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Seems easy to rule out vitamin D if sunlight exposure isn't relevant at time of infection then.

Before the vitamin D link was so widely reported, I remember seeing a bunch of comments online (including HN) from people saying things along the lines of "We've been self-isolating at home since January, only bought things online, and STILL got sick!"

I'm not a professional and this is just me spouting ideas, but I wonder if this is one reason why America is so hard hit compared to Asia. Americans generally commute by car, stay in a massive building complex all day for work, and go home and stay inside. In Asia, a huge proportion of people commute by foot, train (which involves walking to the station), or scooter. Then they walk to a grocery store or restaurant to get some food. I wonder if those minutes of continuous sun exposure add up and lighten the severity of it.

The article is about this being a global phenomenon, with emphasis on France and the UK. Weird to believe that this is any worse in America than it is anywhere else.

It's human nature to have an in-group and out-group. Sometimes it's as simple as language. Generally, anyone who claims they have absolutely no bias against X people for Y characteristic aren't aware of their own biases.

It's fascinating to me hearing about how Hong Kong and Tokyo have similar cost of living to even some of the most expensive metros in the US

It's truly fascinating because I've never seen a city in Japan that costs anywhere near as much as some podunk local economic hub in the US, yet I hear these "it's too expensive" stories all the time.

My combined monthly expenses in a city--rent, food, and everything--comes to maybe $1200. My mind is blown whenever I hear people say they're struggling to pay for things or life is too expensive. The main thing I've noticed is most of these people are going to bars/izakaya several times a week, and it's easy to spend $50+ for a small meal and some beers there. I know people in Tokyo making far less than Western wages but still living very comfortably.

But in-city rent in Japan doesn't even approach a typical 500k population city in the US , unless you're insisting on living in the middle of the most in demand parts of Shibuya or something.

This is a joke, right?

Being taught something != actually feeling something. You can say "that's bad" and people will repeat after you in agreement. Doesn't mean the voice in the back of their mind actually agrees or can just flip like a switch. Decades of thinking that are slowly ironed in don't just go away in an instant.

And the parent comment saying Americans who aren't out there being entrepreneurs and starting businesses are "drowning themselves in self-pity" is insulting.

When I immigrated, I left behind tangible proof of my achievements, but I could've also completely bullshitted my history and instantly jumped into a higher level than was possible in my old country. It's also virtually risk-free should I fail. So long as I have enough money for a plane ticket home, I can just leave and there's zero long term consequence. This is incredibly common for westerners in Asia to do. It's also not uncommon for non-Americans to move to the US to instantly get a leg up in work with some companies really giving preferential treatment to things like H1Bs, then going back home with a larger savings and better opportunities to actually get started as an entrepreneur.

Americans who only have America don't have those massive privileges.

The USA is an absolute paradise for an immigrant.

This is really the key point.

When immigrating to a country, you’re already taking a huge risk. You’re leaving behind extended family. You’re generally a little more well off than a typical person in your home country. You’re not really bound down by debt histories (who’s going to collect when you’re 5000 miles away and your bank accounts are out of reach?). Your debt future isn’t as much of a concern (who’s going to collect if you just pack up and go home without telling anyone?) Your past work experience and education experience isn’t as much of a concern because nobody is going to call up a former employer in a foreign country or look up transcripts or know anything about the reputation of foreign schools. You’re generally willing to take bigger risks because you’ve already taken a huge one by up and leaving your old lifestyle, and you also abandon a bunch of your burdens.

A bunch of people will say their home country doesn’t have great opportunities, but America does. 100% of the time, without exception, there’s an American living in that country making shitloads of money because being an immigrant there presents unique opportunities and they’re laughing at people saying America would be better.

Saying this as someone who immigrated to a country outside of America.

They feel like they're designed to optimize discomfort.

There are really only two ways I can sit in them. One is that just one small point of my head makes contact, and my back is perfectly straight and doesn't make contact with the seat. The other is that I do rest my head against it, but I'm bending my head down at a 45 degree angle and it feels like my neck is about to snap.

I wish they just didn't exist.

I've been picking out pictures of fire hydrants and stoplights for five years now with no end in sight.

Sometimes literally. They'll show me series of fire hydrants that don't end after several minutes, and I just give up.

Boredom is a really overlooked one.

If I’m outside and doing something all day, or I’m really involved in reading a book or painting something, over half a day will pass before I realize I forgot to eat breakfast.

But if I’m relaxing, wasting time on the internet, or not really doing much, I get an urge to grab a snack or have a glass of milk that’ll hit me once an hour.

subsidized by hundreds of millions in VC funding for almost a decade

That hasn't stopped any company from total collapse before and it won't now. Other social media sites have people somewhat locked in since it's all about staying in contact with friends and following certain people. You need to push the entire crowd at once to have a good replacement, but those sites still die when they screw up enough. Reddit's a place where people mostly read comments, see some funny pictures or news, and then go about their day. There's a lot less keeping people from dropping it and moving on.

Wearing masks, like hand washing, has limited benefits if most people aren't doing it. Vaccines are also far more effective if a large number of people get them.

Studies comparing populations with almost 100% mask wearing and countries with almost no masks would make for a better comparison.

My current game dev project is being done with relatively low poly models and non-realistic textures. I've tried adding higher levels of detail to the game, but gave up pretty early on. Unless it looks great and stylized, highly detailed art that's just okay ends up looking cheaper than intentionally simple and under-detailed art. I ended up settling on something a little bit above Sega Saturn style and I'm feeling immersed in my own test levels.

Whenever I see a game with super detailed forests and houses and human models, it's almost impossible to get interested in it. It's too real and bland. Maybe it's a mental association from seeing a bunch of cheap Russian and Chinese games on Steam that use premade assets.

Yeah, the article mentions some news sites being banned temporarily in Japan, but as someone who reads those sites near daily, I never noticed it happening.

There's a considerable difference between galleries holding physical goods with extremely limited space and needing to curate things for a specific market, and one of the largest corporations to ever exist approving software to sell on a virtually limitless marketplace for every niche and need imaginable.

The poster said their kid wasn't interested in fiddling with workings of computers before social media was a thing, so I don't think that's the problem in their specific case.

Yeah I definitely had that experience a few times.

Using the maps on my phone in a different country where nobody spoke my language and I didn't speak theirs with 25% battery life and having it suddenly shut down wasn't the funnest moment of my life.

Seems like your kid just isn’t interested in the same things you are. If the flashy entertainment were stripped away, they probably would’ve never cared about it.

And that’s okay.

Should the biological process through which most mammals carry on their future existence be considered an act of parasitism? I think being a parasite usually requires two conditions be met: 1 is that they're separate species, and 2 is that it's bad for the creature. Children eventually grow up and generally take care of the "host" that they sucked blood from, and their existence is generally beneficial for the species, so it's hard to define as a parasite.

And if a presumably sentient creature is aborted before it attains sentience, has it suffered?

I feel like the demand for desktop versions of simple phone games is pretty low.

Mac users who hope to play anything from their steam library or dual boot Windows are going to be very disappointed.

I think it also depends on the audience and group you're with. If you're moving around a lot, you might end up in expat/international/diverse groups. Most people who move to several countries aren't moving to villages 4 hours from a city and speaking and blending in with the locals and really hearing what rural people think.

Growing up in a small town and moving between small towns across the US every year or so, I never had exposure to "liberals" until I started using the internet as a teen. Until then, everyone I was ever around talked about them like they were bogeymen.

In the country I live in now, I was initially exposed to much more "progressive" opinions from people. Now I'm seen as less "that foreign guy" and more of a local, and I hear what people would normally discuss with their friends and family. It's quite different.

Is fish oil anything more than snake oil?

I've never seen concrete evidence that it does anything. Wikipedia also seems to say it's all ambiguous, with studies flip flopping as much as coffee and wine health studies.

Americans were fighting in Vietnam for about a decade. Bombing was already at high levels in 1965. America pulled out a decade later.

The idea that bombing was working and political issues were the only reason America failed aren't supported by any facts. Saying politics were the issue is mostly used merely an unfalsifiable statement.

If the goal of the wars are redefined to some really narrow goal like just eliminating Saddam, which is revisionist at best, it seems like sending in troops when one targeted bomb on a political event would've worked better is a big oversight. The invasion just caused chaos and more trouble and we still haven't gotten ourselves out of it. Afghanistan is also total chaos, 20 years later. Military might sure isn't helping there.

In most recent conflicts, the winners are generally people with motivation to fight and unpredictable attacks. Sending in aircraft carriers and deploying 50000 young guys to a place they don't know or care about is neither unpredictable or fueled by any deep motivation. People handed a gun and taught how to make a bomb and acting to protect their family from foreign invaders are both.

There isn't a single country in the entire world that could challenge USA to a 1-1 military battle

I guess that really depends on what you consider a "1-1 military battle." Gentlemanly warfare used to be people marching and staying in formation and going straight at each other until they died. With that battle strategy, the victor is generally going to be the one with more people covering more ground.

But that strategy hasn't been used in a long while, because there are smarter ways to fight. Tanks and so on are the old way of fighting battle. The US has a decidedly bad post-WW2 record since nobody is really fighting by the "old ways" that much of the American military fights by, and the biggest advantage is the US can just drop bombs indiscriminately basically forever (decidedly not 1-1 combat) and hope to destroy every living thing imaginable (which still failed in basically everything from Vietnam onwards).

The claim that the US will beat any country isn't backed by any evidence. At all. There are theoretical situations where maybe the US has more people, more money, more whatever and will win if you line soldiers up and have them fight Napoleonic style, but in reality, successful wars following WW2 include... the Gulf War? Which just ended up leaving Saddam in power, ending up with the unmanageable chaotic wars we've had in the middle east these past 2 decades.

Other countries get plenty of fish unlabeled as being from China or completely mislabeled.

Farmed fish also generally relies on being fed cheaper seafood, and it’s hard to beat Chinese prices.

It’s best to just stop eating fish for a while. If the industry shrinks even a bit, things can start to recover.

Poll percentages aren’t raw data. Usually there are various weights and balances applied to the counts, and these could give misleading numbers. E.g., polls might think male latinos who finished college might turn up at the polls at a lower proportion than they actually did, which can result in significant shifts.

There’s also the factor of questioning, both how things are worded and the means they use to ask them. Landline polling with 50 questions (yes, some pollers do this and you can see the questions they ask) aren’t likely to reach people with jobs or people who are young, so that results in the few people they do reach giving undue weight to “make up” for the voters they couldn’t poll. Wording of a question can also change how a person reports their result, and there’s always the lizard man constant and people who intentionally screw with pollers, some being easy to detect and discard.

In a way, they do end up as forecasters.

Gonna save my money and just put a few bucks towards a VPN. Streaming was a fun ride while it lasted, but I can get higher quality video through torrents and the selection is limitless.

Maybe in 20 years these streaming services will collapse and be replaced by something better, and then those services will once again split up.

A few elections back, there was a the “swift boat” controversy with John Kerry. Out of nowhere a bunch of people who worked with Kerry claimed his military experience was fraudulent in some way and the media ate it up, being one of the major factors that costed him the election.

Later on, and with more digging, people who were near him at the time confirmed that the controversy was all a sham. The people who previously claimed Kerry lied all suddenly claimed they misremembered, or gently admitted that they lied. There were just enough bits and pieces of facts to build a story, and BS was used to glue it all together.

I think people are seeing a repeat of that. Some things may be true, but a lot of overly convenient information is coming out to bind it together that’s hard to absolutely verify and will likely collapse under scrutiny.

It's more like selling an electric kettle without a charger. People are already expecting to pay for water to fill a kettle, just like they pay for electricity to fill the battery.

First time buyers of iPhones aren't unreasonable. Being unreasonable is saying a trillion dollar company is fine to charge more for less.