walterstucco666's comments

> Smoking (or other forms of nicotine administration) is self-medication for a significant portion of the population

It is believed to be, but it isn't.

We could make the same argument for alcohol or even heroin, that stop a cough and relieves from physical pain.

> I think it's particularly harmful and sad to say there's no possible conversation

As a smoker, there is no possible conversation on the fact that smoking kills, cigarettes are killers, no matter the benefits one can take out of them, they are "responsible for more than 480,000 deaths per year in the United States, including more than 41,000 deaths resulting from secondhand smoke exposure. This is about one in five deaths annually, or 1,300 deaths every day. On average, smokers die 10 years earlier than nonsmokers"

This is a fact that can only be acknowledged as true, even though personally many people decide to ignore this fact and smoke anyway (including myself).

But we smokers are simply wrong.

My uncle has been smoking for 50 years, suffering no consequences whatsoever.

It must be because cigarettes are good for the health.

/sarcasm

That's exactly why speaking the truth is fundamental, being kind is simply a plus: we all do reckless stuff in life, we all base some choice on assumptions or beliefs, it's usually not that bad, but it can be and someone needs to say it.

Just the fact that we are discussing about an unhealthy diet, that killed millions of people in poor countries, because in rich countries we have doctors and pharmacies and a lot of ways to overcome its dangers and we can't agree that a fact is a fact and choices are choices, proves that being kind before being right can be dangerous.

Doctors will never say "you should eat vegan because it's better for your health", they will say "you should remove this or that from your diet" if something is wrong (yes, bacon is unhealthy too, coke in unhealthy as well etc. etc.) and if you decide to go vegan they will say "it won't probably affect your health, but be careful. Also I want to visit you again in a couple of months".

That's just what it is, unhealthy means not healthy, it doesn't mean deadly at contact!

But people are more sensitive about their choices than their health conditions. People think that their choices defines them, they resist to changes and to facts that challenge their status, because it shutters their reality and trigger their insecurities.

It's not personal, If I say "veganism is unhealthy" it' because it's historically correct and still a cause of malnutritions around the World, not because I think vegans are stupid.

I think they are adults making unhealthy choices (I hope knowing it), just like driving too fast, drinking too much, living a sedentary life or, like my uncle, smoking for 50 years.

My dad worked in lung oncology and doctors couldn't stop some people from smoking even after they had to surgically remove one of the lungs because tumor destroyed it.

Lucky them in Italy healthcare is paid by everybody's taxes or we would have more than a few Walter White.

A popular similar episode happened in the UK, a former very popular soccer player, George Best, had a liver transplant because he drank too much. Even after that he kept drinking and it led to complications and a liver infection that killed him at the age of 59. Few days before he died he asked to be photographed in the hospital and the photo published with the message "Don't die like me".

It took him 59 years, a liver transplant and an horrible death at relatively young age to understand he was wrong.

Do you think nobody was kind, empathetic or nice with him before about his alcoholism problem?

But how many more were nice with him just to take advantage of his glory, fame, and, of course, money?

Being nice alone serves no purpose, being empathetic or nice, sometimes requires "not nice" manners.

If somebody confronted him and actually forced him to quit, he could well be alive and that liver could have saved someone who deserved it more than a repentless alcoholic.

We should also ask to ourselves: why is it so important for some people to convince others?

What purpose does it serve to have tools (empathy, kindness) to win people trust (they value the messenger), when we have tools (logic, fact checking) to evaluate the actual message?

Back to cigarettes.

Hironically my dad was also an heavy smoker, and reduced it a lot when my mother was pregnant of my sister (she had medical problems while being pregnant of me) and completely quit when my sister was born, because she suffered from asthma.

He went from 3 packs a day to zero in a few months and has been cigarettes free for 43 years now.

He knew he was wrong, he just had no reason to change, he probably thought that without cigarettes he would have lost self-confidence. My mother has always been more kind than right, but she couldn't convince him to quit, no matter how she tried.

Your partner shouldn't convince you to quit smoking or drinking when you have little kids, you either understand it on your own or they make you. There's no amount of discussing the matter that can be considered acceptable. There should be no space for being nice or empathic or reasonable or compromising.

But my dad also taught me that "you smoke years of your life away" (just like Bezos with his grandma, it's true, you really do...) and I have never touched a cigarette before I was in my late 20s, not because I ws scared, but because I thought it was stupid!

I eventually started smoking to make breaks at work, admittedly one of the worst decision of my life, but I like it and keep smoking from time to time, no matter how nicely people advice me to stop.

p.s. many in the comments are assuming that people talking straight haven't tried being kind or understanding before.

Yes, a minority of them share the same opinion.

A majority of them studied and proved its unhealthy effects.

Unless you wanna say that every opinion counts, no matter the opinion, we can safely assume that being vegan is like drinking or having unprotected sex or speeding.

It won't probably kill you, it will even improve life for some, but it's not something one should take lightly like "it has no effects".

> Any diet can be unhealthy

Yes, exactly, so if I say "eating candies is unhealthy" I don't think there's gonna be any group jumping at my throat.

Maybe is because candy lovers are not insecure cultists.

They know it's a matter of taste and personal belief, not something with a more profound meaning.

> Both of those statements have some element of truth to them,

No, they don't.

They are supercharged propaganda.

> but they're obviously incendiary, as is your 'veganism is unhealthy'.

Not at all.

Saying veganism is unhealthy is stating an opinion shared by many nutrition expert, it says nothing about vegans, it is just what it is.

meat is murder contains a judgement: if meat is murder, you are a murderer, if taxation is theft, who collects taxes is a thief.

I can accept "you eat corpses" because it's true, I don't eat animals alive, they are already dead when I eat them, but it is also imprecise, because I eat just bits of the corpses, not the entire carcass.

> "Veganism is unhealthy," the issue is that it simply leaves no room in the conversation for the other person.

Smoking is unhealthy, there's no possible conversation.

It is, if you prefer to smoke, it's your choice, no amount of reasoning is gonna change that.

Disclaimer: I'm a smoker, a not very involved one, but still one.

> I remember saying truthful things in very shitty ways during my younger years

People prefer to be deceived than proven wrong.

That's why young people are often thought of as shitty, because they have far less sovrastructures.

The more people age the more they think that when they where young they were shitty and insecure, because they need to justify becoming conformists (they prefer to deceive themselves)

> That's what's happening at the moment in the Western world whether we like it or not.

that's what will happen to the current generation of solar and wind power plants

> Whereupon the cleanup is huge, requires state intervention, and possibly decades.

On today's news

> Brazilian authorities said on Monday that they have no way of knowing how much more oil will wash ashore the country’s northeastern coast, despite President Jair Bolsonaro’s ominous warning during a Sunday night TV interview that “the worst is yet to come.”

https://apnews.com/e757699344844f389d49048b15e9e0ae

> It is very hard to measure the reduced life expectancy due to radiation

There's virtually no radiation, but assuming there was some amount of dangerous radiation, we should also account for death caused by coal or oil pollution as well.

> Nuclear accidents is like a terrorist attack. They cause massive panics and scare

While oil spills cause death and destruction for hundreds of thousands, while also destroying the environment, but who cares?

> Chernobyl involved hundreds of thousands of people doing cleanup.

Hundreds of thousands sounds like a made up number.

But if we wanna talk about costs, the real costs are

    The direct costs of the Fukushima disaster will be about $15 billion in clean-up over the next 20 years and over $60 billion in refugee compensation. Replacing Japan’s 300 billion kWhs from nuclear each year with fossil fuels has cost Japan over $200 billion

And we are talking about Japanese people, the 1991 Gulf War Oil Spill involved mainly Iraqi people, relocation costs weren't so high, after all we were bombing them already...

The cleanup costed "only" 540 million dollars, but

   If you take into account all of the burning oil wells, it is likely that hundreds of millions of barrels soaked into the earth from January to November of 1991 (about the amount of motor gasoline burned in California in 1989

How much did it cost? How much damage did it produce for the environment?

    some of the oil spilled deep into the sea, burrowing up to 40 cm in the sand and mudflats. It remains there to this day. This disaster does not just highlight the responsibilities humans have in managing oil wells, rigs, pipelines, and tankers, it demonstrates how carelessness with a non-renewable energy source and pollutant, purposeful or not, can have devastating long-term environmental impacts that cannot be undone.

> You think Google lied under discovery?

I think the known taxable profits are only a fraction of the real profits.

Don't jump to conclusions, just because you wanna prove a point.

> There is a country that has over 1 billion people running Android with no Google Services.

so you're agreeing with me: it's almost impossible, the alternative is live in China and give up your freedom.

Because you can't use Chinese services outside China.

There's also that.

Anyway Google China it's a thing.

And at this point I would prefer China spying on me than Google.

Maybe Europe should start banning US services as well...

> Apple is far more diversified than Google.

Is it?

Mac HW is less than 10% of their revenues.

What else they produce?

Could Apple really survive out of wearables or iPads or iCloud without iPhones?

I seriously doubt it.

> Estimates for Youtube is that it’s barely profitable if at all.

Nobody knows how big YouTube really is

Estimates are in the range 16-25 billion dollars / year

> Some of those marriages even end up healthy and lasting long term.

Survival bias.

Most of those "relationships" don't even get past the first date.

> Microsoft hasn’t failed in the cloud - Windows has.

as a server, maybe.

as a client not really.

> Android has only made Google about $33 billion its entire existence

Yeah, they are good at hiding profits

and they are an ADV company which dominated the mobile market because it was strategic, they don't need to profit from selling (and manufacturing) the HW, they just need your screen time.

There are between 2.5 and 3 billion android devices around the world.

And it's almost impossible to own an android devices without Google SW on it.

> Less than the amount that Apple makes in two quarters on iPhones.

That's not really true, and iPhone revenues are declining every year.

In 2018 thy made $33.36 billions, down of 9.2% from the previous year.

If Apple loses the mobile market, it's finished.

But people would still watch YouTube advs on iPhone replacements.

> Windows (not Microsoft) has failed in the cloud, the web browser market, and mobile.

I don't agree on the Cloud, it's the strongest competitor to Amazon, and on the other businesses there is no competition: mobile and browser is Google.

Amazon failed as well in the mobile business.

> If you’re doing the same exact thing 5 years later (let alone 10 or even 20) without any tweaks in your process, then frankly you have a job a robot should be doing.

Banks and insurance companies tends to disagree with you.

Maintaining software is just like maintaining buildings, if you don't they fall apart, but mainly it's just about checking that everything is still the same it was when it was built.

You don't change elevators in a building just because the old model is not supported anymore.

There's no conceot of "not maintained anymore" for elevators.

So maybe the poster was trolling, but it is true that you cannot rely on Macs if your software has a predicted life span longer than a couple of years.

> Business needs change

Again, many established businesses work because they don't change much over time.

They just keep doing what they do best.

> that code should’ve been updated.

That code worked, why in the hell risking to introduce new bugs?

I worked on software packages made by millions of lines, you don't just update them because your supplier won't bother supporting your workflow for at least 10 years.

Even Github, a modern fast changing company, was running on Rails 3.2 that was released in 2012 until September 2018, they switched to 5.2 and it took a tech company with some of the smartest engineers around and Rails contributors one year and a half.

> iPhones, iPads, and Macs

Which is just two variants

meanwhile Windows 7 support will end in 2020 and is still being sold

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/4057281/windows-7-s...

That's very different from "algorithm-heavy interview" process.

You could just ask "do you know when quicksort becomes quadratic?"

> Just use a "Library".

Not just a library, a battle tested one.

A bad implementation of quicksort can be much worse than "accidentally quadratic" bad.

a good library could shuffle the array before sorting it and never be quadratic.

Or has hints about quadratic behaviour in the documentation.

A good library could automatically choose the best sort algorithm for the input.

For example Java used quicksort for primitive types and mergesort for arrays of objects.

now it uses trimsort for both.

But the developer just calls `sort` on the collection.

> How about you know your stuff .

I bet you never encountered quadratic quicksort in your life.

   The probability that quicksort will use a quadratic number of compares when sorting a large array on your computer is much less than the probability that your computer will be struck by lightning! 

How about you know your stuff.

I think it is often much better not to write them yourself, but rely on a battle tested implementation.

Of course we're not talking about left-pad here, but implementing your own Diffie Hellman key exchange from scratch is usually a very bad idea.

But the point is you are not doing physics, you are at best tweaking some pre existing model.

I did it in the past while consulting for a major bank, I studied CS, not physics, and I haven't seen any applied physics in banks.

They hire young people studying physics because they are not scared of working "with numbers", but when you past 40 you're not scared of anything anymore and you'll find there a majority of people with a degree in economy, once you grasped the basics, you can do the job.

While the physics student hopes to be a real physicist someday in the future and stop working on trading models as soon as somethings better comes up.