Meanwhile ~40 (mostly young) people drowned in France recently trying to cool off as temperatures exceeded 100F around Paris.
It's true that historically Europe is cooler than similar latitudes in North America. But there's also an anti-AC movement in Europe based partly on environmentalism, partly on reflexive anti-Americanism, and partly due to a general preference for "naturalness"/suspicion of anything new.
Correction: Europe is much warmer than similar latitudes in North America. Madrid is north of Denver. Istanbul is north of New York. London is north of Calgary.[1]
It's very Americentrist to assume anyone ever thinks of "Americans" when deciding their home improvements and expenses.
Most of Europe only sees occasional heatwaves (for now) so it's a compromise to suffer some heat briefly but save money and effort on the AC installation. Those who can, time their vacation to overlap with much of the peak heat.
I think this slowly changes but it's driven by need (longer and hotter heatwaves), affordability, local regulation, not by thinking of "Americans". Not even US Americans.
I don't assume it; it's simply true. Educated/elite Europeans tend to define themselves in opposition to Americans. It's pretty hard to interact with those Europeans (including on this site) and not pick up on that.
There are plenty of Americans who side with the Europeans and also define themselves in opposition to "the kind of American" who has AC/eats fast food/is obese/has no culture. I'm from New England and maybe even a majority of people have that perspective.
> But there's also an anti-AC movement in Europe based partly on environmentalism, partly on reflexive anti-Americanism, and partly due to a general preference for "naturalness"/suspicion of anything new.
It's so amusing to see what people really think about us Europeans, so suspicious of anything new and those Americans, I guess we still burn witches too!
I for one love my AirConditioning unit, but it gets use maybe 1 month of the year ? I can completely understand why people don't see the need when awnings are still a thing. There are just already ways to keep the house cool during the day.
> It's true that historically Europe is cooler than similar latitudes in North America. But there's also an anti-AC movement in Europe based partly on environmentalism, partly on reflexive anti-Americanism, and partly due to a general preference for "naturalness"/suspicion of anything new.
That part might be speculation, okay, so then let's add the number of people, European citizens, dying of overheating every year (lately at least). The history is history, while the current world is so much hotter. It doesn't matter whether you deny climate change models, reality is that France just had their hottest day ever recorded, and such records get broken year after year. I've seen yesterday a picture of a Madrid bus station showing +51°C. So, if there's a better solution than AC for the affected persons I'd be very happy to hear it.
Why did you stop just short of proving that Europeans reject ACs because of "reflexive anti-Americanism"? Because that's the only thing GP objected to.
U-3 (unemployment rate) is 4.3% like he said. U-4 (U-3 plus discouraged workers, people who want and are available for work but stopped searching) is 4.6%. Practically the same.
If you want more detailed numbers, go look them up. BLS publishes them.
Unemployment is nearly at historical lows. But don't let data distract you from the same tired "everything is terrible" line that's every other post here.
Pretty massive difference between "being employed" and "being employed with a decent wage". Yeah, there's plenty of low-wage service industry or gig economy work available to take you out of the unemployment statistic -- there's a lot less employment available that enables you to live a decent lifestyle (i.e. live somewhere without 4 roommates or raise a family)
Very common for people suddenly laid-off from salaried work to turn to part-time gig work and that immediately removes them from the 4.3% unemployed statistic.
That's U-6 (U-5 plus people involuntarily working part-time). It's 8.1%. Pretty low by historical standards, but not as low as it was 3 years ago (6.9%)
The folks who made accurate federal numbers were fired some time ago. the current numbers are about as accurate as someone with an active interest in lying about it cares.
Employment numbers don't tell the whole history. You may lose your job as a SWE making 200k/y and to control the hemorrage of your savings, accept a part time contractor role that nets you a fraction of what you used to get, without benefits, or you can start driving for uber, door dash, etc. All of it will make you count as employed.
That's often called "occupational mismatch" and it smuggles in a normative claim that someone always deserves a job matching their prior title, education, or salary. Labor statistics do not and should not assume that.
Also in my experience part time contractor roles are awesome. <20hr/wk = low stress, most of my big purchases like computer hardware were deductible business expenses, and the coveredca subsidy let me get a very good health plan (courtesy of all the full time guys who bleed taxes and get zero subsidies in return)
The point is, I hope you agree that normal people may find a labor market where should them lose their jobs, there's a heightened chance they will find themselves in a situation of "occupational mimatch" a lit bit stressing and not really the ideal, optimal market under their point of view.
It may be that this perception would be particularly amplified when those persons have some doubt whether they would be able, in any single month, to be able to pay both their mortgage and food with their "occupationally mismatched" new income levels.
Despite the fact that you're probably right when you say the labor statistics should not assume that those people are unemployed, I think you can now appreaciate the fact that for some people, the current labor market is not particularly reassuring no matter what numbers the Department of Labor proclaim for this particular statistics.
Meaningless considering gig work counts against unemployment, but has none of the benefits traditionally associated with employment.
It's 14.3%-19% if you include full time gig work and %30.7-35.4% if you include part time gig workers.
It's ridiculous to say that the "economy works" or is doing well if 99% of people deliver pizzas. Most of the wealth created doesn't come from pizza delivery if people aren't participating in the industries that generate value then they might as well be outside of the labor market entirely.
It's shocking that people don't understand the history or purpose of the unemployment metric. If someone living in a rural town moves to an industrialized city and they cannot find a job then the industrial machine needs more capital allocated to it. Currently we've built a slave economy were low tiers service high tier people. It's a very easy trap to fall into for obvious reasons, but it stalls growth.
I think that is a better way to look at it, although you then need to compare the 35% to historical trends, or you will just have an emotional "that's a big number" reaction.
Historical trends is another kind of trap, because employment used to mean something different compared to the necessity an income has become today.
For most of history anybody could just claim land. You literally just said "Mine!" And it was yours. You could shoot anyone who tried to enter it. You could do whatever you want - hunt on it and trade the fur and meat for pure gold, fish, drill for oil, create 100s of acres of opium fields.
Frankly, for most of history, nobody needed a job.
Today all land is owned by somebody, and even if you do own it, you still owe taxes and it comes with all sorts of restrictions and zoning for how you can use it. Often they are managed by POAs and HOAs, so it's not much different than renting. For those that do rent, it's even worse - you stay working forever.
I digress - even as recently as the 1970s or 80s, if you wanted a job, you had one. If you wanted a house, you had one.
Today, you need a job to survive, there's no safety net (at least not the United States) and basically no way to legally obtain the resources, space, and structures a typical human needs to survive well in the world.
So yeah, something like a 35% unemployment rate - where rent is the most expensive thing in the economy, nobody is allowed to build houses, nobody except for a few are allowed to sell goods, nobody is allowed to freely trade or construct anything - is a cause for immense daily suffering for no good reason.
hIsToRy will not look back on this brief era fondly. It's poverty and suffering for no reason, and we could (and will) do better.
The article is saying that using AI degrades certain skills when AI is not available. You're claiming that AI is making people less effective even when they have access to AI. I'm skeptical of your claim.
The article's claim is probably true, but not really an argument against AI. Using keyboards degrades my ability to write by hand but that's not a good argument against keyboards. AI will become another tool that allows us to operate more effectively and at a higher level of abstraction. Just like keyboards and Python.
Now, we still occasionally need people who can write assembly (and do calligraphy). But mostly we don't.
This is such a silly argument. Battery and solar technologies are progressing regardless of people building nuclear. It's simply not the case that we can stop investing in nuclear and use that money to accelerate battery/solar.
This isn't a silly argument, this is a problem of allocation of resources.
We could have had mass solar deployment since the 70s. We chose not to, and allocate the money elsewhere. Nuclear will take away billions in public money, put it into the hands of nuclear industries, to get electricity at twice the going rate, maybe, in twenty years. A white elephant and a waste of effort.
All the R&D and industrial capacity building we have done since the 70s could have been accelerated if we had invested in it as much as we invested in nuclear, or oil, or gas, or coal. With public money.
The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating.
When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
Off the top of my head, a genocide, albeit by being careless people rather than malicious:
The chairman of the U.N. Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar stated that Facebook played a "determining role" in the Rohingya genocide.[98] Facebook has been accused of enabling the spread of Islamophobic content which targets the Rohingya people.[99] The United Nations Human Rights Council has called the platform "a useful instrument for those seeking to spread hate".[100]
Before Facebook subsidised the internet in Myanmar via the internet.org initiative, only 1% of the population had internet.
The way Facebook chose to operate in the country made rumour indistinguishable from verified news by its users.
Myanmar's Facebook community was also nearly completely unmonitored by Facebook, who at the time only had two Burmese-speaking employees.
If TBL had managed to fund a huge rollout of the web, and convinced everyone that a random phpbb forum he made was filled with BBC reporters, and the defence was two full-time moderators, you can bet people would blame him if someone organised a literal genocide on that forum.
This is an uphill battle, I'm afraid. As evidenced from their other comments, slibhb struggles a lot with basic moral concepts like "you are responsible for the things you do".
It's very fashionable for Westerners to evince belief in the idea that inhabitants of third-world countries have no free will and aren't responsible for their actions. We're told that everything bad that happens in those countries is due to large Western companies or a history of colonization.
This is all very silly. The genocide in Myanmar (it's a civil war last I checked) isn't Facebook's fault (legally or morally). Facebook has surely made mistakes, but that doesn't make them to blame for people killing each other on the other side of the world.
> You might as well blame this on Tim Berners-Lee.
You clearly don’t understand this, and maybe you never will (it seems beyond some people), but moral responsibility is assigned here because of the actions facebook and their employees took.
It is not assigned to Tim Berners-Lee because, again this is important, Tim Berners-Lee didn’t spend years spreading targeted genocidal propaganda in a country with a violent history and fragile peace.
Hope that helps. If you still can’t understand it, I can recommend some philosophy books on morality and our responsibilities to our fellow humans.
Great counter argument, it really illustrates your thought process - or lack thereof.
It’s really sad that you don’t comprehend basic morality, but unfortunately not much can be done in cases like this.
The will for change must come from within, but if you ever do find yourself feeling empathy or even sympathy for other humans I promise there are lots of resources available to help you learn and understand more about living like a responsible human. All it takes is asking for help.
> The idea that facebook is this "well-documented do-bad-for-the-world organization" that has caused "damage to the world" is a perfect example of scape-goating.
True, none of us are innocent.
> When you step back and try to explain exactly what the company has done that's so bad, there's nothing there.
I don't agree about the distinction between programming and engineering; to me it's all programming, engineering is just the word we started using to make it sound higher status.
Fair enough. I can see your point about engineering, but in this case I find it hard to classify the generic SaaS programmer and the guy calculating Pi to 2700 billion digits on his workstation using his own formula - which actually is the innovation here - under the same rubric, but I guess that boat has sailed a long time ago.
Odd example given the SaaS programmer might be doing actual engineering but the math calculation is not engineering by definition. Which is not to say the latter is not more impressive.
> The people who become billionaires are experts at becoming billionaires, creating value probably has nothing to do with it
Give me a break. Elon has created a huge amount of value. Every third car I see on the road is a Telsa and the US was relying on Russia to reach the ISS before SpaceX.
Another wrinkle with Arabic is linguistic conservatism. Due to Islamism and the idea that Arabic is the language of of God (the Quran was written in Arabic by the supposedly illiterate prophet), Arabic has lagged behind other languages in terms of innovation.
Hebrew is a closely related semitic language that simply adopted a block and cursive form. It has also been greatly simplified and friendlier towards loanwords, which has made it far easier to learn.
Muslims don’t believe Arabic is the language of God. They believe that the Quran was revealed in Arabic (true). Thinking the creator of the heavens and earth only speaks one language is absurd. It also kind of implies that Muslims believe in a superiority of Arabs which is also not true.
Weird to say Arabic hasn’t innovated or evolved considering the wild variety of dialects spoken in the modern world.
Conflating the language with the script is also bizarre. In terms of adapting Arabic to technology, look into romanized Arabic which was used before Unicode was common.
I didn't write "God only speaks Arabic" in Islam. That's your intepretation of my post. All I meant was that Arabic has special status in Islam.
> Weird to say Arabic hasn’t innovated or evolved considering the wild variety of dialects spoken in the modern world.
I didn't say Arabic has not innovated or evolved; only that it "has lagged behind other languages in terms of innovation". My belief is that that is due to linguistic conservatism, and linked to Islamism (or, at minimum, the centrality of Islam in Arab culture). Also related to this is the existence of Fusha, its place in Arab culture, and its branding as "modern standard Arabic".
I didn't conflate anything. While a script and a language are not the same, it's not a coincidence that Arabic is often written today in a script that is very close to Quranic script. And -- to really kick the hornet's nest -- it's also not a coincidence that there have been so few outstanding Arab writers (in Arabic) in the past 100 years. One novelist and a couple poets.
> And -- to really kick the hornet's nest -- it's also not a coincidence that there have been so few outstanding Arab writers (in Arabic) in the past 100 years. One novelist and a couple poets.
Now, reading that point one might ask the question if writing has been properly funded, or if the priority of cultural funding in the Arab world has been lower than, say, the funding of architecture and other forms of art. And on top of that, I'd also have a serious look at the market size, especially when compared with English-language writing.
With all due respect, your comment comes off as a bit ignorant and rude. A few points:
Firstly, the Qur'an wasn't written by the Prophet, he would dictate it and it would be written by his scribes.
Secondly, it's hard to argue that Islam has had a negative effect on Arabic or caused it to lag behind. In fact, it's easy to argue for the opposite. It's a historical fact that the Arabic language developed and proliferated rapidly due to the rise and spread of Islam. This is when its script and grammar were standardized, and when more and more works started being composed. And shortly thereafter the Islamic Golden Age began.
I don't have any issue with Hebrew, and maybe it is easier to learn. But this is because it was a dead language which was revived, resulting in a simplified language. Almost every other major language on Earth will have the same amount of "innovation" as Arabic. In fact, Arabic has many colloquial dialects which are used in day to day conversations, and these do consist of a simplified version with many loanwords. So I really don't know what you mean by a lack of innovation.
I don’t think anybody said that Arabic has suffered a complete standstill, and it has doubtlessly evolved significantly.
But if you compare it with basically any other major language, it’s clearly much, much more conservative. If you are a native English speaker, understanding English from 1,000 years ago is like learning a completely different language. If you are a native speaker of Italian, you cannot understand a text in Latin without significant training. This is true for all European languages other than Icelandic.
Chinese is pretty similar, even though the written language is slightly more stable.
So in comparison, Arabic is incredibly conservative.
There is no one "Arabic". Yes, formal modern Arabic (fusha) is based on (but not identical to) the classical Arabic of the Quran, but nobody speaks this in real life. The actual Arabics are the 20-odd spoken languages, many of which are effectively different languages at this point:
A rough equivalent in both time and space is how the Vatican continues to use Latin, but the rest of the Roman Empire has splintered into Italian, French, Spanish, Romanian, etc.
They speak it on tv and it's written in newpapers. They learn it in schools. Educated Arabs code switch into Fusha all the time. Islamist leaders (e.g. Nasrallah) speak Fusha in their broadcast speeches.
It's also pretty hard for foreigners to learn an ammiyya (outside of immersion). "Studying Arabic" almost always means Fusha.
I agree with you that "the actual Arabics are the 20-odd spoken languages". In a healhier culture, Fusha wouldn't exist or would have the same cultural place as Latin in the Western world.
LLMs are intelligent by any reasonable standard. Arguing otherwise is like arguing that chess algorithms aren't good at chess when they easily beat the best humans.
I disagree. LLM's are a language model math formulas that interpret and utilize big-data. Take away the math formulas and we are just back to a massive set of data. Adding to that I would suggest not even the purist forms of data meaning that the data-sets include knowledge from the open and anonymous internet and formulaic tuning from the AI owners and operators.
Your brain is mostly just a Principal Component Analysis calculator. Take away that "math formula" and you don't have intelligence either.
The LLM weights are not intelligent. But if you give an agent a mutable memory store and allow it to iterate, it is obviously intelligent. Not massively - it's constrained by the context window - but definitely somewhat.
The confusing thing is that their language ability far outpaces their true intelligence, and humans aren't used to that. Normally those things are highly correlated, so it tricks us.
Right. But at their core they are math formulas devised by a process designed to produce mimicry of task completion. The math formulas themselves aren’t fully effable. We’re sure studying the heck out of how they complete the tasks!
Bet they converged on how we do it, since it’s our language, but who knows.
If you want to talk about whether LLMs are intelligent, you have to define intelligence. "They're just math formulae" isn't a definition of intelligence.
It's true that historically Europe is cooler than similar latitudes in North America. But there's also an anti-AC movement in Europe based partly on environmentalism, partly on reflexive anti-Americanism, and partly due to a general preference for "naturalness"/suspicion of anything new.
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