robocat

The point is that I'm in a country that is closer to what you said you wanted (compared against the USA).

The vast majority of healthcare here is not profit oriented but instead is run by the NZ govt.

The purpose of most business is money, and few people would choose to be a boss without the financial winnings. I had the opportunity to roll the dice with everything: because fortunately I'm in a country that still has a backstop.

However the boss payout result is quite simply not worth the risk; because the median return for a startup is $0. Remaining an employee would have been a more sensible decision.

Other people like you complain, and I accept that is part of the deal I chose.

I am smart enough to have had the choice of alternative lifestyle paths like teaching or being an artist.

Meanwhile, I'm literally the guy paying for our social welfare and health system because I'm an export earner. Obviously the NZ economy deserves its return on its investment in me and our business environment.

But if you want to imply someone is greedy, then look at yourself or at your government.

You seem to think "efficiency" is the issue.

No. The issue is that there is an almost unlimited demand for healthcare.

That is true regardless of capitalism or marxism or whateverism you believe is the right answer.

Avoiding talking about money: it is easy to see the underlying issue of how should we balance a doctor's lifetime versus patients' needs versus the businesses that ultimately pay tax for it all.

We have public healthcare in New Zealand (a huge percentage of our economy is run by our government - almost socialist). Here we restrict healthcare by waitlists, beaurocracy, and other tricks. It mostly works, but the nurses that I know give too much, and are flaming out.

Meanwhile I've done the dirty boring capitalist work of bringing in overseas income to pay for our beautiful services, and I've reached my personal limit of balancing working harder versus gaining extra income (for myself and my government). I'm taxed at a demotivating rate. There's fuck all respect for being the guy bringing in the bacon to the country. I get to look forward to being treated like a boomer in a few years.

I love kumbayaa political beliefs, but not when I'm the donkey.

Maxxing your income is a foolish optimisation.

I still don't know what my own objective function is.

Quitting work years ago helped, even though I still enjoyed software development. I had intended to instead work on my own investments, but I stopped that after I figured out money is a joyless and meaningless motivator.

Mostly just saying no to helping anyone with computer problems. Fortunately changed from Windows 7 to Linux, so I can be mostly honest when I tell people I don't understand their laptop problems.

Said no to helping family with with any printer issues after ~2005. I often print stuff, but I use the printer at my local library or printshop.

I still occasionally dabble, but only for those people I dearly love. I'm still very good at tech support, I just don't do it.

I've got my tech frustration level down to about the background radiation level (as politics or taxes).

Yesterday I got an anthropic Claude advert on that thread, so dark I screenshot it... Text:

  Never get sidelined by your tools again

  Here for the 3am deploy

Just no.

I wanted an induction hob/stovetop with knobs for my mum for usability. Super hard to find. She had just started to burn stuff on the old resistive unit because she was losing mobility. It had touch sensitive glass that has infuriated her for years (touch on hobs design is always a poor usability compromise).

Highly recommended upgrade for anyone with parents. I would now even go to trouble to import a unit with knobs (I asked at a heap of shops before luckily finding someone just beginning with a new line for their shop).

Finding usable devices and buying them for your parents takes a LOT of work, but the work really pays off when you get it right. I also gave them a microwave with knobs.

I've become oversensitive to UI problems and bugs.

I get triggered when watching my family or friends struggle with egregiously poor design.

I have avoidance techniques, so I can avoid facing the most anger inducing software.

I just feel lucky I'm not a graphic designer or architect or writer. How does someone with good taste even survive facing the outside world?

The US abusing their place within global dependency chains has to start having negative effects on the US, right?

The missing elephant is that our governments are the biggest rent seekers of all.

The article rabbits on about rentiers without once recognizing who ultimately owns all the land and sets all the rules.

It mentions Georgism which to an approximation is replacing private rent with public rent.

Georgism doesn't actually solve the problem of rent seeking it just changes the seeker.

I have a personal theory that governments love to have capitalists to blame for the rent capture of the government. I see the pattern again and again e.g. mortgage interest e.g. electricity bills by state-owned companies in New Zealand e.g. how taxes (GST) and fees and regulatory costs get oncharged to everybody (yet the invoicer gets the hate).

Acshually a protective mutation was quickly being selected for (more precisely, the lack of it was strongly selected against).

Paper about Kuru and mutations referenced in comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49719102

Preinstalled GrapheneOS would be funded by state Honeypot operators, or potentially thieves or blackmailers.

If you wish to steal from someone, select from a population of thieves since they won't go to the police (although they may use illegal means to punish you).

Going with the stereotype that people doing illegal things prefer a secure OS (and are not smart enough to pick a safe source).

One programmed reason for aging is Telomere shortening which kills cells after X reproductions (Hayflick limit) which is part of our body's general anti-cancer defenses.

Also relevant to the article is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypoth...

> Do you understand how incredibly privileged you have to be to afford a $500 shirt

Seems like a virtuously elitist argument against other elites.

Should we apologize for buying any luxury item?

If we only did the necessities of life, how do you think our world would look? What motivates you?

It is demeaning to others to feel apologetically bad about having luxuries that others don't. It is rude to judge others as privileged. The problem with the word is that it indirectly puts down the unprivileged. Everyone alive is privileged and lots of dead people are too. Be grateful for luxuries, sure. Denial and abstention can be just another form of being an arsehole.

Hipocrisy is hard to escape eh.

> It might be that having english as your native language puts you in a uniquely difficult position

Personally I suspect English has some great advantages. The main disadvantage is defaulting to superiority.

The natural disconnect between written and spoken English is tremendously helpful. Well educated English encourages copying sounds - pronouncing foreign names and places correctly. This is a huge leg up compared against some other cultures. Think sports stars having their foreign names pronounced correctly. People often know how to try and say Paris or Barcelona correctly. We naturally know that how something is spoken trumps how it is written.

English speakers often have the ability to hear sounds because there's so many wildly different English accents. Especially vowels (we natively use a wide range of vowel sounds). There are sounds English speakers struggle to hear, but I think we have an advantage over some other languages.

If you're the type of person that attempts to mimic accents, then you've often learnt how to say a huge range of vowels and consonants. And how to stretch them (Strine, some US accents) or shorten them.

> social aspects of learning another language

Maybe if you are near the native speaking country, or potentially if there are significant numbers of immigrants.

But knowing Spanish adds nothing social within New Zealand.

I had a Spanish girlfriend when 30, which made learning Spanish rather incentivised, and I embedded overseas for many months to learn conversational Spanish.

However I rarely hang out with South American immigrants in New Zealand, and those I have met (say at the pub) often prefer to stick with English.

Knowing Spanish is fantastic when travelling - the months spent learning have led to way more enjoyment when subsequently travelling to South America or visiting friends in Spain. Spanish also helps a little in France, Italy, Portugal and Brazil.

I intend to spend a few months in South Korea so maybe I'll try and learn Korean (without a girlfriend). However I'm now older so I suspect it will be much much harder.

Diesel has limited shelf life: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microbial_contamination_of_die...

  Fuel companies state that untreated fuel will remain usable for only one year, after which fuel contamination ("the diesel bug") begins to appear

If saturated brine is pumped in, then salt is not dissolved from the walls. See better comments further above.

The sankey chart refers to her birthday:

https://aella.substack.com/p/my-birthday-gangbang

  With my approval, organizers rejected anyone associated with e/acc, because we don’t need to give nice things to people hastening our doom

(reedited to shorten)

You don't know how that is deployed.

Some of their treasury (Non-Current Marketable Securities) could be bonds that are invested with targeted contracts for trade-secret benefits.

Say TSMC needs capital, and say Apple has spare capital: they are both likely to agree to an investment where Apple gets contractual benefits that other customers do not.

I would expect Apple to be very aggressively investing into suppliers to get results that strongly benefits Apple and perhaps that disadvantages competitors.

You believe signatures by engineers matter.

That is your belief, but I've never seen that belief backed by fact.

Most open source software disowns liability in CAPS in the license. Yet somehow FOSS like Linux gets used for safety critical infrastructure.

Microsoft would love certification requirements for engineers - that would kill open source to their conpetitive benefit.

Do you honestly think if we required Microsoft Certified Professionals to sign the internals of Microsoft OS then Windows would be more secure or reliable?

The bigger issue is that signatures and criminal consequences hardly matter across jurisdictions.

The capitalist issue is that businesses want scapegoats when things go wrong. That would be the outcome of signatures: engineers as fallboys for systemic failures across organisations.

Note how often pilots are blamed for accidents due to the design of planes.

It is just an idealistic belief based on feelies that software certification would achieve the goals you imagine it would.

Signatures are an anachronism: from an alien past.

International business uses different mechanisms for safety.

Our world is intertwined complexity. You somehow think that the buck should stop at engineers?

If engineers signed off on everything then we'd have no more disasters like New Orleans floods?

Who signed what for the Grenfell towers tragedy? Which engineers were reprimanded? Did they decide that more signatures would help prevent future disasters?

Also read this comment by a real biologist:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49734849

How greedy you sound.

It is so easy to rationalise the idea of taking everything off someone who has more than oneself. We've got political phrases to justify it.

But beware because you are the wealthy: that person living on the street wants everything you have; and maybe 95% of the world deserves to take everything you own (that's only fair right?).

In New Zealand we have MMP voting, and minority parties want to bring in wealth taxes: taxes to take between 25% and 100% of retirement savings (assuming someone has managed to save enough to own a nice house). Double taxation since those savings were after already getting taxed at 30%+.

Incentives matter. Overtax the creators, and they either won't create new businesses or won't grow their businesses.

Consider moving to a poor country if you want things to be fairer.

People need to be incentivised to create wealth for their country. So that the country can afford to pay for nice things like healthcare and social services.

Balance is required to disincentivise the parasites (loan-sharks and many finance verticals seem parasitic to me)... We don't need scumbags that take wealth from everybody without creating any surpluses.

"Regressive taxation" is regressive for business building. It's a risky, shit job. Put the taxes too high and why would anyone do it? Haven't you noticed that little don't create businesses in lots of countries (because why the fuck would you!!). Go on: kill your golden geese in the USA (flatten the world market).

I've helped create a business that brings in important overseas income to NZ. I'm taxed so highly regressively that I lack the incentive to risk my precious hours to earn more money.

I hate the greedy fuckers that pontificate about taxing me. Armchair wankers can go create a business then gift their ill-gotten gains to their own governments. Just beware that the median return for a founder is approximately $0.

Do you feel like an inadiquate imposter or something? I'm assuming you work in software.

Watch some engineers in other disciplines and you soon recognise that many of them have about the same responsibility as a software engineer. Design is design.

Or read about engineering failures like flight QF32 (mostly a success story):

  A paperwork review showed that the required signatures were missing from 131 out of 138 retrospective concessions issued between 2009 and 2011

https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/a-matter-of-millimeters-...

Australian Quantas, with a UK Rolls Royce engine on an Airbus, with engines maintained in Aussie.

Safety is now often made up of interlocking: regulations, standards, quality systems, safety management systems, insurance, international legal contracts. Certified engineers and signatures are usually only a very small part of those systems.

Certification matters less than you might think across international borders.

Perhaps I'm a cynic, but beliefs in certification seem so irrational to me. What is it? Jealous desires for status? Desire to have guilds/gatekeepers? Complete misunderstanding of how safety occurs in "real" engineering?

Do you happen to live in a country where your government departments are known for rapid processing? (not weeks of delay like we're talking about here).

I generally see my legal system create severe delays (regardless of how much that victimises or costs everyone involved)

I try to record many specialist professionals (after asking first).

Experts know what they are saying, and they often rapidly download dense technical information. I first noticed the problem after asking a friend for advice on handling a psych issue with a friend's child.

Otherwise experts talk and I listen and I understand, but I can easily forget nuance and detail.

I also learnt to record medical specialists talking to my mum, so I could replay the details to my dad.

Why would dad trust my recall? And will he trust facts if I've repeated them as a non-specialist? And perhaps dad picks up different aspects due to his own experiences.

Sounds like we mostly agree.

I dislike scammers, and when travelling I practice my skills at recognising them. I'm okay at avoiding getting targeted (using a variety of techniques).

If scammers are feeding their families, and relatively rich tourists are sufficiently incautious, then I don't have huge sympathy for the tourists. The rules of the street are everywhere in the world.

I don't support drug users in my home town either.

Of course I've run into many selfish arsehole scammers including ones with their police on thier side.

Options against bent cops in foreign countries are more limited.

But yes, my government always wants to increase taxation, and they are rather deceptive about everything.

But I pay my taxes and I'm mostly okay with what it is used for. Without our social and legal infrastructure, I wouldn't have got anything.

> learned French at all, I got to my current level of ability quite quickly

You probably have some natural ability - or even just drive given your interest. Interests and abilities often hold hands.

The the other major issue with languages is that our teaching methods are rather hit and miss.

This is interesting: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/sep/02/languages.... -- although I cynically worry that he was perhaps rather better at selling himself than doing teaching.

> For Korean, I wouldn't bother with Latin letters. Hangul is simple

I've poorly and unclearly explained the idea sorry. Writing is hard.

Not even close. Evolutionary selection pressures don't usually act directly on genetics. Perhaps you are incorrectly attempting to rely on intuition, and over-simplistic phrases like selection pressures. Intuition is incredibly misleading with evolution.

Your pink and blue example is actually a great model to work from. Think about the genes and the expression of those genes, and then think about what is being selected if all the blue animals are eaten.

Or think about what would happen if there was a mountain range, and pink animals were eaten on one side and blue ones were eaten on the other side.

Or think about what if one of the blue fathers has pink polka dots that gave it a 10% better chance of survival.

Always concentrate on watching that genes are passed on by reproduction - getting eaten doesn't have to be a problem if reproduction has already occurred (unless parental investment is needed or you get complicated like kin selection).

I am not a biologist. But 'The Selfish Gene' is one of my favourite books because of the concepts within. Unfortunately I think Dawkins went off the deep end later (with what I thought was religious zeal). The Extended Phenotype is even harder to read, but also worthwhile.

It is a fun topic because many phrases about evolution seem misleadingly about death rather than reproduction. And the meaning of the word evolution is absolutely twisted in everyday conversation. Ignoring the troubles with bible bashers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_fittest - "fittest" has an unobvious meaning.

> crosswalks

And their a11y/internationalisation is horrid.

We have pedestrian crossings, not crosswalks. We don't have fire hydrants (instead a different solution). We don't have yellow schoolbuses. Our traffic lights look different (and have different names in different cultures). And those examples are just the obvious problems with some captchas. Usually there are more subtle problems with verification UIs.

You're being extremely dismissive and you're denying somebody else's reality.

Demand varies a lot by location, type of contracting, price, etc.