>Nobody at Anthropic is taking a 5 week summer break or working a 35 hour week
The people working at Mistral, Expedition 33, or other top successful software coming out of the EU, most likely also aren't working only 35 hours/week either. In fact some probably squeeze some work on weekends too out of dedication and pressure to meet deadlines.
In a lot of Austrian SW companies for example, have "all-in" contracts where you waive your rights to the scrutiny of the standard 38,5h/week in exchange for a "higher" salary with longer work hours and less time tracking. Similar cases in France I believe.
The 35h/week European meme people here parrot, you mostly see only in civil servants, old established monopolistic companies with moats and strong unions, not in scrappy start-up trying to make it and fix a bug before release, or semiconductor companies fighting a tape-out.
So no, work hours aren't what's limiting EU startups.
That's why historically, leaders would send those men to die in wars. Totally not what seems to be brewing right now.
Though present day men don't seem to be biting the "let's join the military and fight foreign wars for our corrupt baby-eating pedo leaders" nationalist propaganda, like they did generations ago.
The problem is that it became really hard to lead society into a war. See support for Iran war. It started basically on zero and kept cratering.
Now you want to lead these males to die in war, while they are fully aware of what you are doing? At best you will get dysfunctional army fragging itself constantly. At worst you will trigger unrest because males would rather should they have an agency than be sacrificed as cattle.
Which will likely be immediately called out as so. See recently (few days ago) when Orban's goons put explosives on gas pipes in Serbia going towards Hungary and then loudly blaming Ukraine.
Everybody immediately knew that this would make no sense for Ukraine to do that - i.e. Why would they just plant explosives to be found, when they would blow it up on spot if they really wanted?. Whole thing kind of fizzled out because nobody took the bait.
I always found it interesting that homeless folks in the US seem to live in tents a lot of the time, but in my country they rarely have more than a piece of cardboard. I don't know if my perception is incorrect, or if I'm ready too much into this, but my conclusion has been basically what you said: at every socio-economic level, the people at that level have higher standards of living in developed countries than in developing countries.
It’s really hard to compare when you get down to it, even if you ignore “homeless” as a category.
Using money as a proxy doesn’t work perfectly because things can be more expensive, and trying to normalize with things like “living sq ft” doesn’t calculate externalities.
The best I’ve found is to track relative migration pressure - where do people want to go?
Excellent points. In my small island country, prices mostly come down to being labor-dominant or material-dominant. The former is cheaper* than the developed world, whereas the latter is more expensive* than the developed world.
*compared using nominal exchange
>The best I’ve found is to track relative migration pressure - where do people want to go?
I like this approach. It's much more holistic and captures stuff that really cannot be quantified with prices and numbers, like freedoms and rights.
> Poverty is relative. If you have a small apartment in a city of McMansions, you're poor, but if you have a goat in a village of no goats, you're rich.
That worked before globalization. Nowadays, having a small apartment in a city of McMansions means you're upper middle class. Poor people in the west have no apartments and no goats.
Not sure if up to date anymore, but if you look at some samples like here, at equivalent adjusted income levels, people across the world have similar standards of living regardless of where they live.
What is equivalent adjusted income level? PPP between Russia and USA is around 1.8. Median annual salary in the US is $57 ($1196 per week), median salary in Russia is $13200. Even if you adjust it, it's roughly two times smaller.
As someone who lived in a bunch of countries, some rich and some poor, no, living standards among the avg. Joes of the world are not even remotely the same.
>I don't believe our problem is idleness. It's instead a pernicious belief in peace. There's no sense of geopolitical competition in society at large.
I disagree entirely. It's because most EU workers(at least in the richer most developed countries) don't get a proportional slice of the fruits of their labor, but only breadcrumbs after taxes. Working harder as an EU employee just means your boss/company gets to be richer and your government gets more of your taxes, while you get nothing more in return, just taking home a few extra bucks at the end of the month, making the juice not worth the squeeze, causing everyone to optimize for doing the bare minimum because why bother.
Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder? You'll be more tired now and still won't be able to buy a nice house, ending up on the same standard of living and housing affordability as someone who optimized his life around extracting the most amount of welfare and benefits from the government while dodging work. So then why wouldn't you do the same?
Same story around entrepreneurship and VC funding or lack thereof. The taxes, risk and responsibilities of being a business owner with employees on your payroll are far higher that in other places on the planet like the US, making it a better deal to just not bother with all that and choose the cushy life of an employee in a old dinosaur company in an ageing and declining industry, rather than the stress of being the employer/innovator.
Geopolitical competition will not fix this because the monetary incentive structure around hard work still remains messed up. You can fix this by changing the tax laws to reward those working harder instead of punishing them with higher taxes and no gains to pay for the lifestyles of those who contribute the least in society.
Simply look at what Poland or Czechia did to become economic powerhouses in a short amount of time, and just do stuff like that. And you'll find out they didn't start off by giving their workers Scandinavian style of income taxes, welfare and benefits, that I can tell you, but more like cutthroat capitalism and the harder you work the more you can earn tax structures.
If you somehow imagine our companies in Poland (which are mostly western companies) are somehow giving workers here a bigger slice of pie, you are fed some weird propaganda. Our taxation is even worse if you look at exactly the same salaries.
Our success story is the same as recent India one - we're just much smaller. We have educated population that was underemployed and poor, and western companies jumped at opportunity of replacing entry and mid level positions with cheaper workers, across both factory and office work.
My understanding was that the tax situation is not good for salaried work, but Tech workers primarily use limited companies to make it much more comfortable; many of the loopholes that have been closed in e.g. the UK with IR35 are still open.
At least that's the reason I've been given every time I've tried to take a contractor permanent!
The taxation may be worse, but the cost of living is still uniquely low. So the same market salaries will actually go a lot further on a purchasing power basis.
Calling India a success story feels like a bit of a stretch compared to the better known Chinese case, or indeed Eastern Europe itself. They still have huge scope for further improvement.
But that's how it works in America and China as well. And in Russia. And basically everywhere. Since it's the same in all of these places, it fails to explain the differences.
Yeah, they send you to die in dumb wars instead and if you survive then you get your welfare (a military paycheck). So you think dumb wars keep countries great?
> Especially when the big city CoL rises higher than your salary anyway, what's the point of working harder?
If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city. If you're going to have an "idle" lifestyle, you'll be vastly better off moving to a small rural town where prices are a lot lower by default - same if you work fully remote. (Connectivity used to be a key barrier for the latter case, but fast mobile and sat-based connections have changed this quite dramatically.)
>If anything, big city CoL is the flip side of higher productivity inside the big city.
Productivity is only one of the smaller reasons. The other bigger ones are landlord rent seeking, nimbyism, mass migration, interest rates and real estate speculation, all of which aren't connected to your income progress. That's how productivity and employment in a city can stagnate or even decline while real estate prices can keep climbing.
The urban-rural distinction is one of the oldest ideological divides in human history, and that has built immense and unexamined prejudice. We have words like “urbane” and “polite” on the one hand and “pagan,” “villain” and “heathen” on the other, and nobody stops to think about how this is a one-way street of city-dwellers condemning their rustic relations. A lot of modern political decisions boil down to “everyone should live in cities” when cities are historically demographic sinks (lower birthrate), largely because the people who make political decisions live in cities.
>Nearly no one I know in NL and DE works more than 36hrs per week.
You mean 36h in a full time employment contract or by self reported work hours or is it part time work?
> I am talking here solely about my white collar bubble
Well from where I am in the EU and across other people I know in EU, for white collar jobs 40h contract is the norm in most places for most people I know. 36h is kind of an exception in select few fields in certain high-welfare countries with strong unions(German IG-metal for example in Germany, Airbus in France, etc), so you could simply be biased by a privileged bubble that isn't the norm in all of Europe.
I'm guessing he means actual time physically working, not the theoretical time in the contract.
It really depends on your bubble but a lot of people have "full time" contracts (meaning 40-ish hours) but real hours vary. You can come later, leave earlier, go do something else in the day, and don't have to report it to anyone. Just make sure you're not missing a meeting and deliver what's needed on time. So in practice you end up working fewer hours on average, as long as you can produce enough on average (which honestly isn't hard in many large organisations, and hard to measure).
I dislike the smug condescending tone of your comment. Not everyone lives in the "cycle utopia" Netherlands. For some of those that don't live there, this could be a game changer and life saver since its easier to buy a bell than wait for your city to build you segregated cycle lanes.
Personally, I see no use for this bell since in Austria bicycles share the road space with cars, trucks and trams rather than pedestrians, which could be more dangerous, and what I would need is a bicycle bell that could penetrate car enclosures so that drivers would get off their phones and pay attention to the stuff around them.
Yes, I know, ideally there should be dedicated cycle lanes only for bicycles but nothing in life is ever ideal, and the city isn't gonna do that anytime soon since that would mean completely eliminating car traffic on the narrow streets, witch would be political suicide, so a bell would be an instant life saver.
I don't mean to disagree that there are situations where this is useful. I'm just trying to offer the perspective from a situation where the root cause as I see it has been fixed (to a high degree).
The OP seemed to suggest that people wearing ANC headgear should stop doing so, but both the bell and the ANC-wearing pedestrians are a non-issue in my lived experience.
It would be a shame if these "cyclist-pedestrian ANC-wars" distract from the real issue, that cyclists are not, but should be, a fully emancipated participant in traffic and infrastructure should be designed with cars (to a degree), bicyclists AND pedestrians in mind.
> I'm just trying to offer the perspective from a situation where the root cause as I see it has been fixed (to a high degree).
Your argument was not a solution. You just said, "NL fixd this, why haven't other countries?" which doesn't add any value.
Have you considered that other cities/countries can't just add infrastructure that hasn't been designed from the start to accommodate bikes the same way NL has without taking space away from pedestrians or cars as the roads have stayed as narrow as back in the 1800s?
And that fixing it is not a switch you can just turn on on a whim, but requires decades of political and societal change around repurposing infrastructure, plus capital, before consensus is achieved? Democracies are complicated, even moreson in times like these.
What do you do until then, when a bell is an instant improvement?
You're commenting off the sidelines without realizing why most countries can't flip a switch and become NL overnight.
>It would be a shame if these "cyclist-pedestrian ANC-wars" distract from the real issue, that cyclists are not, but should be, a fully emancipated participant in traffic and infrastructure should be designed with cars (to a degree), bicyclists AND pedestrians in mind.
Yeah but what do you do if they are? There's no ANC wars here, Skoda just made a better bell. Are you also against the development of better bicycle helmets, because where you live you don't need them? Like yes sure, infrastructure is the real solution, but what do you do until that arrives?
I was not trying to offer a solution, as this will be highly specific to the situation in your locality and pretty pointless for me to spend time on. I am merely identifying this as a root cause, which for some reason strikes a nerve.
Why does Skoda, a car manufacturer, care so much about interactions between cyclists and pedestrians? As you say, a bell that penetrates the car enclosures would be much more useful. I suspect a similar reason why pro-safety helmet lobby groups in NL received a lot of funding from these same car manufacturers. I digress..
For your information, post-WWII infrastructure developments in NL were initially highly car-friendly. This only started to change in the 70s and 80s, when the government started to actually create bicycle-related traffic policy, after collective protests (e.g. popular pro-bicycle protest songs were written, children refused to go to schools unless bicycle paths were laid, etc.) also helped by the oil crisis of the time.
So, no it can't be fixed overnight, but it can be fixed in reasonable time (and not an unspecified amount of decades, political capital and funding). We are even living through a repeated history right now.
Which was my entire point. City wide infrastructure rehauls were massively easier and cheaper back then than today. The amount of nimbyism and red tape has ballooned exponentially in that time span, let alone the cost. Even NL wouldn't be able to do that today if they wanted to had it not done that in the 70s.
It's a big stretch to say that the 70s and 80s was "from the start", when the preceding 30-40 years had seen increasingly car-friendly infrastructure policy and development.
These things take both time and massive political will.
As somebody living in a city that's quite bike friendly, all things concerned, but still not close to Dutch or Danish levels of biking safety, I'll take any "technical solutions that try to solve social/political problems" I can get to make my commute safer.
Also, anything that makes biking feel safer will make more people try commuting by bike, which in turn increases the political will to change traffic laws and space use. Nothing exists in a vacuum.
I agree you need to get more people commuting by bike. This is in itself creates a virtuous circle of safety. More cyclists means everyone pays more attention to them, meaning it becomes safer to cycle, meaning more people will cycle, repeat. (And ofcourse more political will etc.)
This is btw also why cyclist's rights organizations (e.g. fietsersbond in NL) should be _against_ mandatory use of helmets. Helmets make it less convenient to cycle and reduces perceived safety, in turn reducing the amount of cyclists and as a result _actually_ making cycling less safe (and the vicious circle ensues).
Even only suggesting that it would be beneficial to use a helmet has this effect apparently, hence the organizations are only willing to state that they are "not against the use of helmets".
Just an interesting second order effect I think. You want to always be careful to optimize for the absolute number of safe rides, and not solely for the relative number of safe rides that might significantly reduce the absolute number of safe rides.
>should be _against_ mandatory use of helmets. Helmets make it less convenient to cycle and reduces perceived safety, in turn reducing the amount of cyclists and as a result _actually_ making cycling less safe (and the vicious circle ensues).
Not mandatory and at your own risk IMO, but as a simple thought exercise on your argument, answer me this: if a car hits you on your bike or another cyclists knocks you off your bike and your head hits the concrete/kerb, are you gonna escape better off from the accident with or without wearing a helmet?
Spoiler alert from my GFs sister who works at an ER in Austria: helmeted patients walk away without permanent brain injury which she can't say the same for those involved in accidents without helmets. Helmets saving lives isn't a lobby issue, it's a medical fact.
People telling you to not wear a helmet because it somehow reduces safety through some convoluted spaghetti argument, must be off their rockers, when they clearly save lives at impacts. That's like saying governments should be against mandatory seatbelts and airbags in cars because their added safety encourages a cycle of unsafe driving leading to more accidents, and that without them divers would be forced to drive more carefully and lead to more safety.
It's perfectly fine to militate for the utopia of building of safe cycling infrastructure everywhere for everyone, but please let's not unnecessarily put people's lives at risk by promoting this FUD that helmets don't increase safety, just so people can literally die on this hill.
By all means, each individual should do of course as they see fit according to their desired risk profile of where they live and how they want to live their lives, just don't ask others to put their lives in danger in order to emulate the lifestyle where you live where the risks for not wearing a helmet are much smaller.
> People telling you to not wear a helmet because it somehow reduces safety through some convoluted spaghetti argument, must be off their rockers, when they clearly save lives at impacts.
No, they simply have different ethical frameworks/moral philosophies (consequentialist vs deontologist).
I’d mostly agree with you in that I find it unethical to not promote bike helmets at all, even if this were to somehow increase aggregate safety, especially if that increase is delayed and hard to measure.
But I do see the point against making them mandatory if that makes people take their car instead of a bike.
It’s not like not wearing a bike helmet is a dangerous, addictive substance that people are somehow defenselessly exposed to and that they need protection from, and it’s ultimately their own decision if they value their hairdo more than their brain.
In the basis we seem to agree. Note that I am not trying to discourage helmet wearing (nor for governments to do it), just arguing against making it mandatory or even officially advised (for healthy adults) to wear them.
Actual cycling safety is in numbers, more than in individually taken measures. This is all discussed in way more depth on reddit btw [0].
> but as a simple thought exercise on your argument
I realize could have written the sentence you respond to better, I should have written "and [mandatory helmet wearing] reduces perceived safety", also I said "should" in the sentence preceding the one you quoted, but I should've said that the NL ones ARE against making helmets mandatory for exactly the reasons I specify (and that my opinion is that other rights' organizations SHOULD be against it). Quoted directly from tbe website of the, quite well-regarded and not off their rocker, Fietsersbond [1] (under the header "Veilig gevoel?", translated by kagi):
The Fietsersbond (Cyclists' Union) isn't against wearing a bike helmet. If you feel confident, you cycle more safely. It can be wise to wear a helmet in high-risk situations, for example, for seniors on e-bikes. Unfortunately, it has been proven multiple times that forcing people to wear a helmet actually backfires. People start cycling less.
A helmet mandate makes cycling feel more like a dangerous activity—something you should be afraid of. Getting around by bike also becomes more complicated. After all, what do you do with that helmet when you're not wearing it? And what happens if you forget the helmet or if it gets stolen? These are all factors—whether justified or not—that make choosing a bike less convenient.
So yes, given that you got into an accident, it is very obviously better if you had worn a helmet (and knee, elbow and wrist pads). However, we don't want only to reduce mortality rates on accidents, we actually want to reduce the amount of accidents wholesale. The above point (and the point in my previous post) is that given mandatory or officially encouraged helmet wearing, you are more likely to get into an accident in the first place, further reducing the number of people willing to cycle, and thus safety for all those who still are willing.
I wanted to react to your car/seatbelt point, but I realize now you are the same person arguing about what constitutes starting points in the sibling thread. I don't mean to spread FUD and I also disagree that this is indeed FUD. I'm sorry that Austria is not as nice a place for cyclists as you would like it to be. I hope with this oil crisis you will find a way to foment some change re the emancipation of cyclists in your locality or even country.
That's why Putin attacked in 2022, and didn't wait any longer to build a stronger military. He knew he was on the clock as Europe slowly switched to renewables his fossil fuel leverage got weaker.
Unrelated, but doomer version of me expects that China will wait for the US to exhaust it's cruise missile supply bombing Iran, then move over Taiwan. Hope I'm wrong about this.
China would have no need to wait for the US to exhaust its cruise missile supply before attacking Taiwan. The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring to bear in the region. All US ships and airbases closer than (and including) Guam are toast in a serious war.
> The amount of firepower that China can muster from the mainland is enough to completely overwhelm any amount of conventional firepower that the US can bring
A lesson we learn again in 2026: one can’t seize and hold territory with air power alone.
China can almost certainly deny U.S. warships access to the Taiwan Strait. They can probably deny U.S. access to the South China Sea. But the U.S. (and Taiwan and Japan) can do the same back, similarly from a distance, and that’s the equilibrium currently keeping the peace.
Yes, even if China can deny the US access to the region, that doesn't mean that taking Taiwan would be a trivial endeavor. It would still be the largest and most complicated aquatic invasion in human history, executed by a relatively inexperienced military apparatus. It's far from a given that China would succeed in a direct invasion. All that we're saying here is that China isn't so afraid of US cruise missiles that the US exhausting them in Iran has any real affect on their planning.
Isn't this what Embedded Windows was always for, like for use in medical equipment, ATMs, POS, PLC, oscilloscopes, etc? Basically stuff that's supposed to be fire-and-forget, run 24/7 and that the user shouldn't be able to tinker with.
And also what group policies were for, that can disable the user from installing any software?
Am I wrong to assume that the fuckup was on your end, for using the wrong tool and not configuring it properly?
> Am I wrong to assume that the fuckup was on your end, for using the wrong tool and not configuring it properly?
Not at all. I agree that it should have been locked down and only privileged accounts should be allowed software update. But the system auto-booted into an Administrator account so it really wasn't a surprise that eventually someone would do something stupid.
I will say that this was for Windows NT retail, not Windows NT Embedded. At that point, getting an NT Embedded license practically required sacrificing your firstborn child. It was only when Microsoft got to Win XP Embedded that the license didn't look like it was written by a team of lawyers who already knew that they were perpetually in Hell.
Memories now of what we were given at the hospital long ago: our obstetrics ward was using Philips OBTraceVue software. The original FDA-approved system required Philips to package the OS and hardware all together, so we were given a bunch of generic Compaq desktops to run their fetal heartrate monitoring on.
The biggest annoying complaint was "we want to run our EHR software on it!" but because of the FDA requirements, we weren't allowed to install anything on the box. Yet somehow providing AV could be OK in some cases, and in other cases installing Citrix? And then we'd somehow find out someone managed to install the EHR client onto it anyways and it became a big old mess to have to have Philips come send a tech out of their own to reimage a PC we couldn't "legally" service.
It was a big messy pain for a while back in the day. Was happy when we finally got to upgrade to the newer IntelliSpace software on our own PCs in the ward. (Also got to meet a support engineer that came out rocking an Agilent badge, so that was super cool on its own right of history...)
> somehow providing AV could be OK in some cases, and in other cases installing Citrix?
The only way this could possibly have passed FDA scrutiny would be if the original manufacturer had validated this particular system configuration and approved it.
There's probably tons of stuff like this going on all over the place, but it manages to say under the radar, so no one notices it. But with the FDA's increased scrutiny on cybersecurity it will eventually disappear.
Back in like early aughts I remember seeing an ATM in Rome that had evidently crashed and was sitting at a DOS prompt. I was much younger then, but I remember thinking it wasn't terribly surprising, but it was also a bit of a wizard of oz moment.
Which "new" Outlook? I think there's like 3 versions of Outlook currently on the market. The Classic Win32 one they want you to stop using, the new Lite variant bundled for free with Windows 11, and the new Full Spec one that comes with Office 365, both of which are built on web technologies IIRC.
That one that comes with office 365. My work PC got auto updated with it and I switched back to the Win32 version within an hour because it was buggy and a huge resource hog. It's just an email client and calendar, there's no need to keep reinventing the wheel, especially if you're just gonna make it worse.
The people working at Mistral, Expedition 33, or other top successful software coming out of the EU, most likely also aren't working only 35 hours/week either. In fact some probably squeeze some work on weekends too out of dedication and pressure to meet deadlines.
In a lot of Austrian SW companies for example, have "all-in" contracts where you waive your rights to the scrutiny of the standard 38,5h/week in exchange for a "higher" salary with longer work hours and less time tracking. Similar cases in France I believe.
The 35h/week European meme people here parrot, you mostly see only in civil servants, old established monopolistic companies with moats and strong unions, not in scrappy start-up trying to make it and fix a bug before release, or semiconductor companies fighting a tape-out.
So no, work hours aren't what's limiting EU startups.
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