imartin2k

Thailand is also one of the most visited countries in the world, and 99.9% of tourists never run into any problems. In fact, I’d argue it’s one of the safest countries in the world for tourists. Personally, I always advise people to choose Thailand if they are looking for travel to a place that ticks most boxes relevant for a vacation. Just don’t insult the monarchy or sunbath in a temple while you are there. Neither should be that hard.

Here’s a Swedish one https://ondemove.eu/products/

I recently flew Lufthansa over that area. Here's how the inflight map looked like https://i.ibb.co/ryFdXyC/IMG-8587.jpg

Fortunately I only saw this afterwards, otherwise I would have been worried.

(obviously we didn't actually make this detour)

For me, 3x 20 minutes meditation helps a lot. In the morning, around mid day, and in the evening. Why? It gives me the chance to go from active thinking mode, to passive “observer” mode - and only in that state, I can process all the emotions and stress that pile up during the day.

Then there are much bigger benefits of meditation (depending on which type one practices). But the stress processing benefit alone is already fantastic.

The times I’ve burned myself out, it usually happened after I started to compromise on my daily meditation minutes.

I closed mine a few years ago. I still have a Messenger-only one, which Facebook offered for a short amount of time. It’s working but lacks even basic profile settings for some reason. I cannot even change the profile photo.

My parents had one, sedan version, in the late 80s. Their first car. I remember when we did a Sunday trip and entered the highway section. When the sign said “100” (km/h), my father said “FIRE”, as in “let’s gooo”, and the pushed the car to its limits (with all the noise and heavy exhaust gases this meant). It became somewhat of a family meme every time we entered the highway.

No reason to feel defeated over achieving #2

“ What i dont understand is why such countries advertise themselves as “welcoming” when in fact are pretty unwelcoming and closed.”

Good observation. Probably the answer is that it felt morally good in the short term. Many members of the “educated class” in Sweden wanted to feel good about doing what they believed was right, but just as long as it didn’t mean actually having to be too close to the newcomers. So they kept filling up the (in relative terms) unattractive remote districts and tried for a long time to look away while problems there built up and gang shootings and bombings became frequent

I’ve heard hypotheses about Sweden’s collective guilt about having helped the Nazis during the 2nd world war being a possible cause for the posture as “moral superpower” which shaped the politics of the later decades.

Relevant comment. I was thinking “what is breakfast?”. In my case, usually, I eat my first meal of the day around 3-4 hrs after waking up. I’m not hungry before. Does that mean I’m skipping breakfast?

Interesting. A question: Can regular citizen protect their address in The Netherlands, or are addresses public and searchable online, as in Sweden?

That's somewhat of a pet peeve I have with the Swedish situation. Due to the country's transparency principles (which I in general consider a good thing), everyone's registered address and other personal details are easily searchable online for everybody through numerous different services. Including who you live with, and lots of other information. So basically, to use US lingo, the government is doxxing everyone by default.

There's no way to opt out of this, except if you are already subject to a documented threat (but then it's obviously already too late and you likely are forced to move), or if you belong to a small group of professions that might be considered particularly vulnerable.

In consequence, you can easily and anonymously look up where your enemies, or their relatives, live. I don't see how this is not contributing to the problem. Potentially even being one of its major drivers. However, there's basically zero public or political debate about changing this part. In fact, most people in Sweden are completely oblivious to the idea that it could be different. That as a citizen you might want to have the right to choose whether your address is available to the public or not. Even though that choice is the norm in most countries, afaik.

So I find that totally annoying. Making it harder to look up where someone lives, would likely, over time, reduce the number of attacks on buildings (which not only include bombs, but also shootings at buildings).

There are probably tens of thousands of households across Sweden who experience an elevated risk of being exposed to bombings or shootings, as gang-related individuals (or their family members) are living in their buildings. So this is a real crisis, I would say.

Also often home-built thermos bombs are being used. Those might actually be the more common form nowadays.

Do something in impact tech, which aims for solving the world’s biggest problems. Huge in Sweden right now. Comes naturally with meaning and fulfillment. Unlike a lot of the stuff that e.g. Silicon Valley is mostly visible with atm.

Just read this https://thethaiger.com/news/national/thailand-sees-surge-in-...

Yes most of human behavior is about fear - just that we mostly aren’t aware of it. Almost everything is a coping strategy for fear - some constructive, others destructive. Some people end up with more of the constructive ones, others with more of the destructive ones. The way to have some control over this is mindfulness, to practice being aware of the fear whenever it comes, and then of the habitual response. And then to practice responding differently if one doesn’t find one’s habitual response constructive.

In the end, thanks to the algorithms, almost everyone on the internet who’s chasing fame, seems to end up as a snakeoil salesperson of some variety.

Yep Ben Evans’ newsletter is great. If one only would want to subscribe to one single weekly newsletter about the tech industry, I’d recommend that one.

This seems to become this year’s biggest unanticipated second order effect of LLMs: UGC and organic human-generated content in general is suddenly valuable in a different way than before. This should totally accelerate the move of “quality content” behind paywalls or signup walls. Only commodity content, low quality content, and AI-generated content will remain on the open web.

I’m 40 and I’m pretty happy that I’ve never been married. I look around among my married friends and don’t envy anyone’s life. Which doesn’t mean they’d be better off not being married. I have no idea. It’s just that the alternative doesn’t have to be a bad thing at all. On the contrary.

But I guess one has to be the type for it. If one’s idea of a good life is marriage, then not getting to that point is obviously a problem which will create emotional struggle and subsequent issues.

In Sweden, if you invest in / trade stocks and choose an “ISK” type of account, you pay almost zero tax on your gains (you pay a very low flat tax on the total value of your stocks, and this is quite unsubstantial for most average people who invest/trade)

At least compared to most other European countries, where every profit from stocks is heavily taxed, this is quite wild.

The downside of this ofc is that losses aren’t tax deductible either, and that you still pay the tax even if your stocks lost in value during the year. But still: Your capital gains earned through this scheme are close to be tax-free. If you bought a lot of Nvidia in January and sold it now, you could even withdraw the profit to buy a house or a car - and thereby avoid most of the tax that would come as a consequence of a bigger value of your stock holdings.

Just writing this to point out that there’s more nuance to this “taxes are high in the Nordics” narrative.

I’m using Ghost too, for a daily paid newsletter since early 2022. Super happy. Lots of somewhat basic customization features were missing back then, but have been added since. Email support always responds within 24 hours. The pricing is fair (I personally like the yearly fee instead of having to pay a commission), and reliability has been overall fine - there were a couple of shorter outages (up to a few hours) but nothing too serious.

Interesting. I almost never comment on HN, and if I do, it tends to be without a lot of substance, like this one.

The thought of feeling a compulsion to participate in a lot of HN comment threads is very hard for me to imagine. My general reflexive feeling towards commenting is “waste of my time”. Particularly if there’s the risk to end up in some heated argument. Those are the worst.

Yep and worth mentioning that TC’s feed is not truncated, unlike many other feeds from sites covering tech.

They deserve credit for still delivering full articles via RSS, after all those years and changing owners.

Now I got reminded of this gem https://youtu.be/I6IQ_FOCE6I

Being lifelong students. Being curious. Discover passions. Be there for others who need them. Etc

It was media and bureaucrats who handled the Swedish pandemic approach too, by putting the so called "expert agency" on a pedestal, worshiping it, abstaining from any form of critical questioning while branding the few critics that made their voices heard as saboteurs, and taking all of the mostly incorrect statements and claims that the agency spread during the initial waves, at face value.

Swedish columnist Viktor Barth-Kron recently described the outcome of Sweden's pandemic approach the following way, which I find quite fitting: "Tegnell (state epidemiologist at that time) and Löfven (prime minister at that time) were wrong about almost everything during the pandemic, but they turned out to be right when it comes to the big picture."

I don’t see how this would work unless AI can read my mind. Humans are by default very imprecise with language, hence prompt engineering.

Agree! It’s the best place I know to get updates from many companies. I follow over 1000 startups there for monitoring purposes and it’s incredible how many news are being published exclusively through LinkedIn, at least here in Sweden.