> Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians would be alive now if not for this dispute
I mean, we (the west) could have saved ourselves a lot of money by putting it to Russia that if they crossed the border then we'd defend the airspace. Essentially, being half assed about it is going to cost more money and lives. The Ukrainians were going to defend themselves whatever we did.
I don't think Europe has a choice but to be involved.
> We have lots of problems of our own
I don't really understand that. You don't get to turn away from new problems and global problems because you have some economic issues of your own. Indeed, it's all the more likely to be why you get dragged in.
> The West has sent hundreds of billions of dollars worth of aid to Ukraine
We can afford it. The US is probably well ahead due to the sale of new weapons as well.
Their attrition might be slow, but it's not that expensive. What is expensive are the aircraft/ships/missiles that Europe has too few of that they hope to stop a Russian invasion with if it came to it.
The global population is not dwindling yet. At the current derivative of birth rate it'll keep keep growing for 50 years. Of course many places will experience a demographic crisis well before the global population falls.
> we cannot compete with the Chinese on cost and probably can't trust their quality standards.
This already played out with Japanese cars and it turned out it was the quality rather than the cost that was hard to compete with. I'm going to bet that EVs from Asia will be better built than anything made in the US or Europe before too long (if not already). They'll manufacture at scale and work out the kinks.
Western companies should have been doing this. I feel that Tesla tried and never really got there. Protectionism alone won't make it happen.
You're oversimplifying (to be fair, so did I). There is usually a cost/quality tradeoff. In the long run I think every major country could figure out how to make things with any given level of quality, and have certain costs in the same ballpark. But our labor costs are higher than nearly any other country. Chinese labor is currently very cheap.
>Western companies should have been doing this. I feel that Tesla tried and never really got there. Protectionism alone won't make it happen.
Just because some people online claim they want $10k EVs doesn't mean they would buy them. It also doesn't mean that we could make them for that price, at any level of effort. We pay auto workers WAY more than the Chinese pay theirs.
Protectionism is why we have not already been flooded with crappy cars from overseas. We do not allow garbage vehicles to be imported. Neither do other countries. Of course, forcing people to buy cars at higher prices or different quality points inhibits domestic innovation. But if the industry dies because of ideological purity, we would be worse off as a nation than we would be driving cars that cost slightly more or lack certain features.
I wasn't really thinking about cost, but quality, when I made the comment about what we should be doing. Quality at scale with better processes and automation. I think history shows its the scale that matters. Once you have scale you can improve quality across everything.
> Protectionism is why we have not already been flooded with crappy cars from overseas.
I don't live in the US, but another Western country, one that doesn't protect the car market because we have no car manufacturing here at all. I'm not seeing a flood of crappy cars. The Chinese EVs seem very good on price and (so far, new models take time to reveal problems and serviceability) quality. Regulatory protectionism is a good thing, but I'm also not convinced that folks in China would be happy with crappy cars either.
>Quality at scale with better processes and automation. I think history shows its the scale that matters. Once you have scale you can improve quality across everything.
I agree but I don't think it is possible to maintain an advantage in process or scale permanently in general. If you expect other countries to never figure it out, you're wrong. But there can be a situation where higher local costs in some areas are offset somehow by transport costs or strategic subsidies for domestic production.
>Regulatory protectionism is a good thing, but I'm also not convinced that folks in China would be happy with crappy cars either.
China has many protectionist policies, some of which they have leveraged to steal technology from foreign competitors. The Chinese people are not very happy with their vehicle options, but they do not have the option to buy foreign either for the most part. To give you an idea how unhinged it can be in China, I've heard of campaigns to force everyone to discard perfectly good appliances and scooters to stimulate their economy and eat up excess product. It's a bad move but that's how they roll.
Foreign cars cannot be imported en masse to China, and even the cheapest Western-made cars are more expensive than the average Chinese buyer wants to pay. The cheapest new car on the US market is about $25k I think, and the average is closer to $40k.
>I don't live in the US, but another Western country, one that doesn't protect the car market because we have no car manufacturing here at all. I'm not seeing a flood of crappy cars.
I think you'd be better off buying cars from neighboring countries. Anyway, I think every country that can support car manufacturing should do so for strategic reasons. What I was referring to is US-specific rules about what kinds of cars can be imported. Imported cars are usually the more luxurious models due to the rules. The rules as I understand them involve listing out features that each model has. Bare bones and low-quality cars are rejected even if they could be useful to someone, because this strikes a balance between letting people buy what they want and supporting local industry.
>The Chinese EVs seem very good on price and (so far, new models take time to reveal problems and serviceability) quality.
They are cheap but low-quality and no doubt infused with Chinese spy/sabotage tech. I'm sure that they can eventually improve on quality, but ultimately countries in the West that produce cars now need to guard their own industries against insurmountable foreign competition. Nobody can beat the Chinese on price, generally. Their government will eat a loss to put competition out of business, because they want to take over the world. So the best we can do is act accordingly.
> I can see myself losing this ability in the next few years
Do you really see that? If a numberless analogue clock turned up in a society that had the same time system but had only ever used digital clocks, how long would it take to figure out how to read it? I'm fairly confident a logical person would figure it out in far less than an hour, and for you to relearn it: about 2 minutes. Once you perceive the movement of one hand you're there. For kids, learning the clock is also learning about time, numbers and fractions, so I'm assuming you won't also forget those things.
What I mean by "forget" is more about losing fluency. Right now when I look at a clock, I can have the hour in around half of a second and the minute in another half a second. But I know that a) I was faster a few years ago and that b) this trend for me will likely not reverse.
> They spend all of the their time between yard work
I do find it a tiny bit offensive the idea that kind of thing is boring because it's not your hobby. I live semi rural (not America) and gardening became a hobby, there are garden shows etc.
Everyone has the same amount of time to fill every day. When it comes to "things to do" I don't really see one optional lifestyle as more fulfilling or hollow than another. I could live in a city, which would open more options, more than I could possibly consume, but at the same time it would also constrain my resources so I wouldn't be able to do as much of one thing.. or have a big garden and a studio for painting.
I have two female cousins who are divorced and whose children are grown or nearly so. They are both in their late 40s, early 50s. They still live in my hometown. Guess how much they hate it here (I’m home for the holidays)?
I would be fine here as a married man. But I can’t imagine being single here instead of my two times being a single adult in Atlanta (22-28 and 32 through 35).
I “retired my wife” at 46 halfway so we could travel more (I work remotely) and halfway so she could pursue her hobbies. I would be okay here because most of what I do is on the weekend and there is an airport here that has two flights a day back and forth to the Atlanta Delta hub. She would absolutely hate it.
My resources were far from constrained making even $150K before 2020 living in a 3200 square foot house I had built in the northern burbs of Atlanta for $335K in 2016.
They are a lot less constrained now though making in the low $200s in state tax free Florida living outside of Orlando. That 200K is nothing to brag about in tech. As o said before that’s what a former intern I mentored at AWS is making as a mid level SA
I... didn't really understand most of what you wrote in context of my post. Yes, if I were single I'd probably go for a city. My wife hasn't had a job since we had kids when I was 25, and I think we're in a much better financial state because it meant we had an easier time shifting our lives around the world for my job. I've never earnt big tech salary but I make more than was possible with the jobs I could access in New Zealand.
> René did have to ban an angry troll, whom he mentions in a YouTube comment as one possible perpetrator. Others think someone from the Rust (programming language, not video game) development community was responsible due to how critical René has been of that project, but those claims are entirely unsubstantiated.
So what do we think is more likely here? Jumping the gun due to your own dislike of some groups it seems.
Or just stop watching. I seem to be out of tune with what people want in a TV show nowadays, I don't find much enjoyable. I accept there was never that much, but given how much content is produced now I would have expected more in my sweet spot.
And servo: I wish that one would get more mention as it's quite far along. Having multiple competing browsers again that are not controlled by megacorps would be great. Ladybird for browsing, Servo for embedding.
Plenty of things do work better as a native application. Packaging is a pain across the board nowadays. Apple is pretty good, you pay a yearly fee if you want your executable signed and notorized, but they make it very hard to run without that (for the lay person). Windows can run apps without them being signed but it gives you hell and the signing process is awful and expensive. Linux can be a packaging nightmare.
I mean, we (the west) could have saved ourselves a lot of money by putting it to Russia that if they crossed the border then we'd defend the airspace. Essentially, being half assed about it is going to cost more money and lives. The Ukrainians were going to defend themselves whatever we did.
I don't think Europe has a choice but to be involved.
> We have lots of problems of our own
I don't really understand that. You don't get to turn away from new problems and global problems because you have some economic issues of your own. Indeed, it's all the more likely to be why you get dragged in.
> The West has sent hundreds of billions of dollars worth of aid to Ukraine
We can afford it. The US is probably well ahead due to the sale of new weapons as well.
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