The same is basically true for most other sports in the US too, and yet there are still high-level Americans. Certainly baseball (which other countries do still play in a limited fashion), hockey and football. With football we are undisputed world champs for the last 60 years! Joking aside, there is no doubt that high-level NFL players are seriously talented and their whole sport revolves around structured practices and weekly games.
Basketball might be closest to the USA’s soccer – lots of unstructured play and selection to schools and academies at a young age, but historically the pay to play travel circuit plays a big deal there too, and American basketball players are no doubt internationally competitive.
I don’t have an answer either, I just think that the way we play soccer isn’t limiting the best potential players. I just think the best potential players are choosing to play other sports.
I feel this in my own life. From well before my working years I had a message ingrained into me: “Do not count on social security to be around when you retire.”
It’s probably not all so drastic as that, but for me (and many other American millennials) my financial ethos has been squarely centered on saving and making hay while the sun shines. Compound that over 300M people and multiple generations and you do get overly deep and inflated capital markets.
Unfortunately, many of our urban areas have already been planned (for better or worse) for cars and not the density that makes public transit viable. Autonomous cars will solve a host of problems for the old, young, mobility limited, and just about everyone else.
It will prove disruptive to the driving industry, but I think we’ve been through worse disruptions and fared the better for it.
I'm not sure what the answer is for housing, but there are tons of factors that go in to the growth of cost there. For one, the people making the buying decision aren't comparing DR Horton to Lennar. Usually, they're thinking along two lines: monthly mortgage cost and location.
Still, that doesn't rule out other types of consolidation (that are not necessarily corporate in nature.) There are no new "cities" being built, and even if you want to live in a small suburban community, chances are that you want or need to live near a city for economic reasons. I bet a lot of people on this forum wouldn't even consider living outside of 15-mile radius of SFO or NYC.
For individual families, the choices are often even more constrained. Assuming a dual income household, it's unlikely both earners will be able to geographically relocate at the same time. So you end up with situations where new housing outside of economic centers is pointless to build, and new housing in economic centers is expensive or impossible to build due to regulations and existing suburban street layouts.
Bringing it back to Baumol, we can think of an invisible "land value tax" as rising much like a wage rises without an increase in productivity. Since we're not making new economically productive regions, the cost of living near one of the existing ones has to rise (and we're not doing anything to counteract those trends.)
I suspect it’s a byproduct of Google’s internal launch process which may require more work or longer processes for launching something in different jurisdictions. So it’s probably not an active decision that they couldn’t legally do this in the EU, but a result of being extra careful around what they can “launch” in a jurisdiction with potentially high penalties.
(I am a Googler, but not on this team, or familiar with their launch policies)
Fellow Googler here. I'm the exception that proves the rule. After 7 years of Macbook and Linux devices, I needed Windows for a special project, so I got a "gWindows" device and found it very well supported.
Aside from the specific Windows-only software I needed, I would still just ssh into a Linux workstation, but gWindows can do basically everything my Mac can. I was pleasantly surprised.
It's just easier to iterate and improve on a coding specialist AI when that is also the skill required to iterate on said AI.
Products that build on general LLM tech are already being used in other fields. For example, my lawyer friend has started using one by LexisNexis[0] and is duly impressed by how it works. It's only a matter of time before models like that get increasingly specialized for that kind of work, it's just harder for lawyers to drive that kind of change alone. Plus, there's a lot more resistance in 'legacy' professions to any kind of change, much less one that is perceived to threaten the livelihoods of established professionals.
Current LLMs are already not bad at a lot of things, but lawyer bots, accountant bots and more are likely coming.
Including Ilya Sutskever who is (according to the posted document) among the 550 undersigned to that document.
It's pretty clear this is a fast-moving situation, and we've only been able to speculate about motivations, allegiances, and what's really going on behind the scenes.
It seems pretty self evident that China would not be in favor of military action to enforce climate goals. GP's point was that still developing nations are going to continue producing CO2 regardless of what electric grids look in OECD nations.
Another major stumbling block for train signals once you get the basics down is segment length. Signals indicate whether the next segment is occupied, not whether any given train will fit in there (and potentially block a segment or intersection behind it.)
I frequently set up tracks with segments as large as my longest train, but then end up having to add an intersection here or there, breaking up segments into smaller sizes. This is the root of most of my train woes (aside from LTN issues, which are a whole other issue!)
As referenced by GP - it's a list of inventions from the podcast '50 Things That Made the Modern Economy.' [0]
The first series is my favorite podcast of all time. They're short (~8 minutes, iirc) but pack a lot of interesting info in each episode. In particular, they explore some of the second-order effects of each invention.
The disposable razor might not be a true 'black swan' like the transistor or LK-99, but some of the background and influence around the invention might surprise you! I recommend checking it out. [1]
I think this is a dangerous dream to have. The reality will probably be that the water cooler (or some virtual equivalent) will still be integral to career development, just maybe not yours.
People are inherently social and no workplace will ever be a strict meritocracy. Eschew small talk at your own risk!
I think the walled garden is the whole point here, and you are not the target for this app. It’s no coincidence that the sample they show on their devices is for a student (high school?) newspaper. This is like the blue texts in iMessage. Get them while they’re young, and they’ll be hooked for life. Imagine the shame of being excluded from a high school group project because, “we’re all doing it in Freeform, sorry.” Better ask mom for an iPhone just to be safe.
This is an interesting conversation to peruse while watching an NFL (American football) game being played in Munich. [0]
I’m not sure why the NFL does a few of these games (overseas, more often in London) each year. The stadium seems full, but I don’t know if it’s more Americans who traveled for the game, Europeans who are clamoring for more American Football, or just folks curious to see what the game is like.
I think there is great value for the US in the soft power that comes from other countries adopting American culture, but I’m not sure whether it’s deliberate or just a natural consequence of being such a large economy. There’s also a deeply embedded sense of ‘manifest destiny’ in American culture. We’re out of land to acquire, because we reached the pacific coast and modern politics doesn’t allow for empire building the way it once did. So maybe the next frontier in expanding (our) civilization is to spread our culture.
Basketball might be closest to the USA’s soccer – lots of unstructured play and selection to schools and academies at a young age, but historically the pay to play travel circuit plays a big deal there too, and American basketball players are no doubt internationally competitive.
I don’t have an answer either, I just think that the way we play soccer isn’t limiting the best potential players. I just think the best potential players are choosing to play other sports.