> Also, the service is amazing, and they won't accept tips. If you leave money on the table, they will chase after you, to give it back.
I visited Japan some years back and loved this aspect of the culture as well. An Australian ski guide (this was a winter visit) explained it like so: "the Japanese attitude is to want to do a good job by default. Tipping implies that a good job is only done because of pay. The Japanese see quality service as intrinsically valuable in itself."
HN folks are privileged. We have careers that interest us, engage us, and reward us.
That's not the norm, in this world. I'm grateful for my career. I know quite a few folks that make excellent money, doing jobs they hate. In my mind, that's kind of a nightmare.
Japan does have a well known “customer is god” cultural background; whether or not tipping has anything to do with that is here or there, though it is the expectation that if someone does a job, it is expected not to be half assed.
One of the big differences between here in Japan and other parts of the world I’ve visited and lived in, is the near absence of service staff who actively make a point of looking like they hate their life and treat you like crap, though this is slowly changing here too.
This kind of reply is what makes me want to quit HN forever. There's always somebody out there smarter who knows better. Why bother to try and contribute anything?
The moon is so interesting, easy to forget how much it affects life on Earth because we see it all the time.
Like others in the thread, I have a telescope and it's a wonderful experience pointing it skyward while it's still light out and the moon is visible. Then I can really see all the craters and "pock marks" on the surface. (My telescope isn't good enough to be able to see anything during a full moon, it all just becomes washed out.)
I've never played with Omegle, but can you develop a reputation that will affect who gets matched with you, or is it just random? I guess I'm wondering if when you say "carving out a niche" you meant "creating a reputation" or something else.
In my experience it's a skill that takes time to develop. It's hard at first for sure. There are lots of different models out there that people using for visualizing software and architecture, sometimes they can be helpful.
A piece of guidance that helped me a lot was this: "when looking at boxes and lines, the junior architect looks at the boxes - the experienced architect looks at the lines."
> And regarding scrutiny, morphine is a immensely usefulness tool and it's use surely extremely monitored.
I went to high school in a fairly affluent area and I promise you this is not true. If you have money and know how to talk to your doctor, you can get whatever you want. No questions asked.
You can even get prescription methamphetamine - and Walgreens will stock generic for it!
Definitely not if you're a white male under 60 years old. They won't even give you opioids after surgery now because you are "high risk" .
If you're really rich it may be a different story, but any of the "middle class" good luck. And if you do find a doctor with some compassion, they are probably about to retire.
> One of the most glaringly broken things about society is that abuse of power is not punished harshly enough.
Maybe it's just me getting older but it seems like this has always been true across cultures and history. People like to believe that once they get power, they will act differently than the ones who came before. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, they end up being just like the people they replaced, if not worse.
Every once in a while you get an exception but that's why we remember those people - because they were the exception.
It's why I think the lottocracy people might have a point. Rocketing people from zero to power keeps you from experiencing the traumas associated with attaining or being given success and keeps your ego to a minimum because you know you literally did nothing to deserve it.
We actually have that, called "civil grand juries", but they don't do very much. It'd work a lot better than the current urban planning system, which is hearings where only retirees with a lot of free time who are opposed to the project shows up.
I think the fundamental problem with the current political systems is that they combine two completely different things into one office that should really be separate. Namely what a politician promises to achieve and how they intent to achieve it.
This can cause the actual result of policies to be wildly different from the claimed intended outcome. We’ve seen plenty of examples of this in the past, e.g. claim that you want to make sure everyone will be better off by lowering taxes for the rich (trickle down economics), which of course had the exact opposite effect.
This can be completely malicious, i.e. claim that your proposed policy will have outcome X while knowing it will have outcome Y. It can also be due to flawed ideology, i.e. your policy is based on your idea how the world should work instead of how it actually does work. Or it can be sheer incompetence.
What I would like to see is a system where the goal and the method of achieving it are separated from each other: a democratic technocracy. In this system politicians would only set the intended outcomes, and their relative priorities (in cases where policies would affect different intended outcomes in opposite directions). Then, government workers would decide the policies that would result in the desired outcomes (based on science, evidence based methods, etc.) They would be normal unelected workers subject to performance reviews (did their policies result in the intended outcome) and positions should be completely merit-based.
That way politicians have to be honest about what they want to achieve, people have a clearer idea what they are actually voting for and there is a system in place that will try to achieve those outcomes based on what actually works.
> because you know you literally did nothing to deserve it.
This greatly underestimates the level of vanity. Look only at the number of people who inherited their wealth, or received substantial financial support, yet still consider themselves self-made. I would also expect this to concentrate deistic thinking as people with a religious mindset will see being chosen as God's will and use the gained power to reinforce that.
I don't think I'd want to live in a country governed by the Dunning-Kruger effect. (Or maybe I already do?)
That's a problem of the Rules for Rulers. You think once you rule you have power, but unless you are literally Goku, you don't have power if nobody follow your orders.
> People like to believe that once they get power, they will act differently than the ones who came before. But in the overwhelming majority of cases, they end up being just like the people they replaced, if not worse.
I just re-listened to "Machine"[0] by the Violent Femmes because I wanted to subject a work colleague to it because he mentioned Blister in the Sun.
IIRC this came up when Apple tried to buy Dropbox - it was a way to accelerate the building of iCloud Drive. The Files app is essentially Apple's version of Dropbox, they make money charging for storage.
From what I recall a MSFT executive made a similar comment to Google that search was not a product (which turned out to be true).
How do we know for certain (certain) that Search is not a product? After all, hasn't Google made billions off of it? If it's not a product, then is it a feature? What is it a feature of? If neither product nor feature, what is it?
Man was Calvin & Hobbes awesome. IMNSHO every comic strip currently in print still lives in its shadow. C&H had it all - good illustration, good writing, life insight. It was a real life line for weird kids.
I don't know. The farside is pretty good, as well as Pearls Before Swine. Oh, and Cyanide and Happiness.
None of them reach the meta level of social/theological commentary that C&H did, but they're still really, really good on their own, doing their own things.
I visited Japan some years back and loved this aspect of the culture as well. An Australian ski guide (this was a winter visit) explained it like so: "the Japanese attitude is to want to do a good job by default. Tipping implies that a good job is only done because of pay. The Japanese see quality service as intrinsically valuable in itself."