That list is of the change in moving to cashless since Covid. Sweden is low in the list because it’s been cashless for such a long time already. Those places aren’t more cashless than Sweden. They are the ones that are moving towards cashlessness most dramatically in recent years.

When my coffee shop in Sodermalm’s card readers weren’t working they just gave me free coffee over taking cash. Cash in Sweden is a burden. Banks don’t want it and most won’t accept it.

I also think the days of cash being anonymous have passed. With cameras everywhere and the trivial ease with which numbers can be recorded and shared a government could probably trace the path of a bank note if it wanted to.

Hence tens of launches to make the moon and zero payload to orbit in a dozen flights.

This forum is full of fanboys but their arguments don’t hold up to reality. Saturn 5 had men on the mock. This much time and this many rockets in. Starship has launched a dozen times for $15B - over a billion per launch - and it hasn’t made orbit.

Say what you want about SLS, it works.

Musk is a conman and Starship is a failure. Like the F-35 supposed libertarians and conservatives will happily throw money at it until it achieves its targets, after multiple redesigns, and then claim success as if the neigh-sayers weren’t right all along.

Woodpecker are a better choice. Expensive but high quality.

Mafell and Festool get a ton of hate from people angry at the prices but they are totally worth it if you know. Feel and precision matter. Balance matters. “Design is how it works” applies here. You can’t tell how a tool is to use off a spec sheet, and numbers for things like torque are very easy to manipulate (what’s the load!)

Good power tools are a joy. They change what you think is possible.

Purchasing power and income are meaningless without accounting for what needs to be bought.

Americans can make high incomes for decades only to be bank d by medical debt. Having to own a car per household member can add thousands to monthly outgoings and is common in many places. Even schooling, which should be free, isn’t when sports cost thousands per year and parents are required to furnish their kids classrooms with books, pens and paper.

I am a US/European dual citizen. American wealth is an illusion. Average Northern Europeans are much better off in real terms.

Burning $88k of carbon to run the world’s slowest payment network and produce a tiny corpus of data is stratospherically dumb.

The technological equivalent of raising a forest to produce a toothpick.

Just because “it works” (which is arguable in itself) doesn’t mean it isn’t stupid.

It’s easier for them to believe in the fantasy superiority of a rocket which hasn’t achieved orbit than the real achievements of NASA and other space agencies.

It’s supercharged by a desire to politicize science to defend their sexist and white supremacist worldview. It pains them to see people they dismiss achieving great things. There are no able minorities. Just unfairness. A fair world to them is white men on top, everyone else below.

What’s funny is how different they are from the people they idolize. Just as SS officers would be disgusted by your average ICE recruit, you average NASA engineer from Apollo would have seen through Musk in an instant.

A rocket that requires tens of fueling trips to make a single moon run would be an anathema to them and they would call it out of the bad engineering it is.

There is so much anger that reality is stronger than prejudice and whatever they say and do women, brown and disabled people will be increasingly prominent, powerful and influential whatever they wish the case was.

There are two types of vaccine be coders. Those who review the code generated and those who don’t.

Either because they don’t understand code at all, or because they don’t have time and don’t care.

Code quality is only one factor. Naive vibe coders, who don’t code otherwise, rate performance based on output alone.

It was in terrible shape firstly. The new round of fixes has just been completed so it would be good to see it again before it resumes crumbling (those cantilevers have been drooping from day 1 and were 4 inches off by 1955, when I saw it there were seismic sensors all over).

Secondly as a tall person, 6’4”, the ceiling heights are just uncomfortable. Wright sized things for himself and he was a little man. For me I had the feeling I needed to duck constantly and the sense of unease destroys the other positive aspects of the house. A real shame.

Musk is easy to laugh at and to criticize. Problematic encompasses his lying, pettiness, racism, sexual weirdness, ego and fraud as well as anything. Regardless of the proportions of specific traits, as a whole, he’s a problematic individual. That’s perfectly cromulent.

Every time this is mentioned the comments fill with naval fans pointing out that in fact carrier groups are invulnerable due to layered defenses and air support.

Whenever vulnerabilities are demonstrated, most famously by Sweden's cheap, quiet, diesel electric subs ability to sink carriers during war games so effectively the US begged to borrow one for training, the fans just return to their talking points.

YouTube has a library of videos like this.

Yet reality bites. The truth is the most aggressive administration in living memory is afraid to sail into troubled waters for fear of losing materiel.

The age of carriers is over. Dinosaurs in an age of mammals.

People are confused by this because generally, they see the options as full height window or conventional window. Everyone knows that more light is better. But the ideal is either a full height window, which is blocked at the bottom by seating or a sofa or plants or something, or a window that comes within 30cm or so of the floor. It also means that people outside on the ground have a much more obscured view in and people in the room can continue their visibility by moving back-and-forth very easily.

There are very recent images from the current war of Israel, Israeli mothers commenting on the fact that their children schools have been taken over by the IDF. She walks past the playground and it’s full IDF trucks.

This is in a country that claims it’s legitimate to strike schools and hospitals because they’re being used as cover for the military. Yet what would the response be if Iran was to target is ready children?

In Israel, the double standard doesn’t exist because they see the people they’re fighting as less than fully human. The current administration in the US is moving America towards holding the same view because it’s being led by foreign policy experts, who are uniformly staunch Zionists, with a “Hebrew school“ level of understanding of the regions history.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47543849

Points: 2

# Comments: 0