Sure, we are not an ideal society and over relying on metrics is bad, but it is HARD to decide how we best use the resources to improve the world, and everybody has an opinion.

I have the impression that some people imagine that you can produce now 10x more doctors at the same cost that you were producing one doctor 10 years ago. Mostly because some tasks (even programming) got many times "more efficient" I feel people transfer to easy to other topics.

Even worse, education expenditure is decreasing for many countries! (see some examples: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/education-spending?tab=li...)

I feel that people "trust" too easy these days. Being it brands, politicians, artists, ideas, online videos, phone calls from a Nigerian prince, etc. I am not naive to think the majority will change tomorrow but I would advocate for the need of change. To make a far fetched comparison maybe 1000 years ago people would have said "learning to read is unpaid labors that does not benefit peasants", but I think more knowledge (and critical thinking) benefits everyone.

As an example: I was once shopping with someone that had experience in fashion. While I don't remember all the details, with one look/touch the person could tell and explain if something was poor or high quality, while to me it all looked mostly the same. Based on that experience, I now I mostly stick to checking the material, and avoid plastics which seem to show a tendency for low quality across the board.

I do agree that it requires effort to know stuff about things, but when I see people that go like "oh, I need X, will pick the first X that shows up on Amazon", I am less amazed we get crappy quality for lots of products.

In a "free market" would you recommend on USA to rely only on a Chinese manufactured essential product for its military (or the reverse, or Europe on Russia, or etc.)?

I am not against great private offers (be it rockets/cloud/etc.). But there should also be some "local" capability for some strategic products, so that if the private providers encounter issues (crazy CEO, tariffs, export regulations, etc.) you are not left without any of that capability.

Then, it depends on what you need to do. A 3x cost if you deploy a strategic constellation is fine. A 3x cost if you want to launch huge payloads for a Mars trip (I know costs were for LEO, just giving an example) is probably uncompetitive.

But having educated people everywhere is hard, so some people, because they don't get how some stuff works, they try to abuse friends and allies and make things worse (inefficient) for everybody in the process.

Amazingly on TV in Europe (watching 3 countries) I see how many women are killed by their partners (nicely born here), how politicians are (occasionally, mostly rarely) arrested for building mobster like organizations, how large enterprises (own by locals) avoid paying taxes.

The poor don't resort to violence? I wonder what blessed country are you in for the poor to afford to be nice. 30 years ago in the quite poor Eastern Europe (now part of EU, not that poor anymore) there was direct violence (sure, not concentrated like a terrorist attack) like mugging or rapes or just people beating others on the street because they "did not like how you look". All that without immigrants. So yeah, kind of hard for me to blame so much immigrants for all the violence.

And on that, 70s and 80s the was perfectly calm no? No terrorist attack IRA, ETA (found easy a reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ETA_attacks - 829 deaths), Italian mob and the like were "freedom fighters" probably...

I am definitely not for completely open borders. And immigration should be controlled. And some people should be deported. I just do not think it is the "largest" problem that it is presented, and I find discussing it avoiding other thorny, complex issues (energy, climate, education, etc.).

I would just hope most people don't like them either and they look for the "next one". Otherwise you transform politicians in a cult...

Depending on your situations different actions will have a different impact.

I do try to choose what I can to help. I am not obsessed with "the impact". If I buy a train ticket instead of a plane ticket - that can mean trains get more money. If I keep my phone for one more year, less waste is produced.

Would I help with the situation if I would buy a car consuming lots of gas, take international trips every years etc. (I could afford it, that's not the issue) ? I think not.

Can I say that my actions significantly influence the outcome? Definitely not, but we are 8 billions on this planet, so it all depends on averages. But if I don't do it (I am convinced there is an issue), how could I expect others to have my position...

The next generation must understand how stuff works. If we have privacy and no education, we might get burnt on stakes because any invented stupid reasons, no matter if someone read or not your communications.

Additionally Europe's natality is not great, it needs people working. So many enterprises in Europe are happy with that.

Why is immigration presented as a problem? Because it is easy, does not affect directly any potential voter (I mean, if you say "rich are to blame", around half of the voters will not vote you, if you say "the poor are to blame" the other half will not vote you, but immigrants? No problem they generally don't vote) and because Europe has a tradition to seeing itself "above others". So if there are problems and you see dark people around, must be there fault, no? I really think they are (many) people that think like that (and I also met a couple)...

I wouldn't even mind if they would be honest about what they claim (being nationalist), but I don't see any right wing party talking seriously about programs to encourage natality, reduce poverty or improve education. Blaming a generic category for your problems rarely solves said problems.

So, for me the boogeyman is talking about superfluous generic topics rather than solutions to problems I see: education, natality, energy, industry.

The worst thing might be that it is kind (or close to) a best possible average (can't assess honestly). When I talk with many (mostly opinionated) people, at various ends of various positions (left, right, ecology, industry, security, etc.) I can't imagine any leadership that would make a significant portion of the EU citizens happy.

Now, the historical solution was to make things so worse to calm down all the crazy ideas (mostly implying war or revolution) and make people focus on the basics, let's see how it goes around this time.

I find it interesting when someone mentions that X is bad for something it was not designed for, as much as I am interested when someone mentions that X is good even if it was not designed for something.

I see it for a specialized solution for a specific class of problems, which can lead to surprises if your problem evolves. There are always trade-offs to be made (performance, flexibility, hardware cost, etc.), asyncio just has different characteristics than the alternatives. Maybe since a upper bound of concurrent users it is always a great (the best?) solution, someone with more experience along all the design and requirements space could comment.

Of course European farmers complain (they will get competition and potentially lower quality products), so yes, some people like the current tariffs.

Behind every tariff there will be an interest group. If you are producing X in a country and there is an import tariff on X you are happy. If you are buying X you are not happy.

There can be strategic industries that you want to encourage, but the issue is if tariffs are applied with a plan or not. Opinions might differ on this one but history will tell.

In Canada's case the reliance of one trade partner (see https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/explore/overtime/?exporter=cou... ) is probably a weakness that retaliatory tariffs can influence.