> The alternative option which is consuming less in order to pollute less is pretty unpopular.
If you frame the problem like that, does it actually surprise you that no one will act on it? One has to either freeze or feel guilty of some kind of moral failing about the heat one consumes?
You might say: No, no, the problem is not consumption, it's the superfluous part of the consumption, the
overconsumption that's the problem. Okay, but, then, who exactly stands in judgment of which part of the consumption is the overconsumption? The same moralising types who bemoan the melting of the glaciers?
Reminds me a bit of pre-enlightenment Europe and its juxtaposition of power and catholic moralising guilttripping. What's needed is a humanistic way forward, a way wherein man gets to fundamentally be the hero of the story.
If you come to me and say: Here is a way to reconfigure the economy through technological, economic, and political change, to make it so that one can feel good about consumption again, then I will go to hell and back to make that change happen. If you just tell me "consume less", then don't expect me to do anything.
Ok, understood. I'm now telling you: "Here is a way to reconfigure the economy through technological, economic, and political change, to make it so that one can feel good about consumption again, then I will go to hell and back to make that change happen".
Just don't spend too much time in hell, we need you to act here :-)
If a corporation has operations in a given country including a physical presence and employees and everything, then the profits connected to those operations are absolutely taxable there, regardless of where that entity is incorporated or where its securities are traded or anything like that.
From that perspective, the U.S. operations of a European firm look to the U.S. taxman very similar to the U.S. operations of a U.S. firm, and vice-versa.
The revenues of such operations are usually easy to work out, but the cost-side can be pretty difficult if it's globally distributed and double-taxation treaties are also pretty difficult. This is where transfer pricing and flag of convenience shenanigans come in, allowing these megacorporations to evade the taxman.
It's not like the political will to fix this stuff is not there, but it requires coordinated action from nation-state players, which is not that easy to accomplish.
So, instead, you get these populist governments pandering to their base by going certain things alone in a way that almost certainly backfires economically.
> "having ataraxia." [1] That is, as if it were a medical condition.
There is kind of a noticeable overlap between the stoic ideal and a schizoid personality style. For people who are already left-brain-dominant / spectrumy, or whatever you might call it, which applies to a lot of people in the computing profession, getting into stoicism as a philosophy and lifestyle is probably maladaptive.
Really? To me the murkiness seems much more dangerous. In the 90s you had a clear sense of what was "TV reality" versus what was actual reality. You would compartmentalize and take "TV reality" for what it was: A source of entertainment, not a source of information, and you would develop a mental spam filter that would prevent the messaging from getting to you. With social media, all of this is getting much harder.
There are already many people today who cannot tell the difference in realities, and likely many people who think they can but only succeed some of the time.
It's so pervasive that soon it will become the 'only' reality (online) and then it's too late. This is what the marketing people want, just like the sugar companies.
If I correctly understand the linked materials by Patrick Breyer [1], then the parliament (which is the piece of the E.U. where we are presently asked for our vote), is opposed to this pretty much in its entirety: It says "Parliament has positioned itself almost unanimously against indiscriminate chat control." So, it seems, the way you vote here doesn't much affect that outcome at all.
Also, if I correctly understand this table [2], then "Renew" (formerly "ALDE") is also opposed, so you don't need to adopt the leftist political ideology of the Greens as a package, just to get pro-privacy representation in the European Parliament. "Renew" does seem to be a viable "libertarian" alternative there. They also make some pro-privacy representations on their website. I don't follow European politics much, so I may be mistaken here. For example, I haven't looked into their voting record.
Last time I heard (which was indeed a long time ago, so maybe things have changed), if you wanted citizenship, then your village had to take a vote, so you were well-advised to join the volunteer fire department and that sort of thing, if you wanted citizenship.
Now, with an eye toward the social dynamics of village life, I've always found the notion quite alienating to try to immigrate in a country where petty grievances held against me by my fellow villagers might block my path towards naturalization.
The picture is probably slightly different in more urbanized places, but, in those, it probably boils down more to a question of money.
I'm not sure what to make of your "a quarter are immigrant" statistic. Do you mean they live there, without being citizens? Is that number high precisely because the path to naturalization is so difficult? The number of non-citizen permanent residents, for example, is also extremely high in certain rich Arab countries (like the UAE), but they are effectively an underclass of indentured servants. So "immigration-friendly" is not what that kind of a statistic is saying at all.
(From personal experience) there's a large proportion of people living in the big Swiss cities as 'ex-pats', working for (mostly large) employers who support/sponsor their immigration and ongoing employment. (Such people are well-paid and equally-treated, and certainly not "an underclass of indentured servants".)
If one stays employed in the long term, citizenship is not needed, and IME only a small proportion of ex-pats attempt to achieve it - either because their career and life plans are likely to eventually lead them to move elsewhere, or because there's no incentive in their personal case, or disinterest, or because of the perceived difficulties.
You're right that parts of the system for achieving citizenship may sometimes be problematic, and the Swiss have somewhat of a reputation for racism, especially in the less metropolitan areas. (Of course, you could also say the same for many countries.). There have been anecdotes of people repeatedly failing to achieve citizenship through exactly the issue you originally raised.
That said, the overall approach to citizenship taken by the Swiss is mostly praiseworthy, as some of the more impressive aspects of Switzerland (e.g. its direct democracy, and the engagement of citizens in politics and the democratic process) are embedded within the shared culture of its citizens, and the citizenship process takes a decent shot at preserving this culture - requiring, for example, proof of significant language skills and knowledge of current affairs and politics.
Reminds me of a friend that married a German. In order to become himself a German citizen he had to pass an integration exam with questions about history, law and culture. He passed the exam, his German partner tried the same set of questions and failed it.
you don't have to have any means, just a job, albeit your employer must prove that they couldn't fulfill the job within Switzerland (and within the EU, if you're from outside the EU)
It seems to me that English TTS is already extremely good, even if you're looking at implementations that are far from being the best ones for English.
...and sometimes I wonder, if it's really economically efficient for that many players to compete on making English TTS yet another hair's breadth better than the next guy's, while TTS for languages other than English is this vast field of unmet market demand. At least these guys are doing Chinese, so: good for them.
Last time I looked into TTS systems for German, Google was the only game in town. What I wouldn't give for a viable alternative! It doesn't even need to be open source, I'd be quite ready to pay top dollar.
> Last time I looked into TTS systems for German, Google was the only game in town. What I wouldn't give for a viable alternative! It doesn't even need to be open source, I'd be quite ready to pay top dollar.
Will you still pay top dollar if it is open source though? :D
Piper TTS[0] (MIT Licensed; developed by main dev of Larynx TTS, Mimic3 TTS & Rhasspy voice assistant) has support for ~30 languages, at least some of which have multiple voices available--in a range of quality & data licenses.
And, particularly fortuitous for your needs, potentially, there's at at least one German voice that was recorded[1] specifically for Piper[2] (with emotion variants and CC0-licensed, no less :) )...
https://elevenlabs.io/ And choose German for a sample. Not sure if it’s good enough for your needs but they have a wide variety of languages and voices.
Thanks for the pointer. This does indeed look pretty good. Do you happen to know if they're using any APIs underneath the covers? Or are they fully self-contained?
The funny thing about "big data" was that it came with a perverse incentive to avoid even the most basic and obvious optimizations on the software level, because the hardware requirement was how you proved how badass you were.
Like: "Look, boss, I can compute all those averages for that report on just my laptop, by ingesting a SAMPLE of the data, rather than making those computations across the WHOLE dataset".
Boss: "What do you mean 'sample'? I just don't know what you're trying to imply with your mathmo engineeringy gobbledigook! Me having spent those millions on nothing can clearly not be it, right?"
It came with a few cohorts of Xooglers cashing their options out.
The amount of salesman hype and chatter about big data, followed by the dick measuring contests about whose data was big enough to be worthy was intense for awhile.
This is a pretty snarky outside view and just not actually true (I spent the first part of my career trying to reduce compute spend as a data engineer).
It was extremely difficult to get > 64gb on a machine for a very long time, and implementation complexity gets hard FAST when you have a hard cap.
And it's EXTREMELY disruptive to have a process that fails every 1/50 times, when data is slightly too large, because your team will be juggling dozens of these routine crons, and if each of them breaks regularly, you do nothing but dumb oncall trying to trim bits off of each strong.
No, Hadoop and MapReduce were not hyperefficient, but it was OK if you write it correctly, and having something that ran reliably is WAY more valuable than boutique bit-optimized C++ crap that nobody trusts or can maintain and fails every thursday with insane segfaults.
(nowdays, just use Snowflake. but it was a reasonable tool for the time).
Why do you assume it's an "outside" view? I was freelancing for many years on projects with "Data Scientist" / "Data Engineer" in my job title, having been hired by managers who heard about "Big Data" at an event by KPMG or Accenture or whatever.
And I don't understand why you're reading "boutique bit-optimized C++ crap" into "most basic and obvious optimizations".
One of those most basic and obvious optimizations is to avoid reading a dataframe into memory in its entirety, when the math that you want to do on top of it can actually be done as a running accumulator while reading the data from a stream. This is possible in 90% of realistic use cases, but the fraction of software written back then that took advantage of this was shockingly small. Solving the problem by buying more machines, chopping up the dataframe into smaller pieces, and farming out the payload through Hadoop had management buy-in. Yet, for some reason, doing the sane thing, namely rewriting poorly-written software, didn't.
It's not a zero-sum game, they don't have to reduce support for other languages.
It would be a completely new source of developers for these platforms. Better 1% than 0%, and I would say that effort for that would not outweigh the possible benefits and income from new devs/apps.
It's not Microsoft and Google's job to write Apple's software for them. It's like complaining that Apple doesn't write a good Dotnet runtime; of course they don't. It's not their job, and they don't want to anyways.
> It would be a completely new source of developers for these platforms.
I have no idea who you're referring to here. Who are the developers that are locked-in to iOS/MacOS but would consider ChromeOS or Windows if it supported Swift better? I cannot think of a single person I know that fills that bill. If anything it's the other way around, where people end up switching away because they don't have any use for Swift/AppleScript.
Is that survey actually scientific? I have been doing Ruby and Swift for years and never completed that survey. That survey is of reasonably active users to Stack Overflow — there is a selection bias. There isn’t a lot of great Swift content on SO, so that’s going to attract fewer developers to answer the survey.
If you frame the problem like that, does it actually surprise you that no one will act on it? One has to either freeze or feel guilty of some kind of moral failing about the heat one consumes?
You might say: No, no, the problem is not consumption, it's the superfluous part of the consumption, the overconsumption that's the problem. Okay, but, then, who exactly stands in judgment of which part of the consumption is the overconsumption? The same moralising types who bemoan the melting of the glaciers?
Reminds me a bit of pre-enlightenment Europe and its juxtaposition of power and catholic moralising guilttripping. What's needed is a humanistic way forward, a way wherein man gets to fundamentally be the hero of the story.
If you come to me and say: Here is a way to reconfigure the economy through technological, economic, and political change, to make it so that one can feel good about consumption again, then I will go to hell and back to make that change happen. If you just tell me "consume less", then don't expect me to do anything.