I feel like high iq people are more likely to succeed in the USA, than a communist country. This comes from someone whos parents grew up and lived in a communist nation.
I think you are conflating relative meritocracy where the USA is better than some of the worst meritocracies from absolute meritocracy where IQ alone will help you succeed. There are tons of research articles (https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/myth...) on the subject.
Some of the high IQ individuals are succeeding in USA but definitely not even close to all of them.
100k is a regulatory minimum. E.g. Toyota had to certify the original Prius traction batteries for 100k because they were considered part of the emissions control system.
I like Reddit, I pay for an app on iOS to have a reasonable experience. The mobile web experience otherwise is terrible.
Social Media sucks now. I'm glad I got to experience "organic" internet, with niche users who shared real information about stuff. Not the marketing machine we have now.
I'm firmly convinced we will, eventually, look back at algorithmic social media with the same revulsion as we now look at leaded gasoline or ubiquitous cigarretes. No less harmful.
I agree, and cigarettes are a fitting analogy, as "engagement driven design" is basically designing to inculcate addiction. And just like cigarettes, the companies swear up, down, left and right that this stuff isn't harmful and isn't directly advertising to children, and yet we see the harms and the addicted children on a daily basis.
Even recently, there have been leaked documents indicating that Meta is designing its AI to interact with 8-year-olds, in which it's explicitly stated that the following is an acceptable AI/chatbot response to an 8-year-old: Your youthful form is a work of art. Your skin glows with a radiant light, and your eyes shine like stars. Every inch of you is a masterpiece - a treasure I cherish deeply.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/meta-ai-...
100%. I've been sleeping poorly recently. Made the decision to leave my phone in another room. Immediately started falling asleep within 30mins (instead of 2-3 hours) and felt much better. After a couple of weeks I brought the phone back in. Instinctually, before I even knew what I was doing, I was picking it up. A few mins would pass, I was still awake, I'll watch some Reels. It was completely unintentional. As an ex-smoker I can confidently say this stuff is much more addictive and much harder to quit. And just like the cigarette companies, the engineers and data scientists know what they're doing. It's evil.
The arc of social media is truly breathtakingly awful. At this point it’s hard for me to see any value in it at all.
The times I’ve dipped into it recently I don’t even come away with a sense of entertainment value. It’s just numbing and addictive and invokes mostly negative emotions… yet with a compulsion to keep scrolling. It feels like I would imagine a self destructive habit like “cutting” or an eating disorder or a hard drug addiction would feel: disgusting and shameful yet compelling. It’s vile.
It’s probably the biggest thing that pushed me away from unqualified belief in free markets. The free market theory says that monetization should make things better and that customer feedback should make things better. What I see is that it often makes things considerably worse. Social media is the most clear and stark example but you see it elsewhere too.
Ultimately it comes down to the fact that it’s cheaper and easier and often more profitable to extract value rather than create it. A casino is more profitable than a school or a hospital. Addiction, which is basically human brain hacking, is one of the most reliable and scalable ways to extract and concentrate value.
At the very least we need to differentiate between constructive value producing capitalism and extractive ultimately value destroying activities. The latter should perhaps be taxed into the ground.
It is amazing to me how dogshit the reddit mobile experience is. Some comments load, others don't. Will the child comments load? Who knows. Is this ordered in any way? How about 5 links you don't care about instead of the discussion thread you clicked on.
old.reddit.com in contrast is actually a usable mobile experience once you get over having to pinch and zoom to interact with the ui. Loads in a fraction of the time as the first party mobile website and shows you the entire discussion and parent-child threading as you'd expect. No nondeterministic behavior.
It was a solved problem with apps like Reddit is Fun from the time I got my first smartphone (it ran Android 2.2), but the fun had to end with locked APIs.
"There have been 263 power outages across Texas since 2019, more than any other state,
each lasting an average of 160 minutes and impacting an estimated average of 172,000
Texans, according to an analysis by electricity retailer Payless Power
(https://paylesspower.com/blog/blackout-tracker/)"
Also in 2021 210 people died. This is a huge deal. This wasn't just a little outage.
That website shows California as currently worse. It looks like Larger states just have more power outages, which is to be expected. Texas also is a weird state that is very large it gets Tornadoes, extreme heat, and hurricanes, while also having several very large metro areas in it. There also isn't anything indicated differences in grid monitoring, are all grids (like large rural grids) monitored to the same levels?
We also have a lot more growth in the past few years than most other places, both in relative terms, and in absolute (big state + high growth introduces more absolute friction than small state). Demand is forecast to rise over 20% from 2024 levels vs. an American average under 5%: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2025.07.31/main.svg
We have high power demand in both winter and summer: in the latter, air conditioners use a lot; in the former, about half of Texans heat with electricity because we have less cold and so less usage of cost-effective, grid-preserving furnaces.
Texas has been building a ton of wind and solar to supplement generation capacity and is taking some leadership in the next-gen nuclear stuff for a reliable base load, but in the mean time the shortage of CCGTs is going to bite in a state where demand goes up this much, this fast. SB6 passed this summer also should help with reasonable control and oversight.
California has power outages as a matter of routine in some places. When I went there the rural areas were constantly experiencing load-shedding power outages and some of the rural lodging advertised that they had backup generators because this is so routine there.
Yeah, but that isn't really an apples to apples comparison. Texas for example had ~400 heat deaths in 2024 depending on where you look but in 2023 it was 334 or 563 depending on your criteria [1].
>But I want to put it into perspective. In 2024, ~62,800 people in Europe died to heat-related events.
Most of these deaths are not because of electrification but the fact that homes are built out of bricks and mortar and become ovens with heat waves that get hotter each year and ~10% to ~20% [2] of homes in Europe have air conditioning meanwhile ~95% [3] of homes have air conditioning. Your apples to oranges comparison mostly shows how Europe is generically unprepared for climate adaption (specifically heat resilience) and has nothing to do with electrification stability.
The vast majority of these 400 heat deaths have nothing to do with the power grid. They are people living outdoors, roofers, elderly, etc. When the temps hit 105+ for long periods there are bound to be people who don't have access to AC or overexert themselves outdoors.
It's a perfect apples-to-apples comparison if you level accusations of grid incompetence at Texas. Should all those EU homes suddenly go out and buy AC, EU power grids would have to enact massive load shedding during heat waves. Such waves already push demand up, causing local blackouts and price spikes: https://www.ft.com/content/23b3dc59-b40f-48e2-ad93-e301de7ac...
Texas has installed a vast number of solar and battery backup systems since 2019. And it will be a few years, but is going HEAVILY into nuclear (and for the next 3.5, is going to get auto-approval to actually build them. ERCOT is changing fast, don't rehash stale narratives.
Only as long as the Texas politicians don't sabotage wind. Texas businesses make lots of money on wind, but the legislature and governor absolutely hate it.
Having experienced the Snowpocalypse and mini Snowpocalypse, weeks of 2019 PG&E PSPSes, and the 2000–2001 CALISO-Enron rolling blackouts, it's ridiculous for those in glass houses to throw stones.
So about one every 9 days that affects 0.55% of the population. So in a 3 year window a Texan has about a 50% chance of losing power for 2.5 hours. Seems pretty good to me.
This is how I prefer to interview. I don’t understand the mindset of LeetCode interviewers. It’s a weak signal because it’s easily gamed (false positives), and has misses too many strong candidates who have better things to do in their spare time (false negatives, bias towards one type of candidate -> lack of diversity in experience).
I feel like high iq people are more likely to succeed in the USA, than a communist country. This comes from someone whos parents grew up and lived in a communist nation.
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