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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • The BBC article covering this “boxing” match is awesome. You can tell right from the title that the journalist wasn’t amused:

    Joshua and Paul earn riches but deliver budget sporting spectacle

    The plot played out in the ring was lifeless - a slow, joyless watch that would have struggled to earn even a charitable rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

    And the ultimate irony is that this spectacle has provided one of Joshua’s biggest paydays and, in all likelihood, his largest television audience.

    With seconds remaining in the fourth round, referee Christopher Young perhaps spoke for viewers around the world when he pulled the fighters together and urged them to engage.

    Directing his comments at Paul, he said: “Fans didn’t pay to see this crap.”










  • I don’t think it’s related to patterns, it’s the methodology.

    Sure, there’s some groundwork that needs to be memorized in different fields, but this is like learning your first words. These are necessary so that we can communicate with each other, and they serve as building blocks upon all rest is built upon.

    Everything else we are mostly taught by learning how some old guy came up with an answer, making clever use of the tools that we also have.

    After a while it sort of clicks that there’s a method to the madness, you build up and up until you get to the moon, and you get this feeling that anything can be explained logically - we might not know how yet, but surely it will be at some point.

    Unless it’s quantum physics, fuck that.

    It feels like there’s a lot of people who skipped these building steps, maybe they were just memorizing stuff to get by the exams without exercising their brains on the methods to reach those solutions, or were simply never taught, and now they just don’t have the tools to make sense of what’s around them, and will blindly follow a monster that assures them that they’ll be ok as long as they do this or that…


  • The worrying part is that they kinda seem to be implementing good policies for (at least some of) their people.

    There’s a lot of disturbing stuff, and probably a whole lot more that we don’t even know about, but social security, education, healthcare - my impression is that they’re going the right way, while the US looks eager to go back to the Dark ages.

    Just with STEM degrees, they’re producing almost 5x more graduates than the US, and they’ve surpassed the number of doctorates a long time ago too.

    The current world balance won’t hold one more generation.








  • I agree with you, it is multifactorial.

    An additional aspect, IMO, is that Europeans in general are much better educated when it comes to driving rules and driving in general. Rigorous theoretical and practical exams, expensive mandatory classes, and actual enforcement that, not rarely, will take away a driver’s license for serious/repeated offenses. This causes people to approach driving as a privilege, not some god given right.

    Anecdote time - I actually have a couple of American neighbors, they’re a couple in their late 60s/early 70s, probably. It pains me to see their gorgeous BMW X5 gaining new dents almost single time they go out with it… :(


  • Smarter design and better enforcement

    Street design has also played a key role. Pedestrian and cycling infrastructure has been significantly upgraded in recent years. In addition, cooperation with traffic police has intensified and more traffic cameras and automated enforcement systems have been introduced.

    “Public transport in Helsinki is excellent, which reduces car use, and with it, the number of serious accidents,” Utriainen noted.

    Yep, that would do it.

    Especially road design (for example avoiding those deadly 4-way intersections the US loves so much) as well enforcing speed limits around danger areas like schools, and most importantly, reduce the number of cars by providing better alternatives…

    An impressive feat.