And while I like heat pumps they are not very popular in France and do have drawbacks like a lot of noise and questionable power output depending on climate.
A ground source heat pump has no need for an outdoor unit with moving mechanical components: no external noise is produced.
But they need a deep well or a lot of surface to install tubing for the heat exchanger which is not practical for the kind of large buildings targeted by Qarnot. So there is essentially no overlap between the two markets.
I wonder what they have for local storage. ISTR from my BOINC days that most applications wanted a hefty storage area so their job servers didn't have to be arsed to talk to the nodes more than once a day or so.
From the Qarnot FAQ: In addition, Q.rads computing nodes are stateless without any storage.
These don't appear to be high radiance units as they are partly convective, but I have seen similar mostly-touch-safe (not that you'd want to) wall units in use in homes...
From the Qarnot FAQ: Q.rad can heat a 150 to 250 sq. feet room in a building meeting modern isolation standards. The Q.rad is a system with high inertia and produces a high quality soft heat as opposed to electrical convectors.
The conventional equivalent would somewhere between a low temperature surface heater and an oil filled electric radiator.
You'd need a 20-processor board to match a small conventional mini-heater which would barely heat one room in the winter.
They are mostly targeting new building that, by law, have to follow low-energy standards and thus need much less heating.
Though the heat should be used, I'm not sure that using it for direct home heating is really worthwhile.
Datacenters need lots of cooling and lots of infrastructure for redundancy. Here redundancy is provided by geographical distribution: if a town block loses power then that only impacts a small part of the computing capacity. Same for Internet connectivity. And cooling is not needed. Finally the buildings these devices are heating would have needed heating anyway. So when you compare the two, on one side you need to add the energy needed for the computing, cooling and providing redundancy to the datacenter, and heating the buildings that would have been Qarnot customers; and on the other side, just heating Qarnot customers. So that gives the Qarnot system a good edge from an energy consumption standpoint (which is a significant part of the costs for a datacenter). I'll concede to some hidden costs if you look at it more globally: Qarnot still needs some central servers to distribute the work (but that's not much) and it increases Internet traffic which is not as energy efficient as just distributing data inside a datacenter.
The processors of the Q.rads are regulated to meet the target temperature defined by the end-user. The computing power is naturally impacted by seasonality. By using processors low power modes and by choosing adapted deployment sites, Qarnot manages to keep a minimum computing capacity all year long. To compute all-year round when computing demand is higher than the deployed capacity, Qarnot also starts to have partnerships with green data centers and to develop other products for sites that need heat all year long (water, industry/agriculture).
Qarnot computing is setting up partnerships with private and public research centers and labs which regularly launch computation campaigns that can last up to several years. Such campaigns include BOINC and many other academic projects. Thus, Q.rads will always have a background buffer of useful computations to process to produce heat when inhabitants need heating.
Because this business model is not well though-of. Internet informs me that AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 1700X consumes 95 W of power, much like an old-school light-bulb.
95W to which you add power consumption for the motherboard chipset, RAM, network card, and power supply. Qarnot has been on the market for two years already so I'm pretty sure they know what they are doing by now.
Crappy oil radiators seem to start at 600 W (about 6 CPUs) and better ones have a power consumption of up to 2500 W (26 CPUs).
Bigger = better. Are you American? A 2600W heater is not any better if what you need is a 500W one. Also one big 2600W heater is not better than two 1300W ones as it concentrates all the heat in one place causing uneven heating. Finally they are mostly targeting new building that, by law, have to follow low-energy standards and thus need much less heating.
Even if the CPUs reach a rather elevated temperature (1700X maxes out at 95 C), the surface temperature of the rack is only going to be luke warm, so you're not going to get any heat radiated to you.
Wow! You don't know anything about heating, do you?
High temperature heaters are really out of fashion because they cause lots of convection, moving the dust around, and because all the heat to go to the ceiling leaving the reat of the room, where you are, cold, thus increasing heating costs.
So nowadays most everyone buys low temperature heaters that provide a mix of convection and heating via infrared radiation (with its ultimate form being underfloor heating). They provide a much more even heating which lets you turn the thermostat down and thus save on power.
The heat is going to reach you by convection via the fans, which is a crappy way to warm yourself up.
From the Qarnot FAQ: Q.rads are totally silent since there are no mobile parts inside the Q.rad (no ventilators, no hard drives).
The costs of installation, transportation etc, however, are going to eat away most of the savings in my opinion.
That's probably why they don't target individual houses. Again from their FAQ: For now, we only install Q.rads in buildings for a minimum of 20 units !
I suppose, of course, that Qarnot will be paying for the electricity.
Still from their FAQ: Qarnot computing sells the computing power of the Q.rads to companies and research centers. The selling of these services pays for the electricity used by the Q.rads and therefore the heating that is produced. Each Q.rad continuously records its energetic (kW/h) and computing (CPU.h) consumption which enables Qarnot to bill its computing clients and refund the electricity consumed.
And also the noise, imagine a rack of servers at full load, it will not generate that much heat, but it will sound like a jet engine.
From their FAQ: Q.rads are totally silent since there are no mobile parts inside the Q.rad (no ventilators, no hard drives).
I guess they wouldn't have the costs of a datacenter, but also wouldn't have the benefits, like fast network, someone nearby to solve any issues (imagine a server shutsdown in the middle of the night,
See above: no moving part. This greatly improves reliability. Plus, still from their FAQ: In addition, Q.rads computing nodes are stateless without any storage.. Finally this is distributed computing, no server is critical. If one device dies down, then just direct the workload to any other.
Besides that, using resistive heating is terribly energy inefficient, a heat pump is much more economical.
Datacenters need lots of cooling and lots of infrastructure for redundancy. Here redundancy is provided by geographical distribution: if a town block loses power then that only impacts a small part of the computing capacity. Same for Internet connectivity. And cooling is not needed. Finally the buildings these devices are heating would have needed heating anyway. So when you compare the two, on one side you need to add the energy needed for the computing, cooling and providing redundancy to the datacenter, and heating the buildings that would have been Qarnot customers; and on the other side, just heating Qarnot customers. I'll concede to some hidden costs: Qarnot still needs some central servers to distribute the work (but that's not much) and it increases Internet traffic which is not as energy efficient as just distributing data inside a datacenter.
And while I like heat pumps they are not very popular in France and do have drawbacks like a lot of noise and questionable power output depending on climate.
You must have a really interesting Library that allows you to borrow (for free) movies.
Libraries that have DVDs are not rare. The library here has some though the selection is definitely not great and certainly does not include StarWars (too popular / not intellectual enough). It's also not free (unless you have low revenue): it costs 5€ per *year* for unlimited books, CDs and DVDs (the only limitation being on the number of simultaneous items).
Just because the creator packaged a group of pictographs together into a single 'font' (similar to how songs are packaged into a single album) does not change anything.
While it would be nice to see the penalties calculated on a per character basis, I think it won't work if only because the analogy is flawed: the labels also sell the songs individually, as singles or on online platforms so they can claim damages for each individual song. But I suspect the font designer does not sell characters individually and does not intend to. So he cannot claim damages for each individual character. Too bad:-(
Out of curiosity, why can't a computer... you know, the things that mentally make 500 test moves in a second in a chess game... predict the outcome of what a malicious file is about to do and apply the brakes?
The study itself says "In fact, coffee farming could increase four fold if plantations are moved uphill, "
Yep. Until that area too becomes too hot as well and then they have to move again (or not).
Perhaps a more fair headline would be "Climate change displacing Ethiopian Coffee farmers, but will increase their productivity fourfold."?
No. That headline would be unsupported by the article: the article did not say how much surface would be needed to get this increased production. If it takes 4 times the surface to produce 4 times as much coffee then productivity has not increased at all.
It has evidently failed to capture your attention that the post to which I had responded above did not mention killing in self defense, at all.
It has evidently failed to capture your attention that the subject of this thread is whether intent makes a difference which applies equally to killing in self defense. Now, had your your answer been a little bit more nuanced...
Someone killing a person for molesting their kid is different than killing someone randomly.
The only objective difference between them lies in an appeal to emotion.
So if you kill someone in self defense you want to be treated exactly the same way as the guy who planned for months and killed his parents to inherit?
...and I thought Stanford was, like, where smart people go? I mean, I'm all for EV's and all, but nothing short of an invasion of space aliens or global thermonuclear war is gonna sink fossil fuels in 8 years.
I don't think he's really saying that demand for oil with go down to 0 in 8 years. But if the demand drops by 25% and there is no prospect for it to rebound due to the growing fleet of electric cars, then investment will stop, prices will fall, and existing investments that counted on high prices to break even will tank. That can be enough to sink some (but not all) of the players.
The 2008 financial crisis did not bankrupt all or even a majority of the banks. Also not everyone sold everything off (i.e. the demand did not drop to zero). Yet the disruption was pretty global and severe. In the same way the demand for oil does not have to drop to zero to cause a new far-ranging worldwide crisis.
That said 8 years seems awfully short for the advent of fully autonomous self-driving cars (which seems to be one of his predicates), and their taking a significant enough market share to really have an impact. Also I'm not convinced the switch to electric cars (another of his predicates) will really take off without significant improvements in the battery technology and the timeline for those can hardly be predicted. The counter-argument is that pooled self-driving cars could render the need for better batteries moot: for long-haul trips just switch cars at every rest-stop, a bit like one would change horses with carriages of old.
Tesla cars cost stupid money and you could buy more than 200,000 miles worth of petrol with with the money you save by buying a petrol car.
BMWs and Mercedes cost stupid money and you could buy more than 200,000 miles worth of petrol with with the money you save by buying almost any other car. And yet people still by BMWs and Mercedes. And more to the point the Tesla Model 3 will be much cheaper than the existing options and more in line, price-wise, with the throngs of Volkswagens in the streets.
The whole dream is based on everyone parking in a garage. Most people live in flats.
Countries, like France, made having a charging station in the building's parking lot a right : the landlord cannot refuse to install one if a tenant requests it. For that the tenant must properly notify the owner, provide details of the planned construction work, and then finance said construction work. So the issue of flats is moot... in reasonable countries.
Plug on in in the street and your charging cable will not be there in the morning.
Many cities, like Paris, have had electric car-sharing for years and yet the charging cables are still there. Or was that comment only for Manila too? I think the point of the article is can existing car manufacturers survive with Manilla as their sole market? If not, and the rest of the market shrinks significantly due to self-driving cars (electric or not), they may still get into trouble.
BTW, petrol did not win over steam, it won over electric. Before the model T most cars were electric.
The state of the art in batteries has changed quite a lot since then, though not quiet enough yet.
I do agree that electric will return but I do not agree with your maths or that it will happen in 8 years.
And there I have to agree with you. 8 years seems awfully short for such a change.
Now let us consider a gasoline car. I'll assume an optimistic 10L/100km.
That's absolutely not optimistic. That's very pessimistic. Already 8L/100km would be pessimistic (or reflect 100% in-city driving) and I'd expect something like 6.5 to 7L/100km to be more typical, even on highways at 65mph.
That's more in TAXES per km than your electric vehicle costs in electricity right now. If you think the government is going to let that revenue disappear your nuts... so for a realistic comparison take your 0.0299 cents/km... and add 4 cents taxes to it. Because that's probably how its going to go.
Unless they do the obvious and just increase the income tax which has the advantage of being a progressive tax.
Costs are for fossil fuel cars are going up.
My in-laws house... they couldn't get permitting to add a Tesla fast charging port, they'd need a new electrical box, inspections, new wiring...big project. Millions of houses like that.
Or they could simply charge their Tesla with a regular 220V electrical plug. Not fast but sufficient unless they drive 200 miles every day.
You can't excuse something bad by pointing out it's worse elsewhere.
More importantly you can't say someone who pays $200/month for health insurance got screwed up because you only pay $100/month without also comparing what coverage you both get! The article points out that taxes in France are higher but they include health care, retirement, and mostly free education (higher education tuition fees are under 600€ / year). How do the costs compare once you include all that on top of the US taxes?
Once you've done that analysis you may well realize that you get too little for the price you pay compared to other countries.
Just because taxes could be higher, and just because they are even higher for somebody else, doesn't mean they aren't high.
You can't say that taxes are higher elsewhere without comparing what they get you. In France for instance the payroll and income taxes get you employment insurance, health care, retirement, and mostly free education (higher education tuition fees are under 600€ / year). How much does it cost to get all that in your country?
Slashdot Mirror
And while I like heat pumps they are not very popular in France and do have drawbacks like a lot of noise and questionable power output depending on climate.
A ground source heat pump has no need for an outdoor unit with moving mechanical components: no external noise is produced.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
But they need a deep well or a lot of surface to install tubing for the heat exchanger which is not practical for the kind of large buildings targeted by Qarnot. So there is essentially no overlap between the two markets.
I wonder what they have for local storage. ISTR from my BOINC days that most applications wanted a hefty storage area so their job servers didn't have to be arsed to talk to the nodes more than once a day or so.
From the Qarnot FAQ: In addition, Q.rads computing nodes are stateless without any storage.
Gotta start somewhere.
Qarnot was founded roughly 4 years ago and also has customers in the Paris area.
"1500 AMD Ryzen PRO will heat homes and offices next year in Bordeaux, France"
That is not really geography diverse - it is all within one city or area.
That's their next deployment. They already have customers in the Paris area.
These don't appear to be high radiance units as they are partly convective, but I have seen similar mostly-touch-safe (not that you'd want to) wall units in use in homes...
From the Qarnot FAQ: Q.rad can heat a 150 to 250 sq. feet room in a building meeting modern isolation standards. The Q.rad is a system with high inertia and produces a high quality soft heat as opposed to electrical convectors.
The conventional equivalent would somewhere between a low temperature surface heater and an oil filled electric radiator.
Call it 100W per processor.
You'd need a 20-processor board to match a small conventional mini-heater which would barely heat one room in the winter.
They are mostly targeting new building that, by law, have to follow low-energy standards and thus need much less heating.
Though the heat should be used, I'm not sure that using it for direct home heating is really worthwhile.
Datacenters need lots of cooling and lots of infrastructure for redundancy. Here redundancy is provided by geographical distribution: if a town block loses power then that only impacts a small part of the computing capacity. Same for Internet connectivity. And cooling is not needed. Finally the buildings these devices are heating would have needed heating anyway. So when you compare the two, on one side you need to add the energy needed for the computing, cooling and providing redundancy to the datacenter, and heating the buildings that would have been Qarnot customers; and on the other side, just heating Qarnot customers. So that gives the Qarnot system a good edge from an energy consumption standpoint (which is a significant part of the costs for a datacenter). I'll concede to some hidden costs if you look at it more globally: Qarnot still needs some central servers to distribute the work (but that's not much) and it increases Internet traffic which is not as energy efficient as just distributing data inside a datacenter.
I know the French take a vacation in August, but it seems like you wouldn't want a space heater running during any of the summer.
From the Qarnot FAQ:
The processors of the Q.rads are regulated to meet the target temperature defined by the end-user. The computing power is naturally impacted by seasonality. By using processors low power modes and by choosing adapted deployment sites, Qarnot manages to keep a minimum computing capacity all year long. To compute all-year round when computing demand is higher than the deployed capacity, Qarnot also starts to have partnerships with green data centers and to develop other products for sites that need heat all year long (water, industry/agriculture).
Qarnot computing is setting up partnerships with private and public research centers and labs which regularly launch computation campaigns that can last up to several years. Such campaigns include BOINC and many other academic projects. Thus, Q.rads will always have a background buffer of useful computations to process to produce heat when inhabitants need heating.
Because this business model is not well though-of. Internet informs me that AMD Ryzen 7 PRO 1700X consumes 95 W of power, much like an old-school light-bulb.
95W to which you add power consumption for the motherboard chipset, RAM, network card, and power supply. Qarnot has been on the market for two years already so I'm pretty sure they know what they are doing by now.
Crappy oil radiators seem to start at 600 W (about 6 CPUs) and better ones have a power consumption of up to 2500 W (26 CPUs).
Bigger = better. Are you American? A 2600W heater is not any better if what you need is a 500W one. Also one big 2600W heater is not better than two 1300W ones as it concentrates all the heat in one place causing uneven heating. Finally they are mostly targeting new building that, by law, have to follow low-energy standards and thus need much less heating.
Even if the CPUs reach a rather elevated temperature (1700X maxes out at 95 C), the surface temperature of the rack is only going to be luke warm, so you're not going to get any heat radiated to you.
Wow! You don't know anything about heating, do you?
High temperature heaters are really out of fashion because they cause lots of convection, moving the dust around, and because all the heat to go to the ceiling leaving the reat of the room, where you are, cold, thus increasing heating costs.
So nowadays most everyone buys low temperature heaters that provide a mix of convection and heating via infrared radiation (with its ultimate form being underfloor heating). They provide a much more even heating which lets you turn the thermostat down and thus save on power.
The heat is going to reach you by convection via the fans, which is a crappy way to warm yourself up.
From the Qarnot FAQ: Q.rads are totally silent since there are no mobile parts inside the Q.rad (no ventilators, no hard drives).
The costs of installation, transportation etc, however, are going to eat away most of the savings in my opinion.
That's probably why they don't target individual houses. Again from their FAQ: For now, we only install Q.rads in buildings for a minimum of 20 units !
I suppose, of course, that Qarnot will be paying for the electricity.
Still from their FAQ: Qarnot computing sells the computing power of the Q.rads to companies and research centers. The selling of these services pays for the electricity used by the Q.rads and therefore the heating that is produced. Each Q.rad continuously records its energetic (kW/h) and computing (CPU.h) consumption which enables Qarnot to bill its computing clients and refund the electricity consumed.
And also the noise, imagine a rack of servers at full load, it will not generate that much heat, but it will sound like a jet engine.
From their FAQ: Q.rads are totally silent since there are no mobile parts inside the Q.rad (no ventilators, no hard drives).
I guess they wouldn't have the costs of a datacenter, but also wouldn't have the benefits, like fast network, someone nearby to solve any issues (imagine a server shutsdown in the middle of the night,
See above: no moving part. This greatly improves reliability. Plus, still from their FAQ: In addition, Q.rads computing nodes are stateless without any storage.. Finally this is distributed computing, no server is critical. If one device dies down, then just direct the workload to any other.
Besides that, using resistive heating is terribly energy inefficient, a heat pump is much more economical.
Datacenters need lots of cooling and lots of infrastructure for redundancy. Here redundancy is provided by geographical distribution: if a town block loses power then that only impacts a small part of the computing capacity. Same for Internet connectivity. And cooling is not needed. Finally the buildings these devices are heating would have needed heating anyway. So when you compare the two, on one side you need to add the energy needed for the computing, cooling and providing redundancy to the datacenter, and heating the buildings that would have been Qarnot customers; and on the other side, just heating Qarnot customers. I'll concede to some hidden costs: Qarnot still needs some central servers to distribute the work (but that's not much) and it increases Internet traffic which is not as energy efficient as just distributing data inside a datacenter.
And while I like heat pumps they are not very popular in France and do have drawbacks like a lot of noise and questionable power output depending on climate.
it's hyperbole to suggest that it can level a small country.
Hmm.... Vatican? Monaco?
You must have a really interesting Library that allows you to borrow (for free) movies.
Libraries that have DVDs are not rare. The library here has some though the selection is definitely not great and certainly does not include StarWars (too popular / not intellectual enough). It's also not free (unless you have low revenue): it costs 5€ per *year* for unlimited books, CDs and DVDs (the only limitation being on the number of simultaneous items).
Just because the creator packaged a group of pictographs together into a single 'font' (similar to how songs are packaged into a single album) does not change anything.
While it would be nice to see the penalties calculated on a per character basis, I think it won't work if only because the analogy is flawed: the labels also sell the songs individually, as singles or on online platforms so they can claim damages for each individual song. But I suspect the font designer does not sell characters individually and does not intend to. So he cannot claim damages for each individual character. Too bad :-(
Out of curiosity, why can't a computer ... you know, the things that mentally make 500 test moves in a second in a chess game ... predict the outcome of what a malicious file is about to do and apply the brakes?
Two words: Halting problem.
The study itself says "In fact, coffee farming could increase four fold if plantations are moved uphill, "
Yep. Until that area too becomes too hot as well and then they have to move again (or not).
Perhaps a more fair headline would be "Climate change displacing Ethiopian Coffee farmers, but will increase their productivity fourfold."?
No. That headline would be unsupported by the article: the article did not say how much surface would be needed to get this increased production. If it takes 4 times the surface to produce 4 times as much coffee then productivity has not increased at all.
It has evidently failed to capture your attention that the post to which I had responded above did not mention killing in self defense, at all.
It has evidently failed to capture your attention that the subject of this thread is whether intent makes a difference which applies equally to killing in self defense. Now, had your your answer been a little bit more nuanced...
Someone killing a person for molesting their kid is different than killing someone randomly.
The only objective difference between them lies in an appeal to emotion.
So if you kill someone in self defense you want to be treated exactly the same way as the guy who planned for months and killed his parents to inherit?
...and I thought Stanford was, like, where smart people go? I mean, I'm all for EV's and all, but nothing short of an invasion of space aliens or global thermonuclear war is gonna sink fossil fuels in 8 years.
I don't think he's really saying that demand for oil with go down to 0 in 8 years. But if the demand drops by 25% and there is no prospect for it to rebound due to the growing fleet of electric cars, then investment will stop, prices will fall, and existing investments that counted on high prices to break even will tank. That can be enough to sink some (but not all) of the players.
The 2008 financial crisis did not bankrupt all or even a majority of the banks. Also not everyone sold everything off (i.e. the demand did not drop to zero). Yet the disruption was pretty global and severe. In the same way the demand for oil does not have to drop to zero to cause a new far-ranging worldwide crisis.
That said 8 years seems awfully short for the advent of fully autonomous self-driving cars (which seems to be one of his predicates), and their taking a significant enough market share to really have an impact. Also I'm not convinced the switch to electric cars (another of his predicates) will really take off without significant improvements in the battery technology and the timeline for those can hardly be predicted. The counter-argument is that pooled self-driving cars could render the need for better batteries moot: for long-haul trips just switch cars at every rest-stop, a bit like one would change horses with carriages of old.
Tesla cars cost stupid money and you could buy more than 200,000 miles worth of petrol with with the money you save by buying a petrol car.
BMWs and Mercedes cost stupid money and you could buy more than 200,000 miles worth of petrol with with the money you save by buying almost any other car. And yet people still by BMWs and Mercedes. And more to the point the Tesla Model 3 will be much cheaper than the existing options and more in line, price-wise, with the throngs of Volkswagens in the streets.
The whole dream is based on everyone parking in a garage. Most people live in flats.
Countries, like France, made having a charging station in the building's parking lot a right : the landlord cannot refuse to install one if a tenant requests it. For that the tenant must properly notify the owner, provide details of the planned construction work, and then finance said construction work. So the issue of flats is moot... in reasonable countries.
Plug on in in the street and your charging cable will not be there in the morning.
Many cities, like Paris, have had electric car-sharing for years and yet the charging cables are still there. Or was that comment only for Manila too? I think the point of the article is can existing car manufacturers survive with Manilla as their sole market? If not, and the rest of the market shrinks significantly due to self-driving cars (electric or not), they may still get into trouble.
BTW, petrol did not win over steam, it won over electric. Before the model T most cars were electric.
The state of the art in batteries has changed quite a lot since then, though not quiet enough yet.
I do agree that electric will return but I do not agree with your maths or that it will happen in 8 years.
And there I have to agree with you. 8 years seems awfully short for such a change.
Now let us consider a gasoline car. I'll assume an optimistic 10L/100km.
That's absolutely not optimistic. That's very pessimistic. Already 8L/100km would be pessimistic (or reflect 100% in-city driving) and I'd expect something like 6.5 to 7L/100km to be more typical, even on highways at 65mph.
That's more in TAXES per km than your electric vehicle costs in electricity right now. If you think the government is going to let that revenue disappear your nuts... so for a realistic comparison take your 0.0299 cents/km... and add 4 cents taxes to it. Because that's probably how its going to go.
Unless they do the obvious and just increase the income tax which has the advantage of being a progressive tax.
Costs are for fossil fuel cars are going up.
My in-laws house... they couldn't get permitting to add a Tesla fast charging port, they'd need a new electrical box, inspections, new wiring...big project. Millions of houses like that.
Or they could simply charge their Tesla with a regular 220V electrical plug. Not fast but sufficient unless they drive 200 miles every day.
For about a week until Gesichterbuch and livre de visages get launched.
No. In France we've had Face de Bouc for a long time already.
Yeah, why aren't you working from 6AM to midnight on the laundry!
You know you don't have to stand in front of the washer while it operates. Right?
Somehow this reminds me of something...
You can't excuse something bad by pointing out it's worse elsewhere.
More importantly you can't say someone who pays $200/month for health insurance got screwed up because you only pay $100/month without also comparing what coverage you both get! The article points out that taxes in France are higher but they include health care, retirement, and mostly free education (higher education tuition fees are under 600€ / year). How do the costs compare once you include all that on top of the US taxes?
Once you've done that analysis you may well realize that you get too little for the price you pay compared to other countries.
Just because taxes could be higher, and just because they are even higher for somebody else, doesn't mean they aren't high.
You can't say that taxes are higher elsewhere without comparing what they get you. In France for instance the payroll and income taxes get you employment insurance, health care, retirement, and mostly free education (higher education tuition fees are under 600€ / year). How much does it cost to get all that in your country?