Well I don't think it would be that much different, truthfully. The problem of the suburbs is a matter of layout and zoning, not so much the vehicles used. If you fix the layout and zoning it'll naturally reduce vehicle size.
Yea you're right about that. I didn't mean to imply otherwise though it seems I did.
I guess what I meant to say was, to actually solve this problem we also need structural changes so that even driving one of these vehicles in our cities is a bit uncomfortable and so that it's less common precisely because of the reason you specified and many more.
As we build and design better cities, people will naturally not want to buy such vehicles except if they have actual needs for them. I mean, you should be able to buy whatever you want. If you want a giant truck by all means go for it, but society shouldn't cater to edge cases, especially when they cause hazards like the one you described.
I'm not a doctor, this isn't medical advice, I'm just bullshitting on the Internet. I know this is a controversial topic and the science doesn't appear to be settled.
My understanding about how artificial sweeteners work in part is that they don't have a caloric impact but still cause an insulin response. I've avoided them as best as I can. Some people believe there's a free ride to be had with them - drink Diet Coke and nothing happens, but I'm not so sure that's the case.
If a sugary drink causes an insulin response, and perhaps that response is different of course, but if it causes an insulin response, and so do "sugar-free" drinks - we seem to be in a world where a large number of people are still dealing with issues related to sugar that they maybe aren't expecting. I just have a hard time believe there's a free ride with "sugar-free" drinks. This response probably leads to more cravings for so-called empty calories. A lot of people I find viscously defend "sugar-free" drinks which leads me to suspect there's something there too.
If you grow up with an awful diet, like I did, not centered around so-called whole foods and actual cooking I think you wind up in a vicious cycle of sugar, sugar substitutes, and other empty-calorie style foods that all feed the same biological addiction mechanism. You get fatter and fatter and no amount of exercise will work (you can't outrun a bad diet) and then add in our modern lifestyle and of course we're all pretty dang sick.
Interestingly seeing, or smelling foods can cause insulin release[0]. Perhaps it's not surprising that tasting foods would.
But it does make me wonder. If evolution was so concerned about blood sugar control it led to insulin release even before you ate (and that in evolutionary terms foods were very low in sugar and simple carbs). What must a doughnut do to our physiology?
That article seems a bit misleading. While some sweetener packets, such as equal and splenda contain some sugar, I don't believe this is necessarily true when they are used in other products. A quick google implies that, for example, Diet Coke (my beloved) does not contain any real sugar, only aspartame. So it seems disingenuous to compare the metabolic impact of a sugar/aspartame blend to pure aspartame.
Yes, guns, clubs, fire, and steel weapons. And afterward they had the Reign of Terror, and the rise of the French Emperor Napoleon. It seems like it mostly worked out in the long run, though subsequent World Wars left the French Empire as a weakened shell of itself. In the short term, up until Napoleon was finally taken down by the combined British and Prussian forces at Waterloo, it seemed to have led to all sorts of calamities. How many died? How many did Robespierre manage to get sentenced to death before he met the same fate? Would Napoleon have risen and caused the death of so many?
One thing would-be revolutionaries don't appreciate is that, well, similar to Mr. Putin's experience today, revolutions (and wars) are much easier to start than to control. One day you're chopping off the leader's head, the next day you are pressed into military service and your Constitution is gone. I personally would rather be patient and work on reforming institutions, even if it takes a much longer time. Often times when we get rid of them, it's not that something better fills the void, as anarchists (communists or libertarians alike) like to claim, but instead it's nothing and that capability is gone until some calamity restores the need.
> No, these companies keep themselves in power not because they've solved such a difficult problem that nobody else can, but because they have a moat which they protect.
I don't know that the problem is sophisticated, but it's certainly complex [1]. It's a bit of both in terms of complexity and defending a moat, which all businesses do, including, and especially European ones.
And companies like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, &c. arose initially from solving a real need. Before these companies came into existence when you traveled you'd have to take cash, or traveler's checks or some other nonsense. Today you can, at least as an American, just walk in to the subway in just about any country and tap to pay. Need a coffee at Mt. Fuji? Easy. Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard.
> Time to do away with these foreign entities.
You'll never do that. Why? Because at a minimum you want American tourist dollars and Europe isn't going to start issuing European credit cards to Americans or other citizens around the world.
[1] Why is it complex? Well you have to deal with American and European financial regulations, KYC, &c. - you have to vet merchants, you have to run the infrastructure to process transactions, refunds, direct payments from bank accounts to pay for cards, and all of those things. Those are real, genuine business activities that are non-negotiable and while they may seem simple, in practice they are not at all simple.
> Because at a minimum you want American tourist dollars and Europe isn't going to start issuing European credit cards to Americans or other citizens around the world.
It could be handled similarly to how tourists in Brazil can now use Brazil's Pix payment system.
One way Brazil handles it is with 3rd party digital wallets that tourists can install on their phones such as Wallbit [1]. Another way is with 3rd party services that let you pay from your own digital wallet or bank app and the service makes the Pix payment [2].
Well, you could do that, but that sucks. Not just in philosophy (I don't want to download your crappy app - this applies to any country) but also in practice.
Thankfully Americans at least have enough purchasing power that the demand for convenience - just take my money with this card will keep us away from bad solutions in Europe.
Sorry it would suck for everyone, including an Australian like me. How does it not suck?
Why can't I just use my one debit card anywhere, why do I need to setup a separate card with a random app in another country, then another in another country etc.
My visa debit card allows me to travel virtually anywhere and use my own money without issue.
Anything else is just extremely inconvenient and technologically not really necessary
The vendors you'd pay with Pix in brazil are typically the vendors who may not even accept cards at all, it's pix or cash.
(Although you CAN pay with pix at many supermarkets, I'd rate it as rare. Also useable for online payments, but you take the risk in case of fraud, unlike with creditcards)
Thanks for the information, reminds me of CashApp or something like that in the US. But just to be clear the context was, at least as I understood, moving to using an app instead of using existing credit card rails via Visa and Mastercard and that's just not going to happen because it's a worse experience (in Europe).
If you don't have the ability to accept a card at all, that's a different use case.
I mean it’s an obvious decision to not accept cards if you can avoid it. You’re letting a company like Amex siphon up to 3% of your income away in perpetuity.
Business owners are forced to accept this situation because customers have your expectation. But it’s really not a good situation we’ve ended up in, letting for-profit, uncompetitive companies skim off the top of consumer spending. It’s frankly a rip-off.
Tap to pay could literally just come from your bank’s app.
> I mean it’s an obvious decision to not accept cards if you can avoid it. You’re letting a company like Amex siphon up to 3% of your income away in perpetuity.
In Brazil you can easily be paying 5-6% when accepting card payments, if not more. You'll generally get a 10% discount when opting to pay with cash in clothing/electronics/etc stores.
Handling cash comes with its own expenses too for business owners. It's not "this costs nothing" and "this costs 3%".
Selling something expensive? Well if a customer doesn't have the cash, by the time they go find an ATM (and pay a fee yay!) they probably changed their mind on the purchase.
There's a myriad of reasons to use cards (credit or debit). There's merits to using cash.
But, back to the actual discussion thread, there's no good reason to try and get tourists to use some convoluted app instead of just paying with a credit card.
Cash can get misplaced or stolen, you have to keep going to an ATM to get more of it which for most costs money (my bank pays for ATM withdrawals globally for any fee), it's not nearly as convenient as a credit/debit card though it's cheaper. Though maybe it's not since merchants never lower prices and even if everyone switched to cash prices wouldn't go down. Also there are costs for the merchant to carry cash.
I think your everyday credit/debit card is still objectively better overall, even moreso for tourists which was the main topic.
Sorry but this is silly, as an Australian I can also travel anywhere with my visa debit card without issue. No need to setup a random app for the particular country and transfer money into that, if I need to transfer money into a random app why I can't I just pay the vendor directly?
My visa debit card allows me to travel virtually anywhere and use my own money without issue.
Anything else is just extremely inconvenient and technologically not really necessary
> Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard.
Hard disagree. Until Covid, many small shops didn't take cards in Europe. Taxis, restaurants, market stalls, even trains were often cash only not that long ago. I in the UK ran accounts in companies that had people travel extensively in Europe. We used to issue travellers with EUR200 for the things that cards couldn't buy. Most shops didn't take Amex due to fees. Americans will either have to bring a compliant card or change some cash at the airport.
I also think you have misjudged the mood. I guarantee there are a large number of people in rural Europe that would be very happy never to meet another American tourist, even if it costs them. Americans can look forward to worse service everywhere. I wouldn't be suprised if some people in rural France refused to let you have the Calvados at all.
Its not just American tourists. Its everyone from everywhere.
If you do not accept Visa and Mastercard you are not going to accept payments from all sorts of travellers (tourists, business people, people from your own country living abroad) either.
> I guarantee there are a large number of people in rural Europe that would be very happy never to meet another American tourist, even if it costs them.
> If you do not accept Visa and Mastercard you are not going to accept payments from all sorts of travellers (tourists, business people
Who all stop in chain hotels, who will accept whatever you bring.
> Xenophobic or anti-tourism?
Anti-American tourism. I would say it is a mainstream opinion in Europe that American tourists are very annoying. Each country has its stereotypes about each other, usually stemming from WW2, but the feelings against American tourists have the wonderful effect of uniting Europe. Then America elected a president that threatened us first with economic sanctions, then war. Perhaps it is a fault in our characters, but we tend to take against people that threaten us with military action.
> Who all stop in chain hotels, who will accept whatever you bring.
No, that's pretty much all European hotels actually. Hotels require credit cards for three reasons:
1. Security - if you leave the room a mess or destroyed there's an avenue for recourse.
2. To make more money - having a card on file for "incidentals" increases purchases from hotel guests.
3. Obtain payment - most people don't have the cash laying around to pony up to pay full nightly rates, nor do they have any desire carry thousands of Euros around on their person just to go pay in a large purchase at this conjured up local cash-only inn. It also makes your hotel property an easy target for robbery.
It's strange to me that you're taking such a hard stance over something that is obviously incorrect in order to... make fun of people from around the world who can only afford to stay in chain hotels on vacation?
I usually stay boutique properties which are sometimes, but not always managed by boutique property groups. They take credit cards. Every. Single. Time.
Can you provide the name of a single hotel in Europe that doesn't take credit cards?
And separately, does that hotel accept credit cards?
By the way, American debit cards also run on Visa and Mastercard. So going back to the OP this idea of Europe "breaking up" with Visa and Mastercard is just not going to happen even if somehow whatever number of European businesses just stopped accepting credit cards.
Hotels in 10+ European countries? They accept any visa/mastercard and don't care if its debit or credit, its irrelevant. They will keep accepting them in addition to this new EU system.
I think you don't know what you're talking about in this conversation, but I'll kindly summarize it for you.
I said the following in context of using credit cards:
> Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard.
Jimnotgym said:
> Hard disagree.
Implying that it is in fact not easy, or common, or something like that.
graemep then wrote:
> It's not just American tourists. It's everyone from everywhere. If you do not accept Visa and Mastercard you are not going to accept payments from all sorts of travellers (tourists, business people, people from your own country living abroad) either.
So at this point jimnotgym is saying, effectively, "tourists use credit cards". graemep is accurately pointing out that everyone uses credit cards, not just tourists.
Let's continue...
jimnotgym says:
> Who all stop in chain hotels, who will accept whatever you bring.
So here what's happening is jimnotgym is basically saying tourists use credit cards, they only stay in chain hotels.
Here is where I highlighted why credit cards are used (and sure, debit cards too) and then claiming that every hotel in Europe takes credit cards.
And then afterward you've said a few things which, of course one of them I acknowledged using the wrong words for. Since then you've just been arguing points that aren't relevant to the conversation at hand. You at one point claimed you used a debit card at a hotel.
Great.
Find me a single hotel in Europe that doesn't take credit cards Why? Because jimnotgym is asserting credit cards "are a tourist thing" and are used only at chain hotels or hotels for tourist. I'm giving him a softball question and setting an extreme anchor point here. The vast majority of hotels in Europe take credit cards regardless of whether they are catering to "tourists" or not. That's a demonstrable fact. But do all hotels? I bet they do. Which goes to prove that credit card usage at hotels isn't limited to "tourists".
If you have any specific questions you'd like to ask, I'd be happy to answer them. I don't know what point you're trying to make here and it really seems like you've lost track of what the initial conversation was and now you're just arguing things that aren't being argued.
What is Europe in this sense? In the Europe I know, every small business has accepted cards for decades. The exception if there are some children selling strawberries to tourists.
As for your second paragraph, you seem to be dreaming. Americans are some of the best tourists to deal with, and anybody who works in the tourism sector is happy to receive them.
I haven't been to every country in Europe, it is true.
A few years ago I shut down a website in Poland for someone because people didn't want to pay with cards, they wanted COD. My colleague took a train regularly in the Netherlands a few years back that was cash only. Dutch websites also have to offer whatever the Dutch payment provider is (I forget). Another colleague in rural Spain found that the price they were charged was lower if they paid cash by the exact amount of VAT. In Germany I ran a website that had to allow bank transfer as a payment method because 'companies generally don't have credit cards' according to the locals. Up until Covid travellers from our office to France and Germany always needed to use a few Euros. Up until Covid it was an absolute taboo to buy drinks with a card in the UK and Ireland, unless it was with a meal. My local chip shop is cash only today, but none of them had a machine before Covid. My local Chinese restaurant tells everyone the card machine is dodgy to see if they will pay cash. They only installed it during Covid.
I think we will manage without Visa just fine.
> and anybody who works in the tourism sector is happy to receive them.
Of course they are! That is literally their job. It is everyone else that has a problem with them.
> My colleague took a train regularly in the Netherlands a few years back that was cash only.
I don't know what a few years back was, but I can't believe there was a train in NL that was cash at all for quite some time. In the past over 10 years it's always been an OV-chipkaart, and you can get an anonymous one that you pre-load with money. I'm not even sure if you can pay with cash, short of buying a ticket/loading the card from a person at a desk.
> Dutch websites also have to offer whatever the Dutch payment provider is (I forget).
iDeal, which Wero is based on.
About the only thing I use cash for in NL is paying for my barber as he doesn't take any card, and I'm pretty sure that's black money.
Germany has always had a bit of a relationship with cash, I'd always keep €1-200 in my pocket when I went there, though this is changing now.
> I think we will manage without Visa just fine.
There is also Cirrus and Maestro which are run by Visa and Mastercard, which appears on a lot of debit cards around the world, though I don't know exactly how it works (i.e. do the cards tend to use the local network within the country and only go to the cirrus etc. networks when international, or do they do it always?)
Who is everyone else that has a problem here? Since tourists almost exclusively deal with people who work with tourism. Villagers annoyed that American tourists are swimming in their lake? Street scum irritated that American tourists are taking up space on the sidewalk? When I was young I used to hear anti-tourism sentiment sometimes, usually from the most base people. Everybody else was busy working or living their life, so they didn't have time to loiter in touristic places at touristic times. Unless they worked there.
As for your run-ins with card hostile businesses and people, you have the option to make your purchases with businesses who accept cards. Most customers choose that options, because cards offer the best protection and convenience for the customer. To the tune of the endless teeth grinding of some small business owners who think that their low profits are to blame on a tiny merchant fee.
> Well you have to deal with American and European financial regulations, KYC, &c. - you have to vet merchants, you have to run the infrastructure to process transactions, refunds, direct payments from bank accounts to pay for cards, and all of those things. Those are real, genuine business activities that are non-negotiable and while they may seem simple, in practice they are not at all simple.
Those are partially or completely taken over not by the card network but by the bank that is issuing you the card, so a change in the underlying technology will be transparent.
> And companies like Visa, Mastercard, American Express, &c. arose initially from solving a real need. Before these companies came into existence when you traveled you'd have to take cash, or traveler's checks or some other nonsense. Today you can, at least as an American, just walk in to the subway in just about any country and tap to pay. Need a coffee at Mt. Fuji? Easy. Buying a bottle of Calvados in some remote area? Yea just tap to pay with your Mastercard.
The reality is more complicated.
I have had Visa or Mastercard being refused in other countries by some retail outlets / institutions.
In fact I never travel with only one card from a single bank because I always want to have a backup. And it is not really Visa vs Mastercard because I have had occurences of having 2 Visas, one of which would work and another would not on a specific shop for no obvious nor documented reason.
In some cases different Visa or Mastercards have different fees associated with them, and if the merchant has configured or negotiated with their service providers to only accept cards under a certain fee percentage then just being a Visa or Mastercard is not enough. One example I can think of is the Chase Sapphire Reserve card as that is (or was I guess things can change) a Visa Infinite card and I believe transaction fees are closer to ~4%> or something versus maybe a standard ~3%. I don't know the exact fee percentages but that's the mechanism.
I agree the reality is a bit more complicated and even wrote about it in France when dealing with gas stations but what I wrote is broadly true. You can just take a credit card to Europe and the vast majority of the time you just won't need cash. I also agree it's a good idea to have a couple of cards though and maybe your debit card too. Frankly I do this in the US as well, and not just when traveling abroad.
> Today you can, at least as an American, just walk in to the subway in just about any country and tap to pay.
Is that really true? I remember wanting to buy a train ticket at Charles De Gaulle airport, and the machine only took French credit cards. That was around 2010, so I don't know if something changed.
Well the reverse has been true IME - my Visa credit/debit cards issued by an European Bank have worked just fine abroad, including in the US. There are certainly edge cases where transactions get denied or US people think every card must have a Zip code but overall yes you can just pay.
Ha, well I was just in France last April and didn't have an issue at the machine to buy the train ticket. Though, unfortunately the train just so happened to cease to function on our last night there so we had to take an Uber in to Paris [1].
The wonderful French train company wouldn't refund the ticket either and instead insisted that we might use it one day on another trip to France. Thankfully by the time I got to the front of the line to chat in broken French to the ticket administrator, I had already accepted my fate after hearing a number of tourists (not Americans mind you) yell and stomp their feet uselessly in hopes of obtaining a refund.
[1] That was a fun adventure too. At CDG, well I found out later that taxis are "allowed" and are the same price as the Uber ride and so we could have avoided this by just taking a taxi through Uber, but a group of folks from Great Britain were ahead of me in line and I came across them later when looking for where to get a taxi/Uber. There were rideshare signs or something but they didn't lead anywhere that made sense. They seemed rather aspirational. Well, one of the members of the British group spoke good French (or good enough) and found out the secret spot to go after chatting with an airport employee I think it's at Terminal E (someone else may know for sure) or something and so my wife and I befriended the same British group and went along with them for the long walk over.
We were able to get a ride, though not cheap. Of course the bus was an option and we're no stranger, but we were on vacation and the $50 ride was just chalked up to the cost of doing business. We were already 2 hours behind schedule because of the train fiasco.
All that to say, I think using an American credit card these days is the least of your concerns. I was surprised to see American Express taken rather much more widely than anticipated. Be careful getting gas though as they place holds on your card for $250 or something like that, and once you get enough holds you can't get any more until the prior ones "roll off".
Why would you expect to be able to use a creditcard in a physical shop in the Netherlands? Surely you knew? It works if the payment terminal has support for it, but since no Dutch person uses a creditcard outside of the internet, your kinda going against the grain.
That's not really true. Especially in the more touristy places, credit cards are generally accepted and it'd be unusual for it not to be. If you're out in a village in, I dunno, Brabant, then sure. But the places that visitors are likely to be I'd expect cards to work.
I think even AH accepts credit cards these days, though I haven't tried it myself.
Why would you expect people not living in the Netherlands to just know this?
In South Africa where I live, anywhere that accepts cards accepts Visa and Mastercard. Outside of the "informal business" sector (e.g. tiny "businesses" like a roadside stall), card acceptance is so ubiquitous I don't carry cash anymore and it's very rarely an issue.
> Why would you expect people not living in the Netherlands to just know this?
Because this is a thing in most of Europe. Most people don't own a creditcard, and those that do use it mostly for online purchases outside of the EU. I don't travel to another continent without looking up how to pay for things when I get there.
It's not about owning credit card, but about being able to use it in physical shop. In one of the parent comments author of comment to which I replied said:
> Why would you expect to be able to use a creditcard in a physical shop in the Netherlands?
I was just in Germany and lived on my credit card - not a single Euro used. I strongly disagree with this generalization based on extensive personal experience.
> Why would you expect people not living in the Netherlands to just know this?
It’s generally a good idea to learn something about your travel destination and not to assume everything there is the same as where you live. The world is big and diverse.
Literally just got back from a trip there and didn't find a single business or transaction that I couldn't pay for with various US-issued (Chase + BoA) Visa credit cards via tap.
Even more surprisingly to me - a pretty decent chunk of businesses even would accept AmEx. By no means all, but I recall it being basically nonexistent not that long ago.
And to be clear - much of my time was not in areas that get a ton of foreign tourist visitors.
Not saying your experience didn't happen, but given our very different experiences it might be something with your particular bank/issuer/card?
My experience matches yours. I found AmEx accepted maybe 50% of the time, if not less. But Visa or MasterCard were accepted 99% of the time, both big and small businesses.
I suspect you're right: it depends on the specific card/bank, not whether it's credit or debit.
Most Americans with the means to travel also have access to credit cards with no foreign transaction fees and by selecting "pay in local currency" you get the best exchange rate.
There's still an ongoing trick that some European businesses do where they'll try and get you to pay in dollars because they can arbitrarily set the exchange rate. It's obviously within "reason" but on the higher end for no purpose other than to make extra money. I find such behavior to be dishonest and deplorable.
There's also ATMs from Euronet that are conveniently placed in tourist areas that refuses to pay out Euro if you have a Euro card, you can only get money if you do an exchange and they do a 15% or so on top of a fixed rate. Also do things like charge for checking balance on account and don't tell you about before its done.
Thankfully though a lot of times these ATMs and such are avoided by American tourists because....we just use a credit card.
By the way, those fees are split with other folks. For example you might find that American Euronext ATM in a shopping plaza or outside of a storefront. Those European businesses are getting a cut of that exchange rate.
> credit cards with no foreign transaction fees and by selecting "pay in local currency" you get the best exchange rate.
I’d be interested to compare their rates to Wise. The credit cards here in New Zealand don’t come close. However we regularly get screwed down here, and sadly it’s not just foreign companies that do it.
> I’d be interested to compare their rates to Wise.
Well for US-based "no foreign transaction fees" credit cards the rate is 0. There's no additional fee. For cards with foreign transaction fees you'll see something like 1% that goes to Visa/Mastercard/whoever and then the bank will charge a fee too, typically a percent or two.
But that's one thing, and then you have the actual currency conversion rates. I found an excerpt from an article that I think explains it well enough [1].
"Typically, a purchase at a foreign merchant is made entirely in the local currency. The cardholder authorizes the purchase amount in the local currency, and the purchase price is not converted until the payment is processed.
When you make a purchase at an international store, you may be asked if you want to convert your purchase to your home currency. This service is provided at the point of sale as a value added service and allows you to know the converted price at that moment—but don’t be fooled; it comes at a cost.
While this may initially sound like a wise way to avoid fees, these charges are in addition to any foreign transaction fees your card may apply. These fees assessed by the merchant at the point of sale are called dynamic currency conversion or DCC. You can think of DCC as an added service and just like most services that make life easier, there’s a convenience charge. Plus, even when using DCC, you’ll usually be charged a foreign transaction fee by your card issuing bank unless your card has no foreign transaction fees."
tl;dr version is, at least for an American, get a "no foreign transaction fees" credit card and save 1%-3% on all transactions you may otherwise be charged a fee for, and if prompted by a local shop to exchange currency, don't, just pay in the local currency so they can't dishonestly set arbitrarily high exchange rates. Visa and Mastercard (among others) as mentioned in the article have better negotiated exchange rates so it's better to let them do any exchange that's needed to keep costs to a minimum.
> Now that China has become more adversarial and also more established (you mean people want to actually get PAID to slave away in a mine, or even worse, refuse to even work in a dangerous and dirty pit mine?!) the US is facing some hard decisions.
There is an implication here that the United States is immune or afraid of doing “hard” or “dirty” work and so we outsourced refining and mining to China.
This doesn’t seem to be correct.
China has a national strategy to dominate refining of rare earth minerals and critical components and our entire society wants cheap products and China was the cheapest place for this stuff and environmental rules are more lax, and with an authoritarian regime supporting and fast tracking the business for strategic reasons, well there you have it.
Part of the strategy involves decoupling China from a weak link in the energy supply chain infrastructure: oil and refining rare earths, manufacturing products that use them, and more is how they are pursuing some level of energy independence from the USA which controls oil flows globally, for the most part.
With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.
People in the US will do dirty jobs if thats what there are, but like people everywhere (in aggregate), would rather not.
We outsourced refining and mining to China because 1) it was cheap 2) it meant poisoning the ground and air and ripping up vast tracts of land somewhere else.
China's rare earth metals stratagem I believe grew out of this--it didn't happen immediately, but rather some bright bulb saw the growing reliance on access to the minerals and encouraged internal growth and acquisition competing resources. Absolutely, very clever.
But let's be very clear here. the US might have outsourced those jobs, which I think is an oversimplification, but the EU also outsourced those jobs and the Chinese welcomed and encouraged that outsourcing. Americans, Europeans, and Chinese workers were all onboard at a national level for this arrangement.
I want to be very clear here to avoid any misunderstanding of an application of moral judgement against the United States for "outsourcing dirty jobs".
> China's rare earth metals stratagem I believe grew out of this--it didn't happen immediately, but rather some bright bulb saw the growing reliance on access to the minerals and encouraged internal growth and acquisition competing resources. Absolutely, very clever.
This could be true. The truth is likely somewhere in the middle, in that China never intended to join a US and European led world order because doing so would compromise the power of the authoritarian CCP (free speech, free markets are incompatible with communism) and this became the eventual strategy to work toward energy independence. Of course "independence" isn't a real thing here, just less reliance. You can't run fighter jets or tanks on batteries or solar panels.
> With respect to avoidance of “dirty” jobs. The EU is far, far worse in this respect than the United States is or was.
Well yeah. Because we care about the environment and people like to enjoy their retirement instead of sitting in a wheelchair with COPD due to inhaling a lifetime of toxic dust.
China is getting better at it too, but only a few years ago I remember a story of all the toxic lakes where all the byproducts of neodymium mining were dumped.
You don’t care about the environment. You care about the environment in your backyard. Otherwise you would not import rare earths and minerals from China (which Europe does).
Pretty sure consumers would still buy all the nice downstream products even if they damaged their own backyards.
Evidence: Long history of us doing exactly that.
Valuing convenience, modern products etc does not mean one "doesn't care" about the negative externalities, just like going out to eat at a nice restaurant doesn't mean someone "doesn't care" about saving money.
Individual EUers might care about the environment. It’s pretty hard to personally avoid any dirty imported stuff as you just don’t know where it all ends up. Though I guess overall voting patterns might back up your argument
... you know when you put it that way, it would not surprise me if lobbyists dovetailed the 'cant do stuff in US/EU because of env regs' with the various types of Union busting the US likes to do and for some in the EU it would be the perfect scapegoat for...
Sorry but while that was once true, the current administration has reversed that pretty dramatically. You personally might care about the environment, but when you use “we” in the context of US/China it no longer holds true.
No I mean "we" as in the EU, definitely not the US. The US is sliding back fast, being the only country to pull out of the paris accord (which itself was only the bare minimum needed to halt climate change)
West fine with migrant labours doing hard and dirty work hidden from prying eyes (agriculture fields, meat packing plants). Mining just as strategic, but hard to hide big holes in the earth from constituents. I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.
Yep and the workers from those countries prefer that arrangement since it pays better. The alternative is they don’t do the work, we just pay higher prices, and then they don’t get paid and stay home.
> I'm sure push comes to shove, US can import a bunch of central Americans to do hard and dirty work in mining.
Yea let’s ban migrant labor and the entrance of migrants now so we don’t have this moral failure. :)
By the way, the east (as opposed to the west) is fine with migrant labor too. That’s why remittances are a thing. Well, when they’re not being xenophobic or whatever.
TBH papering over xenophobia is easy because it's just foreigners. Problem with mining is extractors are scarring mother earth, that's the unfortunate optics problem for nimby's, not people, but landscape/backyard, even if it's in the middle of nowhere. I suppose that's why fracking gets an easier pass, because the hole is smol.
> At any distance away from earth where space is so thin that heat dissipation is impossible, then the speed of light will be prohibitive of any workloads to/from space.
Why would they need to get data back to earth for near real time workloads? What we should be thinking about is how these things will operate in space and communicate with each other and whoever else is in space. The Earth is just ancient history
I wasn’t responding to the original announcement, I was responding to someone who presumed that these data centers need to send data back to earth.
I was making a snide comment that certain ultra wealthy people don’t need these data centers to send data to earth, because they don’t plan on being here.
I don’t follow why merging with SpaceX means they don’t have to pay for their existence. Someone does. Presumably now that is SpaceX. What is SpaceX’s revenue?
Maybe the idea is that SpaceX has access to effectively unlimited money through the US Government, either via ongoing lucrative contracts, or likely bailouts if needed. The US Govt wouldn't bail out xAI but they would bail out SpaceX if they are in financial trouble.
Bingo! Elon's main life mission now is to roll back social progress via the anti-woke combination of xAI and Twitter. That's why he's tying them to the now rather-essential SpaceX, despite possibly hurting its IPO. He can now keep pumping money into them without a worry.
Well the other large advantage is that the US is one single market with one common language (English) and while there are variations by state, pretty much one set of rules. So by starting a company in the United States you of course have access to incredibly deep capital markets, but you also have access to 350 million people mostly operating under one set of rules with one common language and largely one common culture. It's the same market advantage that China has, by and large.
It's one of the big ironies of the EU - every time it gets larger (good! increases market size) it also gets more fragmented in terms of languages, retained local rules etc. (bad, obviously).
Now up to 24 official languages and still potentially growing in the future (although this is a bit of an overcount because some of them are mutually intelligible to various degrees, it's still a lot).
It's interesting to think that at the time of original ECSC treaty there were only four languages (French, German, Dutch and Italian). That's just about manageable, now it is a bit of an issue
I've been working with European companies for a decade, language is not a barrier for scaling, local laws are.
E.g. why eu has some laws in terms of data and privacy, local laws take precedence (unlike in e.g. agriculture that it's entirely EU's business). Scaling across borders is expensive and difficult for regulatory reasons.
To be fair the US is not immune to that issue either, some states (looking at you CA) are very fond of making random extra state laws that don't exist at the federal level and affect commerce
It's not very helpful if we "pull back from technology" but fail to pull back from social media usage, since that's the primary addiction mechanism. It's like yea I sold my super cool blue torch cigarette lighter and exchanged it for a classic Bic like they used in the 90's. If you didn't quit smoking it's pointless.
Plus, how many people are still buying Alexa devices, iPhones, Nintendo Switches, and trying to automate their home with Raspberry Pi and Arduino and such?
I agree with your goal - a more tactile world, but I am not sure the evidence supports us heading that way. Maybe I'm wrong though.
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