Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43084811

Points: 4

# Comments: 0

Give it a few more decades of compounding lagging productivity, and that will no longer be true.

> The silver lining is American cultural imperialism is ended in Europe, and we live how we want to over here. There are different ways of living, with different values.

Productivity has nothing to do with cultural imperialism. China has dramatically increased their productivity, and that story has nothing to do with American imperialism

If the EU thinks that low labor productivity is the path to happiness, going down that path is their prerogative, but long term that path will only lead to ruin. Lagging productivity has never in human history lead to civilizational success. Europe will be outcompeted and eventually dominated by its more productive peers.

The average American now spends just 10% of their wages on food. That effectively means, just 10% of Americans’s working life dedicated to food cultivation. That’s the result of economic productivity.

If an American is happy existing at a subsistence level, they’re free to slash their working hours to a tiny fraction of the average person. However, humans have unlimited material desires, which tends to keep us working.

In the short term, lagging productivity can be masked by debt spending and other measures, but in the long run, the only thing that increases human wealth and material abundance is labor productivity. Everything else is illusionary.

All human societies have sought to increase labor productivity. The first stone tools, agriculture, and nuclear reactors are all productivity-enhancing inventions. Any society that opts out of seeking labor productivity will eventually see their wealth, living standards, and ultimately happiness decline. There is no way out of that trap.

And to be clear, there’s absolutely nothing good about low productivity for workers. All that means is that you’re spending more time working for lower wages, to produce things of lower value.

There is no silver lining to this. The EU has to stop strangling its most productive industries with onerous regulations, and allow markets the freedom to innovate and increase productivity.

I often use ChatGPT as a starting point when researching new topics (usually in the software space). In the paragraphs of lies it generates, there are usually a few keywords you can put into Google to find accurate and reliable information.

Meanwhile, I could’ve found conclusive and correct answers directly from Google in about 10 seconds (I’m a fast Googler).

There are exceedingly few situations where I find ChatGPT is worth the effort. At least for factual Q&A-style queries like this.

I suppose it’s also useful for generating things like letters (things where exact truthiness doesn’t really matter). But even for that use case, I find ChatGPT creates overly verbose corporate gobbledygook whenever I ask it to generate text. So I just end up writing the text myself.

I hope CS2 is more agnostic on transport mode. It would be nice to be able to create genuinely car-free cities in the game.

This may very well change months and years from now, but as of now it’s too early to claim it has iPhone-level impact.