It’s indeed thought police. But i suppose there’s a huge difference when the material is used for blackmail… and there’s also a risk it may be stolen and then shared publicly in which case it can be devastating for the victim. But if you keep the material well hidden it’s similar to if it was just in your imagination and hopefully that’s not illegal yet.
Here in Sweden we have Swish which seems to be very similar (just send money to anyone with a phone number/QR Code), but Swish is a private company, not government.
Relatedly, most company payments here, including water/electricity/etc bills, are paid using a system called Bankgiro, which is also a private company (and you can pay Bankgiro bills using Swish, of course).
And even the de facto national electronic identity system, BankID, is developed and provided by a private company. It is used to login to your bank as well as most government systems and any company can use it for login (which most Swedish companies do).
So, it differs from the Brazilian model in that all services are provided by private companies, not by the Government. Not sure which is better, to be honest. On the one hand it's hard to trust a Government like the Brazilian one given its history... on the other hand, trusting a private company even for public services seems wild: what if they go bankrupt, get sold to foreign investors, started using shady business practices??
There's a reason why our government doesn't do anything that you can squint into a monopoly, the EU comes after us with pitchforks when we implement government monopolies. So the alternative is regulating some standard that a private organization implements and hope regulations are sound enough to not be exploited, or pray self regulation works.
That's why our railways are falling apart and why we have 2500 pharmacies but people up north have to travel to the town 100k away to get meds.
I wish the government that we elect every 4 years with public voting and kindergarten bartering could take ownership of things that are essential to life in Sweden, but nop it's all privatized so the companies can optimize profits by removing utility (BankID seems to be an exception here where the incentives align between companies and citizens).
Marco Polo was uncommon, which is why we remember him today. He also didn’t go entirely alone, and spent years traveling to places that can be reached in hours today. Not the same thing.
I grew up in a "developing country". Our family travel was limited to around 200km radius. The first time I went somewhere with only a friend that was like 1,000km, I felt the same as you describe! It was like going to another planet. People had very different accents and liked different types of music, different food etc.
In my 20's, though, I managed to migrate to a rich country and started meeting people from all over the world. I met people who spent 6 months in each country, more or less, and had been to like 20 countries in the last few years alone. These were not millionaires, they were young backpackers who did small jobs to pay for their travels. I did not even know that kind of thing was possible at the time. This changed my perspective and after a few years I started doing the same! Went everywhere I could, staying on backpacker hostels. Like many others are saying, it gets tiring after a while. Today, like top commenter, I prefer to stay at the Fours Seasons (or whatever 5-start hotel is available) and just get slightly off the beaten track... but I still want to talk to the locals and try to experience as much as possible the local culture as it is still illuminating to me.
Here in Sweden, 63% of new cars sold are electrical or PHEV. Still, unfortunately we still see a lot of fossil fueled cars on the roads... you immediately notice them because they're so damn noisy - and when you get used to the silence of EVs , it's hard to not notice them and be a bit disgusted.
I did that for years, just using an average power plug (now I moved to a house that already had a fast charger installed). The car, a PHEV, came with the recharger and charged fully overnight. The car only goes around 40km on EV alone, but that's more than enough for my daily needs. And it's almost "free", we did not notice any change in the electric bill after buying the car!
I find that the 30 miles my PHEV gives me is not enough for daily needs several times a week. Though I seem to be saving hundreds of dollars every month in gas while I haven't noticed a power bill increase (I've only had it for a few weeks so I can't fully gauge the impact, but so far it seems to line up with your report). At the point I can safely tell most people that they should just refuse to look at any new vehicle that isn't PHEV or full EV. Used car buyers should be willing to pay a lot more of the above - it will pay off in the long term.
Note that the big battery in a BEV is a great averaging mechanism. As long as your average drive is less than the amount you get from an overnight charge, you're likely fine. If you're adding 40 miles of range a night to a 300 mile battery, you have to have 4 consecutive days of 100 mile usage before you have to hit an external charger. Mix a few days of 20 mile usage between those 100 mile days and external charger usage is exceedingly rare.
That's quite likely to happen given how American politics tend to go left to right then back almost every election. I suppose some companies (but not all) will prefer to lose some money now rather than to take the risk of investing in large factories in the USA and lose whole factories, along with all money they invested into it, later.
A lot of things are neat because of this. Refactoring becomes trivial and safe. If you do not change the type of the refactored function, you can safely do a batch replace and everywhere the old function was used, the new one will be used after that. If you do change the type, the compiler interface will guide you through an interactive flow where you have to handle the change everywhere the function was being used. You can stop in the middle and continue later... and once you're done you just commit and push... all the while the code continues to work. Even cooler, perhaps: no unit test is re-run if not affected. And given the compiler knows the full AST of everything , it knows exactly when a test must run again.
I think you'll never find a case where someone got in trouble for not being a hero.
I've recently found myself in a somewhat related situation where a guy turned violent in a pub... first I tried to calm him down and almost got hit... he then turned to other guys who were nearby, and one of them got punched in the face and fell unconscious. My family was with me and told me to stay the hell out of it, but I thought that would be extremely cowardly so I jumped at the guy to try to keep him down, but he was strong and I got a punch in the eye which cost me a week with a black eye, but could've easily turned out much worse for me. If I had just stayed quiet, would I be "negligent"?? The police told me what I did was good as I was trying to help someone, but I didn't have any obligation to do it.
In the case of a child in a pool, the difference is a matter of degree. What if I am terrified of water myself? Does that justify my inaction? What if I just "froze", which is common in stressful situations. Does anything justify not doing something?
Here in Finland, there is legal obligation to help people in emergencies, but this does not mean that you are required to danger yourself or act beyond your abilities. So usually only thing you are actually legally required to do is to call for help.
Are you legally required to carry a means of communication? If not, how can this possibly be enforced? It sounds like an end run to get to negligence charges.
For example, how fast can I drive to get to a telephone if I don't carry one or otherwise cannot use it?
The difference is that German law is more systematic and includes a general duty to rescue, but this doesn't result in excessive negligence charges, as awards are much smaller.
> It sounds like an end run to get to negligence charges.
It's not anything nefarious like that. US citizens and US law enforcement tend to have an adversarial relationship, unfortunately. Finns generally do not. That law is an expression of expectation for behavior in a civilized society, not an opportunity for prosecutorial promotion, as it might be in the US. One must take reasonable steps to save a drowning child, including calling police. In practice, only the most egregiously callous psychopathic misbehavior is punished. Honestly, who doesn't think that a person shouldn't be in jail who would prefer to film and giggle while a child was drowning? A person like that needs a timeout at least.
> Honestly, who doesn't think that a person shouldn't be in jail who would prefer to film and giggle while a child was drowning? A person like that needs a timeout at least.
The difference is that jail in the US is not "timeout". Prisoners may be required to work against their will, which is the carve out in the fourteenth amendment which abolished slavery. People openly joke about sexual assault in prison with derogatory comments like "don't drop the soap". All in all, I think the bar should be higher to send someone to prison in the US. We already have too many people in prison and, in my opinion, many of them are wrongly in prison.
I am not from the US but calling out a specific race, besides a specific gender, seems really messed up. You know, just swapping the races you don't like doesn't make you not a racist. Can't you guys get past the "race" issue, please?
> calling out a specific race, besides a specific gender, seems really messed up
One of the bright notes of the last few elections has been the racial depolarisation of politics in America.
That said, we’re not in the endgame. You can still predict partisan (and subpartisan) affiliation by race plus one or two factors. Which is why we poll on that basis. In this case, there is one demographic that provides MAGA economic policies with oxygen. It falls along a specific race, gender and education axis—I don’t think it’s inappropriate to comment on that.
> just swapping the races you don't like doesn't make you not a racist
Sure. I don’t see how pointing out what a specific demographic did (qualified with a partisan lens) is derogatory.
reply