YZF

France spent ~5% of its GDP on education. 5th in the EU in spending.

France is in the top 20% of the world in terms of resources and probably around the middle of the OECD.

When I went to school we had classes of 35 students. Often in the heat with no air conditioning. And we didn't go riot, burn city halls, loot stores etc. We didn't mask up and go throw rocks at the police either.

Whatever is going on in France, thinking about it as "students protesting for better schools" doesn't feel correct at all. You see organized groups of masked protesters attacking the police, looting etc. Are there a lot of people who think they're out there for some supposed good cause? Sure.

High rates can make the currency more attractive. Not less. Tends to strengthen the USD. So the next conclusion is also false.

But yes, higher yields can be related to demand, but they're not simply a function of demand. They relate to things like inflation expectations, and so the short term rates set by the Fed, and the risk premium. In this case likely the higher rates are not high due to demand but rather due to inflation expectations and the Fed having raised the overnight rate.

Bid to cover can be one estimate of demand and I'm not really seeing anything particularly exciting going on here: https://en.macromicro.me/charts/30431/us-10y-bid-to-cover-ra...

Maybe the downvoters can actually provide some real sort of evidence to support their case. If Israel "steals more secrets from the US than China" as is asserted let's see that proven. If human rights in Israel are worse than lessay China, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or Qatar, lets see something to support that. Well- that something doesn't exist.

Here's some actual data, human rights index: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-rights-index-vdem?t...

Worst ten:

North Korea 0.08 0.02 -0.06 -71%

Afghanistan 0.12 0.04 -0.08 -67%

Eritrea 0.05

Nicaragua 0.08

Myanmar 0.10

Turkmenistan 0.11

Laos 0.16 0.14 -0.02 -9%

Palestine/Gaza 0.17

Tajikistan 0.17

Equatorial Guinea 0.17

But haters will hate.

China has stolen x1000000 secrets from the US. Everyone spies on everyone. Israel relatively less. So that assumption is just baseless.

"Has violated every international law". Baseless. Violates less "international laws" than most western countries, not to speak of the rest of the world. I mean "international law" isn't really a thing, it's a series of treaties.

Called non-Jews "human animals". Just the Hamas and the perpetrators of Oct 7th. And rightly so. I mean animal is a compliment to those people. (all humans are animals really).

I don't know where you're getting all of this from. But it's an alternate reality. It is not factual. It is putting Israel under a microscope when most of the world behaves much worse. There are dozens of countries with much worse human rights violations than Israel is even accused of. And many of those accusations are outright lies. That's not to say every Israeli soldier is perfect or that Israel is perfect, but it's certainly better than e.g. anything the west did when it went after ISIS/ISIL or Al Qaeda or pretty much any other war waged by the west. And the west is better than the rest of the world by far.

"Has killed thousands of journalists, doctors, nurses and NGO staff without even trying to pretend that they care." -> totally false again. Many of these were Hamas combatants, e.g.: https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/the-press-files/does-the-id...

You are just echoing propaganda here. And that's the reality of why people hate Israel. Because they are bombarded by propaganda that tells them to hate Israel. If you actually are able to zoom out of that you will see it as well. That plus antisemitism.

EDIT: You are right that Israel isn't spending a ton of cycles trying to get e.g. Europe and Americans to "like it". Between the choice of e.g. winning the war in Gaza and e.g. giving up to Biden's demands (e.g.) Israel has chosen that it must win the war. The American left, media, and universities, e.g. are structurally biased against Israel. They are regurgitating cold war USSR narratives. This is the result of more than two decades of anti-Israeli propaganda. Israel sometimes has to cut its losses. It can't out compete the resources of Qatar, Russia, and China e.g. who are out to splinter the US by whatever means possible. It could do better but between "making friends" and a decisive win against Hamas which is crucial for its future security it will pick the decisive win.

Look at the media coverage regarding Israel's continued pressure on Hamas since the ceasefire. Israel keeps eliminating Hamas commanders, it's eliminating people who were part of the Oct 7th raid into Israel, it's eliminating infrastructure used for military purposes, it's eliminating people who have held hostages. What the media is reporting is simply that Israel is "violating the ceasefire" and "killing Palestinians". That narrative is false. If you believe it then you're going to "hate Israel" as you are programmed to do. But Israel like any other country has the right to win against Hamas in this war Hamas started.

EDIT2: Also reality is complex. So we do have things like an extremist right wing government who is turning a blind eye to violence against Palestinians in the West Bank. However that tends to be blown out of proportion. We see western media simply not reporting on Palestinian violence against Israelis. Just like they didn't report Hezbollah's attacks on northern Israel. The evacuation of the population there. And generally anything that puts Israel in a possible light as being the one defending itself. So if you consume simply a one sided picture you're going to end up with a one sided picture view. And the wrong view. You won't understand e.g. why Israel went into Lebanon if you never heard about the scale of attacks on Israel originating from Lebanon. Israel isn't always right, and ofcourse attacks on innocents are never justified, but those are some small pieces of a big picture, and you're only getting those pieces. From Gaza you are basically getting 100% Hamas controlled views which the media repeats as facts (journalists, doctors, etc.). When media talks about Palestinians in the west bank it also immediately whitewashes everyone into civilians. In fact there are armed factions operating in the West Bank and a lot of the overall violence (not the settlers vs. random innocent) is towards dismantling those.

This is an extremely weak argument.

Pre-1967 Israel didn't control the West Bank or Gaza. So most of the bad stuff people claim about Israel today didn't really exist.

Yet all its neighbours wanted to destroy it.

Lebanon who in theory should have no dispute with Israel bombarded it with ten's of thousands of rockets, mortars, anti-tank munitions etc. After Oct 7th.

The bit you're missing in your overly simplistic analysis is that Israel is really surrounded/attacked by a single religious/political ideology. There is no "everybody else here".

Why are all these AI's making the pelican's pouch so large though? Unless they have some huge fish in there or something they don't tend to look like that... Is it that it's drawing a "cartoon" pelican or something?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelican#/media/File:Pelikan_Wa...

I think some still do. But writing a few lines of code in some computer architecture course isn't really enough. It's not just the language, it's the libraries and not understanding how things work under the hood.

Online dictionary (Merriam-Webster) says: "digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence". So sure, semantic diffusion (I see you read Martin Fowler), I donno. Life is semantic diffusion.

In practice code gets worked and reworked and reworked. I work on code where every single line in a huge file was written by a different person. Even the initial implementation could often fit your definition of slop. Isn't human training also mushing things together?

But cool. I think the discussion mirrors the gap Andrej was talking about. Interesting times.

Is a table saw a tool? It's not deterministic. Every cut is going to be slightly different. It can go "rogue" and toss the work piece back at you. It can even kill you or cut your fingers off.

Virtually nothing in woodworking is deterministic because wood is not deterministic. Every piece of wood is different.

Now that I've nitpicked and feel better ;) ...

I'm not quite sure why this matters. LLMs are definitely not you writing code using a tool. An IDE is more like that. They write the code. Is that even a debate? That doesn't mean the human can't be in that loop, the human can review the code, change the code, change the instructions. I can ask an LLM to mill me a cube on a CNC. Or a more complex object. It's not the same as me doing it on a mill. But I can still control the end result to the extent that I care to control it. I'm not going to learn how to mill a cube by having an LLM make me a cube. I'm not going to become a better machinist by asking an LLM to make me a cube. I can also send my G-code to a vendor and have them make me a cube. Or hire a person and give him a rough idea of what I want and have them make it.

People keep talking about AI slop but then I go maintain our largely human written code base and it's like worse than any slop I've seen from my AI usage. This is with code reviews, tests, and a supposedly strong engineering team.

That said AI feels a bit alien.

My experience with frontier models is that in many areas of software engineering they outperform the average software developer. In some they blow everyone away. In others they're not as good. But they are getting better. The problem is often not the model's capabilities but rather what you ask it to do and are you able to understand what it does and give it guidance when needed.

What I like to call at work "this is not a technical problem". There are many problems we could easily solve if we had the right structural incentives. But instead we have politics, processes, layers of management, etc. All that doesn't disappear (yet?) with AI.

The article is behind a paywall :(

Having lived through hyper-inflation the only thing that got that under control was price controls. Wages going up can't stop inflation - they fuel inflation. Inflation psychology is that your money is going to become worthless so you don't save it, you spend it, which keeps prices going up. It wrecks havoc on loans and debt as well. If you lent money with a fixed rate hyperinflation erases your returns. If you borrowed with a fixed rate your debt is effectively erased.

Not to mention that governments in general don't control incomes. They can lower taxes (which is good IMO). They can pay government employees higher wages (which is hard to do when you lower taxes).

At the end of the day governments make things better by making smart investments (or policies that enable smart investments) and make things worse by making bad investments (or policies that lead to bad investments). Everything else is second order effect.

Isn't age also a factor?

What's "regular old high protein food"? Do you mean something like meat every meal? When I recorded my meals I found my protein intake to be quite low (I don't eat meat. I eat fish but not every day.).

Not everyone needs to live in a hip neighbourhood?

My intuition agrees with the supply side argument. Also higher interest rates to reduce demand? Isn't this how we got here, to these very high house prices worldwide, by a combination of the two? Taxes seem a second order effect here at best.

Iran has executed at least 2,159 people in 2025. Apparently over 500 people this year ( https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20260827-iran-executes... ).

Saudi Arabia executed 356 people last year. Apparently a record.

Iraq, China, Egypt, Somalia... The list goes on. And unfortunately the USA is also on that wall of shame (47 in 2025).

The world is not in a great shape.

EDIT: In many Muslim countries blasphemy and apostasy are punishable by death. Not all of them enforce it though but it's still in the books.

There is also this one: https://archive.org/details/Foundations_of_Mechanical_Accura...

Reading Wikipedia it seems he also didn't win another Nobel because the max number of recipients is 3. It's not that unusual that people get the prize a loooong time after their actual work though.

That's absolute nonsense: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farhud listed to Gad Saad about what he experienced in Lebanon.

Jews were ethnically cleansed from all Arab countries.

Re: your link. I mean the Iraqi authorities said so. Yeah right.

I fact checked with AI as one does these days and at least the AGI supports you with the first Trump admin being what it identifies as a real change in policy since WW-II: "In 2018, the Trump administration used Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962—a rarely used Cold War-era law—to declare Canadian steel and aluminum a "national security threat" to the United States. These tariffs were not applied because Canadian steel companies were breaking dumping laws. They were deployed as broad, sweeping coercion to force Canada to the table to renegotiate the entire NAFTA agreement under threat of economic damage."

So yes. I agree there is an actual change vs. the post WW-II trajectory. At least in the public sphere. I don't know what used to happen behind closed doors. AI here says a lot of power struggles have happened (some specific examples but I'll spare you) but not in public. But argues that the shifting of those into the public sphere is a real change. And I agree with the AI overlords.

I agree. I would also say America is the way it's always been. With good and bad. America is not homogeneous. It is not simple. It is complex. It has and have always had, Neo-Nazis, and human rights champions. Poverty and wealth. Amazing educational institutes, and schools where kids stab each other. Conspiracy theorists, and smart reasonable people.

Reducing America to one simple statement is not possible.

"most Canadians" as a demographic is unable to grasp complexity. They are being rallied to the flag and they rally. Like everyone else these days they all have their echo chambers. It's an easy sell. This is just human nature.

Current day politics are about polarization. More so than ever. There is no room for nuance. This is what worked for Trump and this is what worked for Carney and the Liberals in Canada. The Liberals didn't win on some brilliant policies they simply won on anti-American feelings.

This is not a statement on who is right or wrong. There are certainly many aspects of Trump's behaviour here that most would say are wrong. The problem is when we lose nuance and debate we can't make progress. But a leader in today's world that introduces nuance loses to the leader that polarizes. Dragging us all down.

I'm Canadian. (Full disclosure: an immigrant, like many others here)

Are 30%-40% of Americans really cheering for shredding of the friendship with Canada? Is that supported by some specific survey or are we just looking at approval ratings or some proxy?

Isn't this more or less normal for the USA in the broader perspective? Certainly had some very weird presidents in the past? We had things like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascadia_movement

I feel like we're just not living in normal times. The lack of normalcy is social media, conspiracy theories, politics. This isn't simply a US-Canada relationship question and "return to normalcy" isn't really just about "how do we ensure a certain level of quality of leadership". I'm not even sure what's normal any more ;)

https://leger360.com/in-the-news-canada-us-trade-war-canadia...

https://leger360.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/OMNI_tradewa...

"Our latest survey finds that 41% of Canadians now consider the United States an enemy country, up 15 points from June 2025. At the same time, 64% say their impression of the United States would change if Donald Trump were no longer president."

I find this insane. Also the weighting towards 55+, male, Quebec, is interesting. It says something about how humans are easy to influence IMO. Not exactly a surprise I guess looking at humanity as a whole but something I would have hoped we had some immunity to in free western societies.

Got that in more conspiracy? If you have evidence then a lot of Israelis would want to see that. Hopefully after the elections there will be more fact finding.

The allies bombed the heck out of Mosul and killed a lot more civilians than the IDF killed in Rafah. Those battles are very comparable in terms of number of combatants and number of civilians. Israel did much better.

Hamas was more prepared than ISIS. Better equipped. More tunnels. And the population density in Rafah was higher.

Also the British, Canadian, Australians, Americans, etc. did not send any of their soldiers to go house to house. They sent the poor Iraqis. After demolishing the place, killing a ton of civilians in the process.

Easy for you to say that Israel should have sent its soldiers to be ambushed house to house, blown up by booby traps in houses (which happened a lot despite the tactics), blown up on the streets by mines etc. I mean that's how Hamas wanted it to play out and obviously not the way Israel was going to do it.

You are comparing different things. You should be comparing the intensive part of the battle in both cases. Mosul vs. Rafah is a great comparison. The total number of civilians were similar. The number of combatants were similar. Rafah is a lot denser. Israel's war results in significantly less civilian casualties. The allies pounded Mosul with its civilian population with heavy bombardments. The criticism of Israel on this is orders of magnitude higher than any criticism levelled at the allies (well basically none). If you look at why did the allies go to war on ISIS there is nothing even borderline comparable to the Oct 7th attack on Israel from Gaza. Something to ponder.

That Israel kept looking for tunnels and destroying empty buildings for strategic reasons after the battle was over and Rafah was mostly abandoned is not relevant to evaluating the main battle.

That MSF statement is not specifically about Rafah in your link either. It's about the entire Gaza strip. And just like Rafah a lot of the destruction happened in evacuated areas for tactical reasons, searching for tunnels, preventing guerrilla attacks, dealing with booby traps etc. We can argue about the necessity and legality of those but they are a different kind of discussion vs. the main battle portion.

Well. Hamas was there. Those attacks targeted specific people and we know they were killed. Israel did not bomb the shit out of the evacuation site, the number of civilians killed in Al-Muasi was extremely low. A lot less than e.g. the allies killed in Mosul where they did not evacuate the population.

Mohammed Deif. The head of Hamas' military wing. Was killed in the humanitarian zone. Rafah Salameh. The head of the Khan Younis brigade. Was killed in the humanitarian zone.

These claims are repeated a lot. They are baseless. A critical mind and a bit of research will prove that to you.

It doesn't matter what Israel does. In Rafah Israel objectively and measurably did much better than western armies fighting against Mosul in terms of civilian casualties (and you can include those in the humanitarian zones, still better). But Israel is held to a higher standard.

EDIT: And more: Yassin Rabia, Khaled Nagar, Osama Tabesh, Ayman Mabhouh, Samer Ismail Khadr Aby Daqqa. Fact check me. Also Israel has documented rocket launching from humanitarian zones. Israel has also retrieved bodies of hostages (including Hersh Goldberg) from tunnels under humanitarian zones.

1) They will be allowed to return.

2) It is a requirement by international law.

3) If we compare this to the Battle of Mosul. Which is a pretty good comparison. They are very similar. That battle had a much larger civilian casualty count. The allies there decided to not evacuate the population and the result of that was a much larger number of civilian deaths. Are you proposing that Israel should have done the same? I.e. not evacuate the population and have a significantly higher number of civilian casualties? Do you feel that if Israel did that it would enjoy a similar support as the allies had when they went after ISIS in Mosul?

Basically Israel did the right thing here. Provably better (judging by the number of civilian casualties) than the western armies that allied against ISIS did in Mosul. The ethnic cleansing allegation is not supported by evidence and really can't be proven until the war is over.

The buildings were levelled with bulldozers for the most part after the civilians left during combat operations against the tunnel infrastructure and any remaining combatants. Not sure what the "surgical strikes" comment is about. Are you asking why weren't open spaces destroyed or attacked?

It does contribute to price pressure. The knowledge that the US has to buy oil to replenish will keep prices higher.

It's happening in the US too. I mean this is the wet dream of climate activists. In Canada we had to put carbon tax on gasoline to get people off it. You're getting it for free man!

Solar solar solar! The US is perfect for solar. Do more solar. And drive EVs.

The nation where people drive these ridiculously huge trucks that guzzle gas like no tomorrow is complaining about gas prices. In Europe gas costs twice as much!