Visiting another city is not in any way comparable to living there. Or would you defer to the opinion of some tourist who visited NYC for a random weekend?
I haven't owned a car in the past decade, but the last car I did own was an Audi S5 and I thought it was pretty nearly perfect. Manual transmission, naturally aspirated V8, 4 wheel drive, but also all the electronic toys like lane sensors and physical buttons that were designed to give satisfying tactile feedback. Also just a beautiful car inside and out. I thought this was some kind of a high water mark for car design. You can't get a manual transmission anymore, they replaced the V8 with a V6 turbo, added weird lines all over the car that ruined the aesthetic. The new models are better on paper but feel twitchy and nervous to me. I haven't seen the latest ones, but I would not be surprised if they'd made everything touch-screen controlled as the trend in the industry has been.
But anyway, c'est la vie, it was the end of an era and life moves on. We'd be better off with fewer cars, and with people thinking of them more like washing machines and focusing their attention elsewhere.
Indeed. As I recall about 80% of pharmaceutical profits are made in the United States, while these same drugs are sold in other countries at much lower negotiated prices.
I don't think things are nearly as "broken" as these types of alarmist takes make it out to be. Quite the contrary I think FOSS is a model that other industries would do well to adopt.
People talk about companies "free riding" on FOSS, but the corollary to that is that this allows an individual developer to be massively more productive, justifying the high salaries we see. To obtain value from just about any open source project, companies need to hire developers, individual developers are in a position to benefit as the gatekeepers to all this "free" value.
Everyone is benefiting from this. Free is absolutely essential to making this work. Free is frictionless, free is equalizing. I'm not choosing between Redux over Mobx based on price, I'm choosing purely of intrinsic merits and community.
It is always easy enough to find problems, but looking over the past couple of decades, I don't think you can argue but that things keep getting better.
Wow, this is fantastic. I like to work on my balcony, but there are constantly trucks parking below, with poorly maintained engines left to idle for hours a day, spewing fumes that leave a layer of grime coating everything (and send me back inside).
Yes. I'd say the average American when asked which nation the US has had closer relations with (once you screen out the ones who don't even know Pakistan exists) would say "India" 9 times out of 10.
Times are definitely changing. The situation in Ukraine, especially coming right on the heels of two years of lockdown that has disrupted the "status quo" worldwide, I hope is going to be the catalyst for the western world to find new unity with respect to our shared values and reevaluate many things. We've seen several watershed moments over the past few years completely eviscerate well-established and seemingly unassailable power structures more or less overnight.
North Korea started with the "better" part of Korea by most measures, having far more natural resources than the southern portion of the peninsula as well as more arable land. All things being equal, they "ought" to be the richer country.
There seems to be a marked increase in unreported incidents, at least where I live. I don't trust any armchair statistical analysis of this, particularly when the author clearly has an agenda and a narrative.
Right, this is what I was thinking. Like with a quick Google for "wet markets" prior to 2019 I see tons of articles warning about the dangers and calling for China to close them:
I hear this a lot, but I don't understand how people think it's worse. How is a lab leak worse than the virus emerging from a wet market? At least if it's a lab leak it was while doing potentially life-saving medical research.