Treegarden

I think this is good.

Reading and really understanding a text is not cognitively easy. It should be a privilege for a text to be read by me.

I am a productive and I work a lot with my head. I in my free time I listen to a lot of Audiobooks (fiction and factual) and I view that as the best vessel for taking in information in a causal way. If I really need to study something then I read it. But how dare you to think your text is important enough that I study it - especially in the age of click-bait and low quality journalism. If it is an extremely good text then I will recognize it as such by myself and study it.

I lived in Shanghai for 6 months and the internet sucked more then the air and thats when its hurting to take in a deep breath in winter. After returning to Germany I was more happy about the free internet (and freedom of speech and so on..) then about the clean air.

To me comparing China to the NSA (USA) is weak. As you wrote this, the current top result on Reddit is this: https://old.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/98el62/un_says_i...

I dont see the USA getting these kinds of headlines anytime soon. Moreover China has earned critique for partially rolling out their citizen scoring. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System https://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-cr...

I am not the biggest fan of the GDPR and its also tragic to me that Europe has no real innovative internet companies. And as far as I know Brazil has some big challenges with corruption so I wouldn't take its policies as a shining example (not implying that you did though).

I kind of see the internet as my home and culture in many ways. I have met Egyptians, Brazilians and Koreans that shared the same internet culture as me. In contrast I have made much fewer friends in mainland China due to them not using the same internet as me (and thus not having even remotely something in common). They instead consume their own entertainment such as Chinese soap operas which my mainland friends have told me are vastly inferior to their western counterparts (not soap operas but entertainment and culture in general). Finally the restricted access inhibits the development of better English skills which further divides

I dont care much for visas or nation-sovereignty. I hope that we one day have universal human right centered values based on an free internet and open borders so that I am not limited in my pursuit of happiness by some arbitrary political rule.

I wish there was a longer docuementary about this

I watched that same guy (just discovered his channel through that video) and its hilarious to me that I see him mentioned here and how you have the same reaction to that part like me.

His videos are actually a good resource to the OP. This video is kinda the exact answer to the queston: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70Wcm5c7AF0

The way I understood it is: "By failing my business other people will think because I am a foreigner and I failed my business most other foreigners are failures as well and I don't want that"

My point is that he shouldn't let hypotheticals like that keep him from doing what is best for him, especially if suicide is in the cards.

If I were you I would try to be realistic and cut my losses. Follow the advice of getting an accountant and focus on what is important for your company. If you had a good reason to start it then you should persist if it is appropriate, however if you where dreaming too much either change your priorities or cut your losses. Its your money at the end of the day.

As in terms of career wise I dont think a failed business is such a problem - as long as you can sell it in a positive light. Career wise being an English teacher is the bigger problem I think. Many People that I know from Asia - foreigners and natives - look down on these so called "white monkey jobs".

Also its strange that you use "suicide" and "my actions to reflect badly on other foreigners in Japan" in the same paragraph. If you are depressed you shouldn't care how other foreigners look by your actions.

Are you kidding me? Don't get me wrong I love america for being the epicenter of western culture and its innovation - I even plan on living there for some years. I feel alienated by my own German culture with its weird lederhosen, mozart and the general sentiment for illiteracy regarding all things digital.

As far as I know americans think "God" created (or blessed or whatever) their holy country and its the greatest nation on earth. There is the classic american patriotism. The pledge of honor (and that kneeling thing??). Almost half of americans (or at least a very large Marjory) are creationist and believe angels are real. Even some of your presidents do. There are actual fights weither or not evolution should be taught in schools. Your relationship with Religion is also borderline pathological. There are studies that show higher developed countries tend to have atheist or at least agnostic leanings but the US is an outlier here.

Your irrational war on drugs is a disaster, it, together with your racist history of slavery and segregation causes your cultural critical problems with your minority communities. Your police acts like there in a war zone. Your media is a shit show of of people throwing mud at each other. If you ever learn german you should watch the Tagesthemen which is the most unbiased and informative news I have ever seen in my life. Alternately I think french24 comes close though I'm not sure.

Your relationship with guns is a whole other story as your own students can attest. I can understand the attraction to guns but Jesus you behave like an alcohol addict saying its only medicine.

Some other worthy mentions are your commercial prison system that gives you the highest incarceration rate worldwide. I also heard many times your Judaical system highly disfavors the financially weak but I don't know much about that topic. You also have a "fat" epidemic as I have heard. Also your education system is kinda bad and too expensive.

To close it off - your politics are highly polarized with borderline retarded conservatives that call everyone soyboys on the one side and don't even get me started on the social justice warriors that took a University president hostage[1] and in general know nothing else but to scream loudly.

Cooperation oligopolies are gaining too much control and you see anything remotely welfare related such as the obama health care or free universities as communism.

Btw. education is gonna be the most important field in the future. With rising demand for high skilled jobs poor people are not gonna have it easy. So free universities aren't that bad of an idea (and yes obviously they are not free but paid for by the tax payer).

Also german A-Level History Lessons are of extremely high qualities so we know all about our past and what lessons that brings with it. One of the most important skill I learned in School was in History where we learned to critically analyse any kind of source. It kinda makes you immune to bullshit media of all sorts.

EDIT: I didn't read the source, it was simply the first google match and I just put it there for reference.

1 https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-05-26/they-believe-i-was...

is it so hard for the independent to include a link/name/source to the documentary?

Whats the message in all three of them? I watch neiter disney princess movies nor animes.

why is there no syllabus - as in a list of contents? I want to know what really is behind this buzzword stuff.

Agreed, and if I used an alternative I would have to spend hours searching on google, trying to import "iContacts" or whatever format into whatever other format when I change my pc, phone, loose all the data, or whatever might happen.

Its like downloading your email and organizing it into sub folders instead of using gmail.

That's too inconvenient. The nice part about facebook is that you can forget about people, but then they post a status update that they are currently somewhere in your country and you can meet them.

I have many friends from Egypt, China, Brazil and other places but I live in Germany. If I visit Egypt in 2 years for some reason I want to shoot a message to my friends there to meet them for "a coffee face to face". There is no better service then facebook to enable this.

There is nothing I hate more then writing on my phone. In general I much prefer meeting someone face to face, but at least on my pc my keyboard it is much easier and faster to write a message.

As much as I wish for flying cars in the future, Elon said they would be too loud and dangerous to be feasible. You can watch what exactly he said on the ted interview, would be interested in an counter argument to his position.

Edit: here is the exact video (1 min long): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Nz69M6khCs

Thanks, I enjoyed it too. Why is "black swan" so popular here on HN though?

> Equity isn't the only form of capital investment.

Someone has to pay for the fixed costs. And its most common that an investor does that. Never said it has to be that way, just that it is common and offers many advantages.

> Well, lots of ways, including the thing that actually defines capitalism, the particular model of property rights.

Property rights are just an extension to help the underlying basics I wrote about. If you are a tribe you might life in balance with other tribes and you have control over a river (or whatever) and you might even give something comparable to property right to a member of your tribe. But this is all enforced by society. Property rights are the same thing, just more formalized and generalized. Ofc. there is more insecurity in a autocracy, but that because an autocracy is about exploiting others.

My point was more that the basic characteristics of our modern economy (our modern economy = capitalism) also apply to early human societies. Working a profession, cooperating with colleagues and trading goods are inherent human nature. Even if you are a hunter-gather.

I wasn't referring to specific theories. My point was more about observing how the world is.

How can all companies be employee owned if you need to invest a lot of capital to start a car factory. Half of the fortune 500 companies are younger then 10 years - starting a company has a high risk on the invested capital.

A company is owned by whomever is risking their money to finance it.

How is capitalism different from early human tribes? They also needed to work and trade. Things have become much more sophisticated but the basic principles remain. People complain about spending too much time for a company and slaving away - but in earlier times they would have spend way more time on the fields plowing while 4 of their 8 kids died.

I have been working on something very similar for the past year.

I first build this prototype with the goal of generating sentences and then analysing the user translation because I wanted a feature to see if the user knows the word even though he misspelled it.

http://ling-academy.com/

I finished that 3 months ago, received feedback but its just a proof of concept and since then have been building v2 which is very similar to what you have build - the idea is to have users learn vocab and then match them up with fitting text. This v2 is almost done but not deployed yet.

I do however plan on going much much further then this. I have been looking for a co-founder who is also invested into e-learning and language learning. Maybe we should team up? Email is:

Michael . baumgarn at gmail . com

I think the part about gross cars is a trivial problem. You pay a 100$ deposit for the account and if you puke in the car you lose the deposit. If that happens to often you get banned or whatever.

I like that quote, but to be honest, being a German myself something I hate about other Germans is that they always are very limited in their head and scared of disruptive innovation. Germans are good at incremental but not at disruptive innovation.

Why did they shoot him though? Isnt a human life worth more then some car? This behavior from the police is unheard of in Western Europe, and there would be a public outcry if something like that would happen here. I dont understand americans...

Same here. Really curious though if there is any service/api to harvest news articles from websites to experiment with text analysis with? Havent found any after some search, just apis that provide meta information but not an actual corpus of text.

Just another perspective: If a child in such an economically underdeveloped country would starve or experience otherwise grave consequences for not doing the work many equate to "slavery", then that country has failed. Its a failed state. At least I think that what you call the phenomena in political science. With "country" most mean the government but one could argue its the society as a whole - Certain norms and values in differ from country to country, but who is responsible for those norms or values, weither they are "good" or "bad" ones? (I dont know, no one really does)

The status quo of failed states (corruption, violence, no infrastructure) is hard to change. What can you do today that will solve everything in 10 years? Whats the magic solution?

No one really seems to be implementing any such functioning top down plan.

But there are certain inter-dependencies in our complex world, one of which is that free trade enables child labor. Child labor is bad but in the context of a failed state that represents an even worse environment then child labor it seems more acceptable (the child has to work, but at least it dosent die of hunger). So its really bad but no one is offering a better solution. Everyone is just complaining and pointing fingers at others.

thanks, that was a really interesting article. Unfortunately it focused mainly on what "willpower" is dubious and not so much on what it is instead that helps one resist a craving. Only at the end the author wrote that the drinking lawyer had to much stress (underlying problem). But that isnt really a good general answer/explanation. I once read the book "the power of habit" and maybe that is the answer (its habits we need to control) but I am not sure.

Like what? In Germany? Like beeing an economic power house? Or our universal healthcare? Free Education/Universities? Our extremely low level corruption? The functioning bureaucracy? Our social net of Hartz4? Or do you mean that the world leaders talk?? Should Merkel not talk to Putin and Erdogan?

sorry if this is a silly question, but whats so bad about amazon? Do you mean they threat their workers badly?

Sorry if this comes off as harsh, but do you approach eLearning with this sort of wishy washy that most people tend to have in this field(as far as I observed), or do you know what you are doing, eg. the educational psychology behind it, and basing decisions on empirical evidence?

"Many institutions move towards eLearning" - the impression I got from this topic is that its pretty much every time one of those "Ipad cases" - spend $$$ on Ipads even if they are useless, just to show how modern your institution is. Almost every time I hear about this, its some news-article over hyping eLearning that is so badly implemented that the teachers hate it.

If you know what you are doing (not the wishy washy way) then I would really like to ask you some questions.

What do you think could be improved/changed in the future?

I agree that the process is overly tedious to an unnecessary degree. I have read that test have shown that TSA security( or check-in security in general) is more for show (providing sense of security) then actually being effective. In addition to that the statistics even say that risks of airplane failures are far lower then other risks.

Yet there seems to be a trend in banning and restricting more and more from airplane travel. And many people, that I know, think these restrictions are good.