helloworld11

Congratulations on having exceptionally high personal living standards while residing in the 7th most expensive U.S city. You represent a miniscule fraction of the world's population. Now of course, this doesn't mean you should base your standards on how hundreds of millions of other families with one or more children manage to live okay in the rest of the world, but I note that even in Seattle itself, there are 110,672 children under the age of 18 and I guarantee you that the parents of only a small fraction of these kids own a 2 million-dollar home or pay 30 grand per year in childcare expenses.

Again, many, many people raise children quite well and responsibly without needing anywhere near $2 million to have a couple of them.

>That's fair. And I think my comment was unintentionally misleading. I was not saying that Mexico is a safer country than the United States. I was trying to explain my perspective.

Fair enough, and I'm sorry if I came across as harsh in my own counterargument, but after all these years here, I've grown tired of some expats trying to whitewash how Mexico often is out of misguided political correctness or politeness towards the country. Politeness is fine as long as it doesn't paint dangerously false pictures.

>Even when I've interacted with police. Because a cop potentially wanting a bribe is more predictable/understandable to me than a buzz cut guy with an assault rifle who could kill me like its nothing and get away with it. That's what the police are like in the United States.

There are many examples of U.S police getting away with legal immunity against killing people who turned out to not be threats, but more often, they at least may face legal consequences if they commit a blatant murder or act of violence, and at least in many cases civil settlements happen that don't often get reported. Your take on Mexican police is almost certainly tainted by how they treat you as a foreigner and particularly in one of the safest cities in Mexico's single safest state, Yucatan.

Police in Mexico are more generally very dangerous under the wrong circumstances and have been implicated in more murders and disappearances than I can even number off the top of my head. And victims of their frequent violence can forget things like legal proceedings or civil settlements in all but the most unusual media-hyped cases. I'm sorry, but i'd say there's just no comparison. I'd suggest being more careful in making assumptions about Mexican police when you deal with them in the future. Where I live (a small city close to Puebla), municipal, state and federal police have been implicated in numerous murders, beatings, torture cases and so forth. All this aside from an endless stream of petty abuses that are openly, outright corrupt.

As for Merida, as I said above, known to be one of the absolute safest large cities in Mexico. Lovely place too, if you don't mind the heat. Mexico City has a fairly safe central part of it, a sort of bubble of reasonably moderate crime rates and few attacks against foreigners in particular, but remember that a vast other majority of the city is much more dangerous than that, and especially if you try entering the outer urban regions to the east and south of the city, or further out, entering Estado de Mexico.

With all that said, I continue to love this country after all these years.

Just to add: There are of course many stories and cases of bad police conduct in the U.S and in many incidents, police investigate poorly or react badly to situations, but overall, the general trend is that if you report a serious crime, it will receive a reasonably professional and often very strong investigative response. It will at least be generally incomparably better than how things would be in Mexico if the same were to occur, in this country where only 2% yes, 2% of murders (never mind lesser crimes) are ever solved by police.... People who complain about shitty police service in the United States are right to do so and point it out, but many of them have never seen just how bad it usually is in a country like Mexico.

What's more, basic self defense is practically forbidden. One can sniff their nose at U.S gun laws all they want but at least in most places a basic right to self defense when the police don't arrive on time and one's life is in danger exists. In Mexico, we have an absolutely perverse situation in which police barely respond in meaningful ways, crime is rampant, criminals are heavily armed and easily obtain weapons, but normal civilians risk going to prison if they should carry even non-lethal weapons for self defense, or use a gun in their home to protect themselves against and assault. Why do the police arrest them more often? Because such people are much easier pickings than a real criminal and it's an opportunity for safe extortion. This is very common, and grotesque.

U.S self defense laws are much better as an alternative. Europeans disdain such gun laws, but at least in most European countries where self-defense with weapons is often essentially forbidden, at least the justice system and policing are both functional. In Mexico they emphatically are not, but with the same sorts of highly restrictive laws against civilians who take defense into their own hands. I challenge anyone to defend such a legal landscape.

I too live in Mexico and have for over a decade. If you say you feel physically safer here, it's because you live in a bubble of safety that's probably the result of having enough money to carefully choose where you reside and having picked a place where crime and insecurity haven't quite filtered to yet. Despite this, it's grossly mistaken or even dishonest to paint this country as a safer place than the U.S. The police are almost uniformly corrupt throughout, and where they don't engage in frequently criminal levels of corruption and extortion, they're often simply inept and unresponsive. God help you if a family member should be a victim of a serious crime or kidnapping here. You will very likely receive a terrible if not outrageously corrupt police response. Exceptions exist, but they're not at all the norm.

Now moving onto crime: Though certain parts of the country are safer from it and some places are remarkably peaceful, no honest person should understate how generally pervasive violent crime of many types has become throughout a growing percentage of the country. NO, IT IS NOT about just drug cartels or people involved in the black markets. Extortion, kidnappings, assaults and murders have reached a point where they affect many people from all sectors even if they're often careful.

Now obviously, Mexico isn't some caricature from a Hollywood movie in which one dodges bullets just by stepping outside, and it's possible to be fairly safe in many parts of the country. However, danger and an inability to respond effectively to crime if you are a victim of it go hand in hand and are much more common than many bubble-ensconced expats claim. The murder rate in the country is 6 times higher than it is in the U.S as a whole, in 2021, murders have reached their highest levels since the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century, and this not to even mention forced disappearances, unreported murders or the numerous types of lesser violent crime that are widespread.

To claim that you're physically safer in Mexico than in the U.S is an exercise in extraordinarily selective thinking or very particular, completely non-general circumstances.

Again, I live here, have for many years and have many friends throughout this country from all levels of the socieconomic ladder. Many of them have been victims of crime in many situations. All have at some point been the victims of police corruption.

As someone who learned the language in about 4 months, my advice is to saturate yourself with conversation as much as possible without worrying about grammatical or structural correctness at first, just learn to talk and use as many words as possible for essential conversation without worrying how well you say everything. Immerse yourself in doing this as much as possible.

Ideally, if you work remotely, move to latin america for a few months. Otherwise, find a digital (app-based maybe) or social way of doing the same where you are. Also, suppress all embarrassment about saying anything incorrectly, just get the essential ability to communicate ideas across first while you converse as much as possible. Refinement can come later, the first thing is to learn the broad strokes rapidly.

My two cents from experience learning two additional languages fluently.

These calculations are absurdly subjective and based on some sort of very unusually defined notion of costs per child. In the country I live in (and in many others i'm sure) millions of people manage to raise perfectly healthy kids wonderfully without earning or spending anywhere near those amounts per child or for a home. 2 million for a home fit for two kids? Ridiculous.

>The idea that technology will always bail us out seems foolish to rely upon in the grand scheme, eventually the disequilibriums we create in these environments we exploit will be too extreme to successfully manage and maintain a system as complex as a local ecology. These disequilibriums are already extreme in many places and policy makers rarely seem to care unless some stakeholder is set to see a profit.

Your assumption that technology may not be capable of helping us enormously down the road is much more of an assumption than the pro-technology argument. Because unlike the anti-growth malthusian argument, the reality so far for centuries has been that technology did indeed make life easier and better for people despite an ever growing population.

There's actual, consistent precedent contradicting all malthusian predictions across several centuries of human development, with entirely artificial political disasters mostly being responsible for any failures. On the other hand, we've not yet seen any concrete examples of human development failing in the face of hard natural limits to growth. Wherever it has failed has been because of mismanagement in some form or another, not lack of possible solutions.

Two essential rules by which to judge this headline and story:

1. Never take seriously as an indicator of any massively complex trend or long-term tendency any headline from a single paper or small selection of media outlets whose express mission is to desperately seek attention and hype up drama from any possible thing, no matter how tenuously related to anything wider.

2. Do not assume that one specific regional weather trend of a certain brief time's duration is an actual indicator of something bigger and more complex, especially if other contrary trends are happening at the same time elsewhere. (human effects on climate change are real, but media and uninformed people pointing to any specific individual weather event as proof of them are little better than someone who doesn't believe there's human caused global warming using a single cold winter where they live as proof of their own contrary argument.)

Try buying ebooks on Amazon for kindle app from another country (in my case Latin America), they essentially force you to get the book under their kindle unlimited crap and there's no easy way to remove its DRMif you buy it like that. Because I emphatically do remove DRM from ebooks I buy (they're mine now, I "bought" them, no?), this makes it a no-go.

is rutracker relatively secure for torrent downloads?

>Funnily enough, it's possible to remove this DRM protection, but it's also not something completely legal, and makes me question why did I decide to legally buy the e-books in the first place.

Did you seriously stop yourself from saving your books, that you'd bought, from erasure by these shitty systems because of some silly DRM laws that are to begin with grossly unfair in this context?

Please, next time, strip that garbage and be done with it. Regardless of some silly regulations, consider it a basic assertion of concrete and very fair, paid-for ownership.

Or just pirate them.

It's simple: hear or read about a book you like, visit Libgen, search for it under fiction or non-fiction, (more often than not) find it listed and available, click to download. The entire process literally takes seconds and unless your literary tastes are deeply esoteric or specialized (and sometimes even then you'll be fine) you can get nearly any book you like notably faster than if you had paid for it to be locked into Amazon's shitty kindle platform.

>And the scary thing is, this came out of nowhere, one day everyone online is for freedom and freespeech, the next day everyone became against it

I don't think it came from nowhere. Specifically, I'd say a lot of it started very specifically after Trump won the 2016 election and a whole obsessive craze struck the progressive media and wider communities that follow it (among them, many programmers, techies and other academically educated, otherwise supposedly intelligent people) who rapidly also started to follow the line of this same craze over supposed "misinformation" and other "harmful" information.

Rapidly, the notion of free speech became something that needed to be modulated, coordinated, controlled and carefully allowed because it might lead to another case in which something disliked by the media/academic/cultural ingroup happens.

The related Russian disinformation mania of that same timeframe also introduced a strong and strangely absurd nationalist streak of controlling foreign influence in how people see information to the debate, this further reinforced the wider argument of free expression and access to it being dangerous for people.

Totally outside one's personal politics, this idea is absurd and hypocritical, but it notably became the case after that specific point in time among many people who previously used to aggressively defend the notion of free speech and online freedom. Remember the whole previous-to-that debate about net neutrality? Much of it faded away because it tacitly goes against the grain of these superseding notions about how discourse should be controlled.

The "trust science and lockdown measures" narratives during the COVID pandemic only expanded the scope of the above, and for similar reasons of partisan politics.

I'm curious, if Copyright stays valid for 70 years or so, how are these books only now entering the public sphere if the last of them was written nearly 100 years ago in 1927?

It is very much normal for millions of people to get infected with all kinds of mild to moderate illnesses each year. What bubble of cleanliness and isolation to you think most people should live in? During a pandemic, I can see the need for certain carefully considered (major emphasis on carefully) protective measures being applied. Outside of said pandemic, I can't, for practical and moral reasons of basic freedoms, government authority and absurd paranoias about something that's clearly not going away, not controllable through masks or quarantines and for which many remedies now exist.

This article is absurd hyperbole trying to reclaim a bit of flagging COVID hysteria for the sake of clicks and attention, and it uses arguments that are less valid than ever to do so..

>Falun Gong is a cult — the Moonies with Chinese characteristics. The fact that the author of this article and its associated book doesn't acknowledge this tells you all you need to know about this analysis.

First, one piece of opinion in a larger body of text doesn't tell you "all you need to know" about the rest of it. Much of the other arguments might be very good even if a few are wrong. What a silly notion to say otherwise.

Secondly, whether Falun Gong was cult-like or not doesn't change the fact that China brutally repressed a religious movement of tens of millions of members that didn't engage in terrorism, violence or forcibly integrate new members. This repression coupled with so many of China's other repressions of different groups and minorities makes it absurd to blame a religious group for being crushed ruthlessly, instead of the obvious giant state and police apparatus doing the crushing.

Now you're just engaging in silly semantics. Yes, in all practical sense, you absolutely do own the DRM-free books you've stripped of their rent-seeking garbage. You could even take that to court and quite heavily argue that because you bought them as claimed property, they're yours. You might not win, but a case could be made and in any case, you could move digital copies anywhere you want. The ones doing wrong here are the companies that try to impose DRM on things people are buying under a notion of ownership, That these also randomly erase or reclaim things they claim to have sold only makes the wrong worse.

To each their own, but many people read their books many times over in a life. It can be extremely enjoyable, comforting in bad moments, and bring forth new, fresh views on one's own thoughts and the text they're reading.

First, fuck those retailers for putting such conditions on things you bought to own. They're yours, so who cares.

Second, strip the DRM using Calibre, and store the books off any cloud-based platform and on your own drives, as you always should in any case given the proclivity of many content companies to just flagrantly bullshit their way into excusing themselves when they frequently steal back their customers access to stuff they ostensibly own.

Once a piece of digital content is actually yours, in your own device drives, it's only then really yours.

Keep the on-device cloud-based versions around if you like the user interface of your platform or reader, but your own digital copies elsewhere. The retailer doesn't even need to know (though I personally wouldn't give a tin shit if they did anyhow).

>It is obviously ruinous for anyone foolish enough to still publish content that survives on ads, donation, or upselling other products now.

Why do you think it would be ruinous for people who do any of these things? A (still) half-baked chat/answer AI bot that can reply semi-eloquently is still a far cry from enormous amounts of high quality human information sold through books, courses, long-form, ad or donation-supported articles and so forth. Color me skeptical but this smells like AI-bro tech flippancy at its most basic.

You're saying that Swiss-based Protonmail is worse for privacy than Australian-based (remember Australia's horrible digital privacy laws?) Fastmail? I'd love to see if you can even slightly substantiate that claim. Fastmail, by OZ law can legally be forced to allow snooping on its users without even telling them, while Protonmail has actually fought hard to stop snooping even in edge cases, yet you say you "won't touch" them? Some specific reason?

>So Pearl Harbor doesn't count?

For one thing, Hawaii wasn't a U.S state at the time. Secondly, that's still far from the mainland U.S, an attack on which would provoke a different sort of response.

As Churchill once said very wisely about war and optimism over certain tactics. "all things are always in motion simultaneously". In other words, we can't really know at all whether China's naval techniques, technologies or tactics will work well against U.S. naval power, or whether the opposite will happen, until the two actually fight for real on a major scale.

With that said, nothing prevents the U.S from imitating any tactics (including swarming by tiny boats and ships) that the Chinese use effectively against the U.S and its allies in a real naval war.

To name a very current example of my first point above in action 24/7, just look at the Ukraine/Russia war today. It has evolved in ways that very few people could have predicted just before or right after it started, with surprises on both sides.

To highlight how the same worked at the beginning of the second world war, partially prompting Churchill's own later phrase: the air defenses of the UK were thought adequate against enemies in 1939, until they were proven to not at all be so, and only improved through very deadly trial and error by 1943. France in 1940 was thought by nearly all powers to be more than a match against a German invasion (and indeed materially it was, on paper and stationary on the ground), until it was proven to not at all work as expected in just 6 weeks. All things always shift simultaneously in ways that can confound any expectation, particularly in situations as ferociously dynamic as large wars.

This is so very much worth reading given the context.

https://englishatlc.files.wordpress.com/2016/03/randall-munr...

The people posting here about all the aspects of EV car charging that are just so easy and convenient and present in their region, or easily applicable with a bit of effort have clearly not traveled to the other 80% of the planet that isn't the highly developed nations.

I know that technology can make surprisingly rapid inroads even into far and poorly developed corners, but this applies most of all to either easily or centrally scalable things. The requirements around EV cars are neither. I can't even imagine how quickly or easily much of this stuff will be in any way practical for hundreds of millions of people living in places where EV charging conveniences and personal garages or etc simply aren't the case at all or possible.

These péople won't give a shit about going EV "for the sake of the planet" until they can do it without being screwed in so many ways.

Some of you truly do live in pleasant little bubbles that simply don't consider the wider human world.

Stalin (who knew a thing or two about quantities taking on their own quality), in case anyone wonders. (though some have blamed Napoleon)

This guy's extensive, numerous analyses of plane crashes are downright excellent and deeply detailed like few other texts about the subject that I've ever found online. If he makes mistakes here and there, or attributes blame somewhat incorrectly on occasion, it's a minor issue considering the sheer scope of what he's written.

Many of the criticisms in the comments below that I've seen are deeply uncharitable in a way that's so typical of this site, where man y people post dense opinions with all kinds of viewpoints that mis-attribute blame and say mistaken things for all sorts of reasons on numerous subjects.

How ridiculously typical of the self-congratulatory audience on HN. Have none of you ever written code that has a flaw or two?

For years I've been telling people I know to NEVER trust all their security to one-password services. Given so many tech companies penchant for playing stupid and loose with internal security without customers even being aware of it, this kind of thing was bound to happen. All the worse to trust a password vault service under the circumstances.

Too many people who should know better on this site itself kept recommending things like Lastpass... Incredible.

hah. For years I've been telling people I know to NEVER trust all their security to one-password services. Given so many tech companies penchant for playing stupid and loose with internal security without customers even being aware of it, this kind of thing was bound to happen. All the worse to trust a password vault service under the circumstances.

Too many people who should know better on this site itself kept recommending things like Lastpass... Incredible.

The main problem with Mozilla's initiative is that it presupposes a definition of what's "healthy". This won't be popular with some of the progressive set here, but for many people, being exposed to a freewheeling landscape of ideas that aren't censored or controlled based on their "correctness" or evidence base is a wonderful thing.

The simple knowledge that even the crazy and unfounded can be allowed to express itself so that really interesting notions, connections and concepts can filter their way forward can be satisfying for many reasons, aside from moral questions of free expression. Prima facie, nobody can easily know what good ideas vs- bad ideas are, or where exactly good will evolve from crazy notions. The freedom to express is a fundamental step in discovering that.

I consider a place that allows it to be much less "toxic" than some stultifying, taboo-ridden supposedly healthy social landscape in which you get canceled or burned for going against some dominant grain of thought or any tangent of it, or for violating the dictates of some vocal minority that can't stand divergent thought but shields itself in labels of being "tolerant and diverse" or rational. Often, as we've all seen in recent years and since long before, such people are none of those things, but suffocate the real expression of many unique arguments.

Sure, many people in such an openly permissive and genuinely tolerant environment will engage in flame wars, bad faith argument, drama and all kinds of stupid bullshit and terrible thinking, but it will open room for interesting thinking to filter forward to those who can make better sense of it, without censoring others.

Many of history's best breeding grounds for incredibly creative thinking were places where free expression was raucously, tacitly cultivated in all its sometimes supposedly toxic glory of the stupid and mean sharing space with the thoughtful.