>Remember that a nation works best when there is a shared culture and a shared language - these things being inseparable - which encourage unity and community.
Which nations are these? Looking at the current major world economies:
- US: Federal. Many immigrant communities. English and Spanish.
- China: Two major languages, two SARs, each with another official language. "Chinese Tapei" with Hokkien. Regional cultures I'm not familiar with.
- EU: 24 languages, made up of multiple countries many of which have multiple official or minority languages.
- Japan: Shared culture and language, stagnant economy.
- India: Barely half of the country speak the most common language.
> - EU: 24 languages, made up of multiple countries many of which have multiple official or minority languages.
I'd argue that lack of a common language is one of the main factors in the UK leaving the EU. People here (in the UK) don't realise how similar they are to other Europeans, because they can't understand them or their media.
This problem is less pronounced for the rest of the EU, because they tend to be better at teaching/learning other languages there.
> "Japan: Shared culture and language, stagnant economy."
Somehow ignoring that Japan had a gigantic economic boom in the '70s through the '80s to become the world's 2nd largest economy. Setting aside that relating shared language to economic strength is nonsense anyway, Japan does not bolster your thesis.
I don't know why you picked that list of countries in particular, but in most rankings of countries (by happiness, productivity, social welfare, GDP per capita, etc.) you tend to see several of the nordic countries, which are all quite culturally-homogenous.
I would highlight "social welfare" rankings in particular: people seem to vote more for socialist measures—measures that tax them to provide for others—when they care more about those others. If this correlation holds (between lack of cultural diversity and social-welfare leanings), then it would suggest that the cultures that care most about helping their "fellow man" are the ones in which one's "fellow man" is the least different from oneself.
I welcome your counterpoints which are unpopular of course.
> Research shows that multiculturalism does not help nations and only leads to mutual distrust, increased political partisanship, and a whole host if other problems.
I would argue that the US is experiencing a lot of problems, particularly the rise of Trumpism, because there's now a large contingent of immigrants (many not-so-recent) who don't speak English and have a very different culture. This has stoked a lot of xenophobia, and calls to "build the wall".
China is almost all Mandarin. The SARs are really small exceptions and not like the rest of the country (by design).
Japan's main problems are a low birthrate, and inefficient business processes (too many people spending too much time at work, but not actually being productive). But still, they have one of the world's leading economies.
India is really a mess in a lot of ways, and as you point out, it isn't doing nearly as well as China economically even though it's started out from relatively the same point.
There are counterpoints, however.
1) Switzerland. 4 languages, and the country is both economically super-prosperous (per capita) and safe, with the highest standard of living in the world.
2) Canada. 2 main languages (English, French), and standard of living at least as good as neighboring USA.
I think the difference is that, in both these places, these countries basically started out with these major languages, and made very conscious decisions early on to accommodate these languages and regional cultures, and to be a place where they could all get along. But even this hasn't been perfect: Quebec has long had a separatist movement.
Well technically it's priority not right of way. My guess is that the concept was only codified with the introduction of traffic laws, which in most places didn't happen before the 20th century. Until then, "priority" in land probably came down to common sense: size, conventions, and social status.
It's the kind of contempt for customers that is common for software vendors but is enough to prevent me from buying hardware from them. Valve's just EOLed the Steam Controllers and their next game won't support SteamOS on Steam Machines, so why should I now feel comfortable dropping $999 on a VR headset to play it?
I've done builds in /dev/shm/ on Xeon and Threadripper with only a trivial speed-up. If it can fit in tempfs, make/cc can just load it all into RAM anyway, so I guess you only reduce the build time by the time it takes for the first read. Which would explain why '-j' on a big codebase tends to trigger my OOM killer.
