Ioper
1d ago
It also isn't completed. Although it is closing in on the end and I don't really think it matters much.
The first novel is pretty much self contained and arguably even works better as a standalone, so it doesn't have to be a big commitment to read it.
Nice animation though.
I bounced off it because i thought it was poorly directed, even though parts of it were well animated.
Would you recommend powering through or just reading the novel?
Ioper
1d ago
It's a million small things. Everyday values, behaviours, interests, language used, food eaten, what is high/low status etc. It's in every aspect of their lives, just like my culture is in every aspect of my life.
It is hard to sum up because it's all pervasive and at the same time not that big of a difference. The middle class and the upper middle class are not worlds apart after all.
A lot of it comes down to being less confrontational and more dignified. Also, they spend more time and effort on social signaling and maintaining a social network, outside of closer friends.
Ioper
2d ago
Culturally middle class, economically upper middle class.
My wife is solidly, multigenerationally, UMC and I can feel the difference.
My take is that its the fragmented regulatory, consumer and financial markets that are the biggest problems here. It's not that there is a ton of regulation its that there are 20+ versions of the onerous regulations.
It's too difficult to scale a business in europe because despite efforts and the goal of the EU it is in no way a single market. When you want to scale your business rather than just export consumer products this becomes a massive issue, which is why every notable new company in europe usually starts in their own country (and perhaps very similar neighbours) and then rather than expanding into Europe they launch in America and eventually list themselves there, and only then start expanding into the rest of Europe.
Ioper
2d ago
And the equivalent to the pixel 9a in 2013 was the nexus 5 that cost 350$.
I can not get a phone that works similarly well today for 350$, regardless of what the system specs say, the software requirements for the same programs with the same functions are higher for no goddamn reason.
I mean "killing" them by eating the talent. They didn't disappear, the quality is just shockingly low.
Ioper
2d ago
Also, is the American Music industry that disproportionately successful? Especially compared to Britain. For something like movies America clearly is dominant but for music it doesn't feel as clear to me.
Perhaps things have become lopsided since I greatly cut down on listening to new music some time in the early 10s.
Inversely, it feels like the "tech industry" is eating American software and other areas of the economy are often left in sort of a software desert. We come in as Europeans and think we have garbage solution and surely noone in America could ever want our garbage, only to discover that it's somehow, unfathomably, even worse in the US.
Obviously the tech industry is fabulously financially successful but sometimes I wonder if it would be better if it was a bit less profitable so American software talent could be spread a bit more evenly throughout the economy.
The issue is nominal deflation and that has not happened with computers, there has been inflation.
If you're talking about compute specifically then that is true in a sense but cheaper computers aren't really available and it's not really an option to buy them from a user perspective anyway because hardware requirements rise just in line with hardware improvements. I was fine with 2013s smartphones and I'm using them identically today, but those aren't available anymore and even if they were they'd probably not be usable anyway.
Ioper
5d ago
I'm not really making a value judgment on the superiority of any nation really
Yes, you are.
Great, my post was meant to be pointing at dysfunction, so I guess you got my point...
And yet you fail to see the even greater dysfunction in the places you visit. You're just richer there man. Your analysis of the places you visit is just plain wrong, egregiously so.
What conclusions can we draw from your post? It's nice to be rich and the housing market is fucked.
Food in Thailand is extremely delicious, healthy, and very cheap. I am sure the average Thai person eats a healthier diet than the average Japanese. Japanese food is extremely dated in nutrition and food trends. It is so to such a degree that I suspect it’s a sort of fashion or cliquish refusal to update rather than a lack of knowledge or interest. (South Korea next door has a very modern and nutritious food culture- eating healthy is significantly easier there than in Japan.) Thai foods feature a great variety of vegetables, fruits, meats and seafoods. Before I visited Thailand, I imagined that maybe they would be behind on trends or stuck in the past, since they are poor, but the opposite is true. You can find the trendiest foods in Bangkok- anything from the latest Korean baked craze, to Dubai chocolate bars and parfaits and ice cream cones, to Burmese tea leaf salad. They have it, and you can have it delivered within an hour for pennies.
SK has a 50% higher obesity rate than Japan, and Thailand a fully 100% higher obesity rate.
Clearly they're doing something quite a bit better than the nations you profess are clearly superior. It's fine to say that you prefer Thai food to Japanese food, I certainly do, but I don't really believe it's healthier. For instance, it might not be immediately obvious but thai cooking uses a lot for sugar.
You may be thinking- ok, this guy is rich in Thailand and poor in the US, of course he is going to have a merrier view of the Thai economy. But when I look at charts like this I am in the 95th percentile of wealth for my age, in the US. I am frugal with my money, yes, but I would like to be able to afford a life on par with or better than that of my father at the same age, and I’m not sure I can.
Congrats, you've discovered that the housing market is very dysfunctional. That tells us very little about the productivity of society in general, just that it extracts money from young people and gives it to old people. It might even be that having a dysfunctional housing market makes the economy more productive because it forces young people to work more. If a house cost 300k rather than 1.5m then people with decent salaries might very well choose to work less.
You also have to realise that this situation is even worse in Thailand, with housing affordability and household debt a far higher than in the US.
But then you're missing out on the wonderfully jingoistic lyrics!
If we're counting historic songs that I like that have gone through a lot of versions before ending up in its current form then i would point you towards Björneborgarnas marsch. The melody was probably written in France, the melody was then popularised in Sweden by the famous Swedish troubadour Carl Michael Bellman and was subsequently adopted as a marsch by the Swedish army. 70 years later, and post Sweden losing Finland to Russia, a Swede living in (and naturalised citizen of) Finland wrote a poem that became the lyrics to the song of called Björneborgarnas marsch. This was eventually translated to Finnish and became the anthem of not only the Finnish armed forces but also their president and Estonia's armed forces.
Ioper
7d ago
I don't live in a hot country buy whenever it's hot here and I run out AC I've never been bothered by a dry throat, neither have I while on vacation.
Perhaps this is you problem? Perhaps you breathe through you mouth when you sleep? Maybe you could try using tape?
Ioper
9d ago
Isn't it just a case of a preference cascade? The vast majority's opinion on woke ranged from mildly annoyed to actively hating woke stuff but falsified their opinions publicly due various well known factors. Wokeness then suffered a number of setbacks, plenty of them self inflicted, that caused annoyance to both boil over and being able to be expressed, leading to a preference cascade.
The opinions "disappeared" quickly because >90% of people never held them in the first place.
This of course doesn't mean people are rightwing, if anything redistributive policies seem more popular than ever. It's just that woke specifically was never popular on a grassroots level (perhaps outside a brief period of post Floyd hysteria).
Ioper
10d ago
Google should just call their bluff, where are they going to monetize?
Presumably other internet advertising venues like Facebook?
Maybe google should just unlist their domains and advertising campaigns if they pull out of youtube.
That is how you get bent over and raped by regulators that are already annoyed with you.
Ioper
11d ago
It was not all fake. You might claim that the advertiser boycott was intended to censor political opposition but the boycott itself was real.
That started way earlier back in 2017 in response to among other things PewDiePie making thirdies do racist jokes on camera via fiver and a bit later calling an opponent a nigger during a stream.
This was not YouTube using these things as a pretext for demonitization. Major advertiser like Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Johnson & Johnson, Pepsi, Adidas, HP, Deutsche Bank, etc. started pulling ads completely from YouTube which lead to a steep fall in ad revenue for the creators. YouTube's response came after, trying to get advertisers back.
It was absolutely advertiser driven. It could well be that advertisers don't care now but they did back then.
Ioper
12d ago
Apparently there's a secret third sector neither of us have found yet.
People in healthcare related professions (like nurses) can often get a lot of time off as compensation for overtime and night shifts as long as they don't spend it during the holidays. They are usually incentiviced to do this rather than taking cash compensation.
Ioper
17d ago
For young and older people I'm not sure women travel more than men but I've noticed a specific demographic of female travellers that doesn't really have a male counterpart. It's 25-40yo women who (usually) have some kind of higher education but are either unemployed or underemployed and spend a lot of time traveling, which is financed by their fathers, either directly through monthly stipends or indirectly by buying them a house/apartment with no strings attached.
This doesn't really have a corresponding demo for men because their families won't finance nominally successful men to have a layabout lifestyle, but they will do so for women and spending their time traveling is higher status than being a regular neet, so it isn't a black mark against the parents.
Ioper
17d ago
Not really. Most go directly for the rich countries and almost no-one anchors in the real EE shit holes. Some do "anchor" in Italy or Spain before heading north though.
In addition to what you said I find monotonous physical activities relaxing, like hand-mowing the lawn or chopping wood. The activity itself makes me mentally unwind and the physical excertion makes be relax physically afterwards.
Also Sauna.
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