Andreas

Is this like when they made the kilogram some function of the speed of light instead of the weight of a metal ball in a French museum?

I brought up the social system because you can see that everyone in this thread arguing against you is saying that your “excellent welfare system” is the reason why your income is lower than the corresponding American programmer’s. The massive taxation is obviously a big factor to your reduced income, but let’s look away from that for a bit and just focus on the American companies.

American companies in America pay more because the costs of doing business in America are much lower and there is a greater availability of loans and funding.

American companies in Europe pay more because they have the advantages listed above that local European companies don’t have and they have the resources to invest in a global expansion.

That’s it. That’s the answer.

I don’t think that you, me and OP have different values on this issue, actually? We all agree that the state is supposed to provide us with a structure to live in that we couldn’t have on our own, and as payment for this safety net, we contribute taxes. My and OP’s argument is that with the current projection of the economy and population growth, the state cannot provide the current generation of tax payers with the structures and support that we will eventually need, and therefore many of us would rather pay lower taxes and lose the benefits, because we won’t be getting them anyway. We know what’s coming and we don’t want to be the ones “holding the bag” when the system collapses.

I’m trying to explain OP’s point to the Americans in this thread who don’t understand that European social security systems are currently under severe strain and are on the road to collapse, and how OP feels to have to sacrifice so much of his potential income to support a failing system. The 80s stereotypes of reliable, high-quality social security no longer hold true in Europe in 2023.

I considered buying the P3 or P4 because they’re said to have the best cameras and battery performance, but the end of security updates after 2022 and 2023 respectively turned me off and I got a P6A instead. What are you going to do with your P4A after the support for it ends this year?

It should be pointed out that the author of this article had a private meeting with Meta regarding Threads and signed a NDA. He is also the head of a company that receives funding based on the popularity of the Mastodon software. There may or may not be deals we don’t know about, but he is certainly not an unbiased party.

Meta’s business is monitoring and using online social networks to manipulate human behavior. Their massive userbase will cause Threads content and users to dominate instances that federate with them. It’s more than just “no like”.

Hardware companies have much deeper pockets because the initial investment for hardware design and manufacturing is much higher than software. This also helps them keep their profits because new companies can’t enter the industry and compete as easily.

I also realized that I didn’t mention the elephant in the room, selection bias. US companies in Europe are those who have already “made it” in their domestic market and are looking to expand globally, of course they’ll bring money that Arnes Webbyrå AB doesn’t have. I follow CS industry discussions that naturally end up talking about the US a lot, and there are stories about how retrenched developers with experience had to accept terrible wages like $30k a year with all of the lack of safety nets that living in the US comes with. Those positions exist, but they don’t hire foreigners, so we never hear about them.

But I agree with you that a high minimum wage also reduces how much a company can pay its top employees, because their expenses on lower-paid employees like customer support and janitors will have to be balanced out somehow.

I think it has to do with the higher rate of investor funding in the US that allows companies to spend above their actual assets by a huge margin, because of the significantly lower capital gains taxes there. The risk is much higher that US companies go bankrupt or investors stop funding the company during times of high interest rates (such as now), which is why US tech companies are disproportionately affected by the post-Coronavirus layoffs. Even Reddit itself (according to Spez) has not been profitable through all 18 years of its operation, but someone was clearly pouring money into it to keep it running. European companies on the other hand have a lot more administrative overhead when it comes to loans and investment than US companies, so they can’t use money they don’t have to offer attractive compensation on the level of US companies.

I’m not Danish (I’m the resident foreign invader on the instance), but if you are, you should come over to feddit.dk to complain with us. Privatization and the social system destroying itself is a hot topic right now.

I must admit though, the way you described your country made me think you were from Greece or somewhere that is bleeding citizens because its social systems are beyond salvaging at this point. Is the public pension in Denmark really unliveable? I would assume that it’s much worse here in Sweden but old people are generally still able to get by.

Oof, it sounds like your country is further along than mine on the “broken down social system” scale. My country is already dealing with reports about retirees who can’t survive off their pension despite working for an average income their entire lives, old people who are not able to find caretakers and people who have to wait in line for an unreasonably long time to get public healthcare and subsidized housing. All while politicians slash budgets and make privatized systems the only way to get timely and high-quality services. I can only see it getting worse from here and it makes no sense to pay so much for something whose quality only gets worse with every passing year.

You’re right that healthy, young working adults without children have very little to gain from socialized systems. I’m going to assume that OP, like me, is an early Gen Z who fits this description, and is about to enter the job market or has just entered it. For our generation, this statement

The state is not here to rob you, but to provide you with a structure to live in that you couldn’t have in the same way on your own.

does not check out mathematically. The taxes we pay today don’t get locked away in a box to be spent when we are sick or elderly and need them. They are spent on the sick and elderly we have right now. This means that at the age that we start needing benefits more than we contribute to them, it’s not going to be us, but our children’s and grandchildren’s generation who are footing the bill. But the birth rates across Europe are below replacement level and none of our countries have come up with a system that either raises birth rates above replacement level or successfully introduces foreigners who will be net tax contributors for all their lives. That means that despite paying high taxes and receiving miserable salaries (compared to American salaries) today, we won’t even be able to enjoy benefits from the state in the future because there won’t be enough tax contributors by the time we need these benefits.

It absolutely feels like getting robbed.

Nah, that one can be left hidden. It’s a rambling and whiny mess with e-begging at the end. The Ploum.net article describing Embrace, Extend, Extinguish in practice with Google/XMPP and Microsoft/DOC file formats is the strongest argument against allowing corporations into open software communities.

It’s great that they’re going back to traditional, self-hosted forums instead of corporate social media for support and discussions, but damn, I don’t miss having to manage hundreds of accounts with unique logins for each forum. I understand that they want more control over forum moderation and the Fediverse’s “anyone can post there” system makes it troublesome. It would be great if there was more widespread adoption of decentralized, “one login to access everything” systems.

The article or the thread? The article is just a list of who’s demanding payment from Twitter and how much Twitter owes each company. The thread explains why Twitter has a confusing system of multiple offices and a brand new expensive building (that they are not paying rent on).

USB-A is one-sided, unlike USB-C, so you can’t do direct data transfers between two devices with USB-A ports. It’s much slower too. Electronic waste is not ideal but it has to happen for a large-scale hardware upgrade. I try to reduce it by recycling my USB-A bricks and cables.

I also cannot understand why, unless you use Apple devices exclusively, you would be happy that one company’s series of devices has to use a completely unique charging system from every other device in the world. I don’t care if Lightning is better when it’s proprietary. If Apple “sticks two fingers up” and doesn’t integrate USB-C charging into the iPhone 15, I won’t be buying another device from them, because I’m tired of having to carry two different cables around - one USB-C for my laptop, Android phone, power bank, speaker and other devices, and one Lightning charger for nothing else but the damn iPhone.

Seeing the community get destroyed is hard, but seeing the whole company the community relies on being taken over by someone who doesn’t care about is okay?! These unpaid janitors seriously need to re-evaluate their priorities.

I am not American so I can’t claim to know about the causes of homelessness there, but I think this is because the homeless can generally be sorted into two categories. One is, as you mentioned, the people who unfortunately encountered financial trouble and lost their home. These people are legally homeless but usually invisible, because they move in with their friends and family or live in their car. They are generally able to financially provide for themselves and will eventually have a home again. Society is very empathetic to this group and there is a lot of support for them, but they’re not what people think of when homelessness is discussed.

The public perception of homelessness is the second type of visible and persistently homeless people, the ones you see on the streets. They suffer from mental disorders and drug addiction, so they lack a support network, cannot provide for themselves normally and will often turn to crime to survive. It’s not unexpected that people see this group as “assaults people in public”, “attracts crime”, “leaves trash and needles around” and lose empathy for them. Now I’m not an expert on this issue and this categorization is obviously a generalization, but it helps to understand why people hold certain perspectives in this debate.

Read the article, the problem isn’t their online activities but the wifi attracting them to cluster outside the library building. The residents don’t want the homeless hanging around outside the library and turning off the wifi would reduce their incentive to be there.

PiHole, Adguard Home and the like can’t block ads on smart TVs? Or is it something like the TV refusing to start if it contacts the ad server and doesn’t get a response?

It’s not that we don’t care about the news, it’s that the current news landscape doesn’t offer any options that are trustworthy and accessible. I can’t compare sources and alternative perspectives on an article if 90% of the news websites throw up a paywall at me. That leaves the free websites to public service and the most sensationalist junk. That’s why I use link aggregation sites a lot, because the news is curated by humans and there will always be nuanced discussion from multiple perspectives in the comments. Of course, this places trust in the link aggregation site to be powered by humans and not advertisers or influencers.

Using ChatGPT for anything more than repetitive or random generation tasks is a bad idea, and its usefulness becomes even more limited when you’re working with proprietary code that you can’t directly send to ChatGPT. Even with personal projects, I still try to avoid ChatGPT as much as possible for the simple reason that I’ll be forced to pay for it if it becomes an essential part of my workflow when it leaves this free beta testing phase.