dgut

Addiction is the result of underlying mental health issues though, not a direct cause of companies selling addictive products... Teens have it rough, at least they imagine.

Edit: Not sure why the downvotes. There is a trend of putting the blame for N things on external factors, e.g "he is in debt because of all those credit card advertisements". For Americans, it might seem like corporations are the cause of many such ills, but there are societies where e.g aggressive advertisements which are common in the US are non-existent, and people still get in debt, eat badly or drink too many sugary drinks.

That's funny. This is the best thing I've ever found on HN. Thank you.

It's not US foreign policy alone that creates anti-American terrorists. You don't see Cubans burning US flags or chanting N things against the US despite >50 years of embargo and what not. You don't see the Vietnamese doing that either. There is another element to it.

As a Cuban, I wish the US had intervened in Cuba when it had the opportunity, back in 1959.

I'm just somebody who has lived enough to understand these complexities and appreciate people like Musk.

In my mind, this guy should just have "walked it off". But I've developed a thick skin because of my past.

The mind is delicate and fuzzy.

That's a really great point.

You can't go through a great lot of pain without the competitive drive, the hunger for greatness. In other primates, it's expressed in form of strength, in humans in the shape of great accomplishments.

If we were all nice people who don't mind being last, we wouldn't be "here" now.

Of course, the "non-abusive population" (you name it) have done great things, they help maniacally driven people like Musk to archive things, but they are the ones who lack the assertiveness and initiative, they're the cogs in the machine.

Definitely. At a meta level, this is quite dangerous. This deep hatred and misunderstanding of the outcasts will have us shrink as a society. A society of wimps will just be overtaken by another in time. We can't be a civilization without Musks.

If you push out the asshole "savants", you must also say farewell to all great things our civilization has to offer today: art, architecture, literature, technology and so on. Great achievers have rarely been driven by compassion.

People like Musk are necessary. You can't create great things without a mind outside of the norm, and a mind outside of the norm is often unstable. Most people wouldn't manage (psychologically) to be in Musk's position, much less get to the point where he is now.

It isn't fair (what happened to this engineer), but hardly anything in life is fair. What's important is to realize this and be able to move on. As an engineer in the US, he is already one of the luckiest people on Earth.

Yeah, no way these things will take off without legislation.

And regarding more legislation, no thanks.

And an amazing team: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*TZ-QFPLJjt470c3pc7...

That's a nice looking sales page.

I wouldn't say it's considered the "ideal role model" by some British politicians (as it currently stands), but they definitely stand on very similar ideological grounds. People like Corbyn simply think that if it's them who run the machine, things will run smoothly. That is, there is nothing inherently wrong with their ideology, the only problem with it is who gets to be the supreme leader. In Corbyn's eyes, he can do better. By the way, Podemos is the third largest party in Spain, and it supports Chavez/Maduro and it blames Venezuela's ills on US sanctions. Videos of the leader of Podemos supporting the Venezuelan dictatorship and its ideals aren't rare. Unfortunately, HN has the last years turned extremely left. They are like children who must experience pain before they understand. As a Cuban, I see through people like Corbyn and Iglesias as if I were Casper. The implications of their ideology are something the US/most of the West has not experienced yet, and as such, they're entirely ignorant about it. "The Open Society and Its Enemies" isn't a popular book among people here, I can tell you.

As my Cuban grandfather once told me, turning in his rifle became his most regrettable action after the revolution... :/

In Europe, the Venezuelan crisis is largely ignored. Where I live (Spain), our current government is more or less on friendly terms with Maduro's government and there is little insensitive to do anything about it. The left-leaning media has, for the most part, ignored the topic (El Pais for one...), despite the increasing number of Venezuelan asylum-seekers arriving in Spain each year, and any meaningful efforts to boycott anything would need the media/government's support.

Yet people upvote articles like this. Goes to show how supposedly people of "reason/logic" are as much influenced by "monsters" (ref to Goya's The sleep of...) as anybody else. :/

As an American, Cuba is probably the safest place you can visit in LA.

The French "kids" are 25y afaik.

This is not social responsibility. It's an emotional reaction to a scientific study. There is nothing irresponsible about the study.

Science doesn't have to care for the emotions of specific groups. Then we're doomed.

And yes, neurotypical women are close to identical at the meta level I'm talking about. Same for men.

It's her maternal instinct kicking in.

I know some female scientists who wouldn't want to hear anything about attributing differences to IQ or genes and become very emotional if the topic is ever mentioned. "I don't want to think of my friends from X as N".

"[...] the language has maintained the structure of medieval Spanish and sounds more similar to some forms of Latin American Spanish than European Spanish"

I've read some Ladino and the only immediately apparent difference is the spelling and a few foreign words that have entered the language. They don't speak in formal polite form (as opposed to Latin American speakers of Spanish), so in that regard, it's closer to Castilian Spanish.

Big difference between building localization into the app architecture and translating the app to 20 languages as a starting point, though.

> "Meanwhile we were stuck translating into 20 European languages.” - Christophe Sapet (French entrepreneur)"

That's such a bad excuse. There is nothing stopping them from executing in English, or in French in France in the first place. There are five major languages in Europe: English, Spanish, French, German and Italian. No startup starts doing business in >1 market, not even Uber/Google.

It's really hard to help a neurodivergent person. Normally, that requires having a special type of strong love for that person, the type of love that exists from parent to child (and not the other way around) for obvious evolutionary reasons...

That said, the state in a truly civilized society could take better care of people who aren't neurotypical. Something I believe is lacking in the US.

Hah, that's funny. As an anecdote, I was having a nice trip back from holidays when a security guard body-searched my then 2-year-old kid at Amsterdam airport on arrival. The shock-realization of what sort of society we've become threw me off the track.

Except there is nothing intellectual about it. It's an article about what somebody believes GS was doing/thinking during the World War II and a couple of anecdotes. If you already know the premises (GS was a Jewish writer who lived in Vichy France where she also worked as a propagandist) you end the article like you started, knowing nothing more.

Besides, all "modernists" have done is produce __trash__ and it will be remembered as such no matter how deeply the humanities try to paint it as intellectual and deep, it will never reach the level of Caravaggio, Velazques, Rubens, Cervantes and the like. Nope, it will be forgotten because it's neither beautiful nor good in any objective sense.

It's not that tech/STEM people are intellectually empty, many people in STEM simply don't buy the bullshit.

At the time of writing, there are three humanities articles on the front-page and they are the only articles that have 0 comments: this, Spinoza's Ethics, and A Defence of Common Sense.

So why are people upvoting these entirely subjective articles (because I don't see how they belong here)?

Hasn't the aging population paid their fair share though? How does it help to bring in more adults who for the most part have low wage jobs (=little or no taxes to collect), and will most likely live close or the same number of years as the original population?

You could argue that by bringing Filipinos in you lower the wages, and as a result, the native population is less interested in taking such jobs, besides lowering the "status" of the job itself.

I was recently looking for a nanny in Spain and most applicants were Spanish females. Despite that, most parents seem to hire foreign nannies from LA because it's cheaper.

That said, it's really sad if the elderly in Belgium are being taken care of by people they barely can understand. What a nice ending of life!

I remember from my time in the Netherlands that the elderly there get regular visits from a specific person whose job is to socialize with them to solve some of the "loneliness" problems. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens in Belgium, which is IMO, a growingly anti-social society.

In Spain (which has the highest life expectancy in Europe by the way) many old people are still taken care of by close family members, or in other cases by people from LA who at least speak the same language. I didn't realize how fortunate they actually are.

Mention it anyways, that is don't ever hesitate to post your opinion. Those who can't tolerate the topic aren't worth your argument/time but a lot of people wouldn't mind. Including me, an immigrant myself (not to the US though).

Do they? By how much? Immigrants have usually low wages. Anyways, in Western Europe, the increased demand (which is probably smaller than in the US), those things are easily canceled by the added costs to public healthcare + social benefits.