> A small number of cities, starting with San Francisco, Paris, London, and New York, are where almost everyone working and thinking about artificial intelligence is based. Go to these cities, or the closest approximation of them available to you, not just to work on these problems but to understand what possibilities may come your way.
The problem with this - it leads to group think - you end up being forced to conform.
There's a reason Warren Buffet left NY and went to Omaha.
likewise the best things usually come from the margins - the apple pc didn't come from people working at the best MicroPC companies but hipsters tinkering.
I agree with this... having lived in all of the major cities in the US and worked in "tech" /research- I find places like Pittsburgh, or Portland(Maine), to be much much more inspiring and to contain more interesting people. The major hubs having become monocultural sycophantic symbols of extreme capitalism and greed, advancing only the science of advertising. 12 years in NYC now and jeez, people here are just boring AF. Its the same conversations on repeat, platitudes, rhetoric... express an original thought or unorthodox idea and you are looked at like you are unwell.
seems Steve Jobs is vindicated again - when the Consulting types take over the result is predictable.
cz these guys were never there when the sauce was made, they think the ingredients matter - not how the ingredients compose together.
nike was an early innovator in athleisure - now leggings / tracksuits etc other brands took over - kids hardly care about sneakers - the shoes quality is down - personally I prefer new balance
Except, NB (at least their classic casual models) is actually a pretty decent value on quality/price spectrum compared to other brands. Despite being an “old man” vibe, the classic pair I have is better materials, way more comfortable, and often less expensive than competing classic sneakers. They also still have a few made-in-USA models. Their popularity also increased as retro aesthetics has made a come back among Gen Z and younger millennials, who tend to value form AND function, and personal taste, over louder mass market status brands. Maybe NB marketing strategy was more of a response to an existing shift in consumer demand, but the value proposition was already there.
You are valuing different things than someone else. Neither way is more or less marketed to, just different segments of the same market (people who wear shoes).
yeah might is right. if you wanna bully citizens like dictators do - now they fear some big bully might come snatch them in the middle of the night like bully does to its citizens
Your comment is completely and utterly disconnected from reality. Venezuelans WANT THIS and have been wanting this for decades.
I lived in Argentina at the time when the military were making people disappear by the thousands, never to be found again. Most commenters on HN have no clue what they are talking about and no context whatsoever.
Give it a few weeks. Maybe a few months, hard to say. You will see people joyfully demonstrating on every street in Venezuela flying both Venezuelan and American flags. Just hold your thoughts and opinions if you can for a a bit of time and you'll see. And, of course, don't get your news from leftist outfits who are angry about a socialist/communist/dictator losing power. You'll be able to watch news directly from Venezuela.
Important point: Venezuela is NOT Iraq or Afghanistan. I've seen people equate events. Again, ignorant. Venezuelans WANT democracy. Latin Americans are culturally and religiously aligned with the west. They want this and they want the socialist-dictatorial nightmare to be over.
As is always the case, most are not thinking past the headlines. Venezuela, once the transition to sanity, rule of law and democracy is completed, is likely to become a major player both in the region and globally.
How?
Well, most go for the obvious: Oil.
That's not it though. Expand beyond that: Energy.
And expand beyond that yet again: Manufacturing.
And yet one more time: AI data centers (which need energy, manufacturing and a stable environment).
Venezuela could become a magnet for investment and development we cannot possibly imagine. This one move by Trump, if executed well, will change the face of the American continent --for the better-- in ways that are hard to imagine today. This is a good moment in history. I hope other nations understand the reign of terror is over and join a coalition to truly make Latin America not only great again, but part of what could become the most powerful association in the world, a new, powerful, integrated and developed American continent. I hope to see this in my lifetime. It would be amazing.
It sounded like a sarcastic comment meaning characterizing the action as unjustified bullying rather than what it was.
The left's position on what just happened isn't only immoral, it is 100% dislocated from the opinion of the 9 million Venezuelans living in the diaspora as well as almost the entirety of those still in Venezuela. The reason I say "almost" is that there's a small layer (politicians, military, etc.) who were making a living or getting rich from the regime that is now evaporating.
American car manufacturers don't play to their strengths e.g affordable sports cars - Chevy Corvette Stingray | Mustang GT how many are sold in foreign markets
the Bronco could make a killing in Africa but is it sold there NO. I understand here in the states the 4runner has no competition - yet ford wants to kill it using the Bronco. Why not use the Bronco to kill the land cruiser in markets where people default to a Land Cruiser / Fortuner and force Toyota to play defense.
E.g in Africa certain markets Ford started selling the Ford Ranger Raptor and they're making a killing - and actually starting to cause Toyota to compete and not bring their usual stale cars.
However Chinese have brought their A-game too - Tank 300, BYD Shark etc
There is no way that a land cruiser owner in Africa will ever consider anything made by Ford. That's like blasphemy. The LC has decades of proven reliability, that the bronco needs to compete with.
It's true, the Ranger is immensely popular. But Ranger owners and LC owners do not see eye to eye and you'll have a tough time convincing the LC owner to change allegiance.
For South Africa specifically, the Ranger is about as large as you can go in terms of personal vehicle, before it becomes a serious hassle. Our infrastructure does not really support bigger cars. How does the bronco compare with the Ranger size wise?
Lastly, the Ranger is built in South Africa, I think Ford knows and understands the Southern African market very well.
what Buffet shows is the power of understanding fundamentals & sticking to your strengths
remember this was a guy picking stocks in the middle of nowhere - Omaha Nebraska using just Newspapers, Annual Reports and a phone. With the power of conviction.
not internet like we have to do or "A.I" - yet he built the largest conglomerate known to man
I spot checked some of this and from what I can find, the median salary in London is about $12k more than Mississippi, and the median house price in London is about $100k less than California.
Bear in mind that obviously the mean salary in London is going to be far higher than the median (the finance industry will skew it), while I'm not sure that's as extreme as Mississippi. Additionally median salaries reflect a lot of service jobs and similar labour. Dubai has a lower median wage than either London or Mississippi, but people don't think of it as economically broken.
Comparing California (an extremely large state that I presume has cheaper housing outside major urban areas) to a city seems a bit of a poor comparison.
I don't disagree that the UK has high energy costs.
If you’re trying to do a rebuttal, saying that wages are slightly higher than Mississippi and house prices are slightly lower than Cali doesn’t refute anything, it just serves to make the example more extreme and concrete. Look at house prices in Mississippi in relation to their income and then compare the same ratio for Cali and for London.
I'm not sure why we're doing states vs cities. Jackson (the largest city in Mississippi) has a population of 150k. If I find a non-commuter belt town in the UK with a size of 150k, then the house prices will be dramatically lower. An analysis of London house prices needs to take into account that major urban areas in general command a premium (for reasons other than the ability to earn more).
If you compare SF or LA to London, then you'll find:
City | Median Wage | Median House Price | Ratio
SF | 104k | $1.5m | 14.42
London | 67k | $890k | 13.28
LA | 73k | $1.1m | 15.07
London ends up being slightly more affordable despite lower salaries.
The whole analogy was a bit meaningless - it wasn't an apples to apples comparison. The writer mixed geographic and demographic scales to make a point that could just as well be about the unaffordability of large cities.
That’s right if the quote is net of income tax, but that wasn’t clear. While we’re on the subject we should include the 20% VAT (delta 5-10% sales tax in the states) which is the most regressive tax on the poor there is.
Roughly the same with sales tax, it's just 1/3rd of that number.
> But buy a £50k Rolex and yes there is vat.
This is wildly ignorant of how less fortunate people live. They are hit with VAT on many daily expenses. Ignoring that fact and "tsk tsk"ing them for being frivolous is the [British] way.
I'd say it's very close to even odds that the other poster is correct to say "No vat on the majority of spending".
I'd also say that VAT should be reduced to encourage domestic spending and local growth, but I did leave the country for various reasons that can be simplified as "I do not expect the UK government to do the right thing".
Yes, but you're not contradicting anything here. £5/week in VAT is what I'd expect roughly bottom 5% by income to pay, because of limited disposable income.
If you eat in a restaurant, IIRC that's VAT-rated. A meal for two coming to £20? That's £3.33 of VAT you just paid. Poorest 5% can't afford to eat out basically at all, but it quickly adds up the moment you can start affording that.
For purposes of this discussion, I believe VAT is roughly uniform across the EU + UK and some other European jurisdictions. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I did update the comment to limit the critique to the UK.
Dubai is absolutely economically broken lol. The city was built on cheap foreign slave labor. And the luxurious amenities of the city are only for the wealthy royal and foreigners. Their main export besides oil is the illusion of a thriving metropolis
The example I like to use to demonstrate how broken labor vs. service costs are in the UAE is to compare the price of a Big Mac meal to the price of a standard manual car wash (closer to detailing tbh).
In the UAE, a Big Mac meal costs approximately 35 AED ($10). On the other hand, a manual car wash - approx. 1-2 hours of labor - can cost you around 20 AED.
In other words, you could get almost two manual car washes for the price of a Big Mac.
(1) the middle class (and above) who have money to spend on services
(2) the migrant working class, the bulk of whom send every last extra penny back home as remittances to support family
The second class of people are not considered as a market for the majority of services in the UAE. In the case of food, when they do eat out, they frequent traditional, low cost/quality establishments.
As for why a Big Mac costs that much, labor definitely doesn’t have much to do with it. My impression is that prices continued to get pushed up as long as sales didn’t take a hit, which means it’s mostly pure profit.
Keep in mind that the median salary isn’t that high. Without looking it up, I would guess it’s approx $25k USD/year, but I haven’t lived there in a while.
To the extent that a dictatorship is doing well, it is evidence against the idea that democracy is the natural way to have a good economy.
That said, I don't think those states are doing *well enough* to justify such a fear. What we're looking at from the outside are basically the promo reels from a version of Disney Land made for people whose childhood dream wasn't to be a princess or a knight, but a CEO with a Lambo; what the kids see when they visit Disney has little in common with the effort needed to present the park.
AKA the most sensible economic model for Dubai. It's a nice enough metropolis for the desert, entices enough high end talent to live there to supplement frankly undereducated population a few generations away from nomads, and locals are comfy. What else they going to do with oil money in the desert.
They're just arbitraging cheap labour in your face instead of some farm field or factory overseas. For resource to local population ratio, it's supremely optimized - cheap migrant workforce does all the shit job locals don't want to do, don't have the numbers to do, without need for onerous social safety net of citizenship.
It's economically "fine", as in as "fine" as can be trying to pivot desert city from oil. It's morally broken because labours occasionally be slaves, even though largely everyone wins. UAE gets cheap labour, labour countries get remittance, labourers get life changing pay.
Like west already does this shit in some sectors (agri) and get cheap calories, UAE can't supply enough labour in all sectors and get cheap everything.
> Dubai has a lower median wage than either London or Mississippi, but people don't think of it as economically broken.
Dubai isn’t sold as a place to belong long-term. Most people move there knowing it’s temporary.
The Bay Area is drifting in the same direction too with the increased cost of living around here. (but the same could be said about most big cities, maybe?)
Compare the housing costs of London to the housing costs of San Francisco and then swap out those Bay Area salaries with your “slightly above Mississippi” wages and you’ll see why London looks so broken to people used to LA/SF/NY.
London doesn't have the income level of Mississippi, although that might be true for the UK average. I'd say that the UK may be "seriously broken", but not more so than other post-industrial countries, including the US (or France, or Japan). It's just broken in different ways. E.g. life expectancy in the UK is significantly higher than in America even though they were the same in the '80s. Education levels (and measures such as literacy profficiency and skills etc.) are also significantly better in the UK than in the US. Somewhat tongue in cheek, Americans are richer but they don't seem to be putting their money to good use, as Brits are better educated and live longer.
There are differences, but this is oversimplified, and market is “mostly” working. You need more money in California, for transportation, for health care. The standard is bigger houses (bigger everything) in Cali. Life might be richer, in some ways more pleasant, in London (it’s not weather though), including shorter flights to many interesting places.
From my experience the ratio of savings was similar, but the ppp of course favored US for absolute numbers.
We invented money as a way of distributing scares resources. When there is housing going empty while people live on the streets in tents with no running water, no electricity, no sewage, one has to realize that something's gone wrong.
House prices are only "out of wack" in areas with poor social housing programs.
Housing in Vienna is still affordable, only due to their very successful public housing programs. Public housing can be both beautiful and highly affordable if you want it to be, it's not like we don't know how to make good quality homes with lovely public amenities. It's mostly developers that want to skim on everything while selling it at the highest cost possible.
Poor system if this is the outcome: unaffordability.
Your reply suggests you're thinking inside a very strange (to me) box.
Have you considered… not rationing housing?
As in, you can actually pay people to build more houses, houses are not a fixed resource. Likewise roads, schools, shopping centres etc., they're all things you can just pay to get built. Only thing a little harder amongst the usual talking points is hospitals, but that's because medical qualifications take so long, not because you can't do it.
I am interested in what is working in Vienna when “housing problem” is what almost every city in “the West” has or thinks it has.
To me it seems to be a combination of
- wealth inequality (eg 20/30 trillion dollars was printed and furloughed out in Covid, which funnels its way up to the holders of the most assets, seeing asset price inflation but no attempt to tax back the money printed). Repeat on different scales for unfair tax systems and poor infrastructure and and and
- urban planning (we think the ideal city is dense using seven storey or so apartment buildings and fairly aggressive anti-car (ie far less parking than seems possible) with better public transport and lots of pedestrian access. This describes almost no cities
- mortgages and other pro house incentives. You want house price inflation for decade after decade, just allow people to borrow a greater ratio against their salary — and allow married women into the workplace. Suddenly turning a mortgage limit of 2.5 x a man’s salary into 5x a dual couples salary. People bid up prices, forcing more couples to have two salaries to compete. And companies don’t have to increase salary to compensate … people combine salaries and go deeper into debt. Hell if you only had one policy weapon, forcing 2.5 borrowing against one highest paid persons salary is not a bad one. You won’t get re-elected however.
I don’t follow it but your last suggestion (use single income not household) was new to me and interesting in as much as it seems like an obvious extension of “The Two-Income Trap” thinking.
ChatGPT with no deeper diving thinks you are further off
“””
Social/public rental makes up about 43% of the city’s housing stock; around half of that is city-owned public housing.
The rest includes limited-profit housing associations and private housing.
“””
This compares with London around 20%, paris 24% and NYC 9%
Countries like Indonesia have banned foreigners from owning land altogether. You can apparently still own property through land-lease agreements and other arrangements, but not the land. I think they've cracked down on illegal rentals too.
Real estate prices are out of whack everywhere. Even in places with no good jobs, low population density, and rapid depopulation, real estate prices are increasing exponentially. There are no market forces in play anymore.
Nobody will admit that the housing is overpriced, so they would have to be forced to do so.
This is terrible for normal people, and slightly bad for the investors, but only a crisis or organized government action can reset the damage done by decades of investment in already existing buildings.
> I always reflect on the energy generation statistics of the UK per capita
Can you elaborate on this?
From what I can tell, the UK's per-capita electricity generation has dropped steadily from a 2003 high[0] (4,069 kWh in 2024, 6,657 in 2003, 5,266 in 1985) and per-capita energy consumption has been going down since 2005,[1] but energy intensity (read: inverse of efficiency) has been decreasing consistently since at least 1965.[2] Domestic electricity production is down 24% since 2000,[3] whilst imports (which I don't think includes Albanians) are up 206% in the same period.[4]
That all reads to me as a country whose domestic generation has been replaced by imports and whose consumption has been reduced by efficiency gains, but I'm aware that I'm conflating figures here for 'energy' and for solely 'electricity'; I couldn't find anything for per-capita energy generation, as you specified.
The wealth inequality in the U.K. is very genratioanly skewed, mainly from the source of that wealth (housing and final salary pensions) which is no longer available to younger people.
Would you mind telling me if you are a genuine person who lived in the UK, or at least have some knowledge of the country beyond recent tweets?
Honestly I am shocked at the recent rise of anti-UK comments with horribly incorrect information or skewed views and curious about what is sourcing this.
The core issue is that most major businesses are ultimately owned directly or indirectly abroad, largely in America, with some tapping by London-based intermediaries.
Supermarkets and shopping centres, national assets (e.g., water) the story is the same. Then there's Amazon et al.
Profit generated in this country is by and large not spent here, and is certainly not taxed adequately.
This causes inequality by short-circuiting redistributive measures, either local economic multipliers or government spending.
What gains are felt are concentrated in service sectors which facilitate global capital, concentrated in London. See OP's thoughts on legalistic societies.
It compares to inequality in England before the US was a thing, in the same way. Small elite benefiting from global plunder, vast inequality internally.
The British Empire didn't actually end. There was a hostile takeover by Washington at the end of WW2.
> while in the US you see automated car washes, in the uk most car washes are Albanians n other immigrants etc
Er what? I moved away from the UK in 2007 but even then the only place I or my parents washed a car was the ubiquitous petrol station automated car wash.
No idea where OP is based but like most suggestions about the UK or London online it's bullshit. Most petrol stations have the same automated car washes they've always had. If you want your car hand washed there are lots of people doing that too, as there always have been. Like all places, the UK and/or London has plenty of issues including serious ones - but I'd still pick it over anywhere in the US regardless of salary differences.
Conversely, I've no idea where you or the parent has the idea that the UK is full of automated car washes and the OP is talking bullshit. I live in London and can think of a only a handful of the old fashioned automatic car washes.
Whereas I can get a hand carwash at pretty much any supermarket car park I land on. From a guy with a bucket and trolley to a full team of four going at it with a power wash. Tesco, Sainsbury's, wherever.
The Albanian angle feels loaded, but it's true that many of the employees do seem to be recent immigrants.
I don't see much point denying this reality, it feels a bit like trying to argue there's always been high streets full of betting shops, charity shops, vape stores and American candy shops.
London is an odd one as space is limited and the hand wash places can pop up anywhere quite easily. If I look at the more suburban place I'm from most petrol stations still have the automated ones (contactless payment now instead of the tokens). And most of the larger supermarkets there that have petrol stations still have the automated car washes too.
Yes, it is unimaginable that the UK has replaced most of their automated car washes with immigrants washing cars manually. I've been back there and I've still family there, it's not that different "on the ground" as it were, despite the big political changes.
I can see the reason why people see it this way though. For £20, you can have 4-5 people getting your car into the best state it can be in under 20 minutes. I would even say it is a joy to watch them work so efficiently.
Most people prefer that over automatic car washes, so after some point, while the automatic washes are there, you become blind to them.
I can only think of one automated wash in my UK town, and well over 10 "Albanian" hand washes. Personally I go to the Albanians every time - they take pride in what they're doing, handle the vehicle with care and do a far, far better job than an auto wash.
I'm British by birth, lived there until 2018. I've also visited Kenya and Switzerland and the US.
Kenya's actually third-world. Was playing a card game with my partner and family in a gas station in Nairobi when sparks started flying out of the outdoor lighting system covering the forecourt roof. Place I was staying, there was a power cut that meant the water pump couldn't keep the taps and toilet pressurised. The fancier toilets in the shopping mall, the paper was outside the cubical because it cost too much to not be a theft target if it was inside; other places, squat toilets. Public transport included a Matatu, kind of a hybrid of a bus and a taxi, very cheap but it was also a minivan that only moved when full, and "full" meant about as many people as would physically fit given they'd replaced the cargo area with another two benches and everyone was squeezed in. I didn't visit the actual slums, which are (from the pictures I've seen) much worse.
Switzerland… the discount food is priced like Waitrose. In this regard, it's a bit like America. But American discount food has the quality of Poundland, while Swiss discount food has the quality of Sainsbury's.
The UK is much better put together than Kenya. It is much cheaper than Switzerland or the US.
As a person who moved from a third world country to UK, this could not be further from the truth. Life in the UK, both economically and socially, is miles better than my previous 3rd world country (which is still in world top 20 GDP).
sometimes I wonder if people who write such articles know that 85% of commercial software is not for the Consumer Market but Enterprise / Businesses etc where unspoken, odd rules, mismatched integrations rule the day.
something "simple" as reverse ETL - a lot of value is locked within that - & you can even see players such as Palantir etc trying to bring unified data view with a fancy name etc
it's also the same reason Workday, Salesforce etc charge a lot of money
Battery capacity is still better at short duration shifting- milliseconds, minutes- all night is tough. The xAI mega pack can only do 4 hours according to the article.
maybe finally the US gvt n elites will finally admit the economy is an recession.
not this dress up and cosplaying being done - like the economy is growing - while it's actually shedding jobs, homes ain't selling cz there ain't buyers
The problem with this - it leads to group think - you end up being forced to conform.
There's a reason Warren Buffet left NY and went to Omaha.
likewise the best things usually come from the margins - the apple pc didn't come from people working at the best MicroPC companies but hipsters tinkering.
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