jplrssn

> I care about my neighbours because I know them. I don’t care about the next town because they might as well be same as people living in Tokyo.

Fair enough, but many have the ability to empathise with people even if they don’t know them personally.

> Otherwise why would anyone else (someone else living on the other side of the world) care? People have their own countries to fix let alone worry about other peoples problems.

Do you care about your neighbours? How about people in the next town over? Why should that concern stop at the border of your particular nation state?

There are both mountains [0] and fjords [1] in Sweden, but not of the Norwegian kind they were probably picturing.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scandinavian_Mountains

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gullmarn

My understanding is that a clinic or hospital can’t legally charge you for a procedure that’s universally available through the provincial healthcare system.

So you’re free to pay for anything else if you want.

Is there a technical reason why phone numbers would be easier to spoof in North America than other places?

Anecdotally I’ve not heard as much about it being a problem in other places such as the UK.

My point is that, unless you think that the purpose of human existence is to maximise insurance profitability and mining throughput, lifetime earnings potential is not a good proxy for someone’s value to society.

I think it is sad that many of the people that have the largest positive impact on society — teachers, care assistants and the like — are also some of worst paid.

> Who produces the food you eat, the clothes you wear, the house you live in, the energy you use, the medicine you consume, etc

You could say the same thing about software engineers. But someone spending their days just creating JS frameworks is oh-so-productive and paid enough money every month to buy several years’ worth of food and shelter.

£7 is about the price of a pint. Surely that’s worth it given the convenience of driving right up to the front door of the terminal?

That’s true. But in a world with monthly toothbrush subscriptions one of those end states feels much closer than the other.

I always thought the “you will own nothing” expression referred to a Gini coefficient of 1, not 0.

The intent of abolishing private property would presumably be the latter.

> It kind of feels like these countries rediscover summer every year.

The graphs in the article somewhat disprove that.

You're right, I was thinking of "slammed" as being part of take-down style news reporting.

Looking at Google Ngram, usage of "slams" started inflecting upwards in the early 90's and then even more strongly in the mid-2000's. [0] I wonder if that second increase represents the type of usage I had in mind.

(I looked at "slams" rather than "slammed" to try to avoid some of the other modern meanings, like being slammed with work.)

[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=slams&year_sta...

> EU regulators on Tuesday slammed Apple

This reads more like a tabloid headline than the first sentence of a Reuters article.

I’ll bite: which ideology are you claiming believers in climate change are motivated by?

"can't afford" in this case is a choice to spend the absolute minimum possible on school lunches.

The one advantage Ryanair has over non-budget airlines is that none of their seats recline.

The more you concentrate taxation via capital gains, the more you incentivise the type of tax strategy where people just leave the state/country before cashing out. Countering that with exit taxes and such is hard.

Taxing company profits directly may be less efficient from an economics point of view but it's much more politically palatable.

> competition always leads to lower prices

I don't see how this could be true for emergency visits. Would an ambulance drive you to the cheapest hospital within some fixed radius?

Comparing the total size of countries like this never made much sense to me.

It's not like Americans need to drive coast-to-coast to buy groceries or drop their kids off at school.

> What is “fake insurance?”

Do you believe Ro Marine would have paid out claims related to their "insured" vessels?

It’s ironic that after British Rail was privatized, many UK rail services ended up being run by subsidiaries of other European state railways: French SNCF, Dutch NS, Italian Trenitalia, and so on. Turns out the state knows something about running trains after all.

This strategy would save them having to issue food vouchers at the airport, but not delay compensation per se which is based on arrival time at the destination gate.

I'd be curious to hear LG's defence. Presumably they must have taken the line that they weren't liable for their product self-combusting in the middle of the night.

Are you a software engineer? I'm curious about what your interviews were like.

I've done a fair amount of interviews and they all featured some amount of coding in front of an audience.

I also wouldn't be surprised if labs were starting to mix in a few pelican SVGs into their training data.

Walking around in platform shoes as a substitute for driving around in a lifted truck, maybe?

> Insurance is always more expensive than the expected expense without

This depends on how likely you are to make a claim, no? I imagine some clumsy/unlucky people get good value out of their Apple Care plans.

How much soy does it take to raise 1kg of beef compared with producing 1kg of beyond meat?

Interesting! Thanks.