sleazy, but still better than Apple.

Non native english speaker, but I use English menus for all programs, and English menu language for the OS.

As long as I can write and spellcheck in my native language, I am fine.

Unless I didn't speak english at all, why would I chose to see my language's word for Edit instead of "Edit", and never be able to take advantage of 2.000.000.000 tutorials, instruction videos, forum posts, that almost all assume english menu items?

- programmers never make copy and paste errors in other languages

- programmers never reverse a plus and minus sign in other languages

- programmers never break things with a last minute change

- there are never errors due to the size of code bases

Oh, right. Nearly all of those errors happen no matter what language you are using. Because they are humans giving instructions to a computer, who just does what the human says.

(Ok, the version control complaint might be better handled by merging in git or other DVCS. And there are troubles when people give you a csv where a field is the text 1e24 and excel turns it into a number because you told it to be magic when importing, rather than specifying that column was text)

Edited to add: the focus of that article is on accounting. Double entry accounting was created to make you input everything twice to help ensure you are doing the correct thing. You mess up one of the two items and stuff doesn't balance. Modern accounting software automatically creates the second entry, so you have no idea whether you did something wrong. That's the real issue. We came up with an accounting system that is slower to help make sure you did everything correctly, then we automated it so you only have to input one entry so accounting is faster and all of a sudden, we are surprised that more mistakes are made!

The socialist take is that the government should intervene in cases where a need isn't being met in a sustainable way by the market, and people are suffering.

Another way to look at it might be that one prioritizes the future over the present.

I don't think it's controversial to say that both these are true in certain situations, and sometimes those situations overlap (such as with medicine). In a perfect world, we would have all the benefits of both the free market and socialist takes, without the downsides associated with each. It's possible we might be able to approximate this somewhat, such as with Shkreli's suggestion that the government take over production of generics. Other options are better public funding of research and development, so drug companies can shoulder less of that cost (and thus charge less to recoup investment and make a profit).

In the end, I think neither system is perfect, and both have very real advantages that we need to be careful not to discount.

Honestly, he's very candid, and he says things people don't want to hear. Sometimes he says things that are just wrong and inconsiderate, but other times he says things that are simply inconvenient truths.

For example, he brings up the Epipen situation in a different light: He says $300 ($600 for 2) is significantly cheaper than the alternative (a trip to the ER, which can be thousands of dollars). He goes on to say it's a relative bargain, and that insurance companies should be more than willing to pay for Epipens because of the potential cost savings. To him the problem isn't Mylan (which has become the target of everyone's ire) but the insurance companies or medicaid.

Whether that's true or not it's a different perspective, and as a society we need to hear things that the masses don't necessarily agree with. The US system of healthcare is highly flawed, it's not a good idea to just make a boogeyman who will hide the real issues.

One problem with excel is that temporary steps you went through are hidden - it's hard to reproduce the excel spreadsheet. With org mode + ipython workflow I can trace all transformations that led to the end table, but hide them when they are not relevant.

I believe this gets me the best of both worlds - some form of WYSIWYG tables like excel + IDE-like programming environment in python and version control. Excel obviously lacks proper programming tools. Jupyter notebook does not treat printed tables in a special way org does.

I wrote once a too long blog post about my org-mode data analysis workflow, part about pandas integration: https://kozikow.com/2016/05/21/very-powerful-data-analysis-e... .

What do you tend to use instead of org spreadsheet?

(Checking ... Libre Office 4.4 has Ctrl-D ... ah well.)

This way is a lot simpler and should cause fewer mistakes.

You know you can say the same thing about Pablo Escobar, and Hitler, and many others. Just because someone has an innate talent at something, perhaps even a genius, does not make them worthy of the rhetoric "if only things had turned out a bit different for them...". People do what they do, we shouldn't question what they could have done.

I practice writing things down when I cannot digest a huge piece of information. Or do visual notes like Mike Rohde.