>Sweden prepared more than the US did, significantly more.

I quit working at a major university hospital in Stockholm three years ago, in the very early days of the pandemic. I, and many other scientists from academic research, were contacted and asked to volunteer to help fill out the increased testing capacity, we were run through a hospital bootcamp and were working shifts during the first wave. The whole operation was pretty remarkable to see up close, Swedes always seem to do things really, really efficiently.

The most interesing thing to me was that they didn't need us for the second wave, even though at that point all the emergency tent capacity had been removed, and even though the second wave dwarfed the first. At that point the hospitals were 'properly' prepped and didn't need emergency stand-ins.

I had to set up a lab 2016, ordered a load of Macbook pros for everyone. All keyboards died within two years. I was so mad I swore off Macbooks, tried a Thinkpad with Debian... Boom, computing nirvana. And on this X220, typing nirvana as well.

Three years ago I was doing my postdoc, asked my boss if I could just work from home Wednesdays, saving me 1:30 bike riding in and out. That led to the week being a nice split of intense lab-work for two days and then a break to look at the results and write things up. It felt (way) easier but I got more done.

Then I started my own company, focused on mental health, and after doing some literature research it's impossible to miss the fact that a 40 hour work week is (a) arbitrary and (b) counterproductive.

If you want mentally well, creative and happy employees, let them work the hours that work for them. If you trust them, and they are working on projects that excite and motivate them, you shouldn't have to stand over them with AI cameras and piss-timing apps.

Not to mention the fairness aspect. We've been improving our productivity for decades, but we still work the same 40 hours (or more, if you count the always on-call Slack+mail tech jobs), and yet get paid the same. Time to change the work:life balance and simultaneously tackle this on-going mental health tsunami that's hitting the over-worked world.

We're "lucky" enough to be living through perhaps the single most important pivotal moment in human history. We're either directly living through, or at most a decade away from, a point of no return where we will diverge down one of two paths, either some really deep societal changes towards reduced consumption, 'sustainable' development and massive eco-restoration projects, or business-as-usual until environmental collapse, breadbasket failures, political chaos.

Stories like this really highlight the incredible unlikelihood of the former occurring. As a species we're just not suited to deal with the slow violence of climate change. It's too big, too subtle, too delayed in effect.

At the end of the day our intelligence is Bayesian, and we're heading for the end of civilisation as we know it because of a bug in that method of intelligence. It doesn't handle incremental, delayed action threats at all.

Better off investing in lighters, batteries, guns and antibiotics than bitcoin if things don't change soon.

I met a Swedish spotify coder on the lifts at Chamonix, he was living there for 6 months after a few years in San Fran.

So what is the killer app that would justify a $3000 price tag?

There are none yet, but they will be built. I work in the area, neuroscience/VR RnD, and in my opinion VR is going to be the 'next big thing'. The fact is that VR allows you to selectively edit weights/values stored in your brain in a way that way as well be a kind of neural net molecular surgery. If you look at the behavioural control systems that have been revealed in the brains of mice in the last few years (controlled by the olfactory system), and how those same systems in apes are controlled by the visual cortex, VR is an obvious way to control big, powerful systems of mood/behaviour and more in the human brain.

The hardware is not there yet for consumers, and this Apple set looks more like a developer kit than anything aimed at the Apple crowd, but they clearly understand the potential here. VR is going to change mental health in the same way PCR changed molecular biology.

The really exciting thing is, this is not a technology that has to be developed, it's a technology that has to be discovered, the tech is already there, as functional systems in our brains, the challenge now is to figure out the code.

"Crypto platform eToro ... gives users the options to copy trades made by other people and reward those with the most followers".

These apps aren't about democratising the stock market, they're about letting the filthy deplorables into a previously members-only casino, and pushing the turbo button on the bubble generator. A lot of people are going to make a lot of money, but a lot more people are going to lose everything.

The stock market is completely toast as it is, when even the sombre FT are running stories with titles like This is nuts, where are the profits? , then you know there's a foamy market. There is a compete disconnect with company fitness and stock price. The question is not if everything is going to crash, but when.

I know a pretty high-level climate change guy, works for the UN, he is pretty resigned to society collapsing in our lifetime. I also read the climate change papers, not my science but I understand the statistics, I always thought it was weird that the science was so black and white but nothing changed, until I read the 'Deep Adaptation' paper and realised that we're just in cognitive dissonance about it. Miami has the hottest property prices in the US, and it's a city with terminal cancer.

For us to still have the kind of society we have now, in two decades, will require an absolute miracle of human behavioural change. So much so that it would be arguably a different society anyway, with no industrial meat production, no more oil, huge levels of change in how we treat nature etc.

Realistically, our current Western way of life is done in a few decades no matter what, the only question is it from a massive leap towards sustainability, or the 'Deep adaptation' alternative, Mad Max in Australia, huge swatches of the equator rendered uninhabitable, billions of climate refugees, famines always a bread-basket failure away, even in the West, etc etc.

I'm an optimist, I think we can make the necessary adjustments, but I wouldn't bet on it,

"If you've ever been self-employed, you know that is the maximum for and job that requires a fit brain and a good amount of concentration. At least if you actually want quality."

I just started a company two years ago, the biggest lesson so far has been that Quality work requires (1) a happy, relaxed and creative person, and (2) lots of time that isn't spent on stupid little shit.

And that's not from experience, I did the literature review, it's repeatedly shown if you want 'deep work' you need to have space to work in. For this company, I think the 5-day, 40 hour week is as relevant as an inkjet printer. if 'hours worked' is a metric, then you end up with Soviet Union style hours worked. The only metric should be (1) and (2) and of course, the actual produce of the company.

Let people work when and how much they want, as long as they get their job done.

"This isn't just a case of 'don't buy the first revision', don't buy any revision unless you want to pay for the privilege of helping Apple develop this tech...

When it's consumer ready, you'll know it."

Totally agreed. I work in this area, VR and neuroscience, so I was chomping at the bit to get the iPhone 12 for the LIDAR (it can do in 5 minutes what took 24 hours with photogrammetry 6 months ago), and when they release this I will be first in the queue again, because whatever Apple bring to the market will define the first really broad VR platform to target.

However it's all a pre-market right now, VR is clearly the most exciting new technology around, it is going to be a game changer in mental health, but there is no content, and the hardware is clunky.

Apple are going to bring great displays, efficient silicon, and hopefully wireless to the scene. Can't wait to see what they come up with.

Sweden has no oil, but is as rich as Norway.

Saudi Arabia has lots of oil, has nothing like the economy or standard of living of Norway.

Is it worth it to save on that?

I find, as you do, that generally the cost of things made in EU/US are double that of things made in Asia, but I still try and buy Western. It's not a matter of nationalism, or perceived quality, but a conscious decision to ensure things I own are made by people that have the assured quality of life that I would like for myself.

Yes the cost is double, but then I just buy less. And despite the occasional article (like this one) haranguing the options for buying Western, I have yet to be anything but spoiled for choice when trying to avoid exploitative manufacturing practises. Saving money without considering the moral issue is lazy.

(Although I would add that I personally find the rise of China to be a wonderful event, dragging millions of people out of poverty, I don't consider my avoidance of their goods to be something that will impede that rise).

Aluminium toxicity has been possible the most disproven causative theory in the history of science. A thousand studies, not a single piece of evidence.

Please stop spreading this snopes level bullshit.

due caution requires assuming that the same effects that occur at the larger scale (DNA damage by ionizing radiation leading to cancer, for example) are problematic at the smaller scale as well.

That research is well and truly done, You can read about it if you search for the term 'Heat shock". The premise is you can shock a cell with a slight heat increase, and then hit it again with a heat increase that would kill the cell had it not been prepared by the initial benign heat shock. This effect also transfers across different types of shock, so you can hit the cell with a small heat shock and it will subsequently survive what would have been a lethal UV exposure, or mechanical stress and so on. This is due to the upregulation of shock proteins, called Heat shock proteins due to their method of discovery but they are obviously more general than that.

Nokia has seen Apple and Google jump in on the high-end, taking almost all of the high-profit margin of the market. On the low-end they're going to be increasingly attacked by Chinese firms pumping out phones that are good enough to use, and cheaper than Nokia can make them. They can only try and regain some market share from Google/Apple and there is no way Symbian was ever going to do that. It's a dead OS in terms of mindshare. I think the hardware looks great (The new E9 is stunning) but they need to change OS.

Maemo has been fun but never got any focus from Nokia, and it looks like Meego is being aborted. It was either teaming up with MS or turning to Android.

This fucking sucks though, I have been waiting for a decent maemo phone for ages, ignoring the N900 because of the USB port issues. The hand-me-down E51 I am using is starting to show its age though, so I guess it's a second hand N900 for me now. I can't see this ending well for Nokia. Did they learn nothing from the MS behaviour during the "plays for sure" debacle?