npc_anon

All these takes on European workers being too shielded are nonsense.

First of all, they're greatly exaggerated. The specific case of a large German company that is union connected doing layoffs is cherry picked. It's basically the most shielded situation possible but far from the norm in Europe as a whole.

I'm from the Netherlands myself. Up until COVID we were on a path where employers were pushing everybody into flex contracts. It's a fixed length contract (1 year with a 3 month trial period) that may or may not be extended.

Maximum flexibility for employers, minimum job security for employees.

Did this lead to some spur in growth or innovation? No.

Europe's problem isn't related to worker conditions. It's a silly thing to say considering ludicrous US tech salaries.

Silicon Valley is the result of gigantic amounts of excess (Wall street?) capital creating a tech Valhalla. A black hole ecosystem swallowing money and talent domestic and abroad. Europe doesn't have this capital and the capital we do have we probably put in US tech stocks.

It's a similar problem to US manufacturing vs Shenzen manufacturing. The Chinese government as well as many Western companies invested decades and hundreds of billions into making it the state-of-the-art factory of the world.

Once it's in place you can't replicate it.

"If you don't like it, don't use instagram."

I get what you're saying but by current EU privacy law interpretation this approach is not allowed.

You can of course charge for services but you cannot charge people just to get rid of tracking. This is not to be confused with ads. You can run ads and offer a paid version without ads. It's about the tracking.

You're just retrofitting reasons to justify the behavior I describe.

Forget about those reasons. They don't matter. They can have merit or not, it's irrelevant. Because the behavior takes place regardless. When people can legally avoid paying for something whilst still consuming it, they'll do that.

The idea that if only ads were more privacy-friendly people would not block them or start paying for content at any scale is laughable. They won't. When there's a free path, people take that path.

When I say "all" and "zero" it's obviously tongue-in-cheek, not a scientific assessment that is to be taken literally. Of course there's exceptions.

In a situation of supply scarcity all the market needs to do to function is to sell this limited supply. And this does not require the median citizen to be able to afford this supply. Thus the market isn't even irrational.

People block ads and/or not pay for content because they can. Simply because it's possible. People have been conditioned to consider any and all digital content to be worth zero. Yet continue to consume it for hours on end every day.

When not paying at all is an option people will reliably pick that option. They'll even go into extremes to avoid paying. I know somebody that plays a particular mobile game about an hour each day. Every round (taking 90s or so) it's interrupted by 1-3 mins of ads. It's maddening. She suffers through this instead of paying a one-time $4.99. We're talking about somebody firmly upper middle class.

The problem in your logic is that all points starts wit "I".

You're not the only stakeholder in any of those interactions. There's you, a mediator (search or LLM), and the website owner.

The website owner (or its users) basically do all the work and provide all the value. They produce the content and carry the costs and risks.

The pre-LLM "deal" was that at least some traffic was sent their way, which helps with reach and attempts at monetization. This too is largely a broken and asymmetrical deal where the search engine holds all the cards but it's better than nothing.

A full LLM model that no longer sends traffic to websites means there's zero incentive to have a website in the first place, or it is encouraged to put it behind a login.

I get that users prefer an uncluttered direct answer over manually scanning a puzzling web. But the entire reason that the web is so frustrating is that visitors don't want to pay for anything.

Not to mention that the Patriot Act kicked off digital surveillance and the US has far less privacy protection online, if any at all.

In a recent tweet the company gave an example of a user running Claude 24/7 costing them "tens of thousands of dollars".

For any such users it requires hundreds if not thousands of "normal" users just to break even.

Apple is late but has the resources to catch up in AI. And if not, they can just partner with the AI providers. They'll even get paid for it, similar to Google handing over billions per year to Apple just to be the default search provider.

What is unfortunate for them though is that their AI miss is happening at the same time window in which smartphones seem close to done. They've produced 3 models in a row with zero memorable innovations. You can call Apple a hardware company but it's above all an iPhone company.

Balancing the population pyramid does not require number go up. It requires replacement level birth rates.

When that birth is far below replacement, you get a collapse that cannot be stopped once it gets going.

The two things are not mutually exclusive.

One looks at the size of the population, which is projected to keep growing for a while. It keeps growing because people live for a long time.

The second looks at the age distribution of the population. What comes after the population peak.

Both are valid problems.

This suggests an optimum of 2 full-time working adults where after a long day at work they perfectly share the workload of chores.

This is morally fine and correct from a fairness principle but it misses the point entirely. Dual income workism is the least likely to produce family sizes large enough to not go extinct. The model may be fair but at the same time its suicidal.

Similarly, seeing a work break to take care of children as an "opportunity cost" suggest that the optimum life path is a 4-5 decades long maximalist devotion to some corporate.

Obviously, each individual and couple is free to pursuit whatever they want, but collectively these models and norms will end us.

The problem is that the time benefits of automation are never returned to the people. We'll just invent new bullshit jobs.

(paid) hours worked per family are massively up over time despite exponential progress. We have stuff but no time nor security.

The countries with the most dire birth rates are the ones with a workaholic culture.

The depressing reality is rather than giving people back their time, even more of it will be pushed for in the future, to sustain the ageing population.

My utopian vision is that people should largely be freed from work. The new job is to create families, raise them, and enjoy them. No coercion is needed for these families to be created, we'll produce them out of boredom. Similar to when there's a sustained power outage.

This won't happen though. Instead we'll combine neural-link and AI and will effectively become bionic beings. You'll be forced to join as to not become an obsolete sub-creature.

True, one can not be famous but still have a lasting impact on society. This is not one of those cases.

That's exactly what it does mean. If you're not famous, you have no legacy.

What legacy?

She's not a well known public figure. She ran the ad department at NBC. Is now very rich and at age 61, close enough to retirement age.

The article praises Jamie Zawinksi, for calling out Mozilla on its failings. My take is that listening to him is the quickest way to irrelevance.

He calls out Mozilla for accepting crypto donations, so they stop it. Now they get less donations but there's no actual reduction in harm. Crypto still exists and has only grown.

He calls out Mozilla for digging into AI. As a very generic anti-AI take. According to him, Mozilla should not invest in mitigating the risks of Big Tech AI, it should simply not play at all. And this way magically AI harm will be eliminated.

He calls out the "original sin", DRM video. People that invest hundreds of millions into making a movie, aren't going to allow you to "right-click, save" on paid content. There's nothing morally wrong with paid content.

I could go on but all of these takes are performative and useless. If you want to make the internet a better place you need to engage with the real world and not maneuver yourself into a tiny corner of irrelevance where you self-congratulate your theoretical moral purity to your 3 Mastodon friends that are equally obnoxious and out of touch.

States with a low sales tax tend to have high property taxes.

Apparently the New Hampshire median home price is 487K. With a property tax of 1.89% that's 9.2K/yr or $767 per month.

EU property taxes are a fraction of that: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/real-property-taxes-eu...

Overall, Europeans do pay higher taxes but Americans really overlook how much property tax they pay, and how this closes the gap significantly.

The "United States of AI" cannot produce everything themselves. The USA is the biggest importer in the world. Your 100% independence scenario is a fantasy.

Also, when you disown property owners and default on debt, this doesn't lead to just less investments, it means a total collapse of the dollar.

The US will not have absolute AI dominance in a case of full self-isolation because then their current ways to suppress rivals (sanctions, trade blocks) will fall apart. And when that happens, China wins.

Meta is an ad business. You maximize ad revenue by maximizing time spent. You maximize time spent with a slot machine that exploits our psychological weaknesses.

Meta intentionally drives this and don't forget that it's helped by millions of influencers that learned how to maximize engagement.

A good-faith Facebook with exclusively a friends-only timeline might generate 20% of the current ad revenue. And it won't matter much because the bad-faith competitor will do the dopamine approach and users will be attracted to it like flies.

The context is is Big Tech regulation. Of which there is barely any, allowing these monopolies to exist in the first place.

Everything you claim to be American, responsibility and choice, is harmed by having monopolies. You're so anti-government that you miss that monopolies remove even more choice.

As for dependencies, the US is the biggest importer in the world.

The "EU over-regulation" argument is pathetic. The exact opposite is true, 2-3 decades of zero regulation has led to Big Tech empires that can get away with anything.

It harms the free market, harms the freedom to compute, creates an asymmetrical extractive relation between mega-corp and average internet user, and omnipresent surveillance. It's anti-American if "American" still means a love of freedom, personal privacy and fair competition.

But I do understand the "new" American perspective. These companies are money printers some of which produce as much as $30B of pure profit in a single quarter. If such companies are to exist, they best be American I guess.

People like you keep forgetting that the EU is the single largest consumer market in the world. This does not mean that Apple gets most of it revenue from the EU, but it's still a sweet $90B in 2024.

In which world does a company give up on close to $100B in revenue out of spite?

They absolutely would struggle. 70% of browser usage is mobile where people use the pre-installed browser: Chrome or Safari. There's not a single alternative mobile browser that has more than 2.5% market share.

Correct, and it's a proper moral test for Mozilla, which they obviously fail.

When you fork Chrome, you have zero users instead of 4 billion.

In the US it's 40%. The 10% difference is explained by the US having limited to no public healthcare or pensions. Those are largely paid for privately, which pretty much balances it out.

When the bill arrives you already knew it was coming since you requested it. So you could have simply had your payment method ready. Then you look at the number and pay it. As adults do.

To make clear that you want to make the payment immediately in case this wasn't already obvious, one could use speech: I'd like to pay now.

That's the system.

In the exceptional and unlikely scenario where a waiter speeds away upon you wanting to pay, they aren't going to care about your green sticker system either.

If it takes forever for them to return, I drop cash on the table and leave. I'm not going to sit around for 20 mins and beg to collect my money.