>> Pension funds inherently depend on population growth to avoid shortfalls.
>
>Pension funds inherently depend on increases in production. Population growth is one factor, but technological development can also increase production.
Interestingly, capital returns and population growth are (unquestionably?) on exponential curves. So, are production factors too slow to evolve along with the exponentials? Maybe they are, because of waste, lack of recycling, raw resources decline and environmental damage.
>> The other near-ponzi scheme is the real estate market. In my city of Toronto, average real estate prices have gone from 2x average income in 1972 to 16x average income today.
>
>Hello from a Vancouverite! I broadly agree with this point, and I'm not sure how to work our way out of a housing bubble beyond popping it and dealing with the aftermath. Too many people are invested in the status quo, so any politician who tries to pop it will be crucified for destroying the savings of a large portion of the population.
You could argue that in the same time frame, world population has more than doubled, and because the cost of capital is a lot cheaper elsewhere than in Canada, pressure on attractive living space in peaceful and stable countries has increased exponentially. At this point, the "liberal" view on capital flows and capital control, the fuel of foreign direct investments of Western countries into overseas properties since WWII, came back to bite the originators of the idea in the ass.
Well, the view that history may be in fact (perhaps not objectively, but to any observer cultured enough to entertain himself with observing it) not a time line into the future but cyclical, with civilizations rising and falling, is not new [1].
Perhaps this time what's different is that due to our information age and accelerated rates of change, cultural history's process of change has been pushed from being viewed closer to evolution (the next step of the change being defined by "environment and chance", that is, stretched out over long periods of time and caused by factors not directly being under human influence) to being much closer to immediate, accountable, man-made history (the next step of the change being defined by "environment and choice", that is, actors making active choices causing outcomes) [2]. And so, because most humans, even humans of influence making the choices altering the life outcomes of populuations not over generations but even within single, half or quarter lifetimes, are terribly selfish and stupid and unwise, the outcomes of bad choices just never seem to stop coming.
I'm no expert, but topics like shifting balances between global powers which are interested in different kinds of change (from hegemonic US in a post-WWII word to a very multi-polar world order to xyz) causing metrics like HDI to even out between global population groups have been "hot" since when? the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s? So sure, things might keep falling apart for one population group but still improving for the other group(s).
Another interesting take on "falling apart narrative" interpretations of current history might be a take on how looming juggernauts like climate change, migration waves and so on play into it. This kind of change may be good for something, but surely not perceived stability in the factors that make up human societies.
That's really interesting. Is it normal in UK (thinking £) to get such an extremely short (introductory) loan and then refinance every few years? In Germany, most people take a 10y fixed rate at least to reduce such risk.
Snap makes sense, because it deals with desktop application confinement. Any Firefox process launched as $user is able to use all the RAM, read and write all the files, access all the networks and basically do everything as that user. You don't want that, it's stupid and so Windows 95.
There are alternative solutions: QubesOS uses VMs as the isolation layer, desktop application confinement using firejail with its good selection of profiles tweaked to my liking, systemd-run confinement configured through the vast resource control options made configurable through systemd. There is no reason ~ or even / shouldn't appear completely empty to Firefox the process except for the resources you pass to it (open file, grant download permissions...) or which it needs to run (of course, those would be immutable as far as possible). SELinux and AppArmor are child's play; you don't have a lot of problems of those tools if there are no objects a process could acceess in its namespace to begin with.
macOS I believe is already there in terms of desktop app confinement. Windows is not but at least it has the controlled folder access layer available after they gave up on making store apps meaningfully secure as its own app category (too many escapes/config tweaks possible now). Desktop Linux though has not had squat in that field in the mass market for 2 decades. Basically, you guys run all applications unconfined. Snap is a way to work on changing that.
Not saying though that the current implementation is exceptionally good. It's too slow, and they should have reused systemd or whatever for a thin, tweakable resource control and container layer, not invent a container format from scratch.
What's impressive to me here is not the capacity but the price for the capacity. At allegedly 777 CHF per year this is a steal so far removed from my reality it's obscene.
Does it also tell you of its own volition if the tax office owes you money instead on a return without you having to declare anything? For example, if the tax office knows where you work as an employee and where you live, and the tax code has provisions that stipulate that an employee gains a tax advantage of 0.xx€ per kilometre commuting distance between his home and his place of work, does it factor that in or doesn't it? Because that would actually be _nice_.
Rather than this being a special quality of Apple, I think the marketing strategy of a lot of other B2C brands has now involved """leaks""" to enthusiast circles for a long time, probably since """evangelists""" and """influencers""" became subjects of pop consumer culture --- so I think that Apple leaking not less but the others just leaking intentionally more info ahead of release to fuel the hype is an important factor at play here.
I don't wish to comment on the "and quality" part in your question though.
> However, the power structures in academia are heavily skewed and toxic. Individually graduate students have little recourse when they are wronged. Life in academia is hard. You have to work long days, the chance of success is very low. At every stage the probability of getting that next job is very low.
A "research precariat" is what keeps German universities going as well. This is an international issue; even the OECD seems to have studies on the subject. Would be interesting to see a cross-country comparison of who really has the "best" universities --- or university systems, as this kind of issue does not tend to be specific to one institution.
This is pretty accurate as an observation I believe. "My" middle manager does a lot more and acts more like a PO/PM combination fixing things in a horizontally integrated manner, whereas most typical PO/PM roles do their PM/POeing in a vertically integrated manner, on a product/product team basis. He's very good at that and therefore far from feeling irrelevant. Instead, he's drowning in useful work.
> Eric Schmidt even recently weighed in about the return-to-work debate, [...] "I don’t know how you build great management [with remote work]. I honestly don’t," he said. And about half of managers, 51%, genuinely believe that their workers want to return to the office.
Instead of believing, perhaps ask them?
In general, I find this article to say almost nothing. The headline is the clickbait bringing in a Fortune of clicks, I'm sure.
As a hobby mail everything is fun (from MUAs to sieve). If it needs to be reliable it's not. Don't miss self-hosting my email service either ("has the response to my application arrived or did I fail to receive it").
After the 80s expired, in Germany, long-form audio dramas [1] transitioned from being produced to vinyl to cassette (the transition to CDs happened amazingly late in the 2000s, and for quite some time both cassette and CD were typically released at the same time). Basically, all my audio dramas are cassette or vinyl.
What I was running up to say: whereas the quality of CD masterings typically was consistent and befitting the medium, many of my audio drama cassettes have quite varying physical qualities. It esp. gets noticable with long-running series such as the "three ???" series; over 100s of cassettes, you can make out the slumps and peaks.
It really is a shame that replacement products that are up to par do not really exist. You'd probably have to persuade a local enthusiast or skilled audio electronics repair man to restore an old deck for you unless you can do everything yourself should you get one. At least, the cheap consumable mechanical parts like belts are available for any make and model under the sun, so keeping one deck running with some care is something even non-enthusiasts can do
For me, it was the trouble of inadquate losless download offerings by so many labels / distributors. Even if you just want a digital library, getting the physical medium and making your private digital copy is a so much more stress-free variant, and it also doesn't limit your choice, because almost all music is available on CD and a much smaller fraction as well-produced losless audio downloads. I'm not paying CD price for a mp3, it's not the 2000s anymore, I can afford to download 700M of data for an album --- data saving was the original purpose of lossy audio codecs to begin with.
What happens when such a niche manufacturer's hardware breaks down as a warranty case? I strongly prefer vendors or OEMs who have strong support. I am not terribly impressed by the overall quality of my current laptop by German reseller Schenker/XMG but they, as an alternative to the big enterprise suppliers like Dell or HP or Lenovo have a stepped up support game as well (it reflects in their relatively higher prices vs quality they sell).
This is also the reason why I'm sceptical ordering things like the "Framework Laptop". If it's a hobby expense it's an alright expense and risk, but for productivity, I need assurances, and part of that assurance comes from a track record, which not all niche vendors have (with me).
Europe has lost the hands and the knowledge to do that due to neglect over 30+ years. In order to be able to do such a thing, you need to educate a steady pipeline of people to become professionals that can handle the job. As for contractors who could actually be available for hire to handle this, Korea and Japan come to mind, but both are probably booked out well into the foreseeable future.
When you build a reactor, you probably don't want "first-timers" working on the project for you.
Interestingly, capital returns and population growth are (unquestionably?) on exponential curves. So, are production factors too slow to evolve along with the exponentials? Maybe they are, because of waste, lack of recycling, raw resources decline and environmental damage.
>> The other near-ponzi scheme is the real estate market. In my city of Toronto, average real estate prices have gone from 2x average income in 1972 to 16x average income today. > >Hello from a Vancouverite! I broadly agree with this point, and I'm not sure how to work our way out of a housing bubble beyond popping it and dealing with the aftermath. Too many people are invested in the status quo, so any politician who tries to pop it will be crucified for destroying the savings of a large portion of the population.
You could argue that in the same time frame, world population has more than doubled, and because the cost of capital is a lot cheaper elsewhere than in Canada, pressure on attractive living space in peaceful and stable countries has increased exponentially. At this point, the "liberal" view on capital flows and capital control, the fuel of foreign direct investments of Western countries into overseas properties since WWII, came back to bite the originators of the idea in the ass.