8 ms·

I get you, feels like our politicians dont understand anything but sometimes I enjoy living somewhere where companies cant just do anything.

by nih0 3y ago

cft 3y ago
I'm an American that have been living in Europe for 15 months. My perspective is that Europe is ruled by old aristocracy that is happy with the way the life is. They're very afraid of any change, especially of giving people something constructive to do on a large scale. Another reason might be that Europe went through the two World wars, and therefore they're generally scared of any change.
- SanderNL 3y ago
  I have a unpopular opinion about this, but IMO it is the population that causes this. Vast swaths of Europe are rural especially in the south. Very, very averse to any kind of change. I'm in the Netherlands as you can tell and 'even' we are not that much more progressive. There is currently a massive farmer uprising and everybody is complaining literally non-stop about just about everything. Meanwhile nobody has even tried GPT. I get pitchforked even in my own country for saying we need to stop focusing on breeding cows and get (and stay) better at real tech. Then again, my social skills are not really up there.. EDIT: "real tech", I know. Simplification. I know it's hard and I know it's important we eat, but countries with like 5000% more arable land can provide for us.
  - mrpopo 3y ago
    But why? Why do we need to stop rurality and farming? If people want to keep doing it, why stop them?
    - SanderNL 3y ago
      I don't care, but a few decades ago we signed some papers at the EU level that said we should stop doing them in the way we do them. I know it sucks, but the Dutch are fast at pointing out other countries' misbehaviour so it's IMO only fair that we comply with what we said we would do. Massive simplification, but I don't think it's a completely unfair characterisation.
      - boeingUH60 3y ago
        > I don't care Well, It's easy to see why you get backlash when you tell people to change their way of life, get asked for a reason, and say you don't care.
        SanderNL 3y ago
        I meant “I don’t want them to stop farming, personally”. It is not up to me. It’s not personal.
        boeingUH60 3y ago
        Oh, no worries :)
  - voidfunc 3y ago
    The US has massive areas of rural space and a political system that gives a lot more power to rural areas than they realistically should have and we don't run into this problem so I don't think it's rural vs urban.
    - SanderNL 3y ago
      I agree. I guess I should have said "mentality" or "culture". It's deeper than living in "rural areas" indeed.
  - tablespoon 3y ago
    > I have a unpopular opinion about this, but IMO it is the population that causes this. Vast swaths of Europe are rural especially in the south. Very, very averse to any kind of change. And vast swathes of technologists are insanely over-enthusiastic about technical change, to the point of it resembling a religion (and the singularitarians are like the monks who self-immolate themselves, except they want to immolate all the rest of us, too). Frankly, it's probably far wiser to take it slow than charge full speed ahead for no good reason and just hope you can fix the problems you cause.
    - SanderNL 3y ago
      This is fair and I agree. GPT is way too fast. My point was more about stuff happening in timespans measured in decades that they still think is too fast.
      - hnuser847 3y ago
        Can you help me understand what exactly is so scary about ChatGPT? The only places where I see this hype/fear around ChatGPT is here on Hacker News. I've played around with it a bit and the magic wore off in less than 10 minutes. I asked it to generate code for a sudoku solver and the result it gave me was perfect. I then asked it to write code for a crossword puzzle generator and gave me a word search puzzle generator instead, where it simply shoved all the given words together at the bottom of the puzzle. These were just toy examples - I can't imagine ChatGPT is actually useful at work outside of generating very basic text snippits. I asked a group 10 friends, none of who work in tech, about what they think about ChatGPT and then consensus is that it's a slightly better Google in certain situations. None of them are worried that it's going to put them out of work, take over the world, or violate their privacy. I have to agree with them. I think all this AI stuff is way overhyped, just like all the other fads that came before: VR, crypto, drone delivery, CRISPR, autonomous vehicles, metaverse, etc.
        SanderNL 3y ago
        The first car was slow too. The first computers were awful and nothing like today. There's countless examples like this. Lots of people are showing disturbing levels of lack of vision.
  - starkd 3y ago
    But don't they also export much of that agricultural output? Maybe the citizens do not eat it, but they sure are dependent on its exportation. Not like farmers can easily switch to something else.
    - SanderNL 3y ago
      True and it’s good money. Better money would be tech money.
  - nosianu 3y ago
    Incidentally, immediately after reading the comments here I went to Ars and saw this, which when you read it fits perfectly: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/these-angry-dutch-farmers-really-hate-microsoft/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/these-angry-dutc... Just one sample quote, but it's worth reading it all: > The dispute over nitrogen permits has put Microsoft’s data center developments in direct opposition to an increasingly powerful farming community. Earlier this month, a new political force, called the Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB), did so well in provincial elections, it became the joint-largest party in the Dutch Senate. The party, which emerged in response to the nitrogen crisis, also has strong views on data centers. “We think the data center is unnecessary,” says Ingrid de Sain, farmer turned party leader of the BBB in North Holland, referring to the Microsoft complex. “It is a waste of fertile soil to put the data centers boxes here. The BBB is against this.” And another one because it shows some of the thoughts: > “Of course, we need some data centers,” he says. But he wants us to talk about restructuring the way the Internet works so they are not so necessary. “We should be having the philosophical debate of what do we do with all our data? I don’t think we need to store everything online in a central place.”
    - iso1631 3y ago
      > “Of course, we need some data centers,” he says. But he wants us to talk about restructuring the way the Internet works so they are not so necessary. I'm waiting for them to suggest it should be moved to the cloud rather than put in data centres. This is a symptom of widespread technological illiteracy, globally (at least in the west)
      - nosianu 3y ago
        Ah - now I actually have to come to his defense. Because I only quoted the part immediately after this one and thought it was enough: > Ruiter says he’s continued to talk about data centers because he wants to remind people that “the cloud” they’ve come to rely on isn’t just an ethereal concept—it’s something that has a physical manifestation, here in the farmland of North Holland. He worries that growing demand for data storage from people, and also, increasingly, AI, will just mean more and more hyperscale facilities.
  - piuantiderp 3y ago
    "Nobody has even tried GPT" is as meaningless as possible. Not sure if this is satire, but exactly this is a kind of cargo-culting. 99% of persons are better off not "trying ChatGPT". Your country is very lucky to have its own high-quality farmland and the culture around it. The food there is of such a quality that "countries with like 5000% more arable land" will never have a chance at of having. See the US, for all its land, most of the food is low in nutrition or outright toxic.
    - mk89 3y ago
      Don't worry this is just another European trait: complain about everything, the neighbor's grass is greener etc., etc. I am European, and I just proved it by complaining about complainers :)
    - SanderNL 3y ago
      The food we produce: exported. The food we eat: imported.
  - csomar 3y ago
    Maybe because you are suggesting removing these people's job without giving them an alternative first. Also, reverse the tables: If someone comes suggesting to you to ban computers and the Internet completely and pull a study out (Internet damages brain). Would you be happy, offended, indifferent... okay I hope you get the point.
- rcarr 3y ago
  This. Exactly this. I got downvoted to hell the last time I expressed this sentiment so it’s nice to have my opinion validated by a set of fresh eyes.
- nivenkos 3y ago
  Yeah everything is geared towards the aristocracy - like VAT and Income Tax are insanely high meanwhile there is often no land value tax, property tax, inheritance tax, wealth tax or gift tax at all. And even capital gains are taxed far less than income. I think it's more that the US was made up of immigrants so it got to start anew without a massive established aristocracy and monarchies.
  - etiennebausson 3y ago
    The U.S. have had centuries now to re-build dynasties, and they have, from industry to politics. There is an issue on the capital gain / income in the E.U., but my understanding was that the U.S. was even worse in that regard (people can live of their salary through most of Europe).
  - dukeyukey 3y ago
    Although the UK, despite having a literal aristocracy and monarchy, has a near-identical percentage of self-made millionaires, markedly more than the Continental social democracies, where far more wealth is inherited.
- jlangenauer 3y ago
  I see it less as an aristocracy (most of which are sidelined and/or laughed at), but instead a highly-evolved technocracy which runs Europe according to their ideal of what the citizens should want, and with a certain fear of democracy based on the occasionally vile things that European democracies have done. There is a definite fear of the people, and a elite consensus that they must be managed for their own good.
olalonde 3y ago
Why though? Italians had more freedom and choice before this ban. They were free to decide for themselves whether they wanted to use ChatGPT or not. Now they have one less option. Is that really a good thing?
- zadler 3y ago
  Remains to be seen if the ban is sustained, but it would be great if there were a few holdout counties that can act as controls. AI tech and robots has a pretty big social dimension too.

I get you, feels like our politicians dont understand anything but sometimes I enjoy living somewhere where companies cant just do anything.

by nih0 3y ago

I get you, feels like our politicians dont understand anything but sometimes I enjoy living somewhere where companies cant just do anything.

cft 3y ago

I'm an American that have been living in Europe for 15 months. My perspective is that Europe is ruled by old aristocracy that is happy with the way the life is. They're very afraid of any change, especially of giving people something constructive to do on a large scale. Another reason might be that Europe went through the two World wars, and therefore they're generally scared of any change.

SanderNL 3y ago
I have a unpopular opinion about this, but IMO it is the population that causes this. Vast swaths of Europe are rural especially in the south. Very, very averse to any kind of change. I'm in the Netherlands as you can tell and 'even' we are not that much more progressive. There is currently a massive farmer uprising and everybody is complaining literally non-stop about just about everything. Meanwhile nobody has even tried GPT. I get pitchforked even in my own country for saying we need to stop focusing on breeding cows and get (and stay) better at real tech. Then again, my social skills are not really up there.. EDIT: "real tech", I know. Simplification. I know it's hard and I know it's important we eat, but countries with like 5000% more arable land can provide for us.
- mrpopo 3y ago
  But why? Why do we need to stop rurality and farming? If people want to keep doing it, why stop them?
  - SanderNL 3y ago
    I don't care, but a few decades ago we signed some papers at the EU level that said we should stop doing them in the way we do them. I know it sucks, but the Dutch are fast at pointing out other countries' misbehaviour so it's IMO only fair that we comply with what we said we would do. Massive simplification, but I don't think it's a completely unfair characterisation.
    - boeingUH60 3y ago
      > I don't care Well, It's easy to see why you get backlash when you tell people to change their way of life, get asked for a reason, and say you don't care.
      - SanderNL 3y ago
        I meant “I don’t want them to stop farming, personally”. It is not up to me. It’s not personal.
        boeingUH60 3y ago
        Oh, no worries :)
- voidfunc 3y ago
  The US has massive areas of rural space and a political system that gives a lot more power to rural areas than they realistically should have and we don't run into this problem so I don't think it's rural vs urban.
  - SanderNL 3y ago
    I agree. I guess I should have said "mentality" or "culture". It's deeper than living in "rural areas" indeed.
- tablespoon 3y ago
  > I have a unpopular opinion about this, but IMO it is the population that causes this. Vast swaths of Europe are rural especially in the south. Very, very averse to any kind of change. And vast swathes of technologists are insanely over-enthusiastic about technical change, to the point of it resembling a religion (and the singularitarians are like the monks who self-immolate themselves, except they want to immolate all the rest of us, too). Frankly, it's probably far wiser to take it slow than charge full speed ahead for no good reason and just hope you can fix the problems you cause.
  - SanderNL 3y ago
    This is fair and I agree. GPT is way too fast. My point was more about stuff happening in timespans measured in decades that they still think is too fast.
    - hnuser847 3y ago
      Can you help me understand what exactly is so scary about ChatGPT? The only places where I see this hype/fear around ChatGPT is here on Hacker News. I've played around with it a bit and the magic wore off in less than 10 minutes. I asked it to generate code for a sudoku solver and the result it gave me was perfect. I then asked it to write code for a crossword puzzle generator and gave me a word search puzzle generator instead, where it simply shoved all the given words together at the bottom of the puzzle. These were just toy examples - I can't imagine ChatGPT is actually useful at work outside of generating very basic text snippits. I asked a group 10 friends, none of who work in tech, about what they think about ChatGPT and then consensus is that it's a slightly better Google in certain situations. None of them are worried that it's going to put them out of work, take over the world, or violate their privacy. I have to agree with them. I think all this AI stuff is way overhyped, just like all the other fads that came before: VR, crypto, drone delivery, CRISPR, autonomous vehicles, metaverse, etc.
      - SanderNL 3y ago
        The first car was slow too. The first computers were awful and nothing like today. There's countless examples like this. Lots of people are showing disturbing levels of lack of vision.
- starkd 3y ago
  But don't they also export much of that agricultural output? Maybe the citizens do not eat it, but they sure are dependent on its exportation. Not like farmers can easily switch to something else.
  - SanderNL 3y ago
    True and it’s good money. Better money would be tech money.
- nosianu 3y ago
  Incidentally, immediately after reading the comments here I went to Ars and saw this, which when you read it fits perfectly: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/these-angry-dutch-farmers-really-hate-microsoft/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/03/these-angry-dutc... Just one sample quote, but it's worth reading it all: > The dispute over nitrogen permits has put Microsoft’s data center developments in direct opposition to an increasingly powerful farming community. Earlier this month, a new political force, called the Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB), did so well in provincial elections, it became the joint-largest party in the Dutch Senate. The party, which emerged in response to the nitrogen crisis, also has strong views on data centers. “We think the data center is unnecessary,” says Ingrid de Sain, farmer turned party leader of the BBB in North Holland, referring to the Microsoft complex. “It is a waste of fertile soil to put the data centers boxes here. The BBB is against this.” And another one because it shows some of the thoughts: > “Of course, we need some data centers,” he says. But he wants us to talk about restructuring the way the Internet works so they are not so necessary. “We should be having the philosophical debate of what do we do with all our data? I don’t think we need to store everything online in a central place.”
  - iso1631 3y ago
    > “Of course, we need some data centers,” he says. But he wants us to talk about restructuring the way the Internet works so they are not so necessary. I'm waiting for them to suggest it should be moved to the cloud rather than put in data centres. This is a symptom of widespread technological illiteracy, globally (at least in the west)
    - nosianu 3y ago
      Ah - now I actually have to come to his defense. Because I only quoted the part immediately after this one and thought it was enough: > Ruiter says he’s continued to talk about data centers because he wants to remind people that “the cloud” they’ve come to rely on isn’t just an ethereal concept—it’s something that has a physical manifestation, here in the farmland of North Holland. He worries that growing demand for data storage from people, and also, increasingly, AI, will just mean more and more hyperscale facilities.
- piuantiderp 3y ago
  "Nobody has even tried GPT" is as meaningless as possible. Not sure if this is satire, but exactly this is a kind of cargo-culting. 99% of persons are better off not "trying ChatGPT". Your country is very lucky to have its own high-quality farmland and the culture around it. The food there is of such a quality that "countries with like 5000% more arable land" will never have a chance at of having. See the US, for all its land, most of the food is low in nutrition or outright toxic.
  - mk89 3y ago
    Don't worry this is just another European trait: complain about everything, the neighbor's grass is greener etc., etc. I am European, and I just proved it by complaining about complainers :)
  - SanderNL 3y ago
    The food we produce: exported. The food we eat: imported.
- csomar 3y ago
  Maybe because you are suggesting removing these people's job without giving them an alternative first. Also, reverse the tables: If someone comes suggesting to you to ban computers and the Internet completely and pull a study out (Internet damages brain). Would you be happy, offended, indifferent... okay I hope you get the point.
rcarr 3y ago
This. Exactly this. I got downvoted to hell the last time I expressed this sentiment so it’s nice to have my opinion validated by a set of fresh eyes.
nivenkos 3y ago
Yeah everything is geared towards the aristocracy - like VAT and Income Tax are insanely high meanwhile there is often no land value tax, property tax, inheritance tax, wealth tax or gift tax at all. And even capital gains are taxed far less than income. I think it's more that the US was made up of immigrants so it got to start anew without a massive established aristocracy and monarchies.
- etiennebausson 3y ago
  The U.S. have had centuries now to re-build dynasties, and they have, from industry to politics. There is an issue on the capital gain / income in the E.U., but my understanding was that the U.S. was even worse in that regard (people can live of their salary through most of Europe).
- dukeyukey 3y ago
  Although the UK, despite having a literal aristocracy and monarchy, has a near-identical percentage of self-made millionaires, markedly more than the Continental social democracies, where far more wealth is inherited.
jlangenauer 3y ago
I see it less as an aristocracy (most of which are sidelined and/or laughed at), but instead a highly-evolved technocracy which runs Europe according to their ideal of what the citizens should want, and with a certain fear of democracy based on the occasionally vile things that European democracies have done. There is a definite fear of the people, and a elite consensus that they must be managed for their own good.

olalonde 3y ago

Why though? Italians had more freedom and choice before this ban. They were free to decide for themselves whether they wanted to use ChatGPT or not. Now they have one less option. Is that really a good thing?

zadler 3y ago
Remains to be seen if the ban is sustained, but it would be great if there were a few holdout counties that can act as controls. AI tech and robots has a pretty big social dimension too.