I was paddling with my 3 year old daughter by the shore while my 9 year old was playing with his cousin futher up the beach (and in front of the lifeguard station).
My father-in-law (late 60's) wanted to join the two 9 year olds who had swam a short distance to a sandbar, and were in knee depth water.
The old man got into difficulty, I dropped my daughter back with the family and asked my wife to have a look at her old man.
She said he was fine, he's been swimming here for years.
I recognised the pattern of short quick breaths and short quick movements. Each small wave was sapping energy from him.
I ran to help and reached him quickly. People nearby had recognised the danger but were too afraid of stepping out of their depth to help a stranger. Ultimately, nobody on the crowded beach was prepared to take any risk to themselves to help (which I can understand).
On arrival, I realised I did not know what to do. I held him above the water for a few seconds, which meant submerging myself for the same duration. He was now a dead-weight, who had lost all control. I repeated this twice more, until I felt there was a risk to my own safety.
I swam/dragged/paddled/crawled with one arm the short (12 meters) to shore. I was close to becoming exhausted myself.
Later that night over a bbq, the family asked why he simply did not turn around. The time between tiring, and panicking/exhausting he said was too short, and he was so close to reaching the sandbar.
My wife did not believe he had been in danger until that chat over the bbq.
He is alive today because one member of the family recognise the signs of drowning. Being inclose proximity to the lifeguard station which was manned, had no bearing on the outcome.
Amish or Luddite? No.
Underinvestment in technology? Yes.
Poor bureaucratic response? More yes.
The US is leading in eCommerce with FAANGs. With this trade comes very valuable data mining and 'Surveilance Capitalism' where intimate user behaviours and trends are translated into further competitive advantage.
When you look at the FAANGs. The US gets all the upside (as well as some of the downsides), but the EU gets only downsides. e.g. Amazon will hollow out retail and logistics, as well as computing infrastructure, the economic efficiencies are returned to the US as well as the rich user data.
The EU is struggling to respond in a contructive way. It really needs to create a few tech hubs, and promote new ventures.
Instead, its doing what the EU does best. Kicking the can down the street, and adding bureaucracy to appear to be doing something.
A too-big-too-fail bank is using cheap short-term funding (from repos) to invest in long term assets, bonds.
The magnitude is concerning.
When confidence in overnight lending between banks reduces (because the other banks realise what this funding is for), the interest rate (measure of risk) rises.
For repo rates: 2.5% is high, 10% brings the house down, and has a blast radius that impacts the entire system.
Correct. Hypothermia and drowning (particulartly in cold water) the patient is not pronounced dead until the body has been warmed, this can be 12+ hours after the event.
Children do better.
The mammalian diving reflex prepares the body for long periods of immersion. Not to be relied upon.
You've changed your comment while I was typing: youu mentioned a delta between CEOs and average workers. But we're likely to share common ground. Your new comment regarding revolutions. Not so fast!
The Chinese sufffered the same problems of inequallity and the plebs made the same comparisons - for centuries.
So a delta is to be expected, the magnatude I'm not sure if that matters as CEOs are outliers. I think the point you are leaning to is:
despite working full time, the average US resident cannot afford what we perceive to be a 'good quality of life' (many people from developing countries will find that statement hard to believe). This is subjective, and not likely an issue of labour being exploitative.
It is a question on what type of a society Americans want (and vote for), which is an entirely different discussion covering taxation, education, health care, corpotate political donations/lobbying etc.
From a market perspective the delta represents supply and demand.
So can we equeate the term 'offering employment' to 'offering exploitation'?
Unless exploited by force (slavery). The employed/expolited are free to find their true value by alternavtive means? Find another job - less exploitive, or make your own job.
There are many problems with capitalism, I would argue taxation, or more appropriately lack of taxation is a greater concern.
As for the scenario if everyone had 5m in their accounts in the morning, only the most foolish would quit their jobs as inflation would render the windfall as null and void.
We all cannot be equally well-off. Value will always flow, and eventually concentrate.
Having a private school gives a comparison (and hopefully competition) with state schools.
Also, private schools can do better for children with learning difficulties - smaller class size etc.
I say this as a parent with one child in private, and one in public. I'm very happy with both, but each school caters to the individual childs strenghts.
Highly targetted ads are not my concern here, they may even be welcome.
Using heartrate, activity levels, mobilty can probably infer a broad picture of someones health, which of course, would be very valuable to health insurance/life assurance companies.
With this level of privatised surveilance, I'll stick with my mechanical automatic watch thanks.
I have mostly moved to self hosting email. I still have a lot of legacy registrations with various companies that go to gmail, otherwise everything else is self host on a hetzner vps (2.50 eur per month) which doubles as a wireguard vpn.
First time setting up an email server was quite a chore as I have no background in email, getting all of the moving parts to play nice required some patience.
My second email server used Mail-in-a-box scripts which I highly recommend. Zero to functioning email server in a few minutes. The slowest part is DNS propagation. Anyone comfortable setting up a domain name and the basic DNS settings that are invloved will have no problem self hosting email. The setup includes web-based client. I use k-9 mail client on my phone.
I find the catch-all email feature very helpful in creating ad-hoc addresses for spammy companies (eg car insurance). I can sign-up with [email protected] and it will direct to [email protected].
I'm not completely de-googled, but I am consciously and gradually reducing my exposure to google, and other large networks.