The EU overall is in a less than reproduction rate. With less than two kinds per woman on average. With the boomer generation going into pension now there are a lot of jobs left unassigned. At the same time people are getting better educated and strive for higher jobs.
The notion that immigrants take away jobs is bullshit that has been fed to you by exactly those right wing shills. It's not the 2000nds anymore. We need so many workers l, especially in those low wage/low skill jobs.
At the same time employing an immigrant is much harder cultural wise that every employer probably picks a local over a immigrant when having the choice.
In Finland we've been told that there will be a huge shortage of workers since early 2000s or so. Yet it seems like barrier for entry in low-skilled jobs is only rising. In some areas even minimum wage jobs for teenagers require multi-step BS recruiting processes. Unemployment rate is not going down either.
Really at least in this country there is no general worker shortage, except in some skilled fields like healthcare. There are just lots of underpaid, part-time jobs that do not pay enough that you can survive off them - cleaning, food courier, over the phone sales etc. I don't believe creating a new class of underprivileged working poor from migrants is ethical, I believe any job worth doing should pay an adequate wage. It's not state's job to subsidize companies with slave labour. Attracting skilled workers to enter the country is entirely another matter, ones who can actually earn a livable wage benefit the society as a whole.
They said that about Canada too. As a result we had a surge in immigration that led to huge jumps in youth unemployment.
If companies are so desperate for workers why are wages stagnant and why are so many people getting ghosted during job interviews and why does it take so many applications to find a job. This doesn't add up.
We have record numbers of women in the workforce basically doubling the number of workers compared to the 50s. But apparently we can't find workers.
And now we're right wing racists because we object to you bringing in people from low income countries to work low skill entry level positions in a proposed system that a little too closely resembles colonial era slave trade.
Meanwhile there's a huge strain on housing prices and infrastructure and social services as we struggle to absorb this influx - why so corporations can have higher profit margins. So GDP can get a little higher.
And these clueless out of touch elites wonder why people are moving to the far right.
Prices are dictated by a global purchasing market. This means that salaries cannot grow because otherwise companies wouldn’t make profit, as they have to compete with products built by Chinese companies with much lower salaries.
This sounds like a race to the bottom where we keep demanding workers accept less and less to compete with poorer and poorer nations - while simultaneously ignoring that economic powerhouses like the US who pay workers relatively well
Globalization is exactly that, until there’s global equality of salaries. We’re seeing it at the moment where Chinese cars are taking over the market because they’re better priced than European or American alternatives. To compete they have to move production to Chinese, see for example the large production of teslas in china, or they replace humans by robots…
The biggest problem with free markets is that it’s not really a sustainable system in the sense that with a certain income you can’t afford the things you need provided by people enjoying similar incomes. Hence we need to mass import product from lower income countries, and even local labor needs to be imported from lower income countries. Cleaners from low income countries, construction workers from low income countries.
I don't buy that idea, an economy full of very poor people who can barely afford anything is not sustainable not at the national level and not at the global level.
Countries with very low wages are also countries with very low productivity (throwing cheap labour instead of technology and expertise at problems)
Relationship between low wages and low productivity isn’t true, low wages are enabled by low costs of living. Cheaper employees can be more productive, and more expensive employees aren’t necessarily more productive. Or do you think every software engineer in SF is more productive than software engineers elsewhere?
Maybe not all but for the most part yes I do think software engineers in San Francisco are by in large more productive than software engineers in Kansas city.
Just like I think finance professionals in NYC are more productive than finance guys elsewhere.
There's a culture around that in those places and opportunities and tools that promote excellence in those fields in a way that is very difficult for someone acting alone.
Just like it's very difficult for a kid in Africa to become a Olympic runner while there are many African American sprinters too, the tools and training and instruction and mentorship is simply not available, the opportunity is not there for him to be able to reach his potential. And that often matters more than innate ability
Workers in many poorer countries are overcoming comparatively more barriers just to work, while in rich countries we have systems set up to help us be as productive as possible
Overall, as the OP says, the key issue is demographic. That doesn't mean that the issues you note don't exist. The pressure on housing is very real, but much of it is due to an ageing population. Certainly in many places there is a lack of a suitable housing mix that enables empty nests to downsize once the kids have left home, but still remain in the same community. So they rattle round in oversized houses, leading to pressure's the housing stock.
>Overall, as the OP says, the key issue is demographic.
Here's a weird thought: Maybe the EU could figure out what issues the locals are having preventing them from wanting kids, and fix them, instead of importing more migrants from impoverished nations, and calling it a day.
I remember being at a robotics conference in 2014, chatting with an engineer from some German car company. He was saying that EV would never break through, because "who doesn't love the sound and feel of a combustion engine."
Of course the engineers that work at German car manufacturers love combustion engines. That is why they chose to go work there in the first place. That is why they had (and have) such a disconnect from the consumer market. Cars are built by people that love cars, not by people that want to get you from A to B. They're people that love the solution, not the problem.
The inertia of big companies starts even in people who are not part of the company yet. It is the people who love finicking with the intricacies of combustion engines that end up at car manufacturers, not the other way around.
In the last two generations we went from having 3 or more kids to having 1 kid. You just weren't able to supervise 5 kids with that level of caution like you are today.
Also biologically your whole legacys survival lies on one kid.
So you mean, DevOps has made Sysadmins more service oriented and now instead of having their pets and being in overprotective silos, they actually provide best practices and proper platforms for the poeple developing the software?
Im not sure how former sysadmins feel about it, but from a dev standpoint, DevOps worked great for us. Making a clean cut on a plattform. Was my app down, I got message/called. If the platform was down it was the Infrastructure team / PaaS provider that needed to fix it.
In the old days we had so few deploys and a hotfix was something that was extraordinary. I actually had a board of something in another country approving that we where allowed to deploy. They knew nothing about the application..
yes this server is special to me. No, I cannot move workloads somewhere else and shoot the server in the head. Because customers are running GPU workloads there, I cannot transparently migrate them
How does the analogy falling flat for you? GPUs are interchangable resources; an H100 is just like any other H100, even if you can't take a snapshot of an intermediate state from one and load it onto another and resume.
I thought about it and I don't hate the analogy. Although usually I'm very against comparing IT stuff with physical stuff because it tends to produce pointless conversations.
What I hate is the attitude of "treating your server is a pet is wrong, you should be able to kill it and replace any time". I feel like people who say it never run anything more complex than an HTTP API.
Ah yeah I totally agree. Having pets is fine until it isn't. A single-digit handful is fine. 1,000 bespoke pets, way above Dunbar's number, isn't. Where exactly you run out of mental headroom and should convert is up to you; the point is that there is one and converting over should be planned for in the North Star roadmap of future development.
My (Raspberry Pi) home server is very much a pet, but I'm never going to productionize that thing, so I'm totally fine with it being a pet, despite the practice at work of having no pets, all cattle.
The place it worked the best was where a team of sysadmins were split up and embedded with each dev team. each devop would then rotate onto another team every 6 months or so. This meant that _we_ had to document our shit for the next devop, but also helped eliminate key person dependencies.
We would then have a weekly offsite where we'd bitch and moan about our teams and conspire to make things better.
Nobody is hindering you on reselling your device. Use your legitimate access to wipe the device and unpair it from Our iCloud account and then you can resell it.
My old company had a big problems with leavers dropping off the iPhone without giving either their passcode or unpairing the device from whatever iCloud account they used, so they couldn't even give it to anybody else. Full shelf full of 1000€ bricks all working fine. (Apple didn't have a proper device management service back then)
> Nobody is hindering you on reselling your device. Use your legitimate access to wipe the device and unpair it from Our iCloud account and then you can resell it.
And its parts can then be re-used in other Apple devices?
I don't know why iFixit doesn't even touch on that point.
I live in Barcelona and phones are being pickpocketed every day here. Not being able to wipe or unlock or else is a mayor deterrent for the pickpockets, because noone will take the phone off of them, so it's not worth it. Phones are still being stolen but imagine if they could sell to a global market of repair shops.
You couldn't go to any tourist location without having your phone stolen if it wasn't bolted to your person.
I get the iFixit point as well but if I have a 1500€ phone, I don't want to think about it being stolen, when I am on vacation, because someone needs some parts (oh the human trafficing/organ harvesting similarity...)
Apple should offer a better repair program and offer the ability to "unlock and relock" it in a apple store with proper proof of ownership. Or anything else in that direction.
> I get the iFixit point as well but if I have a 1500€ phone, I don't want to think about it being stolen, when I am on vacation, because someone needs some parts (oh the human trafficing/organ harvesting similarity...)
Do you think thieves are that descending? I know someone whos iPhone 14 was stolen in London. If this helped protect against theft, then why did they steal the phone anyway?
Of course thieves are discerning. They are running a profitable criminal enterprise. They are in it for big money and are extremely sophisticated and not going to risk stealing worthless junk.
An example of one theft is not evidence that the policy doesn’t reduce theft, or that the purpose of the policy isn’t to reduce theft.
> Of course thieves are discerning. They are running a profitable criminal enterprise.
I can promise you the person who stole this iPhone doesn't run a profitable criminal enterprise. But I am also not disputing that someone along the theft value chain, someone will likely be discerning. However, your claim seems to conflate a criminal enterprise and the theft value chain with an individual thief.
Also, I find the notion that it is very risky to steal something in London hard to believe, but if you have some data to back that up I would be happy to change my mind.
>If this helped protect against theft, then why did they steal the phone anyway?
They are plenty of stories on Reddit and TikTok where the stolen phone ends up in China, and then the owner is phished into disabling iCloud so that the phone could be wiped. If not the sold is phone for parts. To me the very fact that you need an entire phishing ring to make stealing iPhones profitable means that there is some cost that deters thieves from targeting iPhones.
Barring phishing, the next best thing is to scrap it for parts. I can see Apple's reasoning here - if most of your growth is going to come from poorer nations it makes sense you don't your customer base worry about carrying a year's salary in their pocket.
I'm also unconvinced it's a "money grab" on Apple's part. Locking down repairs will not come anywhere close to replacing the lost revenue from the consumer's slowing upgrade cycle.
You can tell the theft thing is an excuse from Apple because they don't do things like allowing you to unlock parts you own, or even buy genuine new parts that definitely stolen without silly restrictions like needing to put in a serial number first and then contact Apple to pair it (this is probably done to make it almost useless for repair shops because they want to push their even more restrictive "independent" repair program)
>tell the theft thing is an excuse from Apple because they don't do things like allowing you to unlock parts you own
This would only make sense if Apple had an existing system for customers to unlock their own parts and then disabled it. The system you are talking about doesn't exist, and the idea that they built X but didn't include X+1 because of "greed reasons" isn't entirely credibly.
While you could argue that maybe someone brought the idea up and it was shot down by some devilish exec, it's equally likely to me that
(1) no one at apple thought of the idea
(2) since the product would be customer facing it is some apple design hell along with the iPad calculator
(3) no one cared enough to spend the political points to push for the product
(4) the problem just isn't prevalent enough to justify the cost.
There are plenty of reasons why Apple could be building this to reduce theft while also not building some other auxiliary system.
Something Louis Rossmann who advocates for right to repair, says (I'm paraphrasing of course) is that it's not necessarily that they explicitly go out of their way to say "let's make repair harder", but when there are no incentives to improve the situation it won't be worked on at all and that has the same effect, so it's still important to push them to do it
How do the thieves get the contact details of the person whose phone they stole to fish them? And why did they steal the iPhone I mentioned without having the contact details of the person?
In the last link, the user explains in the comments that when they marked the device as stolen, they could choose some text to display on the screen and they chose to include a phone number that they had access to.
Plenty of people hope for a good samaritan interaction and will do something like that.
also idk if they ever changed it, but a long time ago I found a phone that was locked and no identifying information shown. I asked siri to call 'my' mother and she arranged a pickup.
If thieves have to rely on people seeing thieves as good Samaritans and trusting thieves with their contact details after they were robbed by them, we definitely have entered a realm of absurdity. But while this hypothetical realm is devoid of all reason and logic, theft still remains.
> How do the thieves get the contact details of the person whose phone they stole to fish them?
If the phone is set to display notifications when locked, you can see the usernames of friends of theirs in notifications on the screen.
I found a locked iPhone on the ferry one time and saw Snapchat notifications from their friends on the lockscreen. I sent a message request to one of the users on the notifications, and told them that I found the phone on the boat and that the owner of the phone should contact the ferry company to retrieve the phone as I would hand it over to the crew of the ferry.
Similarly, if your goal was to be a thief instead of being helpful you might keep an eye on the Instagram notifications of the phone, and then cross-reference friends of those people to figure out who owns the phone.
Granted, that's dealing with stolen iPhones getting sold and an entirely set of other problems. You'll note that 26.8% of them were either unlocked, easily guessable, or in one instance had the credentials there (compare shoulder surfing before stealing the phone).
> Of phones they won at auction (at an average of $18 per phone), the researchers found 49 had no PIN or passcode; they were able to guess an additional 11 of the PINs by using the top-40 most popular PIN or swipe patterns.
Not sure I understand. The father's phone was stolen, and the son was contacted, and the son logged into the account.
>How?
Anyone can pop out the sim card and plug it into any dumbphone, navigate to settings and read the phone number. I assume there's probably a USB device to dump data on a sim card.
>Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.
Your phone is lost until you attain the information that it was stolen. I fail to find it now, but there was a tiktok of a woman who lost their iphone at festival and it turned up in china where she also was unsuccessfully phished.
> Losing it is not the same as having it stolen, though.
Your phone could disappear and you would assume it fell out of your pocket or that you left it somewhere, when in fact someone could have stolen it from you while you were not paying attention.
And besides, most people probably don’t expect that a thief would respond and trick them into unlocking the phone for them. Instead the expectation might be that a thief would not respond, and that if someone responded they are a good samaritan trying to help you.
I’m highly dubious of anyone claiming this reduces crime.
Things being easy to steal and sell aren’t the _cause_ of crime, they’re a symptom. If someone has felt the need to resort to a life of crime for whatever reason, how is lowering their “salary” (so to speak) going to reduce crime? Surely they now need to steal more phones to make up the difference? I guess you could argue they might commit a different crime instead?
Activation lock made a huge difference. The next step to talking profits out of stolen iPhones is to make harvesting parts difficult.
I absolutely give Apple the benefit of the doubt when it comes to I this. Back in the bad old days iPhone theft was incredibly common and that has come down a lot over the years.
> The next step to talking profits out of stolen iPhones is to make harvesting parts difficult.
I would 100% buy this if you showed me data that indicates that part harvesting is behind most of the remaining theft of iPhones, which it very well may be, but if we have the data we would not have to guess.
FFS, what else do you think people are stealing them for? To make abstract art? Kleptomania? To stop the 5G towers from giving them COVID?
People steal stuff because they can use it or because they can turn around and sell it. If they can’t do either, they eventually stop stealing those things.
Especially catalytic converters. Can be stolen from an unprotected (i.e. no massive baseplate) car in below 30 seconds, and nets you about 1000$ a piece from junkyards willing to ignore the sawzall marks.
Few people would choose a life of crime as a hobby, or if it wasn't paying much better than an average entry-level office job, so it's not like someone decides to resort to crime and then later considers the financial aspects. Most get into it because of the quick money.
To use a hyperbolic example, if the median profit for stealing a phone would suddenly drop to $10, where their only value are the easily extractable raw materials, a 20-fold increase in theft would be less likely then a rapid drop in theft.
Currently there are avenues to remove iCloud lock, where licensed repair shops or Apple employees remove them for some extra cash [1], so the value of stolen iPhones is greater than the raw materials, making it attractive. But with higher regulation, that could change.
It’s not that it reduces crime overall, it’s that it reduces a specific, very inconvenient crime to be the victim of. Having your phone stolen, especially on vacation, is significantly worse than many other sorts of theft.
And people still die of infection despite the existence of antibiotics. Crazy, right?
Please tell me you understand that reducing the value of an iPhone on the black market will reduce incidence of theft even if it doesn’t eliminate it entirely.
Maybe people resort to a life of crime because it makes them money and they like money, not because they have no other option. People readily accept that rich people do morally wrong things (like exploit their employees etc) for more money. So why assume that the only reason people in general would do morally wrong things is because they need to to feed their family?
> So why assume that the only reason people in general would do morally wrong things is because they need to to feed their family?
I don't think anyone has ever made that claim, but people do tend to do what's easy/convenient and it's a lot easier and more convenient to put in 8 hours in a safe climate-controlled office where you get medical benefits and a salary you can depend on than it is to go out every night mugging people or trying to pick pockets, then trying to figure out how to sell your stolen goods, all without getting killed, robbed yourself, or caught by police.
Most people need to make money somehow and nobody is picking the most dangerous, risky, effort intensive means to make that money when they have other options readily available.
The harder it is for someone to make money doing anything other than commit crimes the more likely they will be to commit crime and for some people (those with few resources, and addictions and/or past criminal records for example) it can be very very hard to get and maintain legitimate employment.
Its like poisenous plants. Being poisenous doesn't prevent the single plant from getting eaten. But it makes it very unlikely, that a lot plants of that species get eaten. So while a single iPhone might get stolen, overall there are less if many thieves targetting iPhones. They don't bring money, but increase the risk of landing in prison.
> So while a single iPhone might get stolen, overall there are less if many thieves targetting iPhones.
Do we have data to show this?
> They don't bring money, but increase the risk of landing in prison.
I also don't think the risk of going to prison for theft in London is that high. Sure, stealing an iPhone increases it, but an increasing an insignificant risk by a factor of 10 could still leave it being insignificant.
There is probably a "trailing indicator" effect at play here. I believe people don't sell the phone immediately, but try and find a buyer later. It will take a few thefts of un-sellable iPhones before the thief realises that the risk is not worth the reward. These changes don't trickle down immediately.
> It will take a few thefts of un-sellable iPhones before the thief realises that the risk is not worth the reward.
But his only bears out if thieves can easily discern an iPhone 14 from other phones, which I'm not sure is that easy in the context they operate. And it also requires it to be risky to seal in London, and I think if that were the case then theft would be less prevalent there. And I think if the people in London cared about having their iPhones stolen, they would take political action to that effect.
But sure, it all sounds very plausible, though I would still like to see data to back it up. It may be, but it also may not be.
>I live in Barcelona and phones are being pickpocketed every day here. Not being able to wipe or unlock or else is a mayor deterrent for the pickpockets
If the whole part won't be used it will be stripped to components and resold to the same repair shops anyway. Yeah the profit margins will be smaller per phone but they will just steal more.
Apple doesn't want phones fixed because Apple wants to sell more phones, plain and simple. There is no other incentive.
> Yeah the profit margins will be smaller per phone but they will just steal more.
The risk of getting caught scales with that increased volume. The extra friction of parting out a phone for less money compared to selling the whole phone beggars belief that "stealing more" is the most common response.
"iPhone theft getting less profitable raises the rate of theft" just doesn't make sense.
Yes, classically, thieves just scale up their operations tenfold when their profit per theft goes down. This is why iPhone theft has skyrocketed in the past decade, to the point where the general public is anxious to ever wield such a device in public for fear of being immediately snatched.
This needs to be higher up. Big points that SAP has going:
* Compliance
* Standard Processes
* Interoperability between companies (a lot of purchasing runs automatically through some sort of SAP Software)
What mostly fails in my experience is the customization. Everybody thinks their process is super special and important and needs 100 escape hatches. But if you ask them to draw their process on a whiteboard, they couldn't do it for one single process without drawing 100 question marks.
That is where SAP shines: The whole thing is so bureaucratic, coming from Germany, which is something you will need after your company has grown beyond a certain size.
* You're getting old and your not spending as much money.
* Getting 5$ from 100.000.000 people is better than getting 50$ 1.000.000 people. Especially if you can do it at lower costs.
* Getting in new audiences to keep the franchise alive and healthy
* And last but not least the average consumer is not interested in it being "true" to some kind of book or whatever. It has to make sense, but not in a true to the original author kind of way.
The problem is the low effort part not the "not being true" part. If you take a result of decades of loving work of some author and give it to a committee to remake it in 6 months (and people in the committee were chosen by some random criteria like genitals or pigmentation) - you get low quality product with big budget.
Then you blame people who understand what was lost for complaining and call them racist.
Few people have problems with changes for the better. But the changes are usually for worse. In the Witcher season 1 most changes were well received (introducing Yennefer backstory for example). But removing the Ciri & Geralt scene which was the pinnacle of the 2 short stories collecting just so that they can put 30 minutes of Ciri walking with that black elf that has no influence on anything else in the story was just dumb. Pacing was awful, and they had to cut the good stuff.
The story got objectively worse, but people who didn't read the books won't complain cause they don't know what they missed.
From a business point of view having a fanatical core of fans who recommend your show to everyone is why you bought the IP.
Today I saw physical adverts for House of the Dragon on the train ride home. The only thing I thought about was how shit the last season of Game of Thrones was and how I will never read any media about that world again. Even though I would have watched a new show set in a completely different world with the production quality I saw in the posters.
Currently Big Corp is spending billions on acquiring IPs which rather quickly end up having negative value. This is, to put it mildly, not good business sense.
It truly is bizarre to watch. It reminds me of the ethically questionable business strategy of buying a premium brand, slashing prediction quality and costs, and then raking in profits before people catch on. That strategy is viable because of cost-cutting though, while many of these franchises are setting records for production costs despite their mediocre quality.
All of these strategies make sense given the financial environment we live in, with a money supply that constantly increases via debt creation. There’s something like an arms race for attention. The combination of this arms race and unlimited financing means we have production costs for for one hour of entertainment in the tens of even hundreds of millions.
I think good art comes from individuals with fantastic visions; but since no individual can fund things at the scale to compete in the attentional arms race, we are left with endless bland re-hashes since these compete on existing brands and thus are lower risk.
>From a business point of view having a fanatical core of fans who recommend your show to everyone is why you bought the IP.
There are probably more than 10x as many people who remember liking the lotr movies as a kid than who are close enough friends with a member of that fanatical core of Tolkien fans to have the show personally recommended to them and probably many times again as many people who are just generally aware of the popularity of LotR. That's the real benefit of the IP. Having some really dedicated fans help hype it up for a few weeks/months before it comes out doesn't hurt, but their job is pretty much done by the time it actually releases.
I think they also buy these IPs for the cultural impact. With these massive brands like Star Wars/Marvel/Game of Thrones, people get a strong sense of FOMO because they know everyone else will be talking about the new show or movie and they don't want to be the only one who hasn't seen it. These names are so big that they influence pop culture, and that's why media companies are paying huge sums for them.
1. Older audiences have more money and spend more of it.
2. There’s only 68 million Gen Z compared to 72 million Millenials.
3. You keep a franchise alive and healthy by protecting the core IP and making the fans happy not by alienating them and making terrible renditions of the story. If you do that then all you have left is a name that is increasingly associated with bad writing and acting and eventually it becomes a joke that no one will turn out for.
Pareto tells us that 0.1% of people account for 38% of the money.
Intentionally aggravating your most passionate fans is a moronic business plan — like a mobile game that intentionally pisses off the “whales” to pursue casuals.
Likening a passionate fan to a whale does not work for me. A whale spends thousands to ten thousands times as much as a casual, but a passionate fan does not spend orders of magnitude more than a casual. A business analyst can only see this first-order effect as money is easy to measure; the second order effect of the passionate fanbase having a larger-than-usual reach and being to organise mass gruntle/review bombing/boycotts and other forms of IP burning/resistance is invisible to him, or he does not care because the cost is already sunk, whereas whaling is always an ongoing business.
The exact shape of a Pareto distribution depends on two or three algebraic parameters. And the Pareto principle isn't some universal law that applies everywhere.
Sure — do you think it’s likely or unlikely to apply to things like profit per customer in media? …do you think the distribution will be significantly different than mobile games?
Are you objecting to the general idea that highly engaged customers produce disproportionate impact — or just those specific numbers?
If the latter, okay… but that doesn’t address my point that it’s a bad business plan, just quibble about it.
The notion that immigrants take away jobs is bullshit that has been fed to you by exactly those right wing shills. It's not the 2000nds anymore. We need so many workers l, especially in those low wage/low skill jobs.
At the same time employing an immigrant is much harder cultural wise that every employer probably picks a local over a immigrant when having the choice.
But feel free to talk to any recruiter.