dd_roger

Honestly I find it pretty fucked up that someone would renounce their citizenship "for convenience". I can't really comprehend how their country could mean so little to someone, especially when that country is a democracy.

Regarding the taxation when living abroad, doesn't it actually make sense? Sure it sounds like an oddity because the US are the only to do it, but most emigrants I know still use the consular services of their country of origin every now and then, benefit from its diplomatic protection, and can return any time if circumstances require it (implying they should be contributing to keeping the country safe and functional in the meantime, call it an insurance policy if you will), and probably many other benefits I'm not thinking of. Some countries will even send special forces abroad to recover citizens in danger.

So yeah apparently the practicalities of it suck sometimes (and that should definitively be improved) but in principle it's not as outlandish as it sounds, imo.

>You are free to not wear a mask or party by yourself, in your house, away from society.

Or you could frame it the other way. Instead of suppressing everyone's freedom, people who are too scared to resume a normal life could watch us live a free life through their window, from the security of their home.

I'm not aware of any country that had a democratic consultation to ask the people which way they wanted it.

>I would recommend looking into decoupling your social needs from your job.

I absolutely hate that this is the standard answer that comes up everytime someone mentions not being happy with WFH. Not only it doesn't answer the question, but it's just a slightly more polite version of "just make friends, duh" which is not helpful at all.

To many people (myself included) 2-3 hours of social activities in a day is not enough. I need to be around people, and while it's great to meet some friends in the evening it doesn't change the fact that I just spent 10 miserable hours alone in my appartment. In addition to that, I find there are many disadvantages to remote work: I hate doing over the phone what could have been a nice in-person chat, I hate how tedious it is to show/explain things that would have been easily demonstrated in person, I hate how difficult it is to grasp non-verbal cues, etc. I don't know a single person IRL who likes full time WFH, but judging by how popular it is here, it seems I shouldn't assume that everybody is in the same situation. Conversely, don't assume everybody can turn his miserable WFH experience in something awesome just "by doing stuff in the evening". Btw no offense but I had to laugh at your suggestion that a vido chat is a social activity.

The explosion in the number of sofware components in modern tractors and combines is inherent to what we expect from them. If your open source tractor is essentially a tractor from 20 years ago without the fancy new tech then there's no market for it. Just lookup how much tractors from before the "e-tractor era" go for. I'll break it to you, it's not a lot.

I think people who aren't involved with farming can't really comprehend the amount of technology involved and the savings that technology enables (and ultimately makes it worth it even if the equipment is more difficult/expensive to repair).

As an aside, we always hear complaints about John Deere and never other manufacturers. I wonder if it's because anti-corporate populism works better when it's targeted at a well known american brand or if John Deere is truely that bad. We don't have any modern John Deeres in my area but a few Case IH and Claas, and I've never heard any complaints.

Btw my point isn't to justify the anti-consumer behavior of some manufacturers, but to provide context as to why "an open source tractor" is a completely naive idea.

I don't understand how "not having to file a tax return" can work. How does it account for all the information a government might not reasonably have about your wealth and economic activities? How do you apply for tax credits? The taxation system is not particularly intricate here in Switzerland but there's absolutely no way a government that is not an orwelian surveillance state would have the required information about each person to pre-file their tax return.

> Not in the west, it doesn't.

(edit: just realised that maybe you meant the west of the USA and not the western world in general, in this case you might be right I'm obviously not aware of local practices from the other side of the world)

It does, I absolutely hate using authoritative argument but my family raises cattle and I've never seen a watered pasture in my life. I wonder what's the background of people teaching me online "how things really are".

In bad years when it doesn't rain enough for grass to grow, people get rid of the animals they can't afford to feed. There's no system in place to water the pastures and "save the harvest".

If you buy cheap, low quality meat from animals that never grazed and are fed grain and silage all year round then yes these feed crops would probably have been watered at some point (but even then, not 100% of the water comes from irigation). The broad avilability of meat grown in miserable conditions is a problem as well but not the one I'm talking about.

> A pound of steak requires 4000 to 6000 gallons of water.

People keep throwing this number around but it's at best voluntarily missleading, if not straight up a lie.

4 to 6k gallons is roughly what a meat cow (slaughtered at 18 months of age) will use in its lifetime (which btw if a lot less than the average westerner in the same time span). To stretch it to "4 to 6k gallons per pound of beef" you have to include the rain that watered its pasture, which makes absolutely no sense. Nobody ever tells that a bread loaf requires 500L of water to produce (roughly the quantity of water needed to water 1 bread loaf worth of wheat) because this water falls for free from the sky anyway.

Now you can make intricate arguments about how if there were other types of ecosystems in place of pastures more water could be retained in the soil and would eventually make its way to aquafiers or rivers -which is true- but I'm confident this isn't how people interpret this number. The goal of people who provide this number without any context is to give the impression that eating a pound of beef is equivalent to letting the faucet open for 4k+ gallons worth of water, which it absolutely isn't.

> I think it's pretty widely acknowledged that speed limits are not effectively enforced on cars.

No it's not, unless you have some study to back it up because it's not my experience.

(edit: just to be clear, the spirit of this comment is not to dismiss anything that isn't backed by studies, sometimes simple observation of the world around us is enough to reach solid conclusions, but I disagree that speed limits aren't respected and enforced. Could depend on where you live as well.)

I'm personally convinced that there's no justification for banning eMTBs (or any other negative sentiments toward them really) beside gatekeeping.

There's nothing about eMTBs allowing people to venture in more difficult trails than with normal MTBs. Most terrains that are too hard on a normal MTB will be even harder on an eMTB because you loose some agility and the ability to carry the bike over unrideable sections.

I often see people complain about "how fast eMTBs go in some climbs, which is dangerous to bystanders". This is the most ridiculous argument, completely unrelated to eMTBs. Regardless of the terrain (uphill, downhill, flat, ...) I always slow down to ~walking speed when passing someone if the trail isn't wide enough to put at least ~1.5 meter between me and them. Meanwhile the same people who complain about eMTBs being dangerous bomb down the hill past hikers at 25+ km/h. Anyway, a long rant to basically say that any argument about speed is only ever relevant if brought up in the context of educating people to be more courteous riders regardless of the bike they ride.

Finally, you're orders of magnitudes more likely to be stranded because you punctured and forgot your repair kit (or whatever other damage to your bike that can't be fixed trailside) than due to overheating battery or whatever improbable scenario people come up to justify hating on eMTBs.

> It is also not really a viable large scale solution to "how do you move people around?"

Not every solution needs to be large scale to be usefull. I think biofuels should be promoted and used as much as possible (obviously within the limits where it makes sense ecologically speaking, e.g. not destroying ecosystems to plant more biofuel crops or burning coal to synthetize (m)ethanol). Both the idea that EVs are suited for every purpose and that they'll quickly take over the entire ICE car pool are ludicrous. Where EVs can not / not yet be used it makes perfect sense to use alternative fuel sources.

> many countries in the West should hire the Chinese to construct and build HSR in their countries with foreign labour under local direction

There's absolutely no reason to do it, most (if not all) western countries are perfectly capable of building highspeed railway technically speaking. The reason why it's not done is political and financial. Also in the current climate you'll have a hard time justifying hiring a chinese companies over a domestic company to build critical infrastuctures (and rightfully so imo). In fact I believe public contracts should always be awarded to domestic companies, granted domestic companies with the required skills exist (which is absolutely the case in Europe for railway).

> Without workers in the office, middle management was left to spend additional time on pointless meetings, inhibiting their workers from spending their time on work tasks.

You're just drawing meaningless conclusions based on nothing but your hatred of management lol.

>I think the conclusion is that additional meetings do not play the supplemental role that many managers seem to believe it does, and in fact minimizing meetings will increase productivity.

I think the actualy conclusion is that people are less productive at home because many people can't work properly due to an unfavorable working environment. Meanwhile since there's no office hour anymore (no commute to divide personal time from working time) people work from breakfast until dinner. In the end you get the same amount of work done but the timeslot that was dedicated to work during the day was 2-3 hours longer than when working from the office.

It's plain illegal in Switzerland regardless of CCTV signs. Even dashcams are in a gray area where it should technically be illegal but it has never been enforced before a court as far as I know (dashcam are extremely rare here anyway). I wonder how it works for Tesla cars that record their surrounding when parked, maybe they don't have that feature here. Surveillance of public areas is only permited with very good reasons (e.g protecting outdoor ATMs) and must be restricted at the minimum required to serve its purpose.

I share your opinion (I particularily like essays; I follow along the arguments, think whether I agree with them or not, etc. but absolutely hate the "how-to" kind of books which I strongly associate with the hustle and self improvement culture that I find quite toxic.)

But I agree with the author that the later kind of books seems much more popular with the general public, being handed solutions appears to be more attractive to many people that being encouraged to think about problems that probably aren't even relevant to them. And in a sense it's perfectly understandable, but I personally prefer the intellectual stimulation from a good essay over what is essentially a marketing speech from a professional hustler.