Even discounting annual variance, the UK economy has been performing very poorly since, at least, 2010.
> The UK economy is in the doldrums. The IMF has forecast it will be the worst-performing large advanced economy this year. But the problems stretch back much further.
> Average annual growth rates have more than halved since the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The UK economy is no bigger now than it was on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic at the end of 2019 and the Bank of England does not expect to recover that ground until 2026 at the earliest.
That’s true of every big European country except Germany. The UK, Italy, France, and Spain (four of the five largest countries in Europe) have basically the same GDP now as in 2008.
Germany is screwed too, they lost access to cheap Russian gas, the auto market is changing, car exports account for 40% of their GDP. Companies like Daimler, the Vag group or BMW should really begin to target the defence sector.
I don't know what the laws are, but the amount of smoking centimeters away from the entrances of buildings in Europe was staggering to me as an American. Both from patrons and employees. I was breathing in smoke plumes pretty much everywhere.
I wasn’t aware of Europe’s laws but I meant outside of Europe too with European expats. Living in Asia currently and second hand smoke is a big part of my social life.
In my experience, trying to push away these feelings of shame, jealousy and inadequacy won’t help at all. By sheer will, or by using “mental hacks” from pop psychology you might be able to push them out of consciousness for a while, but that won’t last for long. Or worse, it will last and the feelings will stay out of consciousness, even though, since their root cause hasn’t been solved, they don’t really disappear. They just become unconscious and part of what Jung called The Shadow: the aspects of ourselves that we can’t accept and we push into unconsciousness. From the unconscious they act up and make us behave in irrational ways without being able to understand what’s happening.
Instead, try to approach these feelings with an attitude of compassionate curiosity.
First, notice that there’s nothing wrong about having these feelings. It’d be wrong if you were mean to your friends because of their success. But you can have these feelings and not be mean to them. The feelings are not the problem.
Second, understand that there’s nothing wrong with you. You’re having these feelings for a reason. There's a casual chain of events that's making you feel this way. So, why are they happening?
The obvious -and wrong- answer is because your friends have money and you don’t. But surely there are plenty of people in the world that have less money than you, and still manage to be reasonably happy. And even your rich friends could compare themselves with even richer people and feel inadequate about how small their swimming pool or their yacht is. Are they feeling this way?
You can ask other more meaningful questions: why do you feel the need to compare yourself with your friends? Why do you feel that you need a ton of money to validate you and make you happy?
These are not easy questions to answer. They often touch deep wounds -otherwise we wouldn’t be so keen to avoid them. But approaching them with curiosity and compassion is the only way to find the root causes of what’s making you so miserable.
I'm a Spanish person, living abroad and with a penchant for cooking, and I was too very gratefully surprised by Kenji's Spanish tortilla video. Also by his other Spanish recipes such as Gazpacho[1] or Paella[2].
It's not that they are very orthodox recipes, cut and paste from a traditional recipe cookbook, but instead very good adaptations of them, taking into account ingredients availability and different contexts.
I can't really tell about other cousines, but judging how he cooks Spanish food I'd say he knows what he's talking about.
Add to that that he seems like a very decent and empathetic person and I'd say he's someone you want to listen to if you are looking for cooking advice.
I can't believe I didn't know about Spanish tortilla before. Easily the best egg dish and also maybe the best way I currently know to prepare potatoes at home now. And they get better when they're cold! I've wasted my life!
I've made dozens since last summer, and Kenji's technique in the video has been pretty much bulletproof for me.
His extra-creamy scrambled egg is also a mainstay now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX-Y513ohbc --- I love how little patience he has with macho restaurant culture, and that he won't even link to Gordon Ramsay, who popularized the dish.
I've made his Spanish tortilla once a month or so since that video came out... However, I once dropped the whole thing in the sink while doing the "flip". (Maneuvering a hot cast iron pan isn't easy.) I've never felt more disappointed in myself than I did at that moment; I was making it for breakfast and I basically just turned the stove off and went back to bed. So now I'm always a bit wary when I start on it, knowing that it has the power to destroy me psychologically.
This has happened to me a few times, and I imagine many others!
I bought a “tortilla pan” in Spain which prevents this. It’s basically two pans with an interlock on one side. You cook the tortilla on one side, grab the other pan and lock it on, then flip it over and put the other pan on the heat to cook the other side. Foolproof and worth it when you cook as many as I do!
I am very surprised it's not a more popular dish in the US - it seems like it would fit well the Denny's, IHOPs or even some fast-breakfast drive-throughs, and work as breakfast or appetizer or dinner.
It's on every menu in Barcelona - yes, served cold.
A Spaniard taught me that mixing in some potato chips gives it some variety. He said he even sometimes makes it completely out of packaged chips.
It is a curious and useful book: the recipes are for the unfussy Spanish homestyle meals they served to the staff at el Bulli each night before opening. Each recipe is one that can scale way up, and the quantities are given to make each dish For 2, 6, 20, or 75 (!) people. It’s a good source of inspiration if you need to cook a dish for a crowd.
There are also detailed photo illustrations of the ingredients and of each step in the recipe.
Just as a point of order (and because I don't like giving Gordon Ramsay credit for things either), Jaques Pépin popularized that technique for scrambled eggs when Ramsay was ten years old.
I've watched this Jacques Pépin video countless times and the ease with which he casually prepares the two styles of omelets in ~5 minutes and narrates the process amazes me every time. I still can't perfectly replicate the second "classic French omelet" style even after years of effort. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1XoCQm5JSQ&t=8s
I’ve been following Kenji for a very long time. One thing I like is on the subject of adaptations. I have made his beef stew a few times, it’s quite involved. But I love how the recipe on the site adapts over time to take into account how people in the comments find different ingredients and tooling. For example, his original recipe works great on his super nice restaurant quality oven, but not as much on your regular persons oven. He adapted the recipe for the audience to take this into account, which I absolutely loved.
While there is obviously Spanish influence in Latin American cuisine, I wouldn’t say the food cultures are similar. Furthermore, the culture can vary a lot between different (or even neighboring) Latin American countries.
There's a common misconception that awkward conversations should be avoided because they are difficult and elicit drama. But that's just magical thinking. Believing that to make something go away you just need to stop thinking about it. Push it out of your conscience.
But not talking about something doesn't magically make it disappear. Things you don't talk about are still there, lurking in the shadows, subconsciously influencing everything you do.
You’re assuming that talking about the awkward situation will help fix it. If it’s something like code review, it might.
If it’s world politics, it probably won’t. Even if you do actually convince him that his pet solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is a bad idea, he was never in a position to put his terrible plan into action anyway, so the whole conversation accomplished nothing.
That's exactly the problem: assuming that the only valid reason to talk about an awkward situation is to convince the other person that they are wrong or change their behaviour.
We can talk about about awkward things, nobody has to convince anyone of anything. You can listen to the other person and just come to understand how they feel and why. You don't need to feel the same way, just have a better understanding of why they feel how they feel.
If more people did this the world would be a much better place. It'd accomplish a lot, I think.
That is exactly the point. It's not about proving your point or bring proven right or wrong. It's about understanding the other point of view. That's what discussion is all about.
But what’s the point? Political conversations, even civil ones where everyone walks away understanding each other’s POV and agree to disagree, usually aren’t going to accomplish anything concrete, because very few people have the opportunity to affect government policy.
The best case scenario is that talking about politics doesn’t make your relationship worse. The most likely outcome, as you’ve noticed, is that we both leave convinced that each other are idiots. The good outcomes of more ordinary conversation, where we learn from each other and put what you learn into action, doesn’t exist. So what’s the point?
It accomplishes a better understanding between people and a less divisive society.
Which is also what we need to stick it to the man. They want us to fight and bicker and be divided into camps and never agree on anything. That’s how they can keep doing whatever they want. Even better if we convince each other that talking about this stuff is taboo and unproductive.
Remember: A populace than can work together is a scary populace, if you’re in power.
> But what’s the point? Political conversations, even civil ones where everyone walks away understanding each other’s POV and agree to disagree, usually aren’t going to accomplish anything concrete, because very few people have the opportunity to affect government policy.
That's true of most conversations - not just political ones. Why put them in a special bucket?
> The best case scenario is that talking about politics doesn’t make your relationship worse.
This is silly. There are lots of good case scenarios. Even "I enjoyed the conversation" is a good case scenario, and there are many better outcomes.
> The good outcomes of more ordinary conversation, where we learn from each other and put what you learn into action, doesn’t exist.
If you've convinced yourself an entity doesn't exist, then it will not exist for you.
Frequently, political conversations are personal. When you're debating about whether or not you should be allowed to vote, or whether you should be deprived of money or other rights, it's difficult to simply come away saying "I enjoyed the conversation".
Political conversations are more likely to be fun when they're discussing abstractions. But they can have real effects in a way that few other disputes can. Even though the absolute power of one vote is very small, it's not enjoyable to be told "I'm going to put my small amount of power to making your life worse."
> When you're debating about whether or not you should be allowed to vote, or whether you should be deprived of money or other rights, it's difficult to simply come away saying "I enjoyed the conversation".
Then I would suggest you discuss instead of debate.
> Political conversations are more likely to be fun when they're discussing abstractions. But they can have real effects in a way that few other disputes can. Even though the absolute power of one vote is very small, it's not enjoyable to be told "I'm going to put my small amount of power to making your life worse."
Many political discussions need not be that personal. This thread mentioned Israel/Palestine. I guarantee you that 99% of the people who have strong opinions about this are not at all impacted by it either way.
But yes, certainly issues about health care, taxes, guns, abortion, etc could be very personal. And that generally is a start for a good conversation. I grew up in the camp of abstract discussions, and while I still enjoy them, they're mostly useless when it comes to political/social issues. I put very little weight to well thought out analyses done in the abstract. When it starts involving real people, and clear "in your face" impact is when the conversation becomes useful. It may also become heated, too. But avoiding a heated conversation for an abstract one is not at all an improvement. And believing that a heated conversation is the only outcome is very flawed.
I personally feel very odd in discussions like the one you mentioned: Israel/Palestine. For those 99% of people with strong opinions but aren't impacted, 99% of them have based their strong opinion on information that's at best incomplete and most often wildly biased.
At best, you can hope for a genuine conversation where two extremely incomplete views come together to produce a state that is merely quite ignorant. That's an improvement, I guess. But I have a hard time getting enthusiastic about it. Especially since, if they did indeed come in with "strong opinions", the best case seems unlikely.
I myself have tried to aim for "weak opinions strongly held". Which is to say, recognize both my ignorance and the large amount of effort it would take to produce a state of genuine knowledge. I'm not kidding when I say that I have little interest in the opinions of anybody on the state of Israel and Palestine who doesn't speak at least one of Hebrew or Arabic fluently... and preferably both.
It's far from sufficient, but I find it weird how few people consider it necessary for holding strong opinions. As you say, these are real people, and if you're not able to speak their language, anything you know about it is at least one step removed -- and likely more.
There are people who will make any excuse not to talk about the exact thing they want to avoid and it's more trouble than it's worth pulling teeth trying to find a way to talk about the issue. They just don't want to face it at all.
A context switch in a modern CPU takes only a few microseconds. A GB of RAM costs less than $10. So those concerns, although valid in theory, are usually irrelevant for most web applications.
On the other hand, simplicity in a code base usually matter. Code written with an evented API, littered of callbacks, is usually harder to read and maintain than that written in a sequential way with a blocking I/O API.
You can recreate a sync API on top of an evented architecture using async/await, but then you have the same performance characteristics of a blocking API, but with all the evented complexity lurking underneath and leaking here and there. Seems to me a very convoluted way to arrive to the point from where we started.
A function call takes less. And using more RAM == thrashing your caches more == slowing down. The price of RAM isn't relevant to that -- this isn't about saving money on RAM but saving cycles. Yes, yes, that's saving money per-client (just not on RAM), but you know, in a commoditized services world, that counts, and it counts for a lot.
That's true, if you're buying OEM ram for Dell or HP servers, it's more like $10-20/GB. However you can buy Crucial ECC DDR4 ram for $6/GB, so there's a hefty OEM markup.
Yes, but. Suppose you build a thread-per-client service before you realized how much you'd have to scale it. Now you can throw more money at hardware, or... much more money at a rewrite. Writing a CPS version to begin with would have been prohibitive (unless you -or your programmers- are very good at that), but writing an async/await version to begin with would not have been much more expensive than a thread-per-client one, if at all -- that's because async/await is intended to look and feel like thread-per-client while not being that.
One lesson I've learned is: a) make a library from the get-go, b) make it async/evented from the get-go. This will save you a lot of trouble down the line.
It's actually a big problem for web servers. If you consider apache for example, that has to do one thread per connection. (yes, apache still doesn't support events for websockets in 2020).
Let's say you configure it for 2000 max connections (really not much) so that's 2000 threads, so 20 GB of memory right away because the thread stack is 10 MB on Linux. It's a lot of memory and it's obliterating all caches.
You can reduce the thread stack to 1 MB (might crash if you go lower) but any caching is still trashed to death.
Next challenge. How do you think concurrency work on the OS with 2000 threads? Short answer is not great.
The software making heavy use of shared memory segments, semaphores, atomics and other synchronization features. That code is genuinely complex, worse than callbacks. Then you're having issues because these primitives are not actually efficient when contended by thousands of threads, they might even be buggy.
The median annual household income worldwide is about 10k/year. 20k/year puts you in the 91st percentile globally for person income. So it's perfectly possible to live with that money, most people in the world do.
I figured we were talking mostly about US, so technically until you're a family of 3 you're not living in poverty, which seems pretty reasonable. It also probably greatly depends on where you live. Housing prices closer to major/wealthy cities are more expensive.
Having an income of 20k/year in US puts you at like 16th percentile.
> The UK economy is in the doldrums. The IMF has forecast it will be the worst-performing large advanced economy this year. But the problems stretch back much further.
> Average annual growth rates have more than halved since the global financial crisis of 2007-08. The UK economy is no bigger now than it was on the eve of the coronavirus pandemic at the end of 2019 and the Bank of England does not expect to recover that ground until 2026 at the earliest.
https://www.ft.com/content/dd195cda-ca12-48a6-9e8b-65a36e4e7...