mustafa_pasi

Socialist is really not the word I would use. "Less egalitarian", "more classist" are better descriptors. Access to capital is more restricted in countries like Germany compared to the US. This is both due to more conservative financial regulations, but also because the wealthy classes who own the capital are more of an insular group who are less keen to invest in members who are not already part of the club.

It is a common argument fielded by people of questionable morals, typically by fake nationalists like the AfD and the Dutch counterpart (which the author of the article praised in an earlier blog post). I have heard it being used in various contexts but pretty much always, "why are we wasting time and effort caring about these brown (!!!) people, there are other unfortunate people having tragedies there, there, and there!"

Somehow, I get the feeling that the author couldn't care less about any of these conflicts and tragedies, and is only using them to lament the fact that his community cares about other conflicts and tragedies and he would be perfectly happy if the news and the people he mingles with only care about whatever happens in his perfect little Dutch town.

It's completely fine for people to have selective attention when it comes to causes they care about. There might also be many reasons why some people feel invigorated or called to action by certain human conflicts but not others.

Frankly, the article is disgusting and quite likely written by a Nazi.

Culture might be a link between risk taking venture capitalists and less publicly financed social security. However I do not think there is an economic lock that forces a society to be either or. I can easily imagine a society that provides both a good safety net and where capitalists are willing to invest and innovate.

I guess what is missing is the right mentality and attitude, so like, our cultures have not evolved to that level yet.

What I see is that the underclass in Europe is better taken care off than the underclass in the US. But the working and middle classes in America are richer and have more opportunities than their counterparts in Europe.

All of this, is completely orthogonal to whether or not private capital is willing to invest in risky ventures rather than hoard their capital in very secure incremental investments.

I grew up in (western, to be clear) Europe and never received adequate dental care either.

But that is a good! Contrast that with other countries where the financial landscape is super conservative when it comes to investment and innovation, like in many EU countries. Economic growth is lower, jobs are fewer, and salaries are lower, and there are less exciting jobs where you can truly build the future. Americans do not appreciate what they have. You do not want the alternative! Appreciate your overly optimistic dumb money. It is a good thing for everyone.

Could GPT-4V be used for robotic applications? I am a bit confused here. It produces a text from an image, but how much actual understanding does it have? Can the output somehow be used to do image segmentation and object detection and tracking?

Definitely. It is why I like to say that when it comes to the upper two quarters of income/wealth, there is way way way more upwards economic mobility in the US than in Europe.

Here in Germany it is very easy to go from broke to middle class if you are talented. But going from talented to rich is impossible. There is no access to capital so people fight over the few good paying corporate positions and even there you mostly get the position through nepotism.

Oh, it's definitely one of the most distinctive difference between US and Europe. Of course it is not all the same. Germans are on the more conservative side, while the Dutch are known to be more entrepreneurial. But overall none is on the same level as you Americans.

Definitely, but it is not our only problem. We don't get those lucrative internships and neither do we get the boatloads of startup capital.

It's all caused by the same risk averse mentality, though.

They all have crazy CVs. If you're really talented in the US you can get very far on talent alone. If he was in Germany he's be a Ph.d or Postdoc toiling in some outdated research field that nobody cares about.

The CTO has an even crazier CV. Born in the poorest European country, BSc at Dartmond (is that considered a good uni? idk), internship at GS, a stint at Tesla, couple of startups and hits gold with OpenAi. A BSc in mechanical engineering wouldn't even get you a job in Germany.

That's if they are not ambitious. Might also be trying to become the new Google, or at least put the O in MANFANGO.

Of all the big tech companies Apple is the most innocuous. There have no monopoly in any of their sectors and you can just ignore them if you wish, as I do, without any consequences.

I don't deny the decades long anti-climate change lobbying and propaganda.

However, being honest with myself, if you asked me right now about my willingness to incur a cost to fund the green transition, I would be hesitant, because I cannot realistically make a cost/benefit analysis. Would I be willing to give up international travel? Would I be willing to eat almost no meat? Would I be willing to pay $10k extra to buy an EV? I don't know. I don't know what that will achieve. I don't know what happens if I don't and what happens if I do. I know neither my individual climate risk, nor how much my contribution would count if I chose to do my part. I am only living one life, so it is pretty hard for me to make life changing decisions without a good cost/benefit analysis.

Luckily, I am by nature quite anti-materialistic and not infected by the consumerist bug either, so my actual carbon footprint is still way below average.

Germany sees itself as a leader in the green transition even if this is not factually correct.

People see Germany as a foolish naive nation which is currently hurting itself economically and making a clown of itself. It is having the opposite of the desired effect. Other countries will be more hesitant to transition to green technologies when they see Germany suffering.

This is a question of perceived cost and benefit. I do not actually think that the US would be undermining itself if it nudged the world's economy to transition to green technologies. I think it would protect itself and even benefit economically.

Not that I used the word "perceived" in my original comment.

That is however one of the the two unknowns in the equation:

    Unknown one: how expensive is the green transition.
    Unknown two: how expensive is climate change.

The issue is further complicated by the fact that both of these costs are variable, depending on the individual, not easily predictable and time dependent. It is all very complicated, when you think about it. If you search the literature there are some people attempting to calculate such costs but the task is almost insurmountable.

I do not want to give the wrong impression. For whatever its worth, I am convinced that climate change will impact us people living today, negatively.

We posted almost the same comment. I do disagree with one point. The US is the country with the most global power and is instrumental in driving global change so I really disagree that they do not hold a huge responsibility.

I mean, Germany is trying to lead by example, but their attempt is pathetic. Nobody is going to care what Germany does and they do not have the economic and political power to enforce global change. But the US does.

I am not saying the US can do it alone, but it has to show both initiative and willingness.

The political climate is just an obfuscation. The electorate perceives the change to be too costly* and the climate risks to be too remote to justify this cost. The problem with reports such as these is that they always give you the big picture but do not directly relate it back to the individual. If people's home insurance suddenly jumped up 1000% due to recalculated natural disaster risks, that would suddenly make people rethink their positions.

* I am actually not convinced either way. Some people believe it is so expensive it will necessitate degrowth, while others think that so much economic change will almost certainly spur economic growth. Either way I think that people who push the degrowth narrative are further reinforcing the view that climate action is too costly. Nonetheless it could be that they are right.

I love watching cooking videos. It's my number one go to, when I want to turn off my brain completely. But I never try to replicate recipes. I just pick up ideas.

I never ever cook from a recipe, either. Cooking is very much like programming. You have a goal (what you feel like eating that day), a framework (what you have laying around and your cooking skills) and you just execute something that approximates your goal. And just like programming you have to learn by doing.

Sometimes it is worth following recipes when you want to cook something new from a foreign cuisine, but I rarely do that. I cook almost exclusively European food, so I know instinctively how to combine the ingredients together to get the taste profile I am yearning for, and I also know how to cook each of the separate ingredients individually.

I really don't "get" people who seem to lack this cooking instinct. In my family there is nobody who doesn't know how to cook. My father rarely cooked when my mother was in good health, but once she fell ill, he picked it up at the ripe old age of 70, and is now able to cook pretty much everything. Baked savoury goods are his favourite.

If you don't know how to cook, you probably need to cancel your food delivery subscriptions and just force yourself to cook your own food. You'll pick it up amazingly quickly. I messed up quite a few times, but I don't remember ever having to throw food away. You always get something edible if you are creative enough.

A couple of weeks ago I had one of my worst disasters. I was attempting a Georgian savoury pie and my dough was a bit too highly hydrated and my filling a bit too warm due to my impatience, and I tried using a new technique for forming the pie instead of the usual one of sandwiching the filling between two pre-rolled layers of dough. The bottom of the pie tore apart and I was left with a mix of filling and raw dough. It seemed like a write-off, but I quickly added a bit more flour and mixed it all thoroughly together and baked it as a bread instead, and it turned out a bit dry but delicious.

Anyway, there is definitely value in cooking videos.

Are there any highly developed cultures with a high birth rate? US Mormons and US Christians maybe?

But unions are not all the same. And I was not trying to make a point about union membership at all. I was rather lamenting economic policy. Some economists and some industrialists believe in keeping wages low to remain competitive. This thinking is present in Germany but (it seems to me) that it is less present in California. In my opinion, the long term economic effect of low wages is economic stagnation, even if you might remain economically competitive on the world stage. Eventually the rest of the world would move on and whatever role you were filling would disappear anyway.

Low wages result in economic stagnation. Just compare California to Germany for an example. Here in Germany, we have unions that put job security above all else including wages. And employers that offer job security as a perk rather than offering higher wages. Result: an over burdened middle class, little innovation and a stagnant economy.

Does it impinge on your personal freedom, if the government decides to put up special privacy protections for groups it deems too vulnerable?

The problem is not really in having children but in raising them.

I think it would be a good solution if couples were to have children in their early 20s, and have those children raised primarily by their grandparents who at this point would be in their mid-40s and very much settled in life.

What I find particular interesting is they claim the goal is 1 million metric tons per annum.

Current CO2 concentrations are at 421 ppm compared to the per-industrial level of 280 ppm which is approximately 1e12 metric tons of CO2.[0]

So with if we wanted to return to such levels over the span of 100 years, we would need 10,000 such plants, which somehow, seems doable. There were 62,000 power plants operating worldwide as of 2012, for some context.[1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_at...

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2012/12/08/all-o...

It is maybe contender for the research paper that resulted in the most monetary gain for its authors.

I honestly don't think there is a shortage of talent out there and don't think any of these people are unique irreplaceable visionaries. I think the bottleneck for successful teams is mostly funding and fit (you need big teams to get anything accomplished and they need to work well together).