You’ll get downvoted to oblivion but it’s true in endless ways even before AI. The EUs obsession with green energy and destroying nuclear in Germany, the wealth taxes, the bureaucracy, how it’s 10x easier to get disability than it is to start a corporation. Death by a thousand cuts. I don’t see this improving until real, visible pain is felt. They are so poor economically but the consequences are not being felt yet
Just my 2 cents. Nuclear was dead in Germany without political influence. The reactors where so old, that upgrading them to modern standard would have been a waste of money compared to renewables. France only works because the state helps out. UKs new reactors are financial suicide.
Everything else you might have a point. The EU behaves as if it has influence over companies abroad. Then its strategy might work and do some good. Sadly this is not the case. Instead we are getting isolated and loosing the AI battle bad while bureaucracy and regulations forces inventors to leave.
Nuclear in Germany was destroyed mostly due to unchecked Russian influence. Shroeder got rewarded by putting the final nail by getting all those board positions in Russia. And they had a reason to be blind to it since the industry does want Russian hydrocarbons.
And as sad of a story as it is, it's nothing compared to what Orange did. It will be a good showcase for the future how business is not the economy.
And it's not even just me who says this, this is an exact title I've seen online as well before, below.
The reality is Europe will tend towards stagnation while other superpowers continue trudging on, some with their help of their governments while others, even despite themselves and their governments.
The proof is in the pudding. On a pure price-return basis without dividends, an investment in the Euro Stoxx 50 in 2000 sat at approximately 0% capital growth for nearly 25 years.
The anti-EU comments are always the same shape, unable to separate the EU from individual countries and misattributing country specific policies to the entire EU. Only a few countries in the EU have wealth taxes, and it's not the EU who imposed them. Disability pensions are not easy to get and require a lot of medical paperwork and approvals in most EU countries. And what does "so poor economically" even mean?
Right - the EU is not that powerful. If anything Europe's mistake has been not making it powerful enough, so there is possibility of competing with China and America.
Britain has left it and that's made a negative difference to our productivity. Large home markets are critical, when your two major competitors have large home markets.
Taxes and social services are cultural things in Europe, based on us understanding what a good way to use the wealth technology has given is. America understands this as well - it spends more on state healthcare than Europe does (yes, PPP adjusted), just not universally available.
That "just not universally available" is kind of the crux of it; all that money in a first world country and many people still fear that calling an ambulance will bankrupt them.
It’s the mentality of the electorate. Without serious, horrible pain, which I truly believe will be felt over the coming 25 years, politicians won’t be elected who really embrace it. The welfare state can’t continue its current form without new innovative companies operating at a global scale. You can point to a few successes but without a grand, EU-wide mentality-shift I will continue to visit Europe exactly as I see it: a sclerotic, decaying old-world system that’s best use is a museum for my tourist dollars
Ha! That's pure nonsense propaganda. Show me where it is 10x easier to take disability than establish a company. Then show me how EU destroyed Germany's nuclear energy, while doing well in other countries.
If you can't you are no better than the russian and right-wing americans that push anti-EU propaganda.
True, the Germans destroyed their own nuclear industry, and with it - its prosperity - entirely on their own. Specifically, Angela Merkel did that, along with lots of other horrible things that deprived the Germans of the future.
Burning down Tesla dealerships and exploding a cybertruk in front of the Trump hotel in Las Vegas was oRgAnIc and had nothing to do with the machine retaliating against Elon for boosting Trump's effort to (allegedly) go after corruption.
Like anything there is a positive and a negative. It’s certain many incredibly talented people immigrated to America with OPT and H1B. However I have observed abuse with my own eyes of H1B labor outside of the FAANG and similar all stars who don’t have leverage to switch firms within the law and have the money or corporate backing to pay lawyers to dot all the Is and cross all the Ts.
Middle market firms love H1B because you get docile labor who don’t ask for raises. It’s market-warping and needs serious reform
The problem with H-1B visas is that they are effectively golden handcuffs - tolerate whatever abuse we give you for X years and you get permanent residency.
The fix would be to allow H-1Bs to jump to any employment, not just employers capable of sponsoring an H-1B. But that creates a new problem: H-1B sponsoring employers are now spending extra time and bureaucracy just to be the welcome mat immigrants step on before getting a real job. This isn't really feasible for them.
It would be easier to more or less "just throw open the floodgates" - i.e. hand out work visas to anyone who can pass a background check and let them apply to any job a US worker can. This would immediately fix most immediately conceivable problems with restricted immigration creating a second class of worker that is cheaper to hire.
On the other hand, nobody wants immigrants anymore. There are an increasing number of people for whom their birth citizenship is the only valuable asset they have, and this sentiment is geographically distributed. It's actually more prevalent in the kinds of countries that are sending people to rich countries - i.e. ask the average Indian how they'd feel about, say, liberalizing immigration with Pakistan or Bangladesh, and they'd probably say something so racist it'd make people at MAGA rallies blush.
Of course, the reason why this happens is pretty straightforward: POSIWID. The people who benefit from immigration visas being handcuff-shaped are the same people who own the news media and are reminding people day in and day out how dangerous and awful the people they're bringing in are.
> The problem with H-1B visas is that they are effectively golden handcuffs - tolerate whatever abuse we give you for X years and you get permanent residency.
Right, people on H-1B visas are being paid less in money because they are being partially compensated in the legal right to live in the US instead of India.
> On the other hand, nobody wants immigrants anymore. There are an increasing number of people for whom their birth citizenship is the only valuable asset they have, and this sentiment is geographically distributed. It's actually more prevalent in the kinds of countries that are sending people to rich countries - i.e. ask the average Indian how they'd feel about, say, liberalizing immigration with Pakistan or Bangladesh, and they'd probably say something so racist it'd make people at MAGA rallies blush.
Every single Pakistani and Bangladeshi could've been a citizen of India if a good number of people hadn't decided in 1947 to go to great lengths to make that not be the case; I for one am unwilling to say that they were wrong.
I think the framing that "their birth citizenship is the only valuable asset they have is mistaken; the actual valuable thing is not being a citizen of the other country demographically controlled by a rival ethno-religious group ("Unbiased at least he was when he arrived on his mission / Having never set eyes on the land he was called to partition / Between two peoples fanatically at odds, / With their different diets and incompatible gods").
> The people who benefit from immigration visas being handcuff-shaped are the same people who own the news media and are reminding people day in and day out how dangerous and awful the people they're bringing in are.
No they're not; these are separate groups of people. The people who benefit from immigration visas being handcuff-shaped are the immigrants themselves (because it's still better than living in India or Bangladesh), and certain wealthy business interests (who like being able to hire cheap labor and can more easily insulate themselves from the costs of the people doing that labor also existing in American society). The people constantly reminding American citizens how dangerous and awful the immigrants are, are not the same people as the business interests, and are explicitly willing to accept economic costs in order to not have the immigrants be physically present.
> The people constantly reminding American citizens how dangerous and awful the immigrants are, are not the same people as the business interests, and are explicitly willing to accept economic costs in order to not have the immigrants be physically present.
If you're talking about tech, you're correct[0]; but there are other industries that aren't so self-consistent. American agriculture is extremely dependent on immigrant labor and donates money to a party which is very explicitly anti-immigration. In fact, they are single-handedly the reason why attempts to curb illegal immigration have traditionally failed: all we'd have to do in the states is mandate e-Verify, but every bill to do that fails. When a state winds up figuring out a way to do the same thing, it creates an immediate and painful agricultural labor shortage - because the agricultural labor system is entirely flooded with illegal immigrants.
Or at least that was the case. I am told nowadays that the commonly-understood story of illegal immigration - i.e. people either overextending tourist visas or paying a drug smuggler to bring them across the country to do under-the-table work for small farmers - is largely obsolete. Nowadays the Mexican drug cartels have figured out how to work the legal immigration system. They have actual corporate identities in the US (usually something like "<State Name Here> Grower's Association" that can sponsor H-2A visas - the agricultural equivalent of tech's H-1B program. This is part of why ICE raids on farms have increased.
These "Grower's Associations" function a lot like temp agencies, except they hire (legal) immigrants at rock-bottom wages, are associated with organized crime, and if anyone quits their family eats lead. One of the hidden upsides of illegal immigration was that if someone gave you a shit job, you just ghosted them and found another. There was no punishment - I mean, even if the farmer reported them to ICE, they're ratting on themself. But these temp agencies are run by organized crime, and they know where your family lives (they wouldn't hire you otherwise), so they can make all sorts of threats and have the ability to make good on those threats.
From the point of view of the people who own the farms, they just see "hard working people" and don't ask too many questions. Actually, a lot of farms are run by people who don't ask a lot of questions, mainly because they don't understand farming and America's farm owners have always been a landed gentry that has no idea how to actually run a farm and wind up papering over their obvious business deficiencies with the most atrocious shit you'd ever see.
> Every single Pakistani and Bangladeshi could've been a citizen of India if a good number of people hadn't decided in 1947 to go to great lengths to make that not be the case; I for one am unwilling to say that they were wrong.
I am almost completely ignorant on the ongoing India/Pakistan rivalry; however, my view from several thousand miles away is that it's more or less three[1] different flavors of the same kind of corruption. Pakistan has a military that sucks their civilian government dry; India's entire banking sector exists to offload bad loans onto the state; and Bangladesh is being looted by businessmen who moonlight as politicians. The people in these countries are hyper-aware of and oppose these problems, but do not have a way to meaningfully check the power of the people causing them because the ongoing social divide between the Hindu/Indian and Muslim/Pakistani sides is overpowering. When you divide the people in half, you can convince each half to hate the other so thoroughly they won't notice your hand in their pocket.
In America, we actually had analogous dynamics. For example, pre-New Deal, one of the more effective ways to break a union was to exploit racial tensions among your workers. Unions have to be maximally inclusive, or they are ineffective. So that meant they were also unusually racially inclusive at a time when the rest of the country was hyper-obsessed about race - and bosses would exploit this. "Oh, why would you ever lower yourself to join a union? Don't you know they let BLACK PEOPLE[2] in?"
When you say the most valuable thing to poor people is not their citizenship, but "not being a citizen of the other country controlled by a rival ethno-religious group", you have to keep in mind that this is a divide-and-conquer attack against those same people. Your government and their government both want you to believe that the other side hates you, so you must hate them, and in order to do that you have to ignore all your own problems, which are really your leaders' fault, which you can't make them fix because doing so requires admitting fault to the enemy.
> Right, people on H-1B visas are being paid less in money because they are being partially compensated in the legal right to live in the US instead of India.
Not quite. It's more like "the law makes it a pain in the ass for an H-1B to switch jobs, and switching jobs is how people get a raise in the industries H-1Bs work in, so H-1Bs are paid at a discount". When you're an indentured servant, your lack of leverage makes you get paid less - even though the H-1B program specifically requires H-1Bs be paid the same wage as citizens doing the same job.
[0] Counterexamples being Elon Musk and Larry Ellison.
[1] As the original partition of India was based on the idea that a country had to have a clearly dominant majority religion, Pakistan and Bangladesh used to be one country.
[2] They would probably use some old-timey N word if they were polite, and the gamer N word if they were not.
I've also seen H1B abuse in startups. Maybe H1B abuse doesn't scale all the way down to 1-5 person companies, but 20-50? Absolutely. A single liason who knows the H1B process easily pays for themselves when you can turn around and hire 15 talented Big 10 grads 25% below market value.
This isn't me bitching about how them foreigners are suppressing wages or whatever. They aren't. I'm a citizen so I had leverage, and it wasn't that difficult to find greener pastures. It just sucks to see good people getting screwed. I helped a few of them get out with some strongly-worded letters of recommendation.
You might’ve seen abuse but it doesn’t mean it’s universal or those people aren’t better off even though they’re being “abused” , which is mostly your opinion else you should’ve reported there employers
Belief has nothing to do with this. If you think something is common then gather evidence of that and make a convincing case to support your claim. "Trust me, guy" doesn't cut it. "I've seen it" doesn't cut it.
It's an interesting paper, and it certainly takes "gather evidence and present it" part of the program very seriously.
Every incentive is there. It benefits the company to take advantage of these people's visa restrictions. The capacity is there to do it without much risk.
The only saving grace would be a business who puts aside its own self interest to be good to their employees. That's very rare and you'd be naive to count on it.
That's not formal evidence of it being widespread but to me it's a strong enough argument to not put myself in that situation.
We have strong evidence that the net effect on the economy isn't what you'd expect if widespread fraud was the problem many claim. The paper we're all discussing is one such form of that evidence.
If all you have is a story to tell that sounds plausible when you tell it, then while I respect your right to do so, I don't personally give it any credence.
They post the jobs in physical newspaper classifieds in the middle of nowhere, and do not post the job on their normal website, because if they posted a real job they would get hundreds of applicants immediately. It’s a fraud but it was tolerated until recently
I live in Boston and software is dead here. It’s a biotech city but we used to be a player in software. AI missed us, remote work hollowed it out. I would love some AI dollars flowing here but it’s pretty sad. My hope is some defense tech drone stuff blows up but your problems would be welcome on the east coast!
I'm not sure why this got flagged... I wonder if someone misunderstood what "My hope is some defense tech drone stuff blows up..." meant.
As for
> ...remote work hollowed it out...
there's a simple solution: make it so that ordinary folks can actually afford to raise a family in the city. If folks can afford to raise a family in your city, then they're there for more than just the big paycheck, and won't run screaming the moment their well-paying job stops chaining them to an absurdly expensive city.
My neighbor is the best wallpaper guy in the city, which you’d think is extremely niche but wallpaper has come back in a big way. All sorts of businesses out there for those who identify needs and service wants. And the best way to know about a business is to work for an established one first
I’ve always wondered how the hell things like vacuum repair shops and other niche stores I still see around from time to time are still around.
It’s not that I don’t think anyone would choose to repair their vacuum. It’s more that I can’t imagine they get enough volume to pay the lease/rent/bills on whatever commercial property they’re on.
The smart ones will own their shop outright. If not, they are on a longterm lease.
Also, don't knock it, a quality vacuum like a Kirby or Miele will go decades, are incredibly quiet, and just need maintenance on wear and tear, which these repair shops provide. I think we got used to thinks being terrible. Like my Dyson, does good work, it's also very loud compared to my financially secure friend's Miele.
Tough as consumer goods are generally getting cheaper and better quality. Can’t remember the last time we had a problem with the TV. We have left them behind when moving apartments as they’re relatively cheap now
> This interview has morphed into my own personal economics seminar, and Professor Bankman-Fried is my tutor. He’s as good at explaining the principles of macroeconomics as anyone out there in the world today—and I know this for a fact because I’ve subsequently watched YouTube’s best on the same subject. But SBF teaches me Macro while simultaneously playing round after round of Storybook Brawl.
> Still, I’ve got my answer. And it turns out that I’ve aimed too low. A trillion isn’t enough money to fix the world’s problems, so SBF won’t stop at merely a trillion. It’s an answer that begs the next question, which SBF, ever helpful, has already anticipated: “So, is five trillion all you could ever use to help the world?”
> SBF is now interviewing himself. He slows down for a moment, and I assume that’s because of the cognitive load of doing three things at once. He’s asking good questions (my job); he’s formulating answers (his job); and he’s playing Storybook Brawl (no one’s job). But then I hear the tap-tap-tapping from his fingers start to accelerate, and I realize he’s not slowing down under the load at all. Just the opposite, in fact: This guy is in the Storybook Brawl equivalent of a gank!
This entire profile is incredible. SBF is one of the greatest conmen of all time, the absolute gall to testify in Congress, pal around with celebs, buy the naming rights to the Miami Heat stadium, claim he is "the most transparent", all built on a total scam of stealing billions.
If this guy doesn't go to jail why do we even have jails?
