jlangenauer

6 ms·

1.
by jlangenauer 2y ago
I'm similar to this - I like drinking, but I've cut it down quite a lot in the last few years. My main rule is that I only drink (with occasional exceptions) on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, ensuring that I have at least 4 alcoh
2.
by jlangenauer 2y ago
A seriously incredible achievement, and I'm sure everyone at SpaceX is very happy with what they've done right now. I was absolutely certain it wasn't going to make it when I saw chunks breaking off the flap.
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by jlangenauer 2y ago
It's a fair point, but the only way at all to land on a body that has no atmosphere is to use rocket engines that point down. The Apollo Lunar Module landed on its "tail", though it did at least have a separate ascent stage
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by jlangenauer 2y ago
And have significant externalities which democratic societies must bear, but allow for the tech monopoly shareholders to reap more profits.
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by jlangenauer 2y ago
This is not exactly the fault of VW/Renault etc. China has quite explicitly encouraged technology transfer as an important strategic imperative for their local firms, so if these companies wanted to play in the (obviously growing) Chin
6.
by jlangenauer 2y ago
Or alternatively, "*technology will be used to extract profit, or preferably rent, from you and constrain your agency even further than it already is."
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by jlangenauer 3y ago
Oh that sucks. I recently rented a Model 3 from Sixt in Australia, and they said bring it back with any level of charge you want, which was great - I only had it for 3 days, and the initial charge was enough for that.
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by jlangenauer 3y ago
Both those brands are exactly that - brands - where a lot of the cost of the product is recycled right back into advertising to convince you that the brands are actually worth the prices they charge. When buying clothing, it's worthwhi
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by jlangenauer 3y ago
I was born in Australia and live in Germany, and I think I see something of the same: in both countries, there is no sense of purpose, no raison d'etre. There is no national project beyond managing a series of externally-imposed and se
10.
by jlangenauer 3y ago
I have a Canon printer which I use with Windows, and I get exactly the same thing. I think your diagnosis is correct.
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by jlangenauer 3y ago
I see we're going from "UI changes, the cause or reason of which we don't know" to "geopolitics" without considering any of the obvious alternative explanations. If China decides (and no-one is saying that it h
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by jlangenauer 3y ago
One of the other nice features of Swiss rental law is "imputed rent", which is rent the government assumes you have collected even if the property is empty, and upon which you are taxed. Discourages keeping properties empty.
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by jlangenauer 3y ago
It's not even a "crime problem". It's much more often people expecting their class prejudices to be embodied in the built environment, so that working class/poor/immigrant folks - which has nothing to do with c
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by jlangenauer 3y ago
To be fair, this is how most "advanced" economies operate. It's identical in Australia (although there the consulting companies run the sweatshops directly so they can skim more cream off the top). Same in the UK.
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by jlangenauer 3y ago
Because you need to pay VAT on imports into the country above a certain value (which is much less than the cost of a Macbook).
16.
by jlangenauer 3y ago
I see it less as an aristocracy (most of which are sidelined and/or laughed at), but instead a highly-evolved technocracy which runs Europe according to their ideal of what the citizens should want, and with a certain fear of democracy
17.
by jlangenauer 3y ago
What the hell? This isn't a slight negative, it's a compelling reason to avoid them completely. A low-risk SaaS business has their account terminated for no reason at all? Good lord, that's not what you want in a bank.
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by jlangenauer 4y ago
It should be noted that no-one was forced to put their money in a VC fund, so when the author is whining about VC's playing with "other people's money", he's ignoring that those "other people" very deliber
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by jlangenauer 4y ago
I detect a certain decline in almost all activism: You can spend years fighting any issue, but the other side will have too much money, too much patience, and even if, by some miracle, you eke out a temporary victory, you know that the same
20.
by jlangenauer 4y ago
I think it's something analogous to Jevons' Paradox. Jevon's Paradox, originally written about the use of coal, noted that as it become more efficient to use a resource, the end result was generally not that less of that reso
21.
by jlangenauer 4y ago
Another vote for Caro's magisterial biography of LBJ. I read all 4 volumes this year, and cannot praise them highly enough - not just a masterful biography, but an exposition of the country and how it changed, plus penetrating analysis
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by jlangenauer 4y ago
Why do "indiehackers" want attention from and create products for other "indiehackers"? As a group they seem the people with the least amount of money to spend on products, and are some of the most cheapskate people on t
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by jlangenauer 4y ago
You tax capital gains, interest income, dividends, royalties etc etc etc exactly the same as income from labor is taxed.
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by jlangenauer 4y ago
Why is it astounding? Leadership is there to serve the interests of shareholders, not employees. For obvious reasons, this truth is usually elided behind talk of "company families" and "valued employees", but it never ce
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by jlangenauer 4y ago
The idea that 10% of tweets are reported is a huge over estimate. I'd say at most 1% of tweets are reported, and it's probably more like 0.1%. Twitters actual numbers (from https://transparency.twitter.com/en/
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by jlangenauer 4y ago
Twitter has around 190m daily active users. You're going to struggle to run something like that with an engineering team of 20-30 people (although WhatsApp did exactly that for many years), sure. But I don't see why an company and
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by jlangenauer 4y ago
The thing about energy crises is that they provoke new forms of innovation and can usher in necessary change. Europe made a strategic mistake, but they are correcting it, and even if the next few years are hard, it's not going to have
28.
by jlangenauer 4y ago
As a very broad generalization, Europe treats businesses as businesses, rather than financial instruments. They are expected to grow and be profitable, rather than be fattened like cows for an eventual slaughter. That's why Europe has
29.
by jlangenauer 4y ago
Reminds me of an old joke. Back in the 60s, a Soviet diplomat ran into an American diplomat on the sidelines of some conference. "I want to congratulate you Americans", says the Soviet diplomat, "your propaganda is amazing, i
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by jlangenauer 4y ago
I've seen a lot of this, and I've started to pick up a few red flags you can watch out for. - The biggest and most obvious is that they don't have a functioning webcam that clearly shows who they are. If I encounter this, the

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