If they had just worn out, that's fine, but they weren't at all. I only use them maybe 5-10 times per year, so the sole still had tons of life in it. The problem is that they didn't sew the sole onto the boot upper and the glue they used just lets go after a while.
I don't think that the soles should just fall off your boots one day while you're hiking, so no, I was not completely satisfied and I would like them to glue the soles back on for me.
If you're not lucky enough to be among the privileged, moving to Europe is impossible unless you have inherited citizenship (which is itself another kind of privilege).
I recently moved from the US to Berlin. I plan to return to the US.
Pros of Berlin:
- Good transport
- Bikeable
- Safe
- Cheaper than the big coastal cities in the US, with lower rent.
- Good clubbing (not my thing)
Cons of Berlin:
- Healthcare is inconvenient. Doctor's offices won't pick up the phone, and won't leave you on hold. You just have to go in person. Providers all work in small doctor-owned practices, and you get a referral runaround with huge wait times.
- The food in Germany is terrible. The quality of produce and other ingredients is very bad, and the restaurants are nothing special. One notable bright spot is the availability of vegetarian and vegan food. Also falafel and doner.
- The salaries are shockingly low. Really ask yourself if all the comforts of Europe are worth cutting your salary in 2 or 3, and that's before...
- Taxes. The top tax rate here is in the low-40s, comparable to the US, but unlike the US, the top tax bracket starts below $65k.
- Europe has an impending demographic crisis, and the social safety net they fund by plundering your paycheck probably won't be there for you when you retire.
- Stores in general suck. They have fewer, and worse products.
> The salaries are shockingly low. Really ask yourself if all the comforts of Europe are worth cutting your salary in 2 or 3, and that's before...
Exactly! No amount of health-care and vacation can cover for that. And that's why as for a skilled immigrant, USA is top destination.
> Taxes. The top tax rate here is in the low-40s, comparable to the US, but unlike the US, the top tax bracket starts below $65k.
It's funny when I see Americans on reddit complaining about how they have to pay so much in taxes. When you show them exact numbers, then they start talking about how they don't get "worth" of their taxes.
Government revenue is 30% of GDP. Most of that comes either from taxing either US nationals or those residing inside US, or indirectly via tariffs and inflation (both of which effects both US nationals and foreigners).
90 years ago it was about 1/4th that figure (as percent GDP). We've had an explosion of government siphoning of GDP, so it's no surprise some people aren't happy about the situation. Recent stimulus checks excepted, in the US a single person making above poverty line can actually be taxed into poverty.
I have looked into opting out of social security, but unfortunately you have to be a member of one of a few select religious organizations or certain unusual employment situations to be exempted (believe some teachers and rail workers with special retirement plans are excepted). I would like to see that option. Let me opt out for life of getting benefits of transfer payment, and in exchange not require me to pay any social transfer payment tax.
Salary is very much Berlin specific, for a lot of jobs you will be able to earn around 30% more in places like Munich, Frankfurt or Hamburg. Berlin and the rest of eastern Germany is historically on a lower salary level. Which was fine while real-estate was also significant cheaper in Berlin, that's pretty much gone.
> The food in Germany is terrible. The quality of produce and other ingredients is very bad
Don't shop at Lidl then. Restaurants are what you make of it, goes from basic to fancy and the basic ones are, well, basic. (Though the basic ones are probably at a step lower than the ones in the US because of fast-food in the US)
Though I'll give it to you that 80% of restaurants are generic Italian or Asian ones
> Stores in general suck. They have fewer, and worse products.
Again, don't shop at Lidl. "Fewer products" oh you mean, slightly different products pretending they're not 50% HFCS like in the US? Or products that "look better" but aren't? (like excessively red apples that taste like nothing)
Nowhere did the OP say they shopped at Lidl. You seemed to have put those words in their mouth, not once but twice. You seemed to have taken the OP's comment very personally for some reason.
Berlin has many wonderful things going for it but Berlin is not known as being some bastion of great food. Nor is known as a food destination. There's a reason for that.
>"Restaurants are what you make of it, goes from basic to fancy and the basic ones are, well, basic."
What does that even mean? Some of the best restaurants in places like NYC, Austin and LA are "basic" restaurants but the food is delicious and cheap. From noodles, pizza, bbq, burgers, tacos, etc.
You comment about apples is really bizarre. The US has some of the best produce in the world, from local farmer's markets to giant Whole Foods. You can also find organic produce at nearly every market these days.
> Some of the best restaurants in places like NYC, Austin and LA are "basic" restaurants but the food is delicious and cheap.
I agree. Maybe Germans think mayo is spicy as the meme says (currywurst aside). But it is changing.
> The US has some of the best produce in the world, from local farmer's markets to giant Whole Foods
"Best produce" is not necessarily the ones that look better on a shelf. Berlin is not lacking in organic produce and supermarkets. Or just fruit/veg stalls.
Oh and before I forget, don't shop at discount supermarkets.
How safe is US compared to EU?, you can get shot in US literally anywhere. Doubt anyone doesn't have a gun there. It's true you make a lot more money there but every day is a Russian roulette.
lol - I'm always fascinated with the fixation on guns in the US. Outside of a few urban areas with brain-dead local policies that exacerbate and end up promoting it, gun violence isn't much worse than other kinds of violence combined vs. other countries. Indeed in totality the US is probably below the other averages.
I mean is there still talk of banning people in London from having a steak knife on their person while in public? Take away guns and people will use other tools to carry out violence they might be intending.
Which is the real issue - people, not the tools/weapons. Fixating on tools is easier than those pesky humans, so I get why people tend to do that.
Not algorithms. There will be infinite addition involved, and algorithms are finite.
Thinking of multiplication as repeated addition also won't explain anything about it. It's a separate operation. Deal with it. For similar reasons, you can't calculate x-th power of a number, when x is irrational, by decomposing it into exponentiation and roots.
This metaphor is just training wheels. At some point you should lose it.
Together with the notion that "multiplication is repeated addition" comes the notion that numbers are quantities. Only some of them are, and this isn't really what makes them numbers. Now what exactly gets repeated, when you don't have quantities?
Which is a technical way of saying "in real life people use finite rational or algebraic approximations for reals, so uncountability of reals and infinite precision aren't a problem".
Consider the following real number made of binary digits:
Enumerate all Turing machines and all possible inputs, iff the i-th machine/input combination holds, the i-th binary digit in our number is 0, otherwise 1.
This number is well-defined (once you fix your enumeration scheme).
But there's no finite algorithm to produce approximations in your sense.
What I was after were what's also called Computable numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computable_number). But I used the more general term of co-recursion, that also applies to arbitrary other data-structures like infinite lists, or with some generalization, infinite event-loops where the important condition is that each run through the body of the loop only takes finite time.
Algorithms can work on symbolic formulas, and symbols can represent anything; infinite objects, operations on infinite objects, infinite sets of operations on infinite objects, and so on.
> In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm (/ˈælɡərɪðəm/ (About this soundlisten)) is a finite sequence of well-defined, computer-implementable instructions, typically to solve a class of problems or to perform a computation.
Newton's method is finite too. You perform finitely many iterations. It doesn't calculate roots. It calculates their approximations.
If you use a termination condition that has to do with convergence of iterates instead of a number of iterations (often the case), then you generally don't know beforehand the length of the finite sequences. Maybe you know a bound, but in general you might not even have that.
In an important sense, it only becomes a finite algorithm. It isn't one. You cannot write the finite sequence of instructions down. It's got loops.
To your point about approximations vs not, if you have an algorithm that, for any desired approximation accuracy can compute the square root to that accuracy in a finite number of steps, then that process is as much "the square root" as anything involving the real numbers.
> To your point about approximations vs not, if you have an algorithm that, for any desired approximation accuracy can compute the square root to that accuracy in a finite number of steps, then that process is as much "the square root" as anything involving the real numbers.
Not really, since approximations, no matter how accurate, don't preserve algebraic properties. You only get to know what it's bigger/smaller than.
I think I understand what you mean, so let me dial back "anything involving the real numbers".
If you are representing or thinking of "sqrt(2)" as "the positive solution to x^2 = 2", then you preserve algebraic properties. But you generally (correct me if I'm wrong) don't get to know whether it's bigger or smaller than something else of the form "the _choose_uniquely_ solution to _some_equation_" unless you rely on an argument where you invoke approximations.
Well, no, not really. The standard definition of the reals is as the unique nontrivial totally-ordered, Dedekind-complete, Archimedean field up to isomorphism.
So what you would really need is a uniqueness proof, with addition and multiplications "provided" by the hypothesis.
And how do you prove that a totally-ordered, Dedekind-complete, Archimedean field does not lead to contradiction besides constructing it explicitly by bootstrapping from natural numbers?
Nothing in the construction requires you to show an algorithm that given x, y \in R allows you to compute x+y and xy. You would make the usual Dedekind construction and show it satisfies the axioms of such a field. (as a matter of fact, no such algorithm exists in full generality!)
It's probably a tomato/tomato kind of thing, but I'm only objecting to the 'algorithm' part of parent's comment.
There aren't many people with the expertise to produce the vaccine, and they're all already working on the existing production lines. The lead times are just inherently long here; takes months to start up a production line.
