The so called safety net don't do jack shit. They are a way to give power to mean, power hungry bitches that can feel good about themselve for "taking care" and scolding other people that receive much less than they do for their bullshit job.
The funny thing is that if the wealth was actually shared fairly instead of politicaly, most of the recipient would fare a better life and we could do away with insane bureaucratic waste.
Another way would be to have less governement taxes and regulations that would allow for jobs to pay better and remove much of the need of the so-called safety nets.
Of course, this way you would take power away from the mean girl bitches running those things so that can't happen.
From my experience, I can tell you that none of the people running those things have actually worked a single day in their life (as in, usefull work, that people would actually agree to pay for) but they can feel good about themselve because they are "helping".
It's hard to describe how corrupted the system is, church corruption seems a bit tame in comparison.
As someone who sarted with Apple in the PowerPC days I couldn't agree more.
To me it seems like the only real advantage is good battery, but I can't figure out who exactly is running powerfull/complicated software on the go where it matters.
If you just need to browse the web and whatnot, just get a cheap tablet?
For all the good softwares, it seems like you just get much better performance out of a much lowered priced PC.
I just don't get who is benifiting for the 1-2 hours of supplementary runtime out of a MacBook and this is wortht the price delta as well as the hassle of dealing with all the specificity of that software implementation.
But then again, my experience with Apple users is that they are not the most logical peoples around, so maybe that's just it.
I still like some parts of macOS but it has been very hard to justify considering how Apple has been behaving lately.
If Apple manages to produce a decent iMac soon enough, it might just bite the bullet once again, but otherwise I'm out.
China is very good at industrialising stuff because they are very obedient and efficient on matters that are already known. Once the west has identified a worthwhile endeavor, they are quite quick at reproducing and churning out copies efficiently.
Sometimes they improve on it slightly but their game is mostly about making it cheaper.
This can readily be seen in the smartphone market. They have all the industrial base, large supply of engineers and large amount of cash. Yet they are unable to make a truly defining product once you remove the price out of the equation.
The first reason to buy a Chinese smartphone is lower price otherwise people still prefer to go with Apple, Google or Samsung. There are small details that make those devices generally just better; even when the Chinese manage to do better in a particular dimension, overall the western designed devices are just better.
They have tried increasing price (at least MSRP, to make their devices look more expensive) but there is no way one would pay Apple/Samsung prices for their smartphone. I actually think this is why smartphone haven't trended down on price much lately, the Chinese are trying to capture the design/engineering part of the pie but with limited success. Meanwhile, since competiton has reduced, the major western player can feel content selling the same stuff without reducing price.
And yes the private sector is quite developed but to me it seems like it is largely devoted to fulfill western needs because that's were the real money is. When they manage to do something special, there is always an enormous western influence, either through education (chinese who studied abroad) or via direct involvement of western people inside their business.
For the big projects, they are relying a lot on technology transfer from the west, buying the IP with consulting from western companies and then copying what they learned at scale.
I think a lot of people still don't understand what a profond influence having a communist mindset has. It looks successfull to them because they manage to afford a good lifestyle thanks to their massive industries but that is downstream of all their copying/mimicking the western inventions.
Western societies should think about what they are doing when they transfer their knowledge to this country on the cheap, because it strenghten them and China isn't a nice player in general.
I calculated the costs of covering the needs of Germany for a 2 days low production event (as it happened between 6-9 december) and you would need about a trillion dollar.
That's for something that cannot even garantee you more than 48h of runtime for half the country's needs.
You would need at least 4 times that to be safe.
Even if batteries price are divided by 2 (very unlikely, there are large fixed costs) you would need trillions of dollar for a single country.
That's just not happening any time soon and even in 30 years time, I doubt it will be that prevalent of a solution.
I did a conservative calculation if you started around 2000 in Germany and went full nuclear like France did. Not using any fancy new nuclear or anything. Literally just mass production of standard nuclear plants. Plus all the updates of the grid, including domestic fuel enrichment and 'waste' storage. Plus all the investment necessary to great a fully modern grid to electrify the economy.
We are talking in the order of 500 billion Euro and this is very conservative assumption on nuclear construction cost. Much worse cost then what France actually achieved in their build-out. Also much of that is actually the grid, grids are really expensive it turns out. But building nuclear in central location next to places where there used to be coal plants, makes grid cost much cheaper because most of the grid is already there perfectly positioned to feed the population clusters. And that accounts for actually increasing overall production of energy, not decreasing as Germany is actually doing.
On the other-hand for the renewable path that Germany is going since 2000, just the grid alone is going to cost more then 500 billion euro, some estimation suggest that 2000-2045 total gird investment requirement is above significantly above that. Sadly today where everything is in this different private organization, this information is all over the place and 'semi'-private organization doing different parts of the infrastructure.
In total, between all the renewables, the grid and the storage, we are talking 1.5 trillion euro and that still includes gas peakers. If you want to go beyond and really go all in, it would be even more then that, as you suggest.
Turns out, if you plan includes trying to gather solar energy in Greece and Spain (or even Egypt), transporting it to Germany and then storing it into batteries there, well yeah, that's going to be expensive. And the solar panels you import from China aren't the expensive part.
France did the exact right think in the 70/80s build reliable long term energy generation, sadly since the 90s the newer generation of French politicians done literally anything they can to handle the situation as a badly and as incompetently as possible but that's a different story.
One thing that is really important to understand is that power is not something that is uniformely needed everywhere at the same level.
Traditionally, power plants were created close to where industries needed them. Renewables require specific conditions to be viable and those factors are not necesseraly what allows industries to thrive, so you need a lot of additional infrastructure to make it possible.
Turns out this infrastructure is extremely coslty and very hard to make reliable. So, even if you have infinite money, that's a massive challenge in itself. But now Europe does not have that much money, the massive debt burdens being a large evidence of this. Yet we are asked to pay more for this future, in the name of climate change, even though most of the factors contributing to this is already happening overseas, largely out of the control of European regulations. So what is the point exactly ?
In the long run, it just ends up making everyone more dependent on external powers while weakening the position of the countries that believe in that "solution".
Nuclear constructions costs are largely overblown, because of the massive bureaucracy/over-regulation, thanks to Germany in no small part. If China can manage to build twice as fast at half the cost, we are doing something wrong for sure.
But the conversation is dominated by ideologues, that have an sadist like fetish. As if weakening your position will ever make your competition/enemies take pity on you and allows you to dictate the terms of the converstion, because people are supposed to be nice, right ?
Even with perfect implementation, there is no way to make renewables work to allow industries to thrive, and now we are going to pay the price of those poor political choices.
With all the money in the world, it was already a discutable choice, but now it is just replacing depence on fossil fuel with depence on overseas manufacturing (most of it in China). Funny thing is that China is not that stupid, and we are selling them the knowledge/skillset to become dominant on the cheap.
I just can't fathom what was going on in the mind of the decision makers 20 years ago, but now it seems they are just insane. There is no way it will work in 15 years, yet we needed that power generation yesterday.
In the process of trying to make climate change better, we have done the reverse. Now people are burning more wood, and I feel like we might go back to coal if electricity doesn't become cheaper (for residential heat). Gas is hopeless, even if the depency on Russia wasn't that strong.
Electric cars are very nice but if it turns out to be more expensive to run them than just using foreign oil it's not going to happen.
I'm just rambling at this point but it feels like there was a large anti-nuclear sentiment by people who are dominated by irrational fears and they have dominated our politics for the worse. It's really not usefull to fear a nuclear meltdown if you end up making your people poorer overtime. Why would you fear something with such a low probability of problems if you end up having to become dependent on foreing power that has no such quaslm.
France had the right path but then leftist ideologues took power and Germany's sabotaging did the rest. In theory we are not at war but in practice, there is very much an economical/ideological battleground going on and we are losing it.
Yeah the only use of the large bandwith in Apple Silicon is for the GPU.
I'm always amazed by the fanboys who keep hyping this trope.
Even when feeding all cores, the max bandwith used by the CPU is less than 200GB/s, in fact it is quite comparable to Intel/AMD CPUs and even less than their high-end ones (x86 still rules on the multi-core front in any case).
I actually see this as a weakness of Apple Silicon, because it doesn't scale that well. It's basically the problem of their Ultra chip: doesn't allow doubling of the compute and doesn't allow faster RAM bandwith, you only get higher RAM capacity in exchange for slower GPU compute.
They just scaled up their mobile architecture and it has its limit.
I do like the taste of the high-end stuff as well. But the point is precisely to get a buzz while not suffering the bad sides of the cheap stuff.
Otherwise there are plenty of very good drinks that have no alcohol, if you want to drink for taste, there is really no need to go for alcoholic stuff.
There is a lot of snobery around the expensive stuff precisely because you need to be wealthy enough to afford it. It is just another class signifier.
People drinking those things like the fact that they can get buzzed while still enjoying the taste, outside of true alcoholics, everybody prefer that but they just can't afford it.
Making good alcohol is an art form. It is a very complex process that relies on quality inputs as well as mastery of a refined recipe. It is no a trivial endeavor and this why many of the good alcohols were produced/invented by monks and priest, they were the ones with enough time and ressources on their hands to focus on this unproductive pursuit.
Nowadays the lines are blurred because it is commercialised and profitable but the consumers of the good stuff are very similar to the priests of old (high status/power), they just delegated the process thanks to their power afforded by money.
Yes, there a selection, it reflected the previous political power sensibilities, now the current power doesn't like them that much, so they are not selected.
As far as I'm concerned, if we really wanted to do things right, any book in a school library should be no less than a hundred years old. This way, no current politics.
> it reflected the previous political power sensibilities
It reflected the sensibilities of the people who were actually running the libraries and whose entire jobs was comprehending and choosing books based on what they know about their field. Now, it reflects the sensibilities of politicians from up above who are likely to know less than nothing about literature, but are important enough to scream "Nonono, you can't just do that!" and be obeyed. It's not exactly a fair trade.
> if we really wanted to do things right, any book in a school library should be no less than a hundred years old. This way, no current politics.
Thinking that all politics is categorically bad is a very strange viewpoint that I could never wrap my head around. It's especially prevalent in the US. Politics, the methods of organizing and running society, impacts absolutely every facet of our lives. Not understanding politics and not being exposed to it leaves one with an incomplete view of how humans work, and how to maneuver around human irrationality to get things done. What's worse is that giving people nothing but century-old books will just teach them about what was "current politics" a hundred years ago, leaving people with heaps of knowledge on how people lived and thought in a completely alien world, and no real objective information on how radically different the current day is, and why.
The sensibilities of the people running the librairies are extremely political.
One could argue that since their employment largely lies outside of market forces, they get chosen or self-select for political reasons.
Having the power to chose what should be read and influence children in the direction you prefer is very much a political endeavor, a power that shouldn't be left to anyone else but the parents and whoever they chose can have that power. This should be true until people become fully formed adult, they are not properties/projects of the state, but very much the result of an alliance between two individuals, it seems that people that are pro-governement forget that a bit too easily.
Politics is the realm of feminity, it brings only chaos, bad strategies and poor decision making. Much of the western world is in a bad spot because they have embraced too much politics.
It doesn't look too bad because there are still structures (business, army) that try to tone done politics as much as possible in order to be achieve their goals.
Yes, politics affect life too much and that is precisely the problem, it hilarious that you advocate for it, instead of requiring a system to become less political and more grounded in reality so that it can thrive. There is no functional system on earth that works because of politics, in fact, politics is the cancer that tries to bring down working system for power and gains to be distributed according to the sensibilites of the rulers.
Old books survive because they are ever-green content. They describe human nature and what works/fails. They are usefull precisely because if you read them carefully, you can understand all the problematic behaviors that lead to failure.
Just because we are a more technologically advanced society, doesn't mean we have transcended the bad parts of human behavior. In fact, pretty much everything that makes modern life confortable, happened despite politics.
And now we are falling back into the old ways, with war, unsustainable debts and all kinds of disruptions because we gave in to much into the politics.
My life experience and resulting sentiment is extremely similar to yours.
I feel that the education system is deeply flawed and rewards all the wrong things because we refuse to select based on real factors because of political ideology.
I think those that are successful become so despite of it, instead of because of it. When you looks at the biographies or people who truly pushed the enveloppe and changed the world, it becomes evident.
We need to ask if the cost of the education system are really worth the rewards. Considering how large that cost has become nowadays, my premilinary anwser would be no.
And I feel that the shift to rent seeking economy as well as reduced innovation and iteration speed is deeply linked to that.
Most of the recent growth came from IT, a field that was notorious for be full of dropouts. That should tell you something.
Now that the field has been innunduated by college graduate, it has shifted to fully extractive behavior.
Any push back against the system is met with suspition because most people feel they should have a shot at making it big, because they are worth it. In practice, it seems that the inequalities never disappear anyway, and people just have to pay more upfront in order to try to prove themselves.
In the long run, it mostly end up exactly as it started and society just pay a dear cost for what is basically unproductive behavior.
You behavior remark is quite on the nose, because from my point of view this is exactly how tyrannies are created. If you get rewarded too much for simply being obedient to the autority in place, overtime any other strategy gets pennalised dispropotionally and you end up with a bunch of sycophant you will never push back against the order, no matter how bad the decisions/rules get.
The funny thing is that if the wealth was actually shared fairly instead of politicaly, most of the recipient would fare a better life and we could do away with insane bureaucratic waste.
Another way would be to have less governement taxes and regulations that would allow for jobs to pay better and remove much of the need of the so-called safety nets. Of course, this way you would take power away from the mean girl bitches running those things so that can't happen.
From my experience, I can tell you that none of the people running those things have actually worked a single day in their life (as in, usefull work, that people would actually agree to pay for) but they can feel good about themselve because they are "helping".
It's hard to describe how corrupted the system is, church corruption seems a bit tame in comparison.
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