I think a more interesting question is: who is “self”? US is historically more prone to favor business, while EU seems more concerned in protecting consumers. And of course there is the noise generated by incompetence/corruption/lobbying that makes the question of “in the interest of whom are laws made?” very nuanced.
Very good points. I've been trying to figure out whose interest is in our "national interests" my entire life. It sure ain't protecting my interests or those of anyone I love that justifies a trillion dollar a year military.
The trillion dollar military is Americas welfare system. You may be chronically confused why no politician dem/republican/liberal/conservative ever wants to cut funding for it, and toss it up as obvious collusion between mega-contractors and politicians.
Well it is. And it's willful. That trillion dollars is spent almost entirely on US made things by US workers. Only a small slice (still large in absolute terms) goes to those mega-contractors. The rest is the only thing that has kept any semblance of American manufacturing alive. The military buys everything (this isn't an exaggeration, you would be hard pressed to find something in your life that they don't buy in quantity) , and there are countless businesses that pay decent wages with benefits for low skilled workers in every state that are only still in existence because of military spending.
It also functions as an incubator, having special provisions for small businesses, especially those owned by marginalized people or located in especially impoverished areas. Basically "We need need coffee filters, so if you buy the equipment and higher the workers, we'll sign a contract to buy 2,000,000 packages a year from you. (And it's a kick-your-door-down felony if you try to backdoor foreign made filters)."
That's why it is never cut. It's a welfare plan that republicans agree too because it requires holding down a job to access. It comes with the side effects of keeping factories running and getting an overpowered military.
And it was an explicit pact between US and European countries: you can have socialism and not much military (because who wants a huge German army??), while we will do our socialism via our military, which in turn will protect you.
But now our politicians are so dumb they don't realize that's what was agreed long ago, and think they can have one part of that deal and not the other.
I am pretty sure if the US decided to get rid of its military entirely, then it wouldnt be long before it was invaded by Russia or China and then the interests of the people you love would be severly impacted.
The world stage is no more a safe place than it has been for any other part of history.
> then it wouldnt be long before it was invaded by Russia or China
I would be lying if I claimed I hadn't dreamed of being liberated by a foreign power with more cultural competence at governance (which excludes Russia, obviously, but they probably at least aren't worse), but realistically anything but a slow scale-down in military power would probably entail the bloodiest world (and civil) war in history. Maybe nukes, too.
But, there's a fork in the road. We can choose to scale down our military presence (and control of trade) today, and figure out how we actually want to exist in a global community outside of letting our corporations swing their dicks freely... Or we can blow trillions of dollars continuing to make fools of ourselves rampaging through other countries rather than building high speed rail before we lose our grip on hegemony anyway as a matter of pure economics.
Or, I suppose, we can just murder anyone who disagrees with us until we're just miserably exploiting each other inside of high walls armed with automated guns. Something tells me that's the option we're going to pick.
> US is historically more prone to favor business, while EU seems more concerned in protecting consumers.
Well that's not that obvious... Sure EU is more than willing to protect consumers from foreign(American) megacorporation because the cost of doing that is very low.
Entrenched major local companies? Well stifling competition through excessive regulation and propping up to bit too fall semi-zombie corporations is not necessarily that great for consumers long-term.
Because VAT is collected at the border on imports, some people (wrongly) consider VATs a tariff. Considering that VAT is rebated on exports, VATs are trade neutral.
Sales tax as implemented in the US is not as tax efficient as VAT due to the impact of sales taxation on intermediate transactions during manufacturing. VAT only taxes the incrementally the value added at each transaction) whereas sales tax applies to the entire value at each stage.
Hmm how is it different in the US do you not get back in the sales tax that you paid for your input. Here the middle man pay tax on the buying price and then collects on the sell price. Then has to pay the government minus what they paid as input sale tax. So all increments on the price gets taxed till the end user. But the tax itself is not taxed again.
Many B2B transactions are tax-exempt but it's complicated. And gets really complicated once international transactions are considered. And also whether the company has a physical nexus in the place the product is being purchased. All in all, I think it would be simpler if the US adopted VAT. But that seems very unlikely.
Last I checked VAT is the same rate regardless if the product is made in China or by pinguins on Antarctica so why anyone in the US gives a damn is beyond me.
At an individual level, it’s not more complicated: it’s reimbursed instead of exempted. And if you’re charging it, it’s easier, since you simply always charge instead of maintaining your list of exceptions.
Not comparable with an H series gpu. I am not sure what kind of applications make sense but I am sure that if it sells enough, developers will find a way to squeeze good stuff out of this.
Edge inference most likely. Its FP4 performance is about 1/3 of 5090, power 170W for the whole thing. It can run big model or several small. Shifting balance to memory favors MoE. Would be nice to see FP32 numbers, they are used in training. My guess about 20 TFLOP, may be more, but 5090 is still times better.
I agree. It’s as easy as that if you respect people having different values. But these laws come from a “my god told me that this is right” mindset and you can’t really argue with that.
if this is what people want, so be it. who cares!
"easy"? ISP can only apply the rules per-connection, so it's not great for parental control. It also can't enforce any filtering past the domain, so sex subreddits are still open. It also creates a list of people enabling sex sites. It would still be a problematic solution.
you can just make a law that websites are required to flag the html for pages that contain rated content so that isp and parents can filter whatever they want. all without infringung on people freedom.
i am sure smarter people than me can come up with an even better solution. this honestly just feel more like imposing religious values than anything else
same rules that apply to pornography should apply to any religious site too. no one under 18 should be subjected to lunacy of religious websites that exist and yet… :)
You ever notice how the parents who are loudest about "parental rights" are the ones who coerce and groom their children into religion before they're old enough to consent or even understand the metaphysical underpinnings of religious belief?
It’s the difference between legislation for the benefit of people and legislation for the benefit of businesses. Both can be good or bad, it’s just a different mindset.
Before you jump to that conclusion you have to be sure that:
- such politician exist (politician is not where we humans shine)
- you believe the ones who claim they will fix it
- the one that you believe can fix it don’t come with values that you cannot accept (extreme example: “I’ll kill all homeless people. vote me!”
Given there are/were cities that are not in such decline and such a state, including SF itself, it definitely seems like there are politicians that can fix it.
The values conflict may be relevant. If, for example, you think it's critical to allow and facilitate your fellow man to become total enslavement to drugs that destroy their lives and health and eventually kill them, then I can get that you won't want to do anything to stop it, even if you have to live in squalor for that to be the case.
Honestly, as a society we should be able to guarantee most if not all of those. Every single one of them is an economic trade-off and when you put for profit companies in the loop, it’s obvious that they will prioritize their profits.
The system is for profit by choice, it is under our control as society to guarantee that list or not, and we have chosen not to.
Might be the right or wrong decision, that’s up to each of you, but denying it’s has been chosen it’s very naive
It's beyond economic trade-off. You're talking about full perfect control over people's behaviours.
> That things that are legal to put in your body will not cause irreparable harm to you
You can get water intoxication by literally drinking too much clean water. How are you going to get anywhere close to controlling that?
> That your medical professional knows what they are talking about
You just lost all medical staff, because they're people and people make mistakes. Even when they don't, people are extremely fuzzy puzzles and we don't have enough tests available to do precise diagnosis of lots of things.
The challenge with medicine, if one is dealing with a known condition, there's a known intervention. And Any number of simple and straightforward tests will make it easy.
It's with the unknown conditions, that doesn't fall into the mental flow chart of a medical professional's mental model are SOL.
The real answer to most folk's chronic conditions are lifestyle interventions, but of course, medical professionals most difficult challenge is ensuring compliance. The only tools available for a medical professional to a patient is to beg, plead, threaten, yell, discuss the interventions till they are blue in the face, but unfortunately, you can lead a horse to water, but can't force them to drink.
The elephant in the room that no one wants to admit is that a lot of health issues are both self-inflicted through lifestyle choices, and it creates an negative feedback loop of demand for professionals to be able to truly have more time to care for the patients that truly need help.
I think a decent number of them are non-economic statements, particularly the motives for doctors, insurance, and interests.
>The system is for profit by choice, it is under our control as society to guarantee that list or not, and we have chosen not to.
The system is for profit by choice, because most people care about themselves. It would very hard to make your doctor care more about your life than theirs, or care about your kids more than their kids.
You can institute harsh criminal penalties for doctors like some suggest in this thread, but even then, they are still putting themselves first.
Im not sure I'm "denying" any choice. Im just stating how it is. I have no doubt the world would be different if people chose different - which is a tautological claim.
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