I think that the financialization of wealth is a problem of education not of the political system. People just do not understand how that is a problem and how it affects them.
For me the best thing in a democracy is the fact that is supposed to have some dynamics. I am more afraid of a fixed set of people taking continuously worse and worse decisions. Many dictatorships started with the dictators managing fine the country, and people being fine to give them more and more power. Then, in something like 10 or 20 years things go to shit, but there is no "mechanism" to replace them.
For better their lives as well as the locals' life I think it is most of them. For feeling rewarded or fulfilled for doing that, I think depends on both the person and the country, but probably quite rare.
I tried two countries so far (>5 year in both) and there were pluses and minuses in each. Which are different to the pluses and minuses in my home country.
I think that one will (generally) evolve and adopt some habits of the country you immigrated too, while giving up some habits you had before. The result? You might be a more complete person (because you become aware of the habits, and can choose to some extent) but on the other hand you will not belong anywhere any-more (you will not adopt some stupid habits of the new country, but you did gave up some stupid habits that you had).
I think that for the physical store example the overhead is already included in the object price, and probably a significant part of it.
> If you want me to pay for your overhead of continued development
My recollection with the status of 20-30 years ago is that people would sell you buggy applications for huge amounts of money and then you would be on your own. Doing good applications, without bugs, supported on multiple platforms and multiple use-cases is very expensive and takes time. Not sure what was your experience with pay once and just use the app, maybe it was better...
The benefit of subscriptions is that everybody has more flexibility. The developers can work continuously on the application. The customers can already use it for less than a one time (very large price) and see if it fits their needs and can change their mind if things don't go in the right direction.
> it not only seems to be mostly written not by a regular users, but by people who contribute to CoMaps
How did you evaluate that? I use CoMaps, I am not a contributor to it, but in the comments I read I do not remember seeing many people specifying clearly if they are or not contributors (there might have been, but it did not feel like "mostly").
For me CoMaps worked well in the ~6 months for my use-cases (with some issues with the search as everybody reports for both projects). I like much better the site of CoMaps than of OrganicMaps, which influenced a bit my decision to use it. I also like they are hosted on Codeberg than on github.
Depends though what you pay for the one-time price. You can pay an offline version of the application (no extra costs afterwards), or a limited period of SaaS application updates (let's say 3 years).
I agree that paying a one time price and expecting continuos updates and new features is not reasonable.
Don't you think there is a difference from "knowing how it works" and "reproducing every aspect of it at the level of the state of the art" ?
Also, your example seems flawed if you restrict to a certain product. Can I build a compiler from scratch? Yes. Can I reproduce in a year a compiler with LLVM/GCC performance level? No. Can I build a compiler from scratch in a year from a room if I need to starting mining from metals, building transistors, then building the first assembler and then implementing the compiler? You can imagine the answer.
I have similar experience with the poster, and the way I read it is, "from the things I build here are some examples". I did learn about advanced physics topics that enable transistors, and even did some experiments, but for fundamental stuff you "don't build stuff".
Did I do all physics or all electronic circuit design or all software stacks? Definitely not. But I spent 3 years learning (and building) about lots of stuff.
I would add though that the opinion is not entirely irrational.
For many people the state is inefficient, illogical, evil and goes after them without any reason (ex: think COVID restrictions). Then why do you care about another way to label you, if you think they already do it, but randomly.
I feel that the privacy discussions do not acknowledge at all there are many other structural society issues. Sure it would make an evil-intelligent government have a harder time, but will not improve at all life with an evil-idiot government, and to me it seems those are a bit more prevalent (note: idiot = implementing solutions that will not solve the problems they claim they do, while them honestly thinking they do solve them)
Sorry to hear about the moment of social anxiety (I assume it happens with humans occasionally). But can't wonder don't you have also moments of joy because of job well done, an appreciative colleague or something similar?
I don't like either the "negative" part, but I find it necessary to have both negatives and positives in life to create bonds, meaning and more simply, not to get bored. I would be worried that if I just talk with a machine (no feelings involved) I will get depressed and demotivated.
Many forums have/had policies about not doing cross posting (in different categories). I find this similar.
Yes, maybe from the "plagiarism" angle is not very relevant, but I would prefer not to have a system in which people try to "flood" repositories (journals, etc) with the same thing over and over. People looking for new information, people reviewing will get most of the burden to "keep things clean" while for the poster that is not a problem.
> Notice the utter absurdity of asking the bottom 99% of humanity to take responsibility for what they have absolutely no control over.
I notice the absurdity of you suggesting you have no responsibility.
It is a matter of how you choose the percentage. You choose 99%. If you would have said 50%, than whoops, suddenly you would include yourself in the responsible part. I claim that most rich people (western countries) are in the responsible part and maybe they should start reason like that.
You claim that rich people shouldn't fly. I would be fine with nobody flying. Or, even, with only rich people flying but not more than today (that would be still a 10x reduction in CO2!).
In my opinion too many people think in the terms of "what should the others do" rather in terms of "what should we all do", so that they have an excuse to do nothing.
Wealth distribution is an issue, but lots of "wealth" is due to stuff that is owned by some and used by many.
Take a landlord as an example: he might have 100 houses and own 99% of the wealth in a village, but if the houses are inhabited, people still use them. If those people want to use a 300 sq meter houses rather than 50 sq meter studios, they do contribute as well to the climate issue.
This holds for other fields as well. Example: "... private air travel accounted for 6.3% of the ‘total commercial plus private aviation emissions’ in the USA in 2019, and 7.9% in 2021." https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-024-01775-z
I honestly can't say that 92.1% which is from "normal" population is ignorable.
There are no easy solution and everybody is responsible by different degrees. Pointing fingers and wanting "others" to fix it first is not in my view something that ever worked.
> They're not, it's systemic with industry being the main culprit and the rich being the ones who benefit from that socialization of pollution costs.
You two might agree if we consider that when you say "rich" you might describe the average individual on this website (if we consider all people alive).
I do believe that 90% of the people would not want to actually destroy the planet the way it seems to be happening, but I also believe that 90% of the people can't refrain themselves from bad health habits either. So, to fix the root cause I would discuss more about people's bad emotional/impulse control, otherwise we will just change one issue (climate) to any of the others (violence, unhappiness, etc.)
30 years ago there were many with the idea "runaway population increase is the biggest issues".
It would be wise to have some pro-natality policies here and there, but look at China what happens if you go all "existential threat" on this issue. Biology is not engineering, things evolve differently than what one wants (there are other examples of strong natality policies fails).
Slovenia joined EU rather fast (2003), so that might also have contributed to the prosperity. Joining EU is not exactly "breaking up", is more like "joining".
Currently, the rest of ex-Yugoslavia countries don't seem to do as well as Slovenia, and the main difference is date of joining the EU...
> We really don't need to import any kind of engineers from outside
I was involved in a startup in the Netherlands. We tried to recruit Dutch people, all wanted safe 9-5 jobs where they would know what they would do in 1-2 years. A startup can not guarantee that.
We ended up with most engineers foreigners, many (but not all) that have studied there.
So I would say that it is also risk and opportunity related. Someone "from outside" will be willing to do more, will have to prove himself, will take more risk. A "local" will have family support, wealth, a network, might want and value stability.
I don't have an opinion about how things "should be", I am just sharing how I saw them (myself an immigrant, multiple times)
Probably the solutions mentioned (sex/robots) are not the only ones. Many complain loudly about what might be a minority of the workers, so just knowing more people would have improved their opinion. Others do not have anything better to do, and they pick up this type of "crusades" with low impact on them, but big impact on others.
But yes, probably an improved psychology (in terms of understanding yourself, trying to learn, be curious, etc), would fix a lot, still feels like a daunting task anywhere in the world.
From what I see, there are many people that don't want to be "bored" more than the people that don't want to be "tired". Of course there are many that want to be neither (so we get social media that gives you "not bored" and "not tired"), but I don't think we can generalize for 100% for neither category.
In my childless group of friends the ratio of happy to unhappy seems similar. What if it is not about the children but about the people? Each has its preferences, and damn I have seen a lot that have no clue what they like and continue doing things that makes them unhappy.
Maybe we should have like with "open university day", "open raise a child day". Some might like it more than imagine, some might hate it more than imagine.
For me the best thing in a democracy is the fact that is supposed to have some dynamics. I am more afraid of a fixed set of people taking continuously worse and worse decisions. Many dictatorships started with the dictators managing fine the country, and people being fine to give them more and more power. Then, in something like 10 or 20 years things go to shit, but there is no "mechanism" to replace them.