You seem to be more confident in universal healthcare having "long wait times for serious conditions" than in universal healthcare resulting in better health outcomes at a lower cost per citizen. What makes you trust the first premise more than the second one?
as we delve further into the mass media spectacle one thing has become clear as everything else has become very muddy: the truth isn't what the facts support, it's what you hear three times from people you consider your peers. the fact is that the data that show increased wait times are for elective surgery (https://www.comparethemarket.com.au/health-insurance/feature...) which (by nature of being elective) doesn't correspond to increased mortality or cost, but the wait times on emergency care are comparable for single payer and individual payer systems are comparable, with the US doing slightly better in waits for people who actually receive care but, again, no indication of how many people avoid care due to the cost.
I must say, regardless of whether his criticisms of German culture and society are justified or not, it is no surprise to me that Zeitmagazin rejected his proposal, them having requested a column titled 'What I would have liked to know about Germany earlier'. The text as written by Ai Weiwei does not even make an effort to follow the prompt, but rather is simply a rant on implied problems that he sees in Germany.
Did Ai Weiwei not already 'know' each of the general aphorisms he wrote in his article? What is specific to Germany about his critique and not, say, to his native China or to any other country? Why would he have 'liked to know' about these things earlier, and what impact would it have had on his life or his decisions?
The text he wrote makes a lot of sense under that prompt because that prompt provides the frame under which to read it. Knowing the prompt makes it obvious that his general observations happen to apply to Germany and he wasn't aware of that before moving there. He's just polite by not spelling it out.
The real issue for non-publication is the one he cites: "additional reflections in a more personal and light-hearted tone". This matches the general type of content in Zeit Magazin. They weren't looking for a scathing criticism of societal ills but some entertaining piece that goes well with the other easily digestible articles.
Commenting on such a broad and general theme as the article does feel useless. Bureaucracy yadada, people standing on an empty street light... sausage is ok.
Doesn't speak the language, claims the people are not free. How shallow.
There are more interesting models to build here. More interesting art to create. But hey it provoked me. Like most modern media, it made me a bit sad.
>Here, at a deserted street, people stop dutifully at a red light. Not a car in sight.
This made me chuckle as I remembered a German friend who passed a red light on a bike at 3am at a deserted street in a German college town and got fined 150 euros by an out-of-nowhere cop car.
Happened to me in Death Valley, in the very hot middle of nowhere.
I came from a dust road and did not fully stop on the stop sign for the main road through the valley, I had only slowed down and then made the turn.
Out of nowhere there were park ranger lights behind me. I still don't know if they were cloaked or if they teleported behind me, I don't know how I could possibly have overlooked them. Everything flat and nothing anywhere, suddenly they are there.
I don't remember if I had to pay or if it was just a warning.
I think it's one thing to "know" in a cynical way what the world around you is, and another to have it confirmed by being immersed in it for any prolonged period of time.
Assumedly Ai Wei Wei would have established himself in a different location if he "knew" exactly how the attitudes he mentions are manifested in the German culture.
> I think developers overestimate how much everyday users care about local-first, or working offline.
And that's because (many) everyday users are not even aware that being online is not essential to perform the functionality they need from their applications. It's not that users don't care that they cannot work offline. It's that they don't even understand that requiring an internet connection is not a technical necessity, but rather an artificial limitation imposed by business interests or incompetence.
A significant proportion of the administrative area of Madrid is covered by fenced-off forests. Plus it covers other swathes of non-developed land and even most of its airport. The administrative area of Paris proper, on the other hand, is fully urbanised. See here for comparison:
London is a whole different animal. While Madrid and Paris are arguably "similar" cities in terms of urban design and residential density, London and UK cities in general are completely different.
> [...] Madrid has a dense network too (≈0.50), though well behind Paris.
As a native of Madrid, I must point out that using the nominal surface area of the municipality of Madrid (~605 km²) is misleading for these purposes due to the Monte del Pardo [0] and Soto de Viñuelas [1], two fenced off forest areas covering around 180 km² between them. The impact of these areas on the nominal surface area of the city is visually obvious when you compare the outlines of Madrid and Paris administrative areas:
As a result, the relevant surface for estimating the density of Metro stations in Madrid should be at most ~425 km². While one may arguably also want to exclude the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de Vincennes from the surface area of Paris, even the "de-Pardo'd" surface area of Madrid still contains significant non-urban areas such as the Casa de Campo forest, large non-built-up areas, and even most of its airport.
(In any case though, after this pedantic "well ackshually", I must also point out that a few Madrid Metro stations actually fall outside of its municipal limits. I would get out more, but I live in a town without a Metro)
We've had decades of 'simple warning signs' or measures as complex as coastguards and yet people are still periodically lost in the wilderness, badly injured, or even killed. Education clearly isn't working here either — what restrictions should we impose on people's right to roam to solve this?
You clearly know the answer here since you used the word “periodically”. There’s a massive difference between hundreds and millions. No one is stopping you from buying a non Google phone, no one is stopping you from running calyx or graphene. Mitigation for the things that affect the most number of people is how the world works.
> Mitigation for the things that affect the most number of people is how the world works.
Millions of people hurt themselves, physically hurt themselves, every day, doing things that we could easily restrict. Yet we still allow them to buy knives, glassware that can break, hammers, power tools, non automated vehicles of all kinds, the list goes on.
We also spend a lot of time educating them on the dangers, far more than is spent warning about online scams, and we do it at a far earlier age (age 0, for some of them).
Of course we still allow the sale of safe knives and plastic mugs, so people are free to choose; that point still stands. I'd argue that there is more competition in tableware, and less friction shifting between it, than there is in mobile operating systems.
Physical goods are much easier to regulate and legislate than digital worlds. You choose to take a specific level of transit when traveling places, guided by your risk aversion and other things you know. But some stuff you don’t know, like the things that go on behind the scenes to actually make those things safe. From road markings to the type of joints used in train tracks.
This is the exact same thing. We don’t spend time educating users of roads on how the road stripe width affects their safety, nor about how train tracks carry radioactive material through their communities every day. We let the companies and governments work to make things safer for everyone, even if it comes at the expense of some.
I honestly can’t believe I’m having this argument. Making things safer for the world should be a goal we all strive for, even if a very very incredibly small minority lose a tiny tiny bit of what they want.
> No one is stopping you from buying a non Google phone, no one is stopping you from running calyx or graphene.
Google and phone manufacturers have been actively moving in that direction and have a long history of being actively hostile to those things. This is just another move on the same board to restrict these freedoms.
> There are, I think, two small cracks in that argument.
> The first is that a user has no right to run anyone else's code, if the code owner doesn't want to make it available to them. Consider a bank which has an app. When customers are scammed, the bank is often liable. The bank wants to reduce its liability so it says "you can't run our app on a rooted phone".
> Is that fair? Probably not. Rooting allows a user to fully control and customise their device. But rooting also allows malware to intercept communications, send commands, and perform unwanted actions. I think the bank has the right to say "your machine is too risky - we don't want our code to run on it."
> The same is true of video games with strong "anti-cheat" protection. It is disruptive to other players - and to the business model - if untrustworthy clients can disrupt the game. Again, it probably isn't fair to ban users who run on permissive software, but it is a rational choice by the manufacturer. And, yet again, I think software authors probably should be able to restrict things which cause them harm.
It's not clear to me whether in this fragment the author is stating the two alleged cracks in the argument or rather only the first one — the second one being Google's ostensible justification for the change. Either way, neither of these examples are generalisable arguments supporting that 'a user has no right to run anyone else's code, if the code owner doesn't want to make it available to them'.
With regards to banking apps, the key point has been glossed over, which is that that when customers are scammed the bank is 'often' liable. Are banks really liable for scams caused by customer negligence on their devices? If they're not, this 'crack' can be thrown out of the window; if they are, then it is not an argument for "you can't run our app on a rooted phone", but rather "we are not liable for scams which are only possible on a rooted phone".
As for the second example, anti-cheat protection in gaming, the ultimate motivation of game companies is not to prevent 'untrustworthy clients' from 'running their code'. The ability of these clients to be 'disruptive to other players' is not ultimately contingent on their ability to run the code, but rather to connect to the multiplayer servers run by the gaming company or their partners. The game company's legitimate right 'to ban users who run on permissive software' is not a legitimate argument in favour of users not having full control over their system.
Thanks for the feedback. Those examples are meant to cover the first point.
The problem if you are a bank is that scammed people can be very persistent about trying to reclaim their money. There's a cost to the bank of dealing with a complaint, doing an investigation, replying to the regulator, fielding questions from an MP, having the story appear in the press about the heartless bank refusing to refund a little old lady.
It is entirely rational for them to decide not to bear that cost - even if they aren't liable.
> rather "we are not liable for scams which are only possible on a rooted phone".
Who is going to prove that though? It’s much simpler and less stressful on our court systems if a bank just says “we don’t allow running on rooted phones” and then if a user takes them to court the burden is on proving whether the phone was rooted or not rather than proving if the exploit that affected them is only possible on a rooted phone.
> Are banks really liable for scams caused by customer negligence on their devices?
In the UK, not legally liable. However culture is not 100% aligned with the law and in practice banks that stick to the rules will be pilloried by the left-wing press and politicians, they risk regulator harassment etc, so they sometimes decide to socialize the losses anyway even when the law doesn't force them. The blog post cites an example of that.
To stop this you'd have to go further and pass a law that actively forbids banks from giving money to people who lost it to scammers through their own fault.
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