dd_roger

Honestly I find it pretty fucked up that someone would renounce their citizenship "for convenience". I can't really comprehend how their country could mean so little to someone, especially when that country is a democracy.

Regarding the taxation when living abroad, doesn't it actually make sense? Sure it sounds like an oddity because the US are the only to do it, but most emigrants I know still use the consular services of their country of origin every now and then, benefit from its diplomatic protection, and can return any time if circumstances require it (implying they should be contributing to keeping the country safe and functional in the meantime, call it an insurance policy if you will), and probably many other benefits I'm not thinking of. Some countries will even send special forces abroad to recover citizens in danger.

So yeah apparently the practicalities of it suck sometimes (and that should definitively be improved) but in principle it's not as outlandish as it sounds, imo.

You are free to not wear a mask or party by yourself, in your house, away from society.

Or you could frame it the other way. Instead of suppressing everyone's freedom, people who are too scared to resume a normal life could watch us live a free life through their window, from the security of their home.

I'm not aware of any country that had a democratic consultation to ask the people which way they wanted it.

I would recommend looking into decoupling your social needs from your job.

I absolutely hate that this is the standard answer that comes up everytime someone mentions not being happy with WFH. Not only it doesn't answer the question, but it's just a slightly more polite version of "just make friends, duh" which is not helpful at all.

To many people (myself included) 2-3 hours of social activities in a day is not enough. I need to be around people, and while it's great to meet some friends in the evening it doesn't change the fact that I just spent 10 miserable hours alone in my appartment. In addition to that, I find there are many disadvantages to remote work: I hate doing over the phone what could have been a nice in-person chat, I hate how tedious it is to show/explain things that would have been easily demonstrated in person, I hate how difficult it is to grasp non-verbal cues, etc. I don't know a single person IRL who likes full time WFH, but judging by how popular it is here, it seems I shouldn't assume that everybody is in the same situation. Conversely, don't assume everybody can turn his miserable WFH experience in something awesome just "by doing stuff in the evening". Btw no offense but I had to laugh at your suggestion that a vido chat is a social activity.

The explosion in the number of sofware components in modern tractors and combines is inherent to what we expect from them. If your open source tractor is essentially a tractor from 20 years ago without the fancy new tech then there's no market for it. Just lookup how much tractors from before the "e-tractor era" go for. I'll break it to you, it's not a lot.

I think people who aren't involved with farming can't really comprehend the amount of technology involved and the savings that technology enables (and ultimately makes it worth it even if the equipment is more difficult/expensive to repair).

As an aside, we always hear complaints about John Deere and never other manufacturers. I wonder if it's because anti-corporate populism works better when it's targeted at a well known american brand or if John Deere is truely that bad. We don't have any modern John Deeres in my area but a few Case IH and Claas, and I've never heard any complaints.

Btw my point isn't to justify the anti-consumer behavior of some manufacturers, but to provide context as to why "an open source tractor" is a completely naive idea.

I don't understand how "not having to file a tax return" can work. How does it account for all the information a government might not reasonably have about your wealth and economic activities? How do you apply for tax credits? The taxation system is not particularly intricate here in Switzerland but there's absolutely no way a government that is not an orwelian surveillance state would have the required information about each person to pre-file their tax return.

Not in the west, it doesn't.

(edit: just realised that maybe you meant the west of the USA and not the western world in general, in this case you might be right I'm obviously not aware of local practices from the other side of the world)

It does, I absolutely hate using authoritative argument but my family raises cattle and I've never seen a watered pasture in my life. I wonder what's the background of people teaching me online "how things really are".

In bad years when it doesn't rain enough for grass to grow, people get rid of the animals they can't afford to feed. There's no system in place to water the pastures and "save the harvest".

If you buy cheap, low quality meat from animals that never grazed and are fed grain and silage all year round then yes these feed crops would probably have been watered at some point (but even then, not 100% of the water comes from irigation). The broad avilability of meat grown in miserable conditions is a problem as well but not the one I'm talking about.

A pound of steak requires 4000 to 6000 gallons of water.

People keep throwing this number around but it's at best voluntarily missleading, if not straight up a lie.

4 to 6k gallons is roughly what a meat cow (slaughtered at 18 months of age) will use in its lifetime (which btw if a lot less than the average westerner in the same time span). To stretch it to "4 to 6k gallons per pound of beef" you have to include the rain that watered its pasture, which makes absolutely no sense. Nobody ever tells that a bread loaf requires 500L of water to produce (roughly the quantity of water needed to water 1 bread loaf worth of wheat) because this water falls for free from the sky anyway.

Now you can make intricate arguments about how if there were other types of ecosystems in place of pastures more water could be retained in the soil and would eventually make its way to aquafiers or rivers -which is true- but I'm confident this isn't how people interpret this number. The goal of people who provide this number without any context is to give the impression that eating a pound of beef is equivalent to letting the faucet open for 4k+ gallons worth of water, which it absolutely isn't.

I think it's pretty widely acknowledged that speed limits are not effectively enforced on cars.

No it's not, unless you have some study to back it up because it's not my experience.

(edit: just to be clear, the spirit of this comment is not to dismiss anything that isn't backed by studies, sometimes simple observation of the world around us is enough to reach solid conclusions, but I disagree that speed limits aren't respected and enforced. Could depend on where you live as well.)

I'm personally convinced that there's no justification for banning eMTBs (or any other negative sentiments toward them really) beside gatekeeping.

There's nothing about eMTBs allowing people to venture in more difficult trails than with normal MTBs. Most terrains that are too hard on a normal MTB will be even harder on an eMTB because you loose some agility and the ability to carry the bike over unrideable sections.

I often see people complain about "how fast eMTBs go in some climbs, which is dangerous to bystanders". This is the most ridiculous argument, completely unrelated to eMTBs. Regardless of the terrain (uphill, downhill, flat, ...) I always slow down to ~walking speed when passing someone if the trail isn't wide enough to put at least ~1.5 meter between me and them. Meanwhile the same people who complain about eMTBs being dangerous bomb down the hill past hikers at 25+ km/h. Anyway, a long rant to basically say that any argument about speed is only ever relevant if brought up in the context of educating people to be more courteous riders regardless of the bike they ride.

Finally, you're orders of magnitudes more likely to be stranded because you punctured and forgot your repair kit (or whatever other damage to your bike that can't be fixed trailside) than due to overheating battery or whatever improbable scenario people come up to justify hating on eMTBs.

It is also not really a viable large scale solution to "how do you move people around?"

Not every solution needs to be large scale to be usefull. I think biofuels should be promoted and used as much as possible (obviously within the limits where it makes sense ecologically speaking, e.g. not destroying ecosystems to plant more biofuel crops or burning coal to synthetize (m)ethanol). Both the idea that EVs are suited for every purpose and that they'll quickly take over the entire ICE car pool are ludicrous. Where EVs can not / not yet be used it makes perfect sense to use alternative fuel sources.

many countries in the West should hire the Chinese to construct and build HSR in their countries with foreign labour under local direction

There's absolutely no reason to do it, most (if not all) western countries are perfectly capable of building highspeed railway technically speaking. The reason why it's not done is political and financial. Also in the current climate you'll have a hard time justifying hiring a chinese companies over a domestic company to build critical infrastuctures (and rightfully so imo). In fact I believe public contracts should always be awarded to domestic companies, granted domestic companies with the required skills exist (which is absolutely the case in Europe for railway).

Without workers in the office, middle management was left to spend additional time on pointless meetings, inhibiting their workers from spending their time on work tasks.

You're just drawing meaningless conclusions based on nothing but your hatred of management lol.

I think the conclusion is that additional meetings do not play the supplemental role that many managers seem to believe it does, and in fact minimizing meetings will increase productivity.

I think the actualy conclusion is that people are less productive at home because many people can't work properly due to an unfavorable working environment. Meanwhile since there's no office hour anymore (no commute to divide personal time from working time) people work from breakfast until dinner. In the end you get the same amount of work done but the timeslot that was dedicated to work during the day was 2-3 hours longer than when working from the office.

It's plain illegal in Switzerland regardless of CCTV signs. Even dashcams are in a gray area where it should technically be illegal but it has never been enforced before a court as far as I know (dashcam are extremely rare here anyway). I wonder how it works for Tesla cars that record their surrounding when parked, maybe they don't have that feature here. Surveillance of public areas is only permited with very good reasons (e.g protecting outdoor ATMs) and must be restricted at the minimum required to serve its purpose.

I share your opinion (I particularily like essays; I follow along the arguments, think whether I agree with them or not, etc. but absolutely hate the "how-to" kind of books which I strongly associate with the hustle and self improvement culture that I find quite toxic.)

But I agree with the author that the later kind of books seems much more popular with the general public, being handed solutions appears to be more attractive to many people that being encouraged to think about problems that probably aren't even relevant to them. And in a sense it's perfectly understandable, but I personally prefer the intellectual stimulation from a good essay over what is essentially a marketing speech from a professional hustler.

I work in OT security in an industry completely unrelated to Telecoms but which is also a matter of national security and everything in this blog post doesn't really sound believable from my experience dealing with sensitive infrastructures. Different industries, different countries, etc. I get that things can differ a bit, but going from "the infrastructure is airgapped" (in my industry) to "the infrastructure is managed remotely by a foreign entity" (as claimed by the author) seems too big to be true. Not gonna lie, I'm a bit sceptical about the veracity of some of these claims.

The argument about increased productivity is a fallacy. Only the primary and secondary sectors have a long track record of increased productivity, in services on the other hands -which represent an ever growing share of the working population in western countries- productivity has been stagnating for multiple decades (in some industries it's actually receding, thankfully compensated by the few industries that have good growth).

My bad, I wasn't familiar with this working arrangement and the vocabulary around it. What I'm describing is simply known as being salaried in my country (not hourly paid as OT is compensated with PTO rather than financial compensation), the vast majority of white collars have such contracts here.

The premise of the article is incorrect to begin with:

The way it’s supposed to work is if you’re salaried/exempt, you’re getting paid to do a job, not for a specific number of hours.

No, I'm paid to work 40 hours per week regardless of the workload, as per my employment contract. If I ever have to work over time, then I get one hour of PTO for each hour of OT.

I don't know if it's an American thing to assume that all companies must be predatory toward their employees or if it's just the internet populist bubble that favors such content, but neither I nor anyone I know can relate to these kinds of articles.

The lack of offering for good students is already a major issue at every step of the education system as it is, closing these classes is a major step backward and "fuck you" to good students (especially with such a lame justification).

If you have a rock in place of a brain there's always some program to keep you in the education system but at the other side of the spectrum if you reach the top 10% of students "that's it you won the game" and you're doomed to utter boredome until university. This is enormously demotivating.

I was in this situation all the way until university (consistantly achieving the best grade without putting any effort into it) and the lack of mental stimulation took a massive toll on my mental health, especially during high school but also middle school to a lesser extend. Looking back at my scholarity I think it was mostly fine until age ~12 because until then school is mostly a fun daycare to meet friends so it's no big deal if the educational content is low or trivial, but then the next 7 years (which corresponds to middle and high school in my country) could have easily been compressed into 4 as far as I'm concerned. But the possibility to do it simply doesn't exist.

There's no company policy mandating me to start that early yet I start between 7am and 7:30am, by 8am the office is mostly full.

The earlier you start the more daylight left to enjoy at the end of the day. 9am really sounds awfully late. People who start at 9 don't enjoy their morning any more than I do. They just wake up later. And it forces them to stay longer in the evening while I'm out taking advantage of the extra day light to do outdoor activities.

I just hope the home office trend doesn't lead to an urbanization of the countryside. I'm from a charming village that was overtaken by ugly and expensive developements during the past 20 years because people from the nearest city realised it was within commutable distance.

I die a little inside every time I see someone oneline saying "I can't wait 'till X area has better internet so I can move there", understand "I can't wait 'till X area has better internet so 10k people can have the same idea as me and turn this rural community into a city".

Now in bigger countries (the US, France, Germany, etc.) there will always be cheap rural areas left (though the most desirable areas will probably urbanize and/or become completely unafordable for workers of the primary and secondary sector) but I'm very worried for smaller countries like mine where rural areas are already sought after as of now and it's only going to get worse.

This is probably going to be unpopular on this forum, but why is everyone assuming that having more researchers is desirable / needed in the first place?

I think scientific research is completely bloated already and there's no need to provide work for even more researchers who will either (1) research an already popular subject where ever growing funding yields ever disminishing returns or (2) research an utterly futile subject that serves no purpose beside justifying the researcher's salary.

Is this an article or a novel? I lost patience before getting to the point.

Beside being long yet void of any convincing arguments/ideas, this article completely ignores the fact that the majority of Covid vaccines are not mRNA vaccines, thus invalidating the premise that "we don't have enough vaccines because mRNA vaccines are hard to produce".

A more appropriate title would be "let me show off what I know about mRNA vaccines".

I think most legacy users from WSB know very well what they are doing.

I've been on this sub for 5 years and it has always been so that everytime the wsb hivemind finds a good deal it gets media attention and the number of clueless users/investors skyrockets. But people who stick around outside of these short periods under the spotlights know very well what they are doing despite the memes.

I don't believe in the theory that there are few people manipulating the entire sub for a pump and dump, rather the entire sub (the few tens of thousands regular active users) knew it was a pump and dump. That this story attracted the attention and money of thousands of clueless newbies is to be blamed on people that reported on it carelessly (medias, celebritites, etc.), not on the people who were doing their things on an internet forum expecting nothing out of it.

Yeah that's a major issue that I bring up everytime UBI is discussed and that for some reason UBI proponents never address.

If UBI isn't high enough to ensure that welfare as we currently know it isn't needed anymore, then why have UBI at all? It just adds complexity to the system for no apparent gain. On the other hand if UBI is high enough to go by without working there's a lot of things that just won't get done anymore.

We don't have any evidence that there was any safety concern here; the FAA has not said that.

That this particular violation didn't lead to any incident doesn't invalidate the need for licenses and the obligation to respect them.

"This particular instance of me driving 200 mph on a public road didn't result in any accident so no big deal right, speed limits are useless"

In my opinion the usefulness of Stack Overflow is vastly overstated. It's nice to find a few examples to get started in a new framework that lacks documentation (when there's documentation at all...) but generally speaking non-trivial questions never get answered anyway. I haven't used it in at least 6 months, maybe even a year if my memory serves me well.

What's most hilarious about this situation is that the EU getting cheaper vaccines than the UK was advertised as a major "Aha you shouldn't have left, see?" a month ago, but now the UK has already vaccinated almost as many people as the entire EU.

Both the EU and its member countries fucked up so badly there aren't words strong enough to describe it. Reminds me of last spring when EU countries were blocking exports of medical supplies to eachothers. The EU appears weaker than ever with the corona crisis ; political cohesion between countries is low, economics are bad, and there's going to be a lot of resentment among the population.

The problem is not using a GPL software internally, but using it in a product that you'd want to sell and at this point be forced to opensource your entire product. Despite what some people like to pretend there's basically no scalable business model outside of SaaS that will make you any money selling GPL-licensed software so this situation is extremely undesireable.