They also have a much lower rate of the population with degrees and their universities ruthlessly weed out first year students. Despite having one of the highest standards of living and among the highest wages in Europe, Germany has far fewer college graduates than most of the country. They realize that a lot of degrees aren't worth anything or are completely unnecessary so they won't let people waste their time and the taxpayers' money.

The U.S. absolutely does have too many people going to college or getting degrees that won't help them. If this weren't the case there wouldn't be a massive student debt crisis because the degrees would be paying for themselves. Most degrees still do, at least engineering or technology degrees. The multitude of people getting art history degrees and trying to get one of a very small number of positions in those fields, not so much. Unless you're at the top of the class or well connected (or probably both) then the odds of that degree doing anything other than saddling you with debt is a dubious prospect. But instead of telling anyone the reality of that the colleges will gladly let you drown yourself in debt.

The idea that college is a magic wand that can waved to solve all of society's ills is naive. It won't even necessarily make people happier. I've known several people (mostly Indian) who were essentially forced to get an engineering degree (or a medical degree) who have good jobs, but aren't happy. It's easy to understand why their parents who often grew up exceptionally poor made those decisions, but even if you decided to limit admissions or shift what's funded to align with what's actually beneficial to society, not everyone is going to make the shift. The people who really do want to study art history, philosophy, theater, etc. aren't suddenly going to want to change to mechanical engineers or programmers.

Yet you're the one who speaks favorably about shoplifting.

Which you failed to do when you talked your "kid" into spending huge sums of money that he never even had for a degree that's basically worthless, and will pay for it for the rest of his life.

https://www.merriam-webster.co...

So what does that say about you, given you're even less intelligent than they are?

You both are wrong. The question is whether it's worth the cost. There's no question or concern over political crap like rsilvergun thinks there is. The question is more: Do you get what you pay for?

And to me, this isn't a simple yes or no answer. The answer I'd give is: What degree did you get, and what did you pay for it? No matter what degree you have, I'd say that if you spent more than $150k, under any circumstance, then you got ripped off. Period.

rsilvergun keeps whining that his imaginary "kid" borrowed $300,000. There is no rhyme or reason to spend that much for any degree, let alone one that has nearly zero chance of ever paying that off within his lifetime. And worse, he blames that on, of all things, republicans, even though the government has been keeping up with inflation when it comes to pell grants and other funding.

And at the same time, he holds blameless the very institutions who have been raising their tuition rates at several times the rate of inflation for decades, and then conned his dumb as into believing that he needs this really bad, even though he really didn't. Or at the very least, he could have done far better by going to community college first, then going to a public in-state university, where borrowing may not even be necessary at all. But at the end of the day, we live in a free society, which also includes being free to make one incredibly bad life decision right after the other.

Then surely you can provide ample evidence of that.

By definition, a wall of text is unformatted. The proper term is rant.

They're not you, either. Yet you're sitting here trying to tell me, based on your own experiences and biases, that the local content is superior while also saying that the majority aren't going to care enough about it to pay for it. You're literally arguing against yourself. I'm not. I still remember talking to a few Aussies about this exact issue on reddit (or something, I don't recall exactly) and they kept going on to rant about an American pop singer named Kesha (who I'd never even heard of by that point) always making their top ten charts for upwards of four months at a time. I really doubt that was due to her being heavily promoted or something like that. Rather, Australians just really liked her music more than anybody else, including ones in her own country. If this was purely due to promotional efforts, then why on earth wouldn't they promote artists that were already doing much better in much larger markets?

The simplest explanation is the most likely. Besides, what would local music there even sound like? Mel Gibson playing a didgeridoo? More ACDC?

It also doesn't mean anything. You might recall the cola wars. Or the sneaker wars during the same period. The party that massively out-spent the other quite often didn't win. People keep repeating this same line about politics as well, but conveniently ignore all the candidates (e.g. Hillary) who massively outspent their opponent (e.g. Trump.) And that is nowhere close to being the first time this happened. Hell, look at the lessons learned during Lessig's Mayday Pac, which was a complete and utter flop.

I too bought memory in April to avoid tariffs. I had to run a stupid python program to generate a dataset that required 96GB of RAM for a delayed project so I figured I might as well bite the bullet. DDR4 was still a good value at that point (it's a problem that can run overnight, performance wasn't too important).

But how are the tariffs limiting the manufacturing supply capacity of RAM factories in East Asia?

Do you have a mechanism to propose?

Do you think they're making enough to meet demand but then blaming tariffs to justify jacking up prices? All of them? It would be an interesting conspiracy but is there any evidence to support that theory?

> How much is this problem is down to AI and how much to beautiful tariffs?

What mechanism are you thinking of where tariffs could limit supply of VRAM from East Asia?

Simple price increases, sure, definitely, but this is described by manufacturers as a supply & demand problem.

Do you have a different angle we should consider?

My recollection was it being taught during middle school, though me (and I think most of my classmates) weren't paying much attention and probably forgot much of it. In my case likely due to (later diagnosed) ADHD. But either way, most of that knowledge came of my own accord whenever it became relevant. I suspect that in these cases of foreigners knowing more about our government than their own is under similar circumstances. I wouldn't be surprised eastern europeans have this the worst in the form of iron curtain states pushing the message of "this is what it's like over there, see how bad it is? ours is better" with whatever that was at the time no longer existing, but that's pure speculation on my part.

Even now, I've been (re-)learning academic stuff from youtube videos of Neil Degrasse Tyson, Veritasium, or even outright history lectures from Sean Munger and Sarah Paine.

Which doesn't change anything. You guys used to make propaganda cartoons about exactly this during the 1960s even:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

You're probably going to start seeing a lot more of that. Hollywood jumped the shark during the dual strike period, and now the sound studios here are basically going unused. Nobody wants to film here anymore, and it keeps getting worse. The strikes are only part of the problem, the other part is the insane amount of red tape.

https://www.latimes.com/entert...

Though, I do think the strikes succeeded in their goal of targeting the streaming companies, who seem to have mostly left. I've run across some people in the industry while engaging in my diving hobby. Some of these guys have been stuntmen in movies, and some of them have been filmmakers (I haven't run across any actors, not even small-time extras.) The latter say that before the strikes you could just pick and choose who you wanted to work with, that is now (and the reasoning I don't really understand) either impossible or impractical after the strikes. The former say it's hard to find work in that industry and basically just do it as a side hustle. Both say that everybody else here is in straight-up denial about the film industry having already moved abroad.

Who is right? I don't know, I just live here.

Well Russia is already sanctioned into the ground. And it already threw its crappy military into Ukraine and lost it. China wants its Siberia and Greater Manchuria back for the natural resources that it doesn't currently have and badly needs, (not only oil, but also fresh water, which it's fast running out of) while Russia has no military left to defend them. Russia has already thoroughly pissed off everybody who otherwise would have cared enough to say something about that. China does not like Russia, they simply share a common enemy. Think the way Russia and America were allies during the period you know only as "the great patriotic war".

So tell me, Moscow, how this ends without you either simply ceding that territory (that'll be the day) or alternatively, you being the most recent smoking hole in the ground?

Do tell.

It's a very weak argument. If they really like the local content better, they'll simply opt for that instead of Disney, especially if it's a lower price. I personally dislike Disney. Not because of the whole woke thing, or the vastly overused multiverse trope (and not even in a fun way like Rick and Morty.)

Rather, I never really cared for superhero franchises, except the Christopher Nolan Batman series, the original two Tim Burton Batman movies with Michael Keaton, and the first two IronMan movies (haven't yet seen the third.) The idea that superman can just defy physics at will and bounce off of literally nothing, or that a massive dose of gamma radiation turns a man into a green giant instead of simply killing him is a bit too far fetched for me. Sure, Batman and Ironman take extreme liberties with it, but at least those guys rely on technology that is in some way plausible rather than supernatural crap.

I also never particularly cared for Star Wars. I've always been more of a trekkie, and I basically see the whole series the same way that Harrison Ford does.

Outside those two, what the fuck does Disney have to offer aside from ruining copyright laws in America in their own image? Well...basically nothing, unless you like musicals. Their current biggest franchise that they didn't simply buy off from somebody else (Frozen) is literally, a fucking musical. Characters randomly breaking out into a song is what I loathed the most about Disney movies as a kid, and that's like the entire movie. They even openly took a massive shit on their classics like Snow White (which I never really cared for, either old or new) that their own fans adored. Even as a kid, I never particularly cared for Disney's live action movies, and that's what they're favoring the most. I honestly can't see why anybody would subscribe to Disney+. Even their theme parks are shit now -- who the fuck wants to stand in line for an hour, all for a ride that lasts all of 5 minutes? Oh, you want fastpass? That's another $200, and it still has all the same limitations that the free one used to have, except you wait even longer now. Disneyland will certainly take you for a ride alright.

The bar that this local content has to reach to exceed Disney+ is honestly quite low, and you're thinking Disney can simply spend its way to the top? Yeah...not buying it.

>"to justify to insurance companies why you are using a free open source project as a main tool."

This assumes that MS-Office is somehow less prone to bugs, errors, issues. Just because more people use it, or that it is closed source, or that it isn't free, or that it is from Microsoft, doesn't mean it is safe (or "safer"). It also doesn't necessarily mean there is any liability that can be shifted. Most commercial software requires you to sign away liability (or greatly/specifically limit it, perhaps to only the cost of the software) in the terms of service.

Just to clarify:

Defending that stupidity is more a you problem. And if you want to know my “technical” complaint, somewhere behind a 20-million cell spreadsheet is someone actually trying to excuse broken default behavior in Excel under the guise of user error. When errors are not the fault of the user, what then is the always-acceptable excuse for the financial messiah?

Part of the acceptable inaccuracy I speak of is the absolute blind adulation for Excel in business. If that program was found to be broken severely and proven quite inaccurate in a future update, no business would ban the use of Excel. Not one. They all sit around waiting for a fix to their fix.

Blind adulation, is blind for obvious reasons. None of which are good.

Uh, that’s a nuclear reactor on a planet that has no protective atmosphere. When you say “minimizing risks”, just be prepared for a lot of laughter from an audience who likely knows better. The idea of any of that being anything but high risk, is a joke.

We will grasp this concept well when the first Martian meteor shower shows the human race the value of atmospheres.

> It did happened before, but not on this scale and speed.

Check out Meltwater Pulses 1a and 1b.