They don’t think, that they are killing innovation! I was told that they measure „innovation“ by „patents granted“ - and if you see it that way, only big enterprises can be innovative! And i bet most bureaucrats never worked at a startup!
That’s why i‘m using claude to literally write everything for myself! I cannot fix software-problems in my car or my fridge or my heat-pump. But I can start by replacing my own infrastructure!
I came to the same conclusion and normally i don’t write about it. Beiing one of the few who pays 250€ to get my family vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 every year here in Germany (i have to pay because our „StIKo“ doesn’t recommend the vaccination) kind of makes me hesitant to talk about it.
If you want to be an authoritarian ruler, truth is the first thing you have to eliminate! If noone knows what is true, a leader can tell you what to believe! Science is our method to determine truth! A führer cannot have that!
More than that if you're a professor (and thus an educator for the next generation) you're now incentivized to modify your speech in favour of the authoritarian in order to keep getting funding.
I wouldn't underestimate the degree to which funding to these is being cut because climate scientists have historically been politically opposed to certain large republican donors that make their fortunes burning fossil fuels.
“When Fascism came into power, most people were unprepared, both theoretically and practically. They were unable to believe that man could exhibit such propensities for evil, such lust for power, such disregard for the rights of the weak, or such yearning for submission. Only a few had been aware of the rumbling of the volcano preceding the outbreak.”
Hahaha! Have fun! I‘m doing the same - together with Claude Code. Since August. With https (mTLS1.3) everywhere, because i can. Just my money, just my servers, just for me. Just for fun. And what a fun it is!
Me too. I already moved our products to it and it is getting fairly robust. Guess many smaller companies got tired with the big guys asking a lot of money for things that should be cheap.
There is a social meme going around about Mississippi being wealthier than Bordeaux, France [1] that relates to the “Mississippi Question" (the question is whether a country is poorer than Mississippi, which is used as a benchmark for low income and wealth within the U.S). Broadly speaking, it speaks to GDP and economic numbers being poor metrics for tracking happiness and quality of life [2] [3] [4]. Mississippi GDP per capita is higher than Spain, Italy, the UK, and France; where would you rather live as a human?
Edit: I do like that this uses time as a measure versus fiat; fiat can be gamed, time consumed to meet a need cannot.
Otherwise Oklahoma would be last in basically every single metric used to compare states. It was more true then than now. Mississippi made major changes to their education system and it has been paying off. I'm not to familiar with how they are doing on other metrics.
But more importantly, it ignores what you can do with the extra hours you work.. same as with PPP it ignores that an iPhone isn't cheaper (it may not be a basic necessity), but many globally traded goods that go beyond basic needs aren't affected by PPP.
Scope note: This index is a floor affordability ratio for non-tradables (rent, utilities, basic food, transit). It doesn’t rate product quality or luxury/tradable goods.
Quality: True—quality varies. We use a fixed, minimal basket to avoid hedonic debates; I can add sensitivity bands by quality/spec.
“What extra hours buy”: Good point. We’ll add Discretionary Hours = paid hours/month − hours to essentials to show room for non-essentials, saving, leisure.
iPhone / tradables: Different lens. Many tradables price similarly across countries; essentials are mostly local/non-tradable and drive this metric. We can add a companion “tradables-hours” (e.g., hours to buy an iPhone/streaming bundle).
Takeaway: Essentials-hours ≠ welfare. It’s one clean piece—time to cover basics—best paired with discretionary and tradables views.
Not a welfare ranking. This measures one thing: hours of work to cover a small monthly essentials basket (rent, utilities, basic food, transport) = price ÷ wage. Healthcare/education/vacation are mostly outside that basket or already baked into hourly pay.
So to put this another way, this is supposed to measure the avg absolute buying power of a worker and compares them by country? The part where I can see the disconnect here is a lot of European countries have their social programs baked into the wage (eg I expect to get paid less to work in Sweden as opposed to the US because I'm getting some of that 'back' through social services) however that isn't always the case for some countries. For example I'm not deducting healthcare costs from my salary in the US, but I'm still paying it after the fact which decreases my spending power.
There's too many specific variables to account for in this that I feel like the general comparison is almost hurtful at worst or doesn't tell the whole story at best.
More speech! The signal vs. noise-ratio shifts. So access to information will become more difficult. More disinformation and outright nonsense will make it more difficult to get to the valuable stuff.
Ok - let‘s see how that works!
