rehtona

The reason we're eating wheat even though we're not made for it is because we could support larger populations on that versus hunting and gathering. Farming societies eventually won, even though hunters and gatherers were more healthy, because farming societies have a food surplus (which it can store), and can then afford to wage war and expand. If you look at skeletons from before and after farming, you see that hunter and gatherers were taller, had bigger brains than we have today, and were overall healthier.

The US and China both have the "unfair" advantage of a big homogenous market. I think that's the main reason you don't see a Microsoft, Google or Facebook in Europe. For example Spotify, headquartered in Stockholm, initially had a domestic market of 9 million people. Spotify is growing fast, but again, not enough engineers would move to Stockholm to sustain a Google. There's a language and culture barrier between EU countries that just don't exist in the US.

$3.6 million in VC funding for a news site about wrist-watches? I wonder what that pitch was, it must have been good.

A country without any problems or immigrants: the USA!

I think some personality types are just prone to the attitude that everything's turning to shit. The same people that feel that the world is less safe today while statistics show the opposite. That doesn't mean he doesn't have some good points. Personally I'm particularly worried about the schooling system. The strain of immigration may be real, I don't know if it will be a net positive or negative in the end. To be safe I would prefer a more modest immigration policy.

I think Sweden is following a larger trend in the west of a more polarizing society with higher income inequality and the slashing of the social safety net. I think globalization and new technology is to blame for this, not naive politicians.

Now do this for the Hadoop ecosystem. I'm ripping my hair out because of the complexity of it all. I get that distributed is difficult, but this just feels like too much. Abstraction upon abstraction upon abstraction. Hadoop is this thing over here, but now we have this other thing built on top that is way better. But actually that thing also sucks, so we built a whole layer on top to abstract away the badness of that other thing plus two other alternatives to it. Oh, but that wasn't good enough, so now you can write queries in this other language. And on and on and on it goes.

I have realised that what I want want is not necessarily a startup, but freedom and doing something that I feel matters. A startup would be one very risky way to accomplish that, and I might still if there is the right opportunity. But I have a backup plan: save for early retirement at around 40, bootstrapping side-projects in the mean time. If something takes off then great, if it doesn't then I'm still retiring at 40 with plenty of time to pursue meaningful projects. Win-win, with a much higher probability of positive outcome.

$150k is really a ridiculous amount of money in Sweden. Not that living expenses are low or anything, but most of life's big expenses are taken care of already: you get a real pension, universal health care, paid for university (no need to save up for your kids), long vacations, 16 months parental leave, cheap child care ($150/month) etc. So $60k is actually plenty. Also, a year or two ago, $60k was $80. The exchange rate is unpredictable.

The title of the photo says "composite photograph", perhaps several close up photos were stitched together?

How is it terrible exactly? It's standard practice where I live. My niece went to child care shortly after 1 year and she loves it. I'm sure she would be immensely bored just being home with mommy all day, every day.

I wish I was able to feel good doing manual labor or outdoors activities but I just can't for the most part. That includes farming, carpenting, fishing, sailing etc. My father is a very handy man, and I've tried to keep an open mind, but I just dread every second of it. Still, I go fishing and sailing with him just to hang out, and he doesn't know how I feel about it. Guess I'm lucky to be living in this day and age, I would have been a terrible and unhappy farmer.