While I agree with you at some level, I can't help thinking of the Amish. They impose plenty of restrictions on themselves and still manage to flourish. There must be a way that is different than simply accepting "progress".
Around the same time, I found a wallet while riding my bicycle on a crowded road, under a bridge. What made it more interesting is that it belonged to someone I had ghosted as a teen, after leaving a job site and never getting paid. Amazing way to mend it, both of us were very happy about the outcome.
I've had similar experiences traveling in Europe. Hospitality must be some sort of human instinct. Thanks for sharing your story and bringing up memories!
Heard the same thing from an oncologist in Europe. Unfortunately the attitude here is still one of sarcasm. "Of course they're making great progress, but do patients agree to take part in the studies?" According to this oncologist, studies that would take 5 years in the West are done in 18 months in China, even in small regional hospitals.
I broke two Deore and one SP PL-1. My cheap Nexus one seems to hold better but drags a lot. There’s a market for a hub that has serviceable bearings, especially with brake disks where it’s the only part of the wheel that’s supposed to experience wear. I’d love to be able to pop two new bearings in place and ride 10k more.
After 15 years of dynamo hub, I’m about to switch to a power bank connected to usb light. Dynamo hubs are quite fragile and not easily maintained. Cheap front hubs are found everywhere and they less drag. I have a few Deore hubs that I found on the street on abandoned bicycles.
And their size puts them in a different class. If a foreign entity has effective powers that make it similar in some ways to a foreign state, it makes sense to treat it as such.
A simple indicator for quality should be the return rate by brand. You need two things: a law that offers a long enough warranty, and a public registry of returns where customers can check that their return is listed.
My pet peeve about urinals has to do with the way the separating walls are usually installed. It's systematically too low, as if their goal was to prevent splashing between each station instead of their role of visual privacy.
I used to live in a small rural city, in a shared house where the door was never locked. On market day, there would be this woman coming in to do her weekly laundry. I was never given the key to that house.
It’s not only feedback, having arbitrary checkpoints like exams is an important motivator, and it also creates a whole culture around it that makes the learning experience into a social one.
If meditation and workout look like a protection against ruminating, they might be functioning as avoidance. If a nap helps, maybe fix your sleep first (good sleep is super important for mental health). Daydreaming is healthy.
I would happily make a career switch if I had the feeling my work in a school would be useful and doable. Where I live, I tried it and it was neither of the two. After having experienced efficient companies, schools feel mind-boggingly stupid. And the policy of never failing students and reluctantly enforcing rules generates an serious waste of human energy.
Seeing the number of poor people in the world, I don't understand what makes you believe you couldn't be one of them. Their kids also need to eat, learn and grow.
I watched a friend generate a 10 pages report based on multiple documents, including scientific papers, and it was almost flawless. It would have taken me days.
A milder version of it was Copilot setting up an environment for a Jupyter notebook. What would have been annoying back and forth between googling and docs went like a breeze.
You may be overestimating technical abilities of 99% of the people. I tried to convert some to pandoc and failed miserably. Personally I love it, markdown is becoming more and more central to my workflows.
The average work time in European societies is probably that. The majority of citizens don’t work (too young, studying, sick, unemployed, retired). But it’s changing fast, the rich are no longer accepting this situation. The ones working get happily manipulated into believing others should suffer as much as they do, instead of organizing lifestyles into a more frugal fashion for the benefit of all.