Expect that this Hacker News thread will be overrun by Swedish patriots who will, with tooth and nail, argue for Swedish exceptionalism and downvote all criticism. War is Peace and all that.
I am ashamed how my country handled this pandemic and I'm ashamed that my fellow citizens are more interested in managing the public image of Sweden rather than learning from obvious mistakes.
I am therefore thankful that Nature published this. It has been debated since early 2020, but the narrative of Swedish exceptionalism is so strong, especially on the Internet, that I wouldn't be surprised if this will tried to be burried.
I have lost friends due to this, not because people have died of Covid but because foreign nationals, who moved to Sweden to work on some of the famous tech companies, have realized how poorly Sweden handled the pandemic. They have now moved to other countries instead.
I think you are thinking about this in the wrong way.
Sure Lat/Lon is the common presentation format for this particular coordinate system.
Right now in Sweden the time is 10:41 (it would be great if it was a couple of hours later, then I could say it's 14:41 to demonstrate the 24 hour time format). Yet, in software, I would represent that as time in UTC. Only when presenting to the user would I convert that to the users time zone.
My last name contain the letter "ö". In software, I would use an unicode string internally, then when writing out I would encoded that to utf-8. (20 years ago, I would have used an old character encoding called ISO/IEC 8859-1 or something like that, but you get my point).
For some damn reason I till don't understand, the decimal separator in Sweden is the comma and not the period. Still I would represent numbers internally as an integer or maybe float, and then when printing to to the user would I convert that to "123,4" (123.4) or something like that.
In Sweden, WGS84 is not the only common coordinate system. There are many others: SWEREF and SWEREF TM for example. Yes internally, depending on usecase, I would probably use a representation of WGS84 as reference, then convert that to present to the user...
I have a hard time following this article because it's so obviously one-sided and ranting.
FWIW the Stockholm Metro is also privatized in the sense that operation, planning and maintenance is done by MTR Corporation, the same company that owns and operates the Hong Kong Metro. MTR also operate a lot of other subway systems in the world, for example Sydney. I don't see any problems inherit in the privatization: Stockholm is excellent and so is Hong Kong.
Tokkaido Line in Japan runs at 187 percent capacity according to a quick googling.
* Combine this with the sudden appearance of subreddit "Antiwork".
Are people depressed or anxious because of covid, or what's wrong?
Trying to be a better person every day, in combination with the wonder of creativity and building, is what made the internet interesting in the early days. Who are these people who are turning communities into sad opposites of these values?
But I think the guy himself has a point when he says he lowers the bar. Think how many different jobs (or "roles") there that can be ranked in a kind of hierarchy: not in the sense of a career ladder, but in services and expertise offered. Between the bottom of this hierarchy, and nothing, is a gap to fill.
Take for example personal protection. Sure, if I need a high tier of that service, I could get myself a bodyguard, maybe one of those with ex-military experience and all the combat training etc. Between that and "nothing" is a random joe who tags along to the Tinder date, like this guy.
Or sure I could meet a licensed therapist. Don't want to? Can meet a friend. Don't have one? This random dude to the rescue.
I am ashamed how my country handled this pandemic and I'm ashamed that my fellow citizens are more interested in managing the public image of Sweden rather than learning from obvious mistakes.
I am therefore thankful that Nature published this. It has been debated since early 2020, but the narrative of Swedish exceptionalism is so strong, especially on the Internet, that I wouldn't be surprised if this will tried to be burried.
I have lost friends due to this, not because people have died of Covid but because foreign nationals, who moved to Sweden to work on some of the famous tech companies, have realized how poorly Sweden handled the pandemic. They have now moved to other countries instead.