I took a bunch of film classes in college and what they’re not mentioning is that sometimes the films bring assigned are crazy boring. I once had to watch an hour of footage shot from a camera in an outdoor elevator as it went up and down. One hour. The professor said it was the perfect summation of everything he’d been discussing over the term. I swear I’m not joking.
Perhaps as a film student you were meant to be looking at the composition, the shot structures, the color grading, the use of sound? The film may have been boring in its message or story but still a technical masterpiece?
Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.
In global economies, it is a general rule that different regions of the world specialise in their respective sectors. In the IT industry, we generally observe that early innovators can extend their advantage by binding customers to their technology platform. One example of how this also applies to Europe in the IT sector is SAP. Founded in 1972, they were one of the first companies to offer ERP solutions. Their founders initially worked at a German branch of IBM and took over a software product that IBM was no longer interested in. SAP's leading position in this market has been so strong ever since that no US company has been able to pose a threat to SAP. Oracle, for example, has tried.
You can see this mechanism at work in the USA itself. Microsoft tried to get into the mobil market, but gave up. Google tried to build its own social network, but gave up. All other cloud providers are stuggeling to catch up with AWS.
Brain drain to USA, lack of good VC / funding, Patents war / patents controlled by the USA, industry espionage, EU mentalities that don't favor innovation in the same direction than the USA, too diverse markets to serve, distributed controls / governments / decisions. The list can go on and on
> Isn’t the more fundamental question why Europe has not been as successful as the US or China in building a native tech industry despite having a huge market? What are the barriers to creating startups and how can you lower them and preserve the enviable European social model? Solve that and you’ll solve the problem of a native cloud.
IMO here in the UK we are good at starting tech startups, we are just bad at not selling them to overseas investors early in their life, or having a tax framework that is advantageous to them growing in the UK.
In the UK see Google Deepmind, ARM, Deliveroo... Elevenlabs being incorporated in the USA, Dyson moving to singapore etc - Even outside of the tech space, Cadburys, Sainsbury's, Jaguar Land Rover... If the UK kept hold of everything that the UK created, we would be great!
Even our infrastructure we sell to the French, Chinese, Germans etc just for short-term gain, despite that we are cutting our nose off if we look forward 10 years.
I am just speculating, but Europe has let itself be very dependent on USA for many things - military/defence, technology etc. "We don't need weapons, USA builds them for us". There has been no need to try and compete.
This is changing now. So maybe the incentives will now appear more clearly.
You don’t have to, this ja the reason. There were multiple successful EU alternatives that were killed by the loads of money the US companies could muster to kill or hobble them. And Europe decided it was fine.
There isn’t even an European card brand that operates across the whole continent, the just accepted to use visa and Mastercard for everything. I hope they change it.
And several European countries had their own card systems. The banks have just decided that letting US companies do the work is more lucrative. It was definitely cheaper and it was necessary if they want to be part of US hegemony network and trade with Asian countries since many of them had bad relationships due to colonialism.
The local card systems still exist in most places, but they only work if you have a card from that country, for people travelling across Europe its useless as once you cross the border people won't accept that card anymore and you're back to taking only visa/mastercard.
Eurocheque existed for a long while for Europe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurocheque . But yes, trusting the US economic and political partnership and also choosing the cheaper option, the European banks eventually decided to not do the legwork of establishing a (global) payment network and settled on American Visa and Mastercard networks.
The divergence of being many smaller countries with different regulations, primary languages, currencies etc have been a blocker, but progress is being made[1] and it seems like people are aware of the problem. It just takes a while when every plan needs to be approved by all countries.
No need, it was much more comfortable to stay in known sectors such as banking, industry or tourism. Now there is a real need so I'm positive things will change.
Let me start with saying I'm all for the European social model, which is sadly regressing. However, this model/system is often a hurdle for start-ups, or any small company for that matter. The rules are designed to regulate big companies also apply to start-ups, adding up a bug overhead in the initial years. I think agriculture specifically is outside most of these regulations, because European countries love their agriculture, i.e. rural votes coming from the farmers.
Talent pool in EU is large but not concentrated like in US. Combine this with every EU country having different rules, and not being able to hire across EU without incirporating in every country you want to hire, it's also challenging to access to the large talent pool.
Well, at the early stages, yes. But at the point where incumbent tech firms have an insurmountable advantage, just adding more startups probably isn't going to save you. Entrenched providers can use their market power to buy up/outcompete/destroy any smaller competitors. You really need both a native market and a startup scene.
China has a huge population that mostly speaks Mandarin. The US has a smaller, but relatively wealthy population that mostly speaks English. Europe is a hodgepodge of languages, cultures, and regulatory environments. That’s a beautiful thing, but it’s not an efficient thing from a business perspective.
Isn’t the whole point of Hamlet that he does have control over his life? At any moment he could have just stabbed Claudius and taken over. The dramatic tension comes from him being unable to get out of his own head and get down to businessto.
I think people need to chill out on this thread. LLMs are neither pure slop nor the end of the programming profession. They are immensely useful tools, particularly for tedious tasks or for quickly getting up to speed on a new API or syntax. They’re great for catching bugs too. Every now and again I’ll give an LLM a prompt and it will knock it out of the park, but that’s exceedingly rare. Most of the time, though, it just allows me to focus on the more interesting parts of my job. In short, for now at least, it is a big productivity booster, not a career ender.
Couldn’t agree more. This is actually a super useful feature. I can’t think of how many times I’ve been reading a book and some minor character resurfaces and I’m like, who the hell is that guy? Now I can know. I can also get information on historical context. Who knows, maybe I can finally read Ulysses without having to have 5 other books.
You could just give more time on tests such that it isn’t worth gaming the time limit. Aren’t we supposed to be teaching subject matter? Why do we care how quickly people can do it? If you’re worried about dumbing things down too much, make the actual content harder. Given how much grade inflation there is, I don’t understand why anyone would be gaming anything anymore anyway. And let’s be honest. Unless you’re trying to get a PhD, your grades don’t matter.
If we don't care about time and only care about eventual recitation of the subject matter, why don't we give all of the students more time instead of only some of them?
The whole conceit of only giving some students more time suggests that timed performance is supposed to matter.
I don’t understand who commissions and who reads pieces like this. Here is a person with no expertise in housing policy, no expertise in homelessness, and no expertise in tech. The only thing he’s bringing to the table is an opinion, which, as the saying goes, are like assholes. Blame inequality and tech and libertarians all you want, but it won’t do a damn thing to solve the homelessness crisis, which is fundamentally a housing supply issue. But I suppose that doesn’t lend itself to the kind of uninformed moralizing that apparently brings such delight to the hearts of lithub readers.
Okay, I disagree with a lot of views expressed in this piece, but still found it worth reading. It's well written. In particular, a lot of people here may agree with what the author wrote on housing.
Why is wealth inequality an issue for people who have mental disorders, chronic drug issues or people who just don't want to live by societal standards?
The scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits. Societal factors produce and reproduce it. It’s greatest in areas of high inequality for example - a fact not explained by individual traits.
Take mental illness. A mentally ill person with more resources can get the care they need, but someone who is poor can soon find themselves on the street. And homelessness itself is quite stressful, and can produce or exacerbate mental illness as well as drive people to drug addiction.
Homeless people are just like the rest of us, with their own basic human needs, and just like everybody else are trying to navigate their world as best they can.
What do you mean by "The scale of homelessness isn’t explained by individual traits."? Are you saying it's not obvious that being high all day with no income will eventually lead to eviction from whatever housing you had?
No I am saying your just so story of why homeless people are homeless does not explain why places with more wealth inequality see more homelessness. Why would this be if your sounds-good-to-you explanation were the actual factor driving homelessness?
does not explain why places with more wealth inequality see more homelessness
That's just because it's not true. Aspen, Hamptons, Martha's Vineyard and other places with the peak wealth inequality do not see more homelessness (or any homelessness worth mentioning). Liberal cities are the epicenters of homelessness because they all follow the same policies of enablement.
What’s the homeless rate in the luxury enclaves you mention? I couldnt find reliable numbers. Note that your claimed statistics for such enclaves could still be true but not discount the overall statistical relationship - such enclaves can have their own housing dynamics (such as small populations and vacation homes) which don’t negate the larger trend we see when we examine many locales such as large cities and so on. So no, cherry picked counter examples don’t negate the larger statistical relationship between homelessness and inequality.
And attributing homelessness to “enablement policies” is another hot take. It’s just as plausible that enablement policies are enacted as a response to homelessness not a cause.
But at least now we seem to be beyond blaming homelessness on individual traits.
This research has nothing to do with wealth inequality or homelessness. It's simply documenting that young children form attachment bonds with consistent caregivers, whether that's mom, dad, grandma, or a stable daycare worker. The key word is stable. Kids need predictable, responsive caregiving from the same people over time. That's basic attachment theory, not a political statement about economic systems.
I am sorry, I cannot read that "actual research" but I figure it did not include places with the most inequality, like ones I've listed?
>Note that your claimed statistics for such enclaves could still be true but not discount the overall statistical relationship
If you know statistics then you might be familiar with the "correlation does not imply causation" turn of phrase. And yes, any counter example destroys a causation claim.
My pet conspiracy theory is there is a fair amount of coordinated manipulation to get political posts on the HN front page. Fortunately, they are often quickly flagged to the abyss.
That’s not a conspiracy theory. Anyone who doesn’t realize at this point that online discourse is heavily engineered and manipulated is an unthinking rube.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives one.”
Knowledge is prerequisite for all else. Do pity the millions who will grow old before reading Ishiguro’s ‘The Remains of the Day’ - you too? Could you see its point?
Society is too large to see itself; someone must observe on our behalf. In this pursuit poesy may tell truth where ten thousand theses have honestly lied.
> No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people.
That might be true, but there are plenty of drug addicts and mentally ill people in West Virginia (#1 in per capita overdose deaths and well above CA/NY/etc in suicides) and yet West Virginia has a pretty low rate of homelessness (roughly 1/5th CA's and 1/8th NY's) so that's clearly not the explanation.
I'm sorry, who do you think the majority of homeless are? 2/3rd are people living in their car or moving from a friend apartment to another, sometimes sleeping in their school (I did that) if possible, or at their workplace (I know a cook who did that for a year). The visible homeless, sleeping in the street or in homeless camps, is the minority.
I guarantee you that 98% of homeless aren't drug addicts or mentally ill. Most of them are students from a poor family (me, for 2 years until my grandmother died and I use the inheritance to finance my last years) or working poors, who don't make enough to be eligible for rent.
But people have a mental picture of homeless, and it is people on the streets they see everyday, not families living in a van or someone couch surfing for years.
People shouldn't let the facts distract them from their feelings and opinions I guess then?
People should base their opinions on reality, not invent a reality that conform to their opinions. Not only because intellectual laziness is bad, but because if we can't at least agree on the material facts, we will never be able to agree on solutions, or understand other people point of view.
> The left love to imagine that homeless people are just down-on-their-luck people who just missed out on a mortgage payment or a rent payment.
> No. They are 98% drug addicts or mentally ill people.
Drug addicts and mentally ill people can be down-on-their luck. That somebody is mentally ill or have an addiction does not mean that society should discard them.
BTW addiction is very rarely the root cause of a wasted life. It's usually a failed coping strategy.
> It's well known that the money that gets given out attract more homeless people.
Homeless people are not infinite resource. You can solve homelessness on the country level, not only on the state level, and then it doesn't matter which state attracts more homeless people - because there's very few of them in the whole country.
> It's insane that left-wing governments think that spending MORE money will solve the problem when in fact it is the cause of the problem.
Poor countries in Eastern Europe does not have this problem. Maybe instead of pretending US is the whole world and if it can't deal with something - it's impossible to deal with it - try to listen to what people did elsewhere?
"Drug addicts and mentally ill people can be down-on-their luck. That somebody is mentally ill or have an addiction does not mean that society should discard them."
This line of thinking (IMO) is both manipulative and harmful. At some point we need to realize that we are enabling and not helping.
You really want to help both the person and the society that they are part of, you need tough decisions that will not be easy or fun.
The way to prevent addiction is to help people before they get addicted (and/or become homeless).
What caused the opioid crisis? Doctors prescribing opioids for no good reason. Why wasn't it happening in EU? Because in EU doctors are paid and controlled by the taxpayers not by the industry. And because in EU doctors have free public education so they aren't 100 000 dollars in debt when they graduate.
Ok but opioids is one way people get addicted/homeless. Another is that they get sick and don't have coverage. Again - in a sane country they get public healthcare so they don't have to default and lose everything - so they have no reason to get addicted.
How about mental sickness? Early childhood is very important. Most EU countries have 6 months or more of mandatory paid maternity leave. On top of 20+ days of paid vacations yearly and unlimited paid health leave. Mandated by the state for all employees. If you don't take them - your company gets fined. HR people force you to take the days off.
Do you see how that would prevent a lot of mental illness/addiction/homelessness?
You can go through most problems in the US, and ultimately they are caused by the insane labour laws, healthcare, or education system.
And the funniest part is - you make all these sacrifices by not having a civilized welfare state, and you still end up paying more for healthcare (yes, including the taxes) and living shorter than people in the EU. You get addictions, homelessness, crime, shorter life spans, AND you pay more :)
Agree with each of your points, but must add some counterpoints as illustration:
Land of the free, home of the brave, there are some Americans who will rebel against the requirements and constraints of their lifelong socialization. I think this is an underappreciated factor in the study of homelessness-- people fight to be free, and as the song goes, Freedom is just another word for "nothing left to lose". There is some serious freedom that does along with having only the clothes on your back and whatever is in your pockets...
I am from a "poor country in Eastern Europe". I'm not sure how you think homeless is dealt with here, but it is nothing that left-wing US liberal would find palatable I assure you.
I'm from Poland. Homelessness is not solved maybe, but it's nowhere near to the level of US.
The solution seems to be public healthcare, education, transport, safety net and cheap housing.
Addiction and mental illness are excuses. Eastern Europe has more mental ilness (generational trauma from WW2 is still alive) and alcoholism than US and yet it has less homeless people.
In early 90s my parents were earning 20 USD per month each. It was about average. There were still almost no homeless people.
It is not "solved", it is marginalized because homeless people are much less tolerated compared to, say, California. In very simple terms a homeless person getting caught shitting on someones porch in Eastern Europe gets punched in the face and kicked out. And no way homeless would be allowed to just squat some park or square with tent encampment in a major city here.
Overall, I don't see neither US nor Poland as a big outliers by looking at the stats[0], it just seems like some specific places (SF) made homeless population a highly-visible nuisance by feel-good unrealistic policies that can't possible work.
There are plenty of houses. The issue is demand; people are paying $4,000/month to live in a shithole because nobody knows what things are worth. Rich executives, H1Bs and digital nomads all flock there to displace working-class families that support the basic service economy. If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.
We dont build high density housing. We killed off the boarding house. There's like one left in DC when there used to be dozens... They were common enough that even in the 80's you could make a tv show about it, now if you said bording house someone would look at you like you had 9 heads.
We dont have SRO's any more... In 1940 the YMCA of New York had 100k rooms for rent...
> If you built 400 condos, 1600 more rich people move in. Supply is not the issue as far as I can see it.
Do you know what the largest predictor of voting is? Home ownership. DO you know what drives home owners to the polls more than anything else? Protecting the value of their home.
The state has, and continues to sue towns for the fuckery that they have been doing to block housing development to prop up property prices. 60 percent of people who are the most likely to vote will turn up to the polls to make sure the costs do NOT go down. It is the tyranny of majority...
SO yes there are plenty of HOUSES, and not enough of everything else that we need for people to live.
Makes no sense. You can build until demand goes down. Demand is high in part because supply’s low. If there were more homes than rich people who wanted them, prices would be lower. But that doesn’t happen because of NIMBYism. I suspect you know all this but are mythologizing the situation as inescapable destiny.
Maybe you’re used to seeing half measures. Be careful with that because half measures are sometimes used as justification to throw out the whole idea of progress instead of doing it properly (“well we tried that and things were still bad so now we have to do it my way”)
I understand why building doesn't happen. OP is saying that even if you build, it's hopeless because demand is endlessly met by rich people keeping prices high.
Even when rents go down to cost, they are still going to be greater than zero and labor and materials won't turn free. Cost won't ever be so low that one could afford housing while doing nothing productive and even less so while indulging in a drug habit.
Since the US had been deindustrialized, most of the working class is now in service sector and does not produce much. Thus service labor is discounted and the construction labor is at premium. Basically, if it costs 1000 man-days of labor to build a house all in (materials, tooling, labor itself) it will have to cost 1000*k man-hours of waiting tables, where k is the discount coefficient between doing a skilled back-breaking labor and taking orders from the tables to the kitchen. At some values of k there is just not enough working days in the lifetime.
I feel like this is burying the lede. England needs to adapt to long dry summers? If the water situation can be dealt with, this would make it a more pleasant place to live.
reply