I find your classification of Sweden somewhat misleading.

For example, you truthfully note that it has no minimum wage.
But that's because it doesn't need one. 70% of its work force belongs to a union, and over 90% of its working population covered under some collective aggrement. Those who do not have a comprehensive and generous safety net.

They pay less than we do for all of this, because they do it far more efficiently than our private-public system.
Read here about how healthcare works there.
Instead of being centralized, it's still government handled, but at local and municipal direction- more like traditional Soviets.

Other than that, I broadly agree with you that Sweden isn't "socialist"- they are absolutely a market economy, and that there is definitely a strong Third Position movement within the current liberal bloc. However, there is an outright fascist movement in the conservative bloc.

Doesn't look good to me from any angle I can find.

Well, you're certainly right that free market is mutually exclusive with authoritarianism, capitalism isn't necessarily linked to a free market.
Fascist systems are very capitalist. The state doesn't own the shit- rich businessmen do. The difference is that if the businessmen don't play ball, they get a ventilated braincase.

We're sweating bullets over the President trying to exert control over the Fed, and you want to nationalize the fucking banks?

Fucking brilliant.

My understanding is the only record they broke were school records, and in the NCAA, they weren't even among the record breakers.
Their performance was mid at best.
Where did you read differently?

Methane is a big deal. Even if it doesn't "last as long"- it still turns into CO2 once it's done.

However- "waste methane" is very little due to natural gas. It's typically flared (converted directly to CO2 without the years of extra sunlight absorption), and it is absolutely dwarfed by methane produced by domestic waste in landfills.

Yes, one where it's more efficient to burn natural gas, dumbass.

Do you not think we still are?

Still over a quarter of the entire planetary economy.

It's a bit fairer to pin it against economic output.
We're viewing CO2 as a cost, so it really should be compared against the other side of that equation.
Per-capita is also alright, but it's just not the whole picture.The US 4% of the world's population, but it's also 26% of the world's economy.

This is normal in the US.
I do not own the mineral rights to my property, and most people in states with extensive mineral exploitation have severed estates as well.

And the UK is still twice as bad as the Netherlands. You'd have to be just suicidal to walk on those roads! /s

You just aren't going to bend.
Per unit of distance is obviously going to be in our favor, as we drive more, at current fatality rates, than you do.

Oh, shut the fuck up, dude.
That's dipshit ethnocentric drivel, nothing more.
Many places in Europe are over twice as bad as us, and you're twice as bad as someone else.

objectively?

Look at it this way- for all of your EU mandated safety measures, how on God's Green Earth, are some EU countries over twice as bad as the US?

All, actually. Combined.

And why are some European roads worse than ours, as they objectively must be given their have pedestrial fatality rates far exceeding ours, in spite of less people using the roads, for less distance, and much better safety features on vehicles.

You're trying to box all of this up in a convenient little package of eurocentrist bullshit, but you really aren't doing a very good job at all.

The EU27 rate, btw, is 1/100k, twice as bad as the UK rate, or half as bad as Poland (2.2/100k)
The rate for "Europe as a whole" that I synthesized included non-EU states, which, predictably considerably raised the EU average, though I didn't include the UK, because it was late, I was tired, and for some reason I had decided that the British didn't consider themselves European anymore. That would have helped considerably with its 70 million at 0.55/100k

This wasn't meant as an attack on certain European norms (very pro-pedestrian vehicle safety standards- i.e., increased crumple zones on the front of vehicles), larger number of pedestrians in dangerous areas, forcing traffic to treat them as existential risks to the vehicles themselves.

It was to demonstrate that overbroad comparisons- the caloric content of soda pop to apples- wasn't painting a useful picture of anything.

The US doesn't have "murder roads", it has cities of a very different nature than cities that you're calling Europe, which is more specifically Western Europe.

Normal government statistics. I think you'll find the discrepancy exists in the overbroad claims you made, and me taking you to task for it.

I was tabulating for Europe-wide- I didn't see if I could, or should make the claim about the UK specifically.
And that's kind of the catch to my argument, anyway.
Europe's a big fucking place, just like the United States.
You don't want to compare Britain to the entire United States anymore than you want us to compare North Dakota (0.63/100k) to the whole of Europe.
The Netherlands, for example, pedestrians are seemingly invincible (0.22/100k), while in Romania, you're looking at a more alarming 3.4/100k

For shit's and giggles, I did look at the UK- pretty damn good- 0.55/100k.
Much better than the US rate of 1.5/100k.

So the UK's rate is twice as bad as the Dutch rate (murder roads, I tell you!), while the US rate is triple as bad as the UK rate, while Poland is twice as bad as the US rate (holocaust roads?).

Calling our roads "murder roads" is a bit absurd.

Nor did you, so I figured I'd match you claim for claim. Your one attempt at doing so was a misfire and a half.

LOL.
Bullshit.
Search engine attribution doesn't come from the training data (which would indeed be dangerously inaccurate). It comes from tool-based querying. You sent the wrong link after filtering ones that didn't fit your narrative. Don't worry about it- happens to the best bullshit artists.

But let's get back to the actual article you meant to reference:
FTA:

The 14% is across the entire workforce.

I don't see how the math doesn't jump out at you.
A 14% increase in productivity for service agents means you can afford to let go of 14% of your staff.
That number is fucking huge.
Microsoft's biggest layoff in history wasn't anywhere close to 14%.
Worse, for these guys- is that the low end folks are 34%. CSRs are buggy whip manufacturers- they're done for.
The cost to improve them by 14-34% is a tiny fraction of their cost as an employee. To replace them entirely is just a matter of figuring out logistics.

Developers are safe for a while. LLMs can assist there, but they really can't operate unsupervised. Everyone's tried it. It's just not there yet. Anyone who claims that is definitely drinking kool-aid. But they will continue to get better. I begin transitioning to a role of LLM-jockey about a year ago. I recommend anyone concerned about job security do the same.
Even when the AI bubble pops- like .coms and houses before it, corporations will continue to become more and more dependent on them. They'll just be a lot fucking cheaper.

There are a few ways to evaluate this claim.
1) You're full of shit.
2) You just haven't figured out how to interface with them yet.
3) You have no actual programming skills.

Entire projects are written by LLMs now.
We are seeing vibe-coded shit in production now.

The purest vibiest form of vibe coding- a programming illiterate person tries to make something out of it is usually pretty limited in scope, but even those- a coworker of mine that we sadly just laid off made an entire fucking front-end for our ticketing and accounting systems, with almost no programming experience (he had the skill level of "being able to sometimes successfully make small changes to scripts to suit him")

Your claim doesn't reflect reality, at all.
I want to understand why in good faith, but I'm finding it difficult without being insulting.

Incorrect. It already has.

Less than employees. We did much evaluation before pulling the trigger, here.
I'm sure other places had their own criteria to satisfy.

Incorrect.
You are talking out of your ass. You clearly do not work in an environment where this is at play.

Incorrect.
Though that is part of the equation.
Some agent roles can be flat out replaced.
In some roles, assistance increases productivity which can lead to reduction in salary costs by removing people who have been made superfluous by a high aggregate production rate.

I think you need to re-read that article.
The 14% increase in productivity is not on "customer service workers", it's for "more senior developers."
The increases at junior levels are closer to 30%, and "customer service workers" are being replaced, flatly.

I wonder if your delusion is some kind of self-preservation mechanism. Gaslight the world into thinking the change that is happening is not happening... May the odds ever be in your favor, I suppose.

lol. Your tinfoil is choking off the circulation to your brain, my friend.