You are completely delusional. As you have been told, even when evaluating favorably the EU job, the difference will be so substantial that it's hardly comparable.

You may think there are many advantages of the social system, but the thing is with the US you get to choose exactly how the surplus will be spent. If you want coverage similar to EU you can, it will cost you lots of money but you will still come out on top.

And that is before even considering that purchasing power/quality of life is better in the US at a given salary level.

Maybe you lack perspective because you have been confortable your whole life?

What use does "the environment" have if you cannot afford to live? The jobs necessarily come before the environment because they are the requirement for survival that makes any of it matter.

Only rich self-righteous people can afford to care about the environment and the irony is that those people are rich and can do a lot of posturing around these issues, precisely because those poor people exist to take those jobs.

I grew up rural, poor, and conservative. Ranching, hunting, farming. That was me until I traveled and experienced people who aren't selfish conquerers who believe all their actions are justified if you just say sorry to god.

> What use does "the environment" have if you cannot afford to live?

There are plenty of extremely poor people in the world who don’t use that as an excuse to try destroy others - and often themselves. Plenty. Travel and you’ll meet a few. Selling your soul to the devil is always a choice.

You are misrepresenting exploitation of local ressources as "selling your soul to the devil". This is such a bad faith way to present the situation. There is absolutely no plan to "destroy others" the fact that you try to argue that this is one of their goals is just bonkers.

The externalities around oil are not just local but also global, so if they accept to deal with the consequences locally because they think the benefits are superior, who are you to judge in their place. It's not like if they refuse to drill and get the oil, someone else won't provide it to the market from somewhere else. They would be subjected to the global externalities just as well but zero benefits and just avoidance of local externalities (which they could at least control somewhat).

You are speaking as if they are simple-minded and this is an easy problem. The only one over-simplifying things there, is you.

Are you supposed to be a "well-traveled" person? If that is the case, one could argue that it comes with the side effect of dishonesty and bad faith arguments.

You should get dumped with no money/ressource somewhere in Africa (let's say Congo) to see how long it takes you to start working on a cobalt mine or something similar to survive.

Pretending to have the moral high-ground is extremely easy when you lack nothing and don't have to fight for your survival.

I agree a whole lot. I find it particularly revolting when Americans comes to EU for "free" education, free healthcare, etc. Only to end up going back to the US at some for the better quality of life and pay (and I believe, avoiding paying too much taxes on amassed net worth).

You will be paying for the education in the form of very high taxes for all your life, regardless of if you studied or if the quality was good or even useful (something extremely debatable, outside of some key selective universities).

I am always amazed at the quickness of some Americans with socialist sensibilities view EUs governments/systems as some panacea when they are doing pretty bad in many relevant metrics.

The EUs benefit is being able to rely on centuries old infrastructure/history/culture but the modern governance is completely fucked up and largely the complete inverse of what allowed it to get there.

At least in the US if you think your chances are better without a degree or that they are overpriced you can try your luck without having to pay for it your whole life. You decide. In the EU, you have no choice and chances are the money will be used inefficiently for useless studies. And this is exactly what is happening.

Germany’s overall tax burden (38%) isn’t much higher than the USA (25%), and it includes healthcare and better education opportunities. Germany is also the best about getting people into the trades if they don’t go to university. You can easily leave your job because your health insurance isn’t married to your employment. At any rate, most Germans aren’t envious of the American system and hardly any of them think it’s generally better.

Trump is lying to you about the EU, you actually have many more choices there than you do in the USA. I really don’t get who falls for that kind of propaganda at this point, but I guess someone does.

Germany is definitely one of the least bad in the EU for sure.

There are, however, many reasons they can get away with that and a lot of it has to do with the economic manipulations they make at the EU level. Germany does not play fair and has imposed many things to benefits itself at the expense of its (supposed) "partners".

It's a bit convenient, when talking about the EU, to choose the one country that has favorable statistics because it's using its power to force laws that benefit itself. If you make an evaluation around the average, the conclusion is much worse and it wasn't even that good to begin with.

With energy price probably never recovering and its industry failing I wouldn't count on Germany being able to outperform its neighbors for much longer. They'll have to create all kinds of bureaucratic bullshit jobs and raise the tax rate just like their neighbors.

I never listen to Trump; I can't even stand listening to him talk because he is such a carricature. You just have a bias because of media propaganda, you seem to believe that if someone believes in freedom and personal choices, he has to be some sort of Trump supporter.

So, I don't know what he is supposed to be lying about but if you believe that people have more choices in the heavily regulated bureaucratic EU you have a serious problem with reality distortion.

I don't know where you pulled your numbers from but even if we accept them as is, there is a 13% difference. Which means you have influence via choices on 13% more of the value you create. And that's if we accept the very low figure for Germany which is completely wrong (it's around 50%).

I don't even want to go into the psychology of your condescending remark, but you are the one failing for the propaganda of politicians. They have created more problems than anything else in the last 30-40 years but you argue that we should give them even more.

Also, for your information having the "right" to "free" healthcare is not at all the same as having access to healthcare. In France, with its insane taxation regimen, there are now what they call "medical desert", places/regions where it's extremely complicated to find doctors (especially specialists) because they are not very attractive and healtcare professional don't want to come live here (no point when the price is regulated, they make same amount anywhere else). So the (often) poor people living there have "free" heathcare in theory but cannot really access it ever, so they usually don't get to fix their problems. The more fortunate (richer) can use their purchasing power to travel far and get care in some big city. There was a doctor who explained that some of his patient even take a plane to make it viable. It was an example around dentistry; meanwhile in my medium sized town, you cannot get an appointment under 6 months and that is if you find one dentist willing to take you at all. I never had any issues with my tooths but when my widsom tooths started hurting and needed an extraction, I had to call a special urgency number on sunday just to get a prescription for a spot at an hospital 50km away from where I live. I had to wait 4 month between the time tooth started hurting the operation could take place. But I guess it's fine, it was "free". Curiously this is not what I observe when I need to pay the minimum for self-employment, which conveniently you have to pay regardless of if you made any money but will also increase proportionally if you make more money.

I'll stop there because it's is infinite. If there is someone falling for propaganda, it's rather you. And let's be clear, I'm not some hardcore libertarian, I believe government is important and many of it's service are essentials (especially around infrastructure). But there are many things that are preferable to let indivuals choose. This is what create a virtous loop, allowing the best behaviors to thrive and perdure. The EU has gone in the other direction and just like the soviet union it will implode one day or another and that's that.

So basically, you are happy because AI could replace a human for cheap?

I mean sure, from a purely profit oriented point of view it's good but you need to realize the human being replaced isn't feeling too good about it. Especially when the AI works because it has used input from works of people like him.

The people possessing the capital for AI are pretty happy about the results for sure but they need to think about sharing the wealth created because otherwise this is just an unfair transfer of value to an already rich and powerful small group of people.

No, that isn’t an accurate description of what I wrote.

In my situation there were no humans being replaced, because I didn’t have the budget to spend thousands of dollars hiring illustrators to make images or academics to review my writing. No one lost work because of AI, but I was able to create new value by using AI. That’s pretty much the pattern of every new technology, from photography replacing portrait painters to widespread literacy replacing letter writers.

Maybe one could make the argument that across the economy as a whole, some jobs are being replaced by AI. Which is indeed true - however, my point was about using these tools for creative individual purposes.

I agree that you don't see it as accurate but only because you are engaged deeply in self-deception.

You say you didn't have the budget, which basically means, "human illustrator is too expensive for the value I get out of it". From this we could infer that either the value actually created is extremely low or that you want a larger share of profit or that there is a market problem.

Yet you said you created value with AI. This does mean that even though the finished work may not have a broad commercial value with a price that is relatively easy to figure out, it does have value, at the very least for one person. You may not be able to make money off it but that's not very relevant, people do all kinds of things where they spend a lot of money on things that mostly (and sometimes only) create value for themselves.

So, it is pretty clear that you value having an artwork but it's just that you are unwilling to pay the price of a human who has the skill and put in the time would require. If a human illustrator could produce the artwork at the same price (close to zero) you would take it without much more consideration.

And this is exactly where your "point of view" is extremely dishonest. You are acting as if having to artwork at all is the same thing as having an AI artwork. It is absolutely not. And you pretend this doesn't affect the illustrators. Sure, there is no direct link, but what you just did is redefine the value of artwork in the market as close to zero as possible. Over time many more people will make the same choice, because they "figure out" that paying an illustrator is too expensive (regardless of if they have the means or not) and they go with AI. Over time, the illustrator job market dries up and soon enough you won't find a lot of them if at all.

The irony is that AI cannot exist without the previous work of the illustrator, the only reason it has been able to produce artwork for so cheap is because it could use a massive amount of past work without either paying for it. If AI companies had to charge people not just for the capital of compute, power and R&D but also for the value of all the works they have ingested, suddenly the AI wouldn't look so good purely on price.

But I guess it's nothing new under the sun, people are willing to exploit the labors of others the moment they get an imbalance of power in the form of capital.

Your examples are pretty bad; they are hardly comparable. Photography is not a strict equivalent to portrait painters. Those still exist and they still sell their craft to rich people; it's just that it's much less popular, (especially for new rich types) or they sell paintings of some other people/things. At 20yo I had a friend who made and sold large scale painting (usually 1to1) to rich people, for example he had a sexy rendition of "Little Red Riding Hood" (had it in our colocation living for a bit) which he sold for 12K. His work cannot be replaced by photography, it's not an equivalent at all, and of course he is not getting replaced by AI any time soon.

Even if we agree that photography replaced portrait painters it is still not comparable at all. First of all, photography still needs a human operator and there are still a lot of skill/knowledge involved even with modern technology. And we want to pretend to have relative equivalency, you need a physical output, which involves more humans and cannot be fully replaced by AI.

As for widespread literacy, I have a hard time seeing the parallel. It's something that we decided to teach to all humans, in order to make like fairer, the equivalent would be to teach all humans how to be an illustrator not to replace them with an AI. On top of that you take a weirdly specific and reductive definition of the world. It's not like if letter writers were a very widespread job and it's not like if it doesn't exist in some other form. If you take a look at many "social work" type of jobs, plenty of them do exactly the same kind of work: they write/correct/enhance CVs, letters of recommendation and the likes for people whose literacy isn't very good (and unlikely to ever improve). This is just one example, there are many more if you don't take a narrow-antiquated definition.

But I guess they should get replaced by AI as soon as possible. And the problem is not just that they are getting replaced, it's that the profit from the value created goes in the pocket of the capitalist controlling the AI tools and to some extent to the people who can exploit the AI to "improve" their output without involving humans (so, like you).

The people getting replaced don't even get to see the value float around in their community/country, it just goes somewhere else entirely. In other cases of technological disruption, people could at least adapt and learn new skills; and the new technology usually created new types of jobs that were still constrained by physical/geographical limits.

AI has is currently pushed/exploited is nothing like we have seen before. It is much closer to theft than its defenders would like to admit and it's not even good enough to actually replace humans for jobs they typically don't like to do. But we surely are going to replace the interesting ones, like illustrations and writing. Having artwork and writing as expensive things was not a bug but a feature. In fact, one could argue that it had already become too cheap, in no small part because of IT, making it cheaper was not really a problem. But since profit can be made from it, it will happen, because the one profiterring will never have to pay for the externalities.

Now you may find AI useful, but don't kid yourself on ethics.

I strongly disagree. I have experienced many very well-off people (middle class+) who consistently choose cheap crap because they refuse to think about their choices in any other ways than maximisation of their benefits (at a surface level).

Poor people are not necessarily the ones to make those choices. In fact, sometimes you find out that they are actually poorer than they would be if they would optimise their choices for their own financial benefits. If you look at who's buying expensive local food at your farmer's market it's unlikely to be dominated by rich people. If you go to some discount supermarket, you will most likely find a lot more well-off people, proportionally. Lidl is a supermarket chain that has terrible consequences, from treating their own employees badly to putting extreme pressure on the suppliers and its whole reason for existing is cheaper prices. Their biggest customer demographic is rich boomer.

There is a cross-over point, it's around your body temp, so usually between 36 and 38C. In France we have thermostatic shower mixer with labeling around this temp, with even a push button lock that can prevent you from going over 38C if you wish. Isn't this common in the US ?

It's not just for health and safety, it's also to avoid inconveniencing others with body odors. And there is a lot to be said about looking "good" too. I have very oily scalp (dry skin) and annoyingly thin and stiff hairs, if I don't shower daily, I'll look unpresentable pretty quickly. I wouldn't be dirty or unsafe but that's the image people would get...

I think you should have social status in your theory. Having access to hot water daily in sufficient quantities to fully bath yourself was not something most could afford, so it definitely made a very obvious class distinction at some point.

I'm pretty sure this is why people used a lot of perfume at some point; if you can't bathe to remove the stinks, you can try to cover it with a stronger and (hopefully) more pleasant smell. But as much as I dislike body odor there is a lot to be said about strong perfumes. Some people find it reasonable to cast their odor of choices to a 2-3m perimeter around them; they might be worse because at least in their case we know for sure they had a choice...

This was my thought instantly. It looks like a worse Soulver with fewer features and not many benefits.

I am confused why you would want to bother with plaintext and go out of your way to use a limiting editor to do that.

Ah well the macOS utility app market is weird.

The amount of nagging in recent Apple software is extremely annoying. Personally, I believe it the influence of women's behavior on how things should be.