According to Varoufakis, Europe missed the bus on cloud capital (=big cloud platforms like amazon, meta, twitter,…) and the race is currently playing out between US and China.
IMHO, it missed the boat on everything to do with tech, and tech is basically 21st century capitalism. The only tech in Europe are secondary services like booking.com that ultimately depend on primary services (Google Search, Youtube, Facebook Platform, Twitter, …etc). I agree in large part with Varoufakis. Although he is “on the left” he has better investment sense than all the suits who control European capital.
Although he is “on the left” he has better investment sense than all the suits who control European capital.
The suits who control European capital are Americans. People like Von Der Leyen and Shultz, or in my country Ireland, Harris, work for American interests. You see it in everything they do. They’re not stupid or lacking sense.
This “elite capture” is so complete that when the US is caught spying on Europe’s leaders, there is a deafening silence in the media. When the US blows up Nordstream pipeline and everyone knows it, even average Europeans stay silent.
The enslavement of Europe will be studied by psychologists in the future.
OK back up a minute. When did this become common knowledge? That’s the second time it’s been mentioned in this thread but the first time I’ve heard about it. I’ve had things going on - please fill me in.
I thought it was always common knowledge? If you mean they’ve admitted it well no they haven’t. But nobody honest can pretend that they seriously deny it. They threatened to do it on multiple occasions and there are no other plausible suspects.
Check out IMEC and ASML, they are innovators in the semiconductor sector. Though I believe ASML has a large (or majority?) US interest, they are still headquartered in the Netherlands.
It’s a Dutch company completely, but the US ordered the Dutch government to stop selling to China because they’re cry babies and can’t handle free market competition.
Well the US are maybe a bit more innovative here, but actually they are just much more aggressive. Things like facebook, twitter, Reddit etc. need to harvest user data aggressively and sell them. In Europe this is seen very critically so it is much more risky to make this a business model. Also AI, they have not been been particularly clever with Chat GP, they just haven been totally reckless and just ignored any concerns guideline etc. Another sector is Oil and Gas. While Europe heavily suffers in case of energy prices, because they have no natural resources, guess who makes all the profit. The fracking and also other gas industries in the US are booming heavily. China on the other side has not those old and high depts like Japan, US or Europe. And the invest everything in those new technologies like batteries etc. also they have still a very high youth unemployment, so they continue their pish to become a global manufacturing powerhouse. But since wages go up, they have have competition from Asia and Africa. Yes the German industry is not strong at the moment and will not grow also in the next years, but most people are also somehow saturated with what they have. So many people just try to work less, which of course makes it hard to compete with other countries. But I still Europe has a certain edge in „educated“ workforce.
You’re assuming that Arch causes the unhappiness. Maybe unhappy people naturally tend to use Arch, so as to avoid further pain from painful distros like Pop! OS?.
I dunno, I was pretty stoked installing Arch almost a decade ago after my spouse surprised me with a brand new PC he built for my birthday. Was also stoked installing Arch, in more recent years, on the PC I built.
And I’ve been at my most miserable in life while being a Windows user 🫠
Such polls / surveys are extremely questionable. I wouldn’t even know what rating to give, if someone asks me how happy I am. This is a dumb question to ask to begin with. Let alone everyone has a different standard to what 10/10 or 5/10 means. And then only 6000 (+ some) have been taken part.
The following data was obtained from polling done between January 22nd and February 9th, 2023. A few details about the polling conducted:
6,022 people answered the questions.
This is significantly larger than the vast majority of national polls conducted during Presidential Elections in the USA (most of which have less than 2,000 respondents).
The poll was presented to audiences of several shows and news sites in order to obtain a large, diverse sample of computer nerds.
The questions were wide-ranging, 100% optional, and no personal data was collected.
Let’s start from a very high level:
6,022 computer nerds & enthusiasts were asked the following simple question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, how happy would you say you are (in general)?”
In polls the demographics of the participants are selected so they are statistically significant.
When you poll visitors to a website there’s no telling what biases might be at work. For example, Arch is a popular distribution so its prevalence in the results could simply be an indicator of that.
Last but not least, correlation does not necessarily mean causation, and that goes especially for an uncontrolled sample. There’s a famous example that says “100% of the people who drink water die after that”.
You can’t compare to the President Elections in the USA. The answers are very serious and with a huge impact, so people will choose wisely. And they are complete randoms. Compared to the question to nerds how happy they are in a rating between 1 and 10 and then connecting the happiness to the operating system they are using. It’s like asking how happy people are and then connecting this to the current president. Who said other factors didn’t play a role?
Not exactly, I use EndeavourOS, almost Arch. But I use Firefox, BTW. I was more unhappy when I used Ubuntu and even more when I was using Windows before this. No idea what rating to give though. What even is 8/10 happiness??
You can just take it for what it is: How people respond when asked to grade their happiness from 1 to 10. Of course it’s subjective, but it’s interesting that arch users rate their happiness lower overall.
Same. I call bullshit. First of all, for me Lunduke = Bullshit. Second, the moment it said people voluntarily participated in this survey, you just know that the demography of the survey takers will be extremely biased.
I choose to believe it’s mostly accidental. Either it fell out of a trashcan while the truck was doing pick ups or sucked out of a car window before the driver could catch it. Or any other number of circumstances that probably happened to us in one point it time.
Obviously that’s not always the case but there’s no point in my getting angry at imaginary people about it.
Tangential, according to one of my college lecturers even the cheapest LED bulbs are capable of lasting multiple human lifetimes, its the little power supply circuit that comes with each bulb that breaks and ruins the bulb.
The actual Light Emitting Diodes loose brighness over time due to, amongst other things, dopant migration which is something that gets accelerated by higher temperatures (though even when disconnected and in storage, it still happens).
(I have some red LEDs which are almost 4 decades old from back when I played with Electronics as a kid and they’re way less bright - barelly lighting up - than the ones I got a few years ago)
That said, the cheap conversion/regulation circuits in those lamps can exposed the LEDs to frequent spikes of voltage or current beyond their spec, and even though most electronic components can handled occasional slightly out of spec power (they tend to be designed with chunky margins), do it too often and they’ll will probably die.
And then, of course, as your college lecturer pointed out, those conversion/regulation when done with cheap designs and components tend to die way more easilly than the LEDs themselves.
Just to clear up any confusion - you can understand violence and racism, but not littering?
And if I do understand correctly, maybe it’s because that’s how their parents were, so they honestly just don’t think about it. My parents were the complete opposite so I abhor it, but I’ve known folks who don’t think twice. We’re still friends, I just try to gently remind them.
I do not have any racist or violent actual friends friends though. Like, I don’t actively pursue their company.
you can understand violence and racism, but not littering?
Yeah. I can imagine what a racist would say if I confronted them about it. They always have a reason for thinking that way and to them that reason seems valid. I can’t imagine what such justification a litterbug would have other than “I just don’t give a shit” so in other words; they know they’re in the wrong and simply don’t care.
It goes both ways. Not all racists have the legitimate ignorance excuse - many just want a convenient excuse to have an “other” to blame their problems on so that they don’t have to take responsibility for their own failures in life.
In a way littering is similar - some folks just don’t give a fuck, others were raised not to think twice about it and so they don’t. The second group can probably be educated though.
There are ignorant people in every group who can be reasoned with and realize they’re wrong, and change.
And there are malicious dickheads who just don’t give a fuck who their destructive behavior hurts in the process and will continue on their path to watch the world burn.
The issues themselves aren’t always the main qualifier.
But isn’t the justification/state of mind for all bad behavior “I don’t give a shit”? If they gave a shit, they wouldn’t be doing it.
The root justification for littering has already been said somewhere: someone has trash in their hands, they don’t want trash in their hands because trash is disgusting to touch. It’s annoying to keep carrying it around. Thus they open their hands.
Both ways can work. Looking up words, and trying to guess the meaning from context. I use both, depending on my mood and the situation.
I like trying to guess the meaning because you have to think things through. That helps you remember the answer. Doesn’t matter if you got it right or wrong. It’s not always easy, but it gets better with practice.
You can usually look at the situation and narrow it down to a few possibilities. If my guess seems decent enough to get the gist, I keep going. Usually, you’ll find something that helps you figure out if you were right.
If I see a word several times, I usually look it up. Otherwise, it’s probably not that important (unless I happen to be curious).
And if I look up a word and forget it, no big deal. Happens all the time. I’ll either come across it again, or it wasn’t that important.
It can be slow going, no matter what option you choose. But if you keep at it, you can get to a point where you rarely have to look things up.
A very toxic industry to be in, I used to be an engineer for a company that looked after slot machines here in the UK. High Street betting shops would regularly get smashed up by people after they lost all their money, but they would just pay us to repair them and let them back a few weeks later because they knew they’d be back. Completely taking advantage of people with a very real problem.
kbin.life
Hot