> one could also question the ethics of buying rare, second-hand books and then destroying them

I believe that is exactly what the parent post is doing

I want to believe most of what they're missing is material held in national and public university libraries and is material specific to the country the books or papers come from. Most of their collections are not digitized and that's what I keep seeing, and then some books that are profession-specific.

They're basically rebuilding Google books, and keeping it private. That's privatizing all of humanity's knowledge.

This must require a shocking cultural adaptation. In the US, we have many social bonding customs. You'll hear often about how Americans strike up conversations at random, often say "how are you?" as a default greeting, and smile a suspicious amount. There are dozens of examples, but that's because it's baked into the culture of USA as a foundational aspect. I can't imagine trying to shift from essentially Japan to America++ in two decades.

Where you happen to be born is the only criteria for population diversity?

right but the entire norwegian society and its welfare state was built upon that homogeneity, where everyone and their neighbor looked "familiar" and could be implicitly trusted to share the same customs. As the foreign born population grows, Norway has taken many steps to restrict immigration, asylum claims, and benefits to immigrants. public opinion has shifted (though not dramatically) as well. parent poster's claim of "easy mode" is receding, so it's not like norway has found a solution to "being a generous welfare state while also openly welcoming foreigners".

How much of that is from legal migration from developed first world countries for both countries?

I know I will be downvoted for this.

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What is wild to me: The United Kingdom, The Netherlands, and Norway took very different paths. For those unaware, the UK shares the North Sea with Norway and there is plenty of oil and gas extract in the UK area of the North Sea. And, the Netherlands has an enormous gas field in the northern part of its country. The UK and Netherlands left it up to private industry and (mostly) taxed it as regular business profits. They didn't create a national petro fund from these profits. However, Norway took a very different path. They created a state-run oil and gas company (Statoil/Equinor) that operate many of the oil and gas extraction sites, and famously created a national petro fund to manage most of the profits. I always wonder why... Was this a missed opportunity for UK and Netherlands?

It usually is when western countries don't continuously interfere with your government.

What are the counterexamples? Maybe Nigeria?

EDIT: yes, also Iraq and Venezuela

We have to stop pretending that the market automatically arrives at socially optimal solutions. We don't say car safety regulations need to be weakened to compete with China, but when it comes to AI, safety magically goes out the window.

Norway is not part of EU (if by EU you meant European Union, not just a country in Europe)

Norway is participating in EU trade, but is not its member. They are part of Schengen (passport-free travel between 29 European countries).

On the other hand, move to the EU and market to customers who don't want to worry about trade wars disrupting their business or the US government subpoena-ing data. Probably not a big enough market to justify that move yet, but it's not obvious to this American that my government is going to reverse its current self-destructive course.

You didn't even make it to the parent's third sentence "bro".

I don't disagree with the sentiment but I think obviously negativity bias would be a significant cofounder.

>> how about even a simpler question: why are almost all governments inefficient (except may be few like tax department) and are full of red-carpet paper pushers?

That you can just assert that as though it is a fact universally known says a lot where your head is at. If the private sector is so efficient, how come US health care is so much more expensive than some public health systems with better outcomes? How come public utilities are sometimes cheaper than private ones? Why do public fire departments exist at all, why not have contractors? Etc.

I agree government is often inefficient. The world is just obviously more complicated then you are considering.

> why are almost all governments inefficient

Efficiency is not the aim of government, except in constrained ways. Efficiency would generally run contrary to governance, transparency, innovation, responsiveness, general applicability, justice, rule following, considering the long term and not just the short term, recognition of human dignity, security etc.

All those things have a cost that takes away from maximum delivery efficiency, but generally societies decide that the cost is worth it.

us-east-1 goes down and half of the "extremely complex and robust technical infrastructure" that Silicon Valley types have built stops working.

The average computer toucher with delusions of grandeur would kill themselves if they had to moderate a public assembly or do a public facing job in a municipal office. Of course you believe that's peon work and your superior intellect with unlimited power as leader would build something better, cue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_State_Project