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while take 4 weeks+ time off

What if I told you, that even mentioning this shows how little free time people get in the US?

There is actually no SWE job (and I do mean actually 0 positions, I watch job postings way more than average person) in CZ that offers less than 5 weeks of paid vacation. When you look for companies that give actually nice benefits you can get 7-8 weeks, big chunk of it being sick days that you can claim whenever you want.

And that all is on top of MUCH longer parental leave, often shorter work week (lol @ 40h a week being noteworthy), much more leeway given to people with health issues and generally shorter commutes.

Not even mentioning difference in cost of living . . . The values are just different here.

This isn't a counterpart because nobody is trying to explain a significant drop in tourism numbers to Paris.

Actually there isn't much to explain. Every single person I know that has been to Paris has been disappointed by it and complained how there are way too many people everywhere. Maybe there were just too many tourists in Paris?

This assumes infinite demand which is not a good assumption imo.

Yes, but "AI replaces people by improving productivity by 20-50%" is clearly a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy. So maybe the "people are losing their jobs" is just totally unrelated to AI . . . but people keep repeating that "companies can do same work with fewer people thanks to AI" nonsense, so there will always be a need to remind them how actual economics work.

Starlink was also ridiculed. "Some upstart beating industry veteran at crewed spaceflight" was also treated as a ridiculous idea (see extra funding Boeing was able to extract from congress).

But all those massive successes are SpaceX . . .

I am super bearish on Tesla but I still would take the side of "not going under" of that bet. The factories have value, and once the brand is de-Musk'd, it can have value too. So most likely scenario is being bought out by someone once the company valuation goes down 10x-100x.

Less than 1 in 4 Americans voted for Trump

Yea and it seems the 75% of population cannot do anything about Trump now.

I wonder when people will wake up to the fact that USA does not actually have a democracy.

Just a nitpick: Nero was nowhere close to "the end of the Roman Empire".

Well SpaceX does not need outside financing anymore, even while continuing to build out Starlink and developing Starship. Seems like a bold claim to say Starlink is not profitable.

But it is still not a business you would want to be in, because it is enabled by super cheap rockets, which no one else has.

Maybe it is not exactly culture-specific, but most of your post definitely sounds to me like "walking on eggshells" stavros mentioned.

Tbh I agree that your citation of Linus' email was an example of not exactly productive conversation. But preventing such emotion ventillation takes effort, same as not feeling insulted when your work is criticized. And who should put in the emotional effort is imo at least partially influenced by cultural expectations.

I have not seen anyone else claim that Ukraine is not an European country.

As for chance / motive to invade other European countries - for some reason Baltic states feel very threatened by Russia. Try to understand their reasons why.

You still seem to confuse concepts of dominance and leadership, similarly how your opponents in the debate confuse dominance and violence.

But I would agree with them that leadership does not require dominance.

So you are saying Hamas would have same domestic support if Gaza was economically at the level of e.g. Slovenia? People who complained about "open air prison" caused by Israeli "occupation" even before Oct 7 would disagree with you I think.

Even in Europe extremists are propped up by promise of "cheap energies" from Russia.

I guess if you dont see the link this is not the place to explain it.

That doesn't seem to be much of a thing these days.

If you ignore Gaza and whole of Africa, maybe.

That actually shows that helping poor people would help black the most. So why not do it?

Isn't the point of OP of this thread that most of those wart-fixes are pointless?

I tend to agree, if you can't sell it as a ticket you probably shouldn't work on it. And "boyscout" PRs are pain to review.

The confounding is natural - If you even think about investing, then having a financial cushion is the best investment to de-risk your life.

If you don't, you are screwed either way.

Thanks for writing this. Simple upvote is not enough, this was really great reminder how to navigate these messy topics.

Shuttle was heavy rocket. Decent in quite a few metrics.

Also the arguments about not having heavy rockets has nothing to do with engines, it's either "we don't need them" or "just use propellant depots". Without certain Alabama senator even SLS would be probably dead already. Big rockets are only useful when you sacrifice performance for reuse AND have enough payloads to maintain good flightrate.

Wanting F-1 capable engine is like wanting exact recreation of combat performance of F-4. No one involved has cared about that for more than 40 years. Just people who don't understand the tradeoffs so they judge stuff based on silly heuristics.

Starlink (v2 sats in particular) alone justifies Starship. Include HLS and potential Mars stuff and the comparison does not make sense. Don't listen to people who hate on SpaceX because of Musk. If you want to hate on him pick any AI-related thing, much easier target.

You are on forum about VC-funded startups. You can get 50M if you really want and what you're saying is true

Public restrooms in Czechia often can take cards now. I imagine it works similarly in Sweden.

If it was such money maker, surely there would be lot of competition offering zero fee bank accounts.

In Czechia banks literally are competing like that, offering free bank accounts, sometimes even with bonuses on top if you pass enough money through it. So it seems like your model of banks' financials does not work.

SpaceX didn't start with an existing knowledge base, talent and facilities either.

This is just plain wrong, look up Tom Mueller's history.

Czechia did not have demographic collapse, and actually got fair bit of immigration from other Slavic countries, mainly Slovakia & Ukraine (pre-war, post we got even more obviously).

It is not simple. Carbon tax is useless without carbon tariffs, which have high political costs. Not to mention without any kind of carbon dividends the whole scheme would be extremely unpopular.

So everyone is just pushing half solutions and talking a lot. Politicians will never go for hard solutions, especially when everyone is satisfied by talking about magic pills like "green deal", "more renewables" or (from current top comment) "climate advocacy" and "citizen engagement".

People just love talking. And feeling good about it.

Both BMW and Mercedes have EV platforms, have you done your homework?

Doing some quick googling I could not find any source for margins of BMW / Mercedes on their EVs. I remember EVs fron GM / WV being mostly unprofitable, but maybe those are old news.

Can you please share some links for those who want to be more informed?

Well sure, I like Europe employment more too. But SpaceX is not operating in Europe, and this is probably not the opportunity to change the entire system?

I do wish NASA would move closer to how DARPA does things where you payout a reward to companies that achieve some milestone.

NASA already does this for a lot of things around ISS and Artemis. SLS is legacy bondoogle pushed by US Senate.

Such a ridiculous comment

The average death count from two planes having an accident is like 600

Do you realize, that your "average" death count has literally never happened in aircraft accidents?