people always cheer up stats like that americans are drinking less, but I think what's overlooked is that young adults also socialising less. Turns out, they also have less sex, less relationships, are less extroverted and play more computer-games. I guess they also date less. I am not sure whether that's a win.
Btw, from my personal experience in europe, I actually don't see a significant rise in sober adults when going out. Combined with the rise of loneliness (from 12h per week of socialising in 2010 to just 5h!) I think its not because they found a fun sober alternative, I think its because they don't see anyone anymore. Or the other way around: Do the share of young adults, who socialize as much as previous generations, also drink significantly less, date less, have less sex? How do these stats behave when controlled for the amount of socialising one does?
I think it's cultural too. (But I'm Polish, not American)
I was raised by very anxious mother, until I was like 20-21, I never got out of the house unless it was for school. And nowadays I just... don't know how I would even meet people.
10-20 years ago, someone would tell her she's insane. Later, she'd be seen as a protecting parent.
Purely anecdotal, but I was recently reflecting at the current trend of people posting really extensive morning routines. Waking up, meditation, yoga, gym, shower, eating breakfast, meal-prepping,....having a whole day before your day starts. While they should impress you with their healthiness and discipline, I just thought how utterly lonely and sterile most of them look like. And you're completely done after work if this is your morning, you can just go to bed and repeat the same the next day. I found it quite sad, actually.
It's an observation that precedes likes and modern influencers, as Baudrillard noticed in his 1989 book America:
"The skateboarder with his Walkman, the intellectual working on his wordprocessor, the Bronx breakdancer whirling frantically in the Roxy, the jogger and the body-builder: everywhere, whether in regard to the body or the mental faculties, you find the same blank solitude, the same narcissistic refraction. This omnipresent cult of the body is extraordinary. [...] This ‘into’ is the key to everything. The point is not to be nor even to have a body, but to be into your own body. Into your sexuality, into your own desire. Into your own functions, as if they were energy differentials or video screens. The hedonism of the ‘into’ [...]"
The replacement of a genuine social life with a kind of machine like, solitary optimization, the point of American Psycho basically, is very much real, common among ordinary people. This is every "second brain" note taking fanatic who never actually does anything but collect notes.
"What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch itoperating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected - far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord."
Yeah I know 0 people like this. And I'd believe it if 1-2 people are actually like that without me knowing, cause they need to manage ADHD or something, but not a large number.
No, it's real. I have AuDHD and very strictly defined routines are how I manage to function day-to-day. It's not a productivity hack or how I'll be a billionaire in 5 years though, like scrollheads often promote. It's just how my brain works. A small fraction of those influencers might also be neurodivergent and sincerely posting what works for them.
I think what OP is saying are fake are the hoards of people posting it on their social/influencer accounts. Sure, some people have very rigid and strict routines that they need to get through their day, but (I'd agree with OP) that it's likely the vast majority are "virtue-signaling".
Well, the loneliness coming through on those posts might just be from the fact that the people that are posting on social media like that are, in fact, lonely and looking for connection. I have a pretty extensive morning routine of practicing music, sitting for meditation/pranayama, food, shower all before work, and then Muay Thai or yoga or strength training in the evening. I just don't post it on social media because I don't have social media. I still go out to see music/art and friends etc, but I also live in NYC where it's easy to do that.
I mean everything you listed there could be done within 2 hours if you do it all at home. Not sure what the big deal is, you wake up at 7 and you’re ready for the day by 9.
But oh yea maybe laying in bed for an hour doom scrolling on your phone before you finally get up is a more efficient use of time.
I really enjoyed how they did it in Tübingen, where I did my masters. You usually had to achieve a certain score on the homework (usually 50-75% of the overall points) in order to be qualified to take the exam. Additionally, if you did really well you got a few bonus points on the exam (something around 80/90%+). This incentivised you to take the homework seriously, especially if you want to get the bonus points. But you still have the written exam at the end as the "controlled environment" and something you have to prepare for, so you can not just listen to the slides once and then forget it after doing the single exercise
The grade system we implemented was a little program: you can pass the class if you get a passing grade on your HW and tests (weighted average); if you fail either HW or exams, you get the lower of the two.
I didn't enjoy the city of arts and sciences tbh, it felt disconnected, artificial, maybe almost totalitarian in its will to show off. I also thought that, if you look past the immediate effect, it just didn't feel that good looking. A bit similar to how I often feel about Zaha Hadids work.
In comparison, in the barbican I felt like I could sit there for hours and enjoy the architecture. It has so many interesting details and aesthetically pleasing corners.
I recently found out that this is not a thing everyone does. This is essentially how I survived my studies, I was never able to concentrate at home except under intense stress. Quiet uni libraries were my safe space to get work done.
As someone from europe, I am baffled by the ability to just fire everyone on the spot. Are there no job-protections for federal employees? This makes agencies really dependent on the political climate, right? Can he really just fire everyone? Isn't there even a 3 months notice or something?
A separate, connected thought is that I wonder why you would choose being a federal employee then. Here, the government promises job security but it usually means less pay and slower processes compared to industry. If you don't have job security, is then the government forced to be more competitive with industry positions in pay/processes?
> I am baffled by the ability to just fire everyone on the spot.
It often isn't about ability. Many of these are being challenged and courts are ordering reinstatements.
It's about leveraging sensitive, protected processes to generate so many constitutional crisis and other chaos knowing that Congress won't exercise it's safeguarding duties.
That leaves the public to engage a limited number of courts to issue orders against individual whitehouse actions - and the whitehouse undermining or outright ignoring those orders because the white house controls federal law enforcement.
Historically (for decades), stability has also been the pitch in the US, with the same tradeoff in pay and bureaucracy. I'm not sure about the exact legal authority, but no one has attempted it before. So much of our legal system depends on convention and what a given judge feels like on a given day that it's really hard to say whether this is "legal" or not.
There are protections, but not for 'probationary' employees (anyone who's been hired or transferred within the past X months).
As for the rest, they're not 'being fired', they're 'being placed on administrative leave', which is a paper-thin excuse but one that will have to wind its way through the court system like all the other bullshit the administration is pulling.
There absolutely are protections for probationary employees, just not as many as there are for those not in probationary status. Courts are already re-instating people who were clearly fired without cause. Our courts just aren't equipped to deal with these types of events as frequently and widely as they are happening now.
Republicans want to privatize everything. They want to make their rich friends richer by doing this. It's going to be a disaster for the average citizen.
VOA/RFE operations were actually run by a separate non-profit org that got the vast majority of its operating funds from the feds. So, federal worker protections aren't relevant by dint of the org(s) being set up at arm's length.
That said, the current regime has had no problem acting outside of the law and existing federal employee union contracts. Tell people they're dismissed, cut off the email and building access, wait for the lawsuits, and then simply ignore the decisions weeks/months later and/or follow them with as much malicious compliance as they need to achieve their original aims.
tl;dr: No, employment protections fundamentally don't exist in the US, and doubly so for those employed by the federal government within an atmosphere of rampant lawlessness.
In short: Job protection for executive employees defeats the entire point of an executive that is accountable to the people. Major magistrate positions are subject to Senate approval before being vested authority, but they are appointed and serve at the behest of the president, who literally embodies the executive.
I am having trouble understanding the document. Where is it stated? I can not exactly follow your argument. I am not sure why being accountable to the people necessitates having not any job protection?
I would have expected this to be codified (What is accountability for a federal employee). I mean regulatory bodies should also be accountable but also shielded from political influence, right?
You’re looking for the Reduction in Force Act for federal protections.
For the second part: no, US government regulatory bodies are expressly political, down to their very existence. You likely intended “partisan”, but, one party is against them existing at all, so…
> As someone from europe, I am baffled by the ability to just fire everyone on the spot. Are there no job-protections for federal employees?
There is, but Trump is ignoring them, and no one in his administration is enforcing those rules. Additionally, as of today he has started ignoring court orders.
Trump and Musk have done a coup and are violating the constitution and law. It doesn't matter though because Republicans in the Senate are complicit and the supreme court has granted Trump unlimited power with the immunity ruling.
it boggles my mind that a place like new york doesn't have the money to just do that. Raising the speed limit gets more important the longer you travel and connects distant parts your city better. It's a recent trend to build high-speed lines to complement an existing, dense subway network (e.g. Paris goes up to 75 mph).
I mean when were these built, a 100 years ago? Surely there's room for improvement.
I just want to point out that germany and US have a similar number when adjusted to it's respected population size (I think it's even a little bit higher).
interesting. I noticed something similar in the UK but not in Germany. Maybe some simple change in the way these utility repairs are regulated is to blame?
While interstates are nice, cities are where people live, so the quality of urban roads matters and is maybe the reason for the perception of US roads?
It happens in Germany as well though, not even that infrequently. It’s particularly common with the recent push for FTTH connections.
At my parents place, they resurfaced to road a few years ago. Only for Deutsche Telekom to swoop in a year later and dig in their FTTC gear. Street was patched after, but reasonably well. At least we got faster internet back then
ah no, what i meant that I see these really low-quality, disregarding patches. It seems like, if for example there's some cobblestone-like road, they are not really required to redo it using the cobblestones but can just patch it up? Also some tar just seems way worse quality in these patches, very quickly disintegrating.
its possible. Just look at Apples GPU, its mostly supported by torch, what's left are mostly edge-cases. Apple should make a datacenter GPU :D that would be insanely funny. It's actually somewhat well positioned as, due to the MacBooks, the support is already there. I assume here that most things translate to linux, as I don't think you can sell MacOS in the cloud :D
I know a lot developing on apples silicon and just pushing it to clusters for bigger runs. So why not run it on an apple GPU there?
Aren't their GPUs pretty slow, though? Not even remotely close to Nvidia's consumer GPU with only (significant) upside being the much higher memory capacity.
For everything that isn't machine learning, I frankly feel like it's the other way around. Apple's "solution" to these edge cases is telling people to write compute shaders that you could write in Vulkan or DirectX instead. What sets CUDA apart is an integration with a complex acceleration pipeline that Apple gave up trying to replicate years ago.
When cryptocurrency mining was king-for-a-day, everyone rushed out to buy Nvidia hardware because it supported accelerated crypto well from the start. The same thing happened with the AI and machine learning boom. Apple and AMD were both late to the party and wrongly assumed that NPU hardware would provide a comparable solution. Without a CUDA competitor, Apple would struggle more than AMD to find market fit.
well, but machine learning is the major reason we use GPUs in the datacenter (not talking about consumer GPUs here). The others are edge-cases for data-centre applications! Apple is uniquely positioned exactly because it is already solved due to a significant part of the ML-engineers using MacBooks to develop locally.
The code to run these things on apples GPUs exist and is used every day! I don't know anyone using AMD GPUs, but pretty often its nvidia on the cluster and Apple on the laptop. So if nvidia is making these juicy profits, i think apple could seriously think about moving to the cluster if it wants to.
Software developers using Macbooks doesn't mean Apple solved the ML problem. The past 10 years of MacOS removing features has somewhat proved that software developers will keep using Macs even when the featureset regresses. Like how Apple used to support OpenCL as a CUDA alternative, but gave up on it altogether to focus on simpler, mobile-friendly GPU designs.
The Pytorch MPS patches are a fun appeasement for developers, but they didn't unthrone Nvidia's demand. They didn't beat Nvidia on performance per watt, they didn't match their price, their scale or CUDA's featureset, and they don't even provide basic server drivers. It's got nothing to do with what brand you prefer and everything to do with what makes actual sense in a datacenter. Apple can't take on Nvidia clusters without copying Nvidia's current architecture - Apple Silicon's current architecture is too inefficient to be a serious replacement to Nvidia clusters.
If Apple wanted to have a shot at entering the cluster game, that window of opportunity closed when Apple Silicon converged on simplified GPU designs. The 2w NPUs and compute shaders aren't going to make Nvidia scared, let alone compete with AMD's market share.
Btw, from my personal experience in europe, I actually don't see a significant rise in sober adults when going out. Combined with the rise of loneliness (from 12h per week of socialising in 2010 to just 5h!) I think its not because they found a fun sober alternative, I think its because they don't see anyone anymore. Or the other way around: Do the share of young adults, who socialize as much as previous generations, also drink significantly less, date less, have less sex? How do these stats behave when controlled for the amount of socialising one does?