HN user
They definitely did not escape any recent war.
The WWII in Scandinavia was particularly bad, including the occupation of Norway and Denmark.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Weserübung
They did escape the contemporary ones the same way any other country in Europe did anyway.
I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously.
They are hard to take seriously because they are not earnest, it's cherry picking to prove a point, based on false premises.
Scandinavia is not even a country, it's like saying "Benelux has the higher GDP per capita of Europe" but Luxembourg has more than two times the GDP per capita of Belgium, the three don't even speak the same language and 20% of the Luxembourgers have Portuguese nationality.
I imagine that Scandinavia has a good reputation as role model society among his audience so he chose Scandinavia.
I had a Swedish girlfriend, still have many friends there and my wife is half Danish, so I agree with the sentiment, but the facts are definitely not there.
If the parameter is "startups per capita" and the geographical region doesn't have to be a sovereign country (Scandinavia is not) then I would say that in Europe (the continent) London and Berlin have the most startups per capita (London also in absolute numbers), despite being two very different places with a very different idea of what being earnest means.
Why is dang allowing this person to bully everyone?
Is this the new normal on HN?
Have you ever heard of anger management?
Can you disprove the data without spewing all that bile?
I'm honestly worried about your health.
Here's a WSJ article about the topic
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-iphone-isnt-the-cash-cow-it...
On the other hand, people using cheap devices usually don't rely on them so much, so the higher consumption is compensated by the lower overall usage, or have made the real environmental savy choice.
I've never encountered an iPhone owner that didn't bring a charger in their backpacks.
Do you see old people like my father charging their sub 100 € smartphones at Starbucks or young people with shiny high end smartphones?
My father use his smartphone so rarely that the battery lasts exactly as advertised: 2+ days on standby (I believe it's ~60 hours).
He uses no app, except WhatsApp twice a year and Maps, has no background service running, takes a few pictures of his niece and that's it. How much power can he consume? How much is he contributing to the climate change compared to me, his son, that starts the day at 9 am and at 18 is on 20% battery?
An I don't even use the smartphone that much, but hey, WFH, slack and teams are constantly checking for new messages, that friend sent you a message in IG, of course I'm gonna check my timeline. Look, a new notification, Amazon is delivering the package, let me check on the news if the streets are still closed today because they are shooting that Tom Cruise movie (it really happened few days ago!)
Etc. etc. How much of this could be saved?
On the opposite side, the construction workers who renewed my house all used old phones like Nokia 3330 because they need something though and durable that won't die on them after a few hours, in environments where electrical power is not granted, so they go for the thing with the longest battery life on the market which is also the cheapest option and, in the end, the most power efficient.
If that was even possible, you would have to wait at least 10 years.
At that point who knows if tablets as a form factor survived.
To be clear, I think that a tablet (not specifically iPads which are expensive in their segment as any other Apple device, there is no cheap option) could replace most PC nowadays, but to reiterate what's already been said: Apple is not present in too many places, for a reason.
To make an example: I work for a company in Italy with 14 thousands employees.
The laptops they give us software developers today are gonna be the accountants PCs of the future. Unless they break before. In that case they are replaced by the supplier with something with similar specs but new. Probably it will be a different brand, depending on what's available at the moment.
It's not imaginable that a company like this, which is relatively small if we look at the real giants of the World (including many in Italy as well), will replace every PC with tablets, not only for monetary reasons, but because they had to re-train thousands of employees. Being in Italy I'm sure that only talking about it would end up in a strike. No kidding.
But even assuming that it would happen, they would buy cheap Asus tablets.
But even assuming it would be iPads, does this software the company has been using for 15 years runs on it?
The answer is most certainly "no, it doesn't".
Battery life and power efficiency is not a factor in such environments, they prefer to plant trees, be part of a renewable energy consortium or power the offices with solar panels, that they can also spin in PR, than buy Apple devices because they have an incredibly power efficient CPU. It doesn't really matter to them.
And I tell you this knowing that I work there because I know that ethically speaking they are vastly better than the average. They really do care of many small things that many others don't, but Apple ARM CPUs aren't one of them.
What does this have to do with the fact that the majority of old people in USA live alone because they are left alone?
Are you saying that most elderly have no family or kids?
And why people with no family or kids should live in solitude?
I have no kids, for example.
Family is not built on blood alone.
A good chunk of what I call family is formed by people who had no family, lost everything during the ww2 and are not my blood relatives.
I simply said that a community that cares about its members is not a pastoral, there are place where it's still the way they live.
The community can be a group of houses in the Italian country in the middle of nowhere.
Coming from a family where I am the first generation who could afford going to college, I disagree.
OP was talking about Vietnam, my experience is in rural Italy and matches the idea of people helping each other, not of the exploitation of the women.
And not in an idealised way either, I could make countless examples that I experienced first hand, growing up with 18 cousins and spending together every easter, Christmas and summer holiday for large part of our lives. Especially summer holidays that last three months in Italy.
They are my sisters and brothers, even though I only have one "real" sister, my 8 aunts are my moms, my 8 uncles are my dads, when I was a kid I probably spent more time with them than with my parents that were working 12 hour shifts in hospital (they did the exact same job and shared 50/50 parenting) and sent me and my sister to our grandparents when schools were closed, so we didn't have to be alone at home or with a baby sitter.
I feel lucky to have a family where no one is left behind or alone.
I never felt we were dependent, on the contrary, they let me develop my independence and I have been a kid who spent long moments alone and still do as an adult.
What you call pastoral I call it sense of community.
Yes, women had it bad in the past, but what you're seeing is not reduced dependence, it's solitude.
Maybe the fact that I grew up in a socialist family makes my perspective different, but I can't imagine old people wanting to be alone, away from their family and loved ones, unless they are forced to.
And the worst thing is that even if you were right and old people are simply fulfilling their desire of independence, women have it worse all the same: stats say that in USA 75% of the elderly living alone are women and to make things even worse widowers have more chances of remarriage than widows.
Considering that old people living alone have more chances of falling into poverty, that poverty increases the chances of being alone even more, that eating it's a social activity for many people, so living alone increases the risk of malnutrition and that in the presence of health issues loneliness increases the chances of the symptoms getting worse, I wouldn't consider more time alone a blessing, not for men nor for women.
China is the largest producer of cultural products in the World right now, Hollywood itself made blockbusters there, financed and co produced by China.
It has already changed, before Brexit was even a thing.
From 2013
China is now the lead exporter of cultural goods, followed by the United States. In 2013 the total value of China's cultural exports was US$60.1 billion; more than double that of the United States at US$27.9 billion.
Yes and no.
First of all, I'm European.
Use of English as a second language, it might surprise you, dropped in the past 10 years, it was spoken by 52% of the population in 2012, now it dropped to 44%.
Not native speakers, English is the fourth language in Europe for number of native speakers, after German, French and Italian (if we don't count Russian, largely first with 120 million native speakers)
Secondly, things can change rapidly.
20 years ago the most studied second language in Italian schools was French.
Thirdly, in Europe countries have spoken to each other for centuries, when I go to Spain I speak Spanish, when I go to France or Belgium I speak French, I can also speak some German.
Of course not perfectly, but we still understand each other better than through English, because of similarities in the languages.
So yes, second language counts, but only when other options are worse (I speak English with Sweds or Dutch - I've been studying Swedish on my own but my progress with the language have been very slow)
In many schools we study more than 1 foreign language.
I studied French in primary and middle school then English and German in high school.
They were regular public schools, far from the best.
It's quite common elsewhere.
My cousins live in Belgium, their kids study French, Flemish and of course Italian in school.
Many Italian researchers, for example, move to Germany and they learn German because it's better to know it when you live there, English is used to bootstrap the social life and at work.
CERN is in Switzerland and even though I believe everyone there speaks English, in Geneva the official language is French, it helps a lot outside of work to learn it, more than English. Move a few Kms and they speak German, go South and they speak Italian and you will still be in small Switzerland.
Where many people are naturally bi or trilingual.
Adding English as a third/fourth it's very easy for them.
Eventually everybody will learn some English, undoubtedly, but it's gonna be foreigners' English, that it's different from proper English and sometimes it's pure nonsense for native speakers and viceversa.
Apple -- at 20% or so in most of the world's economies
Apple has 17% (and dropping) of the mobile market share in Europe and around 9% in computing.
There aren't many other richer economies in the World.
Ferrari is worth now more than General Motors and Ford, so market share and net worth are not comparable.
Their market share is small because they make a luxury limited edition product.
They limit their production capacity to around 10 thousands cars/year (all sold in pre order), Apple is trying to sell as many devices they can.
There are no Ferrari Store where you can buy a Ferrari and drive it home half an hour later.
It's not a small difference.
Last but not least, there is a lot more competition between car manufacturers, even in the most expensive segments, Apple devices are only made by Apple.
Hyundai, for example, had a net income of over 3 trillion in 2019, Apple net income is measured in tens of billions.
English is not about moving to another place but doing business beyond local.
There are "only" 379 million people speaking English as a native language.
But there are 1.2 billion people speaking English as a second language, which means that there are more people speaking English that do not actually speak "proper" English, than people speaking it because they were born with it.
The outcome is that
About 75% of the world's 1.2 billion English speakers are non-native speakers. However, while non-native speakers often understand each other well in English, many native speakers are bad at making themselves understood by non-native speakers.
"Often you have a [room] full of people from different countries communicating in English and all understanding each other, and then suddenly the American or Brit walks into the room and nobody can understand them"
Welfare plays a big role as well.
they want to get the f--- out the EU as soon as they can.
Not in the EU I was born and raised.
English isn't an official EU language anymore, the only country that chose it was UK.
https://www.politico.eu/article/english-will-not-be-an-offic...
Thanks for the question.
I'm saying it should be easy to solve for the richest country in the World given the sheer amount of resources it possess.
It looks impossible for the same exact country, because the society there doesn't like the solution.
Or to be more precise, they don't like being told that if other have solved it, they should just copy what the others have done.
Looks like that if you try to teach America something, the knee jerk reaction is always "X is of course underestimating something, the problem is hard, the solution can't be that easy and if X is proposing it is obviously wrong, or X would be richer then us"
Other countries have solved it, so it is solvable.
Solvable doesn't even mean it will disappear in this case, it means the situation can drammatically improve just by tuning a few knobs.
Like wearing and not wearing a mask, keeping or not keeping social distance, etc. you put all of these precautions together and you magically have much better chances of avoiding the contagion.
It is that simple.
Why it isn't in the US?
Because they don't want to solve it.
It would be as easy as reading the Wikipedia page on homelessness in Japan, for example
I'm taking Japan as an example because it was struggling with the problem, then they changed approach to it and have radically improved the condition of homeless people and reduce their number.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homelessness_in_Japan
At the beginning of the 1990s, the homeless in Japan were viewed as a nuisance. The government tried to get rid of the people on streets because of "beautification programmes". Only in 1997 did Tokyo at last acknowledge the existence of homeless group representatives and start listening to their issues.
I'll be honest, it seems like english is your second language and you're struggling to connect a few different ideas
I could write it in Italian, French, Spanish and even in bad German, but that would make it harder for people to follow.
The best I can do is my confusing English, sorry.
Homelessness as "a problem to deal with" means society is selfish, means exactly what you wrote.
A society where people refuse to see it as a social issue, like sickness, and one that requires a lot of thought because you have to remove them from the eyes of people but don't want to deal with the consequences because it's actually a cleanse under a different name (decency, decorum, etc.).
If SF is the least selfish on the planet (which it isn't, unless you consider a few American cities the World), why people refuse to live with what is obviously a byproduct of their lifestyle?
You can't have all the advantages without any of the drawbacks.
Thinking that it is indeed possible is a symptom of a selfish society.
I live near the Colosseum in Rome and there are homeless living here, in the city centre. Some of them have been living here more than I've been alive.
Nobody thinks they are a problem or have to accept the help, people here accept that where there are people with a lot of money there are gonna be desperate people as well.
Because it's only natural.
And because many have been poor or come from poor families, before being wealthy enough to afford a better life.
It's easier for homeless to find what they need to survive in the big city in the wealthy neighborhood than in the small village in the country in the poor quarter.
They also feel more protected, for obvious reasons (more people with money means more people willing to give, means more wasted food, better illumination, better public services, etc.)
For those in need of medical attention, there is the national healthcare, we call the ambulance, they already know who these people are, bring them in, give them food, a bed and a warm shower and they already know they'll be out on the streets again in a couple of days. At least they have been checked and their health conditions assessed. Because it's their job, they don't have to respond to some kind of profit based mechanism, people taxes already paid for it.
Homeless are not treated like a problem, like rejected or defective people, they are taken care of. Because it benefits the society at large.
Of course some of them are a problem, but it's a tiny minority, our biggest issue is finding as many as possible in winter so they don't die in the street for hypothermia or other cold related disease.
Of course is not all roses, we are still talking about people living in the edge of society and sometimes dealing with them is not a pleasant experience, but it's rare.
Also the police here don't treat them like criminals, which is an important difference as well, police usually protect them from bad people. They are in fact much more often victims of violence than perpetrators.
(According to LAPD report in January this year more than one out of three times police officers used force against homeless people in 2019, a 26% increase from 2018)
It's really not that hard, especially for one of the richest cities in the richest country in the World.
Unwillingness is a form of selfishness.
Not learning from what others already do better is a form of entitlement.
Which is a form of selfishness.
Wow.
Thanks so much for teaching me how to live.
I'm sorry that the city where you live is such a terrible place, I come from a poor country in Europe and homeless people here are treated freely by the State, because people taxes pay for public universal health care.
And every neighborhood in every city has their own local homeless that are part of the living tissue of the place, not a nuisance (or something to bring up when you talk with others about what's wrong in your city, we use holes in the road and waste management).
I understand that when you are a rich country, you can't afford to waste resources on it.
I also understand that it's easier to blame a middle aged man like me for "virtue signaling" (I don't even know what that means, sorry) than apologizing.
Homelessness as "a problem" is the symptom of a selfish society, more than a failure in city management.
Anyway "that incident" is an anecdote, it doesn't prove anything, nobody knows if it's the truth, it's simply blaming the poor, disguised as caring about the city.
I think you meant Muwekma Ohlone.
If we are trying to be precise it was the Spanish who stole their land.
Not all Europeans are made equal.
Not lacking, it simply didn't work as expected.
I'm on Debian + KDE Plasma 5 and the tray icon disappeared, the UI froze for no obvious reason, sometimes only the frame of the windows was visible while the rest was a black square, notifications were hit and miss, sometimes the mic wasn't released after a voice call and I had to restart pulseaudio to free it and sometimes the client couldn't detect the audio devices at all.
I believe it has to do with my configuration, but I never had the same problems with the Teams client.
Perhaps it's a contributing factor to the long stagnation of the Italian economy
Perhaps.
But doesn't explain stagnation in Japanese economy where there are no Italian unions.
Or why France did much better despite having even stronger work protections laws than Italy and wilder strikes (the gilet jaunes for example) or those happened last year against the pension reform where the workers of public transportation went on strike - for weeks - without even announcing it.
Even countries like Germany, Singapore, Switzerland and Finland are doing worse than Pakistan in the GDP growth race.
My point was than if there are stronger work protection laws somewhere else and the laws of your country are weaker, they are not very strong, they are moderately strong.
But can you or can't you be fired for that?
Because in my country you can't be fired for using the work email for that.
Communicating with other workers using their work email is absolutely allowed, courts ruled about it several times [1].
I usually receive trade unions (there are several of them) communications on my work email from the unions' work email, because they have been authorized by the company to send them.
In this case she wrote directly to workers using work email, but having no union or labor protection laws it doesn't make any difference whether she could or couldn't, she could be fired anyway without having to provide any reason.
In countries where there are strong laws protecting workers she would have written to the union members and they would have done the same thing: write directly to the workers.
Of course she did it at Google so it is different, but here the strict procedures to call a strike are only necessary if a public service that requires continuity risk to be interrupted, otherwise unions are only required to alert the company that the strike is going to happen, but have no requirement whatsoever on how to organise it.
Which sound logical to me,strong protection means IMO freedom to collectively counter the actions of the company, if that's not allowed the protection is not strong.
[1] Court of Catania, Labor Section, February 2, 2009 "The RSU employee can send trade union communications by e-mail to the employees of the company during their working hours and to their company e-mail address using his personal e-mail address"
That's not true.
You can as an employer walk away whenever you want, you just don't get the salary for the difference between the notice and when you left.
Example: if you have to give 30 days notice (very common in Italy) and leave on the spot, after your resignation have been accepted, you have to give the company the equivalent of 30 days of pay.
Which is exactly the money they should give you aniway if you stayed for the entire notice time.
But usually the employer and company find an agreement before coming to that.
they could claim wrongful termination in this scenario and likely be awarded the pay they would have received for the missing notice period.
Correct.
That's what happens in Italy for example and I believe in large parts of Europe (I know for sure France, Germany, Sweden and Spain)
The missing pay is granted anyway, but with a wrongful termination the employer will most likely obtain a fair compensation.
A couple decades ago I was awarded a year of salary + the 3 months of notice we agreed upon when I was hired, for a wrongful termination after an acquisition.
with extremly strong worker protection law
Serious question: what makes them strong if employers can't organize a simple strike?
Do Google employers work in barracks?
Unpopular opinion: I never loved Slack and the Linux client wasn't working really well for me so I had to use the web one
I work for a company with thousands of employees and we used Slack in our small team, we chose it because the majority was already familiar with it (I voted for Mastodon) and we spent part of our team budget to pay for it
When COVID hit the fans and we started working from home, the company chose Teams as the collaboration platform for all of us
I don't love Teams either, but I honestly have to admit that the voice/video calls are incredibly reliable even on some shitty DSL connection I found myself using that had a packet loss ratio around 50% and no other alternative worked
For everything else Teams is worse than Slack, except for the integration with the AD domain and sharing documents with colleagues that never used anything else than Windows
On average Teams is as good as Slack and for casual users that only use chats and calls there is no difference at all
I can see why companies are switching to Teams, they have been MS customers for years and Teams comes bundled, it's one less contract to sign and one less vendor to start a relationship with.
Reddit.
64GB of ram cost < 300 euros
A lot of studios sell their old GPU (as in a generation ago) for cheap
If you stay out of vertical integrated supply chains you can buy the best your budget allows
If you are saying that you cannot assemble a laptop of the same quality of an Apple one, I agree
If you are saying that Apple laptops are what people want because they consume 20 watt full load, I disagree
The market of the good enough products is always gonna be larger than 'the best money can buy'
Apple will never make 'good enough products' hence they are not competing with the bulk of what is being sold right now
It could change in the future, but not in the immediate future IMO
Or a desktop with 64 GB of RAM and two previous generation GPUs