The choice between Made in Asia and Made in the USA can be more complicated. For instance, I will acknowledge that 85% of price difference is a lot, but then I'd rather own less stuff: less clothing, less food, certainly no goodie bags. If anything, I hate that the house is filled with stuff that family members bought for now good reason except this jolt of pleasure at the time of purchase.
> When I’m on my deathbed, I won’t look back at my life and wish I had worked harder.
An inconvenient truth is that not everyone can find a meaningful career in their own eyes. Case in point, to me tech industry is such a wonderful industry. We are paid exceptionally well. We get to be creative every day. We largely control our own output. We blend product design with engineering design and implementation. We get to geek out on college maths and statistics. We build things that get used by many people, if not millions of them. The list can go on and on. Yet, I'm sure everyone on HN knows at least a group of tech people who are miserable doing their jobs.
I think a strong loyalty towards a company will work only in a society like Japan: companies are culturally committed to taking care of them employees until their death. In the meantime, the income gap between ordinary employees and the executives is small. Per this article (https://japanoptimist.substack.com/p/japan-reality-check-4-i...): "The biggest difference between the Salaryman CEO and the Superstar CEO is, of course, the absolute gap in CEO compensation relative to average employee pay: in Japan this is now just about 50-times (for top 50 CEOs; the average is about 12-times)". And there is a seniority system. In contrast, the US companies have none of those.
I'd rather subscribe to Reed Hoffman's notion on company-employee relationship: alliance. That is, a company and its employees are allies. It is a two-way relationship that enables companies and employees to work together toward common goals, even when some of their interests differ. If either a company or an employee feels that the alliance does not exist any more, they part ways. Note that this notion is orthogonal to the power dynamics between a company and its employees. The power dynamics has to do with supply-and-demand of the market and the negotiation power of the employees.
> I liked math and physics and economics and even chemistry,
I think the reason is that these subjects give students a sense of instant gratification and instant empowering. Every concept and every theorem could be a breakthrough to my problem-solving skills, and I can immediately see how I can solve more problems through the learning.
But of course, nothing gives more instant gratification than CS. I can try and build things via my keyboard at any time. The learning and the associated work does not get better than that.
Donald Knuth used to go to a secretary school to learn touch typing, and IIRC he could easily type more than 120 WPM. Yet he decided to write his books and papers first with pencil and a piece of paper, and then type them out. The reason is that he found that he typed faster than he could think, which in turn interfered with his thinking process, while writing on paper matches his speed of thinking.
I also find taking notes on paper helps me focus more than typing, but it could be just that writing slows me down so I have more time to unconsciously reflect more. I also find writing math on paper is way more effective than using a computer, but that's most likely because I'm not that familiar with LaTex, so typing out equations interrupts my thought process.
I read somewhere that he even programs on paper and punches it into a computer when he's done.
As for myself, I definitely understand the problem he's describing. I catch all my fleeting thoughts with a keyboard, but I always find my mind wandering into tangents and end up losing the focus of what I'm really getting at, or I end up in a cycle of endless micro revisions. When I started writing with pen and paper it enforced a certain economy into my writing process. By having a natural speed limiter, I have to focus more on the heart of what I'm getting at; being in the zone writing with pen and paper feels totally different to me than writing on a keyboard, you get into a much deeper state of focus.
I'm also similar to Knuth during programming. I start by writing notes and designing on paper. For larger projects, I always keep a dedicated "lab notebook". That notebook contains designs, the rationale behind them, and some mental shaking of these ideas to see whether they stick. Sometimes, I toss the idea, and note why I did it. If the idea makes to the computer and fails spectacularly, reasons are noted as a lessons learnt note.
Personal diaries are also written with pen or paper, because I found out that, even if I type it without any interruptions, I can't dive that deep into the issue and dig it the way I want. I also noticed that, while writing this comment, new ideas for blog posts are also born on paper, with some notes, too.
I also keep a notebook which I carry everywhere and scan it when it finishes. That "scratchpad" carries hundreds of thought blobs like that. While they are mostly to-do lists, also ideas, small notes, and other pointers to ideas and small stuff are in these notebooks, and they work as an external working memory for me, allowing me to dig, process and think in a way which I can't do while looking to a screen and typing away on a keyboard.
Math lessons from Red China between 1960s and 1980s send their regards. Joke aside, it's interesting to see how different political beliefs lead to opposite viewpoints for the same experience.
Due to deeply scarring experiences in communist China, some Chinese immigrants in America are extremely wary of the Democratic Party, believing they've been following in the footsteps of the Communist Party by substituting morality for rules and narratives for truth. These immigrates are like those Cuban immigrant: they turned red (I read somewhere that some research showed that most Chinese immigrants started with blue as they really believed in liberalism) and voted Trump.
On the other hand, some other Chinese immigrants with the same experience reached the opposite conclusions. Their painful experiences made them suspicious of Trump's Republican Party, which they view as resembling authoritarian movements by prioritizing ideology over facts. These immigrants typically became more blue and supported Kamala Harris and Democratic candidates.
I used to discuss my different views and presented data or facts that I gathered The facts, of course, could be wrong, as I have limited faulty to verify everything. Yet, instead of pointing out what I said was wrong, I got angry posts attacking my motives and my posts were flagged. So, now I know the game, and for such politically charged posts, I know what I can do easily: flag it away.
It's true that HN has shown itself _mostly_ incapable of having a useful discussion on topics that involve the current US president. (But sometimes a useful thread of conversation emerges!) Users that are frustrated by a flagged topic will retaliate by flagging comments they disagree with. And vice versa.
I think retaliating like this just makes HN worse. If you stop flagging perfectly good stories, HN will be a marginally nicer place for discussion. I'll say the same to anyone here who admits to blanket flagging of comments.
Please keep trying to discuss your views. Sometimes they'll get smacked down unfairly, but other times they'll stick around. The more you try, the more they'll stick, and hopefully it can shift the tone of discussion here.
The Iron Rule, right? The benefit of the Iron Rule is that those who break rules face consequences, preventing them from escalating their behavior. So you cancel me, I cancel you, only harder. You play law fare, I do the same to you, only more legally but in a harsher way. Hada yada yada. It’s the only way to keep the society civil, eventually.
You post something and based on its content you assume someone from an ideological group flagged it. And for that reason you flag and opinion of someone you assume is from that group?
It seems to me like people were mostly receptive to your facts and data. You got angry posts attacking your motives when you wrote angry posts such as this:
> Yeah, we elected Trump to fuck up the ball of worms that your left cherished so much, and Trump is following through.
Interestingly, that one was not flagged. The ones that gave simple data points were. That said, was that comment angry? I was happy because I finally saw a president deliver his campaign promises. Or maybe I was angry but angry as a liberal: we are supposed to keep government in check, yet when doge found out so much potential issues of the government and ngos, the first reaction of the left was to attack the motives of doge and to protect the institution? Where was the liberalism?
> Britain remained a leader in theoretical science and defense technology, but its socialist government economic policies led to its failure to commercialize wartime innovations.
And the detriment of UK's auto industry, manufacturing industry, and etc. I really don't understand how people still fancy state-controlled economy.
Sorry but this is such a shallow comment. In what way is the US government directing public funding to academic institutions not state control? It's just a different organisational framework that appears to have been more successful.
The mainstream assessment is deindustrialization is inevitable in the western world because all kinds of legitimate reasons: the cost is too high. The talent pool is too small. We are left behind and lack critical IPs and infrastructures. People are too lazy/stupid/uneducated/self righteous/<your favorite derogatory phrases>. We can hang on to our high-value service industry.
What I don't understand is, why would people even want the US dollar and its service industry if we can't produce sufficiently any more? And what about future conflicts in the world? The US can't even produce enough saline solution or disinfectant wipes, let along active pharmaceutical ingredients? Did people see what China goods we tariff on? We tariff China for advanced materials, electronics, machineries, and etc, yet China tariffs on our raw materials and agricultural goods. And we think the US can maintain its wealth by behaving like a colony of China? When there's a conflict between us and China, what do we do? Beg them for the life essentials? And we keep yelling to punish Russia and help Ukraine to win the war and we should, but with what? We can't even out produce artillery shells faster and cheaper than Russia, or drones faster and cheaper than China. Admiral Yamamoto used to say that he saw so many factories and chimneys in Philadelphia that he knew that those industries could turn into efficient war machines if Japan ever declared war on the US. Would he be able to say the same today?
As for what we can, wasn't the US a manufacturing powerhouse until early 2000s? BTW, the US is still a manufacturing powerhouse in some sectors, but we just can't make things cheap enough with good quality because we pretty much destroyed our light industry. Didn't China have nothing and it was heavy investment from the western world that helped China grow so fast and so rapidly? Then, why can't we shift investment back to the US and bring our key industries back? We kept talking about technical difficulties, yet we ignore the necessity of the matter.
> Yet to many Europeans the idea that free expression is under threat seems odd. Europeans can say almost anything they want, both in theory and in practice.
What about the 60 Minutes segment from February 2025, where CBS correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi interviewed German prosecutors about Germany’s strict hate speech laws? The report, aired on February 16, 2025, discussed how German authorities can raid homes and seize devices over online posts deemed offensive, such as hate speech, insults, or misinformation. The prosecutors, including Dr. Matthäus Fink, Svenja Meininghaus, and Frank-Michael Laue, explained that German law allows police to act against speech that incites hatred or insults.
I'm particularly concerned that "hate" and "insult" and "misinformation" can be so subjective. That's why the US 1A protects even hate speech.
And what about British police arrested people who post memes online for the similar reasons?
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