I think this also proves that the comments one sometimes hears in US media (and certain political circles) to the effect that the EU is supposedly going after US companies, are nonsense.
(1) Europe doesn't exist as a nation: it's like the US (states) without a federal government. That means it doesn't have an integrated defense industry or an army, which in turn means it doesn't have the economies of scale that enable the US to be a superpower. For a very long time this was considered to be in the US interest. US leadership was unquestioned, which had its use. Take e.g. the industrial side of the F16 and F35 fighter planes: those benefited (and continue to benefit) quite a lot from European clientele. The same holds for other types of weaponry. We're talking about 80 bln. in arms sales in 2023 and about 97 bln in 2024 to US allies (see e.g. here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.state.gov%2Ffiscal-y... and here https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.defense.gov%2FNews%2FN... ). Arms sales don't exist in a vacuum: it also represents a buy-in in the US as a partner.
(2) For the entire period from 1945 to the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the US and Europe had this bargain: the US provides the military-industrial muscle and the nuclear umbrella, Europe provides the battlefield, about half the manpower, a robust first line of defense plus 100% of civillian casualties in anything but an intercontinental nuclear war. The US had a very clear interest in this tate of affairs, like e.g. keeping the USSR bottled up in a land-locked environment without practical (non-blockable) ice-free ports en a big counterweight to USSR expansion.
(3) For that reason the US had (for that period) been very much against Europe getting anything like a European army or an integrated arms industry. All that changed only when it realised that China had become an economic and military rival. With the Warsaw pact disbanded and Russia no longer a threat, US interests in Europe became more diluted and its commitments there more of a burden.
(4) Europe is indeed ramping up its spending, but there is of course a lead time (of 5-10 years or so) before it can get its 'own' military up to scratch. Withdrawing support before that time means risking Russian expansion once again. That could be an issue if Russia e.g. regains the industrial muscle and mineral resources of the Ukraina.
(5) Currently the situation is that the US has put Europe on notice to get a move on with financing its own defense needs and those of teh Ukraine. And this is having an effect already. Just for the record, US aid to the Ukraine is about 183 bln. by the end of 2024 ehile the EU has contributed slightly more than 50% of all military aid to the Ukraine to date (see e.g. here: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.com%2Fnews%2Fartic... ). There is more to be done, but the figures mentioned by pres. Trump are outright misleading (as usual).
(6) It goes without saying that this development will (over the next 10 years or so) lessen US influence in that part of the world. With that withdrawal of influence there may also be a shrinkage of available military bases, and with it the ability to 'project power' abroad. That in its turn will further contribute to lessening US influence in the world. Whether or not this is desirable is another question, but I think it should be factored into any strategic decision makeing (which in my opionion currently is not the case).
As I see it, the reason for going to school and acquiring skills such as how to do mathematics and/or how to write clearly and coherently is training the LLM that resides inside our skull. I think that the process of learning something makes you better at learning in general, which then applies to other things as well.
The question is: is it beneficial to learn how to use your brains? That would depend on who or what you want to be. Some people can be very successful being e.g. an Instagram celebrity or an 'Influencer', where being able to spell or do maths just isn't relevant.
On the other hand, I think that people with academic qualifications like being able to spell, write, and do maths can make better use of an LLM than most others who are deficient in that respect.
Of course that's a testable hypothesis. I curious as to how that turns out.
The real problem is that cryptocurrencies are a shitty technology. Ledger transactions are 4-5 orders of magnitude more expensive than traditional monetary transactions – they aren't "currencies" at all. They are long-hold assets at best.
Exchanges like FTX/Binance came along to paper over that shittiness with off-ledger transactions. But it's a scammer's paradise and moreover it violates the whole point of crypto which is to not have to trust a central authority.
At the risk of stating the obvious, most users don't care about app store choice, and never will. The only app store they'll ever use is the one that came with the device. Most people don't have an ideological axe to grind on things like this. They just want their $2 Candy Crush app with as little fiddling as possible.
Regulators can do whatever they want but economics wins out in the end. The app stores are natural monopolies.
I don't see this as anything more than a simple business decision. Twitch feels that certain types of content will hurt their brand, so they disallow that content. It's all just dictated by the social norms of the moment.
These rankings are predicated on a flawed idea that has been disproven empirically: That certain "selective" colleges give one a better education, and lead to better career outcomes. The data show that choice of undergraduate institution has almost no impact on a person's eventual career success; that correlates with one's choice of major, and how hard one studies in college. (The same isn't true of graduate institutions, where there is some evidence that institution does have a small impact on career outcomes.)
To be blunt, the value that a selective college provides to students is mostly as a reputation filter later on. Getting a degree from school X becomes a shorthand for "I was selected out through a highly competitive process" that sticks with you. It's a badge.
Given that, the only rankings that would make sense would be based on admissions selectivity. The schools with the lowest accept rates float to the top.
Google's position makes perfect sense to me. ChatGPT comes across as a well-informed bullshitter. Most of the time it's correct, but it often isn't, and either way it states everything with absolute confidence. From a user perspective it's both incredibly impressive and not super useful. Perhaps more narrowly-defined AIs like Github Copilot are more immediately useful as products.
People have also figured out how easy it is to prompt ChatGPT (and probably any similar large language model) to psychopathic responses of all kinds: How to exterminate race X, how to destroy civilization, and how to rape women and get away with it, to name a few that I've seen. No public company would wade into that PR nightmare.
If the iPhone costs $X in Brazil and the charger costs $Y, in Brazil only sell them as a bundle for $(X+Y). Then have a program where an unopened charger can be returned for $Y in store credit. Publicize how eco-friendly your program is by reducing e-waste. Everybody wins.
It's a false dichotomy to separate the world into criminals and non-criminals. Empirically there are quite a few people who in certain circumstances – road rage, getting into a drunken fight in a bar – will use firearms impulsively if they are easily available. Empirically there are also quite a few people who store weapons improperly which leads to accidents. Who knows, a voluntary buyback might avoid some of these cases.
... lack of male nurses?
There's a certain arrogance about the tech industry that's embedded in all this hand-wringing about women and minorities in tech. The implicit assumption is: These jobs, and this sector, is the pinnacle of the economy and therefore everybody must WANT these jobs. If you start with this presumption, then any lack of equal representation – in university majors, at companies – must be due to a problem somewhere in the system because those underrepresented people are being denied what we assume they all want.
People don't wring their hands over gender and racial equality in education, nursing, construction, or plumbing because we all understand that not necessarily everyone wants these jobs. Only the tech sector is arrogant enough to presume superiority over all other forms of employment.
As someone who has worked in tech my entire life, it's a good fit for me but I can 100% understand why it's a bad career choice for most people.
OP focuses on real-time language translation, which could be useful but won't impact day-to-day life very much for people in developed countries.
The real question is: What happens when these same technologies (Turing-passing chatbots, lifelike voice and facial synthesis) are put in the hands of marketers and propagandists? Eventually you flood every channel with so much shit that the only reasonable response will be to stop all interaction with unknown actors online.
As Daniel Kahneman points out, the risk here is that we humans don't even realize when we're being manipulated. So in the end, every sane person will want sophisticated systems to protect themselves from manipulation. I don't know what it looks like technologically but it will be necessary if we don't want to become mindless cogs, or tear apart our society from within.
As for fine art and gold, anyone can invest in them. Buffett has generally not done so because of the same reason he does not invest in Bitcoin.
Interestingly, Buffett has invested heavily in silver a few times in the past. Most recently in 1997 he purchased 3.5 thousand tons of silver, something like 10% of the world's stockpile at that time.
The difference being that silver has a lot of industrial uses, so by Buffett's standards it's a "productive asset".
[We] use bad software and bad machines for the wrong things. -- R.W. Hamming
