I agree, but the German one is also pretty dodgy: Basically pay the rents of the old generation from a share of the working one. It's already coming apart due to demographic change and the next few years will be disastrous.
If there's an approach to model imho it's the Norwegian one: Actually backed by stocks, but managed and distributed by a central investment fund. It's far easier if the country is smart enough to centralize oil profits as well though...
The pension system still works, as long as the pensioners accept that at some point there will be less money to divide between them. Demographic changes don't necessarily cause the pension system to collapse as long as the pensions are adjusted to the income generated by the working generations.
That's the part that causes friction, because (soon to be) pensioners don't want to accept lower pensions, and they still have voting rights, voting in politicians that cater to pensioners over workers.
> pay the rents of the old generation from a share of the working one.
That's what Norway does too, just less directly. The $1.75T that Norway has in their sovereign wealth fund is just a claim on future output. Germany's taxes are a claim on future output.
Or to look at it at a micro perspective. Suppose you have $10M saved for retirement, but need to hire a personal care nurse. But there aren't any and you get in a bidding war with someone who has saved $100M.
Failure in most of these systems were that original contributions were never sufficiently high to actually cover the future outgoings. Whatever those boomers that think they paid say...
When implemented those scheme goal was to make sure people who could not work anymore would have a decent end of life.
The problem is the baby boomer generation transformed it to the point retirement was "when you started living your real life". People being retired perfectly healthy for more time than what they worked is not an exception for them.
And that generation managed to pile more shit on the next generations: regulations to make housing more expensive, requiring more education for every job meaning people start working later, outsourcing has much as possible. And not having replacement level children.
So now people have to pay a lot more for those privileged generations. Meaning they have less available money to get a stable situation, meaning even less children so the problem will go worse and worse. At least one generation will have to be sacrificed to have a chance for ones after them. Will the Millenials accept to be it, or will they pull a boomer?
Yeah, like the other model where you pay people to invest money for you that makes everything more expensive (housing, healthcare) and shittier (jobs, concerts, games) or disappear for the sake of ROI that you don't even get the majority off.
PAYGO-style is definitly the more sustainable approach.
So how evolution works is that a feature needs to have an evolutionary advantage, but the specimen must also not die. So there are two adversarial pressures here, carefully balancing each other in a mammal species that already has one of the highest birth mortality rates of both mother and child. If heads were any larger, it would create a proportional amount of negative evolutionary pressure by both direct and indirect death (of the mother) at birth.
That's a fascinating thought. As people with larger brains are more successful in life and more likely to have children*, mortality rates for natural births would increase, and over time we would evolve to become dependent upon modern technology.
The continued existence of our species would become dependent upon continued civilisation. A dark age could kill us, or at least cripple the population.
*how true is this? Uni-educated people tend to have lower fertility rates.
If maternal mortality were the only issue, evolutionary pressure would also favor women with wider hips/birthing canals. After all, we see hyper intelligent individuals at the current brain size, it's clearly possible to get more processing power in there but there doesn't seem to be much reproductive benefit.
He most likely wouldn't have this problem if he used a VPN product for clueless users. It has nothing to do with trust towards a class of technology and all to do with the fact that computers are hard.
By the decade is gone that any new nuclear project has been commissioned and built, the rest of the world is running on solar + battery storage at a tenth of the price.
Your first graph shows diminishing returns for both battery storage and solar. It's also not clear whether that's the marginal cost or includes the capital cost to build the structures and all the infrastructure.
To compare nuclear against solar you have to compare it against the sum of the cost of solar plus battery storage.
Investing in solar/wind/nuclear energy sources, storage, and research for improving all of the above seems like the best strategic option for at least the next decade.
It's a bit of an outdated quote now with the Schengen area, high speed trains, cheap flights and comfortable modern cars. We frequently do weekend trips 1000 kilometers away from home. And in the summer most Dutch families I know drive all the way to Spain or the south of France to go on Holiday, which is over 1200 kilometers. In the winter those same people drive to Austria or Switzerland for a ski-trip.
I have done a couple of road trips within Europe that were over 6000 kilometers.
Honestly, if I were OpenAI, I'd just go different directions at once, and it looks like exactly what they're doing. Dall-E was a standalone experiment before, and now it's reintegrated into the core product.
It's completely plausible they have two different teams working on Omni and GPT-5, as both are completely different research directions from each other, and with the Q*-gate, it's pretty clear, the other effort is still going strong.
OP's take seems to be overly doomerist and I don't really get why.
I find it a bit weird that Apple with its massive market share and RnD budget apparently wasn‘t able to get a team and traction (or at least any significant acquisitions or acquihires) on AI with the writing being on the wall since quite some time now. Makes me a bit worried about their privacy angle and that it might disappear.
Their privacy angle is 100% the reason they haven't managed to make a decent LLM.
To make a decent LLM you need to ignore data protection and throw all available text into a huge model. If your morals don't let you do that, then you can't make your own LLM.
But you can partner with a 3rd party to submit all that text to, and pretend your still privacy conscience? Pretty sure people would rather Apple build a first party server based option than partner with anyone else. When it's Apple violating privacy people are more chill about it.
> If your morals don't let you do that, then you can't make your own LLM.
You're reaching, a lot. Apple is more privacy-friendly than most companies at the moment - no argument there, but they still sell your privacy on the web to Google in exchange for a 36% cut of advertising revenue [1] which amounts to ~$20 billion [2], or a rather petty amount of ~$10/device [3].
These same "morals" also allow them to hand over data on all Chinese citizens to the CCP, among countless other privacy-destroying compromises they have to make in order to profit from the Chinese market [4]
> its massive market share and RnD budget apparently wasn‘t able to get a team and traction
Frankly I don't want Apple to try to be the best at everything, because they generally aren't. I've been bitten by iMovie getting worse, Time Machine doing a terrible job, Apple Maps being less than useful for a long time, iCloud being generally lackluster, and more. I'd much rather they outsource the service to a company that is solely focused on the task. There's no reason they couldn't ensure those services remain private or secure.
If there's an approach to model imho it's the Norwegian one: Actually backed by stocks, but managed and distributed by a central investment fund. It's far easier if the country is smart enough to centralize oil profits as well though...