That's not really true. He was a control freak and thought he and Apple knew better what people need. They always wanted to control the whole experience and most of the things were initially closed off because he never wanted anyone to modify the Apple experience and his products. That's why initially he didn't even want to let people install other apps on the iPhone and was against the AppStore.
Is this some sort of psy-op here against EU, this isn't the first message like this where someone is praising China and accusing EU, as if it's a unitary entity, about being a "horror show". If only we would have some dictators or extremist parties back in power to break up the EU and take our countries back to the good old days. I'm finding it harder and harder to come back to Hn with all of this stuff.
Sure, it's a psy-op. ONLY POSITIVE EU OPINIONS ARE PERMITTED! :))
I lived 12 years in China and now 1.5 in EU. Traveled both fairly extensively. The above is just my experience.
We left China in big part due to authoritarian politics. But if what's happening in EU (and US? never been there tho) is "democracy" then maybe we need to rethink.
I like many things in EU, and I dislike many things as well. At least here I'm not worried for my safety when I discuss it online, aside from some people calling it a psy-op or whatever.
In the EU countries I have visited you can ask most coffee shop and restaurants to use their toilet without any issue. In the most touristy places you are supposed to buy something, which usually is a coffee or a small bottle of water.
If it's a psyop it's only on the side that China might be somehow better, cause frankly neither my home country nor any others I've visited throughout the EU (and by now that's over half of them) are particularly good in this aspect. Like gas stations now require you to scan your bill to access the toilet, and it's still a toss up if it'll be clean or not, it's practically normal for restaurants to have "toilets for guests only" signs. Like how far can we fucking sink in this regard, it does not cost an euro of water, paper and cleaning work per person visit to run a toilet, it's borderline extortion just because they know people have nowhere else to go.
The only thing propping it up is that unlike a hundred years ago, people generally now have the common decency to not piss everywhere, which I think would reverse this idiocy rather quickly.
No, commonly here on HN it is American commentators who've visited like Italy or Greece or France once, then they extrapolate their experience in a tourist-heavy city, looking/behaving as an American, over the entire continent. Happens almost every day here.
Any comment mentioning EU/Europe here has to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Usually it turns out they've visited some countries and the experience is unique for where they visit.
To be fair, the same happens towards the US too, someone visits Montana then assumes a bunch about the entire country. I guess "American visiting country in Europe" is just more common here, given the US bias on this forum usually.
This is a passion topic of mine and I am a German citizen living in Germany. I am absolutely furious ever since I visited Asia. Public restrooms here are rare, mostly broken, disgusting and health hazards in all of Germany no matter where you go. I'd guess that about 15% of accessible toilets outside your home are OK experiences.
Every non-EU citizen should be aware of what to expect in Germany, and even worse in France, Italy or Greece. Shithole is a perfect description - it is just unbelievable how barbarically bad we are at public restrooms in comparison to anything you find across developed Asian countries.
Even beyond just cleanliness, you always have harassing bathroom bouncers in private AND public facilities in Germany, basically acting as highway robbers to steal your money without ever actually cleaning anything. At best they look up from a phone and nod when you pay your urine toll.
The only half usable bathrooms are from corporations like Sanifair which are making a business out of uncontrollable, basic human bodily functions. China doesn't need to invest in psyops against Germany or the EU at all if we are perfectly able to make ourselves look bad in comparison. Just use Occams razor.
And of course the major issue is vandalism and destruction by a huge population of junkies, homeless, aggressive (male) youths etc. on top of anti-social behavior, hegemonially pushed by American individualism ever since WW2. I guess this is the point where you can accuse me of injecting ideas that could originate from Chinese psyops? In the end I want a society that cares for its fellow citizens.
Europe is Shcrodiger's continent. Nobody knows exactly what countries/regions norms are to be dishonestly projected across all of it until after you know what lie you're trying to peddle on the American internet.
Maybe you'll make it out to all be like the nordics. Maybe you'll make it all out to be like Sicily, or Croatia. Whatever lie you have, Europe has something to back you up, lol.
I'm exaggerating (less than I want to be) but not joking here.
Someone from bumbfuck nowhere visits one big city and generalizes their experience, good or bad.
Or how all of HN is constantly convinced that the entire US is only SV or NYC, which is why they continually praise how Uber broke the "Taxi Cartel" that didn't exist anywhere else.
Or how much of the country only knows of cities from the propaganda they were fed by Fox News, which is why my brother told my mom that Portland Maine was a war zone back during the BLM marches, because 20 kids were laying down in front of the police department, which was a nothing burger and cops weren't even bothered, more like amused.
But the city is somehow not a warzone when ICE abducts 100 people off the street and kills at least one.
Not only have many of the Americans here extensively traveled Europe and/or lived there (myself included), but there are loads of Europeans on HN! Including all over this thread talking about their own experiences in their own countries!
> They also do not introduce these regulations "from tomorrow"
This wasn't introduced "from tomorrow", people had 1 year and a half to prepare for this (at least) or to protest this. See some comments below how individual countries actually messed this up.
> But of course EU is fundamentally different in a way that the politicians need to please the electorate, so nothing is really planned ahead.
> I don't know if this EU regulation will work or not (most likely not)
It's good that you take the time to just make assumptions about how the EU is bad based on your knowledge on how it operates...
They do. You can just break the law. Especially when it's a civil regulation like using recyclable packaging material, you will not go to jail for that.
You responded to an abbreviation of the original argument. The original was "people had one year to prepare for or protest this". And the impact of a required equipment replacement is dependent on the expected lifetime of the equipment. Practically all equipment lasts more than a year. Disposable items bought in bulk are basically a form of equipment that lasts until you run out. Five years will see about a third of stuff get turned over. I have seen some fluoroscopy equipment still running since the late 90s.
Ultimately "make better rules" is only half the battle. You still need a process for implementation.
The stupid rules were imposed by member countries, and not by the EU. There are several countries, like Italy, Hungary who were not imposed that stupid rules, because EU didn't force anybody to have this level of stupidity in these rules. There is a reason why the article mentions only Germany, Austria, et al, they are the idiots, and not everybody or the EU... Also, nobody forced these countries to have incompatible systems. They chose this.
So no, it's not EU's ruling, but their idiot member states. As usual. And of course, everybody points to the usual scapegoat, regardless of the truth. And probably the truth is, that those specific member states wanted this mess.
The EU is the product of the decisions of its members and structure of the coalition. Outsiders have little reason to distinguish the nuance when the discussion has to do with the EU market as a whole.
I'm in EU. But playing the blame game is not getting us anywhere. If you look at this legislation with the most favorable eyes, it still stopped short of making sure it's applicable, and refused to postpone its application as recently as a couple of months ago when it was already clear it'll be a shitshow. That's at EU level, not member countries.
And if you take off the rose tinted glasses, it's the same... um... what's the word? retardedness. when it comes to the environment. In order to... do what exactly? count carboard boxes better? they created yet another bureaucracy.
This is exactly what I meant by not giving a shit about other people's money (or time=money, in some instances).
>people had 1 year and a half to prepare for this (at least) or to protest this.
“There’s no point in acting surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for 50 of your Earth years, so you’ve had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaint and it’s far too late to start making a fuss about it now.”
It's yet another EU regulation that requires a rep for each EU country or you're not allowed to do business. EU single market is a bad joke at this point.
They weren't asking for a "single set of laws". "Single market" however is a pre-existing concept recognized as "one of the EU's greatest achievements" [1], and lacking regulations in providing said market is what their critique was about.
And it is! People here are always complaining about the EU as if it's a single state, even though it's very clearly in the process of becoming one. It's a long road, we're not sure if we're going to make it all the way to the finish line (but I suspect we will), and we're going to have some happy little (and big) mistakes along the way. But for now it's imperfect, and it might be imperfect for a very long time to come. It's still a lot better than not having it, and we're actively working on improving it.
> Nah, it should either become one, or dissolve, but this half baked shit definitely isn’t it.
Since the current situation is shit, and one EU national state will be shit, too, this only leaves one option. :-) So let's dissolve the EU before even more billions are wasted in this futile project.
> I'm trying to think of a single metric by which the EU hasn't been a massive success.
- Number pages of lunatic regulations
- Money gone into the EU
- Not a metric, but fitting very different philosophies of how to handle the domestic currency under one umbrella (ECU, Euro) has lead to massive tensions between the involved countries and their populations in particular when the Euro crisis hiy (e.g. in German "Pleitegriechen" [bust Greeks], PIIGS (pigs) countries (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece, Spain)). If there wasn't a common currency, each country would have solved this problem on its own terms. Now there is hate that continues up to today, and these countries (including their citizens!) can be used as scapegoats.
> People here are always complaining about the EU as if it's a single state, even though it's very clearly in the process of becoming one.
I think that attempts at making the E.U. a state are doomed to fail. There are too many differences between countries, including customs, language, legal systems, etc. The United States of America works because all states largely inherited or adopted the British social contract. You can't replicate this in Europe. The E.U. should have never been more than a free trade agreement. The currency union was a big, fat mistake that amplified the Great Recession in many of the poorer E.U. states.
> Imagine trying to create a single set of laws to apply to all of the countries in North and South America at the same time.
I actually think it would be quite a bit easier than it is to create the EU. There's a lot more broad cultural homogeneity between the countries in the Americas than there is within Europe. Even on the topic of language you've got the vast majority of all peoples speaking some combination of Spanish, English, and Portuguese. And Latin America has a bit more limited geopolitical concerns than Europe does which makes managing some tensions easier than it might otherwise be.
But I'm not sure why you are considering "it's hard to create the EU" to be a defense against complaints or criticism related to the EU itself. Maybe it's hard and it won't work and the criticism is reflecting that and others are pointing out that it's a flawed task to begin with for some number of reasons. For my own part I think it has been a fascinating topic and a remarkable accomplishment of statesmanship to even get the EU to this stage, albeit like anything there are some very valid drawbacks.
Yes, yes really. No I don't believe there's some color filter south of the border - that's your baggage/perception of Mexico/Central America.
> Do you think Mexico looks in the eyes of half the central American countries?
Did you mean How do I think Mexico looks in the eyes of half the Central American countries? If so I'd say it's nuanced and many people in those countries have their own views and their own various problems to solve, just like folks in France have a different view on immigration than, say, Switzerland, or how Germany and France can't agree on a fighter jet project and are looking at different industrial policies, or how Spain has a lot less interest in Ukraine than Latvia does.
Of course South America is incredibly culturally diverse, but I think it's a lot more homogenous than Europe is not just in terms of policy but culturally too. But hey if you disagree, sure make your case if you'd like. I'm just discussing the topic based on my own perceptions. The EU has something like 27 official languages and an Americas block would likely have 3 or so - that itself is the kind of thing that makes integration a lot easier.
It's amusing to see a European cite the linguistic result of European colonialism (assuming your three languages are Spanish, English, French - or maybe Portuguese) - and the destruction of thousands of spoken languages - as an argument for the cultural homogeneity of North and South America that they are unwilling to apply to their own continent.
I'm not European (not that this matters anyway) - and the three languages I mentioned were Spanish, English, and Portuguese just because those are the primary languages spoken across the hemisphere.
In Europe a lot of people speak English as a second language but by and large many member states speak predominantly more languages - Spanish in Spain, Portuguese in Portugal, French in France, Italian in Italy (there's 4 different major language groups right there) and when you add in economy size, prominence on the global stage, geopolitical interests, history, and more it seems to me, in my opinion of course, it's a bit more difficult to wrangle, say, Germany and France together who have collectively killed millions of each others citizens versus, idk, Mexico and Colombia who are certainly distinct and have their own rich national and regional cultures (just like the United States even) but speak the same language and, in my view, get a long a little bit better.
I'm not arguing that there isn't a vibrancy in culture or that these countries are entirely homogenous. I'm arguing it would be easier to wrangle them together in a bloc of sorts than it was to get (and keep) the EU together.
For what it's worth a lot of cultural differences are becoming increasingly (unfortunately) minor differences at best because of globalization and the Internet and other communication technologies.
> and the destruction of thousands of spoken languages
Eh thousands of languages were destroyed by war and destitute and colonialization of various sorts throughout history. I'm not going to put a random assortment of them on a pedestal to get angry about just because they happened to be more recent (400 years ago). But anyway isn't China currently destroying spoken languages in places like Tibet and Xinjiang?
Sorry for assuming you were European in expressing what I see as ironic. Perhaps itself ironic as a mistake. My bad.
I think Europe and the Americas are differently heterogeneous and differently homogeneous. Certainly the Europeans have made more practical strides in building a coalition across their members than, say, South America or Central America. The reality is that Europe demonstrates a higher degree of solidarity between states than these other places. So it's strange to me to argue the opposite.
But if I understand, your assertion is that the Mayans, the islanders of the Caribbean, the people of Peru, or the Amazonians are less culturally different from one another than the citizens of, say, Greece and Norway? I'm not sure I buy it personally .. but I can see your argument.
Well, that solidarity I think you are taking for granted and of course a lot of the disagreements don’t quite make global news unlike any time Trump eats a booger someone in the international media is blowing up over it. But the EU was a very large and intentional project born out of the incredibly devastating conflicts of World War I and World War II. For most of history Europeans were violently feuding with each other. My point originally was that the current state of the EU is a remarkable achievement precisely because of the animosity, history, and very broad cultural differences between European nations.
I wouldn’t say my assertion is that the peoples you mention are less culturally different (I’m not sure and not sure how we measure that) my assertion is if you were to attempt to form a bloc that those cultural differences are very small relative to the whole.
Just like how in the US we have cultural influence from the tribal people that lived here but by and large it’s a small cultural aspect and not the predominant one. I’m not minimizing their importance, significance, or heritage. I’m just saying if you had to go and take people who live in these countries they would be easier to organize as a whole into something of a bloc because at the nation state level they are more, of course it’s just my opinion, homogeneous in interests than when the EU was being put together.
I’m interested in hearing what you think here as well. I’m just chit-chatting - sorry if I sound argumentative. I’m working on not sound like that as much.
not...really a solid argument for how well they would combine, but clearly a major contributor to how how much you know about them.
And FYI those languages didn't disappear 400 years ago. They are spoken today. Guatemala alone recognizes 25 current spoken languages - Spanish and 24 languages that are completely unrelated to any European language.
> For what it's worth a lot of cultural differences are becoming increasingly (unfortunately) minor differences at best because of globalization and the Internet and other communication technologies.
Good news! Many of these languages are still spoken today because these people still live in societies without the internet and other communication technologies! They don't even speak Spanish, their national official language, because they don't know anyone who speaks Spanish.
You don't have to know history, but try knowing a little bit more about current politics and geography before the sweeping statements?
> not...really a solid argument for how well they would combine,
It makes it easier. As a hypothetical you can imagine a pre-EU European continent for example, empire, colonies, and more. It would be much more difficult to get those countries to form a bloc because of the number of interests and where they conflict across the globe.
Now take a set of countries that do not have broad geopolitical considerations or have fewer - those countries simply have less to argue about and less complex arrangements to worry about. No colony, no overseas empire, no war.
It seems intuitive to me it’s much easier to get those countries to agree to various political arrangements and then we can mix in other considerations.
> And FYI those languages didn't disappear 400 years ago. They are spoken today. Guatemala alone recognizes 25 current spoken languages - Spanish and 24 languages that are completely unrelated to any European language.
I didn’t say they were gone - the person I was replying to said they were destroyed by Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. Separately, yes those languages are spoken, isn’t there some 180 languages spoken in New York? But you would still characterize the United States as an English speaking country. Just like no matter how many languages were spoken in Brazil it’s still a Portuguese speaking country.
> but clearly a major contributor to how how much you know about them.
> You don't have to know history, but try knowing a little bit more about current politics and geography before the sweeping statements?
Please stop wasting time with random comments like this. Not only do I generally not care but they are bad practices per the site guidelines.
Please don’t make comments about things that you don’t care about enough to have any information on. It wastes other people’s time when they imagine you are interested enough to learn some of the ways your comment is wrong.
> There's a lot more broad cultural homogeneity between the countries in the Americas than there is within Europe.
That must be the most preposterous thing I've read in while, no offense! :-)
My personal experience has been the exact opposite: That cultural differences (and political differences no less!) in the Americas and also prejudices towards each other are huge, both between countries and often even between individual regions. (And that's even if you exclude the US for a second.) Also, countries in the Americas have had rather different histories (both pre and post Columbus) with only partial overlap. Meanwhile, European countries' history is practically impossible to disentangle, probably thanks in parts to how small the continent is in comparison to the Americas. On top of that, European culture has also had entire millenia to amalgamate and harmonize to the point where, yes, we may still speak different languages but it's very common for people to be able to trace back their ancestors' history across half the continent. It provides us all with the same cultural backdrop and the same roots as to where we come from, whereas in the case of the Americas I would ask: What is the common backdrop here? What are those common roots on a continent that combines both the incredibly rich history of hundreds of different indigenous peoples (all with their individual languages and customs) and the history of Europe, Africa and (in parts) Asia together? The partially shared experience of Spanish colonialism, and English, Spanish and Portuguese as shared languages only get you so far.
Finally, if your claim is that Europe is culturally much more heterogeneous (which again I don't think it is), I'd argue we must have exported a lot of that to the Americas, too. :-)
“It’s hard to do X under conditions C” is a good explanation for why “X is crappy” but it seems like a poor reason to re-evaluate “X is crappy”. For a small business owner, larger markets with lower barriers to entry are better than smaller markets with fragmented standards.
An explanation for why some markets are smaller and fragmented is interesting academically but it doesn’t change that it’s not worth participating in.
I know that this is a popular point-of-view in the US, but your states and legislative processes are all very homogeneous in comparison. You guys mostly speak the same language, you have the same cultural touch points, you have a shared history, shared media, and mostly centralized power.
Your country looks more like Germany (and if you know your history, that's no coincidence) than it looks like the EU.
I think, at this point, most people in Europe broadly have the same language as their second language.
> Overall proficiency: According to data from the European Union, over 43% of the total EU population speaks English as a second language, making it the most widely spoken non-native tongue across all 24 non-Anglophone countries in the bloc.
In theory, true. In practice, state independence has been dead for the better part of a century.
The 10th amendment has been eviscerated by the courts. By a strict reading of its relatively simple language, most of what the federal government does is unconstitutional.
Today, USA is unabbreviated as the “United States of America”, but the country was founded as the “United States for Anerica”.
As such, I am strongly in favor of returning to our former glory by stripping the federal government of most of its power and transferring it to the states.
I am also wise enough to know that will never happen without a long and bloody revolution, and I am okay with that given the lived reality that has defined my life.
We live in tyranny. You may not feel the rolling boil of the water that surrounds you, my fellow Americans, but make no mistake: your goose is cooked.
> country was founded as the “United States for Anerica”.
Do you have actual sources for that?
(Funny thing, I googled the phrase in quotes, did not realize the misspelling, and was a bit frustrated that the only result was this comment on HN...)
> but the country was founded as the “United States for Anerica”.
This is simply incorrect, it has been the United States of America since the Declaration itself where it states:
> We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled,
Add in the function of the senate and the ongoing public perception of it, and as/if the senate is neutered by populist parties (MAGA/DSA) as they intend to also do with the courts, the argument that the states are sovereign (and they are by definition and constitutional agreement) becomes more and more practically useless, unfortunately (in some ways).
I'm not anti-federal government or anything but clearly we can see that there are issues in how the federal government has become so powerful and yet we're beholden to these two big-tent political parties leaving folks across the various states unhappy with decrees from Washington. Don't like Donald Trump's power over you? Maybe the federal government shouldn't have that power then?
Given what the states use their current power to do, I'm pretty fine with it so long as the party I'm like is in control of the federal government. If the last ten or so years of politics have taught us anything it's good to be on top with the tyrants, I guess.
And EU does it with VAT-OSS scheme which was also separate in each country before. There's just no will to do this with EPR because there's too much money and lobbying power in the recycling cartel.
The funny thing is that when the EU introduced these new VAT rules then it screwed over small and microbusinesses as well. It took them years to implement a minimum threshold for VAT (which every reasonable country has, but somehow EU rules did not).
I mean that's what the PPWR directive is already? It's a single set of laws that applies to all member states. They just didn't write any interop so every country has its own system and registration.
If it was just single registration for EU and paying for each kg of plastic or electronics to member states (like you do with VAT already via VAT-OSS) then it wouldn't be such a big deal.
Even if you didn't have any agreement with recycling companies in each member state and you had to pay the highest per-kg fees it would still be manageable for small sellers.
Meanwhile if you want to sell a single circuit board you're looking at several thousand euro in registration fees and several months for processing just to sell legally to 4-5 countries in EU.
This is comical the liberal in their perpetual confused state: "they are doing their very best!", "you couldn't do it better yourself!". The EU primary function is to serve capital interests to protect neoliberalism across the EU at all cost. It's the perpetual shock doctrine, thatcher politics for all, there is no alternative, dead-end, end-of-history, its what you would get when you put the IMF in charge of a continent. Literally everything is falling apart, the fascists scapegoat irrelevant migrants for the mouth breathing median-voter/peasant while the liberals are haplessly groveling at their imperial masters and censure Spain for being an unruly vassal.
You would not have the Euro if the IMF was in charge nor the many failures to have a single capital market. The EU, and politics that created it is much more complex than you think.
Oh please the ECB, EU Commission and the IMF are staffed by the same kinds of people with identical ideology, they are practically the same institution that work together all the time to shiv periphery nations. They never encountered a problem they didn't want to solve with more austerity.
They manage to do it for 50 states in the US just fine. It isn’t exactly rocket science. It’s just that individual countries in Europe all feel like unique little snowflakes.
I mean you're just looking at this from the wrong lens.
nobody in an EU member state thinks of themselves as a "state" in the EU, they're a country but in the EU
nobody would want the US kind of federalism. not to mention there isn't a single majority language aside from English for those that know it well enough
That’s the most uninformed view I’ve read about this in a VERY long time.
The US / Trump doesn’t even manage to renegotiate a trade agreement with Canada, although you speak the same language and your cultural proximity is about 95% - so maybe it’s time to get off your high horse buddy
Yeah, obviously we wouldn't try to do that. Our laws, cultures, and priorities are wildly different. By this lens, the main problem seems to be that the eu expanded too much and grew too large to actually have a coherent purpose.
> eu expanded too much and grew too large to actually have a coherent purpose.
Anybody seriously thinking that seems completely oblivious to how central EU is to the economies and every day lives of member states. There is a lot to criticise about EU but without it, the Europeans lives would be much worse and their economies would be nothing to speak of. It is very sad that populists managed to popularize the image of the bloated unnecessary monster. Even otherwise intellectually capable folks.
A similar strategy to this did help me a lot. Got tinitus 5 years ago in one ear due to a weird ear cleaning procedure followed by some sort of inflammation. It was quite weird in the beginning and it always got worse when I had a cold and my sinuses were blocked. Had some periods when it was really bad and I could fell like I can't take it any more, but somehow I accepted it and started to learn to live with it and ignore it as much as possible, focus on other sounds around me and so on. I went to a couple of clinics, my hearing was just fine and they always recommended white noise (used it a bit in the beginning, but somehow I didn't want to depend on headphones and constant sounds). What did help me in quiet places or when sleeping is just to think of something else and ignore the sound completely, at this point I can barely hear it/notice it even when going to bed or having headphones on with no sound. I do have friends who got it mostly because of loud music (musicians and concerts) and somehow they stress too much about it, making it unbearable. I understand that everyone has different experiences, but for me just ignoring it and somehow making your brain forget it and filtering it out did help a lot. EDIT: also completely ignoring the community (like reading about it on reddit or Facebook groups), stop watching videos like this about it helps a lot in forgetting about it and stops you from ruminating too much about it all the time.
I wanted to say the same thing, Westpark is a gem, loved living next to it and miss it a lot. One of my favorite things there is the Kino Mond un Sterne, during summer they play movies in this open air amphitheatre surrounded by trees and with a small lake with a fountain on the other side.
It is, frankly, amazing. I've never seen infrastructure of this kind so close to the people, so sprawling and so well kept. People swim in side arms of the Isar too, many floating (see pictures near the start at https://maps.app.goo.gl/krgaM2tTKdzCzW398, where people surf on the mini-river).
Of the places I've been, Munich is by far the best one in this area (and many others) that I know.
I loved the article, but the only part that I didn't connect with was the blocking, and probably the goals (not sure if going for the numbers instead of the pleasure of reading something good is ideal long term). I think the author and you shouldn't necessarily be so hard on yourselves to go to these extremes of blocking of these things, usually it works for a while, but it might come back worse when you crack and try it again.
I found myself in a similar situation last year, I felt like I have no time, but I was just scrolling mindlessly on social media whenever there was some off time. As I was reading quite a lot when I was younger, I ended up maybe reading 1-2 books a year, best case scenario. Last summer somehow I wanted to try something else that would help me keep focus or disconnect, maybe for me it worked because of what I started reading. I heard 2-3 years ago on a podcast (Tim Ferris I think) about Ted Chiang and bought one of his collections, but never read it. I got so fascinated with the first book (sort stories, you could just read a story on the go, no huge time investment) and the stories that I ended up reading most all his works, that just hooked me up. A year later, I'm around 2-3 books per month, always try to alternate from fiction to non-fiction, try to mix up and probably the most important part, like in the post, whenever I feel like I don't "vibe" with the book or author, I just stop. Forcing yourself to read a book that you don't like is probably the easiest way of breaking the habit. I even stopped driving to work, the 40 minutes I get per day to read on the train are amazing, it makes me happy if there is some technical issue and the train takes 10-20 minutes longer, more time to read.
> but the only part that I didn't connect with was the blocking, and probably the goals.
Funny, because I found the post terrible but approve of the goals technique if done temporarily. Many many years ago I set myself a reading goal (first year it was number of books; second year and beyond it was time spent reading) and that served me well to both establish the types of books which aren’t worth it and create the reading mindset. Now I read whenever, but it has become frequent and effortless.
Some of the things I found terrible advice in the post include:
> Also, Ryan Holiday — a famous author
Look, you do you, but Ryan Holiday is not a good person to take advice from. Also, being a “famous author” is not a credential for being the person to help you read more, especially if you are familiar with his history.
> Avoid summaries and summary services. (…) reading a summary does not equal reading a book.
Many many books are not worth the amount of pages they take. This includes several books popular on HN. Too many books should have been pamphlets. They take one big core idea then stretch it out over multiple chapters with self-serving examples, story after story of repeating the same bullshit. Not every book is read for pleasure, some are only worth it for the information. Find a talk on YouTube that the author has given, and you’ll get all the important points.
> Avoid even audiobooks. (…)
Look, it’s fine if audiobooks don’t work for you, and it’s fine to let your readers know why. But don’t phrase it as advice of audiobooks not working in general. You may get distracted when listening to an audiobook, you may not be able to concentrate on it, but that is definitely not true for everyone. Listening to an audiobook while cooking or cleaning can work like doodling while listening to a lecture, i.e. it helps retention, attention, and understanding.
What a meaningless gatekeeping distinction. Unless your sole goal is to be a poser who wants to be perceived as a literate intellectual who is oh so cultured and well-read, however you consume the book is up to you. Who the heck is thinking “I really want to read more books, but only if it’s in the way this stranger tells me I should, not the way I enjoy”?
If you like reading paper books, good. If you like reading electronic books, good. If you like listening to audiobooks, good. If you like having your partner lovingly transcribe a book into individual postcards and mail them to you weekly, good. Consume the book however you want and don’t judge others by their preference.
There are many reasons why someone might want to improve their reading, and the only solution to that is to practice reading.
Audiobooks are someone else's (i.e. not your) interpretation of a work. Kind of like how you might go watch a play or a movie instead of reading a script. There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but they're not reading.
> There's nothing wrong with either of those things, but they're not reading.
Why are you compelled to defend that (in my view) meaningless distinction? Why does it matter? I’m asking genuinely, so I can understand why we’re having this conversation.
I am somewhat biased against audiobooks as well, but how do you justify that consuming text, language, words is substantially different between reading and listening? Particularly in novels and the like? If you aren't re-reading passages, and only processing lines of text in a linear fashion, how is that any different from listening to a transcription?
I dont know you about you, but the reason I read is to learn and retain -- many studies havnt shown audiobooks are much worse than reading for retention.
> I dont know you about you, but the reason I read is to learn and retain
Millions of people read for entertainment. If you ask the people who read Fifty Shades and other erotic novels¹, how many do you think would say they do it “to learn and retain”? In fact, not retaining is something I would like to do with certain pieces of media, so I could reexperience their impact.
Have you ever listened to a good audiobook for a fictional story? There are fantastic versions of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett stories where the voice acting really brings them to life in a way many readers cannot with their internal voice (see, for example, aphantasia). How about a book written by a comedian, read by the author? Having them read the funny bits with the intended delivery and in their own voice feels like you’re enjoying another of their stand-ups. They sometimes even go slightly off-script and make jokes not in the written book. Again: Consume books however you like and let others do the same. Why does it concern you how other people enjoy their books?
¹ No judgement. Smut is a big market and you do you as long as you’re not hurting anyone else.
I find it somehow like a dystopia that things like these happen. This isn't about kids dying in some foreign country on some distant continent and we're investing in fancy robot taxis. This is actually that some people have the privilege of living in a bubble and using this technology that these huge corporations put money in (for the profit of their shareholders) while in the same time ignoring the core issues of the society that lead to such acts happening (stealing in broad daylight stuff from a car while people are inside it). I know people will say that this isn't for Google to fix (yeah, they only fix and lobby for laws that help them make more money) or for the tech people working for these companies and browsing these forums to fix, but I do find it a bit disgusting.
I also find this weird. Even though the companies I worked for didn’t have any crazy rules or restrictions (never had phone from work), but I never used my work laptop or computer for anything personal. I have friends doing their own side projects on theirs. Even though in the countries where I worked/work they have to let you know what they track if they track, I still remember one of my contracts that stated that any work done on the work computer belongs to the company. That’s why, even if maybe it’s not legal for them to say that, I never ever used any subscriptions, hardware or tools provided by my employer for personal use.
But you know what's not amusing, but rather sad? the comments here. It's wild that people now are upset that the big bad EU is somehow doing something against companies that make profit from selling products that could hurt people, products targeted for kids that can poison or kill them, but the main issue, as seen by tech people, is the EU targeting Temu...
When I first read the comment I thought this must be satire, it sure does sound like a Silicon Valley episode, but in modern times. I've been a skeptic for quite some time, but managed to get quite good results with Claude in general, not even going through the normal limits for a Pro account, but what people are describing here seems like just tokenmaxing, brute forcing a solution, I don't understand what code people need to write and what projects people are building, is everyone just constantly rewriting systems from scratch, or what is everyone spending these insane amounts of tokens on?
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