freddie_mercury

Your categorical error is that you think people are watching them to cover details in topics.

They are a replacement for TV. You know, the thing that people used to watch for hours upon hours a day?

The vast majority of Vietnamese I know do not have an email account.

So that would be a dumb thing for a Vietnamese bank to use as a recovery method.

> Elsewhere in the world, doctors can and do spend more than 12 minutes figuring out what's wrong with their patients.

Where? According to "International variations in primary care physician consultation time: a systematic review of 67 countries" Sweden is the only country on the planet with an average consultation length longer than the US.

"We found that 18 countries representing about 50% of the global population spend 5 min or less with their primary care physicians."

Why would my government care less about me than a multinational corporation with billions of customers that isn't headquartered or listed where I live?

My Member of Parliament represents about 130,000 people, does regular door knocking to talk to people, and has a staffed office a few km away the I can walk into anytime I want.

None of that applies to a multinational corporation.

The minimum price is enforced by Substack, unfortunately. You can make everything free but you can't charge, say, $1/month. It definitely pushes the platform toward writers who think "I want to make this my full-time job & income". It also definitely suffers from, to a lesser extent, the Medium problem of way too many people thinking it is some kind of get-rich-quick thing. Somehow the Reddit algorithm started showing me the substack reddit, which seemed to mostly be pretty new authors complaining that they aren't making much money from Substack.

I agree. Substack feels more like Op Ed writers realised they could make more money by self publishing than by staying at a dying media company with multiple levels of editorial oversight.

To do well on Substack you need to publish pretty regularly, several times a week to keep and build an audience, and the only thing anyone can generate that fast are opinions. So Substack has really just become a decentralised Op Ed page.

Nobody claimed there weren't a lot of WhatsApp users.

The rest of the world isn't on WhatsApp. What a bizarre claim. Vietnam uses Zalo. Japan uses Line. Korea uses Kakaotalk. China uses WeChat. Iran is Telegram.

And in the US more people are using iMessage than SMS thanks to iPhone's 58% market share.

Nobody ever paid $900 for a toilet seat. That was a statistical artifact caused by an accounting method called "equal allocation".

"The equal allocation method calculates prices for large numbers of items in a contract by assigning "support' costs such as indirect labor and overhead equally to each item. Take a contract to provide spare parts for a set of radar tracking monitors. Suppose a monitor has 100 parts and support costs amount to a total of $100,000. Using the equal allocation method each part is assigned $1,000 in such costs, even though one item may be a sophisticated circuit card assembly, which requires the attention of high-salaried engineers and managers, and another item may be a plastic knob. Add $1,000 to the direct cost of the part and you get a billing price. This is what the government is billed, though not what the part is really worth--the circuit card being undervalued, the knob being overvalued. The need for billing prices arises because contractors want to be paid up front for items that are shipped earlier than others."

There's some weird online effect where people assume everyone they talk to on the internet makes essentially the same exact amount of money they do.

I've noticed this most in a forum for a country I used to live in where foreigners would come in and post "What's an affordable hotel/restaurant/bar/travel experience".

Uh, I have no idea what "affordable" means to you!?

"Analysis by the Yale School of Public Health Humanitarian Research Lab (HRL), which has been tracking the siege using open source images and satellite imagery, found clusters of objects “consistent with the size of human bodies” and “reddish ground discolouration” thought to be either blood or disturbed soil."

The "visible from space" here is clearly dumb click bait from The Telegraph.

Congress are the ones who define what the FDA does. Blame them and the 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. Congress could easily tell the FDA to do something different.

Because manipulating billions of people a year is worse than assassinating 500 a year? Doesn't seem hard to figure out.