157 karma · joined June 17, 2018
Mao killed way over 30 million. Absolutely incompetent, he manage to remain in power just using terror.
The other day there was an 70th anniversary of the founding of PRC and this criminal's gigantic picture was at the hotspot.
I have seen them being feeded in mountains at the north of Spain called Picos de Europa: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picos_de_Europa
Laws change abruptly across boundaries, so it is not a surprise that vultures know when they are feeded or not.
Birds or animals are not stupid. Animals that are hunted know exactly when the hunting season starts and ends. I have seen deer separate in sexes when the hunting ban expires(because the law forbids females to be hunted down), so you will see females with offspring completely relaxed in front of people.
For example saying that people in Spain or Portugal love living the good live and not working is a generalization.
Today, when most work is actually done by machines and not humans, you could actually be way more productive not burning yourself out than burning.
In Germany they have more machines, because they have more capital and because they forced the Southern countries to destroy its industries. That happened with Spain and specially Italy for entering the EU. 32-36% of the Spanish economy was industry before joining the UE, now it is 12% and going down.
For example, In Spain they put quotas(limits) in the milk that every milk producer could generate in the north of Spain, that has a wet climate, like France, UK, or Germany. Those countries of course had not quotas.
This way European companies(specially French companies) could enter the Spanish market and have bigger markets, but the Spanish companies could not compete because they had to reduce production.
With bigger markets, they had bigger mass scale productions, more efficiency and could put prices that put out of the market Spanish companies.
On the other hand, the South of Spain was benefited as it produces things that Europe do not.
They also flooded the real state market with easy money coming from European banks that will lend outrageous amount of money to anybody with a pulse.
That made year to year profits of 20-30% in real state in the bubble, further increasing the desinvestment in industry, that could only give moderate 3-4%.
Of course lending to people that could not pay back was a bad idea, and when the bubble burst lots of banks from Germany, UK, or France should have gone down.
But of course the governments of those countries forced the Spanish government to buy the bad debt, making the Spanish Government bankrupt itself.
Reality is complex, but we love simple arguments.
First, stop using the term "marketing" for "sales and advertisements". It is not.
Real Marketting is "the study of the markets", that is, what people need or wants. Apple in times of Steve Jobs was amazing in Real Marketing.
Apple created revolutionary new products like the mac, Ipod, Iphone, Ipad that sold (and curently sell) in the tens of millions each year. No other company has been able to do so at that scale.
Lots of people wrongly believe that people is brainwashed to buy what they don't want or need, because they don't understand.
They do not understand that it is the other way around. You design what is going to be sold like hotcakes. Because people want it or need it.
It is not even a secret: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FF-tKLISfPE
By the way for a lot of years I wanted a laptop that was done in metal(instead of using plastic with flame retardants) and Apple was the only one doing it. With batteries that lasted lots of hours, lightweight, and silent.
Those were essential for me as a traveler. People that could not understand would believe(because they did not have my needs) I was stupid for buying something 3x more expensive than a 3kgs crappy plastic laptop.
That is there are some new facts that could mitigate or even justify another fact or actions.
For example, if you enter a private property in the US with a gun(in order to steal, or kidnap or kill) the property owner can kill you. Which is a bad thing, but is justified by the fact that someone entered your property armed without your permission.
In some counties in Europe, if you use the force against someone that carries a weapon in your own property, and you kill this person, you go to jail!! And have to indemnify the robber!!
Yes, you do something that is very bad, but you were forced to do it by someone who wanted to profit doing something bad to you. It would be worse doing nothing.
The same happens in wars. Americans invaded Europe and killed (and raped) thousands of thousands of Europeans. That was terrible and wrong. But it was done because someone (Hitler) did it first to other countries in Europe, like Poland and France.(It would have been worse not doing something)
No soldier went to jail for killing enemies(or raping their daughters and wifes).
Another example is police men. They carry weapons(that kill) and they have to use them if necessary, even if it is wrong.
The narrative that you imply is actually creating stories(and facts) that justify your behavior that are actually false.
You know Hitler used german soldiers disguised as Polish in order to justify invading Poland?
He used the fire in the Reichstag fire as Narrative for taking absolute power.
That was stated already by Napoleon, who believed before invading a country you needed a pretext(A narrative) something he learnned from his favorite book, The Prince of Macciavelo.
Today of course those narratives continue existing. Most Americans agreed on Invading Iraq because 9-11. The invasion was planned in words of the secretary of State Defense years before the 9-11 attack. The fact that the country is 2000 miles away from where the terrorist came from (an US allied country) and that they are populated mostly by another faction of Islam didn't matter the least.
But narratives are not bad, if they are true. It is only when they are fabricated when they are terrible wrong.
The first thing you have to do is to identify what is the real problem.
I don't know you, most of the people here do not know you personally so even if someone here is an expert on human behavior and productivity, is is way easier to identify the real problem if you are face to face with an expert.
Odds are that the problem(usually they are several problems) that you have is different to what you see as a problem(the consequence of the real problem).
This expert will read your body language, your voice nuances, your attitude much better than through plain text. This person could ask you about your life habits, that are super important(do you sleep , eat well, exercise, make love with your partner? Do you play and enjoy life?) and tell you what to do.
You probably are doing several things wrong, like working too much, not exercising, isolating yourself, judging yourself too harshly.
Over this you will probably feel anxiety that makes you procrastinate and do no work at all.
It takes a lot of reading, watching videos and practice over years in order to master productivity on your own. Just raw ideas and techniques are not enough, you need to whatch them in action, being applied to really understand. Specially watching masters.
And most important, you need to apply those techniques in your life, not just understand them. A mentor would be your external feedback if you apply the techniques or not.
Would you learn judo reading blogs? Or books? That would help, but a master will skyrocket your learning.
There are programs like "wake up productive"(from Eben Pagan) that you can watch as videos. There are torrents of it if you just want to know what is all about before buying.
A good psychologist could also help you a lot with any issues that you have while working on your own.
There are experts in programming that know the best techniques. Just ask them, make them your mentors if you can.
There are experts in human behavior. Ask them or make them your mentors.
There are experts in productivity...
Find people that are in the same place that you are, a support group. You can create it if it does not exist.
Technology has consequences that are ethical issues because it has influence on the lives of real people.
If you create a technology that is used to abuse other people(like facebook spying or manipulating masses or the military invading other countries), you are responsible for it.
The quality of HN improves if the human side of technology and science is openly discussed.
If a drone kills 30 people it is not "porn". It is a very serious matter.
Would you call it outrage porn if those 30 people were from your family?
He talks about it at the start. If your body and brain in development does not receive enough nutrients, it does not fully develop.
As a volunteer teacher I have seen African kids disconnect after just 2 hours of class because the food they ate was weak in nutrients.
This usually happens with iodine. If the pregnant mother has not enough of it, the baby will develop with smaller IQ.
The same happened in Africa in sport for a long time. It could not compete with the USA, even when most of them actually were genetically from Africa. In the US, they could develop fully.
SpaceX is not revolutionary, it is evolutionary, as rocket's discipline was already well known when they started. You know who was revolutionary with rockets?
This man: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
As a child, he was playing with friends launching rockets(and burning crop fields when they failed), actually as a hobby. I call hobby studding something freely just for the sake of it.
Hoover dam is a terrible example, because almost 100 people died building it, and it should not be necessary killing people for building things like a dam, it is actually much better building things without casualties, the project runs smoothier and faster. And it is a known discipline that Romans already did 2000 years ago.
Cinema, in the words of the Lumiere brothers was just a hobby with no real monetary value.
Most of Newton time was studying freely esotericism and alchemy. Most of it gave nothing to the world, like philosophy, it was done for the sake of it(science and all sciences come from it, so a very small portion of it paid off).
Mr Boole spent enormous amount of time trying to prove the existence of God, and invented Boole algebra as a result. It was of no practical use until more than one century later.
The neuron was discovered because of the photography hobby of Ramón y Cajal, staining cells so you can see it.
Most of the greatest discoveries in things like Mathematics were done by outsiders, like lawyers that were only interested on a very narrow part of it. And it was a hobby.
70 years ago, if you were to live in Germany, Poland or Russia, you will see your neighbors, friends and family slaughtered by war, your daughters or sisters or mother become raped, your possessions were looted or bombed or fired.
That actually happened in places like Syria or Congo or Central African Republic recently.
And the worst that happened to you? Your ego was hurt.
"Always talked and about things he hated or how things sucked. Rarely anything positive."
I don't know if you realize everything you talk about your first job is negative.
I would focus on the positive and minimize exposure if it really was that bad, which I doubt, because your manager told you reasonable things.
I am c programmer myself, with lots of experience programming lots of other languages, and programming raw c is extremely inefficient use of your time, most of the time.
With less than 1 year of experience, your suggestions are of very little value, and if you get experience working with a bad team, you are not improving but learning bad habits.
In an interview, tell the truth, but you had a bad emotional experience and are highly biased against your old job. Look at it as a neutral third person looking from outside. Be grateful for it, and start looking at the good side of it. Write it down.
Forgive them, you decided to work with them so you were as responsible as they were. It is your fault as much as it is theirs. Forgiving them is forgiving you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrdEMERq8MA
On future projects and endeavors start focusing on what you what to do, not on what you don't want to do. Companies love people that is proactive and efficient, not people that blames others, complains and put excuses.
But it should not be about passing an interview. Your attitude should change.
CD quality could be better, but thanks to abuse (Loudness wars), it is way worse from the music quality point of view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
So in practice most vinyl records surpass CDs in dynamic range, because loudness in vinyl means your disc is able to hold less music.
So if you want to listen music with good speakers, you better do with vinyl.
Using vinyl has been a way to shortcut the music producers destruction of its music.
Most memory devices, like pendrives use that.
Fructose in nature , on fruit, has lots od fiber(celulose), that makes release of sugar in the bloodstream slow, that is Glycemic Index low.
Refined sugar on the other way, specially in dissolved water, like with milk, coffee or soda, release enormous amount of fructose in a very short amount of time.
In nature, only honey does that. Refined sugar was a luxury until 200 years ago.
US by the way produces the worst sugar of all, because it is not fructose, but something they could produce from corn, way cheaper than brown sugar that comes from tropical places.
Are you sure?. We have a thing called tomography with things like xrays, magnetic resonance that let's us look inside bodies.
Experiments were done in the past with animals that have a similar brain to us, specially aviation military, that were extremely interested on concussions.
At least they have x-rays photography of impacts. By the way all this research led to car's seatbelts.
Thousands of brain surgical procedures are done each year, there are experts in the anatomical features of the brain, and we have detailed maps of sliced brains and complete heads.
Tens of thousands of people die in car accidents and hundred of thousands are injured. Insurance companies have extensive documentation on those.
We know the physical properties of those things and we have things called computers that let us do very complex models about the brain with finite elements or just analog 3d printed models with gelatin and plastics.
To say that nobody can imagine a brain in motion, so everything is a hypothetical mechanism is quite unfortunate.
We know a lot about what happens more or less. Things have improved dramatically for people like motorbike racers because we actually know a lot and lots of lives had been saved because of that.
I have been in socialist countries with diesel buses traveling empty everywhere most of the time. Then at peak hours getting full.
The theory was that they are much more efficient, and they are when they are full and you are transported like cattle, not moving directly where you want, and having to wait for them.
Bicycles or motorcycles are much better for moving around the city.
It is extremely absorbent to anything, specially nutrients in the soil so they don't get washed away by rain or irrigation. it releases them slowly.
I have done tests myself with very small quantities, 50 or so plants, half of those without, half with it, and plants certainly improve a lot.
We need scientific studies of thousands and thousands of plants for info about the combination of all those things.
It will require several disciplines, like genome extraction from soil, computer science to identify the microorganism present, lots of sensors for humidity, temperature, ph and so on.
Think about that for a moment, you are trained as a mechanical engineer. You know about motors, transmissions and all the complexity involved in creating a combustion engine car, like handling fluids, pumps and so on.
Now, you are going to take a decision that destroys engines, your new cars are not going to have engines. Transmissions are extremely simple or do not exist. The entire car does not need to resist the forces of the engine and transmission. No pumps and brakes last the entire life of the car.
This means mechanical engineers are not needed, and you already have them. Under German law, it is extremely difficult to let them go, and they are your pals,btw.
The infrastructure of cars is extremely expensive, several 1000s millions of dollars per plant. This is amortized in decades. If you buy a thousand lathes that make pieces for 20 years and after 10 years demand for those pieces disappear... your lathes cost at least double.
But the most important thing: Germany is good making mechanical things, but not the leader in batteries or electronics, Japan, US, Taiwan and China are.
A master swordman does not fear novices precisely because they know their movements before they do. They look at (imperceptible for amateurs) body language hints and know exactly what you are going to do before you do it.
In reality there are physics constraints. Before you do a movement, you need to put weight in some part of the body, tense a muscle....e.g it is impossible to jump without a specific movement of going down and preloading.
Not only that , they know exactly what is the best response to it to neutralize whatever comes to them.
Those things are extremely dangerous, but we have not natural sensors to detect and avoid exposure to them.
I bought a geiger detector and it surprised me to find places with thousands of times more radiation than others.
Why do you feel the urge to insult those that do not see the world like you do?
You call them "unrealistic", so it makes you fell realistic. "brainwashed" so it makes you feel clear minded. "tribalist" so it makes you feel individually intelligent. "lack perspective", so you believe you have perspective.
The fact is that some of these people are really smarter than you are and happier and more fulfilled than you are. And have way more money than you have. Some of them will be stupid, but not all like you believe.
These people have real reasons to choose an Apple product and they are as valid as your reasons.
While everything you say is true, the fact is that these people give them a different value that you do. I have a friend that has a company and earns 2000 dollars everyday, does he cares about an overprice laptop? Not really, he cares about time, and interruptions(he had a Windows laptop that used to interrupt him for hours at the worst possible time), he cares about weight, and malware installed by default that you could not uninstall.
Right now I am criticizing your attitude. How do you respond to it is a way to measure your level of "handling criticism ability" that you implicitly presume of.
But it does feels different, doen't it? Criticize others is so easy.
China is just enormous. Over 1500 million people(officially 1200 million), 4x, 5x times more than the US.
Lots of Chinese people are just very intelligent, just simple math tells you there is 4x 5x more intelligent people in China than in the US.
The math does not work because most brilliant people in China go to the States, as their quality of life increases. But they love their country.
The world is changing because most of the world population lives in Asia, just taking into account Indonesia and India.
What the US are doing is just reacting to this fact, they just want to maintain their hegemonic power in the world, like any other empire that came before.
All the culture, the history in Russia is European. It is for sure more European than the USA is.
Russia became isolated because of communism. Now the USA wants to isolate it because it is not in the economic interest of the US, but certainly it is for Europe.
Europe is a small old continent with lots of people but lacking natural resources like oil. Russia is the biggest country in the world, with very few people and lots of resources.
If Europe continue dancing to the US tune, Russia will go closer to China.
Now for me there is another very important one for things that stay connected 24 hours: refrigeration. There is a need at least for aluminum cases with holes for wifi.
Right now only Chinese make those, so it takes a long time to get those.
Those multinationals have concentration of power and influence. The power of the people is way bigger, but it is distributed.
In Europe neonicotinoids were restricted or forbidden. It is a never ending fight.
The war will never end until we manage to create food cheap enough without insects competing for it. This will be hydroponics, electrically creating ATP Adenosine triphosphate or whatever, but until that time comes they will try to exterminate bugs. The already have in a big way.
They are cheap and with just one bottle I can protect lots of trees from ants going up the tree and cultivate and protect aphids.
Without ants to protect them, natural predators just do the work for me controlling the pests.
Most allied generals believed URSS was going to be the next enemy after Hitler.
The nuclear bombs against isolated Japan were more a warning to Stalin than anything to do with Japan as disclassified documents have shown.
Of course, this made Facebook people extremely angry, and they had lots of arguing about it. In the end the man left (losing a lot of money in the process)and of course they can read your messages now.
They had specifically been working on that for something like a year or so. A team inside facebook was created just for that.
Messages are not encrypted by users, they are encrypted by a closed source application that facebook controls 100%. They just modify the software and force an update. It is not magic.
If you can write the source code you can do anything you want.
Certainly with my own robots I can pick raspberrys much faster and better than those guys can currently do.
This thing is extremely slow. I am wondering what kind of engineering those people have used for it to be so slow. Probably they are using java or python or mathlab code, instead of using things like C, shaders and FPGA code, expecting the creation of this low level code to be the "easy" part(in the future of course).
From my experience, your greatest advantage is the ability to master those low level technologies. It has to be designed around this technologies and not as an after thought like this project looks.
Sometimes, countries protect themselves using revolution in other countries. For example Lenin wanted to make the revolution in Germany, as they believed Russia was not prepared for revolution. Lenin was captured in Germany and released with the condition of not trying it again on Germany(or he would be shooted and killed) and sent to Russia, where he started the Soviet revolution.
For example, United States wanted to control the Panama channel, so they supported an "independence" movement against Colombia, so a new "free" country was created, that by "coincidence" gave the US the total control of it for a long time. Even today, the US is in control of it.
Before that, when the US felt the Spanish Empire was weak, they supported the "Cuba(and Philippines) libre" movement. People in Cuba and Philippines were very happy for the help until they realized the helpers army did not go away after the "independence". In Philippines the US exterminated over a million people, forcing everybody to speak English.
After Panama, the US continued supporting coups in other America's countries and around the world.
One of the most important movements the US supported was the popular movement in Persia, now Iran, because they wanted the British Empire to leave(so their own companies could enter and control the oil).
In the end, this movement converted Iran from secular country to a radical Islam one, and the Americans were ousted.
For the US it is routine creating havoc around the world, as the hegemonic power in the world that they are. All empires before had done that too.
They would love to be able to support popular movements in China or Russia as it is a threat for US hegemonic power in the future. Getting united China to disintegrate in several smaller countries would be a great victory.
But Chinese people already play the game.