The icons being tiny pictures of the actual trains is cute, but makes the map quite confusing to look at!
Edit: I just noticed that the marker style changes if I choose something other than "Equipment" from the map style dropdown, selecting "driving/stationary" certainly makes it a lot more readable.
Train movements between stations are simulated based on the expected speed between two points and not based on GPS tracks, sadly, so it's not very useful if you want to check whether your train is stuck (say, due to traffic or signal failures). Notice that the circles representing trains occasionally move at unnaturally high speeds -- this presumably happens when a train enters a station and its location is corrected. It would certainly be useful to be able to see the actual real-time location of a train and not just the approximate location (and I'd assume that at least some of the maps from other countries are indeed based on real-time GPS data!) -- this exists for buses in Oslo (only available in the public transport company's app, unfortunately) and it's nice to know for sure whether you'll have to run to catch your bus or not.
(Several years ago when looking into the possibility of creating a real-time train map, I read that certain train operators and/or the national government considers publishing the exact locations of trains to be a security risk, so unless opinions on this have changed I don't have high hopes that we're getting it soon.)
Another possible factor is specialist availability. As I assume is the case in all public healthcare systems (and in some way or another, e.g. through price differences, in private healthcare), some specialties have a glut of physicians while others have a real scarcity. I've personally experienced having to wait many times longer for a neurologist than a gastroenterologist, even though the issues my GP referred me to those specialists for were about equally serious, simply because there are so many more gastroenterologists available (relative to the demand) compared to neurologists (be it because too few neurologists were trained 5-40 years ago, because neurological issues have gotten more common, because GPs refer patients to neurologists more often than they used to, because neurologists may be more likely to go into private practice than gastroenterologists...).
With medical imagery, you don't just need to get to get the MRI, CT or whatever done, there often needs to be a specialist available who can decide how (or if) to treat you based on the results (the exceptions being very routine stuff that a GP can often handle the treatment of, e.g. common bone fractures; or screenings where a negative result is expected in 95%+ of cases, such as if you present with a headache and your GP wants to make sure you don't have brain cancer).
In the public healthcare system we have where I live, if my GP thinks I have a problem that's serious/non-obvious enough that an MRI would be useful (and it's not a highly routine issue as previously mentioned), the waiting time for that MRI will depend almost completely on when a specialist in the relevant field (or subfield) of medicine is available – otherwise, the MRI won't be up-to-date, etc. The MRI scans themselves tend to be done by private labs that are subcontracted by the public healthcare service anyway, and (as you'll learn if you ever book a private appointment with one such lab) these labs have lots of capacity. MRIs in themselves are cheap enough (it would surprise me if the public healthcare service paid these labs more than $500 per MRI on average, a pittance compared to the cost of a physician*) that there is no point for the public health service to queue up MRI appointments for months if they manage to book you an appointment with one of their own specialists.
The details vary between countries, of course, but if a public healthcare system in a rich country has so few MRI machines (and doesn't subcontract out outpatient MRIs to private labs) and/or are so penny-pinching that they find a speedy $500-$1000 MRI to be too expensive, then I would say those problems seem to be relatively easy to fix without changing anything fundamental about how the country's healthcare works.
*) Although this may not be the case if the physicians in your country earn less than, say, $30,000 USD on average – the cost of technical equipment matters less the richer a country is.
Unlike seemingly everyone else who has commented here so far, I actually took some time to read through the results. There are some interesting findings, like whites being the racial grouping least likely to own a cellphone at 97% ownership, compared to black and hispanic people at 99% and 100%, respectively. Assuming this isn't just a statistical artifact from a low sample size (the sample sizes are not stated, unfortunately), could this be at least in part due to luddite conservative Christian (and nearly exclusively white) groups like the Amish or Mennonites? In total, groups like these seem to have millions of members, but I'm not sure how many of them actually live without modern technology.
Could you elaborate a bit? My parents live in a not-very-well insulated wooden house from around 1900, and use a heat pump as their primary means of heating the house. This is Scandinavia, so it might be that this house (despite not even coming close to modern insulation standards) still has better insulation than most British houses, but it would surprise me (older British houses are generally built in brick, which should provide a better base level of insulation than a wooden house, and I'd think Britain isn't warm enough that nobody would build a house without any insulation whatsoever).
Maybe I don't understand what you mean by the word "feasible" – they don't have a goal of getting their living room above 23 C at most in winter, and I guess heat pumps are insufficient in such a house if you desire ambient temperatures above that. However, while other means of heating could plausibly bring the temperatures higher, that would end up being very expensive also because of the poor insulation – it's just harder in general to heat a drafty house and keep the temperature up, and I don't see how heat pumps are a uniquely bad choice for homes like that.
Edit: This is coastal Norway, so the climate in winter is quite similar to somewhere like Edinburgh, with temperatures usually above 0 C in January. The heat pumps would probably be insufficient somewhere the temperatures regularly reach -10 or -20 C, but that's a very infrequent event both here and in the UK.
The difference between the quality of the infrastructure (esp. roads and rail) in the Netherlands and Belgium must surely be the most convincing testament to what a country loses from even relatively mild (from a worldwide point-of-view) levels of interethnic squabbling!
Eixample is alright, and supposedly a decent place to live, but the main touristy part of Barcelona is the old town, Barri Gòtic, which is a typical chaotic maze of streets. Eixample receives a lot of visitors too, of course, but not so much, I think, because it's very charming in itself, but because it makes up a large part of the inner city and thus contains a lot of tourist attractions (including Sagrada Familia and other buildings by Gaudí) and shopping streets.
Also, once you go beyond Eixample (except to the east) the city's not a regular grid anymore. In the end, Eixample and other, newer neighbourhoods built on a grid probably represent a (substantial, of course) minority of the city.
Sounds like a process similar to how you would debug a difficult bug in a big and/or complicated codebase – through trying to isolate the code causing the bug, comparing the buggy code with code that's known to work, replacing other parts of the code with dummy code/mocks etc. And sometimes a bug seems impossible to solve regardless of how much developer time you throw at it, and you just have to ship the product with the bug (seems to be especially common in the game dev business).
>Moviegoers don't really like "squeaky" in lead male actors.
Unless you mean something different by "squeaky" than what I think you do, then Joseph Gordon-Levitt is an example of a successful actor who fits that description, don't you agree?
Can someone explain the logic behind this excerpt? I don't understand the connection between rising inflation and interest rates and online-only banks being outcompeted.
> "Rising inflation and interest rates this year have made it harder for online-only banks, called neobanks in Australia, to compete with established lenders, making fundraising much more difficult."
The first online-only bank in Norway was founded all the way back in 2000, and has overall been very successful. (Unfortunately, in my opinion, they were bought out by the largest local bank this year.) I understand how regulations and local habits/expectations can mean that an online-only back won't work in certain countries. For example, I can't imagine it'd work very well somewhere like Germany which is very conservative when it comes to tech in finance – cash and faxed contracts still being very much a thing and so on (correct me if I'm wrong, though). However, Australia doesn't strike me as being as conservative as Germany in this sense, so I'd be interested in hearing more about why online-only banking doesn't seem to be doing well there.
I don't think you're right that society doesn't have canned responses for this sort of situation. There's no canned response as brief as "my condolences" or "I'm sorry for your loss", but combine a few vague phrases of the sort "what an awful situation", "it must be horrible to lose control over your body and mind like that" and something about how brave and kind the other person is for helping his grandfather like that, and most people are going to get through the conversation without too much discomfort.
It might sound like I'm being ironic, but even if these phrases are cliched and almost contentless in a strict sense, they're very useful for signalling purposes, and when you're talking to someone whose relative is sick or dead, being able to smoothly signal that you care is actually really good for both parties -- comforting for the recipient and convenient for the sender (in the sense that they can easily make their concern and care for the recipient clear without too much hassle).
That chronic pain can have a central, neuropsychiatric origin is likely to have been considered at least briefly by anyone who's learned that (or who has been prescribed them) antidepressants, of all things, are frequently prescribed for chronic pain that appears without a clear cause.
I'm sure that the medicine of neurodegenerative diseases will receive more attention than almost any other field of medicine in the coming decades. Alzheimers, ALS and similar grave diseases are already major research priorities, but if chronic lower back pain and other chronic pain is definitely shown to frequently be the result of brain atrophy then better understanding (and hopefully treatments) may matter for a large part of the working population as well.
It's not exactly true that your salary is public -- what's public is your taxable income, taxable wealth, total estimated tax, birth year and postal code. Various deductions apply to the income which makes it non-straightforward to deduce a person's actual income, and as for taxable wealth the minimums are high enough and deductions are substantial enough (especially if you own a home) that a lot of people with wealth much greater than zero will be listed with a taxable wealth as zero.
While I don't think anything in the linked article is wrong per se, it's a very brief look at a complicated and interesting topic. I'm slowly working my way through Ratcliffe's Experiences of Depression (mentioned in the article), which is basically "the" volume on this topic. It's a highly technical book (surprisingly so given the wide variety of people I've seen talking about it), so be prepared for a lot of psych jargon, but it's rewarding if you want to take a deeper dive into how depression feels than you get through reading the dry definitions in the DSM and similar resources. It probably helps with comprehension to have had depressive experiences yourself and possibly even more to have experienced a wide variety of conscious states (through psychotropic medication, psychedelics, other mental illnesses, shocking life experiences or otherwise).
I'd say the book is so important that I wish the author would write a book on the same topic but in simpler language (popsci-esque, except less superficial than the typical popsci book) that could be read by a wider audience than Experiences of Depression. I think a lot of people have severe difficulties understanding depressed friends or family because the nuances of the experience of a depressed person are so difficult to convey in words. Such a book could help bridge the gap.
Video games are an active form of entertainment, while movies are passive. There is a spectrum from forms of entertainment requiring a great deal of active involvement and attention to purely passive entertainment: playing physical sports, board games, competitive video gaming and stuff like day trading, single player video gaming, casually dancing, watching sports with some friends (heightened attention due to emotional involvement), reading a book, watching a movie or a play, listening to a podcast (roughly ranked by how actively involved you need to be to participate).
Activities at roughly the same level of required attention can to some degree replace each other (like how watching a play went from an everyday activity to a niche after movies appeared) but I think we have seen throughout the past century and a half that this doesn't happen when the activities require different levels of attention. The day only has 24 hours, of course, so when a new popular activity appears it may steal some attention from existing popular activites, but I think humans will continue to participate in activities at all the different levels of required attention.
Just like good books continue to be written every year despite not being as culturally dominant as they were in the 19th century and before, good stories will continue to be expressed through the medium if film in the future. It's common to say that video games and movies are suited for different types of stories and while that's true to some degree, I think it's simpler to say that people will continue to make good movies because there will still be an interest in that kind of passive entertainment.
As a side note: I use movies as a shorthand, but I might as well have said movies/TV. As ekianjo said below (above?) "movies are not at the forefront of anything for a long time already" -- not sure I'd fully agree with that, but a lot of attention and storytelling talent has moved to TV because the two mediums have been on a path of convergence in the past 20 years. As TV and movies are roughly the same from the perspective of required attention, it might be that TV comes to dominate and feature-length movies dwindle to a niche scene. Similarly, the popularity of sports and e-sports (one or both) could be threatened if a hybrid (like one of those sci-fi American football 1000 years into the future concepts) appeared.
I'm quite happy with my current salary – the problem is that I don't know anyone with my level of experience who earns more than me, and I'm certainly not the person among all my friends and acquaintances who provides the most value to his company. I've ended up where I am by spending a lot of time looking for jobs and being very selective, but it would be nice if the general salary level were higher so that more people could get paid according to the value they provide.
The point is that because of the mentioned factors, artificially little of companies' revenues flow to developers (in the form of wages or other compensation). If the general salary level of developers in the local market increased, then I believe that would happen without large sacrifices to workload or work/life-balance (many of which would be illegal under local laws anyway), because it would only make up for the salary level today being artifically low.
I work as a software developer in Norway. I've long had the impression that there are a lot of workers in my industry – particularly older people but not exclusively – who simply don't seem to care that much about their salary or total compensation package, don't put a lot of effort into salary negotiations and who tend to be happy with annual salary increases just above what's necessary to keep up with inflation. Good for them, but they harm everyone else by bringing down the mean salary in the industry. If there are lots of older developers who are perfectly happy with earning $80,000 10+ years into their career then it's very hard to justify why you should earn $120,000 with three years of experience, even though the value you bring to the company is much greater than that.
This is exacerbated by the fact that it's very hard to fire people and that most developers work for relatively large and stable companies that rarely go out of business. Both of these factors are pleasant for the workers (including myself), of course, but they can have a negative or stabilising effect on salaries. Regular shocks which would cause poorly run companies to go bankrupt without changing the aggregate demand for developers would help push developer salaries upwards.
Lovage isn't quite as obscure as the article makes it out to be. I didn't recognize the English name of the herb but I remember having seen the Norwegian name on restaurant menus and it doesn't even grow here outside of gardens. It seems to still be reasonably common in southern European food.
> This seem to be the reason that in some places people often refer to "catholic" as "roman catholic".
That's not really why, is it -- it's because there are also the Eastern Catholic (as opposed to Eastern Orthodox) churches that recognize the Pope as the leader of the Church while using different rites (including allowing married men to be priests).
Edit: I just noticed that the marker style changes if I choose something other than "Equipment" from the map style dropdown, selecting "driving/stationary" certainly makes it a lot more readable.