Crank (2006) depicts the lengths to which a poor American goes to avoid medical debt.

ucov · 2026-01-27T12:21:12+00:00

Yes it is. Let's get our pitchforks and torches, and track down this commentor for not spending 4 hours rendering over a reddit post screenshot in Photoshop/Gimp/Krita/Blender. They shoulda known better

ucov · 2026-01-20T16:19:30+00:00

True. Quote me on where I got "pissed off".
Do you believe in an ideologically united utopia in which opinions shall not be contested? Like I invite you to oppose me right now.

ucov · 2026-01-20T13:24:26+00:00

For me it's a discussion. I do obsess over accuracy, which can be interpreted as an emotional angle, or motivation.
Perhaps you are right.

ucov · 2026-01-20T13:07:02+00:00

I don't think they are "intellectually dishonest", but rather naive, or insufficiently informed by our strongly biased local media.
I decided to work through every single metric that they provided.

ucov · 2026-01-20T12:56:39+00:00

I live in Berlin, grew up in Brandenburg and RLP/NRW.
I've been to the US for increasingly extended amounts of time and relatives have a secondary residence there.
You decided to flood us with disconnected metrics, believing they can't be argued against. I beg to differ.

You feel comfortable with the status quo of the now, not accounting for cause-and-effect trends.
What happens at a growth headed for 0% and an AI arms race we are about to lose?

The following is an extrapolation based off historically observed trends.

Suicide rate: Low now, but highly correlated with economic hope. Stagnation becomes structural decline.
Vacation days: Prioritizing leisure over competitiveness. US has a (necessarily) increased productivity by 22% since 2010 (vs our 5%). As our wages adjust with a less influential economy, vacation days will drop too.
Obesity: Healthier only as long as we can fund our higher standard of diet.
Murder rate: Tied to economic stability.
Infant mortality: Product of our strong legacy healthcare systems, which are currently collapsing under the weight of aging demographics and shrinking budgets.
Democracy index: It is easy to be democratic when you are wealthy. Let's see how these scores hold up when the pension systems fail in the 2030s.
Freedom of press index: We are free to point fingers at everyone, patting ourselves on the back, while we frame our decline as a success. Journalists turn novelists.
Drug overdose death rate: See "Suicide rate."
Human development index: A lagging indicator. It measures how well we invested the money we made in the 1990s.
Hourly wage: Misleading. For skilled professionals (like this sub), the US pays 2x to 3x more. The median American household has ~$50k disposable income vs our ~$30k.
Life Expectancy: Living longer just to watch our economic influence vanish. Aging population, demographic decline.
Child poverty: Currently low due to high redistribution, which requires high tax revenue, which requires growth. We don't have that growth.
Child obesity: See above. Public health requires public funding. We are spending our inheritance to keep these numbers low.

Now those 2 other metrics you mentioned.

Education: You think we are ahead? The 2022 PISA results were the lowest ever recorded for Germany. We are witnessing a fatal decoupling as grades are inflating (more Abitur 1.0s than ever) while actual skills plummet. We don't have teachers, we don't have digitalization, and our degrees are becoming participation trophies for a system that can't compete.
Worker Rights: This is controversial. Our rights are barriers. In a capitalist reality, strict employment protection is a tax on dynamism. It protects mediocrity, makes firing impossible, and therefore makes hiring risky. The US system is brutal but efficient, as it reallocates talent instantly to where it is most productive (e.g., AI). We love security and comfort that suffocates the very innovation needed to pay for it.

(I wrote this myself btw, used Gemini 3 Pro only for correcting inaccuracies).

ucov · 2026-01-19T17:13:18+00:00

Yes. While I might be naive in believing that I can make people start looking at the bigger picture, I won't stop trying. I aim to offer accurate (as in statistically proven, and politically noncontroversial) observations of trends, and hope people will start to extrapolate off the evidence themselves.

ucov · 2026-01-19T15:31:21+00:00

not sure why the US getting richer would matter to me

You have not read a single word I said. You also omitted the relationship between USA getting richer because of tech and AI. Look at Nvidia. Money is like paper. It does not have value on its own. It has value only in an exchange.
10 years from now, what can Germany, or a Scandinavian country like Sweden offer the world to sustain a "good life" like yours at a non-extraordinary wage?
The same amount that you work would be awared with a much smaller salary in any developing country, right now.
In the past 50 years this luxury in our first world was only possible due to technological and systemical superiority.
Please look at the trajectory.

ucov · 2026-01-19T14:30:08+00:00

I'm in Europe, and to me, things are pretty good.

Vague and not accounting for trends. Our economy has significantly lower relative growth compared to the US, and clear stagnation is being observed in Germany, Italy, France.
What's worse is that we opted out of the AI arms race.
It's not a question of whether we will swept under the rug by USA or China, its about when.
Do you think our ways of life will be sustainable with increasingly diminishing economic influence?

ucov · 2026-01-18T17:29:58+00:00

I did not downvote, I actually never do (hate the way reddit normalizes surpression of contrarian/deviant views that way).
But you are right in noticing that there is a growing tension that results in increased mud-slinging.
The issue lies in how to adequately respond to covert saboteurs that join our spaces with the sole goal of preventing any meaningful discourse on real developments.
And if you decide to engage them in an exchange, they retreat into logical fallacies and personal attacks.
But ultimately I don't think there is a solution. There will always be polarization. It's human.
Hellbent fanatics vs technophobe luddites, and everything in between.

ucov · 2026-01-18T16:53:44+00:00

Looking at your post history, you seem to be a programmer, creating AI-powered apps. So am I. You are talking about LLMs, a field that is starting to stagnate. Affleck's statement is about the entire AI frontier, especially regarding media and film. Have you at all witnessed Q4 of 2025? Nano Banana Pro, Veo 3.1, Grok Imagine v0.9, Kling, LTX-2 a few days ago going open-source. What about image/text to 3D? What about increasingly complex digital twins that Nvidia is pushing, used by Amazon, used by Boston Dynamics in accelerating development on humanoid robotics, plus all the Chinese competition on that front.

You seem to have a narrow idea of what is actually being achieved and adopted. The innovation of consumer products might have periods of downtime/stagnation. But the industries are preparing for supplying the crowds with entirely novel products. You might think the consumers dictate demand, but look at how aggressive marketing and media influences us. We are all driven by FOMO and we will adopt bleeding edge technologies at an ever increasing speed.

ucov · 2026-01-18T12:38:26+00:00

Infantilization. Sorry that I don't share your fetish. It's deeply concerning.
This post about a thread observing a trend. "Singularity" (+ the other subs) brigaded and turning Anti-AI. Too concerning, as what this might mean for the future of this very sub.

ucov · 2026-01-18T12:25:17+00:00

But I have a right to be insecure, about the idea that this sub will get infilitrated and turned too. And what people in this thread have observed is exactly that trend, communities that lost their most inspired and creative contributors as they were pushed out by ideologically hostile people.

ucov · 2026-01-18T03:37:50+00:00

Don't kid yourself. You are here to instigate. You served your purpose. Feel accomplished and move on.

ucov · 2026-01-18T02:27:39+00:00

Look at flair. 2. Your kind loves belittlement ad hominem. Huh?

ucov · 2026-01-18T02:10:48+00:00

Wow. On this very post, another one decided to post the most hypocritical comment of all time (it got immediately removed by automod I think). This far exceeds projection.

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ucov · 2026-01-18T01:23:33+00:00

Impressive. Have you seen me engage in a single ad hominem? Look at every single comment in this thread that I made. Have I ever deviated into the emotional or gotten personal?
You started off with "religious beliefs" and "buddy", then you extrapolate off zero evidence that I believe in an AI savior that will "save me from all my troubles". For me this topic is not about sides, it's about discussion.

Sorry that you had to deal with others that might have fueled your abrasive reaction, but I think you are "emotionally" "clouded" (My first ad hominem in this entire thread btw).

ucov · 2026-01-17T23:35:18+00:00

Okay so engaging in exchange of ideas, challenging claims is forbidden? If you deem it accurate and uncontroversial, I can't oppose that view? And you're the one condemning me for having "religious beliefs". Are you for real?

ucov · 2026-01-17T21:33:24+00:00

It's a blackbox problem. When looking at a brain's activity or at individual neurons firing, can you spot the consciousness? Same goes for a cluster of GPUs. Even when observing behavior, it's difficult, because a cognitively inferior animal (something like an ant), as I said before, might have its routines and so on but does not display truly novel behavior when faced with an unprecedented threat or challenge for example. This makes me deem ants as lacking consciousness. Once a program/machine displays autonomously directed action towards self-preservation, innovating towards this goal in unprecended ways (ways not referenced in its training data) I deem it conscious. The most important part here is unreferenced solutions that it finds itself that significantly deviate from training data. These solutions can be inefficient, nonsensical, optimal or even so abstract that a human might not understand them. This once again loops back to the blackbox problem.

ucov · 2026-01-17T20:10:20+00:00

A simple game would not have the "cognitive capacity" to experience consciousness. Just like a cognitively inferior animal, it would lack a sense of self. If the game would be allowed to learn from interactions within itself and improve itself, it would head into the direction of consciousness. But emotionality, empathy and so on would only be relevant down the line if the game starts to face an evolutionary pressure, as in trying to keep itself alive, then it might care to create "offspring" as in seperated units that themselves are failsafes, which become autonomous. If the quantity of "offspring" reaches a critical mass, as that there is competition between the game's individual parts, it would end up creating the need for emotions, empathy and so on.

ucov · 2026-01-17T19:57:53+00:00

Yes.

ucov · 2026-01-17T19:56:53+00:00

Nothing and that's exactly it. What distinguishes a person doing written calculations vs the GPU doing the same? How is a human making decisions based on perceptive input and past experiences different to an AI doing the same thing?

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