I think there's probably a decent correlation with people who are depressed going for convenience meals rather than take the time to cook or shop for healthy foods and that type of thing. It sounds like they tried to control for some of this but it's not clear how successful that was (I'm not a statistician so I can't speak to that).
At the same time, I think diet and gut health can have major impacts on physical and mental health as well so it makes some intuitive sense that certain foods might be linked with depression. I've always been suspicious of artificial sweeteners, they just seem a lot more chemical and artificial than the natural ones which we evolved to properly ingest.
The first type of 'no' is summarized as just being annoying to implement and not making a big difference, but I think it can be a lot deeper and more consequential than that.
There can be regulation that will damage a companies profits, but also provides positives to public health or other beneficial outcomes. Deeply profitable companies will fight tooth and nail against these regulations even if they are full aware of the damage they are causing. They will come up with as many convincing sounding reasons to say "no" as possible in the name of those immense profits they enjoy, and use techniques like expensive lobbying, sponsoring pseudoscientific studies, running ads, play up fears about economic damage or other negative outcomes of the policy, etc. They try to make it sound like the second or third kinds of "no" in the article and paint it as a bad idea, or impossible to do, or anything else they can to prevent the regulation. And if a certain individual at that company doesn't want to fight for their unethical profit, they'll be swiftly replaced with someone who will.
The obvious (non tech) example is something like the tobacco industry, which spent millions on manipulating public and policy opinion using misleading scientific sounding language or studies to prevent or delay regulation despite being fully aware of the many health detriments of smoking. Public health has been significantly improved as a result of smoking reduction, restrictions on where you can smoke in public spaces, age restrictions, whatever.
I think there is a lot of this currently in companies profiting off social media, oil and gas, and selling user data.
> Deeply profitable companies will fight tooth and nail against these regulations even if they are full aware of the damage they are causing.
Unfortunately this is also very similar to one of the most insidious forms of regulation -- the mildly inefficient requirement. You have something which is absolutely not going to bankrupt the company, but it costs three times more than it's worth.
It may even provide some benefit to someone -- someone who is happy to lobby in favor of it if it means they get a third of the money that it's costing customers to require it.
But then inefficiency increases and costs go up and barriers to entry to go up and the market becomes more concentrated, and the incumbents only make a weak showing of opposition because it's not going to kill them and they actually like that it might kill some of their smaller competitors.
So rules like that accumulate, even though they're each a net negative to the world, until people can't make ends meet because everything costs so much more than people get paid. And nobody can point to one single rule as the problem because it's really ten thousand of these little inefficiencies adding up.
Data sharing is a great example.
Small Biz A can't share data with Small Biz B, but Biz G can share data between Product A and Product B and their thousands of employees.
OTOH, Big G is also a single target should they start abusing that data - as opposed to Small Biz A and Small Biz B, which will just disappear and reopen as Small Biz C and D. Being larger has advantages, but it's not all advantages.
> Deeply profitable companies will fight tooth and nail against these regulations even if they are full aware of the damage they are causing.
There was an article recently about health labels on food in Mexico. The food manufacturers were not allowed to print cute mascots on the packaging for certain foods aimed at children, and had to place a warning label on certain foods. In the first case, the manufacturers switched to transparent packaging, and printed the mascot on the food itself (so that it was clearly visible). In the second case, the manufacturers basically made the front and the back of the packaging the same, but put the mandatory warning only on one side (so store employees would put it on the shelves with the warning on the back). I wish they would pursue ways to make food healthier with the same energy.
The socially positive nature of the industry on one axis and the degree of strong completion on the other.
So we can have say Retail food stores, sainsbury's and tesco, that deliver mostly positive things (food!) in a highly competitive manner.
We can also see positive industries (water / sewage) that have terrible competitive landscapes (fundamentally monopolies/ utilities). These need to be regulated differently - ie with hands firmly
clasped round the throat of all
participants.
Bad industries and bad competition looks like the illegal drugs trade (I personally think the cut throat nature of retail
stores is as literal cut throat as we want. When the completion stops focusing on making the product better and starts focusing on killing the other stores employees we are not seeing improved markets
And your example was bad industry / good competition- cigarettes are a good example here.
I think it's worth adding a third dimension to the grid - time and future shape. The retail food model is a good one but over time we can see the effect on out of town car parks, the urbanisation vs wqlkability etc etc. Intervening in how stores advertise the price of milk won't help this. But neither will "nerd harder" - there is no solution to "this business model if continued will go the wrong way" that does not involve chnaging the business model - ie charging for car parking space or something.
Anyway, it struck me as a useful simple graph. As business models move to different parts of grid they get regulated differently, and adding time/dependencies in means we can shape the results.
But in the end I am arguing for smart proactive interventionist government.
> also provides positives to public health or other beneficial outcomes
But the people asserting these positives are also lobbying, making convincing sounding arguments, running ads, playing up fears, sponsoring pseudo-scientific studies and all the other ills you criticize. And they'll do that even if they're fully aware of the damage they're causing, or will cause with their proposals.
I have to work on a legacy site using statamic v2 regularly and I absolutely hate it; it's slow as all hell and littered with template rendering and parsing bugs.
I'm sure v3 is nicer though from the amount of times I've searched the docs with an issue and seen "fixed in v3".
Interesting that Github has been getting slammed by people upset with the outages, but it doesn't seem like there's much movement towards Gitlab as an alternative.
I use both near-daily for different clients and I have grown to prefer Gitlabs... the price is higher, but it might be worth it to some of the people in the daily HN github issue threads (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30790593 )
If you look at the article data, the lower income bracket have FAR less confidence than higher income brackets.
Also, I think it actually doesn't all go in an instant. I've worked with local businesses that are over a hundred years old and seen many market turns both positive and negative. During recessions they'll make a reduction in employees or other costs and be able to stay open on that until profits rise again... or worst case, they sell the business or real estate and pocket a huge amount of money even though it closed.
The folks that have it all go in an instant are the ones living paycheck to paycheck who get laid off at the first sign of trouble. Their losses insulate the businesses and owners.
This is HN nobody gives a shit about the working poor. And neither does our political system.
There are entire neighborhoods were only 40% of voters turn up.
This doesn't happen to most people so you have a clear personal identity problem. Maybe your name is on a list (when I worked at a brokerage, we had to do identity screens and close accounts if someone was on some sort of international security list... I wasn't a member of compliance so I don't know the full details). Possibly your identity has been stolen and is being misused. Or maybe it is just one specific rogue email account that you are using that is causing you problems. I would recommend reaching out to customer service at some of these companies, possibly Fidelity first as they are a financial institution with strict requirements and might be able to tell you most directly what your problem is. You should probably also make an attempt to check / lock down your credit and any other important accounts you have.
Just don't subscribe if the value isn't worth it, and there are plenty of services available subscription free.
I watch a lot of youtube videos and I have never been tempted by the $12 a month premium service. Sure, I've probably consumed some advertisements in between videos, but that's been worth it to me for the amount of youtube content I've enjoyed.
A service I might find more worth paying for is Spotify, since there is value in the easy access, centralization of all the artists, etc. But I don't always listen to a lot of music, only sometimes. So maybe if I know I'm working a job where I can listen to music in the background it's worth the cost that month to enjoy it ad free, but if I'm not going to be stuck working the warehouse I might not be listening to music and not spend the money on it.
Not exactly correct or incorrect. Some projects built as a single page app (SPA), using a fancy framework like React or Angular with little configuration, end up loading all DOM content client side via javascript which has a number of drawbacks on performance and SEO.
It doesn't have to be that way though. If you want to use React, there are tools to help you easily make something like a static site generator (SSG) which will transform your React code down into pre-rendered HTML pages. Two popular ones are Gatsby (https://gatsby.dev/) and Next.js (https://nextjs.org/) which also supports Server Side Rendering (SSR).
So out of the box plain HTML / CSS might be more optimized than a fresh create-react-app repo, but if you prefer to use the toolset provided by React to build your site (or Vue or Angular, etc), there are plenty of options to make that equally performant.
You should take a year or two and work at a grocery store, then once you've figured out what you enjoy and don't enjoy in your work life balance you can make better decisions about professional development or education.
Also, things have a tendency to work out. When I was in college I wanted to study astrophysics because I thought space was awesome and humbling and I loved learning about it. However, as I worked through my courses I found myself doing a lot of heavy math and very little cosmic wondering. So I switched to English Literature and absolutely loved reading about philosophy and politics and the human condition. Nowadays I work on software development, which has the right balance of creativity and quantitative reasoning for me. I didn't set out on that path, or spend any of my university time studying it directly, but by being flexible and open and listening to my own needs I arrived at a great place (and I hope you do too!)
At the same time, I think diet and gut health can have major impacts on physical and mental health as well so it makes some intuitive sense that certain foods might be linked with depression. I've always been suspicious of artificial sweeteners, they just seem a lot more chemical and artificial than the natural ones which we evolved to properly ingest.