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nivenkos

Re:Who Would Choose Socialism? on Thursday May 11, 2023 @06:00AM (#35900021)
Yeah, but I think kibbutzim is really extreme, and not how even socialists would want to live.

It's a full commune - more like a cult than normal society. So it's quite a strawman in that respect.

Re:Startups Are Scooping Up Big Tech’s Cast-Off Workers on Thursday May 11, 2023 @05:53AM (#35899966)
But those jobs should be automated so no-one has to do them.

And that process should be supported by a high minimum wage - hitting the employers, not taxing productive work to provide tax credits to subsidise such terrible jobs.

Automation leads to more high-tech jobs and investment, and higher productivity, which leads to higher wages as companies compete for highly skilled employees, etc.

Economic mobility and productivity is the key to prosperity.

> And yes we're is your proudness for your country when you know there are people who can't afford going to the dentist and have to wait for a year with a rotten teeth to get it fixed 3h away in a sports gym because there is the once in a year free dental service event?

This is sadly the same in Europe, as dentistry mostly isn't covered under public healthcare in the UK and Sweden for example. So we pay almost 50% tax just to be in the same position!

But I support universal healthcare (including dentistry and opticians), it's a critical part of economic mobility. People can't move jobs or take risks if they'll lose healthcare coverage.

Re:Startups Are Scooping Up Big Tech’s Cast-Off Workers on Thursday May 11, 2023 @05:49AM (#35899932)
I'd love to move, but getting a green card is a nightmare.

I don't want to work for 5 years trapped with one employer and facing deportation with a matter of weeks if I lose my job, on an L-1 visa (and to do that I'd still have to find a position to move to in my company).

Re:Who Would Choose Socialism? on Thursday May 11, 2023 @05:47AM (#35899917)
But what is a "socialist community" in that respect?

The only thing I can think of that's achievable is worker co-ops, and a lot of start-ups are like that for early employees and founders.

Re:Who Would Choose Socialism? on Thursday May 11, 2023 @05:46AM (#35899909)
I mean economic mobility like making it easy for people to switch jobs, move city, work for startups, etc.

So separating healthcare coverage from your employment is one important step, as is providing modern, in-depth STEM + Medicine education so people are able to work in highly skilled jobs where we really need them.

That's a big part of driving disruption and progress.

Re:Who Would Choose Socialism? on Thursday May 11, 2023 @05:35AM (#35899839)
Seems weird to pit socialism against free markets.

There's nothing about disallowing private ownership of the Earth's common resources, natural monopolies, etc. that stops having free markets everywhere else.

If anything, allowing that is what corrupts free markets - as even with privatisation, you never have a real free market on the railways, highways, or electricity grid because we can only build a limited number of them and can't support multiple disjoint networks. But those corporations can then use that captive market for an unfair advantage entering other markets / verticals.

I think the best solution would be free markets and liberalisation, except in natural monopolies, and a lot of taxation against accumulated and inherited wealth (not income) to provide a level playing field and economic mobility.

Re:Startups Are Scooping Up Big Tech’s Cast-Off Workers on Thursday May 11, 2023 @04:36AM (#35899436)
American engineers are lucky to earn enough to be able to save up and do stuff like this, like on $200k you can save enough to really try a start-up for a year or two.

Whereas in Europe we're lucky to get $80k in the same jobs, and then the state steals half of that :/

Re:The Leverage of LLMs for Individuals on Wednesday May 10, 2023 @11:46AM (#35889052)
But the awesome part is that you can ask it to explain parts and it usually does pretty well.

I was using it for debugging WINE - where I have no DirectDraw4 / DirectX6 experience, and it's much nicer than trying to trawl through ancient MS documentation myself.

Or even arthritis.
Re:The rise of ChatGPT-enabled GitHub spam on Tuesday May 09, 2023 @04:27AM (#35871569)
Sad to see people always use tools maliciously, I found ChatGPT quite helpful for rubber duck debugging. Give it some log files and code excerpts, and it can help grab API docs, causes of similar issues, etc.
Ubuntu Touch and Mobian don't seem so bad.

But good support is still far away.

Especially since I'd really need Whatsapp and banking authentication on the phone, which both only support Android/iOS atm.

They really ought to shut down the exchanges.

Treat it like funding terrorism.

I meant even in the case that man is not the child's father.

France has this law. The US has it too if the man signs the birth certificate, and there's no way to force a paternity test.

While together is much more reasonable than absolutely all of your assets as with marriage though.
Yeah, feminism has gone completely insane. At the moment of marriage all assets are divided equally in most countries, regardless of when they were obtained. And in many countries a man can even be liable for child support if his wife cheats on him.

That said a lot of countries actually have lower taxes for married couples like Germany, or separate it entirely like in Sweden.

Re:The AI PR Industrial Complex on Friday May 05, 2023 @12:57PM (#35832014)
Loads of places where before you'd just have amateur art / no art.

We used it for department logos, etc. - it makes sense when it's so cheap.

For it to really grow though it needs to be able to be more domain-specific, like being able to generate 2D and 3D animations, spritesheets and isometric sprites, 3D models, normal maps and textures and being able to maintain a consistent style as a context (like ChatGPT).

Compare European and US salaries sometime, you have no idea how lucky you are.

There's a reason tens of thousands of European engineers, doctors, lawyers, developers, etc. are desperate to move to the US.

Re:Public Money, Public Code on Friday May 05, 2023 @04:33AM (#35826702)
It takes more effort to make internal code FOSS (i.e. upstreaming changes, protecting internal parts, etc.) - and often very few other people use it or contribute back anyway.

I think it'd make more sense as part of a unified effort - like all EU countries agreeing to provide one digital ID service. But that itself is a much bigger issue due to differing levels of digital services, bureaucracy, etc.

I still support it though, and donate to FSF Europe every year with my company donation.

Re:Public Money, Public Code on Friday May 05, 2023 @04:30AM (#35826684)
Wow, even using "Russians under the bed" to attack FOSS now.
Microsoft wanted to control it all with Blackbird and ActivePlatform.

Their greed ended up with them losing out (thankfully).

Re:Is ChatGPT Securities Fraud? on Wednesday May 03, 2023 @03:56PM (#35806934)
"Open"AI
Because people don't want to pay more for things.

It isn't astro-turfing.

It reminds me of the story about the New York beaches where they deliberately designed the transport to try to prevent public transport access to the "better" beaches, so they'd mostly remain only accessible to the wealthy (although it's not clear if this was actually true).

Like they want to make transport so expensive that the poor people stay away, and the rich can travel the world freely without having to share space and attractions with them.

Same for eating meat, and living in the suburbs and larger residences.

That said, an induction hob doesn't take 20 minutes to boil water.

Like Bill Gates saying he's part of the solution - https://finance.yahoo.com/news/im-part-solution-bill-gates-1...

"Billionaire philanthropist" - the definition of an oxymoron.

In the EU private jets are exempt from the new fuel duty as long as they make less than 243 flights every 4 months:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/PETI-CM-731622...

They don't even try to hide the hypocrisy. They're unelected and steal our money with ever-increasing taxes which they exempt themselves from.

Re:The Socialist Calculation Debate on Monday May 01, 2023 @03:46PM (#35778128)
Income inequality is good, and fighting markets is like trying to stop the tide.

It's accumulated wealth that is the problem (and leads to the corruption of free markets and democracy).

Policies should be focused on that - taxing wealth rather than work, and encouraging profitable investments rather than sitting on assets.

Whereas now the so-called "left-wing" policies are awful - rent control is popular in Europe despite being an unfair disaster in Sweden. There are high taxes on income and high VAT, whilst inheritance, land and wealth taxes have been abolished, greatly hurting social mobility while benefiting established, inherited wealth.

Same with a lot of focus on patching up symptoms - like not prosecuting low-value shoplifting, allowing squatting on "empty" properties, etc. rather than trying to improve market conditions, education and training and the housing market, etc. to ensure that everyone could get a much better salary to begin with.

Re:Layoffs Now Targeting Devs on Tuesday April 25, 2023 @07:57AM (#35699244)
Now? It was the same since the start.
Re:Ron: Rusty Object Notation on Sunday April 23, 2023 @05:44AM (#35674807)
I wish this were more commonly used - just having comments is so useful!

Are there already parsers available for Scala, Python, Java, etc.?

Putin is the chosen successor of Yeltsin, who was backed by the USA. I wouldn't pin the current state of Russia on the USSR - the Orthodox Church, etc. have far more influence.

Your point is definitely true for the psuedo-occupied countries like Romania, Poland, the DDR, etc. though. My point wasn't to defend the USSR but that we need competition to drive progress.

For example now the EU has almost none of its own industry - Concorde failed, ARM was sold (and the UK left), there is no equivalent to Big Tech. There is almost no competition (literally the only major examples I can think of are AirBus and Volvo/VW/Renault, and then some industrial ones like ASML and Nordvolt).

China poses more competition because it's chosen to actively protect its own developing industries. So they do have Baidu, WeChat, Bytedance, Huawei, Xiaomi, etc.

I'm also not sure about an EU-led world - the EU isn't even democratic in its current form (the Commission makes most of the decisions, and there are no EU-wide elections). I think it's best if we don't have any leading nation at all but true competition.

Yeah, but if you speak to Cubans they really think it become Miami overnight if they get rid of the Communist Party.

Whereas the reality is probably much closer to Haiti.

It'd be best if there were a steady transition of ending the blockade, allowing markets in non-natural monopoly industries and services (in practice this largely exists already), multi-party democracy without persecution. Cuba has pretty great education in comparison to similar nations and a relatively large population, so I think there's a lot of opportunities.

I can understand why they're so defensive though, the USA has openly admitted to dozens of assassination attempts on the Castro family, etc. - literally no different from Russia poisoning Yushchenko.

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