But where I am from: - bars are 'a third place' where people hang regularly without getting wasted - bars serve dozens of different non-alcoholic drinks - most people in the bar are not "looking for a one night stand" but for some socializing, fun, and a chance to meet interesting people

But as I said, maybe your part of the world has bars that attract different clientele.

There are a lot of "regulars" in most who need to "get a life". I won't object to those who are visiting once in a while, but there are far more bars everywhere I've been than could exist if people "had a life", my general observation is 5-10% of the population is a regular.

Truly a force to be reckoned with.

I removed the locks from all the doors, now entering/exiting is 87% faster! After removing all the safety equipment, our vehicles have significantly improved in mileage, acceleration and top speed!

Initially I assumed this is sarcastic, but apparently not. UX and performance is what programmers are paid to do! Making sure UX is good is one of the most important things in programmer job.

While security is a moving target, a goal, something that can never be perfect, just "good enough" (if NSA wants to hack you, they will). You make it sound like installing third party packages is basically equivalent to a security hole, while in practice the risk is low, especially if you don't overdo it.

Wild to read extreme security views like that, while at the same time there are people here that run unconstrained AI agents with --dangerous-skip-confirm flags and see nothing wrong with it.

And yes, we agree that running unconstrained AI agents with --dangerous-skip-confirm flags and seeing nothing wrong with it is insane. Kind of like just advertising for burglars to come open your doors for you before you get home - yeah, it's lots faster to get in (and to move about the house with all your stuff gone).

Depends. If you had to add to a Makefile for your dependencies, you sure as hell aren't going to add 5k dependencies manually just to get a function that does $FOO; you'd write it yourself.

Now, with AI in the mix, there's fewer and fewer reasons to use so many dependencies.

The governments however have been and continue to be ill prepared to the rising increases of globalisation labor offshoring and automation.

There was a news article yesterday in my EU country about a 50 year old laid off CEO of a small company that continues to be unemployed after a year because nobody will hire him anymore so he lives off welfare and oddjobs and the government unemployment office has no solution.

What happens in the future when AI and offshoring culls more white collar jobs and there will be thousands or tens of thousands of unemployable 50 year old managers with outdated skills that nobody will want to hire or re-train due to various reasons, but they still need to keep working somehow till their 70s to qualify for retirement? Sure you then go to re-train yourself to become a licensed plumber or electrician, but who will want to hire you to gain experience when they can hire the 20-something fresher rather than the 50 year old with bad knees?

Governments are not prepared for this.

I'd say those things are the job of the population itself, via a wide range of pluralistic institutions. The job of governments, which are just specific organizations within a much larger society, is primarily to maintain public order.

I'd agree ONLY IF I'd pay no taxes to the government. But since most middle class people pay 40%+ of their income to the state, then the state now has the responsibility to handle those challenges for us.

But if the state wants me to handle it, then sure I'd do it gladly, they just need to reimburse 90% of my tax payments so I'd have the financial resources to proactively invest in my future security.

But right now we have the worst of both worlds in the west: a huge tax burden on the middle class funding an incompetent state that takes your money, spends it like drunken sailors on bullshit, and when the shit hits the fan, just tells you it's your fault when you fall down, instead of having used your money for societal wide preemptive solutions.

Well, no, we pay taxes for the government to fund the things government is supposed to do and is competent at. Paying the government doesn't make them responsible for or competent to handle anything every problem arising anywhere in society, any more than paying for a Netflix subscription makes Netflix responsible for or capable of handling those problems.

This is really important, because political institutions aren't just bad at handling complex social problems, but when made responsible for them, often get in the way of other individuals, communities, and institutions trying to solve those problems with much better approaches.

> But if the state wants me to handle it, then sure I'd do it gladly, they just need to reimburse all my tax payments so I'd have the financial resources to invest in my future.

Agreed. We should drastically lower taxes, and ensure that most of the resources necessary to improve society are left in the hands of society itself, and not monopolized by a single institution that's subject to perverse incentives.

But if we assume that we're stuck paying the same level of taxes for the time being, and treat those taxes merely as losses, the question reduces to whether we want a monopolistic organization run by people with ulterior motives exercising a controlling influence over our lives and livelihoods -- and often failing to solve those complex problems in the first place -- or whether we would still prefer to solve those problems for ourselves with the resources we have left. And to my mind, the latter is still preferable, even if unhelpful strangers are stealing a good chunk of my resources.

> But right now we have the worst of both worlds: a huge tax burden on the middle class funding an incompetent state that takes your money, spends it like drunken sailors on bullshit, and when the shit hits the fan just tells you it's your fault when you fall down, instead of having used your money for societal wide preemptive solutions.

Yes, that's all true. But to my point above, the only way out of this is not to expect that the incompetent grifters will somehow start behaving like competent philanthropists, but rather to contain them and minimize the grift -- either way, it's still on us to solve our own problems.

Which also includes the education system training you for the labor market. How is the state good at that if what they're training you for is now useless? Also includes the welfare safety net which is now failing to catch everyone falling.

>This is really important, because political institutions aren't just bad at handling complex social problems, but when made responsible for them, often get in the way of other individuals, communities, and institutions trying to solve those problems with much better approaches.

If we know they're bad at this and often responsible for the issues we have, why are we funding them so much?

Norway has their sovereign fund as a premprive solution in case the country hits a rough path in the future.

>but rather to contain them and minimize the grift

And this can only be done peacefully by defunding the incompetent state apparatus.

>either way, it's still on us to solve our own problems

Yeah but you need money for that. And we don't have money because the state is taking half of it.

Does it? That's an assumption many people make, but I'm not sure that this was either the original intent -- public schooling was driven largely as a tool for "liberal arts" and to assimilate immigrants -- nor something that public schooling has ever proven to be particularly good at.

> If we know they're bad at this and often responsible for the issues we have, why are we funding them so much?

Well, most people's main incentive for paying taxes is the threat of being punished for failing to do so.

> And this can only be done peacefully by defunding the incompetent state apparatus.

Agreed entirely.

> Yeah but you need money for that. And we don't have money because the state is taking half of it.

Agreed entirely, and doing away with confiscatory taxation is an important goal. But whether or not the state takes our money is not directly relevant to the question of whether the state is sufficiently trustworthy and competent to assign monopolistic control of critical aspects of our lives to.

And my position on that is that even if we can't roll back taxation, we still shouldn't trust the state with unilateral control over key aspects of our lives and livelihoods, and we'd be better off making do with the resources we retain despite taxation to provide those things for ourselves via other forms of organization or community.

If a person is taking lifesaving medicine that unfortunately makes their skin itch, you wouldn't call itchiness "a problem which they have created themselves in the first place"...

What is revolutionary (in context of EU of course) is easier business operation across different countries, a real bottleneck for EU SMEs.

Is it actually a "real bottleneck" for EU SMEs? Granted, I've only participated in help growing 3 companies from the scale of 3-4 developers > ~100-150 and from national sales to international, but "going worldwide" or "EU wide" was never the bottleneck we had. The most tricky part was figuring out exactly how to do VAT for every single country, but after a session with a accountant + setting up the guidelines + creating a .csv, that's basically it. Besides that, it was basically smooth sailing.

Today I'm sure there even are hosted services that does all of that stuff automatically for you, probably with Stripe integration as well.

What exactly is that bottleneck you're referring to?

The claim was that "business operation across different countries" is a "a real bottleneck for EU SMEs" currently, I don't think that has anything to do with investors?

If you train for your first marathon, is your goal to run it under 2h?

We are all looking forward to perfect results, but our standards are reasonable. We know what the results were last month, and judge the improvement velocity.

Nobody thinks that's a good SVG of a pelican riding a bike - on it's own. But it's a lot better compared to all the other LLM-generated SVGs of a pelican riding a bike.

We judge relative results - you judge absolute results. Confusion ensues.

To use your marathon metaphor, they have the body of Kipchoge in his absolute prime, and are failing to qualify for a local fun-run.