> Even when I live with others, we aren't worried about bathroom noise.
I think there's a specific target customer that would love this. I'm in the same camp you are... I couldn't care less. When it's just my wife and I at home it's pretty rare that we close the door even.
In university though I had a roommate who was absolutely paranoid about people hearing her in the bathroom. She would generally run the faucet the whole time she was in there to mask the sounds. Sometimes... I think she'd even run the shower; I don't know this for sure, but I'd hear the shower running in the bathroom for a while and she'd come out looking just as un-showered as she had when she went in.
You know darn well you aren't the target market for this device, and you know darn well that there is a target market for it as well as why it exists, so you're being disingenuous when you propose talking to oneself as the only possible reason for it.
I think that’s overstating it. There are pockets in the largest cities, but that’s about it. Very few Latin Americans would be like, hey let’s go get some Chinese food, outside of the largest cities. It’s not like Canada or the US where even in towns in the middle of nowhere you can find a Chinese joint.
Now, some do call nannies “Chinese”, so presumably, many decades ago, some very poor Chinese took a voyage across the sea to poor countries because China was even more desperately poor. Also some Chinese as well as Philippine folks were brought over to Mexico as slaves and they were all labeled ‘Chinese’ kind of like how chino fabric originated in the Philippines but is called ‘chinos.’
Ok but Asians or people with Asian ancestry don’t even add up to 1% of the Mexican population. It’s miniscule. There are probably more middle easterners than Asians living in Mexico.
You'd be surprised. And sure, in the 1930's about 80% of Asian immigrants got deported out of Mexico. But even before and after, their descendants became very well integrated and mixed with the rest of society. Also, they tend to not identify as Asians, just like Mexicans unless it is very obvious or 2nd generation
People of Japanese ancestry top out at around 1% of all Brazilians. That’s not a lot or significant portion of the population. If you get to 5 or 7% we can talk about significance. On the other hand they tend to have outsized influence on the country, so you may be projecting that onto pop size.
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
Epicurus
There are multiple potential answers to this basic riddle in various religions. Are you interested in understanding them?
For example, we can say that while God is omnipotent, he has chosen to create a world with humans who have the possibility of choosing to be good -- your word -- or not -- and grow through this choice. A world cannot exist where the "evil" is prevented, unless you also take away the the agency from humans and this potential for growth.
Much of which we think of as "evil" is actually consequence of things we do. One simple example in modern terms is that we tend to repeat the same unconscious patterns over and over again.
We often do it because we have a trauma maybe from childhood -- that we are not conscious of. If I get a physical trauma, muscles around the traums tend to form a tension to protect the site where we get hurt. These often become chronic even after the wound has healed. We have many such chronic tensions in our body.
Similarly, when we get a physical trauma that is too unbearable for us to process, we create tensions around it that protect us from experiencing it.
These patterns we repeat cause much of our suffering. By becoming more aware of our wounds, they can start healing, and we can start becoming free of such suffering.
Our "work" is to learn about ourselves, to overcome these traumas, and heal our wounds. In such a case the "evil" we see is actually a reflection which is necessary for us to become aware of these things in ourselves.
I'm replying to a comment about the Catholic/Christian God...
In his myths he has no problem actively interfering with man. The great flood story itself is a giant logical paradox.
God is perfect.
God is all knowing.
Yet God creates a world so screwed up he has to reset it.
What free will does every human who's not Noah have ?
Revalations heavily implies that one day God will get sick of this. Too much free will or something.
Honestly everyone has a right to whatever myths get them through the day. The issue becomes when your myth infringe on the rights of others or are used to persecute. As in, your magic book has a few dietary restrictions, cool.
Your magic book calls certain people abominations, or suggest they should have less rights, not cool.
But all major religions have multiple strands, and like others, Catholicism also has one or more mystic strands as well. Mystic strands of different religions are thinking man's version of the religion and actually closer to each other that you would guess from the surface level understanding of the religion.
Probably you can find people who believe what you are saying. People believe in strange things.
But if you want to have an intellectually honest discussion about this, you should first try to understand clearly the best possible arguments of the thing you are critisizing.
That is why I asked whether you are interested in understanding the religious point of view. What you are presenting is kind of a straw man version of Catholicism, and I imagine on site like this you will have hard time finding anybody willing to argue about that.
Note also that I have not anywhere said anything about what I believe. I have explained to you a kind of short version what is my understanding of the synthesis of Christian mystical traditions.
This feels like is a side stepping of Epicureus where the primary focus of refutation revolves around trying to explain away "evil" as that which is perpetrated by human beings upon one another.
Perhaps, if you replace "evil" with "suffering", you get a more expansive view of the Epicurean argument.
And if you feel the expansive version is too amorphously defined to refute effectively, you could just replace "evil" with just "plague" or "earthquakes". For eg.
"Is God willing to prevent plagues but not able..."
Yes, I can understand it feels to you like I am side stepping the argument.
The "evil" in the paradox above (I am not responding to Epicureus but to the quote, which is presented out of original context) refers implicitly to a very limited, modern definition of the term, as your examples show.
All the religions that I have some understanding of, have much more elaborate understanding of the question of good/evil. But each religion has a unique view point of this question, so we cannot generalize these terms. I just gave one example.
The paradox is a false dilemma. In my understanding, such dilemmas are often set up within religions as tools to help you to think things through for yourself, they are not refutations of the religion.
I am not trying to refute an argument or convince you of anything. That would be pointless.
I don't consider earthquakes to be "evil" by any sensible definition. But the question "if God exists, why did he create a world with earthquakes" is an interesting question. I don't have any idea how any religion would approach this question.
If you are really interested in what religions can offer you, you can take a look at the feeling that arose in you when reading my reply.
You said you felt that I was side stepping the argument. To me it seems that it was partly because you thought that I was trying to refute an argument. You also missed the part where I said "Much of which we think of as ..."
This being HN, you can think of religions as methods to hack your own thinking. You can use such feelings (and the fact that you miss some key points when you discuss the issue) as a signal for yourself that there is a subconscious emotional issue related to the question. You can learn about yourself and grow through studying these issues.
Firstly, I appreciate your kind and thoughtful answer.
More importantly, I thoroughly commend the intellectual honesty when you said this:
> But the question "if God exists, why did he create a world with earthquakes" is an interesting question. I don't have any idea how any religion would approach this question.
To be clear, I wasn't hoping for a handy solution to one of life's "big questions" in an HN comment.
I was just pointing out that your response to the Epicurean argument was a bit narrow in the assumed scope of the assumed interpretation of the Epicurean argument.
I tried to make a FOSS MTG clone and I keep running into weird edge cases. Anyway, even small games need solid teams to get started.
Even if the games are ultimately monetized , it would be nice to have a FOSS core.
I want to play COD without a bunch of stupid skins and side effects. I would pay 60$ over the base 60$ to disable that non sense, it’ll never happen though. Back during the CS Source days I could just select a no skin server
Nexuiz (foss multiplayer quake) and beyond all reason (supreme commander rts) are both excellent and have large online communities. Battle for Wesnoth (turn based) is also fantastic. 0 ad has been coming along for ages (rts). We're missing a good, well written and big RPG but a lot of other things do exist ...
Urban Terror low gravity CTF was an amazing game. So incredibly satisfying to get the jump just right to swoop up the enemy flag, and make the jump back to capture. I loaded it up some time ago and it was mostly a ghost town. Same thing with Tremulous. Could be my timezone. I really enjoyed the ioq3 total conversions.
Tremulous is more or less dead. Its players moved to Unvanquished, but it is still pretty empty. I remember back when the player count of Tremulous used to be in the hundreds. Good times, had a great childhood. :)
I agree. I feel pretty discouraged from investing the amount of time it would take to get really involved and proficient in a game, if that game is ultimately not owned by me fully and can be paywalled. There's something more satisfying and timeless about a game like Chess or Go which partly I feel is due to them being owned by everyone/nobody (I mean, yes they're also centuries/millenia old but still).
We don't have any money to treat sick people, we need to make sure the networth of billionaires continues to grow.
We need to fund military bases all over the world and conflicts in places most of us can't find on maps.
You find how truly alone you are when you can't afford your medicine. No longer an "American" you're a freeloader, a parasite.
Perhaps God himself hates you.
And Blessed are the Billionaires for God gave them so much.
>Though I and my wife do not presently live in Massena, we live nearby, and we’re doing exactly this — we do not have an automobile, nor do we want one. We use the rural county transit bus, which we have found to be extremely cheap and quite reliable; and it has certainly saved us thousands and thousands of dollars by liberating us from the onerous expense of keeping a car.
This part has me screaming shenanigans. Unless you basically don't leave the house, you need a car outside of like 8 American cities. More believable would be a pair of used bikes.
I agree that his deliberate deletion of a car and Internet access from the example budget undermines his point, but adding $200 to support the cost of owning a cheap car and $45 for a prepaid cellphone plan with ample tethering doesn't change the overall equation significantly.
So you have a ton of people trying to make it off that.
The cold weather is really the red flag for me.
>Considering that the property has a well on-site, water is free, and as far as heat goes, well, one could either pay a little extra in electric for that — or they could have the Amish deliver their scrap wood from their sawmills to burn in a wood stove, very cheaply.
He glosses over heating, but for a full house that can easily be 200 or 300$ dollars.
Snow tends to cause problems. Now if he wrote this living in Florida or something it would be more practical. No risk of freezing. Walking or biking is possible year round.
I'd actually love to see a bike first city, but outside of a few college towns I don't think it exists in the states
You can bike year round in Florida and bike or walk to work if you are in vicinity. Even go to grocery store or in some cases use a golf cart. At least one car is still preferable.
That’s obviously not true, if you change what you “have” to go to.
There are thousands of American towns that are about 10k population - large enough to have a Walmart and other stores, small enough to walk across in an hour or so.
My admittedly unscientific survey of small Midwestern towns with Walmarts (that are NOT suburbs!) is that you can walk to the Walmart on sidewalks. At most, you have half a block to the nearest sidewalk, or have to cross the street.
Some of the middling-old sections only have one sidewalk. The oldest have them on both sides of the street, and the newest developments have them also, usually.
The Walmart in the area from this article is separated from the main town by a four lane road with no sidewalks, across which the nearest crosswalks are more than half a mile away in either direction—so you’re either playing high stakes Frogger, or, depending on your starting location, you might conceivably have to walk nearly two hours out of your way round trip along the shoulder of this road to use a crosswalk. They also get five feet of snow per year, so a good part of the year that walk is extra dangerous and miserable.
I can’t say for sure, but I think this is much more typical of American Walmarts than it is to be able to easily walk to them.
The two smallish towns I've spent significant time in (Tomah WI and Palestine TX) both have difficult to walk to Walmarts. But glad to hear it's not universal!
I see from Google maps that here in Illinois the situation seems to be a bit better... (E.g. Morris, Rantoul and even Du Quoin). Du Quoin seems very inexpensive and seems like it would make a better argument than somewhere truly rural (it even has Amtrak service)
Once it gets cold you won't be walking much anywhere. I guess grocery delivery from Walmart can mitigate this, but that fundamentally changes the situation.
One way (not the only way and I get this won't work well for people with medical needs or kids) to handle this is stock up on rice, beans, nonperishables and have a good first aid kit. You go out to get your "freshies" but it's not an issue to be stuck at home for a week except in the most dire circumstances.
I am sitting in front of PC probably around 10hours a day and drink and sit rest of my day (excluding sleep) and still it is not a big deal for me to have a 7km walk to the city or back is not a big deal.
I think in US it just cultural. "You are walking?! With your feet?! How?!". Unless you more likely to get shot walking via some neighbourhood I can't understand that.
> I'm going to guess that you're a really good shape that a 2 km walk isn't a big deal, but I don't think most Americans can do that.
Shit that's horrifying.
I have health issues and walking 2km a day to try to help fix. So I see 2km a day as basic. 6-10km run a day would be "fit" IMO.
things as humans are designed to walk.
Living in suburbia means I have to walk "for the sake of it" although I cam make it useful e.g. get some milk!
As for cold. Anything above minus 5 should be OK just wear stuff like skiiers wear which can be got cheap off brand.
77% percent of young Americans aren't fit for service.
2 km of walking in a day, even in great weather is exceptional for me. I probably average 1km or less.
And I'm not a car owner. My family members will literally hop in a car and drive 30 minutes over walking .5 km to the grocery store. They like the other one more they say.
Are you sure you mean .5km? That's only 0.3 miles, 1500 feet. That is the distance if you drive to a Walmart supercenter and park in the center of the parking lot and walk to the door.
500 hundred metres? This is long for you? If there is snow you can't walk? Why? Snow is much beteer than rain. And still it is just a couple of minutes. You most probably would not get wet with proper clothes.
Are you from US by the chance?
The average American walks 2.4 miles per day according to the CDC, this person is truly exceptional even among people the most car centric American towns.
You’ll walk more than 500m through the aisles in Walmart buying your groceries.
Huh? I'm not in great shape but I get 2km of walking a day just with my commute. According to my watch I've averaged 13k steps a day this week (something like 9-10 km a day, I think?). Ironically the days I walk the least are when I decide to bike to work instead of taking the train...
Right, I mean obviously the scenario in the article is unrealistic budget wise (and good winter equipment is going to be at least several hundred dollars), but I'm pushing back against the idea you can't walk when it's cold ...
..in what National Weather Service described as "once-in-a-generation storm". Walking 2 km on a normal winter day (or even a mild blizzard) is not dangerous.
This is true. I recently read that the real reason that the Vikings left North America was that the Native American authorities informed them that their site on L'Anse aux Meadows was not zoned for boat repair and construction.
It's just a tradeoff. ~20 hours of low wage employment is more than enough to cover a car. Instead they choose to spend those ~20 hours walking/waiting for the bus. Certainly not a trade I would make.
Agreed, looking at the map of Massena this seems like bullshit. I've lived without a car for my entire life across multiple states and it is incredibly onerous in even mildly dense areas.
Frequency is often as important as the route from experience; because a route that's reasonably distant from your location can be walked to/biked to etc but a low-frequency route means it's something you need to plan your entire day around. And if you miss any bus then you're stranded (which, given that they don't have internet I'm curious how they manage...)
Most of the bus routes here seem to run maybe twice a day, once early in the morning and then once late in the afternoon. There's a few more frequent ones that run on the hour but it looks to be closer to the denser cores.
> a low-frequency route means it's something you need to plan your entire day around.
Okay but the dude is making $5K/y which means he basically has no job and he sits around in his house all week or goes hiking etc. His most exciting day of adventure will literally consist of taking the bus to the library to check out a book, and bringing it back home (while reading it on the bus, perhaps). He can totally afford to plan his entire day around the event.
I don't expect to be able to git clone the Linux kernel, write "claude make it good" and fix everything.
I do expect these tools to be to able to understand they code they write through. Writing new code is very easy. Maintaining code is hard.
So far I'm very disappointed compared to how hyped this tech is. Although, I'm happy to have a job and if these coding models lived up to their promise I don't think I would have one.
This would cost 50 billion or so. But right now you probably interact with at least 3 or 4 oses per day.
Your TV, has one. Your phone has one, your laptop has one. And if you have voice assistants, they run a 4th distinct OS.
The future will have one OS that shares a session.
Two paths exist. 1. This runs primarily locally aside from a very small amount of data to share the session ( which you can disable). It's completely open source and modifiable.
If you want to roll a 3500$ super PC it'll be just as compatible with the OS as a 200$ one. Writing small automated tasks, everything from just asking with a voice command to wake up jazz,to running a custom C script, will be easy to do.
While I'm dreaming I want a new programming language which supports 3 levels. Plan English instructions ran though an LLM, something like Python and a systems level language like Rust. All "native" programs will be built in this framework.
Now, the negative path is this is all closed source, processed in some data center. "John, I noticed you said to Brian your feet hurt, new running shoes are 30% off , just say the word."
This is the far far more likely outcome. They're going to build an AI that's constantly with you, integrated in every device you own, and it'll all be to sell you stuff.
"Waymo, I would like to go home."
"Sure, but let's stop for milkshakes."
"Waymo, please , I'm tried."
"Understood, I've arranged the milkshakes to be dropped off an your apartment."
This technology could be amazing for accessibility, even real time sign language translation would change the world.
We'll get some of that, but the end goal will always be making as much money as possible. Ultimately selling us crap. Your awake for 16 hours today. You must be monetized every waking second.
Once they figure out how to get the science from Dream Scenario to work I'm sure they monetize sleep too
Even when I live with others, we aren't worried about bathroom noise.
I guess if you have a habit of talking to yourself while using the bathroom or showering and need to drown it out this is cool.
However, I'd love this as a general device. I get home and it auto plays music , etc
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