danielrpa

I had just one sentence in my original message about Cuban immigrants, my writeup was not about them in particular. It was just an example of one of the things I was saying, basically that I know that many Cuban immigrants wanted to reject their old regime - not necessarily their culture, which is not in conflict with "the rules" as I see it. I see in Latin Americans refugee a desire to live the US life while preserving their values (which is also the case for other immigrant groups, but NOT all of them).

I was actually praising the integration of law-abiding Latin Americans in the US, including Cubans. In my community, we all eat our food, celebrate our culture and speak our language among ourselves, but we're proud to be American and actually want the American way of life for ourselves and our family. Many of these immigrants easily integrated and even married locals. My wife, who's American, hangs out with Latin American women of different countries, all living a "Latin America spiced" US life.

If you think that Buddhist monks have some good points, do you need to go live in a remote monastery? Kaczynski's critique can make us think about the extremes of modern life; it can encourage us to step back a little and live in more harmony with nature and less so in the grind of industrial society.

Ahem, I'm an older manager and one of the biggest proponents of remote in my company, and I know many 40+ managers who are big into remote too. So your theory is wrong. More than half of my team live on different states (and even countries at one point), so even if we were not working from home, they would not be in the same office as me "collaborating".

You probably just know a bunch of bad managers that gave you the impression this is age-related. Interestingly, and this is an anecdote, it's the younger managers who usually haven't yet sorted out the control problem and are less into remote work.

I said what I had to say, so did you. A comprehensive refutal and clarification of my points would be tedious.

Nonetheless, I'll address one of your points, the one of the involuntary experience: if your hosts are having you out of the goodness of their hearts because you're a refugee, you better do everything in your power to pay it back and play by their rules, not yours. You are not entitled to their welcome.

I'm a Latin American immigrant. When coming to the US, I decided to fully integrate myself in the culture: attain a high proficiency level in English, US history and culture, marry a native and raise my child in the local culture. I believe that if you are moving to a new country, you are deciding to an extent leave your old country behind and start a new journey helping build your adoptive country.

When looking at other Latin American immigrants, I tend to see a strong desire to do the same. Latin Americans often join the US armed forces, become patriotic and even conservative Americans. In particular with Cuban immigrants, there is hatred towards some of the original values (communist/revolutionary Cuba) and a strong embrace of the new world. While you can always find examples to the contrary, I believe that Latin American immigrants in the US have done a terrific job at integrating, perhaps because of our cultural and religious values being already somewhat compatible with the US.

This is not the same for all other immigrant cultures. I don't want to point fingers to not start flame wars. However, I've seen communities of different cultures refusing to mix with locals: they will not marry locals in general for religious and sometimes even racial reasons. For them, the US is just a convenient location with Costcos and Targets, but they often despise our cultural roots and don't even bother to learn the culture or language. Their children are of course better integrated, but their community still frowns upon departing their culture circle.

We Latin Americans still, of course, stay around our community and speak our native language with people sharing our cultural heritage. We still like "our" food. But when you talk to people in the community, they are complaining about how things are bad in Latin America and how much better they are in the US. In some other cultures, it's the opposite; they complain about how things are bad in the US, and how much better they were back home!

I bought and returned a Pocket Operator. One of the least musical, unfriendly instruments I've ever owned.

And imagine, you can buy an OP-1 or seven Volcas! You can get the 2 Circuits and still have money for 2 Behringers! I never found the sound from the OP-1 particularly interesting, and the instrument is more suitable for looking cool rather than making actual music.

I hope you are not referring to my comment, as I'm not advocating a fully nuclear grid. Instead, I'm advocating nuclear as the replacement for the energy needs that are beyond the reach of renewables in many places - for instance, nighttime consumption in areas without hydro potential.

For those against nuclear, feel free to give an example of a working large scale (supporting 5M+ people 24/7, all seasons) solar/wind deployment in continental Europe with zero dependence on fossil or nuclear.

That's why we need "piracy". The "pirate" movement is the only reliable way to protect our cultural heritage against politics and copyright.

We don't have proven "far cheaper" alternatives. It is irresponsible to advocate for a fully solar/wind grid if we don't have a single working large scale example that is able to sustain, let's say, a city with 5M people 24/7, all-season (examples including hydro and geothermal don't count as many places can't depend on these).

Don't get me wrong, I love solar and wind and I highly encourage continued investment and buildup so we need less of other forms of energy. However, ignoring nuclear is the same, in practice, as supporting a hybrid fossil/renewables future. If you are fine betting on technological developments such as megascale batteries or other energy storage approaches, you should also be fine betting on the less impressive, incremental improvements needed for reducing nuclear plant costs.

The future will involve many different energy sources, and nuclear fission has to be one of them until we discover a new major energy source (hopefully fusion).

There was no reason for the average user to switch from Facebook. Arguably, it was worse than Facebook due to poor UI: I could never make my wife understand the value of circles, it was simply not the way she thinks about her contacts.

How are they going to collaborate working from home? Will Sundar blame poor results on the smoke?

It's not preferable. The problem in this line of argumentation is that it highlights the problems of an imperfect system (a big western democracy) and then extends that to qualify the whole.

The US has so many problems, I agree, but what big democracy doesn't? Does the UK have problems? Yes. Does France? Yes. Does India? Yes. Because the US is so powerful, and has used this power for questionable purposes (as well as good purposes), people create a caricature of the country and ignore that we have things like constitutional protections, freedom of speech, mechanisms to sue the government and prevail.

Just to detail one of my examples above, freedom of speech. Many people will go and give examples of why the US has no true freedom of speech. Most of these people have never lived in a place which actually has no freedom of speech! For instance, I've bought many highly critical books of the US government, talked about them in public, visited libraries to read these books. In a less free country, this can, and often does get you arrested or killed, assuming that you were able to find the books to begin with, more often you won't even have access to any real criticism of the government.

I don't want any country storing my personal data. But if I'd pick between the US or China, AT LEAST there is a minimum of transparency and rule of law (and it's actually a lot more than "minimum", the real protections are significant) regarding how this data is used in the US.

Well according to some people on HN, it's all good and dandy. China is no worse than the US is the latest version of moral relativism we have to deal with. So if they have your data, it's all okay.

This is the genius plan by Sundar Pichai, who prefers to blame WFH than himself for Google's failures.

> You mean like a human teacher?

This reminded me of one of my teachers who said that Cuba was a great place to live and the rest of Latin America should be more like them. She was essentially a communist who painted the old Soviet Union and communist countries in general as much better than the capitalist west.