I'm sure it's comforting to believe that people you disagree with do so for silly reasons, but many people will support this just because we like the rule of law.
> A country can ban guns and allow rope, even though both can kill.
That's actually a good argument. And that's how the UK ending up banning not just guns, but all sorts of swords, machetes and knives, meanwhile the violent crime rates have not dropped.
So maybe dangerous knives are not the problem, but the people using them to kill other people. So then where do we draw the line between lethal weapons and crime correlation. At which cutting/shooting instruments?
Same with software tools, that keep getting more powerful with time lowering the bar to entry for generating nudes of people. Where do we draw the line on which tools are responsible for that instead of the humans using them for it?
You’re absolutely right that it is a difficult question where to draw the line. Different countries will do it differently according to their devotion to individual freedoms vs communal welfare.
The knife (as opposed to sword) example is interesting. In the U.K. you’re not allowed to sell them to children. We recognise that there is individual responsibility at play, and children might not be responsible enough to buy them, given the possible harms. Does this totally solve their use in violent crime? No. But if your alternative is “it’s up to the individuals to be responsible”, well, that clearly doesn’t work, because some people are not responsible. At a certain point, if your job is to reduce harm in the population, you look for where you can have a greater impact than just hoping every individual follows the law, because they clearly don’t. And you try things even if they don’t totally solve the problem.
And indeed, the same problem in software.
As for the violent crime rates in the U.K., I don’t have those stats to hand. But murder is at a 50 year low. And since our post-Dunblane gun laws, we haven’t had any school shootings. Most Britons are happy with that bargain.
> meanwhile the violent crime rates have not dropped.
The rate of school shootings has dropped from one (before the implementation of recommendations from the Cullen report) to zero (subsequently). Zero in 29 years - success by any measure.
If you choose to look at _other_ types of violent crime, why would banning handguns have any effect?
> Where do we draw the line on which tools are responsible for that instead of the humans using them for it?
You can ban tools which enable bad outcomes without sufficient upside, while also holding the people who use them to account.
I don't think that's motivated by money. The US companies simply solved more interesting problems. Working for a start up in the Bay area trying to invent a new industry, or scale systems to global is generally more interesting than working on a CRM system for mid-size lumberyards in Sweden. The CRM system pays well enough to have a comfortable lifestyle and provide for your family, but it's a little boring if you're 25 with a shiny new CS degree.
That was true a few years ago, but not any more. Covid made a lot of US-based companies sack local developers and actually open offices in Europe. I have friends in Italy who, between 2022 and 2023, moved from local companies to US companies opening offices in Rome and Milano, and got a salary bump from ~30-35k to 80-90k plus bonus and RSUs. Same thing happening all over Europe.
Because many European engineers move to the US does not mean at all that most European engineers move to the US. There are many engineers in Europe.
I hear that argument a lot, and honestly it sounds uninformed and downright disrespectful. Some kind of "I am a US developer, we US developers are the best, and the few good European engineers come here. The remaining ones in Europe are dumb".
Not to mention that I have talked to quite a few European engineers who could earn a lot more by moving to the US, but just really don't want to live in the US. Maybe there is a reason for that?
I think you underestimate how dramatically the perception of the US in Europe changed for the worse. It was already in nose dive during recent months, but the recent days (Greenland crisis) will put a nail in the coffin. I don’t have a crystal ball, but I expect that influx to dry up very soon.
> What is the European alternative to the US military if Russia attacks Europe?
European military. Why do some people act as if European countries had no armies?
And even if we had no armies and Russia attacked and totally destroyed us, how is it related to the topic discussed here, which is whether the influx of European engineers to the US will continue or not?
> This whole thing just seems like the standard hysterical overreaction of people who spend too much time on social media.
Perhaps. I don't think it is, but let's say you are right. How is that relevant? People do not want to go to a country they perceive negatively. Whether that perception is an objective fact or hysteria is, in this context, immaterial.
Well there is no "European military" per se and there will be no "Russia invades Europe" scenario, because "Europe" is a continent and not a sovereign nation.
What would happen is that Russia invades Poland, or Russia invades Romania or Bulgaria or something. Those are Eastern European countries. (I mean they all used to be Soviet bloc anyway.) Or Russia would invade Germany like the good ol' days. So whatever nation they invaded would sic their own armed forces on them, and their allies' too. NATO could jump into the fray.
Americans (and perhaps Russians too) often misunderstand how terribly small European nations are, really. They're mostly smaller than individual United States. So, less population, less time to transport stuff, fewer natural resources available in a sovereign context, etc. But lots of national borders.
So Russia won't invade "Europe" but they could go into one or more nations on the list.
I do find it funny that Brits colloquially describe "Europe" as being foreign, as in, "in Britain" vs "in Europe", or "in Europe" vs "on the continent. Of course, I guess the "the continent" is a loaded term, too.
I'm not saying it doesn't make sense to me, I get it, and it's easier to refer to Europe as "the other" rather than having to use a longer phrase to describe traveling from the British isles to the mainland of continental Europe.
Fun fact: The term Lingua Franca originally meant something closer to Portuguese than the French spoken at the time. Eventually though, the French language did become the Lingua Franca truly, for some time.
Basic fluency in English is widespread enough that I've had to be way out in the boonies in pretty much any country I've visited for me not to find somebody who can speak English. It makes me feel like a bit of a fool not being able to speak anything but English myself. I've got a learning disability that affects my ability to learn languages, so as much as I've tried, I'm not able to get much further than being able to get fed and find the bathroom in any other language.
I did hit a funny situation in rural France once where I was talking to a French restaurateur through one person who spoke French and Spanish, and then a second person who spoke Spanish and English. It was convoluted, but it worked enough to get me a meal. Alternatively, when I was in rural Spain, near the French border, a French speaking lady desperately tried to get me to help translate for her since she didn't speak Spanish and the merchant she wanted to talk to didn't speak French. Unfortunately, neither of them spoke English. The best I could do was communicate to the merchant in my broken Spanish that I couldn't help.
Neither is pedantry a sign of intelligence, a message many a contributor to this here site would be good to take to heart. As to the choice of language English is and will most likely remain the lingua franca (pun intended) in most of Europe as it is the language which is most often learned as a second language. While many Europeans are not fluent in this language they do manage to read and make themselves understood in it. This makes it not a bad starting point just like the grandparent stated.
Handle it by not doing it. Schedule time to check each of these, according to priority. Start the day with whatever you want, knowing that these will be caught later.
True. But how do I know if it will be caught later anyways? I'd just end up getting distracted in the middle of my work, which is arguably even more distracting, right?
A big database that contains every song is pretty different from a recommendation system, web streaming, playlists, etc. Someone could use the dump to create something like that ofc, but the database itself isn't really the interesting thing Spotify offers.
True, but feature parity isn’t required for competition. Plenty of subscribers will just be listening to what they know they want to listen to, and for them a giant DB of music is absolutely sufficient.
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