Well sure, but in Russia’s case, the average income is incredibly low and their wealth disparity is even more extreme than in the USA. I don’t know how any of that relates to the war point
He isn't. State governors sued him over the potential loss in tax revenue and SCOTUS is likely going to rule against it because the court is stacked with right-wingers. Also see gun laws being nowhere near as strict as people would like, and Roe v. Wade being repealed, with hard anti-abortion laws and bans being enacted in states where a majority of citizens are pro-choice. The politics of the general American populace is far to the left of what the spectrum of "left" to "right" within the government allows.
The only citizens whose interests really matter in the US are conservatives, Christians and (of course, because the US is an oligarchy) billionaires. Everyone else is a serf who takes whatever scraps fall from the table.
I mean, Americans are bringing child labor back. Do you think the majority of Americans support child labor? No. Does it matter? No, because even with a Democrat (ostensibly 'leftist' but, being pro-military, pro-cop and anti-labor nowhere near it in practice) in charge, American laws are moving further right than ever.
So the Biden administration isn't really trying to cancel student debt? They are faking the attempt, secure in the knowledge that courts will strike it down? That sounds like an A-grade conspiracy theory to me.
> The only citizens whose interests really matter in the US are conservatives, Christians and (of course, because the US is an oligarchy) billionaires. Everyone else is a serf who takes whatever scraps fall from the table.
So all my non-conservative, non-Christian, non-billionaire Bay Area tech worker friends, who are doing very well for themselves, are "taking scraps"? Come on, that's ludicrous.
That just seems like a weak concern though. The code for the java compiler is open source. The code for maven is open source. So how is Nim safer from spyware?
If I’m concerned about spyware, then my language and compiler are low down on my list. My OS, my phone, and my network are far higher on the list.
I have no insight into the natural sciences, but I've spent a couple of years in computer science academia. With that in mind:
> None of it would be possible without academia though. Industry just applies academic research.
Meh, that vastly oversells academic research. Very little of academic research in computer science is actually used in the industry. It's not that the industry is ignorant, but rather that the majority of academic work is useless: They create artificial problems [1] and solve them in shoddy ways, with hand-picked benchmark results, and frequently without even publishing the source code.
It's probably not surprising, given that the typical incentive is to get a PhD. So you need a "problem" that can reliably be solved in 3-5 years and which allows you to produce 5-10 conference papers with your name on it.
[1] I'm not talking about theoretical fields – my comment is purely about supposedly practical research.
I was once watching a VC interview a snooty machine vision scientist at Johns Hopkins who was talking up how well his research was at recognizing three d things. So the VC pulled out his cellphone and took a photo of a box on the table. He asked the professor to have the software highlight the rectangular solid. Whoop. He never heard back. The software in the lab that was supposedly so great couldn't do a very basic task that wasn't from its preapproved set of tasks.
I do think that academia can be the source of some great ideas, but they often end up believing their own BS.
I worked at Google and there's just tons of stuff that never actually existed in academia and was created, launched, and then replaced by something better entirely within the company without any publications!
Life today is better if you're already established, i.e. have a well paying job, own a home, etc.
Being young in todays world is exponentially harder than it was, say, 40 years ago. Many young people have given up on the idea of home ownership. I'm 26 and I've had friends laugh in my face when I suggested owning instead of renting. It's simply unattainable unless you're in a lucrative field. I'm in Canada for reference (our home price to income ratio is one of the worst in the world).
I think you are just falling to this same nostalgia bias.
In terms of the material abundance that one experiences today, it is just on a different level from 40 years ago.
Housing ownership is also not the be all end all. And while the prices are higher, the rates are lower so that you will not be paying a greater proportion of your income on housing.
