Please define functioning police force? The fact the police had to remember that turning up to burglaries is a good thing suggests otherwise

Please define takes care of sick people? The fact that ambulance response times were so slow they couldn't save cardiac arrests suggests otherwise

No offence but all those assertions sound like the UK 20+ years ago, not the one of today...

Today, about 100K GBP or EUR are still "senior" SWE salaries at a lot of non-FANG tech companies around UK and Europe.

In that time, the currencies have also cratered against the USD.

The question is, which is it? Do engineers generate so much value that they should earn hundreds of thousands or are US engineers overpaid.

Given that most the FANGs generate over 1.5M per employee I'm inclined towards the former. Europe/UK is just poor. Our markets are smaller, our dreams are smaller and we settle for lower salaries while around us everything else gets more expensive, land healthcare education and energy.

I live on a street that sees almost daily crime (smash and grabs from car windows, bike theft, delivery theft). The police usually don't even bother coming to check things out because they're so routine and the police are so busy. So it does feel a bit useless reporting them to the police, and eventually you become a bit numb to it all as crime becomes normalized.

Can that then explain why crime perception can be high while crime reports come down?

She doesn't preach or judge but I can see how faith anchors her. It gives her answers and an unyielding optimism in the face of difficulty, and I can tell you as someone who has clawed her way through a poverty most people in this world will only ever read about, she has known what difficulty can be. Faith keeps her positive and kind and generous. She finds it in herself to let go of anger and to forgive thanks to her belief in God.

So you're bang on the mark - my personal observations agree that religion helps us process emotions.

Seen through the lens of a social technology, we've replaced religion with consumerism and individualism, and social media has encouraged unchecked mammon. And so we're having to relearn everything old as new again.

Confession and grace are parts of the toolkit in therapy. Breathing techniques from yoga, wim hof and meditation are doing the rounds. The presence of song and chanting in many religions seems like a decent overlap...

Then at times of the highest reported rates of loneliness, especially amongst the young, what did religion give us - a local community.

Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of bad with religion but modern faith in places like the UK or the Nordics seems to be a net benefit IMO...

Best is to follow people who are speaking in precise technical details where you're not the audience. A bit like software engineers talking to each other: speaking in precise technical terms, assuming a reasonable amount of background knowledge. AKA professionals

Then do your own work to clue yourself up on the nomenclature and basics

There are lots of people on the internet putting out super valuable insight and/or trying to educate the unsophisticated masses. Putting out a blanket statement perpetuates this myth that finance is only for professionals, just like coding.

The culture of open source has led to high-trust collaboration in the software community. While anything involving money attracts grifters and scammers, that doesn't mean that there aren't honest and open people out there giving away gifts.

Much like you shouldn't just blindly execute random code on your machine from an untrusted individual on your computer, you shouldn't just blindly open a position on something without thinking hard about the decision for yourself.

LLMs like ChatGPT will bring this to a whole new level. I'm not insinuating that ChatGPT is conscious but I think it definitely advances discussions on what you are calling a "spirit"

[0] https://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/print_on_tuesday.html [1] https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/11533/why...

Proposing to my fiancee, attending my brother's wedding, holding my nephew for the first time, winning my first boxing match, winning life-altering over-leveraged bets on the stock market; these are all experiences that not even the greatest of great trips can hold a candle to, and none of them came with comedowns. I've come to realise that drugs are the fast-food of experiences. You get that great sugar salt and fat rush but it's not really healthy and doesn't taste as great food prepared with love sweat and thought (IMO).

PS if you really love drugs, for me the best of the best is your own adrenaline (again YMMV)

Nine prestigious schools were investigated by Clarendon (including Merchant Taylors' School and St. Paul's School) and seven subsequently reformed by the Act: Eton, Shrewsbury, Harrow, Winchester, Rugby, Westminster, and Charterhouse.

Confusingly, "Public School" refers to the most elite (and very exclusive) schools in the UK

fair - I missed that context when reading the immediate response replying to.

Thanks for sharing your anecdata - the industry is definitely in need of regulation something I've long believed. The ubiquity and ease of access is probably the most dangerous bit. It's astounding that mobile games were able to copy/hire all the knowledge acquired in building slot machines to create an industry that doesn't even have to pay out..!

So speaking from experience: there's probably a finite sum you can spend on Clash Royale. I found the beginning highly addictive and I did spend hundreds when I probably shouldn't have, but the acceleration/frustration and advantage you can buy is very quickly eroded by skill. Once you have a maxed deck, it's pretty hard to buy victories and any new card might buy you some wins but will quickly get nerfed, and players better than you will still beat you (and matchmaking will converge you onto that 49% win rate).

I doubt I'm a typical player but at this stage I've probably extracted more value (by time) from clash than they've extracted from me - even if I spent 2k (a very very generous estimate), amortised over 5-6 years of play, that's not a lot of money (30 a month which is a AAA game every other month, less than a coffee a day) and has definitely given me more than that in enjoyment. And at this point my expenditure has completely plateaued.

Can I see people staying in that honeymoon phase moving from game to game? Yes maybe - I suppose by law of large numbers it's more likely than not Clash Royale peaked at like 100M players so 1k having issues is believable.

I'm all for regulation in this space (it's pretty crazy that it's not that regulated) but without data, my own personal experience feels like this is not nearly as dangerous as gambling or alcohol/drugs. The game milks you of money but doesn't create those boom-bust cycles that the traditional vices do

Getting addicted to an F2P game and losing your time, while sad, is not within the scope of this discussion

I could see <18s getting into trouble but are there adults legit bankrupting themselves from paid-for cosmetics?

How common is the pattern for paid-for lootbox cosmetics (as compared to buy-it-now) cosmetics? Wouldn't say I'm particularly deep in either the RL/Fortnite ecosystem..!

If you're a bored prince with billions of liquid cash and even more billions of yielding assets, do you really care about 10-20k of weekly outlays?

Or reduce the scale, if you have 100k annual salary, do you miss that $3 a day you spend on coffee or $5 a week you spend on mobile gaming? ... or $15.99 a month you spend on Netflix?

Everyone has a thing and a threshold they are comfortable spending on. Some people want 4 wheels that will take them from A to B and other people are willing to spend $500 a month to get a Tesla.

We focus on digital goods because they have a perceived cost of zero to manufacture and are transient (one day the game will no longer work) but fail to spot that the value we heap on many material goods are social and most of us do not buy goods for life (hence why r/BuyItForLife is a subculture rather than conventional wisdom)