I only upvoted to read the comments. I don't really think that the state of american public opinion is due to KGB subversion. I think it's because of the normal culture rot happening to any nation. In US's case the rot looks so dramatic because it's the most powerfull and rich nation in the world.

I figure there is an emergent behavior parasitical relationship where a subset of the population that benefit from pushing things to the edge of instability sometimes accidentally push things over the edge. We’ve not been able to reach a steady state symbiotic relationship due to the sheer size and duration of empires.

normal culture rot happening to any empire? Greens vs. Blues (byzantine), Guelph vs Ghibelline (HRE), etc.?

What factions had the pre-Suez brits?

[Edit: Joseph de Maistre has a most excellent rant about how the rot sets in first in the Universities, and then spreads to morals and national spirit and institutions — only he is writing in the early XIX about the doom which awaits Europe, what with these newfangled Republics and all...

Essai sur le Principe Générateur des Constitutions Politiques, ca. 1814

cf https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k57137914/f72.item.r=u... et seq]

Where did you buy, how was your overall experience?

Close to Castelo branco and the experience is great. Everyone speaks english although I understand and speak some Portugese (and Spanish), the young people don’t even want to say speak Pt as they want to learn better english.

People are hardworking and friendly, there is a lot of entrepreneurial spirit among the young, even though they are not in lisboa.

The house we got is so cheap I didn’t even know you could get actual liveable places for that in the the west of the eu still.

It’s close enough to lisboa and Porto to just have a weekend there regularly.

I don't remember who said it, but there's two things you can't really accept from a brother, their glory and their death.

Not 100% relevant with the original post, but reading it reminded me of it.

I tried many time to stop coffee and tea and for one year now I am sober. I am very happy with my decision. I feel much better and much less anxiety

The thin blue line

I don't understand why you are downvoted, because you are right.

Conducting a successful career is also very hard. Let alone a successful marriage! Or getting fit, loosing weight.

You want to build a company? Just do it. It's not harder than other things in life.

Edit: some words.

Building a successful startup is infinitely harder than having a successful career as an employee.

Because building a successful company = building many successful careers. The point that many companies still do not get!!!

You absolutely have to invest in your people in a best possible way if you are interested at all in building a GREAT company.

This iPhone analogy is full of crap. Apple delivered the fisrt iPhone with the software it needed to be, in itself, very usefull! The app developers came after, when a user base had already been created.

It’s most misused analogy. If you have crappy product that no one is buying, compare it to iPhone v1.

Well, the writer compared Magic Leap to Apple Newton, which was... too early for the aims?

The first iPhone had many flaws but none of these were false advertising, and it also had some unique abilities.

For example, it sported a capacitive touchscreen (touchscreens were mostly resistive back in 2007), it featured multitouch (you need a capacitive touchscreen for that), yet it didn't have 3G (it had EDGE), lacked copy/paste, lacked a repository ("app store"), lacked applications, and required a contract.

Add to that that Apple already existed, had a solid fanbase, and already released their first product for mass market (iPod), and well... Steve Jobs reality distortion field. Who knows what would've happened if Apple was a very new company with no such fanbase, history, or CEO.

I think it's wishful thinking. Everybody WANTS it to be the next iPhone, because the iPhone was wildly successful. That level of investing acumen unfortunately amounts to not much more than noticing that the iPhone happened. Like I noticed the Beatles happened, but saying my band is the next Beatles doesn't make it so. The iPhone and the Beatles were both products of very unique circumstances including a lot of plain random luck.

Humans do not wage wars against animals, they use(d) animals to win wars.

Well what if in the future AI's use humans to wage war between them? That's a far more frightening future than human-weaponized-AI's I think. Food for thought.

This is very impressive that someone would take the time to experiment an document so thoroughly this product. I am thankful because I find this very interesting and I always thought of Magic Leap as vaporware.

As a 43 year old with two jobs and two kids, I found myself playing 500 hours of PlayerUnknown's Battleground in a few months. I had to uninstall the game.

The addiction was very real.

Did you lose your job, destroy relationships with your family and friends?

Or did this merely replace 500 hours that would have been spent watching TV, Netflix or other types of entertainment?

The word addiction has a real meaning with some clinical ways for a trained person to diagnose somebody as having it.

I think of addiction more like alcoholism. Sure video games are engineered these days to be huge time sinks but that doesn't make it an addiction. If you can drop it (like you did) and it doesn't impact your life, its not an addiction.

I am self-employed (I actually run two small companies) and I sent some of my work days playing PUBG. Also I had less interaction with my kids and wife, and no other hobby really.

I looked at PUBG videos very often, sometimes live streams, at the office during the day.

I was thinking about PUBG all day long. It was bad.

Awesome that you're running two companies!

I was just pointing out there is a difference between an actual clinical addiction vs. a really bad habit.

I know the feeling about gaming and have been in similar shoes. I actually stop myself and check if I am doing something out of habit or because I want to... and have found I want to do other hobbies more, its just the inertia to get over the habitual actions that is the problem sometimes.

The point that you dispute is the term addiction. You mention an "habit" for instance. My point is: video games can REALLY be an addiction even for older people.

A useful statistic from 2016: US adults on average watch 5 hours of TV per day. Over 90 days (a few months) that's 450 hours.