Man, I sure wonder if those engineers building Palantir's, Flock's, and other surveillance SW right now (hello if you're reading this), will have this 20/20 hindsight "oh shit" epiphany moment, when the product they helped build is gonna be used against them or their kids in the future. Kind of like when Dr. Frankenstein finds his end at the hands of his creation.
Those SW devs probably think that doing a deal with the devil in exchange for a higher than average income now, will allow them to build an upper class lifestyle where they'll be safe from the government's jackboots, but news flash, NO you won't, unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also on the menu. "It's a big club and you're not in it."
I guess these individuals think like "if I don't do this someone else will, and we'll end up in the same situation - except I'll have fewer millions - so I might as well choose the lesser of two evils".
Some people may have refused to do these things - you just aren't aware of them. It's unrealistic though to think that in a globalized world, individuals would share the same ethics and/or intelligence.
> ... unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also not safe from government overreach
But how did that turn out for Ghislaine Maxwell though? We aren't seeing her much in the posh NYC parties anymore are we?
And something also has to be said about public shame when sentences like: "Bill Gates got even more STDs than Windows got viruses and that lead to his wife quitting him".
I'd rather be a small millionaire than a billionaire having to suffer headlines like that.
Bear in mind your examples are only those few who were stupid/unlucky enough to get caught and exposed to the public. But other Epstein Island clients like Howard Lutnick are sitting next to the president right now, and former client Bill Clinton used to be president, and their families amassed generational wealth, security and political influence that no mortal worker will ever be able to have. There's no justice here.
>A £1500 car is £1500 because it's expected you'll need to replace the engine or transmission pretty soon.
Really not true at all. Care to share your sources for this claim? Anecdotally, I've (plus friend and family) owned plenty of beater cars in that ballpark price, and none had failures needing to replace engine or transmission. Most of their faults came in the electronics (sensors, actuators, fuse box, wire harness) plus suspension, body rust, etc basically the same parts EVs also have.
Meanwhile, if you look up 'EV clinic' postings online, you'll see they find plenty of design failures with European and Korean EVs that are basically ticking timebombs(sometimes literally, hello Stellantis) where electric motors, inverters or battery packs are guarantee to fail in a short timeframe due to various design faults that were entirely preventable. Most common faults with poor EV designs I saw, seem to be the seal of the electric motor stator cooling which fails quickly leading coolant to flood the motor rotor killing it, needing a rebuild.
From what I gather from their analysis', the crux of this issue seems to be that some modern EVs, especially those less premium ones, are cost cut to the extreme in a race to the bottom to maintain shareholder value, both at manufacturing but also at design phase, leading to cut corners everywhere and such issues being a common occurrence and manifesting en-masse after their warranty runs out. From their analysis, IIRC Tesla's powertrains seem to be some of the most reliable and well designed, with the likes of Audi, VW, BMW, Mercedes being less so and Stellantis being trash tier.
Meanwhile, plenty of older ICEs are largely immune form such massive reliability faults, because they benefited from decades of industrial design and development experience done in a past era where race to the bottom cost cutting and planned obsolescence weren't yet a thing. So I wouldn't be surprised when an older 1500$ ICE car will last longer than a 1500$ EV.
In Germany for example(and other EU countries) you get money back from the government on your tax return for your daily commutes to work, if you live far away enough from work to qualify for commuter subsidies. Those subsidies you get no matter which transportation you use, bicycle, train, car, etc. And plenty of people commute by car when their work/home is far away and remote enough for cycle/public transportation to not be very useful or convenient.
Funny how their solution was to subsidize burning fossil fuels for car commutes to the office instead of, oh I don't know, MANDATING WFH!, given Germans are such staunched green environmentalists. Sure, let's turn off nuclear and ban plastic straws, but let's also subsidize the generation of diesel, brake pad and tire fine dust particles we breathe in, for commuting by car to work. We can't forget our car industry lobbyists.
I don't get how your argument infers from your parents comment.
To me it would be the opposite conclusion: stay away from ARM SBCs with proprietary firmware and just go Intel-x86 NUCs if you don't want surprises.
And yes, RPI was(is?) a proprietary-FW SBC as the Broadcom VideoCore GPU driver was never open sourced from the start and relied on community efforts for reverse engineering, which the rPI foundation then leveraged to sell their products at a markup to commercial customers after the FOSS community did all the legwork for them for free. Like so long and thanks for all the fish.
Meanwhile Intel iGPUs had full linux kernel drivers out of the box. That's why they're great Jellyfin transcoding servers.
I had to throw away, literally, a Gigabyte BRIX, because its firmware did not recognised any distro I throwed at it from internal drives, only if connected externally over USB.
The experiements with various kinds of SSD modules, Linux distros, and UEFI booting partitions, end up killing the motherboard in someway due to me manipulating it all the time, whatever.
Raspberry PIs are the only NUCs I can buy in something like Conrad Electronic, and be assured it actually works without me going through it as if I had just bough Linux Unleashed in 1995's Summer.
IDK, why does this matter? What if there's no retail stores close to me? I haven't been into a retail electronics store in years, when online ordering and easy returns makes it so much more convenient, especially for cases like yours with the Gigabyte Brix not working properly. So what were you trying to prove with this because I'm confused as you keep own-goaling yourself.
The thing is, for such a niche use-cases it's expected it's not gonna have major retailer availability since it's not something the general consumer is gonna be knowledgeable enough for it to sell in high volumes to be wort for retail stores wherever you may live to stock up shelves on NUCs with Linux preinstalled just to cater to your limited demographic who refuses to order online for some reason, is a very tall order and not really a good faith argument for anything.
The market for people who are like "ah shit, I need to spontaneously go out to the store and pick up a NUC right fucking now, and it has to have Linux preinstalled, because I can't wait a couple of days till it arrives online or know how to install Linux myself", is really REALLY small.
It does, because I get to punch someone if it doesn't work, instead of looking hopless to an online form.
On a more serious note, how do you want normies to get introduced to the Year of Desktop Linux, outside WebOS LG TVs, Android/Linux and ChromeOS, instead of getting Mac minis and Neos at said stores?
I guess it is buying SteamDecks to play Windows games. /s
Raspeberry PIs are the few devices that normies can buy with GNU/Linux pre-installed.
Now I'm certain I don't want to deal(even on the internet) with people who consider punching low wage workers in retail sector, as the acceptable resolution for their issues with product defects of manufacturer. Especially given this is what free returns of online orders is good for, makes it even more looney.
LE to your reply from below here: Excuse me but a form of expression for what? The spec sheet of that Gigabyte Brix explicitly lists only Windows 11 as the supported OS, not Linux. You tried to install an unsupported OS, and you broke it in the process. What exactly do you expect the retail store workers to do to fix the issue you yourself caused via using the product in a way it wasn't advertised? You can contact the manufacturer for warranty or return it via the online return window, but the fuckup is still on your end and not the issue of retail workers.
How many physical stores sell the alternatives at all? IIRC there is one in Cambridge specifically selling Pi kit and related stuff, but that is about it.
I almost never shop at Target. It's not near to me, and it's not on my list of destinations when I'm away from home.
But I was in Target one day anyway, and they had a Raspberry Pi 3 kit for sale on the shelf. IIRC, it was one of the Google DIY smart speaker kits. I thought that was neat to see.
My usual source for Raspberry Pi stuff is Microcenter. That's also not near to me, but it's a viable destination that's worth a trip all on its own.
At this Microcenter, they move enough Pi hardware that they don't even have them on the shelves anymore. They're instead stocked at each checkout register, and priced at or below MSRP. They're right there alongside a wide assortment of minimally-packaged house-brand SD cards and USB keys and other geek fodder.
It's quick and easy to walk in and grab a couple of spools of printer filament, some 22AWG solid wire for breadboarding, a card of LR44 batteries for the digital calipers, and a Raspberry Pi. (Well, it can be quick. Last time I went, I got sucked into the mechanical keyboard department for an embarrassingly long time.)
Anyway, they also have NUC-shaped computers there if someone wants go that direction instead. Just pick one out, pay for it, and take it home.
>Nobody at Anthropic is taking a 5 week summer break or working a 35 hour week
The people working at Mistral, Expedition 33, or other top successful software coming out of the EU, most likely also aren't working only 35 hours/week either. In fact some probably squeeze some work on weekends too out of dedication and pressure to meet deadlines.
In a lot of Austrian SW companies for example, have "all-in" contracts where you waive your rights to the scrutiny of the standard 38,5h/week in exchange for a "higher" salary with longer work hours and less time tracking. Similar cases in France I believe.
The 35h/week European meme people here parrot, you mostly see only in civil servants, old established monopolistic companies with moats and strong unions, not in scrappy start-up trying to make it and fix a bug before release, or semiconductor companies fighting a tape-out.
So no, work hours aren't what's limiting EU startups.
That's why historically, leaders would send those men to die in wars. Totally not what seems to be brewing right now.
Though present day men don't seem to be biting the "let's join the military and fight foreign wars for our corrupt baby-eating pedo leaders" nationalist propaganda, like they did generations ago.
The problem is that it became really hard to lead society into a war. See support for Iran war. It started basically on zero and kept cratering.
Now you want to lead these males to die in war, while they are fully aware of what you are doing? At best you will get dysfunctional army fragging itself constantly. At worst you will trigger unrest because males would rather should they have an agency than be sacrificed as cattle.
Which will likely be immediately called out as so. See recently (few days ago) when Orban's goons put explosives on gas pipes in Serbia going towards Hungary and then loudly blaming Ukraine.
Everybody immediately knew that this would make no sense for Ukraine to do that - i.e. Why would they just plant explosives to be found, when they would blow it up on spot if they really wanted?. Whole thing kind of fizzled out because nobody took the bait.
I always found it interesting that homeless folks in the US seem to live in tents a lot of the time, but in my country they rarely have more than a piece of cardboard. I don't know if my perception is incorrect, or if I'm ready too much into this, but my conclusion has been basically what you said: at every socio-economic level, the people at that level have higher standards of living in developed countries than in developing countries.
It’s really hard to compare when you get down to it, even if you ignore “homeless” as a category.
Using money as a proxy doesn’t work perfectly because things can be more expensive, and trying to normalize with things like “living sq ft” doesn’t calculate externalities.
The best I’ve found is to track relative migration pressure - where do people want to go?
Excellent points. In my small island country, prices mostly come down to being labor-dominant or material-dominant. The former is cheaper* than the developed world, whereas the latter is more expensive* than the developed world.
*compared using nominal exchange
>The best I’ve found is to track relative migration pressure - where do people want to go?
I like this approach. It's much more holistic and captures stuff that really cannot be quantified with prices and numbers, like freedoms and rights.
> Poverty is relative. If you have a small apartment in a city of McMansions, you're poor, but if you have a goat in a village of no goats, you're rich.
That worked before globalization. Nowadays, having a small apartment in a city of McMansions means you're upper middle class. Poor people in the west have no apartments and no goats.
Not sure if up to date anymore, but if you look at some samples like here, at equivalent adjusted income levels, people across the world have similar standards of living regardless of where they live.
What is equivalent adjusted income level? PPP between Russia and USA is around 1.8. Median annual salary in the US is $57 ($1196 per week), median salary in Russia is $13200. Even if you adjust it, it's roughly two times smaller.
As someone who lived in a bunch of countries, some rich and some poor, no, living standards among the avg. Joes of the world are not even remotely the same.
>I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large.
I disagree entirely. It's because most EU workers(at least in the richer most developed countries) don't get a proportional slice of the fruits of their labor, but only breadcrumbs after taxes. Working harder as an EU employee just means your boss/company gets to be richer and your government gets more of your taxes, while you get nothing more in return, just taking home a few extra bucks at the end of the month, making the juice not worth the squeeze, causing everyone to optimize for doing the bare minimum because why bother.
Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder? You'll be more tired now and still won't be able to buy a nice house, ending up on the same standard of living and housing affordability as someone who optimized his life around extracting the most amount of welfare and benefits from the government while dodging work. So then why wouldn't you do the same?
Same story around entrepreneurship and VC funding or lack thereof. The taxes, risk and responsibilities of being a business owner with employees on your payroll are far higher that in other places on the planet like the US, making it a better deal to just not bother with all that and choose the cushy life of an employee in a old dinosaur company in an ageing and declining industry, rather than the stress of being the employer/innovator.
Geopolitical competition will not fix this because the monetary incentive structure around hard work still remains messed up. You can fix this by changing the tax laws to reward those working harder instead of punishing them with higher taxes and no gains to pay for the lifestyles of those who contribute the least in society.
Simply look at what Poland or Czechia did to become economic powerhouses in a short amount of time, and just do stuff like that. And you'll find out they didn't start off by giving their workers Scandinavian style of income taxes, welfare and benefits, that I can tell you, but more like cutthroat capitalism and the harder you work the more you can earn tax structures.
If you somehow imagine our companies in Poland (which are mostly western companies) are somehow giving workers here a bigger slice of pie, you are fed some weird propaganda. Our taxation is even worse if you look at exactly the same salaries.
Our success story is the same as recent India one - we're just much smaller. We have educated population that was underemployed and poor, and western companies jumped at opportunity of replacing entry and mid level positions with cheaper workers, across both factory and office work.
My understanding was that the tax situation is not good for salaried work, but Tech workers primarily use limited companies to make it much more comfortable; many of the loopholes that have been closed in e.g. the UK with IR35 are still open.
At least that's the reason I've been given every time I've tried to take a contractor permanent!
The taxation may be worse, but the cost of living is still uniquely low. So the same market salaries will actually go a lot further on a purchasing power basis.
Calling India a success story feels like a bit of a stretch compared to the better known Chinese case, or indeed Eastern Europe itself. They still have huge scope for further improvement.
But that's how it works in America and China as well. And in Russia. And basically everywhere. Since it's the same in all of these places, it fails to explain the differences.
Yeah, they send you to die in dumb wars instead and if you survive then you get your welfare (a military paycheck). So you think dumb wars keep countries great?
> Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder?
If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city. If you're going to have an "idle" lifestyle, you'll be vastly better off moving to a small rural town where prices are a lot lower by default - same if you work fully remote. (Connectivity used to be a key barrier for the latter case, but fast mobile and sat-based connections have changed this quite dramatically.)
>If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city.
Productivity is only one of the smaller reasons. The other bigger ones are landlord rent seeking, nimbyism, mass migration, interest rates and real estate speculation, all of which aren't connected to your income progress. That's how productivity and employment in a city can stagnate or even decline while real estate prices can keep climbing.
The urban-rural distinction is one of the oldest ideological divides in human history, and that has built immense and unexamined prejudice. We have words like “urbane” and “polite” on the one hand and “pagan,” “villain” and “heathen” on the other, and nobody stops to think about how this is a one-way street of city-dwellers condemning their rustic relations. A lot of modern political decisions boil down to “everyone should live in cities” when cities are historically demographic sinks (lower birthrate), largely because the people who make political decisions live in cities.
>Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week.
You mean 36h in a full time employment contract or by self reported work hours or is it part time work?
> I am talking here solely about my white collar bubble
Well from where I am in the EU and across other people I know in EU, for white collar jobs 40h contract is the norm in most places for most people I know. 36h is kind of an exception in select few fields in certain high-welfare countries with strong unions(German IG-metal for example in Germany, Airbus in France, etc), so you could simply be biased by a privileged bubble that isn't the norm in all of Europe.
I'm guessing he means actual time physically working, not the theoretical time in the contract.
It really depends on your bubble but a lot of people have "full time" contracts (meaning 40-ish hours) but real hours vary. You can come later, leave earlier, go do something else in the day, and don't have to report it to anyone. Just make sure you're not missing a meeting and deliver what's needed on time. So in practice you end up working fewer hours on average, as long as you can produce enough on average (which honestly isn't hard in many large organisations, and hard to measure).
Those SW devs probably think that doing a deal with the devil in exchange for a higher than average income now, will allow them to build an upper class lifestyle where they'll be safe from the government's jackboots, but news flash, NO you won't, unless you're part of the insider-trading presidential Epstein Island elite pedo-class, you're also on the menu. "It's a big club and you're not in it."
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