CDs were around $16 in 2000, which is equivalent to around $30 today, which is around 2.3 times what a Spotify premium subscription costs for one person.
Equivalently, a Spotify premium subscription in 2000 would be a little under $7.
I guarantee that if you asked young adults in 2000 if they would be interested in a subscription that lets them listen to nearly everything available on CD, at any time, as often as they wished, for $7/month they would have been ecstatic.
Same for DVDs, which were typically in the $20-25 range for new releases in 2000. They would not have been quite as happy as they would have been with Spotify because of the way video is split among several streaming services, but it would still be seen as a tremendous improvement.
I usually ask most of my drivers how much they're getting paid for each ride. Across MCOL and HCOL areas like SF, NYC, HTX, ATX, DMV - I've generally been seeing around 40% going to the driver.
I guess that if I could I adapt to cleartype when I ditched my 16" VGA Philips CRT, I'll be ready for "AI-powered Immersive Experiences", whatever that means in Visual Studio Code.
> You know that EU bureaucrats do what each country want them to do right?
I'n not entirely sure about that.
The vast majority of entrepreneurs are complaining about unrealistic requirements and inconceivable burdens in Germany. Certainly no one wants any of this. Yet somehow the rules pile up.
Which is just German culture as much as food is Italian. If you want rules for everything I'm hard pressed to think of a more regulated country than Germany. And the populace, in general, might scoff at how long things take but absolutely want to understand what the process is... So yeah, you can't have it both ways
> hard pressed to think of a more regulated country than Germany.
Unfortunately the influence of Germany over other EU countries is quite strong in terms of regulations.
Absolutely no one wants more regulations, yet they slowly pile up in the whole EU. I live in Poland, where regulations are incomparably more sane than those of Germany, but even here it slowly grows.
Stereotypes exist for a reason.
It would be stupid to argue that every single Russian is exactly like that. But at the same time you'll find those traits exhibited in a lot of Russians at various levels of seriousness.
Being bigoted is also pretending that tribes/cultures do not share patterns and behavior.
Individuals are unique, but they exist as part of a group. When you talk about the group, you necessarily need to make shortcuts and synthesize.
I'm pretty sure that when you talk about dogs, you'll attribute specific behaviors to specific races. But now it is not politically correct to think humans are the same, even though it is scientifically provable.
> The EU was supposed to bring countries together, but I think it did quite the contrary
What are some concrete examples of how Europeans countries are now further away from each other, since the start of EU and because of EU?
As someone who enjoyed the ability of freely moving across the continent to find a country I'm actually comfortable living in, it's hard for me to imagine EU made countries more distant to each other, but I'm not all-seeing and would love to understand more from another perspective.
Well, in the logistics department there is definitely more freedom. But it's not as much as you would think. You can ship stuff easily, travel easily, and send money easily, but at the end of the day, you'll have to submit to the government bureaucracy of each specific country with no real unifying logic and not even a shared language.
Technically, English is used everywhere (even though, ironically, the English are not even part of the EU anymore), but you can't really rely on it to get anything done locally in small cities.
If you want to move in the middle of France, good luck trying to deal with the bureaucrats in English for example.
Then the freedom was a pretext to do a lot of social dumping. If you ask the workers of the Renault plant that got displaced in the east because of lower labor costs, they won't have a lot of good things to say about this freedom.
I know a trucker who somewhat hates Poles, not because he has anything against them particularly but because they engage in social dumping by competing for work in France while only following laws from Poland. A Frenchman living in France can never be competitive with that because he has to pay a lot more in taxes and follows the French laws.
Germany engages in regulatory warfare for electricity. They are ideologically against nuclear and imposed renewables as the only solution (while burning a shit ton of coal/gas). Since their approach is very costly and not reliable, they imposed regulation on the European electricity to make the cheaper French nuclear electricity less competitive. That wasn't enough, so even though they don't have nuclear anymore, they forced themselves into the Flamanville project and imposed their insane regulation (via Siemens), which is the major reason it took so long. This is industrial sabotage and engaging in bad-faith collaboration. And now we have to sell them winter electricity on the cheap while they offload their summer electricity that literally nobody wants.
It's impossible to not hate them for it, since electricity prices have risen tremendously for the end consumer. The crazy part is that it completely undermined the supposed goal of lowering emission (people went back to heating with wood-burning and paraffin/kerosene stoves).
Spain floods the market with cheap fruits/vegetables that are much cheaper not only because of geographical comparative advantages but also because they import cheap seasonal labor from North Africa, often not respecting labor rules (that much became obvious in the COVID crisis).
Italy wants to leave because they are going down the fascist path they already took a while ago.
Lidl, a German supermarket chain, sells cheap Chinese-made tools in their stores under the pretense of German quality. But since the rise of platforms like AliExpress/Temu, consumers have had access to similar items for even cheaper because they allow cutting out the middleman.
Unsurprisingly, the EU ruled that now consumers have to pay taxes on the items they buy directly from China.
Freedom is OK only when it is the powerful that can fill their pocket after engaging in rampant social dumping. For now, China has settled on shipping stuff to a warehouse located in Eastern Europe and dispatching it from here, basically using a regulatory loophole that allows them to pay the cheapest amount of taxes.
I could go on and on, but the reality is that the EU has largely impoverished and weakened most of its constituent countries. It doesn't look that way for now, because everything has been paid for with unsustainable debt. But now the invoice is being presented to the young generations.
The EU can't even manage to make a common army or apply regulation uniformly across countries (look at the labels on products).
All it has done is create unfair competition that benefits the powerful first and foremost.
So yeah, you can travel freely, but who cares? In my youth I traveled in many EU countries before it was open like that. Stopping at customs and having to exchange currency was inconvenient, but improving those mild problems is definitely not worth the massive amount of exploitation and dissent that has resulted.
The EU is the same ideological enterprise as the USSR, and the same problems that are linked to a massive bureaucracy are now showing up.
You just cannot force different groups to adopt the same rules/behaviors because there are too many cultural differences. Values are too far apart, and the environment/advantages are too different.
Germany likes the EU a lot because they have outsized political power in it and are the ones who profit the most: they get access to cheap eastern labor/resources while being able to sell in the rich markets of their neighbors on the other side.
We may enjoy the freedom while it lasts, because the EU is under attack from all fronts. Russia is waging a real war, China is engaging in economic warfare and the US is pulling out military support to gain resources.
The constituent countries are not any stronger, and in fact, they have weakened their position on many fronts. Fighting together is illusory because the interests/incentives are more often opposed than aligned.
That's a lot of words to skip around the actual question at hand here:
> What are some concrete examples of how Europeans countries are now further away from each other, since the start of EU and because of EU?
Are you claiming that France and Poland are "further away" from each other today than before, because of those issues about the trucker?
Are you saying that Germany is now further away from the countries in Europe than before EU?
You're going on a wild tangent, and I gave you the benefit of the doubt to read all of it, hoping that eventually you'd get to the point. But it's all tangents, nothing about the topic at hand.
So again, the initial claim was "The EU was supposed to bring countries together, but I think it did quite the contrary", do you have any concrete instances of this happening? Not theoretical, not how one Frenchman now hates Poles, but actual instances of the countries not getting closer together, but further apart, because of the EU?
Because currently, your non-answer makes it seem like you don't actually have any concrete examples here, leaving your original comment looking like ramblings without any rationality.
You should bear in mind that thinking of an IT specialist or a software developer is very much uncommon among population. As developers we tend to think alike worldwide. But walk out the door and ask ten (older) German people whether they would prefer to use government email-like service instead of paper mails, and see what answer comes to the top.
German precision was not only about engineering, it has always also been about having a precisely defined bureaucratic process for everything.
Also, people never explicitly say they do want more bureaucracy. More often, the bureaucracy is more often a result of what people don't want to. They may want more roads, but they don't want them near *their* home, thus they fight for something to prevent construction there. They may want this subsidy, but they most certainly do not want person X to get it as well.
Bureaucracy is a beast with its own life, it doesn't care what regular people want. In fact most folks' requirements go directly against objectives of this beast, since people want it as small and as weak as possible, while beast need to be fed and feels internally it needs to be strong. Anything not related to gaining or maintaining strength is antagonist.
And even if that's not the case, the group of "entrepreneurs" is so small compared to the voting population at large, that they won't even notice if they crush it entirely into paste.
Exactly this. Common folks like "tough on crime" postures of politicians and never consider nuance, which is everything. Yeah, crush them, those white-collared fraudsters.
The goal of dev is to be able to change everything whenever they want.
The goal of ops is to have a strong infra that has the fewest changes possible.
They are opposite and usually there are more devs than ops but the first respondent to an issue are ops.
You can only have devops if both roles are intertwined in the same team AND, the organization understands the implications.
Everywhere I've been, devops was just an excuse to transfer ops responsibilities to dev because dev where cheaper. Dev became first respondents without having the knowledge of the infrastructure.
So dev insisted to have docker so that they would be the one managing the infra.
But everyone failed to see that whichever expensive tools you buy, the biggest issue was the lack of personal investment to solve a problem.
If you are a 1.5x dev in a 0.9x team, you get all the incidents, and are still expected to build new stuff.
And building new stuff is fun.
Spending 2 days to analyze a performance issue because a 0.3x dev found it easier to do a .sort() in Linq instead of Sql is fun only once.
People can’t care about stuff they don’t know about. Split the roles and you split responsibility. It’s the same with dev and QA. Suddenly, the person paid to care about quality or stability realizes that the person who’s paid for something else doesn’t care like their job depends on it. Because it doesn’t. So OP above is right, splitting things and specializing horizontally is most times a bad and, if you think about it, not very smart move.
And now it's given by the mainstream media, which is mostly owned by a few very rich people and pushes the same type of propaganda as before (but now globally).
There was a point where I would agree with that, but we seem to be moving past that. The "truth" seems to be coming more from social media influencers than mainstream media now.
It seems today that he was just wrong and used to make "dubious" clinical trials.
> As of 2025, 46 of Raoult's research publications have been retracted, and at least another 218 of his publications have received an expression of concern from their publishers, due to questions related to ethics approval for his studies.
Raoult's case is so strange.. he's not the usual fringe doctor, up until covid, he had a center seat in national health institution and everybody around him was listening. I still don't get why nobody was wary of him there..
> Anyone with two braincells could see it at the time.
It seems a captain obvious now but it wasn't so at the time. (Or maybe my.braincells.count() < 2)
Many people listened because he wasn't some youtuber doing his research, he was the head of the "Infectious and Tropical Emergent Diseases Research Unit" ad the Faculty of Medicine of Marseille.
I've watched one of his interviews where he stated that people survived in his unit with hydroxychloroquine and that he had numbers to prove it.
When you look at his credentials, and my.braincells.count(), it was hard to identify it as misinformation.
I definitely exaggerated with my "two braincells". Even the french president said about the guy "we need more people like him" (although I wouldn't say he's that smart himself...).
But even without being knowledgeable about statistics, there were a lot of very serious people giving very good arguments against his results. You just had to see them. And seeing all the Facebook doctors lunatics instantly side with Raoult and defend him tooth and nail should definitely raise some red flags...
Yes. When coming from DOS, all the UI/UX that could have been created has been created. What we have now is a loop of tries to refresh the existing but it's hard, mainly because it's now everywhere and it has reached maturity.
As an example, the "X" to close and the left arrow for back won't be replaced before a long time, just like we still have a floppy to represent save.
Cars have tried to refresh their ui/UX but they failed and are now reverting back to knobs and buttons.
It seems that VisionOS is a place where innovation could come but it's not really a success.
Moreover, designers keep trying to justify their own jobs by changing fully functional interfaces, and then claiming post-hoc that the new UIs are better because they are better.
Designers decided that scrollbars that shrink to super-thin columns when not in use were better. Maybe... but often it results in shrunken scrollbars that require extra work to accurately hover over and expand.
Designers decided that gray text on gray backgrounds were easier to read, and there was even a study to "prove" it... which resulted in idiots picking poor contrast choices of gray-on-gray, without understanding the limits on this idea.
I will say that the current push for accessibility is forcing some of these "innovations" back onto the junk heap where they belong. I was annoyed the first time an accessibility review complained about the contrast of my color choices on a form once... but once I got over my ego, I have to admit they were right; the higher-contrast colors are easier to read.
Honestly, I could endlessly vehemently express my frustration to any designer that find this "cool".
/* rant /
Those designer never had to scroll to a long, long scrollable section of a page to reach the end and sadly discover that the "end" button doesn't work, because of course the browser goes to the end of the page, not the end of the scrollable section.
And of course, the scrollbar is 2 pixels wide (I took a screenshot to measure it) and it's only visible if I put my mouse in the section.
And of course, it's right next to the scrollbar that the dev decided to put the Action Icons for each item in the scrollable section.
1 Pixel left, open the popup to delete the item, 1 pixel right, scrollbar.
And of course, if I increase the zoom on my browser, everything grows, except the scrollbar.
I can have icons the size of my fist on a 27" screen but those scrollbar stay thinner than an uncooked spaghetti.
I've seen it mentioned somewhere, probably here on HN, that the original thin scrollbar was implemented in Gnome, and that it only applied until you moved your cursor to it. If true, this sounds like a great innovation. Unfortunately, nobody bothers to expand the scrollbar when you get near it. And of course, scrollbars also didn't start to disappear until long after the square-ish monitors that made them so annoying were mostly replaced by widescreen monitors that didn't have that issue.
Anecdotally, I do recall using an extremely obnoxious viewer application (PDFs or ebooks or some such) on the Windows 8 store that reversed scroll entirely. The scrollbars were still there (though I can't remember if they had handles), but scrolling the mouse wheel down moved the document up.
The best UI is no UI--the program anticipates what you need and does it when you need it. Unfortunately, this is impossible in practice for anything other than the simplest systems (eg. pause music playback when the phone rings).
Every young adult I know uses a subscription for everything I used to buy. Even though they own the device on which they consume it.
Spotify for cd's, Netflix-Disney-Amazon for vhs and dvd's, Udemy-Masterclass for books.
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