Long commutes are not unique to the US. I'm spending 1.5 hours one way in the UK. It's depend on your personal circumstances. If you are young and single it's usually possible to rent a studio or a room with reasonable commute time. E. g. if you have a family and/or own a house then moving close to the office in response to RTO mandate may not be an option.
My theory is that all money which could have been invested else where went to AI. It can end up either in investments paying off which will result in AI investors becoming even more rich (poor don't invest in the 1st place) and the rest of society poor or investments will have no returns and it will be wealth destruction on a grand scale and everyone will come poorer afterwards.
Nye Bevan was not a populist, and the NHS was not a populist development.
In the context of its time it was a fairly pragmatic, top-down central-government post-war-socialism project. It appears more radical in retrospect, but viewed in the light of decisions in the war effort and the post-war effort, and in a country that still had mandatory rationing for example, the NHS was a solid decision that was actually pretty evidence-based.
There are few people alive now who can tell you what the foundation of the NHS was like in terms of their professional career, but my dad did tell me about that.
In no way would that have been considered "populist"; the UK was severely negative about populists at that time, for one thing. It actually made solid logical/technocratic sense. It definitely came as a huge relief, but in many ways it formalised the resource-sharing schemes in place in various regions, especially London.
I am not sure you understand what populism is, along with not understanding that securing a number of seats is not something that logically follows from projections of numbers of seats, particularly in the context of an entirely new party with divisive leadership. We don't have PR, so aggregate data like that is not easily interpreted, and council election data is not that strongly indicative.
Also pretty interesting to hear someone who is so pro-Reform so confidently talking up the NHS, considering the long-standing positions of many UKIP/Brexit Party/Reform people that it should be privatised. Free at the point of use healthcare is under threat from Reform in a way that no other political party in the UK would risk, as a consequence of that. Presumably you think we should still have an NHS but the state shouldn't own it. Given the international figures who gather around Reform and the hard right in this country, there is no way the NHS would survive Reform intact.
Populism and popular policies is not exactly the same. I would say NHS is a socialist/left policy but not populism.
I don't know an exact definition of a populism but for me it's when political messages are designed to trigger strong emotions, ignore complexity, promise simple solutions to hard problems. All politicians to some extent lie, over-promise and under-deliver but populists tent to take this on a next level.
Right populists tend to promise tax cuts (which unsurprisingly benefit their sponsors the most) and to balance budget they either increase debt or undermine public services (which is bad in a long term). Left populists promise to tax the rich ignoring that it's can be bad for economic growth and taxing alone would not give enough revenue to significantly benefit poor/middle classes.
Even Southern England cannot get enough wind energy from Scotland to fully utilise wind farms because transmission capacity is insufficient. I would imagine a transmission line to Norway will be even more expensive than to England.
But they are building such a link, because it'll make/save more money than it costs.
Imagine how many doom and gloom headlines we'd have avoided if these two massive construction projects could have been sync'd up perfectly or if we had a national press that could do anything other than try to scare people with big numbers.
I have an impression that both noise level and power consumption are not a priority for home network equipment manufactures. After moving to a new house and connecting to another ISP I've got an ISP modem-router which: 1. has a fan and while it's quiet it's not silent 2. consumes around 20 Wt, not much but working 24x7 it would cost around £45/year at current electricity rates.
I think it's technically possible to make a modem which will consume less power and use passive coiling but I don't think they (ISP and device manufacturer) care.
IMHO Python killed both Perl and Ruby. While Ruby is more alive than Perl it's nowhere near as popular as Python.
I like Perl and used it professionally for year and vaguely remember probably around 2010x relatively massive Python evangelism (lots of articles, conferences, lots of messages from Python adepts on forums e.t.c). One of talking points (no longer needed nowadays) was that Python is backed (sponsored) by Google so Python will be successful and you should not worry about it's future and also if you will choose Python you will be successful (as Google is).
I think Ruby has declined because Rails was its selling point, but Rails was optimized for the world of HTML templates. Once you're writing JavaScript-heavy frontends and mobile apps, Rails isn't giving you much that you can't get from Python or server-side JS.
A few people started using Ruby for command line tools[1] but the community was very focuses around rails. Also Ruby isn't usually part of the standard OS install. So Ruby stayed stuck in it's Rails niche.
For me, this is why python took off. People wanted that lucrative job or receive the reflected glory of a winner, so y'gotta learn python. The rest is just post-hoc justification for why you made that choice passed on as "this language is better because of blah..."
A lot of the justifications don't stack up against serious scrutiny, but are accepted as gospel.
In Canada, I've only ever seen these in grocery stores, operating for a fee (and they don't accept commissions) and a singular credit union branch (because they serve the underbanked at that particular location).
Depending on the future you predict 10% may be a good ROI - if AI will replace humans and traditional economy will collapse all other investments will loos value even more. In such scenario you cannot save the money you only can loose less if you will make a right investment.
I'm not sure I understand why the economy would collapse if AI replaced humans. Wouldn't the companies just make more profit because they save labor costs and stonks go up?
The economy is a macrosystem. For a company to make profit, someone needs to buy. For someone to buy a service or a product, they need to have the money needed to buy. If AI replaces humans and UBI doesn't happen, costs might drop to near zero but so will revenue as virtually no one will be able to buy anything. So the economy will certainly collapse.
It depends on how many jobs AI replaces and which. It is unlikely that LLMs will replaces plumbers any time soon for example. Many technological inventions have replaced humans in lots of jobs, the economy has only grown since then.
>Many technological inventions have replaced humans in lots of jobs, the economy has only grown since then.
Indeed it has, but many of those it replaced did not necessarily get moved to better positions if they were moved at all. The industrial revolution was great if you were young and had little to no responsibilities. Your average middle aged farmer with a large family to feed faced poverty or near poverty and those who were able to move to the cities faced worse labour conditions. People on here love talking about the winners while conveniently ignoring the loser side.
And that's not even mentioning the skilling up issue to which older workers are more vulnerable. Who will fund the nation wide skill up costs for them?
Industrial revolution was all right as long as you owned the farm, as most farmers did. The losers were those farm workers who weren't needed in as great numbers anymore, and they weren't paid well in the first place. I agree on labour conditions though, there industrialisation was a clear downgrade for many.
What worries me about AI is how it's not obvious which new jobs it may create. Younger farm workers and children of farmers could just move and work in factories, where the employers mostly took care of their training. I can't see such opportunities here. I believe whole world needs either UBI, or governments paying for jobs that previously weren't seen worth paying for. Otherwise the economy will collapse due to mass unemployment and resulting lack of demand.
Plumbers and electricians will loose too when demand for their services will plummet because people who will loose jobs will have no money to pay for their services (even if the services are still needed).
Economy is a fine tuned system with lots of interdependent parts, any sadden change can have destructive effects. If many people will loose jobs at least two things will happen: 1. they'll stop buying products and services (may be except food), companies who provide these products and services will layoff employees even if their employees are not yet replaced by AI 2. people who lost jobs will default on mortgages causing financial crisis worse than 2008 one.
UBI and wealth taxes will mitigate effects to some extent but it looks like political elites across the spectrum are controlled by wealthy people - even left of the center politicians prefer to tax middle class steering away from taxing the rich (both people and companies) more.
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