Most deaths attributed to heart diseases are not natural at all, and I would argue it's the same for a lot of cancer cases.
Just a hundred years ago, they were unheard of. Our lifestyle and diet is what is killing us and some very big drinks and food companies have everything to gain from that. They are not natural deaths.
I remember the same thing. I don't have any sources, but I've come to understand that a lot of land is on hills/mountains and is therefore an inconvenient/dangerous place to build.
I think the "overcrowded planet" scenario is not very plausible, except if we're talking about resources. There is plenty of land for everyone, especially if we start to construct efficiently.
> There is plenty of land for everyone, especially if we start to construct efficiently.
I was afraid someone will get it the wrong way: I hope it STAYS that way; that the majority of the planet remains unpopulated, but humans learn to make better use of the space we're already occupying.
I want to copypaste this answer to so many comments in this thread but instead, let me reply to the post directly.
I'm going to travel to Japan (again) around late November this year. For this trip, I made a point to not return to a city I've been to already — Tokyo is an exception but I need to take my plane back home at some point.
Japan really has a high density when you go to the touristic attractions (most of those are inside Tokyo, Kyoto or Osaka). But when you go out of your way, you won't regret it. Peaceful streets, beautiful gardens. I would even advocate to actively go out of your way. Even if you get lost, Japan is very forgiving. People will try to help you.
Somehow, outside of those cities it kinda looks like the countryside everywhere, but as long as there is a train station it's still convenient to go there.
Also, Japan is cheap. People doubt me when I say this, but Japan is very inexpensive. When you do the "Top 5" on TripAdvisor and eat Kobe Beef every day, yes it sure is expensive but it also is an experience that isn't meant to be lived that many times.
If any of you read this and need help planning a trip or want any humble suggestions, feel free to contact me!
Food is cheap, but skilled labor is expensive. In the US, it's common to go out to eat because the reputation and wages of labor for food service have been crushed, but in Japan, asking another human to pour your beers and make you food and then clean up in an izakaya carries an appropriate cost. A friend who'd never left the US was shocked to learn going to teppanyaki cost almost $200/person... and the chef didn't even do any tricks!
The minimum wage seems impossibly low, but there's a human economy - no one who works doesn't eat. You can have fresh, nutritious meals and ingredients right from the field for pennies on the dollar practically wherever you go. The variety is mind boggling, as is the convenience.
> In the US, it's common to go out to eat because the reputation and wages of labor for food service have been crushed, but in Japan, asking another human to pour your beers and make you food and then clean up in an izakaya carries an appropriate cost.
Hmm, unless I'm not getting your point, this seems at variance with the lived experience of most East and Southeast Asians. (I've lived all over the world, mostly in Asia Pacific and North America)
America has relatively high labor cost (plus tax and tips, you're looking at at least $20/meal/person post-covid) and eating out is expensive and it is actually not that common to eat out -- at least not at a sit down restaurant. For most Americans, eating out is maybe a once or twice a week affair.
In most of Asia (including Japan) eating out is relatively cheap and most can afford to do it daily (many young people in Asia don't cook). I don't know if anyone goes to Japan to eat $200 teppanyaki or that izakayas are a daily affair, but most meals in Japan cost under US$10. An udon is under $5, and a gyudon (beef, soup, rice) at Yoshinoya costs under $5. No tax or tip -- you pay sticker price.
> A friend who'd never left the US was shocked to learn going to teppanyaki cost almost $200/person
Yes that is unfortunately true and sometimes they aren't even upfront about it. It's very common to have this fee in bars and izakaya[1].
But I would still argue that it's still quite affordable compared to other big cities.
I'm not arguing for the purchasing power of Japanese people inside Japan[2], but as a tourist it definitely seems like a first-tier destination without the price!
[1]: Japanese pub, basically
[2]: Trust me, they really did get the wrong end of the stick
Edit: After reading another comment, I actually misread Dollars for Yens and I think I was talking about something completely different!
Tokyo, private room. I'm sorry, I made it sound like that's what it cost at a food court.
It just tickled me so much that he admitted he was a little disappointed that he didn't get an "authentic hibachi experience" like at the Japanese steakhouses back home.
No, because while cash loses value, so do many assets. Simply putting money into assets instead of cash doesn't mean you make more money. You might, but you might also lose more money.
No, they haven't. You're thinking specifically about how the US market has been lucky enough for that to occur.
There is absolutely nothing intrinsic about that happening as a guarantee. Look at other countries' stock exchanges.
There have also been periods of time in US history where your equities would have lost catastrophic value as you were ready to retire and all of a sudden you wouldn't have been able to draw down on your retirement without a blend of income from somewhere else.
You're putting words in my mouth and responding to arguments I have never even made.
> There have also been periods of time in US history where your equities would have lost catastrophic value
This is true, but it also is true for cash. You rarely (never?) need all the value of your portfolio at once, so I don't understand your point. Also, most investors invest throughout their lives so even dramatic losses could actually just be a breakeven due to compounding[1]. My point stands that longer-term, an index vastly outperforms cash.
> you wouldn't have been able to draw down on your retirement without a blend of income from somewhere else
Guess what? This is exactly what happens in most cases (at least in my country) anyway as the national pension doesn't give nowhere near enough to live.
[1]: I've found a simulator that goes back a very long time back (https://dqydj.com/sp-500-periodic-reinvestment-calculator-di...). I've selected a period from January 1884 to December 1932. 1932 is one of the big dips, and 1884 would be the time someone would start working if he retired in 1932 (roughly 45 years earlier). For monthly investment you can put whatever you wish, but I've set the initial investment to zero. You can see that your scare tactic doesn't work as the investor still made a huge profit despite an apocalyptic market crash.
You can't attack other users like this here. Since we've asked you many times to stop breaking HN's guidelines and you've continued to do it, I've banned the account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Cash loses value every year. This has been true for every currency. We don't have late 20th century inflation but people who know basic personal finance do not want to hold too much cash right now.
Cash loses value at a relatively predictable rate. Equities and other assets gain and lose value at unpredictable rates. There are different rates and different predictabilities. When investors are happy, equities skyrocket to the moon; when investors are unhappy, they crash. US equities in the last 100ish years had an amazing upwards run that is atypical of anywhere else, anywhen else, or any other asset class; is that expected to continue or is it just survivor bias?
Stocks tend to go upwards much more than cash, in the long term, even accounting for crashes. But those crashes are still big. IIRC, if you buy right after a big crash, you get about twice as much stock for the same price, and skip ahead 10 years (25% of the complete duration of the game) compared to someone who bought right before. I haven't run the numbers but I'm assuming that means it's worth holding only cash for 10 years if you're sure there will definitely be a crash some time in that 10 years. That's a best case scenario but 10 years of retirement is not something to be gambled lightly.
> it's worth holding only cash for 10 years if you're sure there will definitely be a crash some time in that 10 years
Oh, because you know for sure that there will be a crash in the next 10 years? A prediction like that alone is worth billions, and I honestly doubt that you're different from the thousands of other who advocated for the same thing since the last 50 years.
In real life, an investor starts to keep assets that aren't as volatile but still aren't cash (e.g. bonds) as he approaches retirement. But even then, if they retire officially (i.e. at 65) then they probably have a national pension to draw from anyway.
> also, is Bitcoin a currency?
I don't care about cryptocurrencies at all, but it is the same classification as gold. People use it to speculate and reassure themselves thinking that "if it goes bad, it will preserve my wealth" and it doesn't have any value except when you trade it with someone for a usable currency.
Equities also lose and gain value. There's a reason to hold cash when it's preferrable to lose real, time and inflation-adjusted, value versus losing to speculative equities or other securities.
But go ahead, downvote me since you and the rest seem to think any asset is better than cash.
Which, of course, once again, isn't true.
You can buy bonds with real coupon rates worse than inflation; you can buy speculative equities whose YoY return nets negative.
But yeah, cash is bad, cash is bad. Buy assets no matter the value!
Go buy Pokémon cards! Right? I mean you guys are so smart, why hold cash? That's basic personal finance!
I bet you also like to tell people "don't time the market, it's time in the market," right?
There's no such thing as the "Lost Decades," that's a spooky Halloween story.
In fact, you're right, go invest in Keurig Dr. Pepper, or no no, how about Kraft Heinz. Those did so well compared to just holding cash.
What about real estate, huh? How about AirBnB? That better enough than cash for you? Not a fan of real estate?
How about Warner Bros Discovery? Yeah? That better than cash?
You could have lost money constantly on GameStop, but wait, there's more, you can go still lose money on it today! Why hold cash?
> I bet you also like to tell people "don't time the market, it's time in the market," right?
That's right.
> In fact, you're right, go invest in Keurig Dr. Pepper, or no no, how about Kraft Heinz. Those did so well compared to just holding cash.
You're either trolling me or don't know anything about modern personal finance. If you're willing to get out of your cave and open your worldview a little bit, I recommend reading the Bogleheads wiki.
Your argument is also flawed, as cash still lost some of its value. As it always did.
Also, comparing cash to investment in specific companies stock is an unfair comparison. USD vs S&P500 index is a fairer comparison.
It's fine if you yourself prefer to hold cash for whatever personal reasons you have, but please stop talking nonsense. A comparison of any currency in the world vs a roughly diversified index would invalidate all your points.
Not at all. Buying and selling on a fixed schedule regardless of the price of the asset is absolutely not timing.
Let me take the Investopedia definition[1]: "Market timing is the act of moving investment money in or out of a financial market—or switching funds between asset classes—based on predictive methods. Market timing is the opposite of a buy-and-hold strategy, where investors buy securities and hold them for a long period, regardless of market volatility." (emphasis mine)
> It's fine if you yourself prefer to hold cash for whatever personal reasons you have, but please stop talking nonsense. A comparison of any currency in the world vs a roughly diversified index would invalidate all your points.
> No idea why self-hosted software isn't `apt-get install` and forget.
Some of it is. But as soon as you want your services to be accessible from the Internet, you need to have a domain name and HTTPS. To run Limewire or a BitTorrent client, you don't need a domain name yourself because you use a central server (in the case of BitTorrent, a tracker) to help you discover peers.
All the popular domain name services and certificate issuers have APIs. All grandpa has to do is go online and buy a domain - which is a very reasonable step that grandpa can do. Grandpa, after all buys stuff online. But after that the self-hosted app should be able to leverage the APIs to configure all the settings.
I'm not sure if this is what you mean too, but by the same logic it's not a 'graphics company' nor gaming etc. either. 'Chipmaker' as they say, specialising in highly parallel application-specific compute.
> Start with a gsheet, when it breaks build something else.
Absolutely don't. The one who built the spreadsheet will have changed companies and the "business logic" and the knowledge will be gone with them. You're now stuck with a blackbox that no ones knows the specs of but everybody depends on.
If the sky doesn't fall the sky doesn't fall. Buddy of mine in sales is using some old DOS software from the 90s to control inventory and quotes. I bet there are absolutely zero people who know how it works in that company today. But, it works.
Turns out when you make relatively simple software, it doesn't really need maintenance. How often do you need to maintain a function like f(x)= mx + b? If it works it works.
It is kind of interesting seeing the fear developers have over "everything in finance is on excel." It kind of reeks of armchairism where one assumes the worst immediately and assumes this assumption has somehow not been realized by the domain experts in this space who are in fact also smart spend all their time on the thing.
To an accountant, excel spreadsheet is a source of truth. There is no undetermined behavior. They can look at the calculations underlying the spreadsheet and understand what is happening, no different than a developer looking at source code. They do in fact have their own forms of unit tests considering these data are audited in a far more rigorous fashion than most any code that ships with unit tests.
A spreadsheet doesn't scale, is easily lost or corrupted or stolen, doesn't have security and people that tend to use it don't add data validation and don't care about atomic properties or data consistency.
These are different reasons than given previously. Regardless, Google Sheets are automatically versioned and have extensive access controls, both at the document level, and cell level. Further still, these types of documents are not black boxes, since anyone with access can inspect the data themselves. Arguments regarding scale and atomic operations/properties/consistency are fine, though I do not believe all business logic is necessarily beholden to these qualities.
Let's qualify spreadsheets as software: critical software should not be made by a non-technical person that doesn't know software engineering principles.
I guess Google Sheets invalidates some of my arguments, but Excel certainly does not. And, even if the feature is there, I've never seen them applied.
Natural sweet things are healthy (fruits are an example). Processed food where sugar was added to make it addictive is not. I would argue most pastries are not healthy but you can make them at home and remove 50% of the sugar if you really crave one.
For salt, I disagree. Normal humans don't need to add salt to a varied diet. Table salt is completely unneeded but most think food tastes bland without salt because their taste buds have adjusted to it.
I like fruit. I like pastries. I eat plenty of fruit and the occasional small pastry. This is a perfectly healthy, balanced diet. Sure, I could choose to never eat pastries (or to eat pastries with half the sugar in), but the overall effect would be to lower my happiness.
Your approach strikes me as the sort of dietary absolutism that is actively damaging to public health.
The salt thing is a case in point. Perhaps it's theoretically true that we could all learn to enjoy our food with less salt. But this would be very hard, and I'm not convinced that an ordinary amount of salt is very damaging to health (except in the case of some specific health conditions that most people don't have).
But many schools in the UK take your approach: kids get taught to cook meals with no added salt (and also the bare minimum of fat). Everything they make therefore tastes bland and tedious.
The result? These kids don't learn to love cooking or home-cooked food. Instead, they learn that the way you eat food that tastes good is to order it from restaurants and fast food outlets. This is much more expensive and much less healthy than cooking at home using a reasonable amount of salt and fat, and it's a public health disaster.
It tastes bland because our taste buds have adjusted to our salt consumption. I eat with no added salt and my food tastes just fine since I adapted.
Over-salting is one of the causes of the most common way of dying. I couldn't say for sure because I don't go to restaurants a lot anymore, but it's not rare to see people salting their dishes without even tasting them beforehand.
A poor diet is typically one that includes *excessive* amounts of sugar or salt. I agreed with a comment that endorsed sugary foods as occasional treats and salt as a way to enhance flavor.
Sugar and salt are inexpensive ingredients that make highly processed foods more appealing, often leading to over-consumption. This not only displaces more nutritious options but also contributes to their negative reputation and, over time, they have come to be seen as unhealthy in any amount. Sugar, in particular, is sometimes portrayed almost as a poison.
> Table salt is completely unneeded but most think food tastes bland without salt because their taste buds have adjusted to it.
Salt was extremely valuable and thought after before it was broadly available. People always liked salt because it makes things taste better. The amount is a matter of habit and too much salt is unhealthy, but the general principle stands: a little salt is and always was tasty and healthy.
Your body does not need a lot of salt to function healthily.
Sure it makes everything tastier, but salt added to every dish is a danger to your health. Where I live you would get almost all your daily recommended intake by your usual portion of bread.
So, yes, salting your lunch or dinner will result in excess salt.
None. Because you projected your country's laws in the discussion, you failed to see that the countries that allow copyrighted material to be downloaded for personal usage do not qualify that download as "copyright infringement" in the first place.
To answer your question with the only answer I know: Switzerland.
Okay, sure it's been studied for longer but until very recently it wasn't really in the debate—or rather, in the average Joe's mind. Go to a nutritionist and they will tell you to eat less than you consume despite it being much more complex.
So I maintain my point. In fact, most of HN, which I consider educated, probably doesn't know about that. I myself heard about it very recently.
Just a hundred years ago, they were unheard of. Our lifestyle and diet is what is killing us and some very big drinks and food companies have everything to gain from that. They are not natural deaths.
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