paganel

> America's poor have a higher standard of living than medieval kings.

Do America’s poor have a standard thing like a roof on top of their heads? Nevermind a castle, just a basic house which has already been paid for.

> But I do live in the North and in the EU... I care a create deal about not being stress and depressed.

I understood that and I genuinely sympathise with the daylight-related syndromes people up there in the North have to deal with, but you also have to understand that further South we also become depressed if the Sun comes down too early, especially in the summer. So from an utility and democracy point of view the wellbeing of the majority (and the vote of said majority) should take prevalence over the wellbeing of the minority.

> especially in the north

We don't care about the people living in the North, there are more of us living not in North and as we live in a democracy (the EU) the majority vote should cound on this.

> a huge contributing factor to people's "unbalance", and worsening mental state.

This is surely an exaggeration.

> Every single time adjustment (or jet lag) is a drama for me

As a counter-point, I personally don't even notice it. Also, I live in Romania, so every trip West of the border, even just to Hungary, means a one-hour change, so, again, no big deal.

> the public would know

By this point "the public" just doesn't care for this sort of stuff, we just want (stabler, for those still employed) jobs and day-to-day life that is not expensive as hell anymore. What the middle-class elites now call "democracy" has just become a glasperlenspiel, i.e. nothing of real interest to us, the masses, just a social differentiator between said well-to-do middle-classes.

More generally, the sooner us, the masses, spell it out that democracy is well and truly dead the better, that way maybe we can do something to alleviate our situation, but I'm afraid that won't happen anytime soon.

> frontier technology

It's just a lame gimmick, this is not 2024 anymore, people have started to get sick of this AI thingie, especially when it comes to video/image generation. That Simon guy with his pelican is the exception that can only be seen on tech forums like this one.

As to why US (and probably also some Chinese) companies have started pouring hundreds of billions into AI-image generation is beyond my comprehension, but on the other hand I'm no economic genius.

> Or how do you even know it's the wrong answer if you didn't think it through before starting?

Real life is full of unknown unknowns, AI risks putting you on the wrong path without you even realizing it.

It doesn't help a bit that (almost? I'd say all) AI products are very confident while they're guiding you on that unknown unknown path, so of course that you don't realize soon enough the epistemological situation said AI product has driven you into.

> Mars mission we could learn much,

I've mentioned it explicitly, people like me don't want learning, we want exploration, actually getting to stuff. We don't want any new information, we've already got plenty of that, we want an actual change of our physical location in the Solar System.

More generally, I think that this insistence on "learning" instead of "exploring" is similar to how in the late Middle Ages the scholastics were all too happy to rehash the same treatises on Aristotle and the like, seeing that as the epitome of the intelectual human condition. It took some Portuguese and Spaniards from the outskirts of the continent to put all that upside down and actually discover the world at our disposal.

> Those places are terribly inhabitable.

As was most of South America to the European man when Magellan did his thing.

> Similar to how “the Chinese” haven’t undercut on cloud providers’ CPU offerings

No Western company will be allowed to choose a Chinese cloud provider by their legal department or by their stakeholders. Which leaves only the US cloud providers as viable sources (as us, Europeans, have been too busy building our revenues based on turism and other such non-tech thingies instead of building real stuff).

Thanks for the link. As it was expected, at some point he starts lecturing about "immortality" and about "defeating aging", which goes to show how scared shitless he is about such a natural thing like death, death which a Slavic babushka is way more capable in confronting head-on than this so-called oligarch. And he should leave the "Antichrist" discourse to us, genuine Manichaeans/Bogomils, but with many other things original the Protestants have managed to make a mess of it all. I blame it on they being located at the end of the civilized world, with nothing better to do back in the day.

> Space exploration is well and alive. It’s just done with robots

This is not what we were expecting from space exploration back in the '80s (let's say). I don't personally care what we might "learn" by sending robots to Venus or Mars, I want us (humans as a species) to be able to have new Magellans.

You cannot throw out the current neoliberal political regimes based on peaceful protests alone, I thought that by now that would have been obvious for most of us adults in the room who went through Occupy and the peaceful protests of the early 2010s. Tahrir wasn’t peaceful, throwing out Assad wasn’t peaceful, why do people still have the expectation that throwing out a regime that puts an investment banker as its leader is supposed to be peaceful?