grunder_advice

That is true, however beef was always somewhat of a luxury in many European regions, simpily due to geography and population density. We don't have a lot of cheap grazing land to raise cattle on. And if you have cattle it's typically more economical to use them for diary than meat.

Yes, it's one of the few EU countries that is suitable for cattle.

Beef is already too expensive for most people. Americans are probably the exception but I can assure you that most Europeans do not have beef heavy diets. Even culturally, pork (and now chicken) were the proteins of choice.

I find your framing somewhat historically inaccurate. China did not make an "autocratic bargain" with its people. Democracy and Liberalism are offshoots of Christian culture that originated in Europe and spread to the former European colonies (including to Venezuela and Argentina) and post-WWII to the allies. Although China flirted briefly with liberalism and democracy those remained foreign concepts and did not permeate Chinese culture.

So therefore to me a more correct historical reading is that China, a fairly insular culture, was pretty much always ruled as an authoritarian inward focused realm and it still is today. I think it is also an unjustified assumption that China would fare better under a liberal democratic regime. For example, currently the CCP keeps all the Chinese oligarchs in check. A liberal democratic China would find it much harder to control those oligarchs.

Argentina and Venezuela are completely different situations where the population is a mix of different cultures and ethnicities and unlike China they had been injected with a heavy dose of western liberal democratic tradition before they regressed back to authoritarianism.

Bottom line is, I think people tend to have this really weird blind spot to culture and history when they discuss politics.

I feel the need to correct the record. The only reason, there is this racist stereotype in some western countries that such and such ethnicities are not working, is because those countries make it exceedingly hard for those ethnicities to gain employment. For example requiring language fluency and forcing immigrants to attend language school full time instead of giving them a mop and a bucket and a minimum wage. In places where this banal legislation does not exist those same ethnicities are working fine in mixed ethnicity factory floors alongside Poles and Romanians.

And btw those same countries who make it super hard for, for example Syrians, to gain employment, then made a whole bunch of exceptions for Ukrainians. For example in Germany, Syrians without full command of German were told to attend language schools, but when the Ukrainians arrived they suddenly made exceptions and suddenly in our department we had Ukrainian cleaning crew who spoke neither German nor English.

IMHO, Google, Meta and Microsoft are best positioned to be the last ones standing because they have alternative cashflows. The danger with OpenAI and Anthropic is that they might end up being the Sun Microsystems of the AI era. It will only takes them a couple of misteps along the wrong technology path for them to be out of the game.

I feel, like a lot of 21st century life is trying to do things artificially. Going to the gym, talking to strangers at the gym, ... these are both artifical replacements for human activity that is missing. You go to the gym because your daily routine isn't active enough. You try to form friendships with strangers because your daily routine lacks real and fulfilling interactions with other people.

Also it's kind of odd how nowadays everyone goes to the gym. Growing up as a late-stage millenial, gym goers were a niche subculture. Now it marketed to everyone everywhere as this integral part of modern daily life.

Thanks for the correction, I guess I was mistaken. I always had this mistaken belief that moving data is less energy intensive.

The trick we use at work is to take note of the instantenous power consumed. The more it's consuming the more compute it is doing. As far as macro indicators, I'm not sure you can do better than that, without profiling.

I've held green tech stocks in the past but never made a dime out of them. There was a pattern to them. First there'd be demand, then the factories in China will turn on and suddenly there's a glut so the price goes back down. Then the factories would shut off again and the cycle repeats. I wonder if that's still happening.

Exactly. At some point, the specification becomes so complex, it's easier to just write the code yourself.

It's why famously, programmers always say, the code is the documentation, because writing detailed docs is very tedious and nobody wants to do it.

I guess I'm pro-natalist. I do agree with you on the goal of eradicating poverty, although to me that's a goal in itself that does not need to be justified. But I don't agree that all people on earth are fungible, and a birth in Mongolia is the same as a birth is Sydney, Australia.

Your "human achievement" viewpoint is highly reductive. The culture of a place is maintained by it's local population. When you have a low birth rate situation to the point that you need to supplement the workforce with immigrants, that signifies that the local culture is slowly dying. While some mixing of cultures is beneficial, we should also try to perserve our local cultures. We should not turn every city in the developed world into a little NYC.

Yeah, I don't think you're going to have much luck with that mentality.

Personally, I cannot think of a worst hell than having to be married to somebody who was forced to be with me. Yikes.

I think dating apps are a flawed concept irrespective of profit motives. They reduce men to their appearance and the most overt displays of wealth. Then they line them up against the wall, and they ask women to pick who they like best... For the men among us who will be among the most handsome and wealthiest in any given room, it works really well.