Sweden's strategy isn't only about deaths by Covid-19. It's about preventing total number of deaths including deaths caused by the things we do to prevent the spread of the virus. The line is to keep things as open as possible. Quarantine is problematic if you take things such as suicide, alcohol and substance abuse, child and spouse abuse and depression into account. The list goes on.
Swede here. Really baffling for me too. My kids have pretty much never even seen cash. I use the nationwide app Swish to send money to people using their phone number (almost every Swede is connected since it's pushed by all big banks) and only use contactless credit card.
How come Germany is so cash positive? Personally I think Sweden has gone a bit far, where some old people have been put in a weird spot where they can't pay because they're technologically illiterate.
Other people have replied to your message already and pointed out that we do use cards, just not credit cards. I figured that was clear in my comment, but apparently it wasn't, so I'll go ahead and edit that.
As for why we're so cash positive: one of the factors is privacy. If you pay for everything electronically both your bank and merchants are in the position to build a profile on you. If you use a non-local scheme (e.g. MC or Visa), they can too.
> we do use cards, just not credit cards. I figured that was clear in my comment,
I think the confusing part of your comment was where you consider non-credit cards (debit, prepaid etc.) to be distinct from VISA/Mastercard. That is not the case in most countries. It used to be the case in Germany, but is slowly changing as more and more debit cards are VISA/Mastercard cobranded.
Germans tend to take on very low levels of debt (speaking broadly). There are lots of hypotheses about the psychology behind it: https://www.bbc.com/news/business-31369185
I like the quit romantic explanation best, that debt in Germany has a moral component. "Debt" and "guilt" are nearly the same word, so taking on debt is a topic of moral philosophy: It's a sin ;-)
Interestingly online payments with Maestro (what cards are commonly co-branded with right now) are possible as well with quite a few sites, but the Maestro card number is not exposed and even if you manage to get it, I believe the cards are typically not enabled for that.
That's a peculiar choice, but I assume the decision was made to appeal to the typically skeptical German market. I do wonder why it wasn't made opt-in, though.
As a Canadian (where most people use debit/credit) my first time in Germany as a tourist I once had to leave my passport as collateral at a restaurant to go find an ATM to pay for our meal as I didn't have €80ish in cash. It flummoxed me almost as much as seeing Germans eat a hamburger with a knife and fork! ;-)
When asking around I got several answers. Everything from a cultural aversion to debt (and spending via cash makes it easier to track your spending), not wanting to be tracked where you shop due to not wanting the government to know (comes from Nazi/East German past), and just being culturally conservative and not really liking change all that much.
I didn't like it as being a tourist meant I was eating out a lot, etc. I had to carry a lot of cash around that I'd only have to pay a fee to convert back if I had any left.
Because I learned <center> like 20 years ago and it still works, while some of that I've only been exposed to in the last couple years (multiple "this is the right way to center" notions have come and gone since trusty ol' <center> became "bad") and I'd have much lower confidence it'd look the same in my browser as another.
[EDIT] I'm talking about situations like "we need an ugly informational page here for an hour" and all or some part of it would look better centered, or if I'm throwing up a placeholder page on a personal site. Those kinds of things, I'm not gonna google "what's the correct 2020 CSS to do what <center> does" and end up with a bunch of caveats and gotchas when I could just <center> and move on with my life.
And the latest browsers have finally finished implementing the 3D parallaxing layout system which has finally overtaken the other 6 layout systems. It takes a few more lines but it guarantees the compositing for AR is consistent regardless of surface. Meanwhile the center tag actually still just works.
It's easy to give up what you don't have. A web dev in Sweden has a social safety net to maintain a quality of life that is unobtainable in the U.S. without earning as much as possible. It is never at someone else's loss but at the discretion of managers based on the value each gives to the organization.
You do realize that Ionic is mainly used for App Store and Google Play right? You're free to not use it. It's a correct decision for Ionic to go with iOS and Android standards, from my point of view, and the implementation is superb as always with Ionic components.
A company shouldn't design its website with Google or Apple's visual branding as if it were locked into a closed platform. It also appears to be a problem with things like Flutter, though I haven't looked closely.
> "provides me with 625 minutes of work, interspersed with 275 minutes of breaks (provided my workday is 15 hours)."
Why would you work for 15 hours? I aim for 6. No way that you can be productive for 15 hours.
And, do you really want to spend pretty much all your time working? I followed along and agreed with lots of the stuff, then a comment like this throws me off. I totally understand that you're having trouble focusing if that's a normal day.
I've found that since using Tailwind I've got a deeper understanding of CSS, got a greater understanding of UI design (Adam Wathan's tutorials are great) and produce and replicate designs quicker and easier.
It's a design system with constraints, which automatically gives me fewer and better options.
Using something like Bootstrap is probably easier and quicker if you're unfamiliar with writing CSS though.
All in all, quite far from styling with inline `style` (but it takes a bit of learning on the thought process behind it).
Could you elaborate a bit more? I understand how something like this would help with understanding UI design as it abstracts away the unnecessary details of CSS. However without digging into what these classes actually do I don't understand how it helps with understanding of the actual CSS.
No, it does not. They're not exclusive. I've written large pages that pretty much only used component classes for pills and buttons, with Tailwind using @apply. All the other elements used utilities. Paired with purge-css you get small CSS bundles and really quick styling.
You'd often use something like a component based JS framework or a server rendered templating language, making it easy to contain all utilities with shared logic in one place.
I'd say this could probably give some people a way of looking at things, the environment they live in and that privilege is often there even though it's tabu / taken for granted.
At the same time, I find this to be true for a small type of entrepreneurship. My barber, the local store, my favorite restaurant is not really connected to privilege and everyone of them has gotten where they are anyways.
Your second paragraph gets at what I meant by ‘narrow view’. Entrepreneurship happens all over the country at just about all layers of the socioeconomic spectrum.
And yeah, people are idiots for going to bars.