I’ve been a tourist in Japan twice, and maybe it’s because we were using fairly well-worn routes or weren’t there for long, but we neither spoke Japanese, or had a Japanese payment card, or Japanese phone number, and managed okay. It’s not that impenetrable.
Yeah, well trodden paths by tourists will be more accomodating, but it doesn't take much deviation from that well trodden path to hit roadblocks. Even in Tokyo. Japan is huge. And tbh a lot of the experiences are soft-locked behind language comprehension.
RIP to a legend. Picard is an obvious highlight, but I had the pleasure of seeing him on stage in Waiting for Godot too, which was delightful (well, maybe not the best word for the play, but you know).
I watched TV and used computers in the 90s and the whole time I was desperate for display technology to improve. Mainly CRT refresh rates, which often gave me a headache, but yeah I noticed the crappy pixel density all the time too. The nice Apple display I have now is one of my fave things I’ve ever bought and could only be improved by being >60Hz (which I do notice, but it’s not a big deal).
That’s what I’m talking about. 80Hz was just enough to keep the headaches away for me and that was either impossible or came with other compromises for some monitors / video cards.
This post prompted me to try my pet long-standing bug, where you have Dock auto-hiding on, show it, mouse away, mouse back before the sliding animation is finished, and see what happens. Previously the animation would just finish and it wouldn't show again, but in Golden Gate it does. Praise be. I did respond to an Apple survey a little while back and mentioned this one so maybe it got through...
this keeps the animation (although speeds it up a bit - replace 0.15 with another number to change it) it just removes the delay before the animation starts
This is why people find nerds irritating. No one is forcing you to use anything you don’t want to. I use the CLI too, and I’m an Emacs fan, just about the opposite of trendy-flashy. But those of us who also like GUIs for the things they’re good at are interested in making them better.
> By that logic all food production and distribution should not be privatized because is should be for the public good rather then the profit of the few.
Sounds like good logic to me, at least for essentials!
You don’t have to read very far into each of these to see that the historical conditions in each are very different to any first-world country right now.
You don't seem to understand the cause and effect here. Adopting collectivist economic central planning would be an effective way to turn prosperous first-world countries into third-world shitholes.
None of the countries you’ve cited were prosperous first-world countries before the events described. And I didn’t necessarily advocate for central planning in the same way that Stalin or Mao directed it. I don’t pretend to be an expert in such things, but fundamentally I think we can do a lot better than how we organise things now, and that profit for natural monopolies is stupid. If you think that naturally entails famine, I think you have a sad lack of hope and imagination.
If you want to make the argument that anything that is essential should be publicly owned you can make that argument. But I would suggest if you want to make that argument 'nobody should make profit' shouldn't be the relevant argument. The argument should be 'this is how we can solve X problem efficiently'.
Universal healthcare solves the problem. The US is #1 in science and tech, but spends the most with worse outcomes in general healthcare than other peer countries by far.
But it doesn't solve the problem. Does it sound like the nationalized healthcare in Australia is going well? How about Canada? The NHS in Great Britain?
Those countries DO have better healthcare outcomes than the US. You are so ignorant.
The US is #1 in developed countries for infant and maternal mortality.
Americans die from preventable and treatable causes at much higher rates than residents of peer countries, alongside a life expectancy of 79, or two to four years lower than the average for OECD countries.
We spend 18% of our GDP on healthcare, NEARLY DOUBLE the average of other peer countries.
The number one cause of bankruptcy is medical debt.
When will the American people wake up and realize their private healthcare model only benefits the rich that are able to afford the care.
You can cherry pick particular metrics to make the US healthcare system work better or worse than other countries. The US does badly on infant and maternal issues, but that's largely caused by social and lifestyle problems unrelated to healthcare. On the other hand we're at or near the top in 5-year survival rates for most forms of cancer.
Medical debt is not the number one cause of bankruptcy so you're simply wrong there. Most consumers who file for bankruptcy have some medical debt but the most common cause is a sudden loss of income (like losing their job). When consumers don't have enough cash to make ends meet they prioritize paying for food, housing, and transportation, and stop paying medical bills. Thus the medical debts tend to accumulate but this didn't really cause the bankruptcy.
I do support measures to reduce healthcare costs and improve access for patients but let's be clear about what's actually happening.
>The US is #1 in developed countries for infant mortality.
This is only because the United States is unique in its huge amount of preterm babies, which some other developed countries do not even count within their infant mortality statistics. If we had the same average infant gestation length as Sweden, we would be tied for fourth best with France and Portugal, which considering how obese we are is pretty impressive. If we had that and adopted more restrictive reporting categories like Poland or the Netherlands, we could very well be reporting as the lowest.
Its amazing to me how Americans (and others) act as if there are only 2 things in the world the US (private) system and public system that apparently everybody else on the planet has.
The US system is neither fully private nor are those other systems fully public. Its a false binary people use so they don't have to actually engage in the details of how different systems operate.
Nobody is arguing that the US has a good or 'the right' system. And nobody should argue that the British NHS (or systems like it) is some amazing magical place that gets everything right.
> When will the American people wake up and realize their private healthcare model only benefits the rich that are able to afford the care.
And yet one of the countries wit the lowest spending % of GDP on healthcare with very good outcomes has a system that has a lot of private aspects.
It's a technically both a private and public healthcare. But let's make this clear, it is dominated by private health insurance. The vast majority of people are privately insured through their job. The public insurance in America is not consistent, reliable, or good.
The US is #3 in the world for it spending on healthcare as a percentage of it's GDP, actually 16.69% in 2023, right behind Tuvalu and Nauru.
Maybe do some research before you state absurdly wrong things
Not vast. About 55% (workers and the family members) are covered by employer-sponsored health insurance. And that mostly self-selects for the younger and healthier so the coverage is less for random person.
Most retired people are not covered, and ironically very often the sick are not covered.
Okay: it’s obviously inefficient for some people to collect profit on essential services where competition is meaningless. That money should be going to improving the service for all, or paying the workers better, or ideally both. It would be more efficient to collectively organise food, shelter, healthcare, and other natural monopolies. Market competition can be for non-essentials where some inefficiency is acceptable.
No its not 'obviously inefficient'. And just asserting competition is 'meaningless' isn't actually an argument.
Neither food, nor shelter, nor healthcare are natural monopolies. As evidence by the fact that non of them are remotely monopolistic in places where there are no restrictions. Monopolies in these sectors are created and enforced by the state. Unless you are using a completely different definition from all economists.
Ironically major shops sell stables such as rice below price or at basically 0 margin, just to get people into the store where they might buy something of higher margin.
No. The issue is that there is an almost unlimited demand for healthcare.
That is true regardless of capitalism or marxism or whateverism you believe is the right answer.
Avoiding talking about money: it is easy to see the underlying issue of how should we balance a doctor's lifetime versus patients' needs versus the businesses that ultimately pay tax for it all.
We have public healthcare in New Zealand (a huge percentage of our economy is run by our government - almost socialist). Here we restrict healthcare by waitlists, beaurocracy, and other tricks. It mostly works, but the nurses that I know give too much, and are flaming out.
Meanwhile I've done the dirty boring capitalist work of bringing in overseas income to pay for our beautiful services, and I've reached my personal limit of balancing working harder versus gaining extra income (for myself and my government). I'm taxed at a demotivating rate. There's fuck all respect for being the guy bringing in the bacon to the country. I get to look forward to being treated like a boomer in a few years.
I love kumbayaa political beliefs, but not when I'm the donkey.
You’re talking at cross purposes here, there’s nothing “kumbaya” about what I’m saying. We all have to work hard for the stuff in this world and that would be the case whatever the economic system, for the foreseeable future. I just don’t want the result of that hard work to be hoarded by the bosses, that’s all.
The point is that I'm in a country that is closer to what you said you wanted (compared against the USA).
The vast majority of healthcare here is not profit oriented but instead is run by the NZ govt.
The purpose of most business is money, and few people would choose to be a boss without the financial winnings. I had the opportunity to roll the dice with everything: because fortunately I'm in a country that still has a backstop.
However the boss payout result is quite simply not worth the risk; because the median return for a startup is $0. Remaining an employee would have been a more sensible decision.
Other people like you complain, and I accept that is part of the deal I chose.
I am smart enough to have had the choice of alternative lifestyle paths like teaching or being an artist.
Meanwhile, I'm literally the guy paying for our social welfare and health system because I'm an export earner. Obviously the NZ economy deserves its return on its investment in me and our business environment.
But if you want to imply someone is greedy, then look at yourself or at your government.
There wouldn’t be half the complaints if we didn’t see the wealth disparity that we do, or the horror that is the US healthcare system. If you are running a respectable business that pays your employees fairly, has as good working conditions as you can, isn’t profiting from some fully privatised necessity, and pays its taxes, while it may not be my idea of utopia, you’re not the target of my ire.
I sometimes wonder whether capitalism is an emergent property? Or perhaps it is a dominant strategy. I visited Shenzhen and it was chokka full of entrepreneurs - I'm yet to structure my ideas around that.
Then I read about those weird papers that use basic trading strategies that result in power-law wealth distributions.
I always wonder when people complain about those that have more than them, because I seldom see them reflect upon themselves to see how much more they have than those below them. This especially applies to anyone living in the USA since everybody is relatively wealthy there, compared against most in the world. Too often I see the 1% complain about the 1%.
All healthcare systems I am aware of are horrors. Compare the US to the UK. We all struggle to understand the driving forces.
One underlying issue is that few people are proactive about the factors they control. Too many people are reckless with their health, and we all are great at excuses and casting blame elsewhere (and there can be evil that deserves some blame).
I'm fortunate enough that I know to chase intangibles.
Too many people let money dominate their worldview.
I'm also incredibly lucky to be born in New Zealand, where plenty of people also want good intangibles. And I see fewer in my circle here fight to get money/power/status.
I thought I disliked philosophy, but perhaps I like it ;)
Depends on the genre and what settings you play in. If you have the right amp, you may not need any pedals at all for the blues, or jazz, etc. But other styles have different expectations. And there’s nothing wrong with experimentation. There’s a lot of analogue pedals that haven’t meaningfully changed since 1995, but if we’re talking about anything digital, there’s obviously been big changes.
I remember reading an article in I think “net” magazine (Brits, remember that?) in the, I guess, early 2000s, that was predicting the “push” (as opposed to “pull”) internet. At the time I thought that sounded awful, and yep, it’s not good.
Ted Nelson apparently predicted it as early as 1965. In his autobiography Possiplex there is a chapter named "My Box of Crayons, 1965", where he shows some of his early sketches, one of which looks just like any ad-infested blogspam website from today. He used it in an ACM presentation, but I can't find it on the web.
I understand many passkey complaints but not this one. Why, for you as a service provider, are passkeys not just better (or at least equivalent to) passwords? You collect and verify an email address at signup and the account can be recovered in the same way as with passwords, or passwordless-email. No CS-verified recovery needed.
All right, my framing was a little too tight. Sure I can see why an email/SMS passwordless loop is easier for you, but it’s a more annoying user experience than your OS/browser/password manager just filling in your credential directly.
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