Yeah I bet there’s something deeply different about the collective psychological impact of being trapped because of an ostensible bad decision (the wrong major) vs simply having no options regardless of what major you choose. When I talk to my debt-shackled American friends there’s some acknowledgment of studying the wrong thing, even knowing that as kids we’re not equipped to make a smart decision, as you say. In China it seems a lot more bleak, like whatever you study you’ll likely end up unable to use it.
Also, in the US there isn’t pressure to do factory work specifically if you can’t get a job. That’s a particularly rough job, especially if you were pursuing white collar work, but it’s where the ccp is pushing folks.
Plus, some aspects of Chinese society make the end impact of youth dissatisfaction worse than in the US.
For one, the CCP's rule and legitimacy are tightly coupled with performance. China has experienced unprecedented economic growth in these past decades, and that makes the citizens more willing to tolerate the annoying (or outright evil) things the CCP does because at least it's helping everyone in aggregate. But now that that growth is slowing, they have to worry that their justification to power is in jeopardy. And because the CCP obviously doesn't run elections or allow any dissident groups, the only way for widespread dissatisfaction with their performance to surface is unrest. Their bungling of the latter half of the pandemic certainly didn't help their case here.
For another, as the article alludes to, it's thought of as impossible for a man to get married without owning a home, and failing to start a family is failing as a human (particularly as the CCP explicitly calls for citizens to have more babies). Skyrocketing home prices compared to stagnant wages are growing the pool of "logistical incels" who have no realistic trajectory to ever being married or starting a family, which was already a grave problem due to lingering sex imbalance from the one child policy. The CCP is deeply concerned with this because large pools of incels tend to grow unstable and even turn to violence, out of desparation.
And for yet another, the extent to which Xi Jiping is able to promulgate and impose his philosophy has no analog in the west. If that philosophy is "you need to stop whining roll up your sleeves and be willing to work long hours in a factory like we did during the Mao era, even if that means your degree is wasted" -- which is a message the CCP is currently pushing, as cited in the article -- that's going to dramatically exacerbate the frustrations the young are already feeling, again even moreso because they have no way to voice their hopelessness. The nihilism compounds.
The Economist does a great job covering China in general, and especially in pointing out the ways that though their challenges and structures may appear superficially similar to Westerners, often the subtleties make them completely different. I'd especially recommend their podcast Drum Tower, if you're into that.
Huh? Delicate? Where are you getting that “consensus” from?
Their most delicate stuff is the Goretex, and that’s delicate only in the sense that you need to wash it regularly to avoid delamination. Same as any Arcteryx or Tilak or whatever jacket, because that’s just how goretex is. All their other stuff is even tougher, the stotz, the encapsulated nylon, the dryskin, whatever CH is, except maybe like, the knit beanies?
Now if you mean delicate in a more psychological sense, I can see it. Sure, a J1A-GT may be just as tough as arceryx beta AR, but it’s hard to avoid worrying about the condition of a raincoat you spent $1500 on. :)
If we had known how fleeting the glory of the early 2010s internet would be, with everything ad-free and seo still comparatively rudimentary, would that have made it easier or harder to watch it die?
And everything was simpler, you could throw something up on a $10/month shared host. Now you need a full stack of services running in the cloud charged by the minute.
I would describe it differently, but I share your general take. The main weakness of SS is that once it gets heavy you really need professional feedback, because your form will begin to deteriorate. This will happen regardless of the program. Still, I wish SS was more clear about it—most beginners are not gonna film themselves and ask for form checks online, and ought to seek a coach irl.
RPE wouldn’t work either because beginners don’t know how to judge. Everyone who squats heavy knows that a huge part of getting good at it is learning how to keep pushing safely, even as the lift becomes more and more psychologically challenging.
I agree in general, but not for beginners. If you’re some college kid whose idea of form comes from books and YouTube, odds are you’re doing something so wrong that you’ll tweak your back deadlifting or squatting long before you’re capable of overwhelming your work capacity.
Been powerlifting for 15 years and I strongly disagree.
Stronglifts basically aped Starting Strength with minimal tweaks to justify separate branding, and only caught on over SS because of the slick app. Rippetoe has been coaching strength for many decades and was a competitive lifter himself, with his all-time PRs for squat and deadlift being a little over 600. He’s trained a network of coaches who command crazy prices for training because the cert is prestigious and incredibly difficult to earn. He was a key contributor to powerlifting and weightlifting components of CrossFit, until he (justifiably, imo) became disillusioned with the franchise. The Starting Strength book is an incredible resource for powerlifters, going into extreme detail into how to do the lifts, why, how to avoid getting injured, how to do your programming, and how to tell when you’ve outgrown Starting Strength. The forum you linked is actually an incredible resource where you can get free form feedback and general advice from the actual coaches (and Rippetoe), with no analog in the stronglifts community. (Is there even a stronglifts community?)
Mehdi, on the other hand… is some guy who made an app. He’s not even a particularly impressive lifter, and was a decidedly unimpressive one when he launched SL.
On the programs themselves: 5x5 is inappropriate for beginners. In no time at all you will hit a progression wall, and your workouts will take forever, where 3x5 could have continued without a hitch, for no upside. And despite the suggestion that more reps means more practice, the fact is that ESPECIALLY for beginners, doing a zillion reps in a state of fatigue is a great way to get hurt.
Barbell rows are such a poor substitute for power cleans that Rippetoe no longer recommends them at all, and the newest edition of the book expresses remorse for ever having made the suggestion.
But even putting all that aside, the most important part of SS is that it is essentially complete and will carry you for 6-9 months with no modification. Because as the commenter up the chain said, fuckarounditis is the most popular way to fail at getting strong. All the common complaints (“waah my biceps aren’t big enough”) are trivially addressed at the intermediate stage, once you’ve built a base of strength and a habit of training. This is why they are “cultish” about variations: you can do all that once you’ve run out your beginner gains. Until then, you don’t know what you’re doing and shouldn’t mess around.
I’m gonna try to not write like a jerk here, but OP is pretty grating, so I’m sorry if I fail.
Parent didn’t say so explicitly, but there’s really no blog post you can write that is “how to escape from poverty as a teen in high school.” Thus, the problems with this one are not fixable. Off top:
* what’s the opening line of Anna Karenina, again? There are so many disparate challenges that poor kids can face that are more urgent than “get good exercise and send cold emails for jobs” that you couldn’t even fit them in their own book.
* even writing the blog post at all assumes these kids are reading hacker news which is, uh, cavalier. there are zillions of people hawking advice that these kids would need to sift through to even decide to follow this blog. Parents, friends, teachers, influencers, Andrew fucking Tate are all prescribing life strategies, why would they listen to your blog? Moreover, if you’re an impoverished kid who has somehow found HN and for some reason values its advice, you’re already on a better track than your peers, and you likely don’t need the advice!
* in fact, this blog is anti-advice for these people. Probably the single most valuable decision I made in my youth was to always refuse all peer pressure no matter what until I was out of my hometown. Peer pressure is INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS for these kids. They’re not Brock Turner, they’re not getting off easy and free because of daddy. one mistake can derail their whole lives. To read this guy say “don’t worry about peer pressure, it’s the spice of life” frankly pisses me off.
The real answer for these kids, again, is to get lucky until we get our shit to get as a country to make life less treacherous and unforgiving for those with less means. Unpopular here on HN, I guess, but the US is not a meritocratic libertarian tech utopia, some situations don’t have a reliable self-directed escape strategy, and not everything can be fixed by the perfect blog post.
edit: also the audacity to be like “here are some advantages of being underprivileged that you can leverage” is its own headache entire… “you won’t have to unlearn as many wrong ideas about the world”? Absolute nonsense
I went to a school like this for most of my youth and I’m with you. The only real strategy is to be lucky, whether it’s by having good parents or by incidentally avoiding the abundant pitfalls.
Edit: resisting peer pressure shouldn’t be worried about because it’s “the spice of life”? Yikes
Ahh I’ve done so much research here and tried so many different devices.
* the Kindle Scribe has a great feeling, but the software is lacking, particularly around the writing experience. They’ve released two substantial updates to add missing features, but they’re still far from parity with the writing-first offerings from other companies. Also, critically, only some books - crossword puzzles are their example - support writing directly on the page. It’s backlit and feels great to write on though.
* I used an iPad for awhile and it’s a solid solution. Obviously if you install Instagram or whatever you’re seriously degrading its value as a tool for focus, so don’t do that. I switched away because the epaper tablets look better in sunlight, have superior battery life, and feel much much better to write on.
* remarkable feels wonderful to write on. I returned it primarily because I find the company is not super responsive or forthcoming with their plans for improvements. Also, it can’t read Kindle books unless you first convert them to epub, but if you want to write directly on a book on any tablet, you’re gonna have to convert away from Kindle. If you’re really doing nothing but writing — no reading, no annotation — this is probably the right pick. The writing feel is like a scratchy pencil on paper.
* I would not recommend the boox note line. These are fully featured android tablets, though it’s a mystery to me why you would ever want to watch a YouTube video on an eink display. Anyway, I’d avoid these tablets because their response latency/ghosting is quite poor, which will annoy the hell out of you.
* Supernote is what I currently use and would recommend. Their A6X the only one of these devices that comes in a smaller paperwhite-ish size (though they also sell a larger A6X). You can read Kindle books directly via the Kindle app, though what I wrote previously about having to jailbreak to write directly on pages remains true. Supernote has the most robust software for organizing notes, linking between notes, creating digests of epubs, etc, and I find their file management and sync software to be the easiest to use. Also their nibs don’t need to be replaced, ever. And they’re very directly engaged with the community —- you can find a link to their development Trello on r/supernote, as well as regular interactions between the dev team and the community. Their tablet is not backlit, and it’s not as snappy as the Kindle. Their cloud syncing is not automatic, which can be annoying. Also features an email client and a calendar, but I don’t use those so I can’t speak to them. The writing feel is like a gel pen on paper.
* The kobo elipsa 2e is likely the most direct competitor to the Kindle Scribe. It’s backlit and waterproof, and it’s suite of writing tools, templates, etc is frankly what the scribe’s should have been. Unless you’re really wedded to the (again, read-only) Kindle store, I struggle to imagine why you wouldn’t but this kobo device over the Scribe.
* finally, look forward to the lenovo smartpaper is supposedly the one to watch for later this year. It’s a bit more expensive, but is snappier and received good reviews at CES.
Overall I’d recommend the Supernote. My only complaints are that it’s not backlit and can feel sluggish, but in terms of functionality and support, it’s the best. And if you want a more pocketable device it’s the only option.
One last recommendation — if you can swing it, definitely narrow down to your two or three top choices, then order them all and return the losers. The writing feel is quite different across these tablets and comes down to taste.
Some features I don’t care about, but you might, and should research if so: audio book compatibility, word doc compatibility, audio recording
Blood Meridian is getting all the praise, and that’s probably right, but I’d put The Crossing right up there with it. The last scene with the crippled dog conveys so much about the journey Billy has gone through, abba what it’s done to him… I don’t know if “coming of age” is so apt as “loss of innocence”
That stuff with the wolf in The Crossing was as deeply affecting to me as an adult as say, The Never Ending Story's Atrax in the Swamp of Sadness was for me as a kid.
Also, in the US there isn’t pressure to do factory work specifically if you can’t get a job. That’s a particularly rough job, especially if you were pursuing white collar work, but it’s where the ccp is pushing folks.