ksplicer

I'd say the German mindset and American mindset is closer than most other European countries. Germany is one of the most capitalistic countries in Western Europe.

This is where the author lost me as well. Massive peer pressure to conform is not the same as not caring. Maybe thats a little reductive, or the worst possible way to look at it, but no place that really cares would have such a bad reputation for terrible working conditions.

When reading anthropics blog on agents I basically took away that their advice is you shouldn't use them to solve most problems.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents

"For many applications, however, optimizing single LLM calls with retrieval and in-context examples is usually enough."

I try to distinguish between "the scientific process" and building scientific consensus. As rigorous as the scientific process may be, building consensus is always a messy and human thing.

This is something we've been grappeling with on my team. Many of the researchers in the org want to try all these reasoning techniques to increase performance, and my team keeps pushing back that we don't actually need that extra performance- we just want to decrease latency and cost.

Cars are built for drivers, any inconvenience they cause for others is a problem for someone else to solve /s

One example of this that drives me crazy is how soundproof vehicles have become. Horns and sirens keep getting louder to make up for it, which makes being near traffic incredibly painful. Sirens are often 120+ decibels, a volume that is unsafe for listeners for more than 10 seconds. All cars should be mandated to easily be able to hear a 100 decibel siren.

"I always avoid working with EU firms, they are way too lazy. You give them a clear deadline and the next thing you know they tell you everyone went on vacation."

I'm sure you've heard that before. It's exactly the same kind of shit "woman-owned, queer- and POC-driven" firms hear. I'm sure they are happy for the occasional person that wants to hire them due to prejudices considering how much more work they are losing for the same reason.

You almost hit on it, but I think the real problem is the economy got worse first. That trickled down to increase pressure in college and high school.

Exactly, what the hell is "not necessarily because of cars" supposed to mean? Or maybe it's a comment on how, despite cars being way more dangerous, parents over-focus on crime?

You're making the assumption that roads pay for themselves, but that isn't true at all either. Across the US cities are going bankrupt because they can't maintain roads and other infrastructure. California has a gas tax that pays 80% of road maintenance, the rest of which is often paid from local city taxes that drivers and non-drivers alike pay. Many cities are falling behind in road maintenance though, the true impact of which won't be felt for ~20 years. A hidden cost of car infrastructure is also that the low density increases the costs of other infrastructure maintenance, such as sewage, gas, and power. Good mass transit is ultimately cheaper for everyone.

This would only be true if additional lanes were built on top of each other instead of next to each other. As lanes are widened though they just keep pushing things apart and making other types of transit less pleasant, which will then create demand that wasn't there before (because people now need to be on roads longer to get where they want to go). There is a maximum density that cars can support that is LOWER than most cities are built up at.

That's a weird way to put that. Tax haul for 10 houses is definitely higher than the tax haul for a 10 unit complex, but how many 10 unit complexes can you fit in the space you need for 10 houses? The complex has a much better tax haul per square foot.

You don't need more than two lanes to dedicate one to buses.

How are you coming to the conclusion that cars are paying their fair share of costs? I'm not familiar with Australian politics at all, but a quick look found that local governments pay most of road maintenance, not the fuel excise tax[1]. Another hidden cost of cars is that they decrease density of cities and suburbs, which causes all other infrastructure to also get more expensive (sewage, gas, power, etc).

[1] https://alga.com.au/policy-centre/roads-and-infrastructure/r...

What you are missing is that every time we widen roads to allow more car throughput we are making every other type of transit and mobility less attractive. Busy streets with big parking lots are unpleasant to walk or bike along, so people just drive to their destinations instead, which makes the street even busier, louder, and smellier starts this cycle all over again. Every time a road is widened or a new parking lot is added the city also becomes less dense, making getting anywhere useful more time consuming. Drivers have to spend longer on the road to get where they want to go, public transit gets more expensive as routes get longer, and walking and biking quickly become too time consuming. There is just a maximum density that cars can support which works totally fine for suburbs but breaks down in denser cities. Personally I think Park and Ride programs are the most reasonable compromise.

His full compensation was probably between 300k-500k at Google, so I don't think money was what motivated him...

"the odds are good but the goods are odd"

I've only ever heard that said in the Bay Area, and I think I would agree...

Would you also tell the chronically unemployed person that you being flooded with job offers all day means you're dying just like him, but in water instead of sand?

The analogy would be one person not getting any job offers while the other is only getting job offers with compenation that are too low to support their family.

"New housing should be of a family-friendly type (something with a yard for kids to play in)"

Low density of other children nearby and inability for children to safely travel on their own is not family friendly. I agree that if we only build one and two bedroom apartments its going to discourage larger families, but there is no reason we can't build denser three or four bedroom housing.

Though honestly I think the entire premise of this article is flawed. Cost of housing is only one of many factors. Cost of having children is higher than ever before, which housing can play a factor in.

Only considering the cost of housing ignores how expensive transportation can be. See https://htaindex.cnt.org/compare-affordability/ for a comparison of affordability between housing costs below 30% of median regional income and housing and transportation costs below 45% of median regional income. When I moved to New York and got rid of my car it ended up being significantly cheaper than the Bay Area overall despite the higher rent.

Maybe future generations will not have to worry as much about accumulating wealth when countries work harder to ensure a high quality of life in the middle class. I doubt that will happen for the west until they figure out how to relieve all the pressure the housing market is putting on their citizens.

All you'd do is add all the inefficiencies of politics into business-level decision making.

While I'm sympathetic to that line of thought, I feel like it ignores the reality that most business-level decision making is already inefficient and political. Where is the competition and fairness when a sustainable business is bought out, prices increased and development halted to wring out every bit of value, and then sold off for parts to competitors when no profit is left? There are so many common business practices that are actively hollowing out the free market.

I don't think it's contradictory. There was an amazing ROI for a long time, so I think it was a very successful strategy early on. It's just clear that as the founders retired and more MBAs got a hold of upper management positions the first thing that happened was that the employee psychological safety was slowly eroded. Did you know that Pichai started his career at Mckinsey? That place is all about making safe choices that erode a companies future to improve short term profits.

I don't know anyone starting a family happy with the situation. Most people I know are moving to suburbs only because they can't get 3 bedroom apartments in cities. If MFH's became broadly available I think many new families would flock there.

Even our wood has so much fire safety chemicals baked in now that it's not nearly as flammable as it used to be. The safety standards should be reevaluated. Plus, I'm sure that there are some developers who would happily build the whole MFH out of concrete if it lets them only use a single stair.

Plumbers can make a significant amount, but it's not that easy to get into either. How many students go to tradeschool and then can't find a position where they want to live?

One aspect that isn't discussed much is that the heavier vehicles do put appreciably greater wear on tires. Since as much as 70% of microplastics in the environment are from tire wear any increase may have a pretty alarming impact on the environment. There is no car based solution for the environment.

People are notoriously bad at identifying what actually led to their success. Career advice authors even more so.

Replace the switches instead of the lights and you can keep your energy efficient bulbs.

I live in Germany, Bavaria specifically, and I don't carry cash most of the time. That works fine for groceries and almost all restaurants/cafes, but there are some weird places it causes problems. Post offices don't like to take anything except cash for example.