> (like a high-trust environment like Sweden)
You maybe don't know that Sweden is consistently near the top of shoplifting statistics in Europe.
404 karma · joined July 19, 2023
You maybe don't know that Sweden is consistently near the top of shoplifting statistics in Europe.
Setting aside all the environmental benefits of no longer needing to travel to and from the office every day, I also don't understand why these business pages don't see a changed situation as an opportunity rather than always viewing it as a loss. These delis were catering to a system that's disappeared, but in time there'll be new needs in the neighborhood, or new ways to use the premises, and create other jobs.
The people who were eating at this sandwich bar haven't magically stopped eating. They're just doing it somewhere else, giving their business and money to employ other people.
Where I live, nearer the edge of the city, all sorts of lunch restaurants and takeout places are flourishing. This is great because a lot of them are now also open in the evening, making the neighborhood much more alive and vibrant all through the day.
This is just a natural evolution that will stabilize over time. No need to force people to commute to an office for 8 hours a day, to keep a dinosaur system alive.
I was replying to a response that was specifically about Sweden.
> Erikun
> This was my thought exactly (I’m Swedish). It sounds so brutal, and it was not just her own but her entire family’s!
> adastra22
> Then she would have waited 10 months for a CT scan instead of 10 days.
I noticed that adastra22 was downvoted for this. I'm really not sure why, as it very closely mirrors a lot of people's experience with Swedish healthcare.
There have been a lot of stories in the news over the last couple of years, but here's just one at the top of a simple google-search, about a kid that died because their scans were postponed (in Swedish):
https://www.dagensmedicin.se/specialistomraden/cancer/barn-d...
> Due to a lack of capacity at Karolinska University Hospital, the examination of a previously cancerous child was postponed. The child subsequently died of metastatic cancer.
This is such a mischaracterization of the Swedish healthcare system, which is much more a lottery than your 'personal experience' suggests.
I have my own experience of a service that is plagued by delays, inefficiency and outright dystopian suffering alongside other people who have had fast and efficient help.
It's very much the luck of the draw - although sometimes I get the impression that social standing and even 'blondeness quotient' may help to get better care.
> access to control “System Events.app”. Allowing control will provide access to documents and data in “System Events.app”, and to perform actions within that app.
Not allowing this access, seems to disable use of the app altogether - not even a window appears, and there's no menubar item (it's not even capable of quitting on its own - I need to go into the Force-quit dialog to close it).
Two things would be useful:
1. At the very least, explain why you're going to request this access, and why the app needs it to function
2. Try to architect the app without needing the permission, at all.
OK now I get it. Virtue signalling.
Is there a name for this type of question, which is framed in such an ingenuous way that almost any reasonable answer to it will make that person seem like an intolerant and uptight monster who doesn't tolerate their small kids playing around sex-workers giving a punter a handjob in the bushes?
In my view, a "whistleblower" is someone who gives their information confidentially (not anonymously) to a responsible investigating authority.
Not someone who writes a comment on the internet that you or I could write ourselves, with a little research sprinkled with credible-sounding 'insider chit-chat'.
Why do you think we should surrender the tiny amount of agency that we still have, in the face of corporate profit-driven deterioration?
For me, this isn't about a measured risk in relation to other known risks in my life (crossing the road, cycling, drinking alcohol). It's about removing a totally unnecessary risk caused by greed and corporate heedlessness.
A similar case: I stopped eating British Beef when a British minister fed his daughter a beefburger[0] to 'prove' it was "totally safe", during the 'Mad Cow Disease' (BSE) crisis in 1990. I wasn't significantly worried about contracting BSE at the time, but the lengths and efforts that the government went to, to convince people to eat more beef for 'patriotic' reasons, when the farmers had fed their cows on ground-up carcasses for economic gain, meant that my boycott was a small but meaningful expression of my own agency when faced by this sort of appalling behavior.
I feel the same way about Boeing, and about the greed of airlines (like RyanAir), that think only about profit and see passenger safety as an irritating distraction that is only important in terms of 'brand perception'.
[0] https://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/bse-crisis-john-se...
As I mentioned in another post, you can check this theory against the pandemic control-group that kept schools open:
https://www.thelocal.se/20231205/swedish-students-maths-and-...
Luckily we have the control-group of Sweden, that spent a large part of the pandemic proclaiming that not closing schools was going to have a fantastic positive effect on children's learning.
The actual result: Sweden's PISA results declined much more steeply than countries who used distance-learning during the pandemic.
I think Milton Friedman's idea, was that parents would actually receive education 'vouchers' and be free to use them in whichever education context they chose for their children.
This is slightly different, as the private/public system is wholly handled by the State system: parents simply choose between alternative schools, and the state channels taxpayer's money to whichever school the child attends.
Unfortunately, in many cases this has simply led to corporations or individuals who employ fewer or less qualified teachers, who in turn hand out 'optimistic' grades to the kids (attracting more parents), and extracting enormous profits from the State system.
At the same time, the normal State schools are being starved of resources; standards are falling, leading to more parents putting their kids into the private schools, leading to an inevitable downward spiral.
It may contravene some sort of HN guidelines to point this out, but the fact that this comment has not been downvoted by a large number of people is quite an indictment of the mindset here. In my opinion, of course.
But Tegnell is the architect and main proponent of the historical revisionism that I'm talking about. He is the man at the center of the controversial policies.
Even while they were being enacted, Sweden was fed a narrative of exceptionalism by Tegnell and the mainstream media, who never mentioned the comparative liberality of the other Nordic states' policies, and maintained the fiction that we were still following the most liberal strategy (even to this day).
Tegnell is massively popular in Sweden. In fact, as deaths accumulated and it looked more and more like he was following a disastrous path, his popularity increased exponentially.
Criticism or even mildly questioning Tegnell was (and for a large part, still is) totally off-limits: there is absolutely no way I'd mention my doubts about him or his policies to my fellow Swedish colleagues or friends.
edit: Incidentally, for those who can read Swedish (or use Google Translate), this series of contemporary articles is a really great overview of the events in Sweden seen from a skeptical perspective:
https://floderochtekoppar.blogspot.com/2021/09/sveriges-hant...
If you go to:
https://ourworldindata.org/covid-stringency-index
take away the default countries, and instead add Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden.
Then make sure you also click "Align axis scales" you will see that Sweden only had fewer restrictions than its neighbors during a very short period at the beginning of the pandemic (during the first wave).
After that, Sweden had both more stringent restrictions than all its neighbors, and had those restrictions in place for a longer period of time.
The narrative - the historical revisionism, the myth that a very large number of people want to promote, and which has even become some sort of amnesiac 'reality' for many Swedes - should not be mistaken for what really happened.
After the first two devastating waves during the Spring and Autumn of 2020, Sweden in fact 'locked-down' in some ways more restrictively than our nordic neighbors - all of which made timely interventions that meant their restrictions on meeting en-masse in public were for shorter periods and less intrusive on people's everyday lives.
The narrative that it was a 'free-for-all' in Sweden has been fostered retrospectively by neo-liberal groups that placed economics above human lives. In their eagerness to be 'proved right' after the fact, most Swedes now embrace this historical revisionism.
The statistics that show that Swedish "excess deaths" were low or even lower than other countries were cooked-up by a journalist from a right-wing newspaper in Sweden (SvD), who noticed that if one discounts the downward trend in excess death for the last 25 years in Sweden, together with dispensing with demographic weighting, and then averaging the 3 years from 2019 onwards (which includes the period after vaccination), then miraculously you can squeeze the numbers you want from the raw figures.
I don't think sitting in an office somewhere, with my headphones on is any kind of 'moat'. I'm judged on the quality and speed of work that I do. I'm also paid for understanding the underlying needs my company has for the application I'm building. I'm paid for the ideas I contribute, the work-culture I share, and for being present and consistent during work-hours - even though I work almost always from home.
Twice in my career so far I've been involved in projects "paying someone across the world" for "the same output" and they were both total disasters: ending multiple-times over budget without even being completed.
The time-difference alone would have been bad enough (where the feedback loop was often a couple of days even for the smallest change), but we found that the coders you were supposed to be dealing with would regularly be replaced, simply disappear altogether (sometimes reappearing in the project weeks later); the new developers would need to be re-briefed, and altogether the coordinating project manager halfway around the world would spend most of their time either bullshitting or stonewalling us.
Payment, taxes and other problems all just added to the headaches.
I don't mean that these developers were producing code that was lower quality (we barely saw enough to really judge), it's simply that working with someone "locally-remotely" is (almost literally) a world away from expecting to be able to just export that job to a low-wage coder in some other part of the globe.
I guess this guy thought knocking Apple for Meta's unscrupulous methods would just guarantee some nerd-kudos, but didn't feel any need to follow his own advice in practice.
So you are arguing with my loose assertion that it is trivial whereas what I should have been more clear about, was that I consider it possible by experts with the requisite expertise.
But not far away from humans who had been to where the bat virus was found to bring back samples for analysis and experimentation in their laboratory [1]
[1] spoiler alert: the Wuhan Institute of Virology
It's easy to say this, as neither you nor I have the requisite knowledge to prove/disprove your assertion. But I read threads like this one [1] or resources like this one [2] and realize that there are experts who are able to distinguish earlier and later variants.
Incidentally, I noticed that you edited your first response several times while I wrote this. The tone of what you wrote first was a bit less considered than the what I'm responding to now, but I hope it's ok to just leave it at this.
I'm not sure how to respond. I want people to look at posts like this one[1], that actually reference solidly researched studies like those done by Bloom Labs, instead of the manipulated and cherry-picked data used by Worobey and others who support the wet-market scenario (at least in public).
There are a lot of crackpots out there, and I try to ignore their anti-vax nonsense. But just because it's convenient for them to align themselves with what they seem to think is some sort of anti-China hypothesis, it's no reason for me to discount the clear and growing evidence that a lab accident infected workers, and spread from there, wherever it might have been in the world.
It is trivial to tell whether a variant is antecedent - this is how the absurd 'double jump' of lineage A and lineage B was necessary for Worobey to justify his thesis that the wet market was the origin of covid... twice
Because almost no-one has covered this news, you may have missed that the data pointing at the wet-market (from Worobey et al) has been thoroughly debunked using solid scientific data.
I can't tell whether this is sarcasm? I don't even know who Laura Ingraham is and though I've heard of Tucker Carlson I've never seen or read anything he's written or said (on TV?).
I'd characterize myself as a normal, left-wing European who initially totally believed the zoonosis origin of covid. But being genuinely curious about the science, I've read more and more of the abstracts analising the available data, and gradually realized that all the actual facts - even though some of them circumstantial - point with much higher likelihood towards an accidental lab-leak (which incidentally happen all the time), than the very unlikely 'double jump' of two separate lineages infecting people at the market - but not infecting anyone else in the entire delivery chain from capture or animal farming, to the market itself.
Here are just a few of the people that have studied the data scientifically - and have destroyed the supposed 'raccoon dog' theory, the cherry-picked and manipulated data used by Worobey et al, and obviously the lies that went into the infamous 'Proximal Origin' document - which the authors themselves did not believe:
https://nitter.net/R_H_Ebright
https://nitter.net/EmaNymton90
PS: please at least spend a few seconds looking at the links here as it's disheartening that there are so many negative responses within a few seconds of my posting this in good faith. None of these experts are fringe activists or crackpots.
I have one of those 'funny' interview stories where the candidate turned-up with large scrapes all over his face attributed to falling off a scooter which suggests your data-point-of-one is contradicted by my data-point-of-one.
I understand your need to take a dig at Apple, but the current iMac comes in orange, purple, pink, yellow, blue, green and silver.
The problem is that if you're trying to get a specific copy of a classic title (say one with footnotes or an informative introduction), then there's almost no way of telling what you're going to get, as all the reviews are just haphazardly bundled together for a book with the same title - some of them warning about missing chapters, or crazy OCR mistakes, while others are praising the quality of the hardbound covers.
Blows my mind that Amazon don't care any longer about selling fake hardware of every type, but even something as simple and controllable for them as Kindle books has become a shitshow of scams and fakes as well.