That Behaviorism rejected complex internal states (or "cognitive representations") was and is a bit of a strawman. The point is that the internal states must be defined such that they can be grounded in observable behavior.
> Some OSS will keep going - wealthy devs doing it for fun or education. That's not a system, that's charity.
I'm all for non-monetary motives, but the reality is that most people have to work for a living, leaving quite limited time/energy for volunteering. The scale of OSS that we have today would not (perhaps sadly) be possible without OSS development paying the bills.
Wealthy devs context is also foreign to me. I started to open source my code way before I was making any money. I just did it because I saw no reason for it to be closed sourced. It would only benefit me. But in the open it can benefit many people without taking anything away from me.
> Some OSS will keep going - wealthy devs doing it for fun or education. That's not a system, that's charity.
I read that. That statement is technically true but I don't like that they put a negative connotation around it. Apologies if they didn't intend it like that.
But I'll say that there is nothing wrong with charity. Some devs will do open source with hope to monetize. Some will do it for charity. Both are equally valid motivations.
EU is pro-privatization to the core. Keeping the production of goods and services outside the democratic sphere is arguably the raison d'etre of EU/EEA.
The ECB official claims that with the digital euro merchants will start to push towards the no-fee option.
> "The merchant will probably say to the customer: ‘please pay by digital euro, or else you pay an extra fee’. Instead of handing over so much money to Mastercard or Visa, they will have the option of our not-for-profit payment engine.”
But it's the EU who with the Payment Systems Directives bans merchants from passing the fees to customers. Annoying how this isn't even mentioned. Public officials should treat us as citizens of a democratic system, not subjects of techocratic bureaucracy to be managed with PR campaigns.
That said, payment system as public service is kinda a no-brainer. Due to the lobbyist capture of EU I don't have too high hopes though.
Businesses with slim margins in Germany simply do not have Visa/Mastercard -- only "EC", the German network. Thay means it's not a matter of passing on cost, but it's a choice for the consumer: cash or EC.
If I had to guess, having subbbed to the EC network, or any of the other country specific ones, merchants would simply get the new one as well automatically.
Similar things are happening with online ID where an EU-wide provider is being rolled out and if you as a service provider need KYC-type ID you integrate only with it. Under the hood the user can use any of the national IDs.
While this is true, I've seen plenty of bank-backed ads basically stating "please try paying by card even if it's a small amount, it doesn't cost you extra anymore", sending practically free money towards Mastercard and Visa. Participating banks or even governments could easily set up an equivalent advertising campaign for their new system.
The ability to have mobile payment without the prying eyes of the American government alone could be a good ad. I'm sure Trump will start another trade war if an ad actually voices that benefit, though.
In theory, merchants can choose not to support certain payment processors. I can imagine a minimum-price supermarket chain like Lidl eventually dropping Visa and Mastercard to cut costs, for instance.
I imagine 2 big giants basically (Nvidia/google/amd basically influenced by a few select of people) vs (Chinese companies who have investments from the govt)
its sort of like proxy wars and this is sort of whats happening in software side of things with open source models but I think that the benefit of the proxy wars is going to be for the end consumers
But although on the other hand, having two large countries compete with each other while buying everything else and all feels like it astronomically increases the price if someone wants to compete with these two giants (any other country perhaps)
We definitely need a better system where it doesn't feel like we are seeing pacman eat everything up basically
Is it not? All this money is going into AI under the fear that China will win the race to AGI. China releases open-source models that keep OpenAI/Anthropic researching and training their models, which in turn creates demand for more Nvidia GPUs.
Nobel prizes in physics are awarded typically with lag of 20-30 years. In early 2000s China was still a relative backwater economically (and academically). In 2000 US R&D spending was over 8 times China's. Now China has likely surpassed USA. It surpassed EU already in about 2014.
Working in academia, the rise of China academically is palpable. There's an avalance of Chinese research published, and a reasonable chunk of it very high quality, and getting better.
"The large variations in the systems and processes to define mortality causes imply there may be very different numbers of deaths that are registered with a specific cause. This creates a problem for cross-country comparisons of mortality by cause in general, and even more so for deaths of despair, and suicides in particular.
The person responsible for writing the cause of death on the death certificate may be different across countries. In some countries, the police are responsible, while in others a medical doctor, coroner, or judicial investigator takes on this role. Differences in doctors’ training, access to medical records, and autopsy requirements contribute to these discrepancies. The legal or judicial systems that decide causes of death also vary. For instance, in some countries suicide is illegal and is not listed as a classifiable cause of death, leading to underreporting or misclassification of suicides as accidents, violence, or deaths of “undetermined intent.”[25]
Data on suicides, even when reported, can be inaccurate due to social factors as well. In some countries, suicide might be taboo and highly stigmatised, so the families and friends of the person who committed suicide might decide to misreport or not disclose the mortality cause, causing underreporting of its incidence. In other societies, such as Northern Europe, there is less stigma attached to suicides, and alcohol and drug use."
I don't think it would be that difficult to reconcile suicides between G20 countries. Outside of that, sure, data collection methods and quality heavily differ. But many people are interested in the varying levels of happiness among the G20 and there it doesn't seem that difficult to compare.
The World Happiness Report extensively discusses positive and negative affect in Chapter 2 and the relatively high suicide/death of despair rates of the Nordic countries in Chapter 6. These seem to be totally ignored in TFA.
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