rebornshellfish

You realise that Europeans invented economic development, right?

>Tax all of europe X amount of money and shift that wealth to indonesia and ASEAN to achieve an equal living standard?

You're literally the most evil person I have ever seen on the internet. High IQ Europeans, who have secular values, who have the greatest respect for human rights, who invest a lot in their children, and who already suffer under an excessive regulatory/tax burden, do not owe the rest of the world anything.

You realise that Indonesia has 15x the population of the Netherlands, right? And that Norway is tiny, literally like 2% of the population of Indonesia? Maybe if Indonesia was more careful with birth control and didn't have babies that it can't afford, it wouldn't have such a problem with poverty. Having babies is not a debt on other people.

Firstly, it won't work because designing a profanity filter can only ever be an eternal game of cat and mouse - there are always going to be new words or ways of r3wr1t1ng the same words. This doesn't take into account the problem of multiple languages.

Secondly, age-appropriate is a far more complex challenge than simply filtering out "bad" words. Anything can be reworded. Families differ in which words they consider acceptable at each age. If you really want to make an online service safe for young children, you probably shouldn't be matching them with unapproved strangers to talk to in any form.

There is no sociologically valid use case for a profanity detection library. This is a misuse of technology. Get over your shit.

Oh wow, even just trying to read the "Internet is the great equalizer (1996)" article runs into a paywall. That's where we've come.

So I'm guessing:

Soup = liquid ingredients

Salad = solid ingredients randomly mixed together

Sandwich = solid ingredients put into a structure

My guess is that not only is life is much more complex nowadays, but we are continually showered by polished profiles on Instagram et al showing lives that our own do not compare to. This creates feelings of inferiority and missing out, and eventually depression and other emotional problems. Add to that the general pattern towards a society of increasing inequality, and it's possible to see why in this hypercompetitive context so many people are struggling to maintain a baseline of self-esteem.

Secrets are a pre-21st century idea.

I no longer live in the UK, but it's the country I have the most experience with. Here's what sucks:

1) Overpopulation. Especially in England, especially in Southern England. One of the highest population densities in the world, and it really shows on the roads, trains and in how compact everything gets built. (Unlike the Netherlands which has similar population density, there are far fewer people on bicycles due to worse infrastructure.)

2) Unwise immigration policy that has ruined many of the most affordable parts of cities that would otherwise be desirable places for young people to live.

3) Stagnant and outdated culture. It's kinda pathetic in the 21st century that there's still a monarchy and unelected House of Lords. And that people actually defend it on the basis of "tourism". Also, the FPTP electoral system for the House of Commons creates an environment in which only majority/conservative viewpoints get represented politically. In the UK I felt like the political system was run by older generations for their own benefit only; there is very little of a culture in the UK of caring about or investing in the young. The tuition fees debacable is only the icing on the cake of this cultural tendency which runs pretty deep.

4) Government services such as healthcare and education vary enormously in quality from region to region, and the quality is usually pretty poor by international standards. The wealthy get private health insurance and send their children to private schools, which aren't an option for those not able or interested in paying twice.

5) Housing prices. Even engineers can't buy houses in the South. Also, a lot of the housing stock is fairly old.

6) Surveillance state and general unwarranted cultural paranoia. CCTV capital of the world.

7) Failed welfare state (there are A LOT of homeless, and a big underclass population) and failed labour movement (the only jobs which have unions are public sector jobs).

Something I wonder is: would we have anywhere near as much of a problem with a handful of companies monopolising the information technology industry, if we didn't have Intellectual Property laws?

People often forget that patents, copyright, etc. are just an arbitrary social construct with little real justification for their existence. Yet the overall effect they have is to make it considerably harder to start a new company to compete with a tech giant.

It may be that the problem is that we have too much regulation rather than too little.