The Nazis were still killing people in other places at the same time, so the deadliest day is probably much much higher.
The scale of the Holocaust is hard to imagine. Even just looking at very specific suranmes, there are 23,000 killed with the surname Rosenberg, 12,000 with the surname Adler...
> It only makes sense in the context of a company.
Don't you think it can make sense in terms of pension contributions?
I used to track my finances very carefully (but now I'm more lackadaisical). Double entry would've been helpful for "I'm taking money from this pocket and putting it in this pocket".
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.
> Just like San Francisco and Dallas/Texas (from his article) are very different in the US, we should expect lot of differences in Europe
Dallas and San Francisco are both English speaking cities with a shared recent history of being part of the same nation. Most cities in Europe are as close as New York and Mexico City - Dallas and San Francisco is probably more analogous to Milan and Naples (different cultures, different histories, but now speak the same language and are part of the same nation).
I once was thinking that if intelligent machines surpassed human intelligence, the end game would be human intelligence would atrophy but the machines would continue to serve us.
Then I had a humorous thought - what if this already happened, i.e. cats were superintelligent, invented humans to serve them and then they had no need for their own intelligence.
It's funny to think that no matter how our technology develops, cats will be right there along for the ride, completely ignorant of it all. It's humorously comforting to think of an interstellar civilization powered by fusion and AGI serving cats just as they're served now. Scratching posts on starships seems to be inevitable.
The domestication of cats happened because of the invention of farming.
If you store grain in a granary, it attracts a lot of insects, rodents, etc. Cats that could tolerate getting close to human settlements found a good food source. And humans like this, because the cats protect the grain without eating it. So you can see why ancient agrarian societies like the Egyptians held cats in high esteem.
And despite only having a few thousand years to adapt to each other, ends up cats and humans can understand each other and form emotional bonds pretty easily.
I imagine we'll see cats on spaceships of the future just like they were the norm on ships in the age of sail.
I would recommend the two episodes "Three Robots" and "Three Robots: Exit Strategies" from the anthology series Love, Death and Robots if you like this kind of humor.
In the puzzle game series The Talos Principle, intelligent robots (who were made to outlive humanity after a species-ending global pandemic) seem to have the exact same kind of affinity for caring for cats that humans do. It's actually really sweet and cute.
Basically when the "minds" are benevolent deities all scenarios are possible including this one. We can spend our time with cats, we can even turn into cats...as he writes about "Changers" who genetically alter themselves or shift species at whim.
I'm not sure why, but I've noticed that smaller vegetables taste better. Small cucumbers are tastier and sweeter than the big ones (that taste like water), cherry tomatoes are more flavorful than large ones.
Well, that's because most vegetables are water in an organic structure with some nutrients.
Until recently, fruits and vegetables were largely something that was available only to the richest. They don't make sense from a caloric standpoint, taking far too much effort for too little nutrition.
I actually think this is why most women idealize veggies; it is a status thing primarily. You can live just fine not eating a lot of vegetables.
It was shocking to me to see how huge onions are in Vancouver, and I guess the same applies to the US… those things can’t be natural!! In Europe they are half the size.
We have very large ones like Vidalias, small ones like pearl onions, and then everything in between. Most common are probably the size of an apple (how big is an apple, you ask?)
In the UK, driving is on the left, while in much of the world people drive on the right. Arguably it's not so much that the UK is better, but that people should take a test to validate that they can handle the switch. But this would also mean UK drivers should do the same in other countries where they drive on the right.
It’s not especially difficult to swap the side of the road you’re driving on, your brain adjusts very quickly. Millions of truck drivers and tourists do it each year when visiting the UK from mainland Europe and Europe from the UK.
Quite a while back (I think 10+ years), I began to realize that I was too dependent on Phones for even the basic info. So, I’ve gotten back to writing a lot more and use Notebook + pen. It helps. I still use Phones but I like the idea of being able to know numbers, and details without pulling out the phone for everything.
Using the dialpad instead of the Saved/Favorite Name in the phones is an interesting habit I built up even for most used numbers such as my wife, sister, and even the neighbors. I remember quite a few numbers; even if I cannot say it, I can look at a keypad and the muscle memory kicks in.
This is the same for some key Passwords, I quite often just type them out. Again, I might not remember but my fingers just glides through the keyboard. I remember it being handy at a hospital making some large payment saving my brother’s family from malaria in a Hospital in Bombay.
Btw, it is also fun to no look at Map on the phone for most journey that I already have an idea or traveling for the 2nd time and henceforth.
I recently participated in a research study, and at one point, the researcher told me I was going to be given 3 minutes with a list of 20 words. I was to memorize as many of the words as possible. I would then be asked to perform a specific task, and then repeat back as many of the words as I could.
When I was given these instructions, I realized it's been many years since I had to memorize anything of meaningful length. I spent the first 20 seconds trying to remember as much as I could about how to memorize things, and the rest of the time actually memorizing. It truly is a muscle, and I was very out of practice.
Since "A variety of memory systems are regulated by dopamine in the brain." [1], being force feed stimulation after stimulation will affect memory due to the diminishing release of dopamine of less stimulating events.
Being from the first year of Gen X I lived both of these lives. I remember reading newspapers on the subway going to work in Manhattan, having to focus to scan the small stock market print. Yes the news was stimulating, but comparatively slow and limited. I could never read the news at work, but in my later years, working in tech, it was a constant thing throughout the day.
Dopamine if the fuel of capitalism, even illegal capitalism, like the drug trade. This is not dismissive of capitalism, it is just a truth. The only thing that changed is that humanity has found a newer, stronger way to milk dopamine out of the human brain.
I'm not sure it's entirely similar to what you mentioned, but I too remember the sensation of focus, that I'm struggling to get these days. I started to realize this after the web2.0 era.. thinking that ajax infused web apps would allow for better communication and thinking but it mostly unleashed noise, and whenever I run into old, limited forms of communication, i get the sense of value and focus back. Only the things that matter gets to your attention, and it reaches deeper and faster.
Maybe we're memorising different things. On this site it will be remembering where different settings are found in different software tools, or the map of languages to libraries to functions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babi_Yar
The Nazis were still killing people in other places at the same time, so the deadliest day is probably much much higher.
The scale of the Holocaust is hard to imagine. Even just looking at very specific suranmes, there are 23,000 killed with the surname Rosenberg, 12,000 with the surname Adler...
https://collections.yadvashem.org/en/names/search-results-na...
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