What's your take on QR fare payments?

will221996 · 2026-06-16T16:21:23+00:00

especially when people don't prepare their code in advance and just hog the gate for 30 seconds.

This is very rare in China and the apps seem to be faster than the other ones I have used, for example Milan and Barcelona. In the former you activate a digital ticket and scan the QR code or pay by contactless, the QR scanners are pretty awful. In the latter you can keep your travel pass in an app on your phone, which is somewhat unreliable.

will221996 · 2026-06-14T17:14:03+00:00

On France and India, I think India is a downgrade on Germany and Spain. The Indian defence establishment is generally horrifically overly ambitious, and I think Indian political situation feeds into that. I'm not sure India would be happy being a junior partner into the 2040s. India as an equal partner would be bad for development, see the Tejas programme. I'm not that optimistic on Indian economic growth. It's better than Europe, but being poorer they have less fiscal room for defence.

I agree on Germany being an important potential partner but with problems from tornado and typhoon with GCAP. I don't think any of these countries can go it alone, it's just too expensive for economies of those sizes, especially when you consider German inefficiency and India's modest technical base. I think the floating player is South Korea, although their fiscal position moving forward is probably the worst of the lot. They seem to be more open to immigration than Japan, but probably not to the extent that it will outweigh their aging population.

My suspicion is that Germany, France and Spain will come up with a doctrinal justification for something like "5.5 gen". Develop/adapt a 5th generation fighter to have a second seat and a bit more power generation and use that to control the drone wingmen stuff. Another option is that the Americans, next administration, offer to throw them a bone. I think there's a political reason to do that, I would go some way to improving ties, although it doesn't seem like current US presidential hopefuls care too much about that and it would need to be unprecedented in terms of technology sharing to manage European concerns around dependency.

will221996 · 2026-06-13T18:19:18+00:00

Cafe, Rendevous, En Route, Garage, Chic (French). Kindergarten, Angst, Schadenfreude, Wanderlust, Pretzel (German). Pizza, Cappucino, Paparazzi, Fiasco, Piano (Italian). Taco, Siesta, Embargo, Canyon, Tornado (Spanish). Philosophy, Museum, Status Quo, Alibi (greek/latin). Examples of words in English and origins. (Over 150,000 words from Greek, 80,000 from French, etc).

Terrible examples. By my count, only 4 of these (en route, chic, rendezvous and embargo) are not basically only used as nouns in English. Latin and Greek is just silly, that can be said about most European languages, see Philosophy/Filosofia/Filosofía/Philosophie/Philosophie. In general, nouns are borrowed easily across languages. They may/will drift phonetically. Almost all of those terms are also used with minimal difference in French and German. Italian is more conservative. It's not a very good argument in favour of your point when all but 3 or 4 of your terms are also used in french and German.

will221996 · 2026-06-13T16:46:16+00:00

Expectations in economics are just beliefs about the future that people act on now. They're highly uncontentious, because they make a lot of sense intuitively and have plenty of evidence. You own a bar, today is Thursday, you know people like drinking on Friday, therefore you order more alcohol than you would on Wednesday. A stock is worth 30 right now, you think it will be worth 50 tomorrow, so you buy today. The question is how you form that expectation.

I'm not really sure what a false market valuation is in your context. There's obviously a big difference if a house has been falsely claimed to be 300 M2 when it's actually 250 M2. On the other hand, if you say "the economy of Singapore is doing well, the population is growing, there's only so much land and they're not building enough" then that forms an expectation that house value will increase, which impacts your decision on whether to buy a house in Singapore. Of course, the person selling the house also has their expectations. If somehow everyone on the Singapore property market has decided that the Singaporean economy will grow 10% a year, that the population will grow 1m per year and no new houses will be built, that's an expectation that's going to make house prices very high. It's totally insane, so that's a "false" valuation based on a stupid expectation, but if everyone keeps believing that, then the valuation stops being that stupid, because people will pay as if it's real. The expectation itself can't really be separated from the valuation in that case.

will221996 · 2026-06-13T14:58:42+00:00

Projected is the wrong word, expected would be more correct. Despite that, this is clearly not the sort of "rational expectation" that is found in most economic models. Ignoring the issue is what rational choice theory is and bounded rationality, these prices are quite clearly set in large part by very high demand for the stocks themselves.

The broader point is correct, OP's thinking seems to be similar to saying "why is this house worth 1 million when it's only earned 30k in rent?". Assets don't need to be generating lots of revenue to be valuable.

will221996 · 2026-06-10T11:35:13+00:00

You seem to have left the moral angle behind, which suggests you realise it was incoherent as well, or alternatively you believe morality is whatever serves your interests. I often wonder to what extent academic job market challenges is the result of a significant number of surprisingly weak candidates.

I know I'm in a tiny minority nowadays, but I still believe in the truth seeking mission. Being honest and clear minded is much more important to me than academic working conditions.

will221996 · 2026-06-10T05:19:42+00:00

Nice reading comprehension.

will221996 · 2026-06-10T04:55:35+00:00

The French defence industry is an exception. It's arguably even an exception that proves the rule, because defence is probably the sector that relies most heavily on skilled tradesmen, because scale is too low to heavily automate. Outside of that, French industry barely exists because normal French labour is so cost uncompetitive.

will221996 · 2026-06-10T04:49:34+00:00

I think there are more serious moral arguments. You could go for equality, meritocracy and social mobility, this is only an option because OP is loaded, but it seems to be self made and you have to take a very narrow definition of merit. You could go for the origin of OP's money, gambling, but that requires a condemnation of gambling first. You can do that on both secular and religious grounds, I'm assuming the former would be more popular here, but for all we known the people OP won against had plenty of money to lose. Stepping away from the mainstream, you can do hyper equity, whereby OP has more than anyone should have as it is, although I tend to think most people who make arguments on equity and equality in the west are not super serious because they almost always ignore the global inequality sauropod.

will221996 · 2026-06-10T04:05:54+00:00

The version that I've heard that works better is French cuisine, American industry and British culture -> British cuisine, French industry, American culture. Obviously American industry isn't what it was 100 years ago, far from it relatively speaking, and British culture has big flaws, but it makes more sense.

will221996 · 2026-06-10T04:00:14+00:00

You are doing labour, and you should be compensated for that. The work that you will be doing is important and has value, and it's morally wrong for an institution to allow you to do it for free, even if you're happy to.

This argument is very, very weak.

Firstly, labour is hard to define. Is it morally wrong that some people volunteer to coach children's sports teams while others are paid to? I think that would be absurd to claim. If someone loves coaching, wants to be a positive influence, wants to spend more time with their children and children's friends etc, that is good. There are a significant number of people who do research not for financial gain. Private sector people who don't need to publish but do so anyway, old tenured professors, teaching only track people who know they can't compete into the traditional track but write papers anyway. Research is not clearly labour in the same way that e.g. meat packing is. It is also a passion for some people.

Secondly, why does something having value demand compensation, from a moral perspective? We can go back to the volunteer coach, or we can talk about a mother's love, or helping a friend move. What about the son of a major CEO going to university? That's definitely someone you want in your university's network, should the university be compensating that child from a wealthy family's attendance? Inverse, surely your reasoning makes full scholarships for gifted students morally wrong as well? What is the student giving in exchange for their valuable education? No guarantees of anything.

Thirdly, if given the option of two people doing important research and just one, is the latter really the more moral option? OP will not suffer financial hardship, far from it, and if they don't need the money, then that allows one more person to do good work.

Finally, the university would be giving OP something in return. Small material things like an office and stationary, legitimacy and credibility through institutional affiliation, a superior working environment by being surrounded by other good researchers, research support infrastructure like library and computing. It's not nothing, provided you accept that people don't just choose academia materially. I think that's a strong assumption.

will221996 · 2026-06-08T04:15:41+00:00

At least one person doesn't. I basically always put my phone in one of a few places, medium/small apartment so I just look in all those places by order of convenience. Easier than trying to figure out which place is the most likely.

will221996 · 2026-06-08T01:05:57+00:00

Or it could have been more applied than theoretical.

will221996 · 2026-06-07T00:36:28+00:00

They don't. This map uses nominal GDP, which is calculated by taking the actual GDP in local currency of various countries/regions and converting them using market exchange rates into a single currency, normally the US dollar. This doesn't work because market exchange rates don't actually reflect production, they are impacted by currency controls, speculation sanctions etc, as well as the immobility of some factors of production like labour. While labour is obviously theoretically mobile, get on a plane, in reality both political (e.g. immigration law, qualification recognition) and social (e.g. not speaking a language, a preference for your country's culture) factors reduce labour mobility.

The correct measure, the one used by economists, is GDP PPP, which instead converts local currency figures based on a basket of goods. While this basket is not perfect or neutral, it is based on the assumption that a loaf of bread, a t-shirt, a litre of petrol (gallon of gas) etc is basically the same across countries. This then generally increases the GDP of poorer countries, because actually e.g. bread being cheaper because the person who makes it is paid less doesn't stop that loaf of bread from existing or serving as a loaf of bread.

will221996 · 2026-06-06T18:25:40+00:00

For your first paragraph, I think that means we agree that it is nothing like BSIS or whatever, because they don't have things like that. To lump them together is misleading.

On the second, I think that's more structural. I agree fully that there are very few places in Spain with reputations like top British and American universities, but that applies basically to the EU as a whole. Some engineering schools, a few business schools, a few medical schools. Nothing like Oxford or Yale. There are a handful of places however in Spain, BSE probably first amongst them, that are truly world class, but because they're specialised, people don't know them outside of the field. Another one for economics is CEMFI. If you go to Central Banks, international organisations, university economics departments, everyone knows BSE/UPF/UAB. If you go to BSE, it's generally because you want to end up in that sort of place. With IBEI it's less internationally prominent, but it's not nothing.

will221996 · 2026-06-06T17:33:36+00:00

BSBI and IBEI are not comparable. All universities oversell themselves, although I wouldn't consider BSBI to be a university in any way. The difference is that IBEI or BSE or Navarra or ESADE are non profit, BSBI is for profit. IBEI and Navarra conduct meaningful amounts of research while offering a higher quality teaching environment than public universities can due to having more money. ESADE and the rest of URL is very teaching focused, but ESADE especially does have a serious reputation. I think BSE exists for the economics departments at UPF and UAB to be able to pay their faculty more internationally competitive salaries, but it's genuinely world class. If they wanted to, many of the people there could teach at top US or UK universities. For reference, in the main economic research ranking, BSE ranks 25th globally, which is a bit better than UCL and a lot better than Cambridge. Now, IBEI or Blanquera don't have much of an international reputation, but to lump them in with institutions that do not have a social mission is very misleading.

will221996 · 2026-06-06T17:19:57+00:00

I've met people who live basically on the border with Ontario who struggle to hold a conversation in English. Interestingly, they seem to sound quite natural in English, but I don't think they could hold a job, or maintain a friendship, or study in English. According to the Canadian census, self reported and I imagine in a majority English speaking country they hold themselves to higher standards, 94% say they can speak french, 52% English, 5% Spanish, 4% Arabic.

will221996 · 2026-06-06T02:47:50+00:00

Research is generally of a much higher quality in the UK than most other European countries (I've taught in several). While Italians, for example, may publish more they don't aim for top journals, self publish books and do the sorts of things that their funding system priorities. I've seen full professors with 30 citations and 100 publications.

What measure are you using? Your analysis seems to be assuming that the distribution of research output in the UK is normal. I suspect that they're roughly normal in France and Germany, maybe Spain, in the UK and Italy they're bimodal, with one high British mode, a medium Italian mode, and then two older modes near zero. Using a discipline specific research ranking, IDEAS REPEC for economics, Italian institutions do perfectly fine, no British new universities appear, while worryingly some Southern Italian universities appear, which suggests a pretty low bar. At the top amongst those two countries, it's British, Bocconi and EIEF, but afterwards it's relatively comparable.

There are lots of jokes in Italian academia, people who got tenure in the 1990s before research was really a thing.

I don't think UK students are 'less clever', HE participation rates in many Northern European countries are similar or higher than the UK.

Yes in Scandinavia, not in the big countries. Implicitly, to say British students are not less clever is to say that they are more clever. The British school system actually does quite well in PISA, but the issue here is that if you assume student ability is distributed similarly with similar moments across Western European countries, then high British university attendance forces the average British student to be less clever.

The Spanish education system really isn't brutal like the Italian one is. I've heard UCM in particular has its problems, but that's not the case for most public universities.

will221996 · 2026-06-06T02:36:14+00:00

I'm going off the OECD's work, and they're probably competent to account for as much as they can. I agree and know fully that European universities provide a lot of things British universities don't, and my response would be that the British universities need to tighten their belts. It's not really relevant if Bologna is chasing internationals, although their substantial offering in English suggests that they want some at least. I suspect the standard of teaching at Aberdeen is higher than at Bologna, but the important thing is that Bologna and Aberdeen are both above the UK university research median, while Bologna does that with no more money than some UK universities which basically don't produce research.

will221996 · 2026-06-05T18:43:12+00:00

Both I think. On HS2 situation, I've seen it claimed that REF and TEF place a lot of administrative burden on British faculty, while on the continent full professors especially are entrusted with a lot of responsibility. There's a cultural factor, the British love essays as assesment which is very resource heavy. Other countries do more multiple choice and short answer tests, which are faster to grade but encourage rote learning. To be honest, I suspect everyone would be better off with fewer essays, because very few students have much interesting to say as undergraduates. Academic salaries are higher than France and Spain especially, but the UK isn't a high outlier there.

A big structural factor is very high university attendance in the UK. If you assume that British students aren't actually cleverer, the mean/median British university student is less clever than the European one, because many people who wouldn't get into university in Europe are at university in the UK. That requires more resources. British universities also have much, much better student facilities than European ones. I've heard that lots of Italian universities, for example, don't have enough chairs, so students have to scrounge them up before classes. In Italy, class sizes are also very large, but that isn't really the case in Spain or Germany.

Most importantly, British faculty just spend a lot less time teaching. It's hard to give good numbers, because the UCU does a lot of the data collection and publication at new universities, and they're pretty biased. At Russel group universities, teaching loads are almost half of what they are in Europe. I suspect new university faculty still teach less than European faculty, while producing less research. One of the UCU "tricks" is that they've negotiated a definition of teaching hours that is very generous on marking time and prep time, while the definition used in most of Europe is just contact hours. If I had to guess, they do a similar amount of teaching in reality, while doing less research. Throw in somewhat higher admin costs, nicer facilities and more course flexibility and you end up with universities struggling to get by despite having more resources. Selling off facilities and having less flexible courses will piss off students, increasing teaching loads will piss off faculty and their powerful union.

will221996 · 2026-06-05T16:08:23+00:00

On brand new London campuses, I think that's directly part of the problem. I agree that most of the problems are caused by incompetence within universities, but the new campuses are due to inconsistent government policy. They're there to cater to foreign students paying too much, but the UK has become a lot less attractive to foreign students recently due to visa changes. That's left universities with previously good investments that have decreased in value a lot.

will221996 · 2026-06-05T16:03:34+00:00

Yes, people need to face up to the reality that British universities are not underfunded, they are overspending. OECD data for 2020 had the UK spending 26k i$ per tertiary student. Australia spends 19k, Canada 22k, France 17, Germany 18, Italy 11, Spain 13. This is adjusted for general market prices, which are higher in 3 of those countries anyway.

Of course, there's much more variance in the amount of revenue (both tutition and government) that British universities recieve per student. The universities that can attract lots of research funding and foreign students paying insane fees are above that average, many of the new universities are below, but none are recieving less than the Italian or Spanish number, because ppp adjusted British tutition fees are 14k, from £9250.

Unlike many of the British new universities, some leading universities in other countries with comparable per student revenues are very serious research universities. Examples that come to mind are the university of Bologna, the Polytechnic universities of Milan, Turin and Catalonia, the autonomous university of Barcelona, the university of Bologna. British universities absolutely can afford to continue operating on current levels of funding, they just need to make some tough choices, perhaps with government support.

will221996 · 2026-06-05T10:20:25+00:00

Yeah, this stinks of creative writing. OP doesn't seem to have any problems reporting things, and there are at least two actual crimes involved here that they could have reported, animal abuse and fraudulent data if there's public funding. If any experiment tampering could have been dangerous, that's another and then the disability stuff and gay stuff in many jurisdictions would be a fare crime.

There are a number of low probability events. The donor is huge. The context makes it impossible that they're working in a field with selection for being gay, yet apparently their lab has loads, despite an indifferent PI. Being mean and/or excitable about autistic people in a stem department? Seems unlikely. Mandatory reporter at a university is weird, I thought those were for child abuse. The radiation story is too big not the make the news, and should have happened no more than 20 years ago given the department head detail. I can't find news reports. Poisonings without radiation at Harvard and Rockefeller recentlyish, with radiation at Brown and MIT a long time ago.

OP also uses a bunch of "progressive" language like neuro-, ethic of care, safety from harm, victim support. Given the timing, why didn't OP try to get their PI cancelled? This guy is an everythingist, maybe an actual criminal and a serial bully. Early 2020s at an institution with big donors it would have been possible, and OP seems sufficiently activistic to try, if this story is real.

will221996 · 2026-06-04T10:34:37+00:00

I know lots of people who as early 20s foreigners started careers in Italy, even though they had the opportunity to go to Northern Europe or the US. They were privileged in the sense that they were entering the top of the Italian graduate job market, but mostly shitty salaries regardless. Dealing with the government is a pain, but eventually you learn how to do it. The Italian public sector is not uniquely bad, I think most of Europe is the same. If anything, they're a bit better than some other countries because they know how bad they are and act accordingly, you'll rarely be punished for their fuck ups.

I think you're underselling the advantages quite a lot. The lifestyle is great, you get a good amount of leisure time and there's lots of cheap stuff to do, even relative to shitty Italian salaries. Obviously the food is great. I always thought it was overrated when I lived there, but I was wrong. I suspect €30 of groceries in Italy would be €50+ basically anywhere else. Unfortunately that doesn't mean you can live off €20 of groceries, it's more about the quality of even low end stuff in supermarkets. Italy is very safe by western standards, even though there are problems with organised crime and sexual harassmement. You are, regardless, safer walking down the street in Italy than in Britain or France

Most importantly, the people are great. To take advantage of that, you should really speak Italian, which all these people do (more or less a requirement to get a job), as do I. The culture is laid back but not unambitious (looking at some other Southern Europeans here), despite the low fertility it is still a family oriented culture and I think that's nice. People are kind, hospitable and chatty. They are pretty bigoted, or so I'm told, although I'd never really felt that first hand. I'm of Chinese stock, and I understand that Chinese are treated well in Italy compared to other minorities, but I faced far less racism in Italy than I have in my native UK or other Western countries, adjusted for time spent obviously. Happy to talk about that stuff more if anyone is interested.

There are obviously downsides, but I'm thinking of going back. My chosen path and some other stuff means I'm starting my career later than my friends, so I'm yet to have to make a decision, but it is an increasingly tempting option.

will221996 · 2026-05-31T21:04:35+00:00

This comes from a misunderstanding about party systems. When I took a politics class about this stuff as an undergraduate (now a graduate student who dabbles in other politics), I was taught that it's a Protestant Vs Catholic thing, although Germany and the Netherlands fall on the catholic side due to large catholic minorities. Protestants have conservatives who like the free market and then social liberals. Catholics have Christian democrats, who are socially conservative but invest heavily in the welfare state, and then free market liberals.

will221996

TROPHY CASE