> As an American, would you say that EU has fallen and it has become a shithole or maybe something in between?
Would love to know the social media you've been consuming that could make you believe that an American in Paris who is praising French city planning for its positive health effects could possibly believe anything close to that epithet uttered by the current American president.
Dollars to donuts the only thing standing in the way of you having a mutually meaningful conversation with anyone in this set of people is your low effort filter.
People who say stuff like this are just signaling. Same exact thing as the people that “don’t care about fashion” yet wear the same hoodie jeans uniform as everyone else.
> I'm sorry to be that guy, but can we reintroduce a good dose of skepticism in our mental diets?
Of headlines? Always. Of the content of the article? Not without you providing counterevidence.
Speaking of the content:
* BYD has seen an uptick in demand for EVs
* "At one [BYD] dealership in Manila, the capital of the Philippines, demand is so high that it booked a month’s worth of orders in just the past two weeks"
* another dealership nearby had to hire more salespeople
* small uptick from Edmunds for people researching EVs in relevant period[1]
Important-- when they say "cotton" in the article they're talking about gabardine cotton as a water repellent layer.
Neither one of these dudes is wearing cotton base layers, midlayers, socks, etc. It's too slow to evaporate moisture which can cause blisters on feet and rapid drop of body temperature drop in cool/cold weather.
If I look at the Wikipedia article for gabardine, it's supposed to be tightly woven wool, which makes more sense to me since the exterior of the fibers are supposed to be hydrophobic. Kind of confused at the existence of gabardine made of cotton which is hydrophilic... Polyester seems like it would be cheaper and more effective... Maybe in the past it was the economical choice, but cotton gabardine is still sold today. Seems like the worst material choice for gabardine of today, but maybe I'm wrong.
> The data proves that the gear of the past is capable, but it has a narrower operating window. If you stop moving in Mallory’s kit at 8,000 meters, you will freeze quickly. Modern gear buys you a safety margin if you become static.
That was the key takeaway for me as well and is very consistent with articles I've read in the past about mountaineers with gear that was adequate except when it was not - and that can make the difference between life and death.
We’ve had the ability to make water/wind-proof garments long before Gore-Tex. The crucial thing is that Gore-Tex is water vapor permeable. So it has a way better ability to shed excess heat without needing to take off a layer.
Traditional materials still have a place though. Material science has not beaten down feathers or wool yet, for the most part.
> Gore-Tex is water vapor permeable. So it has a way better ability to shed excess heat without needing to take off a layer.
It's a way to shed water: Wearing waterproof, non-breathable layers often is worse than not, because the moisture your body releases and that gets trapped soaks you from the inside as surely and rapidly as the rain. (Maybe it's a bit warmer.)
> The crucial thing is that Gore-Tex is water vapor permeable.
While dry, or intermittently wettened (so it can still shed water). Numerous independent tests show that it doesn't breathe at all, once the surface is fully wet. Also, Gore-Tex is no longer best-in-class amongst rain-shedding breathable fabrics; it simply has name recognition.
To be fair, few things do breathe once their surface wets... but wool's surface is so convoluted by the twisty, hydrophobic threads that it rarely gets fully wet on the surface.
I like this idea. But last time I tried it the customer representative on the other line told me they were sorry but they could not accommodate my request at this time.
> Corruption gets things going and in a society that has no trust it is a positive trait.
That's a red herring:
> We first demonstrate that perceiving corruption predicts lower generalized trust almost universally across individuals.
That couldn't be the case if autocracy meant a "society that has no trust." You're just speculating (or perhaps "anecdozing") while the article is attempting to measure these things.
When we witness corruption, our trust is eroded the distance between how we think that things should work, and how they do work.
In a democracy, there are official rules about how things are supposed to work. Those rules are how we expect things to work. Therefore, encountering corruption violates our expectations. And reduces our trust.
In an autocracy, nobody expects that the official rules are how things actually work. You don't say that - doing so is dangerous - but everybody knows it.
However behind the scenes, people learn to cope. And a key part of coping is a blat network. This is the classic, "I know someone who knows someone who can make this happen..." In other words, people develop personal networks of others that they trust.
This trust is not eroded by encountering official corruption - that's expected.
This trust is also not eroded by having to grease a few palms as part of getting something through the blat network. In fact it is improved. You expect to have to pay something. The whole point of a blat network is to get something otherwise unavailable, or at a better price than you otherwise could. And so these encounters with corruption increase your trust in the power and effectiveness of your personal network!
Now go watch that video. It explains that what Jeffrey Epstein was doing was running a blat network. The availability of sex crimes was social proof that created trust among elites in what Jeffrey Epstein could do. His real money came from fundraising, brokering deals, and so on. For example Leon Black paid Epstein about $158 million for financial advice, such as structuring tax shelters. (Care to bet whether Epstein's connections made the IRS less likely to question those arrangements?) Bill Gates paid him some unknown amount for brokering deals with JP Morgan, meeting Saudi princes, etc.
We, the general public, have mostly focused on the sex crimes. But we should also be concerned about the normalization of corruption as "business as usual" among elites. Because politics is like a fish - it rots from the head. Corruption at the top will not forever remain corruption at the top. If left unchecked, it will some day be corruption for all of us.
> so comments are just dangerous as they would without doubt evolve into a system of annotations -- an additional layer of communication which would then not be standardized at all and which then would grow into a wild west of nonstandard features and compatibility workarounds
IIRC Douglas Crockford explicitly stated that he saw people initially using comments for a purpose like ad hoc preprocessor directives.
Directness can be taken to imply trustworthiness, as the author seems to be doing. But it can just as easily be taken as a sign of ineptitude, technical-mindedness, boorishness, courage, immaturity, confidence, impatience, or a dozen other attributes depending on context and participants.
For that reason, reading this is like reading a blog on poker strategies from someone who is only vaguely aware there are different suits in the deck. It's of course fine to ask others to play as if all the cards are diamonds, which is what I take this as. But the way it is written does strongly imply the author has a hard time imagining what the other suits could be for, or how an awareness of them could change their perception of card games.
Honestly, it's refreshing to imagine the lack of "suits" in this sense-- e.g., spending the day with a group of people who not only all claim to couple directness with trustworthiness, but who all earnestly deliver on that claim. I also get the sense that the author is probably not "sticky" in their judgments of others-- perhaps they'd initially judge me as inconsiderate for using niceties but quickly redefine me as trustworthy once I stopped using them.
I would like to know from the author: in the real world, are you aware of the risks of directness without a priori trust or full knowledge of someone else's internal state? I mean, for every one of you, there are probably several dozen people who claim to want unadorned directness but (perhaps unwittingly) end up resenting what they ultimately take as personal, hurtful criticism. And some number of them (again, perhaps unwittingly) retaliate in one way or another. And I haven't even delved into the social hierarchy of jobs-- it's a mess out there!
Agree, and you use especially good analogies here!
As I've moved from an IC into a leadership position, I've had to learn to employ a variety of different communication styles beyond "super direct" which is what I did at the beginning — almost all of which were learned as a result of undesired side effects of directness.
As they say: Good judgment comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgment... and s/judgment/communication.
Would love to know the social media you've been consuming that could make you believe that an American in Paris who is praising French city planning for its positive health effects could possibly believe anything close to that epithet uttered by the current American president.
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