James of England

A married California attorney with a focus on international corporate law. After working in Cayman, London, China, and Iraq, I'm back home in DC.

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

I hear you. The threshold is important. But I think the elites are probably slightly more engaged and at risk of the death than the people, and the elites who don’t want a bad peace much more so (just as the people who have a strong view are), so creating stats showing less is a mixed bag.

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@runrunfrom1900 @Teoyaomiquu I’m with you. I just worry that it unnecessarily concedes so much as to partially undermine its case, a case that is in fact overwhelming. I appreciate your work and should have maintained a more positive tone.

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@BrianODowd5 @OOCcommunism Personally, I prefer my democracy to include a little less political or narco violence, but it falls within classical definitions. As above, I feel like the equivalence between the Russian view of the Ukrainians as not being a real people and the Irish view of Ulster is unfair.

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

It’s worse than that. There’s around 418 people who fit into the pool of MR + Minister/ equivalent + Forbes List. I don’t know how many adult kids they have, but most of them are surprisingly young; I speak to a lot of female MRs with young kids, and believe adult kids are rarer. At the last election 63% were 45 or younger, with the average Ukrainian father with an educated wife being ~30 when his first child is born. We will likely be seeing the numbers tick up a little this year as we’re smack in the fat part of the bell curve for VIP kids reaching majority.

More importantly, the MRs/ Ministers are definitionally not in the army; they’re working as MRs/ ministers. If you evaluate tech entrepreneurs + their kids you’ll have a comparable low number because most tech people are doing tech stuff and they dominate the category because they don’t have many adult kids. The definition ensures lower participation than the general populace.

Expand out to elite categories that do have kids, like senior religious leadership, and the kid fatalities climb steeply, but even then you have to take the leaders themselves out of the denominator or you’ll get a whacky result.

I can’t work out how it gets to 3k, but I think it’s by including all living former MRs, too, maybe minus the CHESNA list of collaborators/ assets/ etc. or some similar set of folks on the other side. But for the non-current list the age problem goes the other way. There’s ~45% of them over 65. Compare the Ukrainian baseline of 19%.

But even for that list, 8 seems low. In part it seems low because if you’re the son of an 85 year old dude who was in the Rada for a term in the 1990s, the odds are that your death won’t be treated as particularly newsworthy.

Take out the currently serving Rada members and normalize the number of elderly and you’ll find the number much closer to the baseline for the country. Add in assassinations and you get a little higher.

The numbers aren’t easy to work out, and I appreciate the effort, but I think the numerous anecdotes, like former MP Ilya Farion being assassinated and her son in law being killed at the front a few months later, Bohdan Stefanyshyn, husband of a sitting MP, being killed by shellfire (neither included in the above 6-8, and I have no idea how they could get below 8), are better.

Also noteworthy; the parties that push for a harder line serve at much greater levels than either the average or the parties more open to compromise. The elites certainly include both, but it isn’t hypocrisy for the people fighting and dying to advocate for the value of fighting and dying, even if they share a legislature or other elite forum with people more interested in having a temporary pause.

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@Marharyta930 @DeBallsac @RobEld75 @iceye_global @tryingattimes @nokia No, he’s got a point. There will be enormous benefits to Europe from whatever successor states there are after the Putinist regime collapses.

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@ibetxter @KyleWOrton Yeah. Graham’s secret lover comes forward after decades? Could be true. Graham turns out to have been frequently indiscreet through decades of expensive efforts to find a scandal? Essentially impossible.

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@Heminator Zelensky isn’t going to march on Moscow; more GW than Churchill. But he is likely to get Churchill’s result; Putin is unlikely to survive defeat and his death and regime collapse is likely to result in profound long term change.

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@WillardFoxton @KyleWOrton Also, not everyone can get one who wants one because many people rent or otherwise lack agency over white goods, and because Brits generally live in tiny homes, like rats or New Yorkers, that lack space for these things.

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@WillardFoxton @KyleWOrton Did you read my link? You’re addressing definition 1. But definition 2 is different. If I describe something as a five pound burger because it costs $7, correcting me because the meat weighs less than half a pound is not insightful.

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@WillardFoxton @KyleWOrton My first thought was that this must be a British English thing, but no, even British dictionaries say that that is exactly what a luxury is. https://t.co/3CreVh9ONd

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@WillardFoxton @KyleWOrton About half of UK homes own one. It’s not AC, but it’s still a leading example of the UK not quite having absorbed the twentieth century.
How would you better describe the normality of having to do dishes by hand?

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@KyleWOrton @holland_tom I’m not sure I’m for it for Westminster, which has produced many great figures and modally pretty good ones. But seems like a missed opportunity to have the Senedd lack any limnetic ensiform elements. Perhaps a republican mixed scheme in which moistened bints picked 1/3?

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@DelmarquisDol @Tyras_Mikhail You know, Moldova is a pretty good test case for this. We’ll see in the next decade if they make more of a move towards Romania or Moscow.

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@grok @WKrapek @pinangodan @DanielJHannan @grok Is part of the reason that Russians don’t have the same success with innovation, patents, and such because they do not have so many “world class” engineers?

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@grok @WKrapek @pinangodan @DanielJHannan @grok, Does Russia produce a comparable engineering economic output to the US with those greater numbers of grads?

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@grok @WKrapek @pinangodan @DanielJHannan Hey, @grok, did @wkrapek falsely claim that Russia produced more engineering talent despite having a smaller population, when in fact Russia is a backward place per capita where child pornography is legal but not political speech and indoor toilets are not universal?

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@WKrapek @pinangodan @DanielJHannan If they churn out more engineers, presumably those engineers do something. Does Russia beat America in car sales? Perhaps in airplanes? Oil? Skyscrapers? Are Russian roads better? Software? Data centers? Computers? Biotech? Environmental engineering? Indoor toilets? Nothing? Huh.

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@jimgeraghty @HSurfdog If you really cared about affordability, you’d have addressed the issue comprehensively. Neither the impact on the risk pool from dropping the individual mandate nor my wife’s preference for fancy sodas are mentioned. Not even the effect of El Niño on crop yields. Pretend to try!

[James of England @Jamesofengland]

@jaynordlinger I feel like it’s maybe more valuable to have books prepare us for life than vice versa. Maximizing our appreciation of books might thus not maximize their value.