njepa

Yep, Sweden is unfortunately a long way from "the middle way" these days.

Absolutely. I am all for making the best of things, but the conditions have to support it as well. Today more and more things are temporary, from doctors and workplace to where you live. Of course it is hard to make those connections. Especially since it also gets even harder as less people have them. That is why it always annoyed me when people say things like "just move", "just quit" or "it isn't a right to ...".

Also it doesn't really matter since the implementation is close to 20 years old, which means the patents should have expired anyway.

I don't think any pirate party really had the numbers to make that happen. Usually a faction represents some larger group of people. The only way I see that happening is by unionizing tech. But that would be incredibly hard exactly because it would create a political force.

10 years is probably a realistic mean. If you have experience with music, creative software and doesn't expect a finished product then it can take a shorter time of course. Teenage engineering were founded by marketers, they are selling dreams.

> what are some simple facts that would cause revolutions nowadays if made widely known?

I don't know about revolution, but most Americans tend to be pretty shocked about the rapid development of China. Even those who have some understanding get surprised seeing it for themselves.

There is no minimum wage, but salaries are bargained for via collective agreements. So everywhere but the smallest shops and temporary jobs you get paid a decent wage.

> They do it by spreading information and reducing barriers, not by giving money to higher risk people though, since that's easier to align with their place in the system.

And it is mostly misguided. The barrier to entry and availability of information is what have already changed. It is everything else that hasn't. Or it has, but in the wrong way. By charging a premium for housing, education and contacts instead of taking it out of the equation. Some day all this friction is going to have consequences.

According to his talk at startup school this was because he quit his job and moved in with his college friend in San Francisco to start a company. His share of the rent was apparently $1150, so seems fairly likely that he could have made that if he wanted to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPLnfUPBXwA&t=115

It isn't like 3 or 4 percent though. Starting a startup ranges from a largely risk free career move to impossible. Most people today start at negative. Want to live in a decent sized city? That's at least $2k a month. An education? Might very well be $50k in debt. Job security? Need to put in the hours young.

Otherwise there is a very real chances of getting evicted, not being able to find a decent job, not being able to keep your friends or start a family. Plenty of people who are successful today have their parents pay for university, their first apartment and/or a safety net. And that is just to have a normal career.

> By this, I believe he means private-school, summer-house, frequent-flyer-miles-in-your-early-20s rich.

The example given literally attended one of the top private art school in the world. The reason people are reacting is likely because of this often damaging non-differentiation of being temporarily and perpetually poor. Many people can't even afford to move to a city these days, let alone start a startup. And if they do it might have negative consequences for years and years.

I don't disagree, but I think the perspective is a bit weird. Especially this part:

>But the fact that the market power of the Americans has such a big influence is our own fault. European governments have failed to create framework conditions to create competition here as well. If you know which parties in Europe are in charge, it is not surprising.

Europeans have been specifically willing to let the US and China dominate these markets. Most of Europe literally relies on the US for their security with NATO. Many of our companies have been sold to China, or are manufacturing in China. Of course we can't have our cake an eat it too. (Unless it is something like this that you meant).

I does factor in, it is somewhat hard to see because startups will always be marginal. In Sweden both Markus Persson (Minecraft) and Daniel Ek (Spotify) come from non-privileged background, with little university experience. When you see this in the US it is usually that someone got into a well known school first, with the contacts that bring.

I will disagree with most of the comments and say that the barrier to entry in programming isn't abstract though or critical thinking but quirks, inconsistencies and obscurities. That is really why programming favors having an interest in it. Because you need to some extent be excited about banging your head against the wall, in one way or another. That is why very smart people with PhDs aren't necessarily good programmers. And why if you don't have some relationship with programming, or something related, you might just think it is stupid.

So I do think it is to a large question of motivation and time. That is why so many programmers, even those with qualifications, are self-taught. Of course it helps to be smart, but programming isn't unforgiving enough that you can't be average. So that isn't really the barrier.

The devaluation of the profession happened a few decades ago, otherwise most of us wouldn't have been able to join the industry. Especially in the last decade most people in the industry have been cheering on the abstraction of what you do from what you make. At some point someone is going to call the bluff. I think people who join the industry now can do very well. And they probably see it more as a profession than most of the industry with all their social conventions. Then we can go back to the profession being valued for what it actually delivers.

It isn't so much that they get details wrong. As you say they are smart. It is that they won't present the full picture. Sometimes they even do that, but come up with conclusions that aren't supported.

If they for example supported tabs they would end up writing a story how you could attribute the success of Python and Microsoft to tab usage. The quotes and the numbers would be correct and they would make a compelling case, but in the real world the difference would be marginal at best.

Unfortunately I think the Economist is one of those publications where it seems authoritative until they write about something you really know about and realize it is mostly just written in an assertive style.

You can probably find it in some '60s future somewhere. Why would you build a perfectly fine tunnel and use that for irregular traffic, when you can hide the traffic and have the street for mixed use [-1]? We have had trash chutes [0] and AVAC [1] for centuries in Sweden (not always connected unfortunately). My local garbage truck have one of those robotic arms, and I don't live anywhere fancy. So I can't say I get it.

[-1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_street [0] https://translate.google.com/translate?langpair=en&sl=sv&tl=... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_vacuum_collection [2] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sopbil_skelleftea.jp...

A simple search can summarize better than I can. There are many sources, including papers and books, for this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surveillance_issues_in_smart_c...

I think surveillance could be part of a smart city. But for that to be smart it would have to solve the inherent problems with surveillance. An actual smart city project would proudly announce what it did to solve these challenges.

I don't see anything on their website that does this, rather it talks about how developers can enjoy access to ubiquitous connectivity [0]. This is in stark contrast to other successful initiatives like Vision Zero that started with trying to define the fundamental problems.

[0] https://sidewalktoronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Sidewa... [1] https://www.monash.edu/muarc/archive/our-publications/papers...

It looks like every (mostly useless) waterfront, science city or business park I have ever been to. Is there something new here, or is it like with many things these days that people's perception have diverged from reality?

I would think that even a slightly sophisticated spell checker would catch this. So arguably a lack of automation. Could of course be a human machine interaction problem, where the misguided human and machine makes errors together.

And sometimes things were actually better. Of course it is surprising that people want to go back to something like coal. But it isn't surprising that people want to go back to a time when their communities had a purpose and a future.

Security got a lot more plentiful after Anna Lindh and Utøya. (And of course the whole war on terror). These things can't happen too often and stay the same, unfortunately.

This is probably your best bet. https://jacobinmag.com/search?query=olof+palme

The documentary about the Swedish involvement in South Africa is also fascinating, but not specifically about Palme. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_4Ah8HCRcrQ

Are those batteries actually good enough at cycling that this would work though? What is the cost of degradation?

Sure, but cards are even more centralized.

The "feature" of WeChat is that it can be used for almost anything. It is a cash successor more so that a card alternative. Anyone can print, display or scan a QR code. Doesn't matter if it is a store, a friend or a random person. Doesn't matter if it is in the physical world, on a website or in a chat. And it is easy to do. And almost everyone uses it.

Contactless cards only matches WeChat in the same way something like Apple Pay does.

I meant that Ada does explain its syntax (at least partly in that pdf), but many languages don’t seem to. And when they do I can more easily accept whatever it is. It is when the syntax seems random I can’t wrap my head around it.

Personally I don't mind unusual syntax. I do find it a bit problematic that programming languages seem to select syntax almost at random, or at least they don't tend to spend a lot of time explaining it [0]. A lot of special characters can quickly become less pleasant with a non-English keyboard however. Especially if the syntax is hard to predict (with for example autocomplete).

[0] https://www.adacore.com/uploads_gems/Ada_Safe_and_Secure_Boo...

I agree in theory. The connection has a lot more value than the trips themselves. You could locate a company in these regions and access the talent and funding pool of the larger cities, and so could the employees.

Unfortunately, many of these cities seem to already suffer from sprawl which might limit their potential. Going from SV through farmland just to eventually end at a tiny station, with little public transport and low rise buildings would be a little bit too ironic.

It is almost like it would make sense to build the stations between the towns, or at least at one end of them.