This is almost exclusively just online behaviour. Everyone I met in person is very nice :).
The conference I mentioned was ZuriHac. After the key-note Q&A there was a small hallway discussion around how to grow the adoption / reach of Haskell. The conversation revolved around mostly technical points (like how Haskell is superior to x, because of y). What I found interesting was that there was little to no talk about the steep learning curve, developer ergonomics or business use-cases.
The thing is, if someone has not yet learned about functional programming, strong type systems or category theory, why / how would they see the advantages or the power of pure functions, lazy evaluation, Monads, etc. At the same time, their opinions or struggles are often dismissed due to their lack of knowledge. The parent comment is a prime example of this.
> When the dude uses `foldl` over lists and `foldr` with `(*)` (numeric product) it is not the language that's the lost cause.
This is a great example of Haskell's community being toxic. The author clearly mentioned they're new to the language, so calling them a "lost cause" for making a beginner mistake is elitist snobbery.
I usually don't point these things out and just move on with my life, but I went to a Haskell conference last year and was surprised that many Haskell proponents are not aware of the effects of this attitude towards newcomers.
> But my concern is always what happens to the poor.
There are subsidies available to low-income households. I'm unsure about the specifics as subsidies differ from one canton to another and usually depend on your income and family status.
I hate to cite Wikipedia as a source [1], but it looks like the majority of countries do not add fluoride to tap water (only 24 countries in total do).
But Sweden seems to have an interesting history with it indeed.
Sure, it's _somewhat_ lower than the US, but not to the degree that you can claim a big disparity in my opinion. As such, we could even rewrite your statement to the following:
> Today I learned that 59% of Finns are obese. Never been to Finland but I'm truly baffled how people and the government could let this happen.
Also, as other commenters have pointed out, "overweight" does not mean "obese".
I disagree. While this dichotomy might hold true in other examples, in the case of iPhones it was always possible to push custom software to your own device for development purposes. There is a somewhat arbitrary limitation that those apps only work for a week until the process needs to be repeated (unless you enroll in Apple's Developer Program), but that's a different topic.
The main demand in these "sideloading" discussions is therefore that Apple ought to make installing unlisted Apps easier. Personally, I don't understand why this should be of Apple's concern though. They already present a choice to app developers: Either go through their walled garden or impose a technical process on your (non-technical) end-users. Interestingly, there are already projects like AltStore that try to make the latter easier, which should be taken as proof that the whole "sideloading is impossible" argument is not really truthful.
Why this rose up to the highest ranks of the political system is beyond me.
PS: The existence of Jailbreaks further undermines the argument that you cannot control the software on your device.
> We can sell and ship within the EU as if it were one big country.
Is that really true though? To my understanding, there are still laws such as the European packaging & packaging waste legislation (PPWD) that require registration in each country you're selling to. The exact law differs from nation to nation as well, so you still require knowledge about each jurisdiction before you can safely sell to other EU members.
Also, while sending products directly to consumers shouldn't be much of an issue, I would imagine that there is some re-packaging / re-labeling needed if you'd actually want to have your German product in the supermarkets of Spain.
Thanks so much for the comment - I was trying to do that with the stable source yesterday evening with no success. Saw your tweet too, but don't have Twitter to ask you over there.
It's above average for sure. As a counterexample, take the city of Münster, which covers twice the area of Freiburg and is often praised as one of the most bike-friendly cities in Germany. It only claims to have 300km of bike lanes.
> > I doubt any of the 1M+ pop cities I’ve lived in came anywhere close to that
> And this sad.
There are a lot of 1M+ cities that have more than that. Just from personal experience:
* Munich - 1,200 km
* Berlin - 422 km
* Toronto - 973 km
* Metro Vancouver - 4,600 km
But comparing the cumulative length of bike-paths is a bit of a silly comparison anyway.
> I paid a grand total of ~€500 despite being self-employed at the time (so I only had standard public insurance everyone in Germany gets).
IMO, this is a somewhat misleading statement as Germanys public insurance (that everyone can sign up for), costs quite a lot. Normally the employer would cover 50% of the contribution, but as you mentioned being self-employed that could easily be over 800 Euros per month.
That doesn't quite tip the scale in favour for the US, but the differences between the two health care systems are more nuanced as you're making it out to be.
PS: From personal experience, I find that health care providers in North America will jump to expensive tests or hospitalization much quicker than European counter-parts. I don't know if that's common (I don't have enough data-points) but this could be another factor explaining the difference in cost.
This webapp seems to be more useful though, thanks for sharing.