Are the non-EU states like Belarus and Ukraine really better off than CEE EU states? While the situation may not be ideal for the CEE EU states, the alternative doesn't seem great either.
I don’t know what to say to that, other than to talk about my experience living in Eastern Eruope: about two of my friends are the ones who remained in the country, everyone else has gone to the west, whether Austria, Germany or the UK, they all understood that there’s a better life waiting for them there (with its own pros and cons, of course). So very few remain with the will and the courage to wish for a system that’s not corrupt and fundamentally broken. And not just the people in STEM. Natural resources are also increasingly leaving, whether legally or through bribes to officials.
And the money, something which always gets thrown at Eastern Europe, how it benefits from incredible amounts of grants - that tends to end up in private pockets and not in restoration, infrastructure or innovation.
Again, I can’t tell you what the way forward should be, because I don’t see it myself and I’m certainly not smart enough to imagine it, but what’s happening is certainly noticeable even to individuals.
The same happens in Southern Europe and membership of the EU allowed me to get a 6-digit income and to live in a country where I don’t need a political affiliation to get a decent job and where the state bureaucracy is not merely a welfare system for government employees.
I’m not sure I’d blame this state of affairs on the countries that decided to not be economic basket-cases. What should Germany do? Cut its productivity or destroy its value chains?
Individually there are of course benefits to being able to go to richer countries. On the whole though it is obvious that a free market within the EU is vastly better for the large established industries of the west.
An underdeveloped country can hardly compete with the likes of already huge corporations without some serious backing from the state. And even then it may be unfeasible.
Of course you can blame Germany and other developed nations with established industries that while benefiting from educated immigrants and the free market within the EU don't care to give anything back, or even view this as problematic in any way.
I don’t see this as problematic because, at least for Eastern European countries, the west absorbed some of their unemployment, while they were catching up, potentially reducing internal tensions and smoothing the transition to a modern high value-added economy. Access to the European market allowed them to become part of the German value-chain, which produced wealth and exported technology and know-how. All this while receiving transfers from the West to build infrastructure.
I’m not sure what alternative scenario we could have had. I think that Poland outside the EU would have ended up closer to Ukraine than to where it is now (Poland GDP per capita PPP is 3x the Ukrainian).
My point is that all those things happen in Belarus as well, except even worse. The average salary in Poland is around $1500 usd. In Belarus, it’s 300. In Ukraine, it’s around 800. Belarus is not immune from brain drain, either. Those who can leave, do leave. So the author should consider the alternative to joining the EU before calling the relationship exploitive.
I fully agree with your stance. I am from Romania, and, although there are still many things missing, things are, IMO, getting better.
There might be some sort of colonial relationship going, but we are getting in return many things as well, and we have grassroots economic initiatives lately as well. The political system is still a mess, but where is it not?
For me, personally, it would make little sense leaving the country. Biggest reason could be the education system sucking a lot compared to the much better education system somewhere in the EU, and this would become important once I have kids.
It seems like a hit piece to me. Nothing is compared to other brain drains that happen through out the global economy. In the EU system places like Prague and Tallinn have grown and reasonable amounts of money comes back with retirees in Europe. In countries with greater wealth inequality how do the brain drains play out?
Looks like inflation has spiked in the last few months in the US, but that's after a long period of fairly low inflation. Compared to the past century, it's not that extreme yet; the 1970s and 1980s had higher inflation[0]. And the high house prices are not something from just the past few months, so it's really not inflation that's causing it.
My personal experience is Netherland[1] where the period of low inflation still continues, and house prices have also been shooting up for quite some time. We sold our previous house for 25% more after 8 years, and our current house has increased 25% in value after only 4 years. And even before I bought my first house, I was dismayed at the ridiculous house prices and wanted to wait until the whole thing crashed. (It did crash shortly after we bought our first house in 2008, but even that barely hurt the value of our house.)
There don't seem to be many practical applications of integer factoring - basically it's good for cracking PKI. On the other hand these recommender algorithms looked really useful for the applications that folks use recommenders in now and for extending to deal with potentially other sparse matrix problems as well. Which is good because the paper here produced a good classical alternative.
This is a problem for QC though because there really aren't many actual algorithms to run on these things that are going to be that useful afaik. At least with analytical complexity results (I think quantum neural nets don't have these yet?) - I would love to see counter examples!
Note - a lot of QC algorithms provide only modest speedups like ^2 improvements - the ^n improvements are the ones we want and are v.rare.
I would focus on what you bring to the table. If you’re able to drive sales for this idea, or come up with a compelling marketing plan to drive user acquisition, then you should have no trouble finding someone to make the app for you.
Just because an authoritarian government made a decision doesn’t necessarily mean the decision was authoritarian.
In the U.S., it’s somehow become popular opinion that the government shouldn’t do anything. Without the ability to make coordinated decisions, the U.S. has predictably fallen behind on a wide variety of metrics (income equality, health care, education, mass transit, etc.)
You should reflect on why you view a government making a decision for the health of its citizens as a bad thing.
Why should the government control how I manage my time? I'm pretty sure this site would be pretty outraged if the government decided we could only code 3 hours a week.
And please don't use the "but coding is constructive!1!" argument. A good use of time is defined by whoever spends it, not whatever someone else's idea of wasting time is.
As a case in point, playing hours of Splitgate has kept me sane during the pandemic as a college student locked in a room for 1.8 years. I meet on Discord with friends and discuss topics while playing. I've made more friends gaming than physically in the past year. That's pretty constructive if you ask me.
I live in the state of Georgia where most of the state belives in the "smaller the government the better". Alcohol sales can't happen during certain hours on Sundays...all because of...wait for it...religion. LOL.
Why should the government tell stores & restaurants when they can or cannot sell alcohol? How can the government tell me when I can, or cannot buy/consume alcohol. How is that a benefit to society? Why is it in a country codified for separation of religion and government are they allowed to have this in law?
The government is controlling how children spend their time. In the U.S., the government mandates a lot about how children spend their time. They need to go to school and they aren’t allowed to buy alcohol or tobacco. Children under 16 aren’t allowed to spend any time driving an automobile, etc.
To justify any arbitrary regulation imposed on children.
No child owns his own life or decision making. Typically parents make most decisions, the government makes some others e.g. mandatory schooling, setting standards that parents most abide by if they don't want their children taken away from them (sufficient food and shelter etc.).
there is a strong correlation between strong government and higher GDP. Weak economies are weak because of corrupt and weak government. So that would be my case for government action - collectively or through a good dictator.
Your logic seems good but is removed from history and reality.
And if you look at the past 200 years that we've made large progress towards all the things you mentioned, with each of those accomplishments have been enabled by...GDP growth
But China is better than the US in all of those things. They don't wage war, they have better health care (no massive drug monopoly charging obscene prices for cheap insulin), higher life expectancy, way fewer people in jail per capita, less of a drug problem (no opoid epidemic), less obesity, not nearly as much violence, practically no school shootings (as opposed to weekly shootings), etc.. this iist is LONG.
But is China better than Norway? Or New Zealand? Or Switzerland?
The US (pockets at least) are dysfunctional but other countries demonstrate the model of not having to live under a dictatorship that commits genocide and restricts liberties and have high values in the things you mentioned.
Not to mention that obesity comes from… consuming too much food. Chinese will be obese too soon as they become wealthier. Well, unless the government mandates calories or something like they do hours playing video games..
China will probably become much better than Norway, New Zealand and Switzerland once they increase their GDP. They have made major strides already despite their relatively low GDP per capita.
The US is the only country committing genocide. They have killed over a hundred innocent civilians in Afghanistan just the past few weeks. Over the past decodes they've killed around a million innocent civilians in the name of the hyper-aggressive and hypocritical "war on terror". Indirectly, they're responsible for several millions criminal murders during the same timespan, and they've not once been put to trial. They're not only failing their citizens, they're a genocidal, terrorist state.
Hard to have a response to something so far removed from what I'm seeing. Not really any reconciliation possible here I think. Have a good day/evening!
That's an odd, but unfortunately not uncommon, way of forming convictions. What are you unconvinced about? You openly admit that instead of uncomfortable information triggering your curiosity, it strengthens your already made up convictions to the contrary.
There's plenty of research, and leaks have uncovered much of the extent of US war crimes. The proportion of civilian casualties in Afghanistan (and Iraq) are immense, bordering 80%. This is because of the extremely low bar for claiming someone are enemy combatants.
A "suspected" car bomb (not a car bomb at all), triggered the US to kill 10 innocent civilians. They claimed they targeted ISIS, and that no civilians were known to have died. This is the rule rather than an exception, which leaks and whistleblowers have extensively shown.
Why would I reverse statements that are made on the basis of facts and research, of leaks and serious news reporting? Wikileaks is a thing for example, look it up. Not sure why you choose to refuse doing research into the topic and ignore evidence-based reporting to the contrary of your opinion that is presented to you, which you've been insulated against by a world of US & UK corporate media. You got to admit that you choose to live in that world, which is probably comfortable to you.
I don't think that was the statement made, just that strong government is correlated with strong economies. Strong economies/governments are a necessary, but not sufficient requirement for those other things.
GDP is the thing we should measure because without it, you can't have all the things you mentioned - you might be able to not start wars but you still need a strong army.
To say that money isn't everything is already a luxury
I never said it wasn't important, but we literally have the largest GDP - we won, game over! And we don't have universal healthcare.
It's like we've confused a metric (GDP) with success; we maximized the metric and can't even wake up and realize it's not what we were actually trying to accomplish.
what is success then? what are you trying to accomplish?
I'd argue the best way to accomplish whatever you're thinking about that we should be accomplishing - something that is hard to measure - is by maximizing GDP. Because GDP is correlated with everything you're thinking about accomplishing.
I'm not sure I'm following your train of thought here. Maybe you can help?
You say that people can't be left to the own accord, but then you also want people that you can't trust (leave to their own accord) to be in charge of you and managing a country?
Yes, I do think people can't be left to their own accord and some people should be allow to make rules for others. How we determine who those `some people` are is a matter of what we tried already and what was effective.
I don't really have a good suggestion. I wish I did. I kind of believe in the "democracy is the worst form of government except all of the others" statement because it appears to be so. You can probably make better democracies though but they require education and participation. Education you can do at scale, but participation is hard to achieve amongst heterogeneous populations, especially when they're large.
IMO that's why we're seeing problems with the U.S. that simply will never resolve. The long-term future is balkanization in some fashion. Either outright via secession or implied via arbitrary restrictions that make certain places undesirable to go to. Contrast that with a country like Iceland where the population is more homogenous and the democracy seems to work better.
And it's not a race thing so much as a belief/culture thing. Just in case someone mistakenly believe that was what I was implying, it's not.
But I do think it's hard to reconcile saying that you fundamentally mistrust people but then you still want to give them power to make rules for you. The safer bet would be to have less or no government in that scenario unless you trust that you can create a process that really weeds out those who are not trustworthy. It's hard to do that too. Even people who are highly credible (scientists, doctors, etc.) often aren't people you would want making rules for you because they're not philosophers...
I disagree that the safer bet is to have less government - look at the macro picture, things are better than ever as governments are exerting more controls, so there must exist a process of which allows for better prosperity for all by allowing government to modify our behavior.
Making rules is a function of government, and government is a function of the collective will of the people. So rules are nothing more that what I, and most of my neighbors, believe how everyone should behave, and the process is ultimately a trial and error; an experiment.
I know why you made this comment about race, but even Aristotle hundreds of years ago noticed that multi-culti does not work with democracy, simply because it breaks homogenousity of citizens.
Because in the US a large number of us value the freedom to live our lives as we choose. Given that a policy like this one effectively allows the government to intervene in an activity that does not harm others (only oneself) it stands that we in the US view it as appalling.
Other societies may look at it differently and feel ok delegating decisions about how their lives should be lived to their government. I, for one, would never be OK with that.
Oh please, the US government actively intervenes trying to prevent minors from seeing adults having sex, an activity that does not harm others (and even whether it harms minors who view it is questionable). But I've yet to hear an American state that they view it as "appalling" that children can't watch porn.
> Just because an authoritarian government made a decision doesn’t necessarily mean the decision was authoritarian.
True.
> In the U.S., it’s somehow become popular opinion that the government shouldn’t do anything.
Amongst some people and some topics. Liberals don't think the government should do anything about heroin needles and homeless people, and conservatives don't think the government should do anything about gay conversion camps (arbitrary examples). This is the core of how democracy works. What you're seeing here actually is a breakdown in homogeneity when you have 300+ million people trying to make decisions when they have different values.
> Without the ability to make coordinated decisions, the U.S. has predictably fallen behind on a wide variety of metrics (income equality, health care, education, mass transit, etc.)
Which depends again on factors such as demographics, etc. and is largely a function of the lack of homogeneity. Not to mention all sorts of compelling arguments. Like we have people who won't take a vaccine, but we were also one of the first countries to roll out mass vaccinations. It's not simple.
> You should reflect on why you view a government making a decision for the health of its citizens as a bad thing.
I think many people do reflect on that. It's a precarious balance of liberty, management of a nation state, and many other things. I don't think it's wise to try and over-simplify these things into "well the government just wants you to be healthy". Ok. Let's ban all junk food, alcohol, cars, high-end restaurants, skydiving, and make everybody walk 10,000 steps/day or else they go to jail. I mean, why would you view the government making a decision for the health of its citizens as a bad thing?
Your examples are awful. Liberals, if there was such a thing as a monolithic block, are the ones that want to use government resources to combat people using dirty needles, and want to provide shelters for the homeless. Some conservatives probably want to make conversion therapy mandatory, some want it to be allowed, and some probably want it outlawed. I think I understand what you're saying with the rest, but you're overally generic and incorrect examples makes it really hard to actually support your point.
Zoom isn't really setup for something like this. Ideally you want something that is one to many (broadcast), is low latency (since the participants would be able to hear the professor talking both in person and over the app), and is reliable.
Thanks for that. Disabling copy-on-select is really in my mind, priority #1 along with not having multiple clipboards I have to pass things between. It's insane that it's still broken. It's Xorg's equivalent to Firefox's crazy 20 year long ctrl-q drama.
What could they do instead? There's so many trivial solutions. A clipboard named pipe for instance, or at least something that operates like one. Read is paste, write is copy. That's a very 1970 style fix that could have been done 35 years ago. Then anything that can read and write from a file can interface the clipboard, opening up a whole new array of applications without setting aside "highlighting text" as having some special magical power.
Also having multiple clipboards is trivial, just have more of these special files. You can even set one aside if say some crazy old Xt application someone is still running only works with copy-on-select for some reason
A clipboard history is super trivial as well, just set up a pipe...
There's so many more unixy ways this could have been done. It's so dumb how it works. Heck dbus would be a less insane fix
> Disabling copy-on-select is really in my mind, priority #1
reading yoru entirely comment, I am not entirely sure if you mean changing how it's implemented or if you really would like to get rid of the user interface it has.
Because copy-on-select along with middle-click-to-paste is like ... the best thing. Tiny bits of data stuck that follow your cursor is the most information-at-my-fingertip feeling that I can get out of these machines.
I've hated this feature for 25 years. I run up against the design flaws of this limitation alone usually multiple times a day. From websites that try to have some funky JavaScript convenience (including nearly impossible to use things like medium) to applications that want to select the entire thing and destroy the clipboard as I'm trying to put something in. UX limitations and bad design make it utterly useless constantly.
The whole paradigm is broken. From applications that just select the entire document when you're one pixel off the line of selection, as if anyone has ever asked for that, to application interoperability with anything more than text, parity with windows OLE from around 1993, being still a total pipe dream. Drag and drop is still totally dependent on what toolkit the two programs you're using was written in.
That's nonsense! It'd be like a world where I can't pipe say output from python as input to a bash script because they were implemented in different languages and people would be like "welp. That sounds right. I don't see a problem here"
Also the world of programmers have decided they can go around randomly selecting shit to try to make my life dealing with clipboards easier even though it just makes it utterly unusable. I'm not going to go on a crusade to personally win that fight on a program by program basis. It'd be so much better to have flexibility on how clipboards work
Things could be amazing but instead we defend it being terrible.
Here's an example. Imagine where I can not only do basic asks like drag from inkscape to figma but also have something I'll call a "transport station" where I can drag things into a dock to share them with colleagues who can receive them and then put it into their application of choice, in a non-destructive, non-disruptive way that maintains the flow of productivity. Sound like a smooth and fantastic collaboration tool? I agree.
I've tried to make this, there's lots of fundamental problems that ought not exist. That's the power an unbroken clipboard could have.
What do you do with computers where you don't viscerally feel these limitations daily?
I do feel these limitations daily. Sometimes I feel I have this knack where when I start using something it immediately breaks whenever I want to do something that is a little bit outside the happy path. It's frustrating.
I will grant you that the situation concerning copy/paste as a whole is "not great", I have certainly run into issues before. But this interaction where selecting a word either by dragging a mouse along some text, double or triple clicking to select and then being able to paste this text somewhere else just by pressing the middle-mouse button is just really god computing.
Crucially: This is a very local interaction that does not interact with my clipboard at all. Which lets me copy two things at the same time. I use this all the time for copying/pasting username/password combos.
But that reminds me - the correct way to do this is setting up my password manager to do it for me...
I am interested in the "transport station" you described. I am currently trying to find a way to seamlessley working on multiple computers at the same time, and a shared clipboard like that would be really iteresting. Also to synchronize to my phones' clipboard. Do you have some already written notes on the issues that you ran into ?
Isn't Discord just chat (aka IRC)? Every time I try to get on Discord, it seems chaotic and confusing. Like chat, I guess it depends on who the users are at the moment you happen to use it. Forums are a much better approach to information sharing IMO.
Discord is chat in a sense. But community forums are also a form of chat. You shouldn’t confuse a technical implementation (e.g. Discord or IRC) with the end product (e.g. fostering community discussion).
Only if you don't understand the constraints on battery and battery supply chain. The reason Ford is not actually planning to build as many as people assume.
Only in the short term. The additional food allows for additional bullies to survive, so now the bullies occupy their old stomping ground AND the bird feeder. And of course the new bullies need nesting sites that they’ll happily take from submissive birds.
