European labor regulation and European tax rates have nothing to do with each other. The former is about restrictions on how employers can treat employees. The latter is about funding a robust welfare state. For what it's worth, both are good.
> Because then the question arises: What if the current way of handling labor protection in the EU (as one of many components) leads to destroying yours and everyone elses standard of living, simply because it's unaffordable?
The GDP/capita of e.g. France is 10x what it was in the 1970s. There is nothing "unaffordable" about the European social safety net, except that there are political pressures to dismantle it (right-liberals like the Economist)
I recently google searched "80cm to inches" and it gave me the result for "80 meters to inches". I can't figure out how it would make this mistake aside from some poorly conceived LLM usage
> This will not bother most people. Most people are willing to use GMail, even though it snoops on their private emails and uses that info for advertising purposes.
While I agree with your larger point and am no fan of Google's privacy practices, they stopped this specific behavior in 2017
80% of people in manhattan have no personal vehicle and I would not say they are "living like it's the 1500s". The problem is that most of America has car-dependent infrastructure.
There is a lot more software that currently exists written in C than in Dusk OS's forth dialect. The C compiler allows Dusk to run this software (once it's ported over)
I would frame it differently, "collapse" can mean any number of conditions that exist in the world today -- internet access that is limited, censored/liable of being shut down, or nonexistent. Same with electricity. We also rely on institutions that may or may not represent your interests to build software that you rely upon (e.g. the decline of search, the locking-down of major social media platforms, etc), and so on.
Virgil's "collapse" mindset, to me, is about building resilience and independence, and IMO Dusk OS is fantastic at this purpose.
The core system is about 8000 lines of code. The C compiler is 1400. Its memory footprint is extremely small (1MB to have a C compiler running on bare metal in the PC architecture). From here, you have a system capable of building C programs as well as bootstrapping itself.
This is level of simplicity is staggering and empowering -- it is completely reasonable to read and understand every single line of code in Dusk OS. This would be incomprehensible in something like Debian.
One of the most interesting Forth projects to me currently is Dusk OS, a 32-bit operating system written in Forth that includes its own C compiler, with various porting efforts under way
Capitalism does not drive towards 'efficiency' in some general sense. It is full of dead weight, destruction, forced scarcity, waste, and bloat. This is not accidental, it is essential to how the system functions.
> their need to advertise admissions, how they talk to the media and university rating services, their relations with China, the student lawsuits they face, their need to manage relations with Oxford the political unit
This all sounds to me like DG's definition of 'bullshit'. David Graeber is an anthropologist, ie, he takes a wide view of humanity: many societies, including societies not that alien to us, manage to function without this kind of work. Why is it suddenly indispensable? It is not a business advice book about running an individual institution, it is a wider social critique about how we have set up our society and economy.
> let him spend a year managing a mid-size organization, say 60-80 employees,
Graeber is an anarchist anthropologist and would critique the idea of a top-down capitalist firm itself (ie, the deeper question: why do we insist on structuring labor this way?). He is not telling anyone the best way to run it.