Yeah but it's the job of the elected governments to build and maintain housing, education, social and welfare systems for their population that keep up with the challenges of the times, not the responsibility of the private sector to hold back progress and inefficiency just so more people can stay in employment even if they're not needed anymore.
The governments however have been and continue to be ill prepared to the rising increases of globalisation labor offshoring and automation.
There was a news article yesterday in my EU country about a 50 year old laid off CEO of a small company that continues to be unemployed after a year because nobody will hire him anymore so he lives off welfare and oddjobs and the government unemployment office has no solution.
What happens in the future when AI and offshoring culls more white collar jobs and there will be thousands or tens of thousands of unemployable 50 year old managers with outdated skills that nobody will want to hire or re-train due to various reasons, but they still need to keep working somehow till their 70s to qualify for retirement? Sure you then go to re-train yourself to become a licensed plumber or electrician, but who will want to hire you to gain experience when they can hire the 20-something fresher rather than the 50 year old with bad knees?
> but it's the job of the elected governments to build and maintain housing, education, social and welfare systems for their population that keep up with the challenges of the times
I'd say those things are the job of the population itself, via a wide range of pluralistic institutions. The job of governments, which are just specific organizations within a much larger society, is primarily to maintain public order.
>I'd say those things are the job of the population itself, via a wide range of pluralistic institutions.
I'd agree ONLY IF I'd pay no taxes to the government. But since most middle class people pay 40%+ of their income to the state, then the state now has the responsibility to handle those challenges for us.
But if the state wants me to handle it, then sure I'd do it gladly, they just need to reimburse 90% of my tax payments so I'd have the financial resources to proactively invest in my future security.
But right now we have the worst of both worlds in the west: a huge tax burden on the middle class funding an incompetent state that takes your money, spends it like drunken sailors on bullshit, and when the shit hits the fan, just tells you it's your fault when you fall down, instead of having used your money for societal wide preemptive solutions.
> I'd agree ONLY IF I'd pay no taxes to the government. But since most middle class people pay 40%+ of their income to the state, then the state now has the responsibility to handle those challenges.
Well, no, we pay taxes for the government to fund the things government is supposed to do and is competent at. Paying the government doesn't make them responsible for or competent to handle anything every problem arising anywhere in society, any more than paying for a Netflix subscription makes Netflix responsible for or capable of handling those problems.
This is really important, because political institutions aren't just bad at handling complex social problems, but when made responsible for them, often get in the way of other individuals, communities, and institutions trying to solve those problems with much better approaches.
> But if the state wants me to handle it, then sure I'd do it gladly, they just need to reimburse all my tax payments so I'd have the financial resources to invest in my future.
Agreed. We should drastically lower taxes, and ensure that most of the resources necessary to improve society are left in the hands of society itself, and not monopolized by a single institution that's subject to perverse incentives.
But if we assume that we're stuck paying the same level of taxes for the time being, and treat those taxes merely as losses, the question reduces to whether we want a monopolistic organization run by people with ulterior motives exercising a controlling influence over our lives and livelihoods -- and often failing to solve those complex problems in the first place -- or whether we would still prefer to solve those problems for ourselves with the resources we have left. And to my mind, the latter is still preferable, even if unhelpful strangers are stealing a good chunk of my resources.
> But right now we have the worst of both worlds: a huge tax burden on the middle class funding an incompetent state that takes your money, spends it like drunken sailors on bullshit, and when the shit hits the fan just tells you it's your fault when you fall down, instead of having used your money for societal wide preemptive solutions.
Yes, that's all true. But to my point above, the only way out of this is not to expect that the incompetent grifters will somehow start behaving like competent philanthropists, but rather to contain them and minimize the grift -- either way, it's still on us to solve our own problems.
>Well, no, we pay taxes for the government to fund the things government is supposed to do and is competent at.
Which also includes the education system training you for the labor market. How is the state good at that if what they're training you for is now useless? Also includes the welfare safety net which is now failing to catch everyone falling.
>This is really important, because political institutions aren't just bad at handling complex social problems, but when made responsible for them, often get in the way of other individuals, communities, and institutions trying to solve those problems with much better approaches.
If we know they're bad at this and often responsible for the issues we have, why are we funding them so much?
Norway has their sovereign fund as a premprive solution in case the country hits a rough path in the future.
>but rather to contain them and minimize the grift
And this can only be done peacefully by defunding the incompetent state apparatus.
>either way, it's still on us to solve our own problems
Yeah but you need money for that. And we don't have money because the state is taking half of it.
> Which also includes the education system training you for the labor market.
Does it? That's an assumption many people make, but I'm not sure that this was either the original intent -- public schooling was driven largely as a tool for "liberal arts" and to assimilate immigrants -- nor something that public schooling has ever proven to be particularly good at.
> If we know they're bad at this and often responsible for the issues we have, why are we funding them so much?
Well, most people's main incentive for paying taxes is the threat of being punished for failing to do so.
> And this can only be done peacefully by defunding the incompetent state apparatus.
Agreed entirely.
> Yeah but you need money for that. And we don't have money because the state is taking half of it.
Agreed entirely, and doing away with confiscatory taxation is an important goal. But whether or not the state takes our money is not directly relevant to the question of whether the state is sufficiently trustworthy and competent to assign monopolistic control of critical aspects of our lives to.
And my position on that is that even if we can't roll back taxation, we still shouldn't trust the state with unilateral control over key aspects of our lives and livelihoods, and we'd be better off making do with the resources we retain despite taxation to provide those things for ourselves via other forms of organization or community.
I used to be an occasional MR reader, but stopped visiting lately because of this.
When it became obvious how the US presidential race will end (basically after assassination attempt) Cowen's tone heavily shifted.
Even the facade of objectivity went through the window. Now most of his writing is spent on defending the indefensible. Shame, his early takes helped shape my world model.
If I found a folder with a hundred images of naked kids on your PC, I would report you to authorities, regardless of what pose kids are depicted in. So I guess the answer is no.
Energy is expensive because fossil fuels are destroying the only planet we have.
If a person is taking lifesaving medicine that unfortunately makes their skin itch, you wouldn't call itchiness "a problem which they have created themselves in the first place"...
> business operation across different countries, a real bottleneck for EU SMEs
Is it actually a "real bottleneck" for EU SMEs? Granted, I've only participated in help growing 3 companies from the scale of 3-4 developers > ~100-150 and from national sales to international, but "going worldwide" or "EU wide" was never the bottleneck we had. The most tricky part was figuring out exactly how to do VAT for every single country, but after a session with a accountant + setting up the guidelines + creating a .csv, that's basically it. Besides that, it was basically smooth sailing.
Today I'm sure there even are hosted services that does all of that stuff automatically for you, probably with Stripe integration as well.
What exactly is that bottleneck you're referring to?
There's a reason I rarely see local subsidiaries of cool small companies from other EU countries - it's too complicated to open them, have a couple of local employees on a payroll, handle notarization, translations of documents, not to mention labor laws etc.
The bottleneck is having a standardized SAFE for Europe. Global investors must be able to invest without having to understand Italian and Polish corporate law
That's a different thing all together, but a good point nonetheless. Always been dealing with local investors when building startups, because of that.
The claim was that "business operation across different countries" is a "a real bottleneck for EU SMEs" currently, I don't think that has anything to do with investors?
>I like the pelican riding a bike test, but my standards for what’s “good” seem higher than generally expected by others.
If you train for your first marathon, is your goal to run it under 2h?
We are all looking forward to perfect results, but our standards are reasonable. We know what the results were last month, and judge the improvement velocity.
Nobody thinks that's a good SVG of a pelican riding a bike - on it's own. But it's a lot better compared to all the other LLM-generated SVGs of a pelican riding a bike.
We judge relative results - you judge absolute results. Confusion ensues.
I think you’re missing the criticism I’m making. The models already have the capacity both to create hyper-real imagery, and they have mastery of the SVG medium. These two capabilities are the entire recipe a human would need to produce what I’ve described.
To use your marathon metaphor, they have the body of Kipchoge in his absolute prime, and are failing to qualify for a local fun-run.
If entities comprising the union are not forced to compromise (and compromise by some type of majority is the most logical one), and want to pick and choose, then that is no union. And there can be no union like that.
>Food shipments are being restricted because it's not generally accepted that you have to feed your enemies while you're at war with them.
Funny way to put it.
You do not feed the enemy, rest of the world feeds the enemy.
You make all effort to prevent the enemy being fed, to starve the enemy to death.
Starving the enemy is generally accepted as a war crime, but Israel disagrees.
Oh yeah, and enemy in this case includes infants.
> The enemy does not include children, but hamas cannot use them as a shield to protect or even deflect attention from their own fighters. Again it's awful but not criminal.
When the Allies bombed Dresden, that was a war crime. When Israel kills children because it's operationally easier than figuring out how to just kill combatants, that is also a war crime.
Like, they appear to be able to do targeted attacks on Hamas people basically everywhere except Gaza, which seems pretty weird.
> there has to be intent to prevent civilians from accessing food
Intent, in cases of genocide, is basically impossible to establish except in retrospect. We can only establish what is happening right now:
> “The worst-case scenario of famine is currently playing out in Gaza,” UN-backed food security experts said on Tuesday, in a call to action amid unrelenting conflict, mass displacement and the near-total collapse of essential services in the war-battered enclave.
> The alert follows a May 2025 IPC analysis that projected catastrophic levels of food insecurity for the entire population by September. According to the platform’s experts, at least half a million people are expected to be in IPC Phase 5 – catastrophe – which is marked by starvation, destitution and death.
> It is unclear to me how much actual starvation is taking place there.
It sounds pretty clear to the UN.
Israel is in full control of this situation. If things were playing out differently to how they wanted, they could permit more aid to go through.
> They claim there's enough food entering gaza, but hamas is stealing it
The idea that there's plenty of food but Hamas has squirrelled it away so that everyone starves is ludicrous.
> so long as they are keeping international laws in good faith
The International Court of Justice has ordered Israel multiple times to permit aid into Gaza.
> You have to realise that genocide is not a realistic operational aim for the idf or the political establishment
Sure it is. They just have to keep doing what they're doing right now. It's worked so far.
---
I cited a laundry list of expert organizations specializing in identifying crimes against humanity. You've cited an op-ed. The balance of evidence and expertise overwhelmingly indicates genocide, and it's not even close.
The un has such a long and consistent anti israel bias i find it hard to trust anything they say. UNWRA basically is the de facto propoganda and civil administrators for hamas. Again the ipc changed their definition on famine in order to include gaza.
Israel is most definitely not in full control of gaza. They are trying to assert some with the ghf despite UN/Hamas strenuous opposition.
The idea that hamas isn't stealing all the aid is ludicrous.
And finally Israel does permit huge amounts of aid into gaza. I wonder what UNWRA are doing with it.
The only thing you have established is that gaza is indeed in the midst of a war and that resources are scarce for people there and lots of people are dying which is exactly what you would expect in a war.
Just because you want something to be true doesn't make it so. Israel isn't to blame for what has happened in gaza. Unless you claim having an interest in not being massacred, kidnapped and raped is unreasonable.
> The idea that hamas isn't stealing all the aid is ludicrous.
Bro what the fuck are they going to do with enough stolen food to feed an entire nation? It's not as if they can sell it. World's biggest mukbang tiktok stream?
You're either wilfully blind or unspeakably obtuse. Open your eyes or shut your mouth.
"a supercomputer inside a camera that fits in your pocket" stopped being a novelty 15 years ago. We call it just "phone" now!
"lying flat on a table" is a critical feature for a device that on a daily basis lays on the table.
If it clanks and thuds every time you press it (and pressing it is the only way to use it) while lying on the table, then it is bad design that should be addressed.
I legit don't think I have even once used my phone lying on a table. Ergonomically that makes no sense. But then again I neither use my iPad nor Macbook lying flat on a table either, so what do I know...
Huh, that shocks me. I'd say half my day my phone is on my desk here. I'll occasionally swipe/tap it to deal with notifications and various other things.
But I came up using Nexus/Pixels, which had an "always on" display very early, a great UI around "glanceability" putting all kinds of useful and interesting things front and center, a much better Swipe keyboard, and a much more functional notifications experience, so maybe that trained this behavior.
Do you not? Do you just... leave your phone in your pocket all day?
