Recent submissions

Comment · 3 years ago
I am not hand waving it. This line was commented ad nauseam when the book was released and is the one people who have no idea of neither what in the Greek text nor what’s in the translation like to discuss. As it’s far from being the most questionable part of the translation, I don’t see the point of centring discussion on it, especially when you consider it’s not an awful translation of the original. It’s not very close but you can find far worse later.
Comment · 3 years ago
> Four hours of knowledge work a day is actually a lot. The average corporate worker probably does far less. Meetings, small talk, answering emails, etc. feel like work, but most of the time it isn’t. Four hours of focused knowledge work can produce exponential more value that four hours of meetings.

No idea if I should be rolling on the floor laughing or extremely saddened reading that. I might advice taking a reality check before spurring this kind of non sense in public if you want to avoid sounding both entitled and utterly disconnected.

Comment · 3 years ago
Evidence and proof are the same word in my own native language.

> There's a lot of circumstantial evidence

Hardly. You could arbor doubts for the people who ate at her place but for her husband there is absolutely nothing. I am not proud of HN falling at the level of the tabloid press through not really surprised.

Comment · 3 years ago
The complaint - which I definetely share by the way - is that for all the critical acclaim it got, Emily Wilson's translation strays so far from the actual text, it is not really a translation anymore and is actually closer to being a new text inspired by the Odyssey. That's fine if that's what you are looking for but it doesn't make for a great translation.

The πολύτροπος thing is a complete red herring by the way. Her translation is questionnable but remains within the bound of what I would expect from a modern translator. I am more annoyed by everything she drops in the rest of the poem. Remarkably and annoyingly, the coverage when her translation was released spend far more time dwelling on her gender than on her actual work.

Comment · 3 years ago
Imagine randomly accusing someone of multiple murders on the internet with absolutely no proof.
Comment · 3 years ago
Sure, I'm convinced that no one is going to riot when they get their their lifetime savings casually wiped out. I bet on them fully understanding that they just made a terrible decision when they chose the wrong bank, it's entirely their fault and that it is what's best for the economy as a whole.
Comment · 3 years ago
At this point, the EU has the worst of both a free market based economy and a planned one. Profits goes to corporate owners when they exist and losses are taken up by the general public through subsidies. It's very comfy for our corporate overlords and the old generation who could afford to become shareholders in these companies when public policies actually helped them but it's a raw deal for the rest of us. Sadly, old people are the one who still vote and put our governments in place so I don't expect things to ever get better. I guess it's doomed to happen when the median age of your country hits 45.
Comment · 3 years ago
> I'm not sure what the banking market is like in Italy

Significantly less competitive than in the USA.

Comment · 3 years ago
I am not sure myself. The past two decades have shown that banking is a sector which needs to be tightly regulated and bankers can never be trusted to not do utterly stupid things if there is even the slighest hint of profits. Honestly, I would be fine with the banking sector being nationalised at this point at least for the retail part. We are already bailing out banks when they fail so let's be coherent.

It's entirely technologically possible for central banks to take over retail banking at this point and Brazil has demonstrated nicely that taking over payment processing would be a net improvement for everyone. Honestly, I don't understand why we haven't done it already but I suppose entranched interests are partly to blame.

Comment · 3 years ago
It's even easier to not do the study if you are going to use bogus data anyway.
Comment · 3 years ago
Unsurprisingly, highly regulated sectors like banking where entering is extremely hard display cartel like behaviors. There is no incentive coming from the competition so why would anyone lower the net interest margin. In this context, I think a windfall tax somehow makes sense. Then again, I'm pretty sure it's going to be misused by the government. I would much rather see regulation forcing banks to raise interest rate on deposits but well at least this goes somewhat in the right direction.
Comment · 3 years ago
I will bet on the usual confounding variables when it comes to lifestyle study. Highly likely that eating late at night means coming home late, probably due to working late which probably means a more stressful life. Sadly they are controlling for a chokingly low amount of variables so we will never know.
Comment · 3 years ago
There is little point of doing a study based on BMI when what you want is body fat. BMI is imperfect. It’s fine when you want to give people a quick metric for them to assess their fitness by themselves. People who are extremely fit with a high BMI already know they are extremely fit after all. It’s not fine when you want to analyse the effect of different life styles.
Comment · 3 years ago
Given the delay to get cars right now, I'm guessing Europe has significantly less "bog-standard" fabs that you think it does.

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