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EU is rich, insulation problem can be handled, especially if we build enough green energy to bring down electricity prices, which makes even poorly insulated houses livable. I live in a Nordic country, and people have survived here for since nearly 10 000 years ago, soon after first ice age ended. If they could do it without any modern tech, Germans, French and the others will be okay.

I'm way more worried about food production.

Banning Russian gas is the right thing to do, and good for long-term energy independence & prices.

I had a similar experience when I was young. Bought a vape and some Cannabis, which probably had really high THC concentration as it tends to have nowadays. Took a bit, didn't feel anything, then took a bit more, and boom, a panic attack. Might even had some hallucinations, I'm not fully sure what was real and what wasn't.

After the experience I felt kind of weird and "slow" for several days. Later I found out that there is also a genetic risk of schizophrenia in my family. No way I'm going to touch anything with THC ever again. I've tried CBD oil though and that was okay, slightly calming effect. But ultimately I prefer beer over that too.

Nordic style social democracy works quite well though. Communism sucks, but too much unregulated Capitalism isn't great either, as we can see in USA and many other countries that suffer from extreme inequality.

I can't see much creativity and innovation in Russia. They sell oil and natural resources & use the money (whatever is not stolen by oligarchs) to fund an unnecessary war which they are losing.

If anything, Russia is a prime example of inefficient allocation of resources.

Probably we can blame higher hygiene standards, or some other environmental factor for it. Forests haven't changed much in past decades.

Here in Finland I've never been affected by any kind of tree pollen at all, but somehow timothy grass pollen gives me horrible symptoms, forcing me to take antihistamine most of the summer. I lived my childhood near farmland and forests, so definitely got exposed to both forms of pollen at early age.

The problem I have is that I find generic code reviews really, really boring. With agents I write less code but read more code that I didn't write myself, which makes the job more boring than it was.

I would rather let AI do the code reviews and focus on test coverage.

"I think the big AI companies are trying to transform into the next Microsoft. Completely capture both enterprise and consumers."

That is going to be a failing strategy though. Whatever OpenAI or Anthropic implement, Microsoft and Google can trivially copy and provide to their existing customers that are already deeply invested in their platforms.

Still those technological issues do happen, and in those situations it's good to have a human pilot in control. See for example Qantas Flight 72 - the autopilot thought aircraft was stalling, and sent the plane into a dive. It could have ended up very badly without human supervision.

"Without ability to manufacture missiles, Iran would be unable coerce people to buy into it's Hormuz transit toll system, and the strait would reopen."

You don't need missiles to keep Hormuz closed. Cheap drones, naval mines and such are enough, and those don't require that much production capabilities, especially if you get some help from Russia. It's enough to hit a ship every now and then, which keeps the insurers away.

Even without any infrastructure IRGC could wage a guerrilla war for a long time.

Cuba can barely keep electricity on amid fuel shortages and ancient infrastructure. They are in no position to fight a war, and don't really have a strong ideological force like IRGC in Iran. The ruling elites are way more likely to make a deal that allows them to keep their heads.

I guess that's how it is in America. If you are lucky enough to live in the Nordics, you pay far, far less, sometimes nothing at all. I don't think anywhere near 3000 a month for 3 kids is normal in most of other EU either.

So, over here car seats may be a much bigger factor than daycare costs.

I agree. Whenever I've tried jumping into NodeJS world, I quickly get overwhelmed by the lack of obvious "right" solutions to common problems. There's no way to know which of the dozens of ORM's, auth libraries or whatever will be still around 10 years from now. With Java & Spring the choice is always obvious.

Of course there are "batteries included" frameworks for NodeJS too, but they all seem to be unstable compared to Spring Boot.

I believe in this case regulation would work just fine. My old Macbook Pro from 2012 was just as solid and high quality as the newest models, but much more repairable. It's possible to create repairable devices without compromising much in other areas.

US car culture has been dead for a long time, at least internationally. People like big American cars made in 50s - 70s for their looks, but since then all I can think of are oversized pickups, Nascar and Tesla which is getting eaten alive by Chinese competitors.

Just cross the border to Sweden or Finland, and the share of EV's of all new cars drop from around 90 to something like 30-35%. The EV transition is going to take a while longer in most EU countries.

Of course something to note is the absolute number of cars sold, which has dropped dramatically at least here in Finland. Most people who are priced out of new EV market simply don't buy any new car at all, and the average age of cars is climbing fast. Either way, few people are looking for new ICE vehicles. No point buying outdated tech new, when the used car market has perfectly good ICE vehicles that perform just the same.

Don't you have private healthcare in the UK too, if you aren't satisfied with the NHS?

IMO universal healthcare is awesome as the final safety-net that provides critical care, no matter your financial or employment situation. Yet it doesn't need be the only option. If businesses or people with money want to pay more to get care faster from private sector, that's okay too. It's how the system works here in Finland.

But where will office workers displaced by AI leave? Industrialization brought demand for factory work (and later grew service sector), but I can't see what new opportunities AI is creating. There are only so many service people AI billionaires need to employ.

Most likely these clothes will be just dumped to poorer parts of Africa and Asia, where they're finally sold for peanuts, or in worst case dumped into a landfill. That's what already happens for a lot of used clothes that people give away.

IMO selling the clothes to people that otherwise couldn't afford them is always better than destroying them, so EU is doing the right thing here.

It's much cheaper to drink at home when you're unemployed though. I live in a country with seriously rising unemployment rate (highest in EU), and bars/night clubs are going bankrupt left and right here.

Demand for all those services (with possible exception of essential medical care) will shrink if big portion of white collar workers end up unemployed. Without a job people simply won't have much extra money to spend on them.

Yea, I've ran bunch of office PC's with nearly 20 year old components 24/7 without any stability issues (acting space heaters doing CPU intensive tasks in winter).

No need to replace a quality PSU until you start having issues.

Syria was an absolute hell under Assad for dissidents, can't blame America for that. Iraq and Libya maybe, though Saddam and Gaddafi weren't exactly great leaders to their people either.

Anyway, IMO the thing about Iran is that it's mostly Shia, and the population isn't that religious, especially not in cities. Unlike Syria, Iraq and Libya of the past, they aren't ruled by a secular dictatorship, but religious extremists. So, while US intervention in Iraq, Libya and so on created space for religious extremists to rise, I think getting rid of Iranian government could actually do the opposite - give a chance for secular opposition to rise.

Yes it's possible to make a fire on a plane, but it would be even easier to cause a big fire if there was zero monitoring of bags. As flawed as airport security is, it should generally catch things like somebody trying to get a carry-on bag full of gasoline or extremely large lithium-ion batteries on board.

I take security that catches 50 or even 20% of threats any day over 0 security.

A year ago Air Busan Flight 391 burned completely after a single passenger power bank caught fire on the overhead compartment, and crew couldn't extinguish it. If that had happened on a plane that was in middle of an ocean for example, it would have been almost certainly a total loss with everyone dead, or at least ditching into the sea.

You're right that fortunately there aren't many cases of people causing fires inside airliners on purpose. But that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. When a single power bank can cause catastrophic results like this, I'm glad there's at least some monitoring of what people carry into the airplane in their bags.

It's just not bombs that are a danger. You really don't want anyone to set the airplane on fire either, or start shooting people or holes into the fuselage.

AFAIK America has had plenty of shootings, and probably arson attacks too over that time period.

Yeah. The "security theater" absolutely does play its part in stopping attacks. Without it, airplanes would be an extremely easy target for any nutjob to commit mass murder in. They wouldn't even necessarily need a bomb, anything that can cause a big enough fire mid-flight could be potentially catastrophic. Over past few decades many airliners have crashed because out of control fire in the cabin / cargo hold. I really don't want it to be easy for any random person to cause such fire.

Considering America and Israel accomplished total air superiority over Iran in matter of days just few months ago, they're obviously pretty damn far from being untouchable.

Invading Iran would be difficult, but totally destroying IRGC and military (as long as they side with the former) wouldn't be that hard. Dropping communications equipment and weapons to Iranian opposition groups wouldn't be hard either.

Voice is going to become more important, but I doubt it's going to be that much of a threat to websites. I can already ask Gemini in my last generation smart watch for latest news, but I much prefer reading them myself. IMO AI will be simply integrated to smart watches and phones. Maybe you'll also have more devices like Amazon Alexa at home, but I see no demand for an entirely new kind of a device/user interface.

That said, I don't have much faith in the future of my programming career either. Unless robotics gets exponentially better, registered nurses are going to be way safer from automation (at least the ones doing physical treatment).

I agree. In many cases it's probably easier for a developer to become more of a product person, than for a product person to become a dev. Even with LLM's you still need to have some technical skills & be able to read code to handle technical tasks effectively.

Of course things might look different when the product is something that requires really deep domain knowledge.