pgeorgi

GDP / (average annual labor hours * number of people working in some way)?

GDP is a pretty rough metric for efficiency, but it's among the better ones that are collected somewhat uniformly.

"average hours worked * number of people working" is an approximation of total of person-hours worked (approx. because both numbers are probably cleaned up a bit in incompatible ways)

The result would be the value a person in the country contributes to the GDP every hour (on average), which should serve as a reasonably proxy for efficiency.

There were some calls to shut down AfD, but that's probably too difficult (and the process is difficult for good reasons!), and having them "certified by the courts that they're not extremist enough to be closed down" might be just the advertisement they seek.

The current target seems to be the "Junge Alternative", the AfD's youth organization. Since that's just an association and not a party, it's an easier target. Also, the party youth organizations tend to be more radical than their "grown-up" counterparts, so it's probably relatively simple to make a case there.

The last new nuclear plant to go online in Germany was Greifswald 5 in November 1989. For 23 days.

Given the massive failure of AVR Jülich, whose design was supposed to be "fail safe" while it's now the most 90Sr-contaminated nuclear facility world-wide, and the corruption around it, there's little trust that even if the technology is safe, operations would be.

That accident in Jülich was 1979, rumors that something happened were struck down with political support, and so the acknowledgement by the operator was 21 years later in 2000 and the government confirmed it only in 2010. The plan for decommissioning is to get it done by the end of this century, after we "develop some procedure during the next 60 years." (that is, we have no f'ing clue what to do with that thing right now). By that time, the incident has been 120 years ago...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVR_reactor (and even more so its German equivalent page) has the gory details of that mess. Germany likes to do things at industrial scale, and so it also messes up at industrial scale.

As a result (and while Chornobyl didn't help the nuclear-power cause, the German anti-nuclear-power movement predates that incident by ~10 years), Germany moving away from nuclear power has been a long time coming.

Just look where Marsalek comes from: We import our criminals from Austria.

Several decades of politics and industry kicking the can down the road and hoping that the challenges go away by itself.

For example: German car makers are still somewhat reluctant to embrace electric motors (no matter the power source or storage) and would like to stay with combustion engines (no matter the combustible) because that's a niche they and the entire downstream industry feel comfortable with.

Yes, a large share of the industrial base in Germany hinges on it. But a long-term view on things would have started divesting from this exclusivity decades ago. Instead, they hoped the challenge just goes away by building better combustion engines. There's _finally_ some movement in that direction (Volkswagen embracing EVs is huge), but there are also still reactionary pockets that try to water everything down because hydrogen or synthetic fuels are right around the corner, just you wait! (possible, but very unlikely)

Another example from the industry: The chemical industry never hedged their reliance on fossils, either. While they will remain a consumer of fossils for chemical processes, the industry was comfortable just heating whatever they need to be really hot with them as well. Now they're scrambling to retool their factories to still use fossils where impossible to replace (e.g. fertilizer production uses the chemical properties) but to use hydrogen when stuff just needs to get hot. That the amount of fossil fuel might go down was _kinda_ obvious with all those CO2-reduction targets, but they preferred to wait it out.

I see more hope with them, though: they need to retool, but after the furnaces use hydrogen (wherever that comes from), they can do business as usual (and gradually optimize hydrogen sourcing). The car industry (some say that 20% of the German industrial base rely on that directly or indirectly) is much worse off.

Another example, this time politics: Deutsche Bahn (DB) is a private company fully owned by the government. There's some money going back and forth between the company and its owner, but one of the arrangements was that DB pays for maintenance of its infrastructure itself, but catastrophic loss of infrastructure (and related repairs/rebuilds) are covered through government money. What is the private company (that was expected to pay some 8-9 digit sums of earnings back to the federal budget for years as part of that back-and-forth) doing then? Cut down on maintenance. When stuff breaks entirely, repairs aren't on them, so that's the "rational" choice for the company. Politicians were asleep at the wheel as far as these incentives are concerned (or worse: they calculated with them, kicking the can down the road.)

There are advocates for moving more logistics from the road to rail, but that's kinda stuck because there's a huge repair-and-investment plan right now (to deal with that oversight of decades) that will block various key routes for the next few years.

And it's not as if the Autobahn-network is any better off (map with construction sites at https://www.autobahn.de/die-autobahn): lots of bridges from the 60s reaching their end-of-life all at once because maintenance is an expense that was better ignored (since politicians decided that above all else, the country mustn't increase its debt: So we had a kinda-balanced budget but accrued the steel-and-concrete equivalent of tech debt)

It's less a "Firefox above all" sentiment, it's that Mozilla had

1. Firefox as baseline product declining

2. Lots of failed experiments to find new revenue streams while staying true to its mission

3. Baker's CEO salary rising several-fold

4. Engineers laid off for cost reduction

Any three of them might well be okay, all four together look terribly self-centered on Baker's part.

From one of the earlier announcements Google has made:

- Bard is that talkative text interface, a product.

- Gemini is the LLM design that currently backs Bard (but also other Google AI products).

- Gemini "Basic", Advanced and Ultra are different sizes of that design.

This is conjecture, but "Ultra 1.0" probably indicates that they intend to release more models based on the Ultra configuration. Since that's the most commercial of theirs, I wouldn't be surprised if that comes with some stability promises (e.g. Ultra 1.0 is still available when Ultra 3.0 is released, so that if you do your own validation when integrating in your own project, you can expect small-to-no shifts in the underlying model)

I have different levels of access to Bard through different accounts, and the feature set varies wildly. Generating images and summarizing websites is enabled in _some_ configurations, but I have no idea what the rules are.

The feature set also seems to depend on other factors: The account that is images-enabled only does so if I ask in English, but not when asking in any other language I tried.

The CIA/BND connection wasn't known, but the collusion with certain agencies was known to different degrees for decades: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Crypto_AG&oldid=7...

Tech CEOs and VPs found that they're out of ideas on how to grow the pie. So to achieve their personal goals (which is always more), they had to increase their share.

The fear, uncertainty and doubt over the economy serves to make everybody else fear that the pie could disappear completely. And so they're happy they still get scraps, leaving enough for those CEOs - for now.

Lately I keep thinking about Mr Buffett's remark about class warfare...

Or history is more complex than a sound bite.

Getting Germany off nuclear has been in the making since the 1980s, and a big factor was fighting corruption.

We still have a glowing mess from those days, waiting another 80 years until it can be cleaned up.

I suppose people forgot what "radio buttons" are (and where the name comes from). At least I haven't seen them on non-vintage devices in ages.

WIth that, it might make sense to reevaluate if they're still a useful UI language idiom, and if the different handling is still necessary.

The Nakba, you mean when all neighboring Arab countries said "hey Palestinians, step out of the way, we'll kill the Jews real quick and then you can have all the land"?

And then lost the war they've started?

Yes, that's a catastrophe for Arabs, just like losing WW2 was a catastrophe for certain Germans. And also for those in Germany who were exiled from their (sometimes extensive) land, no matter what they thought of the war and its outcome.

Eastern Prussian didn't then go and tried to kill the Western German president when the FRG took them in, though. Besides some whining by a few select bunch, that chapter is closed.

Not so for the Arabs for whom the "Nakba" was and is that the military campaign failed and not that Palestinians now live in misery.

> They support Hamas because they can't see any other potential path to prosperity.

Prosperity through Hamas? Only for a select few who live in other countries. With the amount of aid and money thrown at Gaza, any third rate politician could have achieved prosperity if only they were genuinely in it for the good of the people.

Hamas didn't, because their priority doesn't lie in the welfare of the Palestinian people but in the eradication of Israel.

(and potentially not even that: there are more billions to amass while living in the safety and comfort of some emirate when the situation on the ground remains volatile and the Palestinian people miserable. In that case, Palestinians don't even have a "way out" of their misery by completing Hamas' mission, because their misery _is_ Hamas' mission.)

Except where they weren't. The German borders after 1945 or after 1990 are unlike any other shape of any German nation (or collection of German states) before.

If Germany or Japan is your guideline here, maybe Israel should get a Bomber Harris (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Harris#Second_World_War) or a Truman (see nuclear weapons dropped on Japan) on the scene?

People are saying that what Israel is doing right now is a genocide. You have seen nothing yet: With either of them at the helm, there would either be an unconditional surrender by Hamas or no Palestinian alive anymore - and by November 15, last year.

We don't do such things anymore, and for good reason, but that means that these past situations are unsuitable as example for the present.

Hamas controls Gaza, where Israel withdrew nearly 20 years ago. First thing Hamas did: destroy all the infrastructure set up by Israelis. Or maybe Hamas murdered the Fatah officials first. In any case, there was little Israeli left in all that time, and there's a border with a supposedly friendly neighbor, tons of money and expertise by the global community invested in that area, and they squandered it all in favor of raping and pillaging the hippie communities of the Israeli peace movement.

> They just want Palestinians to have full human rights on their land, from the river to the sea.

What's the word for word translation of the original slogan again? "From the river to the sea, all land shall be Arab" if my dictionary doesn't fail me...

Everything blue on https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:State_Religions.svg

You mean they were raped ok by the militants? https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/there-wasnt-a-moment-freed-h...

Iran was pretty miffed when some weapons of unspecified origin recently hit Iraq and Syria because they happened to land on the heads of Iranian operatives.

The concept of nations and borders in the middle east is a bit... different from the western variant.

All correct and yet, what should happen? Israel stops their campaign. And then?

Spend tons of money on iron dome to shoot down the rockets and hope that Hamas won't manage to conduct another massacre, even if "only" half the scope of October 7?

This mess features not one but two parties who currently reject the concept of a cease fire.

The business models this regulation harms are the business models that aren't desired to begin with. As such, a competitor is encouraged by regulation to find another, compliant angle to deal with monetization.

And competitors that already do that get an uplift (over time, but still).

That's a great way to route 4% of their global earnings into the EU's bank account.

https://consentomatic.au.dk/ also allows to reject them automatically.

For example in accounts on image sites that are exposed to suspected scrapers but not to others. Scrapers will still see the real data, but they'll also run into stuff designed to mix up the training process.

The debugger is a relatively simple environment: you have a program, you have inputs, and one of these leads to weird behavior.

When you encounter people, they might be in a bad mood for a thousand reasons you can't know about and that you can't inspect like you can in "computer + program + data", leash out at you (verbally) for no discernable reason at all (and that they themselves may not even be aware of)

When you never learned about that messiness of a system as complex as people, it can feel arbitrary and hostile. If you're the type who needs method and order to feel safe, computers are wonderful, people much less so.

They focus more on it, but in a lord-of-the-flies kind of way. You either get the cues, or you don't in which case, tough luck.

It's the same in other fields, e.g. sports/physical ed often works that way, language and maths as well depending on the teacher. But with none of them, the failure to impart that knowledge increases the risk of murder (as seen here, even though that's an extreme case.)

Edit to add: and in cases like Hans Reiser it's doubly sad because he surely was a smart kid. Sending him off into special "emotional intelligence classes" probably wouldn't have affected his intellectual skills in the slightest (or maybe even in a positive way). But while it's an aspect that most schools try to impart through osmosis, they don't detect when they fail, or even when they notice, there's little they can do about it.

Not sure if people consider "contributing to the spying-censorship advertising machine vortex thing" a benefit based on which they choose their career preferences.

It's more "pays the bills plus doesn't consider you merely a cost center", "pays the bills plus lets you try weird stuff of your interest with ~unlimited infrastructure at your disposal". _That_ was the appeal of Google. Not anymore.

On the other hand, the advertising machine (however you want to characterize it) is still alive and kicking, so that part isn't gone.

Google was most successful when it was "like a giant grad-school". Its downward trajectory coincides with it being run by McKinsey alums.