Even with AI you'd want the AI to be writing python scripts instead of following an analysis.md.

Lots of EU people are now travelling longer distances due to housing prices and job relocations.

My last commute in Germany was 1.5 hr one way and some of my colleagues had 2.5 hr commutes. Hybrid hours though.

You're right. One of my friends in the Netherlands does has a 3 hour total commute over the day. It's insane.

True although a big component of the energy prices in Europe are due to policy driven taxation. There is a huge difference in intra EU petrol prices from around 6$/gal to 10$/gal.

I like to say, traders and people you put money on the line are often far more honest about economic policy, than economic influencers like The Economist.

Traders have no more special insight into economic policies than anyone else. The economy != the market.

Nobody ever recognizes themselves as extremist.

Nah, even as a leftist, The Economist is mostly in the "enlightened centrist" area. I'd say they're a reliable source of facts as long as you know where their bias is.

I'm pretty sure some people do. Luddites, for example.

I completely agree with this, but my banking apps, my broker, my health insurance, my simcard provider all already require my face for identification.

Perhaps we should distinguish between institutions that require strong identity (phone networks shouldn't be in this list but are, which is a separate argument) and institutions that really shouldn't, like random websites.

A pointless distinction for OP's (heavy handed, LLM-generated) point:

>The database you are helping build for a trustworthy government does not stay in trustworthy hands. Administrations change. A registry that merely catalogs who you are today becomes, under a future government, a map of who to find.

This is an objection to driver license databases, to passports; they don't want face scans at airports, much less for banking or insurance. They want off-the-grid, untrackable anonymity. This is incompatible with much of modern life, at least in the mainstream.

FYI the processing for FaceID on iPhones is entirely offline. I think the Samsung androids have offline face id as well.

I hate that banks do that, right after that asinine Apple/Google monopoly proliferation. But “giving my face” to an institute where I was, since forever, required to submit a photo ID to join is a far cry from handing it over to earn the privilege of being exposed to whatever brainrotting garbage infests antisocial media these days…

What I do not find plausible is this scenario where AI is so smart it can replace us all, but at the same time somehow still easily controllable and utterly subservient to the ownership class.

No because public EU compute is adminisered by physicists and although they are very competent in their own domains they are winging it when it comes to AI. It like expecting OakRidge to train LLMs...

They already tried training LLMs.

I don't think using the median lethal dose of toxicity is a good metric to compare pesticides.

Idk, I often felt the opposite. I naturally tend towards working on hard problems but my feeling is that if I chose instead to focus on an easier "thing" I could execute really well and be overall more successful.

Spending time doing deep work on hard problems also doesn't go so well with the "track your hours against approved JIRA tickets and compare your logged hours against your estimates at review time" that every corporate culture devolves into. If you're looking to survive the next round of layoffs, quick wins are your best bet.