No half-baked products? Have you ever tried using the translation feature in the book app? That is the most infuriating, dumb piece of software I have seen in a long time.
I went jogging in Brooklyn (Williamsburg) and stepped on a huge rat. Poor dude was just having breakfast in one of the garbage heaps on the sidewalk. Never experienced that in Europe before.
WallStreetMillenial on Youtube just had a nice explanation why comparing risk for self driving cars and human drivers is not that simple. At least for Tesla, the answer is "hell no".
To add another source, the Atlantic had a piece on birthrates in South Korea last March: https://archive.li/Fm93M
Quoting from the article:
> There are a lot of reasons people decide not to have a baby. Young Koreans cite as obstacles the high cost of housing in greater Seoul (home to roughly half the country’s 52 million citizens), the expense of raising a child in a hypercompetitive academic culture, and grueling workplace norms that are inhospitable to family life, especially for women, who are still expected to do the bulk of housework and child care. But these explanations miss a more basic dynamic: the deterioration in relations between women and men—what the Korean media call a “gender war.”
Unfortunately, there seems to be little commonality in how men and women see the issue. Hard to imagine any solution at all.
"Another economic factor in the falling birthrate is the rising price of real estate and a resulting increase in unmarried or late-marrying people. The tradition in Korea is for men to prepare a family home before marrying, and the rising cost of housing in recent years has thereby triggered a decline in marriage rates."
> anyone can learn to fix them at home with very few tools
Everytime I read comments like this I feel dumb. I'm fixing my own bikes, but it takes a lot of time and quite a few tools. Just learning how to properly adjust the derailleur took me quite a few hours. Youtube university forgot to mention that Shimano GRX 400 front derailleur has intermediate gears.
Many bike parts are not really standardized. It seems almost impossible to know in advance whether some part fits on my bike, I mostly have to try. Also, manufacturers keep changing how certain things work, and then Youtube university may be misleading because they show a previous generation.
Parking where you want can be a problem. You won't have issues if you use a parking garage or park in the outskirts and then use public transportation.
If I understand your hypothesis correctly, the obvious counterexample is German. Germany had a very weak central authority for most of its history, a steady influx of non-native speakers, and still maintained its complexity.
In Finland, ethnicity is fairly homogenous, and so is culture and language. The only exceptions are the Sami people (10,000 in Finland) and Finns of historically Swedish ethnicity. So in that sense, the white people of Finland are very homogenous.
I strongly believe that US-based categories of ethnicity do not work well in European contexts. We also try to avoide the term "race", that has a bit of historical baggage over here.
But do "we" really ignore the tacit knowledge? I think you are wrong that "scientific literature" pretends those things.
The issue of "context of discovery" vs "context of justification" is a hundred years old. And modern accounts of measurement and modeling make it quite clear that there is much more going on than simply writing down numbers. Theories/hypotheses can come from anywhere, I don't think that is even disputed.
However, when doing science, maths, engineering, the question is often what people are even saying, and what counts as evidence that something works. You cannnot do this without abstractions, and at some point we'll have to agree what those abstractions are. Should we leave it to individual experience if LK-99 is a superconductor?
You don't need formal maths training to raise a barn or build a kayak because there is brutal feedback if you are wrong. You'll need maths training to learn how to be right about things that will not give you any feedback.
Deep down the brain is 100% discrete: Neurons are either firing or not. To me, the brain's biggest mistery is how it goes from this to doing all the analogue stuff, and ends up with our capacity to deal with symbols.
Imagine two scientists, Bob and Alice. Bob has spent the last 5 years examining a theory thoroughly. Now he can explain down to the last detail why the theory does not hold water, and why generations of researchers have been wrong about the issue. Unfortunately, he cannot offer an alternative, and nobody else can follow his long winded arguments anyway.
Meanwhile, Alice has spent the last 5 years making the best possible use of the flawed theory, and published a lot of original research. Sure, many of her publications are rubbish, but a few contain interesting results. Contrary to Bob, Alice can show actual results and has publications.
Who do you believe will remain in academia? And, according to public perception, will seem more like an actual scientist?