You are basically meant to prop up the pension ponzi-scheme because they are running out of payers and the amount the boomers paid was quite little relative to now
>You are basically meant to prop up the pension ponzi-scheme
Also the housing Ponzi scheme. Germany says they're desperate for workers but actually is lacking the housing for them and puts no real effort in building more because it has Co2 caps in places (lol).
You got a new job in Berlin? Great, now good luck finding an apartment. Germany housing prices are completely out of whack. Munich land prices are similar to SF but wages are 1/3 those in the Bay.
So yeah, you're just cannon fodder for the German economy. Great time to be an employer or landlord in Germany though.
Germany also does a piss poor job of showing that it actually wants immigrants. The Berlin immigration office is a disgrace. German bureaucracy is downright hostile. Oh and now they literally stopped accepting citizenship applications in Berlin.
I know that it's not personal - the system is broken for Germans too - but it diminishes my feeling of belonging. I accept this relationship as transactional.
> Germany also does a piss poor job of showing that it actually wants immigrants
That's because it really doesn't. Businesses and parts of the government probably do, but public opinion is definitely divided on the issue. Germany as a country was founded less than 200 years ago as a nation-state, that is a to say, a country bound by common ancestry and language. The idea that a country like this (or any European country founded the Westphalian system) was just going to turn into a "melting pot" pro immigration state in just a few decades has always struck me as foolish.
The problem is that modern life destroys fertility rates, everywhere from the USA to South Korea the pattern is the same. But the economic systems, particularly pensions and retirement systems, are built around the fundamental assumption that, at the very least, there is a large enough working-age population to support retirees.
So to keep the system going you either need to increase birth rates (which is quite hard, Germany pays you £200 per month per kid and still has abysmal TFR) or increase immigration.
Using immigration to try to solve this issue is either a band-aid solution or a form of population planning "technical debt".
Because if you effectively integrate immigrants, they behave almost exactly like your existing population, including not having enough kids to sustain a workforce and then you're back at square one, needing to either solve the fertility rate issue or increase immigration.
On the other hand, if you fail to effectively integrate immigrants, you run the risk of them forming parallel societies, where even second and third generation individuals from these groups don't feel any attachment or loyalty to the host country, don't properly learn the local language, reject the local culture in favor of their heritage culture, and so on. The problems associated with this become their own issues that the country needs to deal with in addition to the population problems.
So yeah, the entire system is sick, beyond Germany as well. So your take of:
> I accept this relationship as transactional.
Is probably the right one to have.
Who said there are no immigrants? Every new year is a record immigration year. Also for housing prices.
The whole "we need even more immigrants" is wage suppression propaganda. Many of the big German business crying wolf have had record sales, only beeing kneecapped by the disappearance of cheap Russian gas and are trying to compensate it with cheaper labor.
I think German themselves made that race to the bottom when they selected cheap Russian gas as their main competitive advantage - as you very well noticed.
Do you think German manufacturing can compete with Chinese one once salaries grow?
I don't know for Germany, but you'll usually have option to receive your pension from abroad, or have it dumped in a local account for later, or transfered to your permanent residency country.
It's always a PITA with no straightforward way, but if you paid for 20 years you'll probably be motivated to go through the hoops to see that money back in some form.
And if you don't qualify, you can get your pension payments refunded (but not your employer's share). If you left Germany, you definitely ought to do it.
Same in Finland, the employer side constantly screaming about worker shortage, but I have been in several interviews where when I presented my salary request, I could see the person grin because they thought it is too high but it was just little higher than my current... Luckily, I got a new job in Hong Kong with decent salary and lower tax rate.
They want to saturate the market with massive immigration so the salaries never rise, but when there are too many developers, they can actually push them down. If there would be real shortage, they would increase the salary.
> If there would be real shortage, they would increase the salary.
Technically, a shortage occurs when an external mechanism prevents price from rising. Think price gouging laws as once such mechanism.
Where I am from, doctors are prevented from raising their prices in an effort to give equal access to all, rich and poor alike, which would allow for a doctor shortage to transpire. But a real labour shortage outside of such unique situations would be unheard of.
>Where I am from, doctors are prevented from raising their prices in an effort to give equal access to all, rich and poor alike, which would allow for a doctor shortage to transpire
Where is this? In Austria the government also caps how much the public doctos can charge, but guess what, most doctors exit the public system and go fully private where they can charge however much they want leaving a shortage in the public system.
Here in Finland they are screaming WORKER SHORTAGE too, but when you talk about salary, suddenly there is no shortage. It's interesting view of the market that when there is a shortage, they should be able to import more and more workers from the outside so they don't have to increase the salaries, but when there is less demand, the salaries should also go down. By this logic they should never increase
This is a lump of labor fallacy - importing workers increases your salary because immigrants, being prime-age consumers with complementary skills to the natives, increase labor demand more than supply.
(They don't have complementary skills to themselves, so they're more likely to suppress wages of other immigrants - so you could say the rational thing would be for them to shut each other out and you to encourage it.)
I have played for over 30 hours since release, and now at Act 2. It's one of the best games I have played. I am not a huge D&D fan, but I like real RPG games where the player choice actually matters such as DOS 2 and Pathfinder WOTR, so this one was instant buy for me and I am very pleasantly surprised. I can already see myself doing another playthrough, there is lots of diverging in the story. Too many so called RPG games nowadays are just pipes that you walk through with some kind of illusion of choice and few lines of different dialogue.
The inventory management is little messy and could be better, but honestly I don't find much else to critique yet.
Because it is actually an RPG, there is actually choices there, even in Act 1 there are quite few major choices that have big ramifications in Act 2. Take something like Pillars of Eternity, it mostly had the illusion of choice and not much real reactivity, the npcs might say few different lines but it really did not matter much.
I am tired of the games that present you with illusion of choice but it actually doesn't matter. In BG3 you can actually be the evil character so that by itself lends the game at least for 2 playthroughs. Personally I am playing it through as Dark Urge first, and later going to do another run with good druid.
Also the graphics are really nice, almost everything is voice acted, companions have interesting stories. Story is already much better than divinity 2. I have 39 hours in now and I bought it at launch
I think you've hit the nail on the head here with the illusion of choice in some games it really feels like the story is on rails and your character had very little agency. Mass Effect series in particular I think is to blame for this the series became incredibly popular but the actual role playing elements were not really there - these games had a Hero/Villain slider and every conversation had basically 3 dialogue options, the edgy sarcastic reply, the goody two shoes reply or the neutral reply. You would arrive at same place on dialogue tree. The story proceeded the same way regardless of how you chose to act. Because of how popular Mass Effect was I think it had a warping effect on the genre.
Voice acting as well is another key thing I think easy to overlook but it helps a lot with the immersion and getting invested in the world. Pathfinder Wrath of Righteous was a fun game but lack of voice acting made it a slog to get through there were what felt like paragraphs of text to read through constantly. By mid way through the game I found myself skipping over a lot of it. Imagine if tabletop roleplaying the DM handed you a stack of paper to read every conversation instead of narrating what was happening - that was kind of how I felt.
I’m curious to see if Baldur gate avoids this. It’s basically impossible imo. Act 2 is always Act 2.
But I can’t agree with your second statement. The problem with long boring text is not the lack of voice acting’s it’s the text itself. I’m not going to listen to some guy ramble about lore that seems unlikely to matter.
There are places like HK and Singapore where firing is super easy, yet the software industry in those places still pales to USA and even to Europe in some cases
The org I work at has the same issue with Elm, there is one Elm product and no one really wants to take those tickets because everyone hates dealing with it. It has become a total pain in the ass, and I believe someone is rewriting the app in React
I'm guessing the people who actually love Elm left.
You really do have to love a paradigm to work with it, because paradigm shifts have a cost. Elm's paradigm shift is "do everything declaratively/immutably/non-side-effecty" and the massive (IMHO) benefit of going about things that way is "no runtime errors" (!!!) in addition to quite performant code.
But yes, the cost is there, and it is that you sometimes just want a side-effect to get something done, you sometimes just want to call into another library to get something done, etc.
The thing is, if Elm allowed this, or made it easier, you'd lose the Elm guarantee of "no runtime errors". Which, frankly, is a pretty big one- just inspect any popular domain's web page and you're likely to see dozens of JS errors that are simply hidden from most users, contributing to a "janky" web experience.
I literally just inspected this very page I'm typing this comment on and I see:
This page is in Quirks Mode. Page layout may be impacted. For Standards Mode use “<!DOCTYPE html>”.
Error: Promised response from onMessage listener went out of scope
The cost of perfection is high. You really have to love the ideal.
But yes, if no one does, then Elm is a boondoggle.
I'm dealing with something similar with NixOS. NixOS's big guarantee (which is also big) is basically "no build or runtime failures that are due to misconfigured dependencies". But there's a steep learning curve and scattered documentation. The core idea is amazing, though, and that's what I love. The rest I tolerate while climbing the mountain.
What we really need is robust treatments that either slow down the ageing process or reverse it to some extent. There is some promising research relating to both slowing and reversing. The current approach where we treat age related disease as individual things will never really work out in the long term
One thing right now that is available is rapamycin which basically improves health span and lifespan for every animal it is given, won't make you live to 150 but will probably reduce risk of disease.
I am considering starting rapamycin myself as my mom was diagnosed with ALS few months ago (doesn't seem strictly genetic as her mom and dad lived relatively long and didn't get that disease), so I might have some risk genes..
World where people live to 90-100 and where increasing amount have dementia or other age related disease won't be a nice place
] Although the overwhelming majority of studies on the effect of rapamycin on longevity in mice have shown a significant increase in lifespan, there are five studies that have reported either no effect or reduced lifespan when treated with rapamycin.
When you write "every animal it is given" .. do you mean only flies and mice?
I've been having a hard time finding results for any other animals.
There's a decade of research with marmosets (here's a 2012 mention about it in Nature - https://www.nature.com/articles/492S18a ), but none of the papers I find report lifespan, only secondary measures (eg, "Long-term treatment with the mTOR inhibitor rapamycin has minor effect on clinical laboratory markers in middle-aged marmosets" - https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajp.22927 ).
Since marmosets live for about 15 to 16 years, surely there should be something concrete by now if it has the same effect on middle-aged marmosets when the research started.
I found there's research for dogs, but https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8507265/ says it's also ongoing. I haven't found any published results on lifespan only, again, on secondary effects (eg, quoting the paper, "An initial randomized, double-blind veterinary clinical trial confirmed the safety of this treatment and provided indications of potential efficacy (benefits for cardiac function) in dogs".)
What other animals have shown improved lifespan with rapamycin?
If it's only flies and (most) mice, is that really enough to call it "promising" in humans?
Of course we cannot be 100 % sure it will work for humans, but the results on mice are promising and they are replicated by different labs which is very rare for anti-aging compounds. Rapamycin consistently shows effect. The effect on humans probably won't be anywhere near the 25% increase that is shown on mice, we will maybe get some extra years + better health span but the cumulative effect on society will probably be more than any current intervention. If we look at how ageing appears on different mammals, it is actually remarkably similar in terms of the decline, the speed is just different so I would say it is indeed quite promising if the mice results are replicated majority of times.
There was study on a drug what is now called Everolimus (mTOR inhibitor) and it showed that it increases the influenza vaccine effectiveness on elderly people
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25540326/
I just don't think there is any compound currently that is more promising than rapamycin, so that's why I mentioned it here.
The most promising future treatment seems to do with cellular reprogramming as it increasingly looks like epigenetic alterations are responsible for a large part of aging, the epigenetic drift theory of aging.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41580-019-0204-5
The current way of doing medicine for the elderly will never work simply because of ageing, it is like trying to bail water from a sinking ship without fixing the hole. Will work for a short while until it doesn't. I am also very skeptical of getting a working treatment for diseases like Alzheimer's disease without intervening in ageing.
Already when I was a teenager I realized that treating ageing is the holy grail of medicine and it seems recently this field is gaining more attention, but realistically it will be decades in minimum until we get some more radical treatments, might be even longer. At least the billionaires have realized that there is not much point being a billionaire if your body is breaking apart.
All we have now is lifestyle choices, possibly some medicine like rapamycin, and just hoping we don't get unlucky. Worrying trend is also people taking HGH for anti-aging but in the lab it seems to have complete opposite effect, it actually seems more like ageing accelerator.
That's a convoluted way to say you don't know of any demonstrated lifespan increase result beyond mouse and flies.
> it showed that it increases the influenza vaccine effectiveness
I was asking about lifespan increase, which was your point, not secondary effects.
> The dog aging study is ongoing
Which I already mentioned, and it's linked-to in my earlier comment.
> Some smaller scale study on rapamycin for dogs
Yes - it's literally the same paper I already mentioned in my earlier comment.
> more promising than rapamycin
The question I asked was: If it's only flies and (most) mice, is that really enough to call it "promising" in humans?
Not the comparative "which is the most promising of the many compounds which have been reported to increase mouse lifespan?"
> Rapamycin consistently shows effect
Really? You write that after my comment, where I quoted how "five studies that have reported either no effect or reduced lifespan when treated with rapamycin" and provided the citation that shows your assertion to be incorrect?
