Ultimately the issue is allowing Google to skirt around anti-monopoly rules by throwing money at Mozilla. Can't really blame the latter for cashing in when the rules fail at enforcing a competitive environment.
West Europe is far from cheap. Housing, childcare etc is unaffordable for many in the middle class (and as dev, you are in most cases in Europe not a very high earner).
Universal healthcare is the main (last) advantage Europe has over the U.S (and its a big one.)
What is considered a "good healthcare plan"? Can you compare American insurance plans with Europe's ones?
92% of American had health insurance in 2023. Some people may have more than one insurance plans, thus the total number below is greater than 100%.
Of the subtypes of health insurance coverage, employment-based insurance was the most common, covering 53.7 percent of the population for some or all of the calendar year, followed by Medicaid (18.9 percent), Medicare (18.9 percent), direct-purchase coverage (10.2 percent), TRICARE (2.6 percent), and VA and CHAMPVA coverage (1.0 percent).
Does anyone actually have good dental insurance? I think mine just does a small copay when i clean but even before I had dental out of pocket for that is only like $70 every 6 months if you bother listening to dentist (most don’t after mom stops taking them up to having a bad tooth issue later in life). Any actual work done on my teeth even with insurance has been out of pocket because in the eyes of the insurance company, having functional teeth is a cosmetic matter. Extraction? Hope you have $2500 to pay an american dentist for that. Or you can get the exact same procedure done from someone with the same training and experience for about $700 if you drive or fly to Tijuana for it.
US Big Tech healthcare plans do. I don't recall last time I had to pay anything out of pocket for dental cleaning, for example, and it's covered 4 times / year. I had root canal and wisdom teeth extraction too, and while those had some copay, it was nowhere near the numbers you quote.
Other countries don't do that either. IIRC the main reason for this is that dentistry was invented very recently and dentists are frequently just scammers who love unnecessary procedures.
Many European cities aren't exactly low cost of living, and those that are have even lower salaries.
In the end someone who was working at Google in the Bay Area for 15-20 years can retire if they didn't have life style creep (which is different than cost of living). Not the case in Europe.
What about European taxes? I', paying 48% + there is 21% VAT on almost everything. Plus taxes for water (taxes, not pay-per-used-m3, and this payment is here too), energy (atop of market energy prices), roads, gasoline, etc.
Slightly tangential question for you- does 48% taxes include healthcare? How about pension? It’s tax week in the US, I think my rate was 22% overall. But another 10% of compensation is health insurance. Another 15% is retirement savings. My municipal water bill last quarter mostly was not for actual water usage (about 40% was for water) rest is system charge and storm water fees. Regarding the VAT thing… we may be effectively getting the equivalent with tariffs on goods and materials supposedly taking effect!
48% doesn't include healthcare (it is another about 170 euro/month per person, and, really, you don't have choice for better or worse conditions, formally there is "market" for this but it is very regulated) or pension. Some industries (but not software/IT one) have industry-wide pension funds, but it is additional payments and if you are in industry without this fund you can go to one of the "open" pension funds and put your money in them.
German here. Me and my employer pay 12 (together) for healthcare. I have no clue where the idea of „free“ healthcare came from, but it’s far from free. 20% of your wages is the general rule for healthcare here.
On paper, my employer pays me 72k per year. I net 36k of this after taxes and social insurances are paid.
There is more than one pension -- one for old age (which the government is paying) and another from the company plan. The usual trick is to also pay out mortgage by this time, sell the house to buy something smaller and enjoy your life somewhere in a sunny place.
3blue1brown runs Summer of Math competitions to highlight other creative math videos. Many, but not all, use the same 3b1b 'manim' animation software, so they often have the same look'n'feel. Here are the results from 2022, and the huge YT playlist:
That’s kind of the point, you won’t be able to due to the algorithm.
I can give you something analogous though: I’m a big fan of old school east coast hip-hop. You have the established mainline artists from back then (“Nas”, “Jay-Z”, “Big L”, etc), then you have a the established underground artists (say, “Lord Finesse” or “Kool G Rap”), and then you have the really really underground guys like “Mr. Low Kash ‘n Da Shady Bunch”, “Superscientifiku”, “Punk Barbarians”, “Harlekinz”, etc.
A lot of those in that third “tier” are every bit as good as the second tier. And both tiers contain a lot of artists that could hit the quality point of the mainline artists, they just never had access to the producer and studio time that the mainline did.
I know these artists because I love going digging for the next hidden gem. Spotify recommended me perhaps one or two of all the super-underground guys.
Somewhat off-topic, but what do you feel like are the best techniques to find the artists in Tier 2 and 3? I face a similar conundrum just in a different genre.
(I realize know I dislike using the descriptor "tier", as it implies some sort of ranking. Perhaps "layer" would have been better, but I'll stick with it for now)
For both tier 2 and tier 3 its basically the same process. This is for Spotify btw, I have no idea how different the workflow would be for something like Apple Music.
Say the genre you want to dig around in is Hip-Hop. You are aware of Eminem and Mac Miller, and vaguely aware of a guy named Nas. By intuition you'd probably already be able to tell that Nas is more at the edge among the mainline artists.
You click on "Nas", and scroll down to Fans also like. Right now, for "Nas", it is showing "Mobb Deep", "Mos Def", "Rakim", "Big L", "Wu-Tang Clan", "Gang Starr", "Ghostface Killah", "Method Man" and "Common".
This is a mix T1 and T2. "Wu-Tang"s in there along with assorted members, but some of the other artists are much lesser known quantities.
Its a bit hard for me to decide what a Hip-Hop layman would consider the most unknown name here, but I'd venture it'd be "Big L". We click on him, do the same thing. Now we're really getting somewhere, with guys like "Inspectah Deck" and "Smif-n-Wessun". Click, dig, we get a bunch of names amongst which "Lord Finesse" stands out. The Show more at the end of Fans Like is also invaluable.
In total the dig order for me to get to the very bottom of the undeground is "Nas" > "Big L" > "Smif-n-Wessun" > "Lord Finesse" > "Channel Live" > "Ed OG & Da Bulldogs" > "Trends of Culture" > "Brokin English Klik" (358 monthly listeners).
I wouldn't consider each of those going a tier (layer) deeper. As a guy who knows waaay too much about Hip-Hop, I'd separate them into:
- T1: "Nas", "Big L"
- T2 "Smif-n-Wessun", "Lord Finesse"
- T3 "Channel Live", "Ed OG & Da Bulldogs", "Trends of Culture", "Brokin English Klik"
Perhaps "Brokin English Klik" should be in its own T4 and 3 tiers lacks the fidelity to be necessarily accurate. Not sure.
A little shortcut would be using "The Edge of $Genre" playlists. They're the pair playlists to "The Sound of $Genre" (broad slice) and "The Pulse of $Genre" (most popular) generated via everynoise.com, although as that guy got fired from Spotify its up in the air how long those will keep working.
Edit: oh, and if you run into a playlist that caters to that deep underground (in my case, that was "90's Tapes"*), that's worth its bytes in gold.
I hate the fact there is no diversity in recommendation algos. We need to bring back Yahoo style top-down directories recommendations and not just a blackbox. But you can find good channels on youtube using tags like "#some3" and "#some2" and so on.
TikTok's recommendation algorithm is probably one of the best. It puts content first, giving what seems only a passing weight to follower count.
That doesn't mean that having a big follower count doesn't increase you chance to go viral and gain a lot of views, but it is much more likely for great content from a small creator to go viral, than mediocre content from someone with 500.000 followers.
You can also see this in that successful TikTok profiles often have a much higher view-to-follower ratio than something like YouTube.
3b1b's animations are certainly important but his main selling point is his thoughtful explanations of mathematics -- the topics, approaches, and words.
Hate the game, not the player, basically.