wobbleblob

A friend of mine lives, well lived, on the Isle of Man. He's been in a rehabilitation center on the mainland for the past year, after being hit by a Ferrari driving at entitled velocity.

Why do you even need cars there? Everything is within cycling distance.

The cost of living in the SF area is about comparable to that in major cities in western Europe. You can't easily make a 1:1 comparison, some things are way more expensive on one side of the Atlantic, and some on the other.

Yeah, but are you looking at this from the Silicon Valley point of view, where a computer programmer can expect a 6 figure income straight out of college? Because that's far from the norm in the parts of 'the West' where I live.

I'm not claiming the job is "easier". Making a website isn't exactly brain surgery. I'm saying the reward is higher in terms of your income and status in society.

> They do tech because it provides a way of getting a good life. In the West, where conditions are less harsh, women don't feel the need to go into tech to get a good life.

But does it now? All of 'the West' isn't Silicon Valley.

I live in 'the west', Western Europe to be exact, and while I probably make more than a plumber or a shoe salesperson, I'd say someone with a medicine, law or business degree tends to make a lot more than I do, under easier conditions, and in those fields, you're not considered old at 40, and you're not on call in the weekends. IN terms of 'a good life', tech isn't the best return on investing 5 or 6 years of your life in a degree.

It's probably not a coincidence that these are the degrees women like to pursue. For a job that requires a college degree, 'tech' isn't that rewarding in terms of money or 'the good life'. It's rewarding in terms of getting to work in tech. You really need to want to work in tech to do it. This may be stupid prejudice of mine, but I get the impression guys tend to think more in terms of what they want, and girls tend to think more in terms of what would be smart of practical.

Now I can imagine that for someone in India or Romania, a degree and skills in tech means you could work for customers in the west or even move there, and make a lot more money than you would otherwise, while a business or law degree and skills don't transfer as well across borders, so the same dynamic of choosing what you want versus what would be the smart choice leads to a different decision.

“We can’t make paying taxes pleasant, but at least we can make it simple.”

I actually don't mind paying taxes, because I can see around me every day that the money is mostly put to good use. I can imagine if I lived in a place where there were little or no public services, bad public schools, bad infrastructure, five digit annual college fees, polluted tap water, power with frequent blackouts or brownouts etc, I'd be pissed off with my tax bill too.

They don't make [foo] like they used to. Lamentations like these have been going around in western culture since at least the time of iron age Greece, which people felt was a regression from the bronze age.

The observations from the article can be explained by simple attrition. Old fridges that were crap have been thrown away. Old buildings that were crap have been demolished. Old cars that were crap have been scrapped. What you're left with is the tiny percentage of buildings, appliances and cars that were designed and built a little better and cared for a little bette than the rest, making it look like old things are of a higher quality than new things.

Half a century from now, there will be people who, looking at the few surviving buildings, cars and appliances from today, will lament that they don't build things like they used to in the early 21st century.

Short answer is: you don't. You'll mostly be standing still until the kids are a bit older.

If your answer is "But [insert famous tech guru] does it", you'll find that [famous tech guru] has a spouse who takes care of all or most of the kid stuff.

The EU is designed entirely for internal reasons: to end the cycle of great wars between France, Germany, Russia and Britain over resources and arable land. The basic idea is that you don't need to fight over coal and steel, if you can just buy it. Protectionism, by design, leads to conflict. This could be intentional, expecting to win that conflict, but for Europe, with several adjacent powers of similar strength and modern weaponry, it was obviously not working out well.

American influence has actually been instrumental in getting the project started[1]. 'Europe' doesn't have any geopolitical or military ambitions, and as so many member states are NATO members, it tends to follow American interests in these matters.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/1356047/Eur...

If you look again, I didn't mention that name at all. The only relation is that, after the changes in London and Washington, outside interference will now not only be coming from Moscow, and they are capable of exerting far more refined influence than Moscow's online troll army and funding of anti EU activists.

On the contrary. People outside of France get to see her through the mainstream media, which makes it look like only xenophobes could be voting for her. From Francophone friends I hear she's actually smart, witty, an excellent debater, and if she weren't held back by her name and the reputation of her father, she could have more mainstream appeal.

After the round of elections in France and Netherlands this spring, and Germany this summer, Europe may or may not start disintegrating, depending on the outcome.

Ms. le Pen may not win this time, but she will one day. A correctly timed scandal or major terrorist attack in the second round may sink her opponent. Moscow, London and Washington are hard at work with her, to make this happen. When she, or someone like her, wins in either France or Germany, the EU comes to an end.

It is very difficult for me to understand what strategic goal the new White House administration intends to achieve by disintegrating the EU and thereby pushing parts of it from the American to the Russian sphere of influence, but I'm sure they have thought this through very carefully.

A friend mentioned they successfully petitioned against a sidewalk on their side of the road, they don't want people walking by their property. These are cultural differences that Hollywood doesn't prepare you for.

You all have so much space, but how you choose to use it is a bit disappointing. There is no shared space. No bike lanes, ok, I understand that, but in most places in town, there aren't even side walks. No town squares, no city parks, just endless rows of little castles, accessible only by car. Crossing the street on foot is illegal. Even to go running or cycling, I'd have to drive somewhere first.

There are enough things to like, but this aspect is something I'll never get used to.

Not long after I discovered Pandora, they banned me for living in the wrong country. No, they didn't want my dollars. Off with you scum in non-English speaking countries, your money probably smells funny.

It's ok, there's Spotify now, which doesn't arbitrarily ban users for living in the wrong place. Spotify has become a much better, much more flexible service. Even if Pandora were to lift its ban on foreigners, there is no longer a market for their service here. Sorry Pandora, you had the momentum, but threw it away.

Is that percentage high or low compared to the products of low skilled labor?

Maybe with their work, labor costs are a relatively small portion of the product price?

Yeah, but what you've learned doesn't effectively rot away at the same rate. Old diseases don't go away, people don't develop new organs as they discard old ones.

Oh cool, he made a webshop with an RPG backend. I last did that about 15 years ago, it looked just as awful, and just like him, I was so proud of my achievement at the time, that I couldn't see what an abomination it really was. It's a pity, that customer deserved better.

I totally believe age discrimination is real, and the Corgibytes author hits the nail on the head with:

> Only as Good as Your Last Two Years of Accomplishments

> Kent Beck has suggested that, with consistent use of pair programming, the capabilities of programmers don’t differ much after two years of experience.

Experience in our field rots away at an amazing rate. I don't think it's as short as 2 years, but if you're still regularly using techniques you mastered 10+ years ago, you're probably falling behind. I don't think lawyers, doctors or stock brokers have this problem.

> I'm just a science fiction writer

Did you write anything we may have heard about?

If people see a headline that doesn't reinforce what they already believe, they dismiss it as obviously alt-right fake news, or obviously part of the liberal media conspiracy.

Maybe it's a good idea not to unfriend your [Wrong side] voting facebook friends and relatives, but to keep your network diverse. At the very least you won't be as utterly shocked when [Wrong side] wins, even though absolutely no one you know would ever vote for [Wrong side].

You know what happens when a ruler's legitimacy is widely questioned. See the legitimacy question as separate from the question whether the ruler is popular or good. In the past armies have been raised against perfectly fine rulers whose legitimacy was questioned, and armies have been raised in defense of horrible tyrants whose legitimacy was not in doubt. My enthusiasm for representative democracy is that it has largely done away with these internal conflicts, without a need for repression.

The vices of voting that you mention are more an artifact of a first past the post, two party system: over time, any idea that has a plurality will get all of the influence. Any idea that never has a plurality will never have any influence.

In a system with proportional representation and a tradition of coalitions, over time, an idea that has 20% of the vote will gravitate towards about 20% of the influence. With many parties to choose from, the choice for your educational platform may not be automatically bundled with a choice for a foreign policy.

I think you misunderstand the point of democracy. Democracy is not a mechanism for selecting the best ruler or the wisest policies. Democracy serves as a solution for the succession problem without revolutions and civil war.

It is a mechanism that places the process, the system, above the ruler, and provides a strong and formal mechanism for replacing the old ruler with the new one.

Totalitarian states nearly always descend into chaos and violence when the dictator dies. Without clear succession rules, they rarely have an undisputed successor ready. Monarchies are historically more stable, but every so often a ruler dies without an undisputed heir, or one is such a blatantly bad ruler that civil war breaks out. Some dictatorships are able to maintain stability and prevent revolutions or civil war with more or less extreme repression.

Democracy is meant to solve all this. There is no need to take up arms against a bad king, if you know he or she will be replaced in 4 or 8 years. People who were at least consulted about the choice of ruler (in the form of elections) are less likely to dispute the ruler's legitimacy. Succession isn't disputed, because it's the system and not the ruler that chooses the successor.

Revolutions and civil wars are bad, they used to kill millions every other generation. The system we have maintains itself with minimal repression. So yes, one down side of democracy may be that people get to decide about issues they don't really understand. It's totally worth it.

That's great, but didn't Concorde show that there's really not that big a market for shaving a few hours off an intercontinental flight? Wouldn't it be more future proof to invest in "fast enough" ultra low fuel, low cost intercontinental means of transport, that's still viable after peak oil?

You don't get it. The importance you place on hair and skin color in telling people apart isn't following a set of objective, mathematical criteria, it's a set of priorities based on what you're used to. It is entirely possible someone from a different background thinks of hair- and skin color as irrelevant details, much like you would with a brown and white cow vs a black and white one.

Someone else posted this: http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=3285

> (Similarly, I would not be surprised if a face recognition NN worked better on Europeans rather than Chinese, for the prima facie reason that they have more variable facial features and other aspects like multiple hair colors other than black.)

You might be surprised to learn that to Chinese people, westerners all look more or less the same. To Africans, white people look more or less the same. Our biological hardware is great at distinguishing minute differences in things (especially people) we are very familiar with, while we automatically start generalizing about things we are less familiar with.

For comparison: a metal fan may be able to distinguish a dozen distinctly different styles of Norwegian Black Metal, while to outsiders it's all loud white noise made by people dressed like undead clowns.

I'm telling you, it's not the speed, it's the outfit and the bike. I don't suddenly ride faster just because I'm wearing a helmet and goggles, but other people's attitude is sudden;y totally different.

Is that strange? Are you confident you'll stay completely composed and in control with a live bug in your eye? I lost control while trying to get the source of pain in my eye to stop.

> if car and a bike have an accident, by law, it is automatically the fault of the car, no matter what. Even if the person on the bike is drunk, driving in the wrong direction, etc.

Both drivers and cyclists seem to believe this, but it is an exaggeration. The law says a court may decide to hold your (mandatory) liability insurance liable for some of the damage 'without having to prove your guilt'. It does not say you get the blame no matter what the pedestrian or cyclist does. At the same time, you can still sue the cyclist or pedestrian for damage to your car.

http://www.anwb.nl/juridisch-advies/aanrijding-en-dan/aanspr...

Looking before opening your car door is an amazing innovation... what will they come up with next? Looking before turning?