The geographic and demographic orders of magnitude when comparing these two places makes it difficult to extrapolate applicability of best practices. Who's to say the Swiss model scales? Article doesn't convincingly address this.
For context:
41 US States are geographically larger than Switzerland. It's most comparable state in area is West Virginia. West Virginia is .064% of the national area.
Some fun distance contexts. Driving end to end in Switzerland is comparable in distance to:
Driving from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, Detroit to Chicago, or New York City to Washington DC.
Extrapolating with this method, large cities should be as well equipped as Switzerland.
Los Angeles has 10x the population density of Switzerland and around the same population density in urban area. Same for Washington dc, San Francisco...
It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing. Distance between cities may be large, but the order of magnitude is closer when comparing within cities.
Yeah but like 10x the population, 10x the GDP, etc.
You're saying they laid down rail in the US from end to end during wild West times but modern infrastructure can't be built to the same scale even with mechanisation?
Lmao sounds like the UK. It does make sense tho, the world is now filled with middlemen and getting any job done costs 10x because of parasites.
And also a time when people were laying down ties with their hands and a hammer.
This isn’t a labor issue it’s purely political. Some people get rich from the status quo and bribe politicians to prevent competition. America is increasingly corrupt, particularly since citizens united and accelerating under the current admin
This is the same American-branded copium we see during discussions of socialized healthcare, which every other first-world country on the planet seems to manage. China has 10G and 50G home fiber. Zurich is larger geographically than Manhattan, while having much lower population density.
Unfortunately, problems like socialized healthcare are just far too complicated for contemporary America to solve. We used to be able to tackle big problems, but unless you're looking for ways to dodge taxes or rip people off, we're just not equipped for complex problem solving anymore.
Fine, 99% of China "landmass" does not have 50G. 100% of the US does not have 10G. The fact that in NYC, the richest city in the history of cities, most buildings still only have access to cable from a single provider is absolutely ridiculous. Urban centers is what is worth comparison here, and the US falls massively behind.
Very untrue. There are several providers in the US which offer 10Gbit services. Many more offer 2-5Gbit services pretty broadly. I've got friends in Kansas City with 40Gbit residential service. Sonic also offers 10Gbit in California.
Not all landmass because most of Tibet/Xinjiang empty, but ~100% wireless coverage east of Heihe–Tengchong line where ~95% of population are. Including Tibet/Xinjiang remote areas, ~95%+ of administered population areas down to village level where poor farmers have access to 5g AND fiber hookup option by now.
Building infra and networking gear is cheap in society that knows how to build and carriers are required to install in administered villages even if it's not profitable. Fiber adoption rate actually higher among rice farmers because they get subsidies, 1Gbps gigabyte fiber for cost of 200 Mbps in city and because bunch of villages got hooked up in last 10 years - they skipped straight to fiber which was bundled with road/power buildout.
Meanwhile US so dysfunctional / can't brute force rural fiber, need to literally invent SpaceX to plug gap. Which TBH is good copium.
More likely the cultural practice was not passed down after the massive change in food preservation about 125 years ago. In the United States, fermentation was a universally practiced method for the pickling of vegetables. This practice has been so reduced that the word "pickle" now only refers to cucumber preservation.
I don’t agree that the word “pickle” has been reduced like you claim. Used as a noun, it is only applied to pickled cucumbers. But it’s used as a verb is still very common and the average person understands that many things can be pickled.
Although if you were to ask them to guess at the etymology, you probably would get a lot of disappointing answers.
I think the big difference is sauerkraut is pickled in brine, resulting in fermentation. Whereas all the pickles I grew up with in the UK were pickled in vinegar, which doesn't produce fermentation. Pickled onions, eggs and beetroot come to mind
And yet an accessible ecosystem of 3rd party non-emacs tooling has not been developed.
I would pay big bucks for an obsidian-styled org-mode clone that had a no-frills GUI interface. I find org-modes task tracking, calendar, and agenda views top tier.
For what it's worth, there is this vscode extension https://github.com/realDestroyer/org-vscode/ which is pretty neat and can do org-mode task tracking, calendar and agenda view--and HTML preview.
I worked for a few years in an large org which utilized perl for build scripts, testing automation, and a few other things. I would summarize the half decade Perl learning curve as initial bewilderment, intermediate cult like praise, to advance level disillusionment.
There was something about scaling usage in large teams that felt awkward and high friction.
I think the primary issue is that there is massive demand for adolescent social interaction in a world that is increasingly physically isolating for kids.
Demographic shifts make suburban families too sparse to support children friend groups. Denser cities are increasingly financially impossible for families to move in.
I suspect that helicopter parenting is a much larger contributor than physical isolation. We have had sparse suburbs in the US since at least the 1950s, and generations of kids grew up in that environment and did just fine.
It's definitely this. I live in one of the safest cities in the country, in the Midwest. The other day on some local Facebook group, I saw a mom trying to find someone to pick up her kids from middle school and elementary school every day. It was a 10 and 5 minute walk respectively that EVERYONE in that neighborhood took 30 years ago. No busy streets, nothing. Sidewalks and everything. Absolutely insane.
I also live in an incredibly safe area and had a friend from outside the US say it is like a horror movie after walking around a few times on a beautiful summer night when they visited.
Perfect summer night and there is not a person to be seen. They felt like they were walking around in some kind of zombie horror movie that all the people had vanished.
It's hard to tell. You have to wait a generation or two to see the long term effects, as people will still have their earlier social habits.
It feels as though people slowly learned that they could get away with not introducing themselves to their neighbors, invite them over for dinner, and other activities that were once assumed.
Ehh, I grew up in the suburbs in the 90s. We were fine. I would hang out with the neighborhood kids unsupervised all day long even when I was single digits old. The issue is with American culture and how it shifted into a low trust society.
I think the parent is saying what you had is now not possible, because the neighbors don’t have kids. I’m in the burbs. Nearest kid is 4 door downs. Nearest kid the same age as my kid is two blocks over. Most people are 60+.
Anecdata but I think this is what the parent comment is asserting anyway.
Yeah, homeownership within young families is ridiculously out of reach, which makes “young suburbs” a difficult thing to maintain. Anecdotally, we are a young family and there’s very few other ones in the neighborhood that are in the similar boat as us.
As compared to what I heard from the older neighbors, when they had kids, all the others around also had kids. So many in fact that all the neighbors had doors in their backyards that opened into all the other neighbors yards, so the kids would just run around without having to go into the streets.
Just deep dive into the technology of your choice. Write clearly and comprehensively about your projects, the roadblocks you faced, and how you overcame them.
Another recommendation is to blog on a collaborative project. Could be with just one other person. That way you're reaching a wider social network.
What's very satisfying is googling on some technical problem and finding in the top search results my own blog article from several years back.
This was before my time but I appreciate the write up and the nostalgia from folks in this thread.
My take away was that VisiCalc was a fairly straight forward technological problem, but a 10,000x+ impact idea. I feel like there are still idea's like this waiting in the shadows to be discovered by a lowly undergrad somewhere who tries something unique for the first time.
For context:
41 US States are geographically larger than Switzerland. It's most comparable state in area is West Virginia. West Virginia is .064% of the national area.
Some fun distance contexts. Driving end to end in Switzerland is comparable in distance to: Driving from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, Detroit to Chicago, or New York City to Washington DC.
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