What if I told you, that even mentioning this shows how little free time people get in the US?

There is actually no SWE job (and I do mean actually 0 positions, I watch job postings way more than average person) in CZ that offers less than 5 weeks of paid vacation. When you look for companies that give actually nice benefits you can get 7-8 weeks, big chunk of it being sick days that you can claim whenever you want.

And that all is on top of MUCH longer parental leave, often shorter work week (lol @ 40h a week being noteworthy), much more leeway given to people with health issues and generally shorter commutes.

Not even mentioning difference in cost of living . . . The values are just different here.

Actually there isn't much to explain. Every single person I know that has been to Paris has been disappointed by it and complained how there are way too many people everywhere. Maybe there were just too many tourists in Paris?

Yes, but "AI replaces people by improving productivity by 20-50%" is clearly a case of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy. So maybe the "people are losing their jobs" is just totally unrelated to AI . . . but people keep repeating that "companies can do same work with fewer people thanks to AI" nonsense, so there will always be a need to remind them how actual economics work.

But all those massive successes are SpaceX . . .

Yea and it seems the 75% of population cannot do anything about Trump now.

I wonder when people will wake up to the fact that USA does not actually have a democracy.

But it is still not a business you would want to be in, because it is enabled by super cheap rockets, which no one else has.

Tbh I agree that your citation of Linus' email was an example of not exactly productive conversation. But preventing such emotion ventillation takes effort, same as not feeling insulted when your work is criticized. And who should put in the emotional effort is imo at least partially influenced by cultural expectations.

As for chance / motive to invade other European countries - for some reason Baltic states feel very threatened by Russia. Try to understand their reasons why.

But I would agree with them that leadership does not require dominance.

Even in Europe extremists are propped up by promise of "cheap energies" from Russia.

I guess if you dont see the link this is not the place to explain it.

If you ignore Gaza and whole of Africa, maybe.

I tend to agree, if you can't sell it as a ticket you probably shouldn't work on it. And "boyscout" PRs are pain to review.

If you don't, you are screwed either way.

Also the arguments about not having heavy rockets has nothing to do with engines, it's either "we don't need them" or "just use propellant depots". Without certain Alabama senator even SLS would be probably dead already. Big rockets are only useful when you sacrifice performance for reuse AND have enough payloads to maintain good flightrate.