It usually does because other people are also intelligent beings that are usually trying to have a good life and succeed in whatever area they're pursuing. Whatever field it is - earning money, becoming athletic, becoming a musician, becoming a good cook, becoming a good writer or public speaker - there are uncountably many people with a strong desire to succeed in that area and a subset of those that have dedicated their lifes to it.
Unless you're a world-class expert and one of the best in the world already, any insight you can come up with has been had by other people and if they're not doing it anymore it's usually for a good reason.
Even when the the "common sense" route is not optimal along whatever metric your measuring, there's probably something else you're not noticing: the classic dinner of potatoes/rice, cooked vegetables, and a piece of meat might not be the best in terms of health or nutrients or taste, but when you take into account things like ease of cooking, low cost, low mental effort, easy to make bigger portions, it very clearly becomes obvious why basically every civilization has traditional grain/potato-vegetable-meat type meals.
I feel like there is a big overlap between being against common sense and believing you are better / more intelligent (more "rational" perhaps?) than other people. For me, at least, gaining a bit of humility / being a bit more down-to-earth about being a person like everyone else has made me significantly more likely to just pick the common sense path as a default.
The problem with "secret esoteric hacks/techniques" is that other people are not NPCs and are in fact also trying to achieve their goals, and for any goal you can imagine, there are a million people who have put in way more effort into figuring out the optimal path.
If there's a secret method of becoming good at an instrument quickly, why don't music schools teach that? If there's an obscure way to run a 4 hour marathon without much training, why doesn't every training plan include that? The common sense approach is usually right on the inflection point of the 80/20 rule, where you get the easy, simple way to get decent results.
Of course, there are sometimes real constraints (i.e. popular apps like Duolingo are bad for learning a language, because most people who use it are not serious about becoming fluent and not willing to put in time) but even then, the reasonably effective answer is usually 1 layer below the surface (learn the basics through a textbook/course/online material, then just use the language a lot and actively study new vocab/grammar/concepts), not in some obscure rabbit hole.
This is also caused by the decline in social activity and community. People in the past didnt have this problem as much because they had tons of trusted family members, friends, neighbors, who also had children and could thus look after theirs for an evening.
and the law says food must be safe, and to attract buyers costs must be similar or lower than the competition.
Of course in a cynical view companies only try to "generate profit" but usually generating profit is tied to providing some sort of service or product, and people like to buy good products
I'm reminded of an interaction I had with a non-technical user. They knew ChatGPT can translate text, and so, to remove spelling mistakes from their (Dutch) text, they would first ask ChatGPT to translate it to English and then ask it to translate it back to Dutch. Mind-blown when I said "you can just say 'fix the spelling and gammar', no need to translate"
This is the level that many non-technical users are operating on.
Right. A life hack carried over from when Google Translate was the best tool, and loop-back through it could be reliably used for longer-form text (similar to how "did you mean?" in Google Search was an excellent spelling corrector for shorter text).
I would guess that people that are driven to risk their life to escape might be the ones that have the worst lifes and/or the most negative opinion on North Korea. There can simultaneously be a somewhat wealthy educated upper class in the capital (which would have little incentive to escape), and a very oppressed lower-class.
North Korea independently developed funcitoning ICBMs and nuclear weapons, you can't do that with uneducated starving peasants who are eating rats.
> I would guess that people that are driven to risk their life to escape might be the ones that have the worst lifes
Generally it is the other way around. The better you live, the more opportunities for escaping you have.
> North Korea independently developed funcitoning ICBMs and nuclear weapons
Maybe because it is not that hard, and it is pretty strong motivator when your only way not to consider rats to be celebratory delicacy is to be exceptionally good at building what The Party wants you to build.
North Korea has, like all (formerly and currently) communist countries, a decent education system.
An educated population of 20 million people will easily provide you with a several thousand people needed to develop functioning nuclear weapons. Those you need to feed. The rest may, and do, starve.
Yeah, the idea that North Korea is putting on a country-sized Truman Show for the handful of tourists seems a bit bizzare to me. Of course they will keep tourists in the better, richer areas, but at the end of the day it's a real country with over 25 million people. Even if it's poor and totalitarian, like any other country that size it has big cities with an upper class of wealthy elites, it has a class of highly educated scientists who likely have a high standard of living (they produce working ICBMs and nuclear weapons after all).
I feel like due to popular portrayal, many people have an almost cartoon-like view of North Korea as "the dystopian totalitarian state" as it's portrayed in like, 1984 or something, forgetting that it's a real country with 25 million real normal people, and that there are just certain things a country has to do to keep existing.
Even with Russia, everyone understands that Putin exists in a balance with military leaders and oligarchs and has to keep them happy. But with North Korea, people are so caught-up in the one-dimensional view of Kim Jong Un as the supreme leader, that we forget a simple fact: one person cannot manage the entire military and all the industry in a medium-sized country, and inevitably there will be other high-ranking people that have a lot of power and a dictator has to keep them happy to stay in power.
It's still the world's largest prison: most North Koreans would be killed on sight or imprisoned for even attempting to leave (i.e., escape). It also has millions of slaves, in fact the highest rate of modern slavery in the world (approximately the same as the US in 1860 before the Civil War). Kim Jong Un executed his uncle in 2013. Privilege or comfort, where it exists, can be stripped by force from an entire family at once for any reason. So, yes, Kim Jong Un is not a literal god on Earth -- there are balances he must maintain within the country to keep his power. Not every North Korean is a slave. You're not wrong about those things. But I feel your description is coming dangerously close to portraying it as a relatively normal country, which it most certainly is not. It is a prison and slave state, one of the most severe in history, enforced via extreme brutality and shielded by nukes against those who would save its people.
Theres a lot of American military bases inside the EU that could be turned into craters within 24 hours. And even if Europe decides to not retaliate violently and simply says "you have 24 hours to leave the continent", thats still a lot of material and arms lost.
Which is fine, inside the US. But when Americans leave the US, they are no longer under US law, theyre under the law of whatever country they enter. Which means, if the country acknowledges the ICC, any American in that country falls under it. Just like a tourist in America has to follow American laws.
Not exactly. Tourists are one thing, but US military personnel stationed in foreign countries typically operate under a status of forces agreement which limits the ways in which they are subject to the host country's laws.
yes when it comes to allies, but typically war crime stuff happens during conflicts, and usually in a conflict they are there without consent by definition.
People forget, that a war crime is simply a crime that (state) combatants dont have immunity for in war. The geneva convention gives immunity for everything that is not a war crime.
Unless you're a world-class expert and one of the best in the world already, any insight you can come up with has been had by other people and if they're not doing it anymore it's usually for a good reason.
Even when the the "common sense" route is not optimal along whatever metric your measuring, there's probably something else you're not noticing: the classic dinner of potatoes/rice, cooked vegetables, and a piece of meat might not be the best in terms of health or nutrients or taste, but when you take into account things like ease of cooking, low cost, low mental effort, easy to make bigger portions, it very clearly becomes obvious why basically every civilization has traditional grain/potato-vegetable-meat type meals.