Of course they wouldn't, owning and operating a plane is -incredibly- inconvenient. That's what we are discussing, tradeoffs of convenience and discomfort, you can't just completely ignore one reality to criticise the other (admiting some hypocrisy here since that ideal train system mentioned earlier only exists in a few cities).
Is this some culture or region or climate related thing? I’ve never heard of BO brought up as a reason to avoid public transport or flying commercial in northern parts of Europe. Nor have I experienced any olfactory disturbance, apart from the occasional young man or woman going a tad overboard with perfume on the weekends.
Should we restructure society so that having a private airplane is easier and cheaper, but if you don't have one you'll have serious trouble in daily life?
I don't know about a full on conspiracy, but it's no secret that in the US they put a lot of additional sugar into products you wouldn't think had them.
Are you sure the difference didn't mostly come down to being a tourist in temporary accommodation vs having access to a familiar grocery store and your home kitchen?
In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance. That tasted disgustingly.
You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat. Those sauces are also disgusting. Good beef meat (and in the USA there’s very good meat), needs only salt and maybe a bit of pepper. Not those weird sugary sauces they put in the USA.
Seriously, for someone from Europe, some food in the USA is just disgusting (and it’s not due the quality of the ingredients, as those are usually very good) but due to the stuff they add on top.
All of the things you described are available, that's true, but any major supermarket, even in rural areas, will have plenty of healthier options available as well.
Take bread for example. Sure there will be some crappy sliced white bread on the shelf. But there will also be organic sprouted 7-grain high fiber next to it. In fact, there will probably be more healthy varieties available than just about any other country.
The options are there, but it can be exhausting to actually find them.
There are far too many products that try to position themselves as "healthy", but are closer to the rest of the crap on the shelves than actual "healthy" food. Even more frustrating is the insane amount of food now using sugar replacements to masquerade as a healthy option.
I personally, find it exhausting to shop at new stores because it can take looking at 2 to 5 items to find one that's actually made healthy.
French food having sugary sauces has nothing to do with American food having too much sugar though, and I'd wager 99% of the US has never heard of steak au poivre. We may know of pepper steak, but that doesn't always have sauce.
> In Europe you don’t expect your bread to have added sugar, for instance.
Were you eating sweet bread meant for coffee or desserts and thinking it was for making a sandwich? Most breads use just enough sugar to rise the yeast.
> You also don’t normally expect sweeteners in your meat.
Were you eating barbecue, where the sauce is whole point? There is plenty of unsauced meat in the US. Any steakhouse will give you as much meat as you want without any sauce unless you pour it on yourself.
> America hides sugar in everything. Plain old white sandwich bread often has loads of added sugar.
It's not hidden, it's on the label, and expected. I just don't buy garbage bread.
> Sugar isn’t necessary for bread making. Yeast can break down the starch. That’s what it evolved to do. Flour, water, yeast, salt, done.
That usually means that malt is added to the flour (most bread flour). You can get breads without added sugar or malt, but you're going to have to go to a bakery that makes their own dough and buys flour without additives, which is getting rarer and rarer.
Every day another city or village in 4 different states. I won't go into everything I saw or noticed while staying there. HN doesn't like criticism of the US.
I should have worded that better, I meant no UPX-style end-to-end compression like the OPs project used. NES games had to be much more judicious than that since there wasn't nearly enough RAM to decompress everything at once.
That's not a very compelling counterexample, when you consider how often countries with governments force other countries with government to do as they want, often with nothing but economic or soft power.
Buying an entire cart full of groceries that will last for weeks is a somewhat American cultural thing. I'm not saying that I've never seen it, but the norm where I live in Europe is to have one of those hand-held baskets and getting enough for 2-3 days tops.
I was shocked to discover how incredibly poorly IndexedDB works. I always thought it would be fast and snappy if a bit alien. But nope, it's incredibly bad!
Despite being a native feature to the browser it's incredibly slow, and the way it works in terms of fetching records based on non-primary keys forces you to either load your entire dataset into RAM at once or iterate though it record-by-record in a slow callback. Something as trivial as 10k records can bring your webapp to a crawl.
I've built some pretty intensive stuff in indexeddb and it was the only thing I've ever done, using native browser features, that I could get to consistently crash the browsers I tested it on (granted, this was many years ago). On top of that, the API is so ugly. I cannot believe indexeddb won over websql (when every browser ever already embeds sqlite). What a shame.
Because it would be stolen by the government. Ask people in post-Soviet countries about how Soviet governments were stealing money from their bank accounts, from all citizens collectively. No one believed in money under socialism in the USSR. The government could always pull a funny trick called "and now... it's gone". Be happy, comrade, that only your money is gone, you could also be in prison.
USSR operated under state capitalism, nothing like what any of the communists or socialists ever imagined. But I guess that is what USSR made socialism mean as a result.
BTW: Most of the world lives under state capitalism, not capitalism, not socialism, not any other form of economic system. The state has an unrestricted claim to any and all of your wealth.
Emulators are wonderful, I got into assembly for the 6502 processor used in the NES (Nintendo Entertainment System) and it's been an absolute blast, there is something so inherently satisfying and almost zen-like in it.
A big difference is that you can't put a robot in jail. Even though the person driving the car is usually not harmed by hitting somebody on foot, it's still a life-or-death level situation, they might be looking at multiple years in prison, a large portion of their life gone.
The same even stakes are not there with robots killing humans. For one side it's a life-or-death situation, while for the other side it's profit margins and numbers. Companies are usually very happy to increase yearly profit for something as minor as a decimal percentage rise in human deaths spread across society, that's not even controversial.
Heck, not only can you not put a robot in jail, you can't even stop it from driving the next day as if nothing happened because it's duplicate running the exact same software and hardware is all over society.
I still think robot cars is a good thing though, because they will have a lot less accidents than us humans who love to drink and drive, or speed for no good reason. Still, it will raise some big important questions.
At least in most parts of the US, hitting and killing a pedestrian does not usually result in jail time for the driver - unless the driver was driving under the influence or was driving recklessly. Most times their license isn't even taken away.
We have put CEOs in prison in the past. We could do so again. If a company really operates with blatant disregard for safety we should. Waymo's CEO makes it clear that she thinks their cars are better than normal humans, so long as that is really the case and she isn't ignoring issues she shouldn't go to prison for deaths their cars cost, but it is (or should be) an option if the company isn't careful.
The point of failure is probably not the CEO, though. They are rarely technical people directly supervising the taxis. If it can be proven that management skimped on quality, then, by all means, jail them. Otherwise, it becomes the fault of the people monitoring the systems.
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