xwolfi

You may misunderstand how the "entire world" thinks about it.

I'm French and live in Hong Kong so I'm exposed to a lot of European and Asian real estate experience, have friends with everything from a villa in Vietnam to a flat in Berlin etc.

So the way we see the US is:

  - it's risky to live there, for many reasons (high crime, gun ownership, children mass murders, rampant untreated schizophrenia, drug abuse issues)

  - it's optimized for gasoline consumption, you can't really live near your work as much as elsewhere, the city center isn't as interesting as in Asia/Europe and suburbs are very low-density, copy-pasted houses, so the "value" of a property is more flimsy than other places.

  - it's expensive with low speculative upside: it's a very mature market, it might conserve some value but it won't like double like in Saigon, Bangkok or Lisbon, and it won't "last forever" like Paris or Hong Kong who have structural reasons to be expensive (Paris as capital of a European geographical center between 6 rich countries, Hong Kong as a gateway in and out of China). To give you a random example: Seattle is quite "new" and particularly useless / unknown to, say, a successful Tokyo upstart. It's considerably more expensive than what it should be from an Asian point of view.

  - Visas are annoyingly complex vs very open economies (in term of real estate investment) and the US is far down the ranking of countries you trust to access your property easily. I'd rather have a small thing in Singapore that I know I'll always be welcome to visit, than something huge in Ohio which will make me feel like shit each time I have to fill paperwork to see.

  - Political instability seems to have taken hold and we never know if foreigners will be barred from the US on a whim because of some flu. It doesn't feel that much better than China, which is considered one of the worst market to invest in around me (basically you have random chances to simply see your house unreachable for years there, or disappear).

I feel "the rest of the world" considers the US as average, not too dangerous but not too profitable to invest in. Most of my friends are very wary of investing there. I would never myself. All these may be factually wrong btw, this is just how I hear the market talks around me, in the rest of the world: the US "brand" is not very popular, is all.

Normally yes: in France we also have 30y fixed-rate mortgages (in fact, nobody sane would do variable: there's no upside except for the bank). If the rate gets way lower, you can pay the advance repayment fee and reborrow, so the banks directly just cut your rate, everyone does it. And if the rate goes up, the banks swallow the losses.

There have been discussions in parliament for decades about the prevalence of fixed rates and the cost it has for the banking sector, but it's nearly impossible now to change it. Banks simply have to make less money, and expand abroad if they want to do more predatory variable rates. The French philosophy is that banks should not speculate too much on mortgage profits and accept to make some but not optimal profit there. Suffice to say that our banks are struggling a little bit more than say British banks.

Marrying is a government assurance that your assets will be distributed to the person you signed the marriage contract with upon your death, nothing much more.

The government MUST accept it, it s the ONLY value of marriage: it is not an "act", it s a legal contract.

Ofc it s stupid not to make it happen, and it has been a long combat. Most of humanity doesnt allow it yet, and maybe from the comfort of where you type from, it's done and away, but here in China, it an exhausting fight.

What were you finding so strange in saying it was a long combat ? I see 100 years at least before it happens here.

I was born and raised in France. At 26, I emigrated to China, been 9 years.

How much do you think I have to conform vs being myself ? It s not that they re mean in refusing to accept my Frenchness, it's that they cant even care, and if I want anything done, I need to meet them halfway: learn how conventions work in China to not brush them off, how to speak their language, how to dress and behave in a way they can recognize, so many little details that transform me from an alien ghost-faced weirdo to a surprisingly enjoyable human to hang around with.

I wonder if it wouldnt be the same for other groups: maybe minorities in general would enjoy life more if they were given more chance to conform, rather than given more space not to change ? Im not even trying myself, Ill eat my croissant in secret if I want, but for most people, I m a rice noodle eater like every "normal" person here. I hate it, I still do it: I conform, and life goes on.

It takes a lot of effort, actually. For instance, Im a minority in my current country: cant speak the language well (Chinese), cant write nor read much, dont look like them at all, work in high level jobs they cant relate to for the most part, and am European to a fault in almost every belief system that matters.

So, what should I or they do ? Tolerate me, they could try, but shouldnt I ... fit in more ? Learn more seriously the language, dress more like them, marry local, put my kids amongst them, or even leave and live amongst my peers ?

I think it s impossible to ask a majority to tolerate me beyond very basic human politeness. My religion, my culture, my beliefs are so foreign for the majority, 1.4bn people, that the most efficient way for us to live together is for me to change and adapt a lot more than for them to do so.

I hesitate. I do see your point, but I find it maybe short sighted: see, pleasing other is self-serving, the more you please them the more they adapt to you. There is an advantage in making others enjoy your existence more, and if we're going to actually help, embracing what societies are, machines crushing difference for a reductive common compromise, teaching autists to pretend to play the game is going to work better than teaching current winners that they should lose a bit to help autists feel better.

I suppose our disagreement might be in how feasible each is: it is easy, maybe lazy, to try to make autists adapt to the rest of us and probably impossible, at best extremely expensive, to make the rest of us more atuned to their needs. Not that we dont want to, but we're all thermodynamics machines trying to save energy: we may never really massively expense some to their benefit, sadly, especially if they dont learn to go our ways, sometimes.

You know these people who can recite dozens of gun specs, know which bullet pierce which material at which velocity etc, in your country ?

It's part of your culture because you discuss guns all the time, well in France, we do the same but for cheese.

To be honest, I was born and spent my first 23 years in Normandy, never quite could enjoy the real Camembert. I prefer the supermaket ones with less aggressive taste.

Ofc I moved to China and now all I can eat is Brie.

Im French, and when I was 16, I went to New York and was traumatized by the border checks on both ends opening all my luggages in front of everyone (and every other French person had to do it) to make sure I wasnt carrying frigging supermarket cheese nobody cares about. They specifically check French people for these crimes, I was told, because we seem not to realize we're threatening the US with our crappy Camemberts.

In China we feel safer, strangely. Social media is very policed, reported message are auto scored and disappear quickly even if it does reduce offensive-yet-legal discussion (but is it that bad?). Social media companies are actually terrified of being in the news because they know actual consequences will hit them.

I know it s contencious to even defend this, and this message would be disappeared if HN had the same scoring system as Red (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiaohongshu) in China, but you re right: it can be done, social media can actually be optimistic and positive. But do you want this?

Hot air, like most discussion online, especially when children and sex are involved.

Conformance is an advantage, a way to progress and get what you need or want. I feel weird reading people saying that it would be wrong to try to help people with trouble conforming, conform: what would be the alternative ? Realistically, tolerating differences can only go so far as the other tolerates it: autists and transgenders have similar issues in accepting that the wider society is different from them and the compromise has to start at both ends. And I think nobody's really asking anyone to actually change behavior, but simply to hide it better in temporary/crisis/exceptional situations.

For instance, I think homosexuality's long combat to marry, a very VERY conforming demand, is helping it move away from the view others had of it being a non-conforming sexual behavior. Nobody's talking anymore of the physical act, the actual difference, but instead we talk about their attempt to conform, and it's very hard to find arguments against it.

Depends: I m probably the opposite of someone with autism: I love chatting with strangers, I can dance with girls in clubs until 8am on a whim at the despair of my gf, I m very chatty in general and overshare. I suffer strongly when I see others suffer so I probably have working mirror neurons (empathy). I seek social connections and moved to Hong Kong to be surrounded by dense population rather than feel so lonely in Paris. This immigration adventure was the highlight of my life and I enjoyed tremendously the danger, the unknown, the overloading of things to do and learn.

Yet, I feel connected to monotropism in some way: I can only get interested almost obsessively in one thing at a time and completely forget and disregard anything and anyone else. It s very annoying for people around me and many find me autistic somehow, geeky at best.

All Im saying is, either it s really what a "spectrum" is or it s just a sort of common human traits. Us programmers had to be a bit obsessed with computers to dedicate most of our waking time to it, and everyone here is probably sharing this trait, none of us being really autists and may sound disrespectful or misguided calling ourselves so ?

I work in a giant investment bank with hundreds of people who can answer across all time zones. We still f up, we still don't always know where problems lie and we still sometimes can spend hours on a simple DoS.

You'll only get better at guessing what the issue could be: an exploit by a user is something you'll remember forever and will overly protect against from now on, until you hit some other completely different problem which your metric will be unprepared for, and you'll fumble around and do another post mortem promising to look at that new class of issues etc.

You'll marvel at the diversity of potential issues, especially in human-facing services like yours. But you'll probably have another long loss of service again one day, and you're right to insist on the transparency / speed of signaling to your users: they can forgive everything as long as you give them an early signal, a discount and an apology, in my experience.

Some might, many I think you're dreaming: but that's a market to study. End of the day, americans might want to use their money for more important things than origin of manufacture, and they'd be smart to throw the paper money the government prints at Chinese underpaid labour giving them actual toasters in exchange, rather than give it to each other.

Don't forget, when you buy a toaster from China, you're basically making them bleed and sweat on it for nothing more than your currency they can only use to buy back stuff from you, if you'll allow it. It's a very good deal, so good US consumers should increase their chinese imports rather than decrease it. Or next thing they know, they'll be the ones sweating in sweatshops soldering around toasters for capital-rich Shanghaiese.

Especially when you can sell for more something made in France, Italy, Japan or Germany. I think the "made in" chauvinism is a hard sell if it's the USA, especially to US customer: doesn't feel exotic and isn't cheap, so what's it there for except some cheap cash grab ?

Plus, you know, there are some nice Chinese stuff now and they have an economy of scale that the US simply can't match.

What if the ingest system wrongly feeds your blockchain with faulty records? They are saved permanently, sure, but are they correct ?

It s like saying that because you kidnapped a bitcoin millionaire and took his key, the blockchain allowing you to claim his balance means that you are indeed the rightful owner of the funds. No, you're not.

But then, by which mean did you "ask yourself the same" ? Or is it that you cannot imagine a conversation ?

In France we had this big plan to swap batteries near instantly at the charging station, like we did with horses 300 years ago (but it's an old idea since electrical batteries were used to power vehicles everywhere), and tested it in Israel of all places with Renault... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Better_Place_(company) . Didn't work but maybe that's one idea ? Now if only we could standardize this...

Yeah but petrol cars weren't serviced as well as now when they started (arguably with a much longer range per much faster "charge", maybe). EVs are probably going to be a good idea, it'll just take time.

Imagine in 1995 saying emails will never replace sending around documents at the office, just because there wasn't any infra yet. Wait a bit, or even help !

You're very wrong ! The suffering of the victim matters more than the ability of the culprit to act within a certain legal budget.

If someone found a small, legal "act committed = no fine" way to victimize someone to the point of suicide, do you think it should be left unpunished ?

Justice MUST be subjective.

But I mean, even my dad died of a motorcycle accident... maybe this dude just did too ?

When Cathie Wood was asked by Bloomberg, she called 21Shares staff who replied they have cold wallets. She didnt reply "oh ofc we're insured"... 21Shares staff didnt either...

Expect a shitstorm in case of hack (or lost keys) with these clowns.

Imagine you were leveraged long ETF news, then the fake news started then descended in liquidation,your long leverage has been closed and you have no more money to buy now.

That fake news cleaned up a lot of leveraged bets up and down.

It's hot air all the way down !

None of these ring a bell here in China. My Indian friends are probably unaffected by Carl Icahn, yet the problem is present there too.

Social media is an artifact of the internet spreading, it will fade away or we'll adapt to it, but during the transition period, people who cannot deal with it are being rejected, somewhat violently. It's like blaming the depression of horse riders on the war policies of the time.

Verizon/Comcast don't even exist here, and I live between India and China, almost half of humanity. Are you talking in hyper-local terms ?

Peering exist everywhere, and at scale you have to pay, yes.

It's like saying communism isnt the problem, but that it s how every single group attempted to implement it that should be blamed.

Sure, maybe, but if nobody ever can implement the theoretical utopia, maybe we should talk of things humans can do instead and ditch the unimplementable idea.

QA cannot be done by a separate team the way you dream: it will always be a political buffer zone staffed by the cheapest half-competent people you can find, expulsing good people into dev or management. Or you merge it into dev/solution design.

The reason is simple: just like contract law, you only care about quality once you are in trouble and need to reverse back the source of the issue to give to the client a post mortem. Otherwise, you care first about velocity, or $ input/hr of effort.

Probably because there's a very low value in building message streaming framework once you've done the basics: how do you come to, say, a trading broker and say "your order management system could be just as fast with my other messaging framework".

He did it to learn and have fun, but finishing it to be prod-ready would require at least one user.

Even funnier is that there is no Social Credit System in China, not the way you think there is. There is no record of small offences by the billion and a half Chinese, we're barely even able to maintain proper records in general, let alone useless fluff like a score for each citizen.

I invite you to read this: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/09/15/china-social-credit-sys...

I quote: "Contrary to common belief, the cities mainly target companies, not individuals. Nonetheless, legal representatives of a violating company are also included in the blacklists to prevent reoffending elsewhere or under a different company. Nationally, about 75 percent of entities targeted by the system end up on blacklists because of court orders they have ignored—the so-called judgment defaulters. The remaining companies are typically collared for severe marketplace violations—for instance, for food safety infringements, environmental damage, or wage arrears. But much of these cities’ day-to-day use of the SCS is banal thanks to the system’s fragmentation and inflation of results."

The gist of it is that it was a grading system for businesses, to distinguish the bad payers, often bankrupts people restarting business over and over. This is ofc not great because we would need a "start over" mindset like in the US, but stop reading buzzfeed-like news about this thing, it's a bit cringe.

We are oppressed maybe, but not THAT good at it. Most of the censorship in China is self inflicted and networked, from the bottom, think "shhh don't say that you'll be in trouble" or "I prefer not to answer that question, wink wink". No need for complicated expensive systems diverting taxpayer money away from the pockets of our dear leaders, when a simple 2-hour interview of one person at the police station can silence an entire social graph of hundreds of people for months :)