> thing with credit cards is that you can have more than one. I have a Visa and a Mastercard and when I shop at Costco I use Visa. I don't see this reason stopping someone wanting to compete as though if they can't get the Costco dollars, they have no product.

I'm sorry, are we really saying that it's acceptable for the market to begin preferring one completely compatible payment network vs another? This is clearly an undue influence in the market due to monopolistic power being used as leverage. No one should have to open an account with visa just to shop at a retailer. Anti competitive and anti consumer to the core.

> But that really has to do with ridiculous regulations and things like KYC, but we're not ready to have that conversation yet.

Ahhh, fearmongering about KYC. Know your customer is an obviously good regulation for banks to know the type of business they are partnering with for both risk assessment and anti fraud protections. So, what scams are you in favor of allowing by removing KYC regulations?

> No one should have to open an account with visa just to shop at a retailer.

You know you have to pay just to enter Costco right? What's the difference if they want to force customers to use cash or Visa. Do you feel the same way about businesses that reject Discover?

I really don't understand the outrage.

> Ahhh, fearmongering about KYC. Know your customer is an obviously good regulation for banks to know the type of business they are partnering with for both risk assessment and anti fraud protections. So, what scams are you in favor of allowing by removing KYC regulations?

KYC and AML measures have a limited impact on stopping fraud and terrorism financing. Current efforts intercept only an estimated 0.1 to 0.2 percent of laundered money. A 2018 study suggested that the overall impact of AML policy intervention on criminal finances is less than 0.1 percent, which is considered negligible. This aligns with a 2011 UNODC report indicating that "much less than one percent (probably around 0.2 percent)" of the proceeds of crime laundered via the global financial system are seized and frozen.

Regulations should not be judged by intentions but rather results

https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/why-anti-money-laundering...

I don’t understand this line of argument at all… Costco has competitors, you do NOT have to go to Costco. I choose not to go to many places because I disagree with their business practices or politics or whatever I feel like - it is my right. I do not understand this at all - especially in America. You don’t want my MasterCard or Discover or WhateverNewPaymentThingy? Great, imma head over to XYZ and spend my money there. Going to Costco (or any other business) and saying “you must accept XYZQ form of payment or else…” feels China-ish at best. And excusing Amex - why is that?! Fees alone? So we’d be cool if Visa just said “whatever you have to pay MC/Discover we’ll do it for one penny less”? At Costco’s scale that’d still be a boatload of money

If you want a healthy market, your standard cannot simply be: As long as there is more than one retailer in the space, retailers can place whatever restrictions they want on how you pay for their services. Businesses in one sector being able to directly affect consumer choices across sectors is how you end up with cross sector monopolies.

It is bizarre to bring up China here, this isn't about the state dictating the payment system but maintaining a healthy market. It's like a garden, you don't dictate exactly how the plants grow, but you prune them once they encroach onto other plants to maintain a healthy balance.

I brought up Amex because it is common for merchants to not accept it, due to it being a significantly worse deal for the merchants. I am fine with the argument for an even more expansive version of my argument, but I'm making a more narrow argument due to discover, visa, mastercard being so close in how they function that it is not a burden on merchants to accept one vs the others.

> And excusing Amex - why is that?! Fees alone?

To be fair, the core AMEX product is a charge card, not a credit card. They have more recently expanded into a few credit card products. I don't know the exact details, but my understanding is that the charge card system is more merchant hostile than the credit card system and more than simply larger fees.

but we are establishing here that companies (like Costco) have the right to choose which payment methods they allow in their store… if they can (of course they can and no one should stop them) then they can - end of story

Oh this is wildly cool! Do cloud providers like aws allow you to upload a custom system image to run as a vm?

Absolutely. Everyone who deploys unikernels to the public clouds does this. Some are better fits than others. AWS for instance you can build an image and deploy an ec2 instance in a matter of seconds.

My information is probably out of date but historically yes. Also historically operating systems other than Linux were pretty iffy.

I know you can run BSD on AWS for example.

All this talk about culture and the author doesn't talk about the fundamental issue: The EU created a European identity yes, but the amount of decentralization and universal consensus required to create the EU means it will never be a functioning state in and of itself. So there isn't a European tech industry, there are highly interconnected but distinct tech industries in Germany, France, Netherlands, Finland, Estonia, Ireland, Sweden. Only very recently has the EU began to try to consolidate pools of capital to facilitate large scale VC funding. There is a bright future I think, as America continues to rapidly decline, but this needs to be addressed. The ultimate irony? The author is English and moved back to London which is emphatically not European now. Going to be hard to cheerlead for the EU from the wreckage of brexit

Great Britain, where London is located, is in Europe. As such, it remains European.

It is no part of the European Union but other countries in the continent are also not, without having ceased to be European.

America existed before the USA became a country and all countries within it haven't ceased to be in America or American either.

We're talking about industry here so political boundaries matter not the geographic definition of Europe. Trade restrictions are in place between the UK and the EU, and thus place a wedge between the two.

Great tip! But it only remove's Google's terrible AI summary, not AI generated content from showing up in searches, which is what the OP wishes for. A combination of -ai and before:2022-01-01 is probably the closest we can get to that

> It's interesting because in some respects we are in the middle of a cultural and scientific Renaissance

I'm sorry to rebutt your very first assertion but we had been in a cultural and scientific Renaissance and the last 15 years have been the slow unwinding of that. We got lucky that the internet explosion overlapped with the tail end of publicly supported cultural and scientific production.

I hung out with physics majors in college, all of them smarter than us compsci chuds, and uniformly they are absolutely struggling to survive as post docs or in industry. One of my college buddies has worked at nasa for 4 different firms and has had to move to Texas, Kansas, and Maryland for these gigs and has once again landed on a project where the funding got cut and is looking for a new job. Another works in nano scale semiconducting and had to move to Finland to get project funding from the EU since the US has made basic research funding so scarce. And after several post doc roles he is leaving the field after his last grant wasn't renewed, with not an ounce of negative feedback. Just, sorry we don't have any money anymore. He's now going to go into failure analysis for a mobile phone manufacturer to pay the bills.

The woes of cultural production have also been well documented.

We are in a cultural and scientific collapse

But there's so much money in academia. Where's it going?

Universities charge stupid amounts (50%+) of overhead to researchers. The PIs basically run a lab, hustle for the funding writing grant proposals, and uni takes a big fat cut of whatever funding gets pulled in. And that overhead all gets spent on useless administration, buildings and facilities, investments, and basically anything other than the research the grant was for.

https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/25910/what-does...

The problem is that there's so little money in academia. In the US, state support for public universities has plummeted in the 21st century. In the last state I lived in, the state university near me went from providing over 75% of teaching costs to under 25% in less than 20 years. Tuitions have risen, but it's important to understand the sticker prices are usually discounted with financial aid. If a university raises tuitions by an amount x, they are usually brining in less than 1/2 x new funding. Ironically, reducing university funding leads universities hire more administrators, as they attempt to replace lost funding with donations or indirect costs.

The administrative class in universities are doing just fine.

The US civil war is not the only time the US has been politically unstable. The civil rights movement, the labor disputes of the 1970s, the economic shocks every decade or so from market crashes all have been moments of instability.

What is January 6th if not a concrete example of recent political instability?

As for foreign policy consistency, 7 administrations takes us back to Reagan... The entire movement to sell out our industrial capacity to China and now the movement to try to reverse that have occurred in this time frame. This is just as important as our endless wars in the middle east, imo.

I don't disagree totally but I felt the need to put some nuance here.

If those are "minor" shocks then is it only outright war that counts as instability for you?

If so then what countries in Europe (sans the Balkans) or East Asia do you think are less politically stable than the US?

If some catastrophic event is required to define instability, then by definition any country will be stable right until one second before catastrophe. This may work fine for certain analyses, but for predicting if or when that event may happen it is useless.

You're saying "nothing bad will happen because nothing bad has happened so far". There's a first time for everything.

We're already there. It's one of the causes of why all our physical infrastructure is failing. When we outsourced our manufacturing in the 90s-2010s, we lost all that talent.

It's also why this will be the Chinese century.

> It's also why this will be the Chinese century.

Modulo how important AI turns out to be.

25 years ago, it seemed obvious China was going to be to the 21st century what the USA was to the 20th. But also 25 years ago, AI translation in a video call that not only dubs you in your own voice but also modifies your mouth to sync lips with the synthesised voice, was wild speculative SciFi on par with a warp drive.

China's population peaked in 2022, 8 years ahead of schedule. It's a massive challenge and no country in history ever managed to reverse a trend in births of this sort.

PRCs aggregate births from 2000-22 is like ~350m, around a US worth with 60% and rising tertiary enrollment, disproportionate going STEM + technical. They're going to be drowning in talent (hence youth unemployment problem), multiple times than US can match with domestic+immigration. This is more than enough talent (and cheap due to supply/demand) to compete/dominate in strategic industries until 2060s+, especially with emphasis on driving brains into hard sciences vs finance or excess software. Yeah there's going to be challenges dealing with the pyramid but not with domains driven by skilled talent. All the catchup PRC has done in past 20 years was fueled by fraction of skilled workforce relative to what they'll generate in next 20-30.

The high youth unemployment is an indicator that their industries haven't caught up with providing jobs - there's no way for those people to utilise that talent.

All that when China's fertility rate has been below replacement since at least the early 90s. This is the generation of "little emperors", who were heavily invested in.

Japan went that route, complete with a real estate bubble which is also present in China. Didn't go well for them.

OECD combined STEM talent generation = high more indicator of surplus / overcapacity in generation = cheaper talent. It's about not having SHORTAGE of talent while catching up, even if some excess ends up driving cabs. Eitherway, youth emplloyment high, but not crippling high and overall unemployment is like 5% which means youths finds jobs eventually, just not right away.

The goal of family planning / investing in 1-2 kids is explicitly so resrouces can be pooled to throw them into tertiary - little educated emperors - so they can compete in advanced sectors instead of having 10 kids make widgets.

Japan is basically a US Satrap whose economy can be easily coerced via US influence (i.e. US killing JP semi / forcing it to appreciate FX to kill competitiveness). PRC insulated from that / doesn't have to comply. Also JP's talent is why it's still competitive DESPITE having such shit TFR, same with SKR. The issue witht those are relatively small countries is that they've already maxed out their human capital (80% skilled work force). They're running to stand still from bad demographic trends. PRC is still transitioning from 20% skilled to 80% skilled, they still have so much substantial room to accomodate 100s of millions of new skilled workforce and milk productivity gains current driven down by massive pool of under productive / undereducated labour will slowly be replaced (really die, since that cohort leans old). That's the problem comparing JP with PRC demographics... their skilled demographic/workforce composition not remotely comparable.

Almost. They’re already fantastic at manufacturing and to a certain extent improving on technologies but we haven’t seen a lot of new breakthrough come from China yet. I don’t doubt it will start happening, it’s just a matter of when.

ChatGPT still thinks Mississippi has an R in it sometimes.

It depends how you look at it. /s

that used to be so hard to spell, it used to make me cry, but since I’ve studied spelling it’s just like pumpkin pie

I'm sorry but even if you manage to resolve the PIP, it is always there in the HR records as a black mark. It will always make it easier (not guaranteed, but easier) to get hit in the next round of layoffs