I’m not talking about British exceptionalism in any way. Clearly lots of people in this thread don’t like the UK. Fine. That doesn’t mean you should twist my words though.

Your words are not being twisted as I’ll lay out below.

Multiple EU countries haven’t adopted the euro and don’t show signs of adopting it. So clearly the EU already practises “flexibility” on the euro, to some degree.

These countries enjoy the things the UK decided to reject when leaving: Special privileges for joining early enough.

New countries joining do not receive any such privileges anymore and neither should the UK. That is being treated fairly. Any position that wants the UK to be treated better than other new countries wanting to join is what I called British Exceptionalism.

If EU citizens decide they don’t want the UK in the EU, okay. I would like good UK-EU relations, but I can’t control what EU citizens think of the UK.

I’m fine with them joining on the same terms as every other new country. If they don’t want to join, there are plenty of ways to cooperate without that. Finally: I generally don’t tend to think of the UK at all (neither negatively or positively), unless it comes up in political topics.

Weil die deutschen Wähler auf Bundesebene jedes Mal mit überwältigender Mehrheit Transatlantiker wählen? Bei allen Bundestagsparteien ist lange bekannt wofür sie stehen.

But if the EU just wants to punish the UK for Brexit then that is going to go down badly with many Brits, so closer relations will become less likely.

Being treated like every other new country wanting to join isn’t a punishment. The “British exceptionalism” mentality imho causing these thoughts is one root of the problem.

A punishment would be if the EU were to demand reparations for the economic damages the UK inflicted on it. Which, you’ll note, nobody is asking for.

I’m only aware of comprehensive data for the USA, but see historical ceo-to-worker compensation. Note the extreme compensation explosion after the year 1994, which is shortly after the much more comprehensive executive compensation reporting rules were implemented (1992-1993).

Now, correlation isn’t causation, but it would be a hell of a coincidence. Imho anyone who argues for salary ranges not being disclosed is trying to suppress wages. Whether deliberately or through ignorance.

Yeah, somebody has to pay the running costs, but there’s a place where the search engine could exist by just covering the running costs, without making infinite profit on top.

People have tried and went out of business, because users predominantly do not want to pay for something they could (supposedly) get for free, doubly so if the paid version isn’t even significantly better. It sounds nice, but it hasn’t been true for the last 20 years or so.

The current funding model didn’t come out of nowhere, it’s the consequence of user behavior. Personally, I would e.g. support a search engine as a public service funded through EU budget, but I’m in a tiny minority with that opinion.

Eventually, yes. But many people don’t like hearing that the vast majority of them, the users, didn’t want to pay for the operating costs of a global search engine when the web got popular. Neither as customers of a company, nor via government spending as a public service, and definitely not through donations.

Hence, given the economic system we live in, the people running search engines had to find some means of funding, which turned out to be selling their users’ data and serving them ads. Once they had gone down that path the rest became more or less inevitable.

Trouble is, the web for which the PageRank algorithm was developed has long since died - its highly decentralized, interlinked network of freely available information has almost entirely been replaced by centralized, account-gated silos. Web search engines, in turn, have gotten progressively worse since long before LLMs had become computationally feasible.

True, but imho the last great game BioWare made was Mass Effect 2. ~16 years ago.

A lot of people want local inference, and somehow they assume that the problem is solved now because we have open-source models, we’re going to be able to run them on our computers, and so we’re not going to need all the stuff in the data center.

We don’t need them even without local inference. There was already more than enough total global compute for the most valuable use cases of LLMs (research, development, admin). The datacenter build-up is almost entirely fueled by utterly unrealistic expectations of future capabilities. Before and now the case for local inference is a matter of access, not capacity.

But from a global allocation perspective, actually it’s quite terrible to have everybody, like, have a bunch of the world’s limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer and being used five percent of the time.

Utilitarianism like this is a disease. By the same logic, it’s inefficient that we allow other species of animals to exist and consume usable energy. Hell, why stop at other species? It’s inefficient to allow humans to exist - let’s kill all humans!

Now, I know that’s not what he said, the point was to show that when someone uses utilitarianism as a serious argument, they are no longer worth listening to.

Like you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you’re trying to deal with this very supply-constrained environment,

The supply is only constrained because you keep hoarding more than you need. Maybe it’s time for some communization? So communities where data centers are built get most if not all of the profits from it?

Die Grünen in Berlin […]

Bund != Land. Zu den Landesparteien (bzw. deren Programmen) habe ich keine Aussage getroffen.

Was leistest Du zum Thema?

Warum greifst du die individuelle Person an?

Progressive Kräfte angreifen um den rechten Rand zu stärken? Bisschen “Teilen und Herrschen” unterstützen für die Öl-Tech-Bros?

Der Kontext war links vs rechts, nicht progressiv vs konservativ. Tut es weh in der Sachebene keinen Konter zu haben und deswegen meinst du so etwas machen zu müssen? Das kannst du gerne und in Ruhe alleine tun.

Was war an meiner Aussage verwirrend? Du bist (anscheinend) in einer Partei, deren letztes Bundestagswahlprogramm (BTWP) rechts war. Was das über dich als Person als Person sagt? Keine Ahnung, da hab ich ja auch nichts zu geschrieben. Ich kenne links Eingestellte bei den Grünen, bei der SPD, und ja auch vereinzelt bei der CDU und sogar AfD; das ändert nichts daran, dass man linke Positionen nicht ausreichend viel in den BTWPen von 2025 wiederfinden konnte, als dass auch nur eines dieser insgesamt links wäre.

Ein zentristisches BTWP auf der Achse links/rechts läge da, wo die ökonomischen Verteilungsverhältnisse nicht weiter verändert werden würden (der “Status Quo” der Verteilung würde aufrecht erhalten). Da aber das aktuell laufende finanzielle Verteilungsssystem in Deutschland in Summe bereits stark rechts ist, müsste man selbst dafür erst einmal die aktuell weiterlaufende Umverteilung nach oben stoppen.

Wer rechts wählt kriegt halt Klassenkampf von oben. Wir sind aktuell auf der Bundesebene immer noch bei ~80% Zustimmung für rechte Bundestagswahlprogramme (AfD,CDU,CSU,FDP,SPD,Grüne).

EDIT: Link zu den Zahlen. Alles, wo eine der unteren Einkommensgruppen deutlich weniger entlastet werden sollte als die kumulativen Inflationsraten der Vorjahre an Kaufkraft entwerteten ist eine reale Umverteilung nach oben; aka rechte Fiskalpolitik.

My two cents:

Creating a monetary union without a fiscal union was a grievous macroeconomic mistake. For example, it allowed countries like mine (Germany) to abuse the shared currency to artifically lower the cost of exported goods, with the downstream effect of allowing it to “move” parts of its state debt to others, like e.g. France.

There really are only two ways towards eventual stability: Create a fiscal union (which for all intents and purposes means turning the EU from a confederation into a sovereign state), or breaking up the monetary union.

The latter, however, would destroy large parts of the export-dependent German economy almost overnight. It would almost certainly lead to economic suffering not seen since the Great Depression in the short-term. To steelman the argument for a moment, it could theoretically be a (state-)controlled burn to purge all those ailing German big corporations almost exclusively dependent on fossil fuels that have been refusing to innovate for more than 30 years now and be the catalyst for a rapid green transition. But there’s 0% chance of any far-right party desiring this, let alone being able to pull it of.

So that means either we create a fiscal union, or we’re screwed with a monetary system that will continue to amplify existing problems, instead of being a tool capable of addressing them equitably.

The most effective form of protest workers have against owners requires no violence at all: It’s strikes, ideally a general strike. The economic damages from even one week of half of the country’s workers refusing to work would force the wealthiest permille to make concessions.

The principal problem people in the USA have is that your hyperindividualism prevents you from developing a class consciousness with your fellow workers. Most of you are not joining unions to make them strong for collective bargaining, not standing in local elections against establishment candidates, not joining/creating local mutual self-help groups, and so on.

Danke an die Durchführenden für die Arbeit. Ich bezweifle allerdings stark, dass dies Wähler von Bundes-SPD oder noch Illiberaleren interessieren wird.

Yes, thanks for asking. Did you?

The Budapest Memoranda do not contain “If someone else (e.g. Russia) attacks you, we will deploy our own military assets against them to defend you”, which would be the requirement for the “the USA agreed to protect Ukraine from Russia in exchange for them giving up their nukes” claim.

I’m not a fan of the USA’s foreign policy, but there’s no need to claim they promised something they did not.

Merz schon, der hatte mit denen als Blackrockchef zu tun.

Er war Vorsitzender im Aufsichtsrat der deutschen Tochtergesellschaft, kein Chef.

Niemand mit einem Restfunken an Verstand würde Merz operative Verantwortung für irgendwas geben.

So the US agreed to protect Ukraine from Russia of they gave up their nukes

No, the USA never agreed to protect Ukraine - it was an atrocious deal for the latter.

This not being in a nuclear umbrella is the reason why Russia was willing to risk invading them.

I don’t get why people are saying there should be a punishment.

Being treated exactly like every other country outside the EU is not a punishment. A punishment would be demanding reparations for the damages the UK inflicted with Brexit, which you’ll note neither me nor anybody else here I could see asked for.

[…] Why not just let them leave and then realise it’s wrong when it happens and come back?

This is what that looks like: Accept the same terms as anybody else or don’t join. There are plenty of ways to have constructive cooperations without the UK joining the EU.

Like if a family member that I know and love hurts me and leaves, I’d eventually welcome them back and let bygones be bygones, because we are a team. But if it’s some coworker I don’t care about, I’d want to be made right for the troubles.

“We” are not a family. The EU is a confederation. If we were a family, I would require both contrition and some form of reparations, because breaking such a much closer bond has more severe consequences.

It’s good to let the leavers feel a taste of how bad it is to do it, but joining should always be a good thing and not a punishment.

If the UK thinks joining on the same terms as anybody else is a punishment they are free to not join. We have way too many grandfathered-in friction-causing privileges already.

I’m all for constructive cooperation moving forward, as long as the UK never gets its special privileges back.