If they aren't competing on price, what were they competing on to have Wal-Mart take over so much market share? Did people just switch to shopping at Wal-Mart because they like the greeters?
And what about Aldi and Lidl? Why do people put up with these weird German hard discounters, if not for lower prices?
In Austria I have noticed a massive social stigma. I think that's embarrassing and backwards. As someone who is very athletic and takes nothing extraordinary besides creatine and whey protein I fully support anyone who wants to become healthier, with or without medication.
In my experience this is not healthy. People who had problems with weight are very quickly losing excess weight and displaying a range of symptoms related to that including sunken and starved looking faces and significant loss of lean muscle mass. Changes made to the face with rapid weight loss may become permanent and especially for older people the loss of lean muscle mass can become a major health problem. Sudden extreme changes in body composition are often neither healthy nor stable.
There might be health problems associated with these drugs but they need to be compared to the next best option. I think for a lot of people on these drugs the next best option is continuing the status quo which has a lot of negative health outcomes as well.
Work for big companies that offer SWE positions they don‘t really need but won‘t downsize due to lack of accountability.
Never join small, privately owned (or even worse, privately controlled!) companies with extreme accountability and ownership. No startups. Run if they mention they are a company that is performance driven or a place where you can make an impact.
You want to be one of many random swe who can hide among his peers and you want to be able to make tons of meetings and red tape responsible for your slow progress.
Government, insurances, banks, big-corpo-bodyleasing consulting (like accenture, NOT „high pressure boutique consulting“). Body lease consulting is ideal, you can regularly leave behind the mess you caused and move on.
Doctors are usually just normal people that had the means, memory, drive and endurance to get through an exclusive education that will guarantee them a life in relative affluence and maximized adoration.
Connected thinking, interest in helping and extensive depth or breadth of knowledge in anything beyond what they need for their chosen specializations day to day work are rare and coincidental.
> Doctors are usually just normal people that had the means, memory, drive and endurance to get through an exclusive education that will guarantee them a life in relative affluence and maximized adoration.
Is that all?!
Also, everyone is just “normal people” in aggregate.
At least some portion of utilities and tax charges pay for ongoing maintenance and investment to provide expected quality of life. Similar to how rent for a home eventually pays for a new roof or other repairs.
The profit margin component of rent is probably what most are referring to in this discussion, but presumably tax and (government owned) utilities don’t have that.
This context is about a profit that gets distributed to shareholders, which obviously does not benefit the payer. Whatever "profit" a government owned utility earns is presumably, eventually re-invested into the utility eventually benefiting the payer.
Mobile phones are baffling to me. I heard a story recently that the Venezuelan government is stopping people on the street and inspecting mobile phones for dissident content. In such an environment, why are people relying on phones for anything? Why trust it at all? This stupid device _could_ get you taken to prison for merely having the wrong ideas, but you've still _just got to_ use it! I'm starting to think that if mobile phones gave parents' children rapid, aggressive brain cancer, all anyone would be talking about is "regulation" and "minimizing usage."
And I know someone's going to say "not using a phone might look _more_ suspicious!" I suppose but the needle does need to turn at some point, right? This risk was pretty easily foreseeable. If you got arrested for what was found on your phone during an arrest would you ever look at the device the same way again? In 5 years, would you be using it for meaningful or private communication whatsoever?
You might need to disclose social media accounts, phone numbers, email accounts, and a lot of other information, regardless of your burner: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1dz0g2ykpeo
Depends on when that goes into effect and how thoroughly it's actually implemented.
Isn't that highly suspicious? Or are you preparing burners with years of alternate social profiles activity? Because blatantly lying to the authorities is not something I'd take easily...
Why lie? If they ask you why there isn’t anything on there, just say you brought a cheap replacement phone because you didn’t want to lose or break your expensive daily device while traveling. Or because you don’t want it stolen or hacked when you’re in a foreign country. All valid reasons. Pick and choose whatever is most accurate for you.
Yeah I do think if your trust in state institutions is gone for whatever reason (such as living in a dictatorship), it'd be absolute madness to carry around an electronic snitch with you. I'm not sure what I would rely on in those circumstances, but it certainly wouldn't be smartphones. Personally I'd want to rely on in-person communication as much as possible.
I'd go even further. Even if you trust it now, can you trust it in 5 years? How much of your data do apps, companies, and mobile providers hold onto? The real answer is that you don't know. So if your phone is a super precise GPS that you can't turn off (eg: Android) -- were you near a crime scene by chance? How about a big protest 2 years before the political winds shifted. Who knows you were there? You can't know for sure.
Phones are just an easy target. Dumb phones still have address books, these are social networks too that can be exploited. In fact, that's how Chechnya prosecutes and kills unwanted people, like gays or regime opponents - by unraveling phone contacts.
The EU is slowly weakening Google's grasp on Android, for example by evening the playing field for app stores. You can get google-free Android devices from both Chinese manufacturers and the Netherlands (Fairphone). They aren't terribly attractive right now, but that could quickly change if the demand exists
At that point Google would probably turn even more hostile to the open source nature of Android, leading to some sort of fork
Google is tightening their grip on Android. They are going to effectively kill of alternative app stores by requiring them to use Google's developer verification (there have been discussions on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45569371 ). Many countries are introducing things such as age verification and ID apps that require Google Android. A lot of bank apps will only work with Google Android. This is why Fairphone offers a Google Android option, an I would guess that is what most people use.
There are lots of other problems. As discussed recently the HSBC app will not work if you have installed any software at all from another app store.
"Google-free" FOSS Android-builds (Graphene, /e/, iodé) are available today and usable for most tasks. Just make sure your government IDs and banking apps don't depend on proprietary Google-only features.
If the EU made a decent certification option so that the Google Store wasn't necessary for a lot of our apps, then Graphene and similar would be good replacements. As it is I couldn't use a single app on my android phone (I basically only have public sector apps + banking) without the Google Store thing. Since these all either require the Google Store themselves or the national digital ID which does
When I was developing C# winforms applications 15 years ago, I just created a fat signed .exe that was then distributed. Installers and click once stuff was a big turn off for users.
On startup, if not already there, it automagically copied itself to the installation directory, created an autostart directory link and started it from the new location and got killed with a named pipe command. It contained and extracted another .exe that was continuously checking for new versions, downloading them and starting them.
As malwary as it gets but it worked flawlessly!
The windows store nightmare that came after looks dreadful.
I do not use twitter/x, I do not use bluesky and I feel like I am dodging a lot of non anonymous people with uwarranted self importance.
I guarantee you that you will be happier if you avoid nom anonymous people with unwarranted self importance im general and online discussion connected to emotional topics specifically.
Anything technically interesting will appear on hacker news and other worldy news I can get by a quick daily check of my favorite news pages.
>Anything technically interesting will appear on hacker news
Sadly there's not a huge gamedev community here. So I do venture to the mainstream sites to peruse most gaming news. This is especially the case with the indie community that pretty much stick to the Twitterverse and Discord.
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