Disclaimer: I haven't been able to read the full article because I don't have a subscription.
Yes, there are alternatives to GDP, but context is key.
If you just to make more meaningful charts or rankings of top 10 countries, you just switch to another indicator and that's it. This could also impact, to some extent, real economic choices.
Other applications are more difficult.
For example, debt substainability. Governments issue bonds to finance stuff, but they eventually have to repay at least interests. This introduces a link between GDP and debt growth. If you replace GDP with another index things get more vague: a country may have the maximum happiness, but if it issues bonds and it cannot repay its interests, it's going to have some trouble anyway.
Monetary policy is also difficult to decouple from GDP. Alternative indicators often mix many aspects, which means the central bank can either
1) target the whole index, which means it could try to influence not just interest rates, but education, healthcare and so on (it essentially blends with the government), or
2) keep targeting inflation, but through non-GDP estimates, which means the price "signal" is mixed with other "noise".
If the only person who can get the money is you (or your partner or children or whatever), it’s fine as a form of compensation for potential damages.
If anyone, including your surgeon, can take that life insurance policy based on your life, things can go bad pretty quickly (hint: what happens if a profit-maximizing surgeon would earn a lot more money from your policy than from his regular job?).
Engineering is not just about the tests. It is also about following standards, making decisions based on data and requirements not just personal preferences or trends, and especially being aware of the legal and ethical implications of what you're building.
That's why there is so much emphasis on signing or stamping projects in the "ordinary" engineering world: you're literally telling a potential third party (which may include a court of law at some point) that you reviewed the work and can be held responsible.
This doesn't rule out team work of course (just think about civil engineering, it's not something you can do alone most of the times), and this doesn't mean there are no unethical or even corrupt engineers, but there is in most cases a single person who is responsible from a professional, ethical, and legal point of view.
In my experience this never occurs with programming unless you're dealing with SWE in engineering-adjacent sectors (aerospace, ...), and even then I'm not sure as I have no personal experience in those areas.
>Moreover, ownership of data cannot be left solely in private hands but must be appropriately regulated. Data is the product of many contributors and should not be treated as something to be sold off or entrusted to a select few. It is necessary to think creatively in order to manage data as a common or shared good, in a spirit of participation, as Saint John Paul II already suggested regarding collective goods. [128]
It does mention IP concerns, but that's not the greatest existential threat posed by AI.
I think the real limit of plain text is pretty obvious: you cannot embed pictures in it.
It’s like SMS vs MMS or modern chat. With pure text, you can at best add a link to a picture (which could get rotten or inaccessible for other reasons), but you cannot directly graphical content.
You can but it’s not part of a plaintext standard. You could certainly build a text editor which can decode a base64 string, but to transform that into a picture you need something implementing the GIF (or JPEG or PNG) specification, otherwise it’s just a binary blob.
I've run some benchmarks a couple years ago, I don't have them at hand unfortunately but off the top of my mind, seqread 4k produced around 1500 IOPS while seqwrite was like a third of that. The practical performance was abysmal, I moved PostgreSQL storage to a volume and it was very noticeably slower just by browsing the web app (compared to NVMe SSD storage).
For comparison, I'm now using UpCloud which uses network-attached storage for all volumes and easily hits 10k IOPS (up to 100k with some tuning).
I certainly may have missed something while testing this so I'm happy if someone else wants to contribute and correct me if I'm wrong.
Yes, there are alternatives to GDP, but context is key.
If you just to make more meaningful charts or rankings of top 10 countries, you just switch to another indicator and that's it. This could also impact, to some extent, real economic choices.
Other applications are more difficult.
For example, debt substainability. Governments issue bonds to finance stuff, but they eventually have to repay at least interests. This introduces a link between GDP and debt growth. If you replace GDP with another index things get more vague: a country may have the maximum happiness, but if it issues bonds and it cannot repay its interests, it's going to have some trouble anyway.
Monetary policy is also difficult to decouple from GDP. Alternative indicators often mix many aspects, which means the central bank can either
1) target the whole index, which means it could try to influence not just interest rates, but education, healthcare and so on (it essentially blends with the government), or
2) keep targeting inflation, but through non-GDP estimates, which means the price "signal" is mixed with other "noise".
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