>>notably speech and the expression of opinion that cast the government or the war effort in a negative light or interfered with the sale of government bonds
I remember before mass LLM adoption, reading an issue on GitHub where an increasingly frustrated user was failing to properly describe a blocking issue, and the increasingly frustrated maintainer was failing to get them to stick to the issue template.
>The "pioneer spirit" is so core to the American identity and hard to replicate in Europe
Consider that the European frontier is either
- west: Americas (already done)
- south: Africa (not gonna happen again)
- north/east: drang nach osten (again, not to be repeated)
- up / down? Perhaps Europe needs to focus on space and mining tech?
Russia has a frontier, and they are pretty strong in engineering, but I doubt that a SV style ecosystem is likely to form, given the… ahem… unique cultural aspects.
All said, I disagree that a frontier experience is necessary: the UK, Germany and Austria-Hungary were massive industrial modernizers while the US was still going through its westward colonization.
Is tech an exceptional field, or just the current SotA in industrial development?
There's different frontiers. Good farmland used to be the big thing. And trade routes, like natural harbors or navigable rivers. So in many parts of the world, most of the best places were already taken and the "frontier" was worse land. But not so in Americas, because there was available land for reasons. You could have "fertile frontier".
Over time when farming technology improved, people could live self-sufficiently in worse places. Transportation technology changed as well. Railways, highways. And now remote working and data centers. So there have been frontiers also in the old world in that sense. The king of Sweden in the 1500s declared some eastern frontier areas as tax free for some time, as he wanted people to settle there to control those areas (in accords, some of it might have been Russia...). Many places have waxed and waned over the centuries. When Estonia gained independence for the second time, some Finnish farmers went there as there was excellent farmland that was very underutilized.
With modern knowledge you could even build up a great place to live almost anywhere. Good policies and cheap energy. Maybe fresh water is the hardest physical requirement.
I read that Oceanic climates are less stable, making it harder for the massive cumulonimbus clouds associated with thunderstorms to form.
Here in Ontario, I can sit on the beach and look over westward and see storms approaching from Michigan. One summer I saw a cloud top on the horizon at about 3:30pm and managed to get in one last swim before packing the car and getting on the road right as the rain started around 5:00… European weather is not that predictable until you get into the continental zone… eastern Germany through Poland.
One of the cultural touchstones of being a Canadian is the smug yet bleak realization that your tiny (in population) nation has produced so many titans of various creative fields, but everyone thinks they’re American because they had to bugger off down there to get their careers going.
Not sure if Canadians are aware of this, but Canada does two things really well:
1) Developing its own domestic artists/musicians, to a much greater degree than the US (eg https://www.factor.ca/)
2) Greatly restricting smaller foreign acts (especially from the US) from performing in Canada for commercial purposes
Yes, point #2 also applies to the US, but it's not enforced. But if you cross into Canada with musical instruments, they'll put the fear of God into you.
This is largely why the phenomena you describe exists: artists can develop within their domestic cocoon, without being crowded-out by Americans, and then tour their larger, wealthier neighbor to greatly expand their profile virtually risk-free.
2) Greatly restricting smaller
foreign acts (especially from
the US) from performing in
Canada for commercial purposes
Yes, point #2 also applies to
the US, but it's not enforced.
But if you cross into Canada
with musical instruments,
they'll put the fear of God into
you.
This almost never has the intended effect of producing world class homegrown musical or cinema acts. Like almost a 100% failure rate especially when theres a shared language.
Lots of countries have this quota system where they try to artificially force feed homegrown music, tv shows and movies and it never works.
People always gravitate to the larger American sphere because it doesnt have such restrictions in place. They dont work anyway.
When I first saw Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah (2008) it was so fresh and un-Hollywood like in the presentation of the raw violence and vice, that it stunned me. I still cant stand most PG-fied and Disney-fied American films.
Even as a U.S. citizen this hits me frequently. A lot of amazing comedians I didn't realize were Canadian for a long time, as a U.S. citizen. Norm Macdonald comes to mind, but he's far from alone.
Canada has government programs requiring broadcasters to broadcast Canadian content. So there are strong economic incentives to find, fund, develop, and promote Canadian artists working in various media.
In my undergrad days I learned about the MAPL classification to be considered Canadian content: Music, Artist, Performance, Lyrics
IIRC you need to hit 3/4 to be considered Canadian content.
At that time J Biebs was big, but since his music and lyrics were written by Americans and he performed/recorded in the States, his music was not CanCon despite him being Canadian. So, at the radio station I volunteered at, his music would count towards the 30% quota of not-CanCon music.
For Norm, just the crude nature of a lot of his jokes felt like something that was very "American", at least certainly in the 90s and 2000s. His delivery, on the other hand, always felt fairly unique to me. It's also possible I just mistook characteristics of Canadian comics as being those of American comics by simply not realizing how many popular comedians are Canadian.
>The tech track works great if one falls into line and doesn't rock the boat by questioning authority or trying to see the big picture
Is this true?
I thought senior engineers were expected to push back as a matter of course, and staff engineers were expected to think in broad, business needs and translate that down to the code.
An engineer who just shuts up and writes code, is so we are told, the first casualty in the age of AI.
Ya I mean I can't really comment on such a broad topic in a few sentences without generalizing and projecting from my own experience.
I agree with you, that the best engineers weigh the business needs when working towards a solution.
But I've also seen how the top problem solvers rarely get promoted beyond a certain level. A lot of us got into this to change the world, but ended up settling at middle management.
It's kind of a learned helplessness. It's strange to see the best and brightest commanded by people who aren't necessarily dumb, they just view the work as almost a sunk cost rather than something that pays dividends if done right. So there's this constant constraining of ideas that rubs off on us and gradually diminishes our light. Until eventually we're just another cog in the machine, showing up day after day only to keep things running and not rock the boat. And making up stories about how critical we are to the process without seeing our own expendability.
It's sad to say, but we're about to get tossed out and replaced by AI. I don't think that rising above being code monkeys is going to save us.
So on that note, we're also about to get radicalized. Imagine spending one's entire life in discipline learning the most esoteric knowledge, hoping to get ahead someday, only to find out that there wasn't enough time. Having to watch the most vacuous blowhards become millionaires at the highest levels of power and casually destroy everything we worked towards.
The offense could have been the Dutch person being direct about their stubbornness to feedback.
Also possibly a point in favour of political speech vs directness. Much easier to politic a stubborn person than tell them to do something directly.
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