vladms

And zoning and giving landlords great benefits (some countries not taxing wins from rents, others allowing changing rent easily, etc.) really solved the problem? Multiple major countries (in which rent control is not a thing) have huge housing issues, so something should be done. For some places I would much prefer reducing regulation required for new constructions, but this is very situation dependant.

Rent control working depends on multiple other policies and on the characteristics of the place. For Paris for example it did seem to have a positive effect: https://hal.inrae.fr/hal-05315123v1/file/Morin%20et%20al.%20...

Why does this might not apply to other cases? Paris is very dense already, not a lot of places to build anyhow. What other policies are required? Ensure people do not buy only for investment and leave things empty - they raised the uninhabited tax to discourage that, will see if enough to make a dent.

I find the discussion about AI starting from the (mostly) for profit companies involved in AI very dubious. There are a many fields (bio-tech, nuclear, chemical) which could provide an "existential risks" to the human species, but most of the companies involved argue they control it, while other people argue they don't do it well enough.

I do think AI is posing a threat, but not "by itself" but mostly what it can do in the hands of misguided (or evil) people. The same as with previous risks.

And if our digital infrastructure can be brought down by something (AI/human/government) it is just badly done, being afraid of "AI" will not improve the situation. Someone should come with a proposal about what do we do now, but I would prefer more root cause solutions (how to make resilient systems) rather than "fear of AI". But building is hard and fear catches media attention, so...

I do indeed wonder why do they care about ICC considering they did not recognized it. One reason is that in fact that some of this "great powers" are much more "weaker" than they pretend, and that someone exposing something bad that they do will still have some effect on them.

Or (not sure if better or worse), they the "great powers" are stupid and they did not hear of the "Streisand effect".

I understand the feeling, what worked for me was "you know what, fuck it, I will just plan it more loosely, let's see what goes wrong or who is unhappy".

Most of the times, everybody is happy even if things are not perfectly planned, and then they thank me for the "effort" (which was minimal, and sometimes can introduce confusions, as I need to adjust the date or the style as more constraints become evident).

I sometimes think it's a problem of my education of engineering as well, because I want everything planned well, think of all exceptional cases, etc.

I personally avoid to think about my self with labels about what "immutable" things "I am". Like "he is tall", "he has Z skin color", "he has 9 fingers", "he has brain type X", "he is thin", etc.

I do care about what values, passions and friends I have, and I have tried to find a set that is consistent.

I do not mind if someone tells me "I am an introvert", even if I do not find it extremely interesting. But if he says "I am introvert and will be unhappy all my life because I can't change that", I can't avoid thinking that he is focusing on something that does not help.

I think previously it was at least as bad. For hundreds of years slavery was fine. Killing people for believing into one thing or another (witchcraft, different religions, etc). Making people kill each other because the ruler says so. And many others.

Sure, we are not an ideal society and over relying on metrics is bad, but it is HARD to decide how we best use the resources to improve the world, and everybody has an opinion.

You can mass produce anything, but it has a cost.

I have the impression that some people imagine that you can produce now 10x more doctors at the same cost that you were producing one doctor 10 years ago. Mostly because some tasks (even programming) got many times "more efficient" I feel people transfer to easy to other topics.

Even worse, education expenditure is decreasing for many countries! (see some examples: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/education-spending?tab=li...)

From an economic perspective I think (more) informed consumers will just accelerate competition and innovation to obtain better results. Would be curious though to see some (academic) analysis on what is the influence on consumer expertise and brand impact over efficiency.

I feel that people "trust" too easy these days. Being it brands, politicians, artists, ideas, online videos, phone calls from a Nigerian prince, etc. I am not naive to think the majority will change tomorrow but I would advocate for the need of change. To make a far fetched comparison maybe 1000 years ago people would have said "learning to read is unpaid labors that does not benefit peasants", but I think more knowledge (and critical thinking) benefits everyone.

I see "quality brands" as a potential way to avoid knowing yourself stuff about what you buy. In itself, outsourcing one's expertise about a product might be the root cause of the detrimental effects you mention.

As an example: I was once shopping with someone that had experience in fashion. While I don't remember all the details, with one look/touch the person could tell and explain if something was poor or high quality, while to me it all looked mostly the same. Based on that experience, I now I mostly stick to checking the material, and avoid plastics which seem to show a tendency for low quality across the board.

I do agree that it requires effort to know stuff about things, but when I see people that go like "oh, I need X, will pick the first X that shows up on Amazon", I am less amazed we get crappy quality for lots of products.

I would like decentralization (mostly for resilience in case of natural and human made disasters if anything), but for the control I am not sure it is better. Someone has to make a choice of what is shown. Someone has to moderate things. And I am not even sure who is the best to do that - am I capable to decide a good balance between in-bubble and out-of-bubble content; or decide about the difference between hate-speech and free-speech ? Who can I trust to do that? Would a communist/libertarian/etc. be better than an insecure wannabe dictator?

Price is not the only characteristic of a product (hence the mention of "strategic constellation").

In a "free market" would you recommend on USA to rely only on a Chinese manufactured essential product for its military (or the reverse, or Europe on Russia, or etc.)?

I am not against great private offers (be it rockets/cloud/etc.). But there should also be some "local" capability for some strategic products, so that if the private providers encounter issues (crazy CEO, tariffs, export regulations, etc.) you are not left without any of that capability.

While I agree with your analysis, would you think is the best to use the same generic term "colonialism" for both the situations in French Guyana and let's say Venezuela in the last year? I would prefer more words to differentiate a bit, but maybe that's just me.

They are more expensive but the figures I have seen are 3x for Ariane 5 and 2x for Ariane 6 (source : https://spacenexus.us/guide/space-launch-cost-comparison).

Then, it depends on what you need to do. A 3x cost if you deploy a strategic constellation is fine. A 3x cost if you want to launch huge payloads for a Mars trip (I know costs were for LEO, just giving an example) is probably uncompetitive.

While in the current case I agree it is the path that should be taken, ideally I would prefer efficient relations, where people cooperate rather than having to duplicate everything because they don't trust their neighbor (should I make my bread because the baker might decide to poison me?!).

But having educated people everywhere is hard, so some people, because they don't get how some stuff works, they try to abuse friends and allies and make things worse (inefficient) for everybody in the process.

> Turn on the TV or read a newspaper to see how much crime ...

Amazingly on TV in Europe (watching 3 countries) I see how many women are killed by their partners (nicely born here), how politicians are (occasionally, mostly rarely) arrested for building mobster like organizations, how large enterprises (own by locals) avoid paying taxes.

The poor don't resort to violence? I wonder what blessed country are you in for the poor to afford to be nice. 30 years ago in the quite poor Eastern Europe (now part of EU, not that poor anymore) there was direct violence (sure, not concentrated like a terrorist attack) like mugging or rapes or just people beating others on the street because they "did not like how you look". All that without immigrants. So yeah, kind of hard for me to blame so much immigrants for all the violence.

And on that, 70s and 80s the was perfectly calm no? No terrorist attack IRA, ETA (found easy a reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ETA_attacks - 829 deaths), Italian mob and the like were "freedom fighters" probably...

I am definitely not for completely open borders. And immigration should be controlled. And some people should be deported. I just do not think it is the "largest" problem that it is presented, and I find discussing it avoiding other thorny, complex issues (energy, climate, education, etc.).

I would expect people I don't like in power. They should represent more than just me, and most of the population has quite some different opinions.

I would just hope most people don't like them either and they look for the "next one". Otherwise you transform politicians in a cult...

I think "how to stop this" is the wrong objective. It's like "what I can do to achieve world peace tomorrow?". There is no answer to that. Yes, people promise to solve wars "in a day" but that does not work.

Depending on your situations different actions will have a different impact.

I do try to choose what I can to help. I am not obsessed with "the impact". If I buy a train ticket instead of a plane ticket - that can mean trains get more money. If I keep my phone for one more year, less waste is produced.

Would I help with the situation if I would buy a car consuming lots of gas, take international trips every years etc. (I could afford it, that's not the issue) ? I think not.

Can I say that my actions significantly influence the outcome? Definitely not, but we are 8 billions on this planet, so it all depends on averages. But if I don't do it (I am convinced there is an issue), how could I expect others to have my position...

While I don't mind privacy, I care much more about other topics, like, for example, education. The right wing party in the country I vote in, when it got into power (not for long thankfully) managed to slash 1 billion of education!

The next generation must understand how stuff works. If we have privacy and no education, we might get burnt on stakes because any invented stupid reasons, no matter if someone read or not your communications.

To be honest immigration happened forever because people look for a better place to live. The able, hard working and entrepreneurial ones bring a lot to the countries they immigrate to. So, I do not see immigration as "a problem".

Additionally Europe's natality is not great, it needs people working. So many enterprises in Europe are happy with that.

Why is immigration presented as a problem? Because it is easy, does not affect directly any potential voter (I mean, if you say "rich are to blame", around half of the voters will not vote you, if you say "the poor are to blame" the other half will not vote you, but immigrants? No problem they generally don't vote) and because Europe has a tradition to seeing itself "above others". So if there are problems and you see dark people around, must be there fault, no? I really think they are (many) people that think like that (and I also met a couple)...

Far-right mostly uses migrants as an easy scapegoats for any problem. In many countries I have seen migrants taken advantage of (worse work condition, employers not paying taxes, no healthcare provided, children have worse education, no insurance, etc).

I wouldn't even mind if they would be honest about what they claim (being nationalist), but I don't see any right wing party talking seriously about programs to encourage natality, reduce poverty or improve education. Blaming a generic category for your problems rarely solves said problems.

So, for me the boogeyman is talking about superfluous generic topics rather than solutions to problems I see: education, natality, energy, industry.

Not that they don't disregard some of my opinions too, but I am quite worried about the opinions of some of the other citizens.

The worst thing might be that it is kind (or close to) a best possible average (can't assess honestly). When I talk with many (mostly opinionated) people, at various ends of various positions (left, right, ecology, industry, security, etc.) I can't imagine any leadership that would make a significant portion of the EU citizens happy.

Now, the historical solution was to make things so worse to calm down all the crazy ideas (mostly implying war or revolution) and make people focus on the basics, let's see how it goes around this time.

There are things that are quite good for other than what they were designed for.

I find it interesting when someone mentions that X is bad for something it was not designed for, as much as I am interested when someone mentions that X is good even if it was not designed for something.

Not the OP but my impression with asyncio was that it's great for the uses case it was built for (hence the "no problems") but if you need to do something a bit different it can become an annoyance (hence the "unexpected bugs").

I see it for a specialized solution for a specific class of problems, which can lead to surprises if your problem evolves. There are always trade-offs to be made (performance, flexibility, hardware cost, etc.), asyncio just has different characteristics than the alternatives. Maybe since a upper bound of concurrent users it is always a great (the best?) solution, someone with more experience along all the design and requirements space could comment.

Who is "Everyone"? EU is trying in various ways to reduce tariffs, like (biggest example I know): Mercosur, to quote "both the EU and Mercosur will gradually reduce import duties on 91–92% of exports" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU%E2%80%93Mercosur_Partnershi...).

Of course European farmers complain (they will get competition and potentially lower quality products), so yes, some people like the current tariffs.

Behind every tariff there will be an interest group. If you are producing X in a country and there is an import tariff on X you are happy. If you are buying X you are not happy.

There can be strategic industries that you want to encourage, but the issue is if tariffs are applied with a plan or not. Opinions might differ on this one but history will tell.

Maybe reducing trade with a country that is taking bad/strange/stupid decisions might be worth it. If your industry can change some trade partners (and diversify) it might a plus.

In Canada's case the reliance of one trade partner (see https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/overtime/?exporter=cou... ) is probably a weakness that retaliatory tariffs can influence.

I wonder if thinking in a binary way (convenience over freedom) is a good description.

I bought mobile devices that I could root over the ones that I couldn't. I favor companies that are less shitty. I preferred Linux over Windows as main OS even when Linux was harder to use (now I think in fact might be easier). But life is made of trade-offs and I did not see particularly good arguments of why Android is "that bad". You can root some devices and one can even avoid lots of services if you don't like Google (maps, mail, etc.) - which I also do.

So for me Android manages to stay in a unstable equilibrium : good for what I need, trustful enough for some stuff (money), not more spying that others (GSM towers), some levels of customization if you really want. Could it go "evil"? Sure, but considering what happens in the world, I am more worried my neighbors would have idiotic ideas than the fact that Google will be so evil.

For some projects specification is also hard because of interdependence between modules or data or parts of the project. To which you might answer "make more tests". And we turn in circles, because it is hard to test something you did not thought of.

My experience is that users (customers) even when presented with a prototype (done fast by AI, or previously, in the slow way) can take days to "discover" or "think" about things they wish. Then more days to understand why some wishes can't be done because it breaks other stuff they want.

Maybe you have smarter, faster, more experienced and decided users. Then I can only say: good for you, you are lucky!

Lots os engineering projects took as long as you mentioned because they were horribly specified. Then the engineer either waits for an answer (which they generally do not get) or takes a decision (which might not be ideal without domain knowledge). Then you release and the customer suddenly starts explaining what they want.

You can improve some parts with LLM (make more prototypes, iterate faster), but if humans are the bottleneck and the problem itself is complex it will not be 10x improvement.

Of course, maybe we talk about different type of project, there are also the type of projects like "a web-shop that sells stuff" that someone considered "expensive to code".

From what I see most benefits are for people that work with LLMs, but usually smaller percentages never 50% or more because of the LLMs (OK, unless you were doing basic, repetitive stuff, but then that's not to write about).

Which kind of answers the original question "why bother working?" with "because now, I can do a bit more than before".

I also see bad quality (in code, documents, presentations). It comes from people that had no clue how to do something before and now they imagine that just asking Claude is solving well the problem. And is annoying (and hard) to explain to it them, and then they get frustrated.

I see OSM as a mapping application. It is in the real world, publicly visible for a long period of time, and there is no law preventing sharing the information (like military stuff) it can be in the mapping application (decide what is relevant enough is another story).

I would not include the wishes of the people into it, because there are various groups that might have strange ideas (dunno, like only churches of some type should be shown; or no shops of a certain kind because it hurts my feelings, etc.).

I personally would not like any edits that advances the wishes of "any" group of people (like removing features). I do not like all things that exists on maps, but I will not remove them because of my feelings.