pimmen

The justice system in the US is not perfect but the people who are in US prisons had access to defense attorneys, hearings about bail, trials where the prosecution had to publicly present evidence and testimonies to explain why the defendant should go to jail ("they are a muslim" is not enough), and also a process for appeal. And International observers are allowed to thoroughly investigate US prisons, and when they publish scathing criticism of the US prison system it's not cracked down by jailing the reporters or diplomatic pressure.

That is, by any resonable definition of the word "better", much better.

And this statement is just categorically false:

"It shocks me that there’s no real discussion of this issue in the US."

I can name five news segments or documentaries about the US prison systems role in structural racism on National television off the top of my head. Try pitching a segment about the CCP's human rights violations to Chinese television where you have full editorial control and you'll get laughed out of the room, at best.

Trump has not even nearly as much power as you seem to think. We hear about his abuses of power because hearing ”California government implements reforms to reduce carbon emissions, in spite of Trump” doesn’t generate as much emotions as his corrupt practices.

Imagine a Chinese provincial government openly (key word openly) going against the CCP’s wishes. Or a judge, or a prosecutor.

And for its justice system. And its infrastructure.

The difference in transparency between China and the US is hard to overstate.

This is illustrated with the deck Affinity. It sweeps beginner players consistently even if the pilot keeps making mistakes but once you meet tougher opposition all of the options the deck presents become overwhelming and you know that you need to maximize the value of every play to beat a good opponent, especially if they have boarded in counters for your deck.

Whenever I play poker with friends this is my experience too. I don't do anything really fancy at all, I basically just follow very simple guidelines anyone can look up on the Internet. I just wait for good cards, permit worse cards the further down I am in the betting chain, raise or fold instead of calling most of the time, and I bet agressively when I have really good cards to get the most value. I win because my opponents have no idea of what they’re doing, and even if you would point out an obvious misplay they wouldn’t even agree.

Most people who play casually have some romantic ideas about poker from spy movies, where it's about bluffing. Bluffing only works if people actually believe you have good cards, people won't believe you have good cards if you play with mediocre or bad cards every hand.

I am by no means good enough to beat a person who is good at the game that could profile my playing style, do the mental math faster than me and who can tell the difference between whether or not I have analysis paralysis or bluffing.

I don't know if this was just the culture and influence from Kalanick, but Uber all around seems like a terrible company. Tehy cover up data breaches, they lie to regulators when they test their self driving cars, they act passively when women get harassed on their watch. I haven't worked there but from the outside it seems pretty much "do whatever you want, but don't get caught".

In Sweden, most middle class people live in detached houses. However, most young professionals desire to live in apartments because it's simply more convenient. I hate the garden and I hate driving.

This article is about Sweden, remember. My parents have two houses, one outside Gothenburg (big enough that they have converted the floor me and my younger brother lived in into two apartments, one if four bedrooms the other one is two) and a beach house further up north. They're from a completely different generation with different priorities.

A comment on #2 would also be that you should organize and enshrine your rights when you have the power, not when you're weak. Developers are powerful now, can possibly become weak later.

The issue is far more complicated than simply not having de-regulated rents. De-regulating rents would do something, no doubt, but there are so many more reasons why we have astronomically high real estate prices at this moment (and didn't have them just 20-25 years ago).

* We have massive tax cuts and subsidies for home owners. You get to make deductions off your interest rate payments, something that was introduced as an emergency measure in the 90s. We also have effectively no real estate tax, meaning there is no incentive to move out when your kids have moved out and the home is more than you need.

* For a long time, there was no need to even pay the principal of your mortgage. Now there is and it's one of the primary reasons the prices have gone sideways in Sweden for the past year.

* The local governments don't want renters and have gradually been given more and more power to get rid of them. They own a lot of the rentals and especially in Stockholm they have aggresively converted them into apartments that are owned (the common, Swedish system of buying a membership into a home owners organization is a bit hard to translate into an appropriate English term, but it's called "bostadsrätt"). The national government is basically powerless to increase the housing stock, if you go back to the 60s when my grandparents were facing a housing crisis the national government had the power to build one million homes mostly in the bigger cities like Stockholm, Gothenburg and Malmö. They have nowhere close to that power anymore and the local governments have no incentive to solve the problems of low income people in a completely different city who would like to switch cities to get a decent living.

There are more than these too, these are just the first ones that popped into my head.

And all of this is unfortunately hard to change because most Swedes live in homes they own and it's a very common retirement plan. People who are in their 30s, like me, also think that falling interest rates well below inflation is the new normal because they've known anything else throughout their adult lives and thus take larger risks than they should.

In Sweden the unions are the ones who will go to court and negotiate for you because they know that if you go it will set a precedent that exposes everyone else too.

Health care, dental care up to adulthood, parental leave protected by law and education through college is definitely not unrelated to standard of living. Neither is mandatory pension contributions from your employer, as well as a guaranteed contribution from the state (we unknowingly get contributions to our retirement for every month we go to college).

Sure, if you're single with no kids, in very good shape, employed as a data engineer and 30 years old , like me, you would gladly take the money instead of all the other stuff. But I like the fact that children who are born into working poor families in Sweden will have a much healthier upbringing than if they were born in the US.

Go back 20 000 years and modern humans didn’t write Kama Sutra either, because just like bonobos we lacked the technology and knowledge to write.

That's like saying humans have evolved radically different behavior compared to 200 years ago because back then they couldn't travel to another celestial body.

I would argue jerking off to Internet porn and jerking off to a fantasy are both exhibiting the same behavior, just like a polar explorer from the 19th century and a lunar explorer from the 20th century are exhibiting the same behavior.

Users having multiple addresses is something I've cursed a lot over. I work in a team that does data analytics for a news publishing company, and our print business is still very important. Unfortunately, in our database over print customers users are basically addresses because you don't really need to know how many people are receiving your paper as a distributor, only where and how many papers. Since it's also been a safe assumption for a century that people share newspapers with each other, market research was done street by street to inform ad buyers of which markets we reached. Many people have more than one home. Some people take out another subscription for a relative.

This mapped very awkwardly to digital subscribers who we had individual data on. We were able to join databases in a way that sort of works through more or less (mostly less) comfortable assumptions. The queries are not pretty.

There are also countries that thrived economically after the fall of socialism. Why yes, I'll gladly take an apartment in East Berlin if you're offering me one.