It's really fun: I read so many propaganda on Lisp here that by now we should all be coding in it. Don't we get perhaps weekly posts like this?
But ... somehow almost everyone simply ignores this propaganda --- that's actually the way we ought to handle propaganda! Funny that it works with Lisp, but not with many political topics where it can be shown that propaganda really works.
My experience with Lisp is somewhat special-cornered. I only know Emacs-Lisp, and that not great. And for me, Lisp an out, outdated and confusing thing.
I don't know ANY other programming language that elected assembler mnemonics to be "high"-level expression: car and cdr.
While I love Emacs, they claim all the time that is has 100% discovery through build in doc. But that is only 70% true. It doesn't exist in Lisp like it does in other languages. For example, I have an association list. Now, what functions exist that uses them? I can't use the equivalent for (dir alist), alist.dir(), or use some LSP for that. I can't even look in the symbols, because operators are written like assoc or assq with not logic. And then there are either prefixes to them (rassoc) or postfixes (assoc-string).
That there is no namespace is soooo 1970. I mean, even Turbo-Pascal had namespaces.
Typechecking is nonexistant.
At least we have byte-compiling.
And note that I don't croak about the parenthesis. While I find it mildy weird that I as a human program in almost-AST, Emacs has superp support for the parenthesis. So people croaking about them just had never had a good editor IMHO.
Now, one can argue that Emacs Lisp != Common Lisp. But these propaganda articles don't tend to promote one specific Lisp, they only talk in generals. So I can apply this general principle and compare it to the tiny corner of these awful language family.
Fun fact 1: Switzerland (a major provider of GPS chips via u-blox) never signed or ratified CoCom. But they still followed it mostly, for fear of retaliation. They even had an allowance of "sell list 1 goods for up to 35 million Schweizer Franken" that they never reached, they only went up to 8 million Schweizer Franken. They however are a member of Wassenaar.
Fun fact 2: Russia is a member of Wassenaar. But I guess they now give a shit on it and give to North-Korea whatever NK wants, for all of these nice North Korean cannon fodder soldiers.
Yea, like the water in San Diego. Water tastes bad in plenty of USA. Not only due to clornination.
In in the fracking counties it isn't even drinkable.
Also note that I actually used the term "western europe" in my post. I was in UK, Belgium, Netherlands, France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Czech, Romania, Hungary, Poland ... and everywhere was tap water totally drinkable. In Mallorca (Spain) it didn't taste that nice, but it was drinkable. Germans travel a lot, and when you book a travel, you get some information about your host country. And never ever did I read "don't trink the tap water".
So of all places I've been, "tastes bad" only was once true. "Can't drink" was never true. Your "plenty if parts" is definitely hallucinated.
However, I've not been in many places in south-east and east europe, like not in Albania, Moldavia, Slowenia, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, the Baltics, Belarussia, Slowakia, Ukraina, Russia etc etc etc. So I have no idea on how their water is.
That is because EU is everything ... but not something homogenous entity. Living in Austria is very different to living in Spain, is different to living in Greece.
There are countries in EU where it is almost impossible to get out of public healthcare, for example. And then some like yours, where this seems to be quite common.
But I guess "rent is higher than minimum wage" isn't true for all of Spain. Spain is extremely centralized, everything is in Madrid. But if you somehow can get away with living in the middle of nowhere, then I don't expect rent to be higher than minimum wage.
These extremely expensive metropoles exist all over Europe (London, Prague, München, Madrid, Paris, ...) but also in the USA (New York, and probably 40 others).
That migth be true in some cases, but there are glaring cases there this isn't the case.
Look at the conflict on clorinated chickens between USA and EU. The USA insists on not-so-clean production environments and to get rid of the bacteria with clorine. While the EU insists on a clean-from-the-get-go approach, where clorination isn't necessary.
(Fun fact: "the customer is always rigth / drives the market" isn't applied here. The USA farmers want to export their chicken to the EU, but never ever did they consider to produce them according to what the EU standards are and what the european customers want: chicken without a clorine taste).
Or your eggs: you wash them for no real reason, That removes the protection against bacteria from the eggshell, and then you need to have a complete fridge chain towards the customer. Whereas in europe eggs aren't washed, keep their egg shell protection and don't really need to be put into the fridge. One could argue that here indeed the USA has "more strict controls" by requiring the washing phase. But this is faux security, as it worsens the product, mandating a more special handling of it.
However, things are really complex to compare. For some bacterias, e.g. Listeria monocytogenes, the US is indeed stricter (zero tolerance). Whereas the US has some "100 colony-forming units per gram". However, what is better? We know that the human body actually needs some amount of bacteria, lest our immune system isn't trained or turnes against ourselves. So it might be that a little exposition is actually tolerable --- and given that europeans have a higher live expectation than US-americans, that might actually be true.
Also the measurements is totally different. In the USA, they measure usually with a simple n=5 method, whereas europe has a n, c, m, M system based on ISO standards. That also takes in process hygiene.
"Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points" is mandatory in EU for all food, in the USA only for some (seafood, juice, meat, and poultry). So here the EU has a leg, albeit this isn't strictly bacteria related. However it relates to toxic metabolism products of bacteria and fungi.
And a fun fact: while many things in the USA differ from state to state, food hygiene in the USA doesn't. Their FDA and USDA work throughout the USA.
In the EU there is no central one for food. We have some FDA equivalent, but that is more for drugs & vaccines, not for food. And I'm not aware of something like the USDA at EU level. Instead it is usual that a EU regulation that the members agreed upon is then implemented in all member states ... and often slightly different. So any US legislation like the GPDR (and all others) have counterparts in national rights. And e.g. the german version might be slightly different to the estonian one. Thats for data protection as well as for food surveillance.
That being out of the way: drinkable water isn't really an achievement, we have it in all of western europe. Maybe even in all of europe. However, in the USA you have these places there the water is heavily poluted due to fracking. That is bad in itself. But even worse is that the political / judicial system in the USA is unable to fix this.
Being a country for 250 years is ... neither good nor bad in itself. And if you look at ancient egypt that had 4 digits here, then it is pathetic to bring this up. But also in the western world 250 years aren't that much.
Many wars ... yeah, the USA started and/or participated in many wars. More than european countries did during your lifetime. Out of my mind: Korea, Vietnam, Lebanon, Panama, Grenada, Bosnia+Herzegovina, Irak, Irak, Afghanistan, Iran, Libya. And don't forget undeclared wars like lots of "Wedding seeking hellfire missiles" in Yemen or Somalia.
Oh, and that was just a selection. Look up Wikipedia on the full list of US wars and incidents. You'll be mind-blown how militaristic / violent they are.
And then don't forget all the coups it did in south america, I think more than 20 incidents. Or the awful Nicaraguan Contra thingy, where the USA paid death squadrons to terrorize just normal people, not just communists.
Depending on how old are you, all of the above happened during your lifetime.
Ah, and did we forget in these 250 years not about their civil war, about the enslavement of millions of people? Or of the genocide on natives? Never heard of the trail of tears perhaps?
No way the USA has a even a tiny bit more of morality on their side as other countries.
First, the EU parliament isn't a "fake" parliament. You just claimed this, without any reasoning, so I'm free to just claim the opposite. The members of this parliament are freely elected and they can decide out on their own whim, without consulting the executive. So really they are one of the 3 legs, the legislative.
However, the "EU is a fake democracy" is maybe correct.
The thing is that one should never confuse the EU with some sovereign country, like the Unites States of America. Or with a federal state like the Federal Republic of Germany. The origins of the EU aren't based in some idea of nationality. They are based in trade: how to make trade easier, how to create a common market. It's much more similar to the "Hanse" than than to a modern national state.
And as such, comparing the EU with a national state is futile.
It's actually astounding that this trade club got so many democratic institutions, like the EU parliament or the EU court of justice. A lot of other trade agreements only have fully undemocratic arbitration tribunals.
Also, "the EU cares about" is silly. The EU is a body of many members. The member states think not in unions (just think of "Visegrad members"). This list here isn't even complete:
- Council of the European Union headed by Antonia Costa
- EU Commission headed by Ursula von der Leyen
- EU Parliament headed by Roberta Metsola
- European Central Bank headed by Christine Lagarde
- European Court of Auditors headed by Tony Murphy
- Court of Justice headed by ... no idea
So one part can "care" about a thing, while another part does not. One must have lived under a rock to not know how e.g. the Commission often wanted some Orwell-1984 laws, again and again, and the EU parliament or the EU court of justice dismissed them. So no, the EU isn't a uniform body. And any claim in that direction is therefore inherently false.
Well, it's a (usually believed for nationality reasons) myth that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone.
In reality, it was the German "Philipp Reis" who invented it. In Friedrichsdorf he made the first prototype and also invented the special (coal based) contact microphone used in phones ~ 1990. He demoed the prototype in 1861 before the physical society in Frankfurt/Main.
Later on he sold phones in quite low quantity, usually to experimenters. Examples of the phones made it as far as to Russia or Scotland. Bell, who was too from Scotland, learned about Reis' telephone in Edinburgh in 1862.
Bell reverse-engineered it, improved it, and created a successful business around it. And that's not something shabby...
... but he definitely didn't invent it. Not even the name. "Telephon" was the name that Philipp Reis already used.
Oh, and another thing: that only 19.6% "already" have one isn't that much concerning. It is actually quite common that people do a job education (or 2nd job education) at an older age.
Examples: you learnt to a nurse (which isn't college here), but the stress is too much. So at age 30 you learn something else, e.g. carpentry or backoffice things.
So that someone that learned soccer learns something else, e.g. insurance agent, at age 30 would be totally normal and socially acceptable over here.
The most important factor however is that many EU countries don't have a US-style college system. E.g. in Germany we have a very different schooling system and a very different job education system. Even the university system is quite a bit different to the US-style.
Some jobs (e.g. bookkeeper) here are apprenticeships where in the US you'd go to some community college.
So there might be european soccer players around that don't have a "college" but still have learned a job from the basics.
That said: a german source says that only 19.6% of the soccer stars (Bundesliga) have learned a common job.
Nah, I'd say that common "americans" (really: US citizens) are perhaps a bit on the dumber site. Not only confuse they constantly a continent (America) with a country (USA), they also have no idea about history. Or logics. You wrote "ALL of tech" ... no lets check.
Cars - Germany (Gottlieb Daimler, but he didn't patent it), Germany (Carl Benz which made the first patent).
Motorbikes - Germany (Gottlieb Daimler)
Train - invented in Germany
Radio transmission - UK (James Clark Maxwell described them theoretically), Germany (Heinrich Hertz created/used them first in experiments)
X-Ray - Germany (Gustav Röntgen)
Telephone - Germany (Philipp Reis, your Bell bought examples and reverse engineered them)
Bookpress with movable letters - Germany (Johannes Gensfleisch a.k.a. Gutenberg)
Lightbulb - Germany (Heinrich Göbel)
Periodic system of elements - Russia (Dimitri Mendelejew) and Germany (Justus Lothar Meyer)
Dynamo / Generator - Germany (Werner von Siemens)
Vaccination - UK (Edward Jenner)
Gliding plane - Germany (Otto Lilienthal)
Pain killer - Germany (Felix Hoffmann, Aspirin)
Relativity theory, Quantum theory - Albert Einstein, Planck,
TV - Germany (Manfred von Ardenne)
Cathod ray tube in TVs - Germany (Conrad Röntgen experimentally, Ferdinand Braun with horizontal and vertical directivity of the ray)
Computer - France (Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace) for mechanical ones and Germany (Konrad Zuse) for electric ones
Atomic fissure, used in plants and bombs - Germany (Otto Hahn)
Chip cards - Germany (Jürgen Dethloff, Helmut Gröttrup)
MP3 music compression - Germany (Fraunhofer Institut)
Electricity - actually already in ancient greek they used electrostatic charging of amber. And one century before Christ they had actual batteries in Bagdad! But then a plethorary of european scientists brought the work forward: UK (William Gilbert, Francis Hauksbee, Joseph Priestley, Henry Cavendish, Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday), Germany (Otto von Guericke, Ewald Jürgen Georg von Kleist, Georg Simon Ohm, Carl Friedrich Gauß), Italy (Luigi Galvani, Allesandro Volta), France (Charles du Fay, Charles Augustin de Coulomb, André-Marie Ampère), Netherlands (Pieter van Musschenbroek), Denmark (Hans Christian Ørsted).
I actually terminate this electricity list here. I could go on and on.
Also note that physical units named after their discoverer indicate some kind of importance of the relevant invention. So we have e.g. Volt, Ampere, Coulomb, Farad, Gauss, Watt, Ørsted, Tesla, Weber as units. None of them is based on USA's academia.
If we look at unit names outside of electricity we also find outdated ones like Röntgen or Curie. And still used ones like Plack constant, Newton, Pascal, Kelvin, Becquerel, Gray, Sievert. So where are the USA american ones if "all" of technology is supposed to stem from their academia?
IF we want to trace the roots, then perhaps we need to go back to antique greek philisophers. Because western academia itself traces itself there. But then again ... something like that existed also in ancient India and maybe China.
BTW, you cannot compare a country ("USA") with a whole continent ("Europe"). The countries in europe aren't all in EU or EEC and are much, MUCH more different than US' states are.
"the environment in the U.S." ... and yet you have abysmal drinking water quality in some areas. A friend of mine from Florida was astonished that you can drink tap water in all of Germany. We can all see how bad USA is with it's environment if we link hydraulic fracking to tap water quality.
Many people over here think that a good amount of US americans are so dumb because of lead poisoning.
Air quality: currently https://waqi.info/de/#/c/5.69/7.058/2.8z doesn't indicate that the USA is vastly better. Yes, there are green areas ... but these are areas devoid of people. Europa has this in Scandinavia. In areas where population and industry density is high the USA isn't that good either.
"beautiful places" I grant you that, but that has every region on earth. You also have many, many more awful places to visit. The last two times I was in the USA locals warned me about "no go" areas. That doesn't exist in Germany, for example.
"people are friendly" no, they aren't. You have the highest crime rate in the developed world. People robbing or mugging me aren't friendly. That "no go" areas even exist is also not a sign of friendly. Your immigration officers are exceptional rude and unfriendly --- virtually the first experience a tourist travelling the USA has with their "friendlyness". And your ICE is even more rude: a swiss journalist from NZZ was e.g. detained for about 2 weeks. Instead of just denied entry and put into the next airplane heading to back Zürich. And the detainment was in one single room with about 30 other illegally-jailed inmates with zero privacy. Even the loo was visible for all. That's US friendlyness ...
Even not rutal... the last time I was in TX I heard on local radio that some whites put a colored man with chains on behind an oversized US car and drove him to dead. And if you are an outlier, e.g. you are from a minitory, or LGBTQ or whatever, then you have a hard time in the friendly rural-ness. Many people leave the ruralness towards towns to gain freedom.
If you have a collection of children tales from the Grimm brothers... then this is already watered down.
These brothers traveled in Towns and collected the tales that the adult told to each other, e.g. when spinning wool or whatever boring but necessary winter job they had. They called their first collection "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" (children and house tales). The children aimed ones where ... more or less ... okay. Being on the cruel site, of course. But the ones not aimed children could be quite explicit or sexy-hexy --- at least for the times. Small kids probably didn't get most things.
The german wikipedia e.g. writes "Die Texte wurden von Auflage zu Auflage weiter überarbeitet, teilweise „verniedlicht“ und mit christlicher Moral unterfüttert. " which I translate as: the texts were edited from edition to edition, belittled/diminished and bolstered with christian morality" --- the latter probably because most of the editorial work happened in Kassel, which at the time was hugenotic evangelical.
Since the Grimms played a remarkable role in the german language, there is LOTS of academic literate on then, their german words dictionary, their tales collection. So you dive as deep into it as you want.
In Germany it's often not IN cities, but around. Example for Frankfurt:
The's a metro ("S-Bahn") going north up to Friedberg/Hessen. Friedberg is the capital of the country. But there's no free "Park & Ride" there. Two stations towards Frankfurt you are in village called Wöllstadt. And there you have a free Park & Ride. More south some other village, no P&R. But then again in Bad Vilbel you have one.
Is however P&R + public tansport the fastest way to Frankfurt? That depends.
First, the Wöllstadt P&R isn't easily accessible from the Autobahn, or not even from the B3, which goes around Wöllstadt. And even when it went through it some years ago, it was several turn-left turn-rights through small streets.
And then the S6 only drives every 30 minutes to Frankfurt. It's supposed to change once they double the train tracks, but that will change. On top of it: metro lines don't have precedence, the quick trains like ICE have. So the S-Bahn more often than not waits until a faster train passes.
If it isn't between 7-9 in the morning, you're actually faster by car in Frankfurt than by public transport ... So the P&R is quite helpful for people living in the neighboring villages: they go by car to Wöllstadt, park there for free, commute to Frankfurt by metro. And that traffic jam free ... but not necessarily fast. And since parking in Frankfurt usually comes with a price tag, it's also a bit cheaper.
Yes, and they are higher due to 2 reasons. And both seem to work.
Number 1 reason is that power was quite highly taxed, since it is directly linked with pollution and CO2. All powers, but that also means electrical power. The effect is, that european cars are smaller and use less. And also european houses are better insulated. You can measure this, the typical german 4 person household uses less than 50% of the electric power of a 4 person US household. Before COVID I even saw a statistics that this less usage compansated the higher electricity prices, so both norm-households payed the same for electricity. Unsure if that is still true post-COVID.
The other reason is that also a good amount of money is directly invested into the grid, to make it more resilient. And you can also measure that. If you lookup the SAIDI (system average interuption duraction index) of e.g. USA and compare it to Germany, you immediately see why over there uninteruptible power supplies are hardly used except in data centers. SAIDI Germany 12.2 minutes per customer per year, USA 125.7 minutes per customer per year. That's a whopping 10x worse. Not just as number, but also for the industry.
And I heard that the SAIDI in Texas is even worse than the US average.
Well, some of the non-centralized social media is quite left-wing. If someone favours the SED or other parts of the ex-GDR regime (like FDGB etc) then it's IMHO already bordering on left extremisms. After all these guys enslaved a hughe population to make people do their biddings. If that is not extreme, I can't say.
That said, if you insisted that some "Germany's Independence Day" existed, then it's perhaps that what got you banned. Germany was never really a colony. Not of UK, not of Spain or Portugal, or not in newer times of Russia. Many countries that were a colony of them, or just annexxed, have an independence day. Germany doesn't --- the last time it was partially colonized, in roman times, there was no Germany.
Spotted the US-american assuming their law system is used world-wide.
If over here a lady buys a hot coffee in a McDrive, drives away, spills the hot coffee on their legs and makes a car accident due to this ... she won't be able to sue the McDrive. There's no fine-print or "Coffee is hot, you dumb person" writing needed anywhere. She could be lucky if she doesn't get fined for endangering others by her stupid actions.
So, if we have a power outage here, the courts don't suddenly get busy. Because there simply no one is suing.
Fun fact: despite this bad power outage, the power grid systems in Europe are still better (even way better) than in the US. There is a comparable statistics measure called "SAIDI" --- system average interuption duration index. And duration wise, per custom and year, the US power grids are worse than over here than in most of West Europe: (US SAIDI 2020: 1.3 hours, German SAIDI 2020: 0.3 hours). That's a factor of more than 4 on the worse-iness of US power grid!
That could be an indicator that suing at the tiniest chance isn't helpful macro-ecnomical. Or that a general suing culture (with legalese trying to protect one from the economic risks) aren't actually helping improving things in the general sense, although they reduce the risk of getting bankrupt. But society-wise, a sue culture is most probably a negative: you spend energy/time/money on things that aren't necessary in saner law systems.
You are just assuming that the whole readership of Hacker News are US-citizens.
I, for example, are from an EU country. So "there are 450,000,000 of us" if I'd had a similar attitude.