ichbinwiederda's comments

There was absolutely no need to include the stupid fake feminist take. Plenty of women and plenty of feminists also oppose porn.

The problem with onlyfans and chaturbate and others is that there are a lot of serious criminal activities that the creators might be engaged in. Anything from the creator stating they are over age when they are a minor, to full blown sex slavery where girls are held and forced to perform against their will. So it is understandable that people are wary of getting into that mess.

The same fake feminist spewing bullshit about men keeping sex workers down, will very quickly accuse the same men of profiting from sex slavery or child porn if they had invested in these platforms.

I don't like the Dutch system, having experienced it personally, but it is worth pointing out that the wealth tax exists in place of a capital gains tax.

Yes. It goes to show how much they care about safety.

When I was a kid (some 15 years ago), I remember people like you would wait till early 30s and then setup a software house, which is basically a small contracting firm, where you use your accumulated contacts to get contracts and hire junior and mid level people to work for you. Is that sort of thing not done anymore?

You are confounding two things. The impact of research and the impact of the researcher. Increasingly more research is done in publicly funded academia, not the opposite at you claim. OTOH the relative impact of individual researchers has gone down, but this is mostly due to problems being tackled being increasingly harder. In industry you can have relatively more impact because you are not doing research but you are building things using knowledge somebody has already collected for you. Maybe that is what you wanted to say.

I am happy that AR and IOT are getting delayed so much. I hope these stupid gimmicks never make it.

An ML PhD will not help you pass leetcode tests. Completely different knowledge base.

> That's probably because you have not suffered to be the only people of your country/race/culture in a company.

A whole lot of immigrants have gone through this. None of them are represented by the usual minority voices. The only minorities that ever get attention are women and blacks.

And the reason for that is that these minorities have disproportionate influence and visibility in the public sphere.

I don't think that you can stick to philosophical principles because those tend to be too simplistic and real life is messy. Twitter as a private entity should in theory have the right to do whatever they want. OTOH, their platform gives them influence over the democratic process. In theory people shouldn't be censored. OTOH it is easy to fool people with targeted propaganda.

Philosophizing is not going to get you anywhere, really. It's a technique of the past. There are many competing effects at play here. I think the more rational approach is to actually study the real world system to find a policy optimum that achieves a set goal. Philosophy should be relegated to figuring out that goal e.g. should it be democracy over all else or maybe individual rights or something else.

From what I read it seems people who are young and not otherwise at risk don't really need to take the vaccine as it doesn't inhibit transmission (results not concluded but very likely it does not). In any case it is unlikely it will be available to you if you fall in this demographic anyway.

Those claims are bullshit. The people most likely to travel are last in line to receive the vaccine and supply is limited so you cannot just go to your GP and get the shots.

It is not small. It is just that other tech companies you are comparing to are relatively overvalued, because branding and speculation inflate their worth.

I like to think of it like this: if magically the whole semi-conductor industry vanished overnight the world would be much poorer. We would be in a crisis. If magically the whole of Apple vanished overnight, we'd still have smartphones and laptops and tablets and basically all the tech that Apple makes.

Just goes to show that what the market values and what is actually valuable in aggregate are not metrics that are in tune.

At the start of this century, some famous American investment bank (Citigroup ?) came up with a report that said that in the near future (today) stocks which are luxury items will grow much faster than stocks that are essentials. And that is exactly what seems to have happened. The report said this was due to increasing economic inequality. Basically the middle classes of the first world have money to spare so they buy Apple Iphones and Tesla cars. The poorer people have less money and none to spare.

The free market does not care about EU sovereignty and such geopolitical issues, so the EU cannot rely on the free market to make the EU competitive in tech. Also in any case no private entity has been banned from participating in these markets.

Also in the whole article there is no mention of funding. It is probably a tech sharing and licensing agreement more than anything.

Beat me to it. Also Sweden is leading in tech, how exactly?

Tesla is trying to be the Apple of cars. The market opportunity is more or less the same: a sort of default luxury brand for people who do not particularly care about cars but just want to own "the best one" without having to put any thought into it. So judging Tesla by their technology portfolio is going to lead you astray. They are banking a lot on building their brand and they have really good PR and I think they will succeed.

No I agree with you on that but I think my definition of what is a luxury is quite well defined.

All these fake greenies flying to India to find themselves are still going to burn in hell though.

I understand what you are saying, but you can make the same argument for why littering should be allowed. Banning littering is also sacrifice. Very likely technical solutions alone won't cut it.

My issue with sacrifices is that they often punish the wrong people. For example, let's say there is a carbon tax on flights (very likely to happen soonish). People who travel for work and for other necessities should not incur the same penalty as tourists who travel purely for pleasure.

It happens outside of your bubble. It's not about being dumb. It's about having a certain way of life that values frugality and simple living. But you need land to live on. Go tell the Amish to sell their land and move into a condo because it makes more financial sense.

Yes but it is like a complete rewrite of the tax code if you are American. In my country we just don't have municipal taxes. Municipalities have reduced responsibility. All the important services are funded directly from central governments. So you don't get problems like underfunded schools and such. Municipalities get pocket money also from the central government and are only in charge of less important infrastructure and service.

There is no property tax, but we have capital gains taxes based on transfers of assets.

I am talking from experience. You are wrong on both counts.

What makes you think that poor people don't inherit property? There are lots of people with very low incomes but who own a house. And no they don't just sell it. Why sell the only house you have? Or maybe it is not their house but it is a piece of property that they have always owned and which they use as a garden or a yard or storage.

They don't sell it because they'd rather have a piece of land to enjoy then some money in the bank. It might be their only luxury in an otherwise frugal life.