It was edited to "average educated European", whatever that means.
But I think two languages is probably not exagerating. And not only in Europe. People have their native language and usually an international one (in Europe that would be English).
And then there are similar languages. Say a Spanish person will speak Spanish and English, and possibly French/Italian/Portuguese, so that quickly goes up to 3. Also in many countries there are already multiple languages (a portion of Spain speaks Catalan and Spanish as native languages, then probably English as international language, and they are probably not bad in French/Italian because of the similarity).
Same in the northern country that are all germanic languages: Swedish is pretty similar to Norwegian for instance, both are not too far to German, and everybody there speaks English fluently.
And then if you go in the Eastern Europe... like in Slovenia people seem to all speak 5 languages, it's insane :-).
I agree that a lot of people speak two languages. But man, I've lived in several countries in Europe for many years, and even the average university student doesn't really speak English (and I work at the university so I interact with many of them). Even in countries like Belgium where there're three official languages!
However, I'd agree with that the average educated person can somewhat communicate ideas in a second language. This is what polls usually show, around 30% to 50% of people.
It has been edited to "average educated European". If going by tertiary education, that is about 30% to 35% of the European population. I wouldn't be surprised if that group speaks three languages. In Spain it is typical to speak three of Spanish, Catalan, Valencian, Galician, Basque, Portugese, Arabic, English. In The Netherlands basically anyone speaks Dutch and English plus a third language, usually Frisian, Limburgish, German, French, Spanish, Turkish or Arabic.
Two American tourists were backpacking in Europe when a car pulled up next to them. The driver rolled down his window and asked in german:” Where is the nearest diner?”
The two Americans, not knowing a fraction of German, stared blankly at the driver. “Sorry, but we have no idea what you are saying.”
The driver tried again in French and again was met with blank stares and shakes of the head from the two tourists.
Getting frustrated, he tried again in Italian, in Spanish, each time receiving nothing but sheepish smiles from the two of them. Finally, he cursed under his breath and drove away angrily.
The first American asked his partner:” Maybe we should learn a second language.” His partner shrugged and replied:” Why? That dude knew four languages and it didn’t help him.”
Same way as the hard sciences - you make a prediction for something that you would never observe if the hypothesis is true, and then you go look for it. If you find it, then the hypothesis must be rejected. I might suspect that hunter gatherer tribes don't go to war, and I might observe many such tribes which don't, but that doesn't prove my hypothesis right. On the other hand, if I can find just one tribe which does go to war, then the hypothesis has been falsified.
The problem is that there are no two equal situations in social sciences, so you won't ever have the same set of initial conditions. I don't know why they call them sciences, but the scientific method is intrinsically incompatible with social phenomena.
You won't ever have the exact same set of initial conditions in any experiment. You drop two balls from the tower of pisa and do it again you have different air conditions, the planet has moved, the tower may have leaned slightly more, etc. You either control for these variables or assume they don't matter. The value of science is that even if you drop two balls on the moon, you're still going to get the same result after controlling for differences - the results are broadly applicable. It's exactly the same in the social sciences. If you're looking at something real, it will show up consistently in repeated experiments with proper controls despite variation in irrelevant initial conditions. The phenomena that social sciences try to understand may have many more variables, but there's nothing inherently special about humanity that makes us impossible to describe.
I'm not saying humanity is impossible to describe (on the contrary!). your physics example is too different to what happens in social sciences, it's not a good analogy. you can largely control the conditions under which you throw the balls, while if you're, for instance, studying the recent socio political events in the USA, things are given and then you need to rely on similar past event to understand current ones. even in fields like psychology it's too difficult to even measure initial conditions and outputs. that's why you rely on qualitative analysis.
I used to feel the way you do, but as I've gotten older, learned more about the fields, and met more researchers, I've come to disagree. Calling them science is a farce. We should put money into them and continue most of these areas of research, but we shouldn't pretend they're reaching firm, quantifiable, scientific conclusions.
The replication crisis really should have hammered this home to everyone by now.
I agree with what you say, but that doesn't make social sciences the same as astrology. their conclusions, even if qualitative, can be valid and useful.
What big picture? Can you elaborate, or just snide drive-by criticisms?
I mean I understand that a lot of people in this comment section wish ads didn’t exist and that everyone just automatically knew about relevant products and services without ads, but it all reads like utopian fantasy stuff.
I guess a lot of people feel that if they didn’t have the ability to know about all relevant products and services, the quality of their lives wouldn’t suffer.
I'm baffled that so many people think advertising is a recent invention.
Do you genuinely believe there were economies anything like the modern luxuries we enjoy that also didn't have advertising? That advertising was an add-on that appeared at a later date?
We have plenty of archaeological evidence of advertising in ancient civilizations.
I didn't mean to imply it was a recent invention. However, the almost total centralization of advertising in a few companies on the internet IS new. Their parasitism and malevolent monopolistic omnipotence is pretty obvious to anyone who runs any kind of business with an internet presence. This severely inflates advertising costs and transfers profit that should be going to businesses who actually add value to companies that simply exploit their control of the platforms. Competition being introduced into this space, which at this point is only possible via government force, would make advertising cheaper and bring more exposure to companies and their products, which I fail to see as anything but a good thing for the economy.
Possibly? There have been advertisements for at least 2500 years. It's very likely that as long as there has been an economy as such, there have been business owners promoting themselves.
Right, but the unprecedented control of the public discourse on the internet by just a couple megacorps PREVENTS businesses from promoting themselves, unless they pay through the nose for the privilege. This destroys small competitors by design and leads to more and more monopolization of every industry, which is an absolute nightmare scenario for everyone involved in the economy but a tiny handful of people.
Yeah they probably had fewer advertisements back in the good old days, but they also had a much smaller economy, producing a whole lot less than we produce today. [1]
And you might not like everything about the world today, but living in a vibrant economy where people create wealth by building new businesses has led to more comfortable lives for the large majority of humanity.
All these hyperscalers do is control the internet and suck money from companies that actually add value via that control. I can name on one hand the amount of successful products GOOGLE has natively launched (without acquisition). This predatory behavior has the opposite effect on the economy you're claiming here.
Is there RoI for this advertising spend or isn't there? If there is, what are we talking about here? If there isn't, then why would people spend on something not giving a positive RoI?
We're talking about it because quantifiable variables aren't the only aspects of reality that matter. If a company does something profitable but it makes everyone but them worse off, there's an argument they shouldn't be allowed to do it.
This is obviously not true. You don't have to do the math to realize: when you pay rent, every moth, an important part of your salary simply disappears, leaving nothing for the future. When you pay a mortgage, your paying the house you'll own. Of course, there are interests and fees and whatnot, but you'd need to pay huge amounts so that it becomes unviable; I can't imagine a single scenario where that occurs.
> This is obviously not true. You don't have to do the math to realize [rent is throwing money away]
This greatly depends on your specific numbers.
We did the math with my partner: our current rent is 5k/mo. Our mortgage for the same place bought when we moved in would be 9k/mo + transaction cost + maintenance. It will take our rent almost 10 years to catch up to the cost of a mortgage. Max increases are capped in California.
Over those 10 years, investing the delta in index funds puts us about 200k ahead of buying in terms of net worth. We’re also not handcuffed by a mortgage for 30 years which gives us optionality.
Not buying has let us build about 700k net worth debt free in the last 10 years we’ve been together. We’ve also moved 3 times with essentially zero transaction cost. I think that’s fine
you definitely came ahead by not buying and you did the math. Good for you!
Generally, this holds true today for most HCOL and MCOL areas. It is still a good idea to buy in a few LCOL areas.
What I have seen is that in high-earner areas (Bay area for example) buying completely outpaces renting in cost (buy to rent ratio_. Mainly because the pool of buyers outbid each other. This is mainly due to the narrative and social pressure to buy at all cost.
Similarly, renting stays relatively low as people do not compete as much.
> Generally, this holds true today for most HCOL and MCOL areas. It is still a good idea to buy in a few LCOL areas
We have friends who rent to live in SF and buy in LCOL as investment properties. Also seems to work well as a strategy.
I think of primary residence as a consumption expense. It's not really an investment because you can't cash out[1]. So unless you put value on the act of owning itself, it's best to do whatever gives you a lower monthly. In our case that's renting.
[1] yes I know about HELOCs. I'd rather get margin loans on index funds than risk getting kicked out of my home.
I fully agree with you. I also think that there are as many good intangible argument for owning as for renting.
Renting allows you to be flexible for new opportunities. They allow you to focus on other things in life than your house, treat your landlord as a service provider, free your time to do more important things.
Frankly it is sad that as a society we value homeownership so highly and judge people that decide to rent so harshly.
Yes that’s a pretty good strategy achievable by most people who hang out on Hacker News. Lots of variance tho. Poorly timed life events can really mess it up
In the majority of markets an individual that invested the down payment into the SPY500 as opposed to a house comes out a head. Especially if you sell the house on average every 7 years ...
Just do the math yourself; it's pretty easy [1] [2] [3] [4].
That said, not every decision in life needs to be profit maximization. You can enjoy owning a house.
This doesn't take into account that you need to live somewhere.
If you spend $2K on rent (which gets no return) and put $1K into the SPY500 every month or put all $3K into your house, you will be far, far ahead with real estate.
You seem to be completely clueless about the issue. There are many resources to learn about it. One very good one is Ben Felix on YouTube. Search for his owning vs renting videos and spend some time trying to understand the analysis. It will be a bit difficult when you come from "rent is money disappearing" mindset but it will be worth it.
The buy-vs-rent discussion is more aimed at first-time buyers. If you already own a property that is largely paid off and has had the benefit of appreciation over the time you owned it, then yes, it may be more beneficial to keep the property, as you have seen from the calculator.
If the answer was always that rent would be cheaper, then the calculators wouldn't have to exist ;-)
> housing cost would almost DOUBLE
Except that you will now have the profits from selling your previous property, which you can invest. That investment payout can partially or even completely offset the cost of renting, which means your monthly costs will be much lower.
Say you make 500k by selling your house, and invest that against 6% ROI, then you make 30k/year passive income, thats 2.5k/month. So deduct that from the rent you'd pay and compare again.
This is where one can notice that LLM are, after all, just stochastic parrots. If we don't have a reliable way to systematically test their outputs, I don't see many jobs being replaced by AI either.
this is flatly false for two reasons -- one is that all LLMs are not equal. The models and capacities are quite different, by design. Secondly a large number of standardized LLM testing, tests for sequence of logic or other "reasoning" capacity. Stating the fallacy of stochastic parrots is basically proof of not looking at the battery of standardized tests that are common in LLM development.
Even if not all LLMs are equal, almost all of them are based on the same base model: transformers. So the general idea is always the same: predict the next token. It becomes more obvious when you try to use LLMs to solve things that you can't find in internet (even if they're simple).
And the testing does not always work. You can be sure that only 80% of the time it will be really really correct, and that forces you to check everything. Of course, using LLMs makes you faster for some tasks, and the fact that they are able to do so much is super impressive, but that's it.
ok ok I get the point but let's not exaggerate