I dont like Costco, it epitomizes American over-consumption. Parking lot overflowing with oversized SUVs with people loading up oversized trolleys with food from food corporations to take back to their oversized fridges and storage basements.
A lot of the price difference between Europe and USA now are wages. US wages for construction workers in NYC or SF are 2 or 3 times that of Madrid. Lots of things are cheap just for this reason alone.
My office has a big grad program so there are hundreds of interns and people under 25 in the office. Is really fun for them, I think its a real benefit that people look for now.
I know its not an acceptable view in 2026, but if women had to leave school at 16 and thus couldn't have a professional career I'd think many more women would have multiple children, like 5+ would be normal.
One issue is that the wealthiest most advanced countries are having the fewest people, while the poorest countries have a the fastest growing populations. Pakistan or Nigeria alone will have more people than the whole of Europe. They may become wealthier but more realistically there will be an even tiny minority of people living well with most of the world in slums.
There ended up being 4 lines between the two cities. Hard to believe such a thing was possible in this day and age. I guess if there were no cars trains would be much more popular.
I have Opus 4.7 at work at 15x. Burns through tokens like water. It feels like one of these new mega datacenters is just for me. I'd love to know what the bill is, but we're just encouraged to do as much AI as possible.
There are millions of homes that are super cheap and no one wants to live there. I think we missed a real opportunity for WFH to allow people to move where things are more affordable, rather than having everyone live in mega cities and complain of high prices.