sneed-oil

The problem in most first world countries is that there are not enough workers to take care of the aging population

I guess I'm one of those suckers, except that so far I've made a 3x return on the small sum I bet, I would say it's a hedge. I’ve been betting on the Iran war since mid February, the reasoning was that if the conflict happened, my payout would offset some of the jump in my cost of living. I could have used traditional financial instruments to buy options or oil futures or gold, but there's more friction there and I already had some crypto.

A male in a country that is about to enter a war could decide to leave to avoid conscription, depending on the odds

Centuries? It's hard to take something seriously when it doesn't even exist yet...

I would guess that having more than one passenger increases the chance of at least one of them dying in an accident

> I'm glad I live in Europe where literally nobody has guns except police and heavy criminals

I live in the EU and that's not true, I know multiple people who own guns and go to the shooting range every other weekend

It lets entrepreneurs bypass bureaucracy

Maybe because to them the upsides are more important than the downsides, including because it would be illegal to go out without pants in their country. I don't think wearing clothes should be required by law.

> There are no downsides to wearing a mask.

Besides the obvious effort required and the monetary costs, as somebody who wears glasses and commutes by bike and train I can name a couple others. After biking to the train station my breath is heavier than normal, and having to put a mask on when entering the train made my glasses fog up, so I would usually wear it under the nose (even those with a valve, because they still made it hard to breathe after biking, although a little easier). Otherwise I would be unable to use my phone nor laptop and I would have nothing to do for most of the commute. My glasses would also fog up when entering indoors locations during the winter, so I would have to clean my glasses and mess around with the mask to make the air come out from the bottom. There's also no clear upside for me given that I rarely get sick, the last time I had a fever was in 2022 and the time before that was 2017.

I don't mind my 75 minutes x 2 commute, but 55 minutes are spent on a half empty train and the rest on bikes (mostly on bike lanes or empty roads), so I get to eat a snack, use my laptop and do some mild cardio. I've done the same commute a couple of times by car and it was much more stressful.

It might also be due to demographics in Western countries. If the ratio of workers to total population decreases while the demand for work remains the same, there will be less competition for jobs and workers will be able to demand higher pay. It also depends on how many can be replaced by machines.

> They used to claim they were not an advanced economy and still a developing nation so they should be allowed to do it. Just like the West burned coal to industrialize. Is that still the official story?

I guess so, their median income is still lower than that of the US and western European countries

The same is true for me, but I could have learned those things without going to college and without wasting time studying subjects that have never been useful in my work.

It seems to me that the main purpose of having a college degree is signaling that you're not too stupid and too lazy, although it depends on what degree you got, in which college and which country. Of course you're supposed to have learnt something while you were there, but for the vast majority of my peers, what they learned about physics, electronics and control theory while pursuing our computer engineering degree, was mostly useless. All my acquaintances ended up working as software developers, and I know only one who writes firmware and needed to have some electronics knowledge.

So I don't get why many companies still require a degree for software developers. Some of my best colleagues don't have college degrees. Companies could use IQ tests to filter out stupid people and then proceed with a regular interview for those who passed the IQ test. Lazy people are very few in my experience and they would get filtered afterwards, but companies could just pay people less for the first few months to compensate. Maybe they could apply the process I described just to applicants without degrees.