> "Government is fine if it’s done by people that aren’t in it only for themselves."
Academic studies consistently show that people attracted to a career in politics (regardless of affiliation) score higher on "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy).
And even for the non-sociopaths, the problem with humans is instinctively we ARE only in it for ourselves and our family. Anyone claiming otherwise, ironically, is probably attempting to signal virtue for...personal gain...yet again.
I think it's reductionist to say politicians are psychopaths.and it's completely dependent on how you structure your society. And, regardless, social coordination is absolutely necessary and you won't be able to do it without the state.
You have to be either a psychopath or a conspirator to get anywhere in politics. The former for a dictator style "cult of personality". The latter for a technocratic/bureaucratic "rules based" parliament rule.
Rule by parliament by the very way it is set up becomes a snake pit of betrayals, horse dealing and back stabbing, when alliances are made. Look into any European political discourse online and offline, and it's all about which parties should ally with which parties after the elections. A million rules are made and routinely circumvented to try to maintain a non-existent "system" of governance which isn't tied to any person, but some abstract paper construct.
Rule by strong man attracts psychopaths and narcissists for obvious reasons, and if not, at least the most ruthless people you can imagine.
>"how you structure your society"
How who structures your society? Now you're back to step one where either the psycho or the snake conspirators rule.
Any change has to first come from within. People have to personally as individuals decide to not pay taxes and decide to not follow the law when the law is unfair. These things are doable, and when enough people do it, the power starts returning to them.
Social coordination has been done for thousands of years before anybody had ever heard of the concept of "a state".
In the future - maybe in our lifetimes - the idea of a state will be irrelevant and forgotten by most. People will laugh at the idea that people revered and feared and even worshipped that paper tiger. It will collapse and disappear into obscurity just like so many other false ideologies through history. Just like the Soviet Union went from being a super power striking terror into the hearts of the world into becoming just a meeting room with a few powerless men with no country and no people to rule.
Some people are wired such that altruism makes them feel good and gives them a sense of purpose. Maybe it's evolutionary, but it doesn't change the fact that they don't think of it as 'virtue signalling' or personal gain when they do it.
In fact the ones who can only classify the behavior as such because they can't even comprehend it look like the real sociopaths.
If doing the thing makes them feel good then they’re doing it for personal gain?
I don’t know why people hate acknowledging the reality that humans are 1st person actors.
The system we have works because it converts this pursuit of personal gain into broader humanity gain, tying those incentives together where possible, even if imperfect.
Refusing to acknowledge this and instead pretending politicians can be selfless has resulted in the worlds worst atrocities like the communist experiments of last century.
Issues with majority support never change in almost all of the biggest democracies in the world right now.
For the US specifically its a representative oligopoly with Madisonian gridlock and a few million non-elected bureaucrats thrown in the middle.
The US gives the smallest amount of say to people to pick either Coke or Pepsi. Don't like sugary soda and think its making you fat? Tough luck, you gotta pick Coke or Pepsi.
Switzerland is so democratic they refused to let women vote until the 1990s (in the last canton) because the voters (men) didn't allow that. It's my go-to example of how direct democracy has pitfalls too.
Under the terms the current democracy at the time, yes, that was the will of the (voting) people. It's of course ridiculous it had to get to the courts to force the last canton to allow women to vote, but now that everyone can vote, I'd say it's a very democratic country. People (all of them) get consulted on everything.
I laughed out loud. Do you understand in the EU Anthropic wouldn’t even be possible? Why do you think Mistral is so far behind?
Also, as a US citizen Dario is subject to US law regardless of where he lives.
The US loves throwing its weight around via the US treasury and threatening countries with banning their ability to transact in U.S. Dollars, hence how the Obama administration turned every global bank into a dragnet for enforcing its draconian global taxation scheme on non-residents via FATCA.
The US has too much power, period. Doesn’t matter who’s in power, both parties abuse it. China rising to be a real counterbalance is a good thing imo.
If you think its insane to spend that amount of money on it (essentially: it's not worth that much to you), then you holding onto it instead of having $1300 is pretty much the exact same scenario? By holding onto it you're saying it is worth that much to you.
It sounds like believing you hunted down a 'deal' causes you to wildly change how you perceive value at an emotional level.
I would probably do the same thing. It's just funny to see expressed on HN where everybody complains that advertising and marketing are evil/scams and proclaims loudly how rational they are.
He wants the thing. He does not value the thing at 1300 dollars so he would not buy it for 1300 dollars. He found it for a lower value, he kept it because the point at the start was he wanted the thing.
On the topic of HN users, is it our collective first day on earth?
it could simply be that you value owning the object in terms other than money. sentimental reasons, completionism tendencies, novelty, some other "non-rational"/emotional reason; any of these can have a stronger pull on the mind than $1300 to someone who doesn't immediately need the cash for survival. i have some records like this (not in that price-range but still) along with a few other collectible items (some rare handmade keycaps that were going for over $500 a piece at one point) that I refuse to part with for money because i just... like them :)
The point is it's irrational behavior. And we all do it.
It's burning $5 in gas and $20 in time to go to a store further away and save $25 on a sale item. And then proudly bragging "I'm not like those idiots who pay full price!"
OP didn't find a record...he found a $1300 arbitrage, then decided to spend the proceeds on the record by keeping it.
In other words, this is why selling stuff to consumers is a nightmare.
You have to trick them into believing they "won one over" on everybody else, via discounting and promotions, no matter if ultimately they're the ones losing by spending hours of their time jumping through hoops on a product that they legitimately value at full price.
> On the topic of HN users, is it our collective first day on earth?
The disease of financialization at work. Money is all that matters to people, everything is converted into money. It's only value is what you could get from selling it, and/or what you spent to acquire it.
Like those weird fuckers who buy $200k supercars so they can sit in a damn garage. (She said, having put 30k miles on a Corvette inside of 3 years)
> 10k mi/yr is a nice round "lease" number of miles. Are you sure you don't value the resale value of your car more than the joy value?
I mean it's helped by the fact that I can only realistically drive it like 7-8 months out of each year, and it's my fun car, not a commuter. As much as I'd love to drive for fun every day that's just not feasible, lol. That said it's resale value has never once entered my mind. I'm waiting until the loan is paid off at which point I'm planning several modifications to get more power out of it, and probably a lambo-door-hinge kit.
I don’t see any sign they own the original pressing which is $1300. Instead they own the 1977 remaster which apparently sounds as good as the original pressing though I don’t own the original. The 1977 remaster sells for between $5 and $50 depending on grade. I paid $3 for mine and it might be worth $25 or $30 of if I did a lot of leg work.
You’re making a lot of assumptions here in your thinking. The first one is that you can just randomly turn around and sell that record for $1300. Hitting those peaks usually only happens with in person sales or amongst collectors who know each other well. It’s incredibly expensive to get to that point and requires thousands of hours of work. For a normal person without extensive contacts, it’s still a lot of leg work for a fraction of that price. That might yield maybe $30 an hour.
Some people value their time higher than that; it’s really not that deep.
My feelings about this rest of the scope of liability. From my understanding, Google is now liable if making false claims about a personal/business reputation. I like this idea in theory (key word).
However, I can easily see the slippery slope where in practice this means providing any AI response becomes too risky, and it becomes another money club used to extract wealth from big tech due to the current hysterical anti-AI moral panic.
Which would ultimately kill the ability of the German people to get access to competitive AI models.
I'm sure many anti-tech/anti-civilization doomers on HN will cheer this on. However, in reality it would do nothing to stop Germany falling behind, and continue its economic malaise/low productivity growth and social welfare collapse. When things in Germany get bad, Germans historically have tended to...ummm...cause issues for Europe. I would not take this lightly given the current rise of more polarized political rhetoric and German economy pivoting hard into weapons manufacturing.
The slippery slope of being held liable for an AI overview leading to neo-Hitler is certainly a take, and a ridiculous one at that.
It's one thing for an LLM to get things wrong. This case is not that though. And if big tech can't make sure that their models don't libel companies and individuals then good riddance. Whatever diminutive economic advantage one can get from "competitive LLMs" probably isn't worth it anyway, especially with all of the other disadvantages of these "competitive LLMs" compounding on our societies and the planet, as the resource usage of the data centres necessary to run and train them exacerbate the ongoing climate crisis.
My point is Germany further rejecting participation in the the next wave of technology (as they have done for 50 years) is going to NOT improve the trajectory they are currently on...which is bad.
The neo-Hitler and re-militarization thing is already happening. AfD leads in the polls, they're opening talking about remigration of immigrants, Germany now produces more ammunition than any country on earth. AI has nothing to do with it.
And, given I'm speaking to one of the the anti-civilization/anti-tech doomers of HN as predicted, do you think Germany rejecting technology again is going to improve the "climate crisis" or hurt it? How is the de-commissioning of Nuclear working out there?
It is not anti-AI, it is anti misusing AI. Clearly you are trying to manipulate the situation here. If your AI is half baked and produce garbages, you should be liable for the damage of those garbages, that applies to any product or service on this planet, not only just AI.If your product or service is defect, that causes harm, you are liable.
But to loudly proclaim your love for this idea as most have here seems a bit premature given there are potentially massive downsides to applying legal liability to an AI model, if not done extremely carefully.
I'm just trying to move a bit beyond the emotional first order thinking. You might see this as manipulation if you love just swimming in emotional vibes, but I find this website becoming quite boring lately due to the lack of debate beyond this first-order thinking.
As someone living in Europe, watching a bunch of rich American engineers fanboy European over-regulation which they aren't actually being subjected to, is super cringe. It's the epitome of the principal-agent problem.
> It gives us European some opportunities...Now I feel more relaxed as Siri isn’t coming anytime soon.
We've had endless opportunities to compete during Apple's entire 50 year existence.
As someone living in Europe I feel ashamed to read you openly admitting this. This sentiment would feel at home in the USSR.
Instead of trying to create things the world finds useful by building something better/cheaper/more innovative, we're choosing protectionism so we can screw our customers with inferior products they're forced to buy...and relax.
I think we've done enough relaxing in Europe.
We were the birthplace of the industrial revolution...the technologies of which went on to bring the entire world out of poverty last century.
Do we seriously have nothing valuable to contribute to the world during the entirety of the digital revolution? If not, I think our decline and collapsing social welfare systems are deserved.
This garbage "research" being on the front page of HN without getting flagged is a good indication we've reached peak irrationality in the current smartphone moral panic.
People will blame the EU’s nightmarish fragmentation and regulatory headaches (all true)…but ultimately all factors ladder up to one thing: the availability of risk capital to invest in new ventures.
When Stripe was founded Venture Capital in Europe was even more nonexistent than it is today. Regardless of the regulation, if the EU dumped 2X as much risk capital into payments startups at the same time the U.S. did, Stripe would be a European company.
Talent flows to where the money is. Then once talent starts aggregating in one place it produces network effects (gravity), that gravity pulls in more capital and talent in a virtuous cycle, until fast forward a few decades and suddenly you have almost all the most valuable companies in the world being from Silicon Valley. Hence the present time we live in.
Who’s fault is it Europe is so far behind? Ultimately WW1 and WW2 destroying European wealth, assets, talent and risk tolerance.
If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
Ireland is also a tech hub, although those facts probably don't have any bearing on each other.
Irelands success comes entirely from low corporation tax, EU infrastructure funding, investment in workforce education, and the fact that we speak English. This combination of factors resulted in a massive tech boom, with lots of American tech firms setting up in Dublin, mostly for tax reasons but ultimately creating an actual tech industry where development happens.
The fact that stripe exists at all is because the Collision brothers grew up in and around that industry, with Patrick doing coding lessons in university of Limerick which had a massive computer science dept built to feed that industry. Without that he might not have been in tech at all. But looking at the history, his first payments company was turned down funding by Enterprise Ireland, sending him abroad where a Canadian company bought it and gave him the footing and confidence to go on to found Stripe, which had lots of SV investment. sadly I don't think that would have been forthcoming here.
It's a textbook case of the European tech industry problem, which I'm sure is mirrored in other EU countries (regardless of if they were in the wars or not). We invest heavily in education and workforce and encourage tech to be here, but we won't take the risk of investing in it. It's all European developers working hard for American firms, or small European firms trying to compete.
Maybe that's about to change with EU governments wanting to reduce reliance on American fimrs, like swapping Stripe for Adyen. There might finally be money to go with the talent. Maybe the next Collison will found their firm here
> Spain also stayed out of both wars but had a domestic Civil War in the 30s, which had the same net effect of destroying their prospects.
The Spanish Civil War was arguably just a proxy opening of WW2 between the USSR and Germany. Doesn’t change your point, just came to mind while reading your comment.
Very true, I preemptively assumed someone would reply 'What about Spain?' but then whether you consider the civil war part of WW2 or not is irrelevant given it had the same effect.
Ultimately, a company like Stripe sits on top of a fragile patchwork of societal/technological abstractions that are a byproduct of generations of compounded wealth.
Humans battling in the marketplace builds this compounded value, humans battling in warfare destroys it and makes you start from zero.
Just as the industrial revolution started decades before humans began leaving the farm en masse, the digital revolution started decades before anyone had a personal computer on their desk.
Europe was busy rebuilding firebombed cities and industrial capacity, while Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one). This early lead compounded. Moral of story: don't get in wars on your soil.
> Americans were free to birth the next layer of abstraction post-WW2 (the digital one)
The "on your own soil part" is even more complex than this implies. America spent decades waging wars across the world to reduce the chance that Russia could do the same.
> If you look at the countries who stayed out of both wars (Sweden, Switzerland)…they are currently the tech hubs of Europe. They both have more unicorns per capita than the US.
And in absolute terms, the UK has the #1 number of unicorns in Europe, 4th globally.
EU has plenty of VC, maybe not enough to sustain crazy rounds rounds like those we see often in the US, but capital is not the biggest blocker to founding your company in Europe, law is.
US has a very advanced corporate law, which is crucial in protecting investors, founders, employees and shareholders.
In Italy and most of Europe, if I create a startup, there is *no* legal way to give people stock options. I am bound to give it upfront, or the employees are bound to believe they will receive some. Even a legal contract signed at a notary cannot enforce stock options mechanisms 100%.
And this is a problem also for raising equity by the way. There's no C-Corp equivalent for low capitalized companies (e.g. any young startup) and emitting shares at small scale is borderline, as is cancelling shares after a buy back (which is why they are uncommon in European stock markets, it's feasible but very complicated).
This has been the killer of a startup of some friends of mine. They split a company in 3 and then one of the 3 left after some months and retained all of the equity and benefits without doing nothing and effectively held the company hostage for years pretending a huge exit. They had troubles raising equity because of him as well.
On top of that, in Italy, worker's protection is such that if you hire the wrong person and that person stops working after the brief period you can cancel the contract (generally 3 months) it's your problem and it's up to you to prove you had a valid cause. Even when you have and provide carrots for your employees and coworkers, there's no stick. You're at the mercy of lucking into the right people.
And, on top of that, you have taxes. Just to make an example. In Italy, it costs a business 70k euros to give 30k net to an employee. How am I supposed to compete for international talent if, even if I had the money to pay them very well and compete with higher cost of living countries, I then get hit by a truck of taxes? And that's not even mentioning corporate taxes.
And, bureaucracy is another issue. Let that sink in: it's easier for me in Italy to create a C-Corp in Delaware than create a basic ltd in my own country. And that bureaucracy scales at every level of your operations.
And, last but not least, the EU is still a fragmented market where regulations change dramatically as you cross borders. Scaling in the EU is hard in virtually every business, the unified market is just not there.
But every country and government will repeat populist propaganda that "we do our own way and protect only our interest, we won't delegate to Bruxelles".
UK is the only feasible place in Europe to make a startup, but even UK does not have as strong and mature corporate law as US does.
Pre Trump, if I had to found a company I would've just went with a Delaware C-Corp, even if I didn't need venture capital, let alone if I did.
Nowadays being a US company is increasingly risky, so I would probably look at Malta or UK.
Academic studies consistently show that people attracted to a career in politics (regardless of affiliation) score higher on "Dark Triad" personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy).
And even for the non-sociopaths, the problem with humans is instinctively we ARE only in it for ourselves and our family. Anyone claiming otherwise, ironically, is probably attempting to signal virtue for...personal gain...yet again.
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