pimmen

The justice system in the US is not perfect but the people who are in US prisons had access to defense attorneys, hearings about bail, trials where the prosecution had to publicly present evidence and testimonies to explain why the defendant should go to jail ("they are a muslim" is not enough), and also a process for appeal. And International observers are allowed to thoroughly investigate US prisons, and when they publish scathing criticism of the US prison system it's not cracked down by jailing the reporters or diplomatic pressure.

That is, by any resonable definition of the word "better", much better.

And this statement is just categorically false:

"It shocks me that there’s no real discussion of this issue in the US."

I can name five news segments or documentaries about the US prison systems role in structural racism on National television off the top of my head. Try pitching a segment about the CCP's human rights violations to Chinese television where you have full editorial control and you'll get laughed out of the room, at best.

Trump has not even nearly as much power as you seem to think. We hear about his abuses of power because hearing ”California government implements reforms to reduce carbon emissions, in spite of Trump” doesn’t generate as much emotions as his corrupt practices.

Imagine a Chinese provincial government openly (key word openly) going against the CCP’s wishes. Or a judge, or a prosecutor.

And for its justice system. And its infrastructure.

The difference in transparency between China and the US is hard to overstate.

This is illustrated with the deck Affinity. It sweeps beginner players consistently even if the pilot keeps making mistakes but once you meet tougher opposition all of the options the deck presents become overwhelming and you know that you need to maximize the value of every play to beat a good opponent, especially if they have boarded in counters for your deck.

Whenever I play poker with friends this is my experience too. I don't do anything really fancy at all, I basically just follow very simple guidelines anyone can look up on the Internet. I just wait for good cards, permit worse cards the further down I am in the betting chain, raise or fold instead of calling most of the time, and I bet agressively when I have really good cards to get the most value. I win because my opponents have no idea of what they’re doing, and even if you would point out an obvious misplay they wouldn’t even agree.

Most people who play casually have some romantic ideas about poker from spy movies, where it's about bluffing. Bluffing only works if people actually believe you have good cards, people won't believe you have good cards if you play with mediocre or bad cards every hand.

I am by no means good enough to beat a person who is good at the game that could profile my playing style, do the mental math faster than me and who can tell the difference between whether or not I have analysis paralysis or bluffing.

I don't know if this was just the culture and influence from Kalanick, but Uber all around seems like a terrible company. Tehy cover up data breaches, they lie to regulators when they test their self driving cars, they act passively when women get harassed on their watch. I haven't worked there but from the outside it seems pretty much "do whatever you want, but don't get caught".

In Sweden, most middle class people live in detached houses. However, most young professionals desire to live in apartments because it's simply more convenient. I hate the garden and I hate driving.

This article is about Sweden, remember. My parents have two houses, one outside Gothenburg (big enough that they have converted the floor me and my younger brother lived in into two apartments, one if four bedrooms the other one is two) and a beach house further up north. They're from a completely different generation with different priorities.

A comment on #2 would also be that you should organize and enshrine your rights when you have the power, not when you're weak. Developers are powerful now, can possibly become weak later.

The issue is far more complicated than simply not having de-regulated rents. De-regulating rents would do something, no doubt, but there are so many more reasons why we have astronomically high real estate prices at this moment (and didn't have them just 20-25 years ago).

* We have massive tax cuts and subsidies for home owners. You get to make deductions off your interest rate payments, something that was introduced as an emergency measure in the 90s. We also have effectively no real estate tax, meaning there is no incentive to move out when your kids have moved out and the home is more than you need.

* For a long time, there was no need to even pay the principal of your mortgage. Now there is and it's one of the primary reasons the prices have gone sideways in Sweden for the past year.

* The local governments don't want renters and have gradually been given more and more power to get rid of them. They own a lot of the rentals and especially in Stockholm they have aggresively converted them into apartments that are owned (the common, Swedish system of buying a membership into a home owners organization is a bit hard to translate into an appropriate English term, but it's called "bostadsrätt"). The national government is basically powerless to increase the housing stock, if you go back to the 60s when my grandparents were facing a housing crisis the national government had the power to build one million homes mostly in the bigger cities like Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. They have nowhere close to that power anymore and the local governments have no incentive to solve the problems of low income people in a completely different city who would like to switch cities to get a decent living.

There are more than these too, these are just the first ones that popped into my head.

And all of this is unfortunately hard to change because most Swedes live in homes they own and it's a very common retirement plan. People who are in their 30s, like me, also think that falling interest rates well below inflation is the new normal because they've known anything else throughout their adult lives and thus take larger risks than they should.

In Sweden the unions are the ones who will go to court and negotiate for you because they know that if you go it will set a precedent that exposes everyone else too.

Health care, dental care up to adulthood, parental leave protected by law and education through college is definitely not unrelated to standard of living. Neither is mandatory pension contributions from your employer, as well as a guaranteed contribution from the state (we unknowingly get contributions to our retirement for every month we go to college).

Sure, if you're single with no kids, in very good shape, employed as a data engineer and 30 years old , like me, you would gladly take the money instead of all the other stuff. But I like the fact that children who are born into working poor families in Sweden will have a much healthier upbringing than if they were born in the US.

Go back 20 000 years and modern humans didn’t write Kama Sutra either, because just like bonobos we lacked the technology and knowledge to write.

That's like saying humans have evolved radically different behavior compared to 200 years ago because back then they couldn't travel to another celestial body.

I would argue jerking off to Internet porn and jerking off to a fantasy are both exhibiting the same behavior, just like a polar explorer from the 19th century and a lunar explorer from the 20th century are exhibiting the same behavior.

Users having multiple addresses is something I've cursed a lot over. I work in a team that does data analytics for a news publishing company, and our print business is still very important. Unfortunately, in our database over print customers users are basically addresses because you don't really need to know how many people are receiving your paper as a distributor, only where and how many papers. Since it's also been a safe assumption for a century that people share newspapers with each other, market research was done street by street to inform ad buyers of which markets we reached. Many people have more than one home. Some people take out another subscription for a relative.

This mapped very awkwardly to digital subscribers who we had individual data on. We were able to join databases in a way that sort of works through more or less (mostly less) comfortable assumptions. The queries are not pretty.

There are also countries that thrived economically after the fall of socialism. Why yes, I'll gladly take an apartment in East Berlin if you're offering me one.

The Swedish company Klarna is a good example. It’s now so common among Swedish consumers to have a Klarna account that it’s probably the most frictionless way for customers to pay online.

I have a colleague who worked there like five years ago. She bought as much stock as she could. Once it IPO or gets acquired I suspect she’ll get a hefty contribution to her retirement.

Open plan offices became more frequent because office area is more expensive because real estate has become more expensive. That's at least my guess of how we ended up in this mess that everyone knows is bonkers.

I think this will have unforseen effects on real estate.

If the population globally is shrinking, that means the likelihood that any given town will increase in size is also shrinking. At first, this might look like the real estate prices across the board will decrease but I don’t think so. I think that when people factor in that the town they are in currently will not increase in size they look at cities that already have good markets and move there instead, driving up the prices of already established cities.

This is basically what is already happening in European countries with falling birth rates.

That would absolutely be a valid reason to build the service like that; the medical community thought that only an excess of opioids would be a problem, and it directly improves the numbers they're evaluated on. However, once the medical community gets wise to what an awful idea that was, I hope that when the software providers hear about this they try to figure out a way to mitigate the damage they're causing. This feature was added in 2016.

Though, I think we agree that you cannot make an ethical decision on which action you should take unless you have any idea of what the consequences of your actions will be.

This was a rare occasion when I opened the comments before the link, and it was good that I did.

I think this creates an interesting discussion on the part of the designers and programmers. Did they understand that what they were building was going to increase opioid dependence? Did they ask about it?

And, the most interesting question of all: If they found out that was the case did they try to justify building it to themselves in some way?

Full disclaimer: I have built software that I had ethical reservations about myself. I am in no way a saint, I don't claim to know what I would've done in the same situation but I think it's for the benefit of software development to acknowledge that we do make ethical decisions when we build things and that the solution to something as complicated and diverse as ethics is not to just ignore it.

I'm not a lawyer or legal expert, but I think that over the past century the entertainment industry has successfully gotten a myriad of laws and court rulings in their favor which complicates something like that a lot. Data is new and fluffy and there are still many areas where it's unsettled who owns the data. The EU probably sees the opportunity to write the rules in a more "blank sheet of paper" kind of way when this industry is still relatively young, and not repeat the mistakes of the entertainment industry where the governments have been sleepwalking for the better part of a century.

If you have an app that solves something we take for granted in the West, and the initial cost barrier is very low, you have a great business model for the Indian market.

When WhatsApp cost $1 per year it had a terrific business model for the emerging markets. Now that it’s free Facebook is complaining that they don’t make enough money.

Universal healthcare doesn’t erase that incentive, nothing does. You need a vigilant medical board that penalizes bad doctors to deal with that, fortunately something like that can be reconciled with the system we have in the Nordics.

Of course, it’s far from perfect just like any regulatory agency ever.

That’s the thing about burnout; it feels great because you’re so productive and respected ... until one day your energy is gone. It might take years, it depends on how much support you get from people around at managing your stress, and of course it depends on your own ability to manage it too. I’m skeptical of how effective toys like a Rolex and booze is long term at easing the stress.

My ex-wife felt like she was on top of the world until she was burnt out and it developed into full fledged depression at age 27. I’m not saying everyone will end up like her, everyone won’t develop lung cancer from smoking either.

I turn off email and Slack when I get home. My stakeholders has to call me if something breaks.

I should note that when they do, my union has negotiated a wonderful overtime compensation where I receive a minimum of three hours pay, at 1.5 times the normal rate, if I have to solve an emergency even if it took me five minutes to fix it. If you're my employer, you better make sure that thing is critical to fix before you call in the cavalry.

After my employer did call me, and other team mates, to fix stuff we warned was not stable multiple times well, wouldn't you know it, suddenly people start listening to us when we want to spend more time fixing something instead of just shipping it quickly.

In Sweden we have many protections against this in theory, but the fact that people are willing to take shit means it's not very effective.

A person I met who is in the video game industry talked about something that happened at one of the companies he did consulting for. A poor guy at that place completely burned himself out and had to be hospitalized to recover. A month after this guy was burned out, a 23 year old was doing the exact same tasks, with the exact same workload and the same impossible deadlines. Sure, video game development with their crunch time is extreme but it's still very scary that something like this is even legal.

A fresh college graduate at age 22 does not understand what 60-100 hours mean. The closest frame of reference they have is pulling an all nighter before an exam or to get a term project done. They can't contemplate their romantic relationship falling apart, the lack of feedback resulting in continuous self doubt keeping them up at night when they're supposed to be resting or how shallow friendships between colleagues are compared to friendships between students (especially when their colleagues have families).

They understand what it means to soldier on despite being tired. They don't understand how much they've taken for granted all that support and feedback that was able to let them cope with the stress, and that now they're on their own.

I'm Swedish and yes, it was almost insufferable when this book was the hotness during the past two years, but this is hardly "one of the biggest scientific bluffs of our time". It's not even the worst one that got mainstream in Sweden. Electromagnetic hypersensitivity[1] is far more stupid and God knows how much money has been wasted on shielding people from electromagnetic fields by local governments. Hell, just the fact that this has been debated and taken seriously by politicians and government officials is astounding to me. It's a sad reflection on the state of physics literacy in my country.

So, stupid? Yes. One of the worst pseudo-scientific scandals ever to have swept over Sweden? Not even remotely close.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_hypersensitivi...

So much damage has already been done by fossil fuels, and unfortunately there is just so much left in the ground which hasn't been exploited yet solely due to politics. Russia wants to extract the fossil fuels in the Arctic which potentially holds vast reserves, the only thing preventing it is the idea that pissing off all the NATO allies surrounding the Arctic is not a good move. Norway is a very oil rich country and a lot of its welfare is due to the oil, if the profitability of its current reserves wasn't enough, the only thing stopping Norway from extracting its own reserves further north would be domestic, political backlash.

We need to be very vigilant politically because in a purely short term, economic point of view fossil fuels still very much makes sense.