except Germans). Still lower than the replacement rate, but enough to stave off complete demographic collapse. Mu Cow posted:Population decline in Germany was getting a bit of news several years ago, but since Germany is currently doing much better than most of Europe, it's been kind of forgotten. That's true, a lot of those deep-blue areas are probably rural areas with a low population density. It's part of the general trend of people moving from the periphery to the center. Belgium and the Netherlands don't really have the equivalent of that kind of peripheral area, and that's why you don't see any blue zones there. Still, Germany has been losing population for years now. I wonder how that will affect its social security system, particularly pensions, once baby boomers start retiring. Will they be to able to cope with it? It looks like they'll be hit even harder than the rest of Western Europe. Here is the equivalent map for the USA, showing estimated population change at the county level between 2010 and 2012:  The interactive version of this map (detailing natural change and net migration) can be found here. At first glance you might think the country breaks even, but a lot of those gray counties had very low populations to begin with. It's the same phenomenon of people moving away from isolated rural areas to the cities. On that note, I wonder what's going on in the western part of North Dakota. Maybe they discovered more oil.
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Jun 6, 2013 17:15
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lonelywurm posted:I can sort of help in regards to one of the folk culture regions. The blob of purple straddling central Manitoba/Saskatchewan in Canada is where my family's from, and it's very strongly Ukrainian, with no shortage of Poles and Russians as well. And it does show: my mum grew up speaking Canadian Ukrainian (and we're not Ukrainian - she picked it up from the community as a whole, in spite of her parents speaking exclusively English); the tradition of pain-stakingly painting pysanky was taken very seriously, the town has significant congregations in both the Ukrainian Catholic and Ukrainian Orthodox churches, and most of the food you'll find at town fairs are based somewhere on slavic cuisine - even in my family, which was Anglo-Irish, borsch was very, very common at meal-times. Which area/city was this? Sounds like an interesting cultural phenomenon. prefect posted:You get clobbered with enough disasters, you start to believe in god? I'm a little surprised that even in places like Vermont it's still more than 25% of the population.
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Jun 7, 2013 15:28
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I'd like to see the median income rather than per capita. The East Coast presumably has a lot of people (in the financial sector, for example  ) making obscene amounts of money, which brings up the average. And the cost of living is much higher there, as well.
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Jun 10, 2013 17:06
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Moldova is determined to be the worst European country in everything.
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Jun 15, 2013 19:54
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computer parts posted:The US should be Red because it doesn't have a parliament. That's not really true. America doesn't have a parliamentary system since the executive branch is not entirely dependent on the legislature, but the United States Congress is still a (bicameral) parliament in the general sense of the word. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 13:52 on Jun 18, 2013 |
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Jun 18, 2013 13:49
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^ Watch out with using memes outside of the meme thread.menino posted:You mean the country with the preponderance of native speakers of a language creates definitions of words based on it's particular usage? That's shocking. Downright shocking. Yes, the fact that we insist that the US Congress falls under the generic category of 'parliament', regardless of its specific name, is due to our undying hatred of America.
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Jun 19, 2013 04:38
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Look at that bulge, it's nowhere near China. What's their justification?
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Jun 20, 2013 19:20
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Norway, notable banana republic.
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Jun 21, 2013 19:06
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ComradeCosmobot posted:Unless "well enforced" and "mostly enforced" are clearly defined, I'm not sure what the difference is and why Ireland is so special. Just let them have this. Actually, I'm a little surprised too. I thought Ireland had very strict abortion laws. That strikes me as something that 'harms women'.
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Jun 28, 2013 22:43
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Annual meat consumption per capita: The usual suspects are in red.
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Jun 28, 2013 22:53
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It doesn't surprise me. My dad works in Luxembourg City, lots of great restaurants there. And look at the United Arab Emirates, using their oil wealth to eat ungodly amounts of meat.
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Jun 28, 2013 23:00
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redscare posted:What the hell? I thought this kind of poo poo only went down in places like the Soviet Union (seriously, my parents have told me about these 'kielbasa trains' where villagers would just roll into moscow, buy everything they could carry, and then roll back home) Scandinavians can be really weird when it comes to the price of things like alcohol (and apparently, meat). I always point that out when people are talking about how it's paradise on Earth. Then I head to the local bar and order a beer for 1.70€. 
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Jun 29, 2013 12:16
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More Later posted:Ask the Bretons and Nantes is Breton, ask everyone else and Nantes is everyone else's. Can't wait for Soviet Commubot to shine some knowledge on this! I think he just forum searches for the word 'Brittany'. I've learned a lot about that region just by being in the general vicinity of his posts. Every secession movement could use people with that level of commitment. Kainser posted:And man, that map really overstates the extent of a lot of regional cultures/languages. Although it's nice to see a 'cultural' map that doesn't just label the top third of the Nordic countries+Kola as 'Sami'. Right, it seems more like a historical map that is not necessarily relevant today. Off the top of my head: - A lot of Navarrans, especially in the southern part of the region, don't identify with Basque culture - Northern Ireland has a Protestant majority - Most Valencians resent being lumped in with the 'Països Catalans' - Most people in French Flanders and Brussels speak French - Karelia is overwhelmingly Russian It's also strange that they didn't apply the same principle to the traditionally German areas in Eastern Europe. Kaliningrad is still Kaliningrad, for example. Probably because in that case you're dealing with forced resettlement rather than gradual assimilation. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 12:23 on Jun 30, 2013 |
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Jun 30, 2013 12:05
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Jake Hitlerston. Jake Hitlerston. Whenever I start thinking that maybe I should try to get into alternate history, I will think of this name.
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Jul 1, 2013 09:55
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Thanks for ruining it. Jake Hitlerston would have made it hilariously bad, now it just sounds bad. Edit: good username material, too.
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Jul 1, 2013 10:25
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That really was the dumbest deus ex machina. I stopped reading after the 'atom bomb' twist.
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Jul 1, 2013 15:44
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Shbobdb posted:Radical Republicans transitioning to socialism isn't terribly surprising. A party that was all about giving an oppressed agrarian class land and enfranchising them at the expense of an entrenched aristocracy sounds positively Maoist. The Republicans, even the radical Republicans, had more modest "domestic" concerns in the north, but given discussions at the time about "wage slavery" it isn't much of a stretch to have them go pretty far left. I don't know about that. If I remember correctly, the Republican Party in the nineteenth century was mostly for 'native' Anglo-Americans, geared towards traders and small farmers, particularly in New England. They have no reason to start sympathizing with the Democrat-voting industrial urban workforce, which consisted mostly of recent immigrants. I can see them become a liberal party in the traditional sense, i.e. socially progressive and economically liberal. In fact, you could say that this is the current role of the Republicans in suburban America outside of the South and Midwest.
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Jul 2, 2013 14:18
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Normally I would agree that maternity leave is the last thing you want to start applying austerity to in a country experiencing a terminal demographic crisis, but two years does seem crazy. Are you serious about that? I think it's four months in Belgium. Edit: also, it was mandatory? You just mean that the employer had to allow it and not that the mother was forced to stay at home for two years, right? Because if it's the latter you can unironically thank Germany for making you get rid of an insanely sexist law. Phlegmish fucked around with this message at 11:35 on Jul 6, 2013 |
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Jul 6, 2013 11:23
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Yes, but consider this: Hitler. Checkmate, Germanailures. 
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Jul 6, 2013 12:27
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Right. Ius sanguinis and ius soli are not necessarily mutually exclusive, and neither is the most common method of obtaining citizenship in the vast majority of countries.
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Jul 9, 2013 21:43
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There is no way that Maine is the dumbest state by any sensible metric, but we probably shouldn't be overanalyzing a gimmicky map that is barely 'politically-loaded' to begin with.
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Jul 11, 2013 17:57
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Vegetable posted:I'm pretty sure most people outside the UK are utterly baffled by the political arrangement of the British Isles. Scotland, Wales, England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Great Britain, Britain, United Kingdom, the British Isles, Crown dependencies. When it comes down to it I wouldn't be surprised if some Britons can't pinpoint the finer distinctions. The confusing part is that England doesn't have a parliament of its own, but Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales do. What kind of federal system is that?
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Jul 11, 2013 20:49
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There are people (namely, Justin Bieber) who barely know what Germany is. I think educators are just setting their standards realistically low.
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Jul 11, 2013 21:35
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It makes perfect sense. Population-wise, Australia is barely twice the size of Belgium. For me, the surprising part of that map is South America.
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Jul 12, 2013 16:56
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fermun posted:That's a graph from the Fluoride Action Network, an anti-fluoridation group that talks a lot about various fluoride conspiracies. I assume the data is somehow cherry picked for that. But...it was posted by someone arguing for fluoridation. I'm sure it has beneficial effects, but it doesn't seem to make that much difference in developed countries.
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Jul 24, 2013 18:25
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Yeah, take that you loving palefaces. A less RATM-y map:  The territorial distribution of Serbs in Croatia before the civil war. Unsurprisingly, that's where most of the Serb-occupied territory in Croatia was during the war.
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Jul 25, 2013 06:57
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Is this correlationequalscausation.jpg? Remember kids, Protestantism causes diabetes  (yes, I know it's actually fuckthesouth.jpg, version 8749852)
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Jul 31, 2013 17:51
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Regarde Aduck posted:Protestantism possibly causes a lifestyle outlook that leads to diabetes. It's not impossible when you frame it logically. Considering the type of people who got kicked out of Europe and forced to flee to the Americas, religion probably is important when considering some of the ills of American history. Puritans, for example, were unforgivable scum and their legacy is still felt today. Except that Calvinist-inspired denominations traditionally promote an austere and non-ostentatious lifestyle. I can maybe see how it leads to diabetes in a very roundabout way, through the development of capitalism and consumerism, but there is certainly no direct connection. Killer robot posted:This is one of the most perfect summations of how "The South" for so many is a magic phrase that lets them suspend their normally stated principles and say that, no, poverty really is a moral failing. wikipe is just sort-of trolling, but that's a good point. It's especially ironic when you consider that rural African-American poverty plays an important role in those statistics. That's the one map they left out, strangely enough.
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Jul 31, 2013 18:07
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Squalid posted:lol what is the horrible legacy of Puritanism? Besides New England's status as the least religious region of America. Like I'm just skeptical you can assign much blame for anything to a movement that effectively ceased to exist in the 1730s. Actually, it did have a very large impact on the subsequent development of American culture. Just not on its diabetes rates.
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Jul 31, 2013 19:10
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I have to say their 1532 map was pretty terrible. I know they were very insular at this point, but it still surprises me a little. Even those ancient Greek maps where the Indian Ocean is an inland sea are better than that.
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Aug 2, 2013 19:13
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Fizzil posted:Maududi, this image was flipped, but note the arabic is upside down here. That's not too bad except for Southern Africa being a separate continent for some reason. When was it made?
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Aug 3, 2013 11:20
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It is interesting to me that everyone assumed Antarctica existed, and it's even more interesting that they were right.
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Aug 5, 2013 20:44
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Mercator's map of the Arctic isn't loading for me, and it sounds great from the description. You're such a tease, AlexG.
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Aug 12, 2013 18:34
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Squalid posted:Personally I want to know how "race" translates in different languages, it being a western concept that probably gets equated with various local ideas that only approximate its western definition. Like I assume indians hates living next to other races so much because race is translated into caste, or maybe caste/religion/language? Whatever it is I doubt their prejudice is about skin color. Caste and skin color are actually very much correlated in India. Edit: Koramei beat me to it.
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Aug 13, 2013 22:55
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Notorious b.s.d. posted:edit2: found a way better dialect map It's decent from a historical point of view, I guess. In reality, most Basques and Valencians speak Spanish, while the overwhelming majority of Bretons, Alsatians and French Flemings speak French. I'm also not sure why they made Brussels French-speaking if they were going for the historical angle. It seems completely arbitrary.
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Aug 14, 2013 23:11
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 21:54 |
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I'm fairly sure that Wales comes from the Germanic word for 'foreigner', like Wallonia. That would indeed make it orange on the map, since the indigenous name is Cymru.
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Aug 15, 2013 18:04
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