romanoderoma

> I find it hard to take sweeping statements like this seriously.

They are hard to take seriously because they are not earnest, it's cherry picking to prove a point, based on false premises.

Scandinavia is not even a country, it's like saying "Benelux has the higher GDP per capita of Europe" but Luxembourg has more than two times the GDP per capita of Belgium, the three don't even speak the same language and 20% of the Luxembourgers have Portuguese nationality.

I imagine that Scandinavia has a good reputation as role model society among his audience so he chose Scandinavia.

I had a Swedish girlfriend, still have many friends there and my wife is half Danish, so I agree with the sentiment, but the facts are definitely not there.

If the parameter is "startups per capita" and the geographical region doesn't have to be a sovereign country (Scandinavia is not) then I would say that in Europe (the continent) London and Berlin have the most startups per capita (London also in absolute numbers), despite being two very different places with a very different idea of what being earnest means.

Why is dang allowing this person to bully everyone?

Is this the new normal on HN?

On the other hand, people using cheap devices usually don't rely on them so much, so the higher consumption is compensated by the lower overall usage, or have made the real environmental savy choice.

I've never encountered an iPhone owner that didn't bring a charger in their backpacks.

Do you see old people like my father charging their sub 100 € smartphones at Starbucks or young people with shiny high end smartphones?

My father use his smartphone so rarely that the battery lasts exactly as advertised: 2+ days on standby (I believe it's ~60 hours).

He uses no app, except WhatsApp twice a year and Maps, has no background service running, takes a few pictures of his niece and that's it. How much power can he consume? How much is he contributing to the climate change compared to me, his son, that starts the day at 9 am and at 18 is on 20% battery?

An I don't even use the smartphone that much, but hey, WFH, slack and teams are constantly checking for new messages, that friend sent you a message in IG, of course I'm gonna check my timeline. Look, a new notification, Amazon is delivering the package, let me check on the news if the streets are still closed today because they are shooting that Tom Cruise movie (it really happened few days ago!)

Etc. etc. How much of this could be saved?

On the opposite side, the construction workers who renewed my house all used old phones like Nokia 3330 because they need something though and durable that won't die on them after a few hours, in environments where electrical power is not granted, so they go for the thing with the longest battery life on the market which is also the cheapest option and, in the end, the most power efficient.

If that was even possible, you would have to wait at least 10 years.

At that point who knows if tablets as a form factor survived.

To be clear, I think that a tablet (not specifically iPads which are expensive in their segment as any other Apple device, there is no cheap option) could replace most PC nowadays, but to reiterate what's already been said: Apple is not present in too many places, for a reason.

To make an example: I work for a company in Italy with 14 thousands employees.

The laptops they give us software developers today are gonna be the accountants PCs of the future. Unless they break before. In that case they are replaced by the supplier with something with similar specs but new. Probably it will be a different brand, depending on what's available at the moment.

It's not imaginable that a company like this, which is relatively small if we look at the real giants of the World (including many in Italy as well), will replace every PC with tablets, not only for monetary reasons, but because they had to re-train thousands of employees. Being in Italy I'm sure that only talking about it would end up in a strike. No kidding.

But even assuming that it would happen, they would buy cheap Asus tablets.

But even assuming it would be iPads, does this software the company has been using for 15 years runs on it?

The answer is most certainly "no, it doesn't".

Battery life and power efficiency is not a factor in such environments, they prefer to plant trees, be part of a renewable energy consortium or power the offices with solar panels, that they can also spin in PR, than buy Apple devices because they have an incredibly power efficient CPU. It doesn't really matter to them.

And I tell you this knowing that I work there because I know that ethically speaking they are vastly better than the average. They really do care of many small things that many others don't, but Apple ARM CPUs aren't one of them.

What does this have to do with the fact that the majority of old people in USA live alone because they are left alone?

Are you saying that most elderly have no family or kids?

And why people with no family or kids should live in solitude?

I have no kids, for example.

Family is not built on blood alone.

A good chunk of what I call family is formed by people who had no family, lost everything during the ww2 and are not my blood relatives.

I simply said that a community that cares about its members is not a pastoral, there are place where it's still the way they live.

The community can be a group of houses in the Italian country in the middle of nowhere.

Coming from a family where I am the first generation who could afford going to college, I disagree.

OP was talking about Vietnam, my experience is in rural Italy and matches the idea of people helping each other, not of the exploitation of the women.

And not in an idealised way either, I could make countless examples that I experienced first hand, growing up with 18 cousins and spending together every easter, Christmas and summer holiday for large part of our lives. Especially summer holidays that last three months in Italy.

They are my sisters and brothers, even though I only have one "real" sister, my 8 aunts are my moms, my 8 uncles are my dads, when I was a kid I probably spent more time with them than with my parents that were working 12 hour shifts in hospital (they did the exact same job and shared 50/50 parenting) and sent me and my sister to our grandparents when schools were closed, so we didn't have to be alone at home or with a baby sitter.

I feel lucky to have a family where no one is left behind or alone.

I never felt we were dependent, on the contrary, they let me develop my independence and I have been a kid who spent long moments alone and still do as an adult.

What you call pastoral I call it sense of community.

Yes, women had it bad in the past, but what you're seeing is not reduced dependence, it's solitude.

Maybe the fact that I grew up in a socialist family makes my perspective different, but I can't imagine old people wanting to be alone, away from their family and loved ones, unless they are forced to.

And the worst thing is that even if you were right and old people are simply fulfilling their desire of independence, women have it worse all the same: stats say that in USA 75% of the elderly living alone are women and to make things even worse widowers have more chances of remarriage than widows.

Considering that old people living alone have more chances of falling into poverty, that poverty increases the chances of being alone even more, that eating it's a social activity for many people, so living alone increases the risk of malnutrition and that in the presence of health issues loneliness increases the chances of the symptoms getting worse, I wouldn't consider more time alone a blessing, not for men nor for women.

China is the largest producer of cultural products in the World right now, Hollywood itself made blockbusters there, financed and co produced by China.

It has already changed, before Brexit was even a thing.

From 2013

China is now the lead exporter of cultural goods, followed by the United States. In 2013 the total value of China's cultural exports was US$60.1 billion; more than double that of the United States at US$27.9 billion.

Yes and no.

First of all, I'm European.

Use of English as a second language, it might surprise you, dropped in the past 10 years, it was spoken by 52% of the population in 2012, now it dropped to 44%.

Not native speakers, English is the fourth language in Europe for number of native speakers, after German, French and Italian (if we don't count Russian, largely first with 120 million native speakers)

Secondly, things can change rapidly.

20 years ago the most studied second language in Italian schools was French.

Thirdly, in Europe countries have spoken to each other for centuries, when I go to Spain I speak Spanish, when I go to France or Belgium I speak French, I can also speak some German.

Of course not perfectly, but we still understand each other better than through English, because of similarities in the languages.

So yes, second language counts, but only when other options are worse (I speak English with Sweds or Dutch - I've been studying Swedish on my own but my progress with the language have been very slow)

In many schools we study more than 1 foreign language.

I studied French in primary and middle school then English and German in high school.

They were regular public schools, far from the best.

It's quite common elsewhere.

My cousins live in Belgium, their kids study French, Flemish and of course Italian in school.

Many Italian researchers, for example, move to Germany and they learn German because it's better to know it when you live there, English is used to bootstrap the social life and at work.

CERN is in Switzerland and even though I believe everyone there speaks English, in Geneva the official language is French, it helps a lot outside of work to learn it, more than English. Move a few Kms and they speak German, go South and they speak Italian and you will still be in small Switzerland.

Where many people are naturally bi or trilingual.

Adding English as a third/fourth it's very easy for them.

Eventually everybody will learn some English, undoubtedly, but it's gonna be foreigners' English, that it's different from proper English and sometimes it's pure nonsense for native speakers and viceversa.