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How about striding for one of the core societal values that make many advanced democraties (including the European nordics) so much better/happier than the US?

by anonyfox 4y ago

How about striding for one of the core societal values that make many advanced democraties (including the European nordics) so much better/happier than the US? It’s called Equality. Insert strong progressive taxes, especially on wealth, and use it to fund a strong public sector, so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/… . I think you vastly underestimate how much money is the rich have siphoned from society, what do you think that printed money goes to? The change impact would be _massive_, suddenly people would have disposable money instead of crushing debts, nd actually stimulate the economy!

jokethrowaway 4y ago
[flagged]
- danjac 4y ago
  Um...Python, C++, Linux, Erlang, mobile phones (Nokia), Spotify, HTML... Having worked for both European and US companies, I would say that a) innovation is mutual (we learn from each other) and talent/mediocrity are pretty much evenly distributed. The US has a more "dynamic" economy in some sense - for example the VC ecosystem is far better funded - but is detrimental in others (Byzantine health care system deters would-be entrepreneurs).
  - roenxi 4y ago
    And yet if we take a snapshot literally right now: Guido van Rossum - Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Bjarne Stroustrup - professor of Computer Science at Columbia University (City of New York) Linus Torvalds - Nationality American/US since 2010 (should I write GNU/American/US? Someone educate me). Erlang - I don't know anything about Erlang so I've got nothing to say. Nokia - brutally ejected from the market by the Americans, bought out and sepukku-ed under Microsoft leadership. Now phones may as well be an Asian technology. Oversaw the collapse of European leadership in the mobile space, to the point where it is going to be a case study in how to fail at innovation. Spotify - Leading EU tech success story. Makes up 50% of the counterexamples, along with ASML. Not detectable as a serious tech company when compared to Google, Microsoft, Amazon, etc, etc. HTML - I mean, we'd probably have managed without the Europeans on this one. Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads.
    - anonyfox 4y ago
      You are not wrong but also forgot the reasons… Most stuff you cheer here is basically a few tech giants out of Silicon Valley. The science kickstart for all that came from a bunch of scientists (like Von neumann) you got when winning WW2 from europe. In a time when many potential competitors were still rebuilding from ruins. This is over now, europeans tend to no longer go to the us but still produce excellent scientists, Asian countries catched up and both continents start to leave the US behind in most aspects as a desirable place to live, except for 2 things: Military power and billionaires. Enjoy your 5 tech giants while they last, but also keep in mind that these are international now and draw from nonamerican intellectual power also.
      - Gordonjcp 4y ago
        > The science kickstart for all that came from a bunch of scientists (like Von neumann) you got when winning WW2 from europe. Don't forget that the USians would all be speaking Japanese if it wasn't for the technology they "borrowed" from the British. American "RADAR" was a laughable non-starter until they got shown how to make magnetrons by Randall and Boot.
    - danjac 4y ago
      That's the point though. Van Rossum, Stroustrup and Torvalds made their name early on in their careers or even at college, while still in Europe. Sure, later on they emigrated to the US for the money, but that was on the back of their accomplishments. Of course Nokia was eclipsed by foreign competition (mostly due to terrible management), but it was still innovative in its time. Just as US companies today face competition from Asia. > Although useful, HTML isn't a very technical accomplishment. Anyone could invent this, including most CS undergrads. Yes, but they didn't, did they? It's easy to look at something with 20/20 hindsight and say "anyone could have done this". Back in 1989 Berners-Lee had that insight.
    - finikytou 4y ago
      this is right. but its mostly the proof that when you have the highest military spending in the western world you suddenly get things moving your way.
- anonyfox 4y ago
  That’s the total opposite most people around me (many immigrants from the US!) experience for the like last 2 decades actually, where have you been to that draws such a funny picture? Europe has more % Entrepreneurs/Self-employed people than the US, lots of great companies even though not leading in the richest top5-ranking, and the work ethic is focussed during working hours instead of chitchatting/looking busy 12h+ per day. Maybe you are also fooled by one critical thing: US companies are muuuuch better at marketing than European ones, outshining them so you tend to see exclusively US blogvertising and not where real innovation actually happens: all around the world now and the US actually falling behind.
  - mkmk3 4y ago
    Could also be the advantage of a unified market helps US startups scale faster, maybe someone else can speak to that better. Its been influential where Ive worked, at least. I also think at least US tech has significantly larger firms, but I dont think thats directly in line with societal good. Seems pretty fucking cancerous to me. Cant speak to industries outside of software though.
    - danjac 4y ago
      Europe (mostly, at least) does have a unified market on paper, but not culturally, which makes marketing, localization etc. harder - a commercial that sells well to Germans might go down like a lead balloon in Spain. The biggest advantage I've seen in the US has been the VC ecosystem. For all we deride VCs - and sometimes (particularly given events over the past few weeks) with very good reason, the money spigot is just much more generous in the US. Of course that will change in the new low interest rate economy, but that to me seems more the deciding factor than silly claims that Americans are somehow more innately "innovative" than Europeans.
      - anonyfox 4y ago
        Money as a forcing function seems to come to an end, also I really am laughing right now how the US tries to suppress TikTok so it doesn’t overtake all these social media companies seemingly unable to compete :-)
- pharmakom 4y ago
  If the US was half a competent at city planning as Europe it would be a no brainier for me. Unfortunately the US cities that are remotely walkable are also the most expensive. Phoenix / LA / Texas car dependency? HELL NO
  - anonyfox 4y ago
    You are right, still I always think of https://www.quora.com/Why-are-American-cities-essentially-all-the-same-and-boring-comparative-to-Europe https://www.quora.com/Why-are-American-cities-essentially-al... this on the topic… :-) Yes a walkable city is a massive life quality factor, but one can only „get it“ after experiencing it. Add good public transport on top of that and you can see why european/asian cities are so popular nowadays
- walthamstow 4y ago
  London Oyster card introduced June 2003 NYC Omny card introduced October 2021
- stavros 4y ago
  I agree. What does it matter if healthcare costs an arm and a leg when you have drones delivering your weed?
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  All that companies do in the US is make money from other people's ideas. It's like a furtive and sneaky version of China. There is no innovation in the US, nothing that would make me want to get up and go to work in the morning.
ChatGTP 4y ago
I can’t describe how much better Europe, specifically Netherlands felt due to the social safety nets provided, and do not tell me that The Dutch aren’t hard working people, because they are. People are so much more relaxed there. 99% of the concern about AI is because we’re living in a cut throat capitalistic society, if we knew that AI didn’t mean starving or losing our homes, we’d be way more relaxed about it, and imo we’d take out time a bit more and think about safety. It’s the American race to the bottom attitude which is IMO no longer compatible with a highly automated world. To start with, if the economy breaks, AI breaks. I saw Microsoft is winging because other search engines are stealing ChatGPT responses, get used to it M$, you own nothing.
- anonyfox 4y ago
  I cannot imagine being rich and be surrounded by homeless people, crime, drugs and the like. The only „solution“ that still avoids realizing the problem is to try to escape into gated communities and shoot those plebs coming too close, ideally robots so no human is at fault conveniently. Or what useful is having that mercedes when most others want to steal or at least damage it? I, for one, prefer to treat other humans as, well, humans. And by making everyone around me better off, my quality of life also improves. For simple striking example, how about giving homeless people housing for free, so they can get their stuff together again? You can argue about how „they„ don’t deserve this all day long or simply do it and eliminate a problem https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-leading-the-way-in-ending-homelessness-but-how-are-they-doing-it/ https://world-habitat.org/news/our-blog/helsinki-is-still-le... - and even save a lot of money in the process as a society!
  - ChatGTP 4y ago
    When you think about it, All wealth, every single bit of it has come from the same earth we’re all born on. This is the one truth which binds us all, including the AI, it’s too a child of this Earth, which means all people should have fairly equal access to at least basic protections the Earth provides us with. That’s all there really is to say about it.
    - 4y ago
Applejinx 4y ago
Yup. One of the things that's going to become starkly obvious is this: being in ownership of the money machine doesn't entitle you to power and compensation matching the output of that machine. Feedback loops set in. If you need X amount of power and Y amount of resources to get it going, but it pays you enough for X times 2 power and Y times 5 resources, the first person to get the machine cranking becomes a human version of that AI paperclip maximizer. And this has obviously already happened… So now it's just a matter of, how obvious does this need to get before all the world is paperclips with one idiot sitting there, in his limited human perception, thinking he's won. It really is Star Trek Future or bust. We don't have the luxury of steampunk attitudes towards power and societal structure anymore. Machine assistance and its multiplier effect are too big, and the runaway feedback effects are too obvious. Do we have to wait until it's no longer Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, who are at least very aggressive ambitious idiots paying high prices for their goals, and instead it's some feckless Sam Bankman-Fried who ends up holding the bag? What's it going to take to illustrate the scale of the problem?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Morally comparing order of magnitude I don't really see the difference between any of your examples. They're all structurally lacking in empathy and every one of those would sell their mother if it got them ahead in the game.
  - Applejinx 4y ago
    I don't disagree, but there's a profound difference in effort (most notably seen in Bezos vs. Bankman-Fried). This changes the result, and I think it also significantly changes the framing. Bezos started in the days of Windows 3.1, and already was positioning himself near Microsoft as a force multiplier even though, in those days, he and other humans had to do vast amounts of work and thinking. If the only requirement for dominating the world is adjacency to AI, the gameplan is still exactly the same but now the work and thinking is what you turn over to machines as a force multiplier. Without that, where is the justification for producing individuals who dominate the world? It becomes, not arbitrary, but purely a factor of who is adjacent to the AI at the right time.
deleted 4y ago
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revelio 4y ago
>> so _everyone_ has as access to basic goods and services for free, like education/health/transport/… Access? UK tries this. High taxes and high borrowing to fund a large public sector. Result: - People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly. - People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport workers are constantly going on strike, despite Tube drivers earning £56k/yr, only a bit less than that of a software engineer. Putting the public sector in charge doesn't guarantee access to anything, it can easily lead to the opposite, which is why the USSR was constantly being wracked by bizarre shortages especially for anything that mattered to the general public like consumer goods. And now the UK suffers massive healthcare shortages. Same problem.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > People can't reliably see dentists or get doctor's appointments because the nationalized health system can't manage capacity properly. Not accurate in the slightest, this is due to the current administration deliberately funding the NHS less than it needs to function effectively. > People can't reliably move around the country because the public sector transport workers are constantly going on strike Only currently true because of similar reasons, it's not structurally true of that sector. > Putting the public sector in charge ... And now the UK suffers massive healthcare shortages. Same problem. Not accurate at all.
- anonyfox 4y ago
  This is a forced imageproblem try to get privatizations look better than state run, by defunding public sectors and claiming all kinds of weird stuff upto straight lies some people want to believe. Don’t buy into that propaganda, look at the US how privatization ends up: still lots of tax money, additionally people can’t afford stuff, and a few assholes getting insanely rich in the process by siphoning money out of the society. Try to ensure appropriate money is used to make the NHS effective again, including wages that allows people to live where they work (<1h commute). Most communist shortages came from being cutoff from international trades with wealthy countries, and having to start from ruins or nothing at all btw. These are different problems, and you might learn in the process why capitalism is going to end soon. :-)

jacquesm 4y ago

This is the key point. The single unified market with 300+ million people speaking the same language is the advantage that will make all the other ones more or less irrelevant.

anonyfox 4y ago
This factor is dimishing in importance with the absurdly increasing wealth gap. Who cares about this big majority of people that can’t afford stuff?
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Sorry? You think the American economy is so broken that people 'can't afford stuff' anymore? That there is an absurdly increasing wealth gap is a fact, but that doesn't mean that - for the time being - US households as consumers are still spending lots of money. And if you're in the B2B side of the market then it's even easier.
  - anonyfox 4y ago
    I said dimishing, not gone already. A shrinking middle class is a real problem, leading to all kinds of issues, like reduced spending power - something that until recently was hidden by people going into debt massively… which now turns into even more problems soon. All the while you can now do stuff in English all over europe increasingly well and legislations are getting normalized between countries, ignoring the odd brexit events here and there. Ultimately what I am saying is: the factor exists and is significant, but getting lower for the US and other parts of the world are catching up rather quickly.
    - tekknik 4y ago
      This comment can be read as you being happy for the demise of the US. It’s wonderful to see how many actual allies we have, who the minute we trip up they’re immediately on scene saying “i told you so” and ready to pick the bones.
      - anonyfox 4y ago
        You are reading that wrong, and it even sounds you want to read it that way. For sure Europeans are not keen to have to deal with china or Russia as the new world powers instead of the US. Really! But sometimes friends have to call out each other when things go in a bad direction. But most Americans probably have to deal with the fact that they really aren’t the greatest country on earth any longer, except for military spending, gun deaths and prisoners. This realization is needed before one can really make steps into improving things again.
- megaman821 4y ago
  The wealth gap can increase and the median household can also have more discretionary income at the same time.

jrochkind1 4y ago

> The only „solution“ that still avoids realizing the problem is to try to escape into gated communities and shoot those plebs coming too close, ideally robots so no human is at fault conveniently. Or what useful is having that mercedes when most others want to steal or at least damage it? You say this like it shows how it's not a plausible outcome or shows the error of this path, but unfortunately that's exactly the American plan. Yes, that. Is what is literally already happening in USA. It is pretty nightmarish. The rich don't seem to think it's a problem, or don't seem to think there's any available option more desirable to them.

anonyfox 4y ago
The great thing about fascism (the extreme form of conservativsm when going more rightwing) is that it’s always a matter of in-group vs out-group, THE stereotype of thinking of the right-wingers. Like, we have the true values and they are immoral. This thinking naturally Leads of subselects within the in-group that are even more true than the others… and it gets recursively smaller going towards fascism. So ultimately you end up with a tiny in-group (the führers are now some billionaires), that still want to backstab the others secretly, who become paranoid over time, isolate themselves to minimize contact with these lesser human beings left behind… and loose touch with reality. this is where it ends, usually, one way or another. But the important part is that it actually DOESNT MATTER what they think - at some point people are frustrated enough and simply take it all away from them… the tipping point is when even public security staff (like police) is willing to let it happen - mostly to reduce suffering from family/friends/… .
- tekknik 4y ago
  > The great thing about fascism (the extreme form of conservativsm when going more rightwing) Stopped reading after you asserted that fascism is a right only attribute.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    Self-righteousness, violence, or tendencies to authoritarianism can be found on both left and right. But fascism means a certain kind of far-right populist politics, not just these attributes in isolation.
  - anonyfox 4y ago
    words do have definitions. every political direction can have authoritarian traits, still fascism is the extreme form of conservatism. So is communism as the extreme form of socialism, to compare it with left-wing words. The third political direction is liberalism that ultimately leads to anarchy (no state at all). Both American parties are in the area of liberal-conservative… as a European it simply looks like slightly rightwing (dems) and bordering fascist (reps). Political classification is a complex topic though, it needs multiple dimensions to somehow get to something useful as a mental model. I am „green“ first and foremost, and while the solarpunk or eco-socialist movements surely have socialist aspects, the „green“ main focus isn’t even covered in previous models. Green is neither left nor right nor liberal, it’s… future oriented? Dunno.