It's shows true ignorance about what happiness is and where it's found. You can probably find more smiles and hope for the future in the Ukrainian trenches than reading comments from Silicon Valley workers making $150k a year.

I mean, do you guys even know Buddhism any more? It was such a hip thing in the 70s over there.

I truly dislike this recent trend of making people feel bad if they have learned to just slow down and be content with life. "It's privilege being able to take a break and smell the roses, I'm too busy for this nonsense" is protestant crab mentality that I find revolting.

I've met "too busy for this" people in every line of work, regardless of their pay band. When you get to know people, you will see that pretty much everyone has their own trenches, and slowing down is a matter of priorities, not privilege.

You'll have a hard time finding more suffering than in Wall Street. Meanwhile I haven't found more content, relaxed people than when I visited my distant family in sub-Saharan Africa, taking life as it comes. My point still stands.

You seem to be arguing against the point "only happy people can be rich". This isn't what the GP comment said. It said only rich people come out with things like "life is a farce". Which I think is true. Are any of your sub saharan african relatives giving interviews to press pontificating on such things? I assume no.

Only rich people are unhappy and suffering is such a ridiculous point, frankly.

Including in Africa for that matter. In fact, you will find plenty of people there that go to extremes to avoid or minimize suffering ... including making other sub-africans super suffering in the process. That happy take life as it comes sub-Saharan Africa includes Sudan and Congo full of people who are not happy and very active in trying to change thing around them (not necessarily in the positive sense).

See perhaps Viktor Frankl on this:

> Man's Search for Meaning (German: ... trotzdem Ja zum Leben sagen. Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager, lit. '... Say Yes to Life nonetheless: A Psychologist Experiences the Concentration Camp') is a 1946 book by Viktor Frankl chronicling his experiences as a prisoner in Nazi concentration camps during World War II, and describing his psychotherapeutic method, which involved identifying a purpose to each person's life through one of three ways: the completion of tasks, caring for another person, or finding meaning by facing suffering with dignity.

> Frankl observed that among the fellow inmates in the concentration camp, those who survived were able to connect with a purpose in life to feel positive about and who then immersed themselves in imagining that purpose in their own way, such as conversing with an (imagined) loved one. According to Frankl, the way a prisoner imagined the future affected their longevity.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man%27s_Search_for_Meaning

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl

"too busy" is arguing for ignorance, which is defensible but not agreed on

#2 rule of slop: even posts critical of pervasive AI usage and how it's ruining the world can be AI-generated

More appropriately, government is optimizing for 4 year electoral terms. No one cares about longer timescales necessary to tackle hard problems.

This is where autocracies like China, or monarchies for example, win over democracies.

And the green initiatives in France. These, transit, Grand Paris, and much more are initiatives that take many years to realize.

Now let's move over to New Jersey and New York City. The most densely populated state (NJ) has some of the worst transit despite being in the NYC greater metropolitan area. An old tunnel between the two needs to be replaced, but politicians with four year mental horizons canned it until recently (ARC project). Infrastructure is a fight between Federal, two states and a city politically and partially from a funding perspective.

We could go on, but I just wanted to point out that the United States is a poor example of good governance. And that we don't need to live in a totalitarian nightmare just because we acknowledge the US fails to produce innovation and investment for the public good.

And let's not talk about debt, as if it is a unique problem to France or anything new.

A democracy doesn't prevent long-term planning if only the electorate appreciates long-term projects. Democracies can build stuff across parliaments if differences between parties aren't so overwhelming so as to the majority of them can agree on developing something even if the relative power of elected parties varies over terms.

In a lot of countries the major parties agree on many core views and social code because they share a common nation/society, and the political differences happen merely on the edges or linings of the value spectrum. A government of highly polarised parties voted by a highly heterogeneous pool of voters is not ideal for long-term efforts.

Something like public transit that powers a region that's a sizable fraction of US GPD should not be a state affair in the first place. What Europeans have that Americans lack are perma-technocrats with a long term vision that are entrenched in power.

Autocracies like China, are able to plan longer term. But, because they don't regularly change their leadership like a democracy, the leaders become old, tired, schlerotic and surrounded by 'yes men'. Hence "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.".

Corporations promote people to Principal or distinguished engineer only when they prove their worth by running long running large scale projects.

But when it comes to governing the whole country: lobby, marketing and boom, you are a president for next 4 years, which is anyway not enough to deliver anything big and see the impact. (Except the destruction, destruction is easy to cause)

I believe one important factor for a democracy to work properly, is to have a large number of citizens who 1) can stand up and push back when they feel something is wrong, and 2) is sufficiently knowledgeable. We don’t have that anymore. Of course I’m also to be blamed for that.

Public education was supposed to deliver that. This is a dream that has failed in the US.

Possibly the most lacking tools are Critical Thinking (not directly taught as a subject AFAIK) and some class with a focus on how government(s) work. The latter was an elective I took in high school (not a core requirement, it should be).

At least when I was in college it helped to have critical thinking skills, but was not a basics (100 level) course. Political studies might be a different degree, but again not a core course. I find that ironic since everyone has to interact with government regulations and vote.

WW2 took slightly less than 6 years, when we count it from the invasion of Poland to the fall of Nazi Germany.

The moon landings took little less than 7 years, so I don't think we are terribly off by the timeframe.

Considering the world's been getting faster (just think about how different the US was before Trump took power a bit more than a year ago), I think 4 years is fine.

This is the wrong characterization, and in fact it's where monarchies lost out to democracies. Without an organized system of replacement in response to poor performance, autocracies with a poor leader are stuck with that poor leader for life. Ask North Korea how that's going. The upside is that if you have a brilliant leader, then you also get the benefit of that brilliant leader for life. The variance in an autocracy is absolutely huge, and that's their weakness in the long term. Democracies take the edge off, and are intentionally designed to have both less upside and less downside, trading performance for stability. Xi Jinping looks good comparatively because we have gormless losers like Trump and Biden to compare to him to, but he makes plenty of his own mistakes as well (the whole Taiwan situation is a unforced error driven by his own ego, similar to Putin with Ukraine), and we've seen historically what China looks like when it's stuck with a shit leader for decades (Great Leap Forward, anyone?).

Yes, I stumbled upon statecharts checking out this Godot plugin: https://github.com/derkork/godot-statecharts

I often have my AI code output one just to make sure my logic feels more sound. Along with mermaid charts if I need to toy around or drop into stately for more power.

I've had models produce very reasonable Mermaid diagrams that matched the intended design but not the actual program. It felt helpful until I realized I was reviewing the plan twice and the implementation zero times.

For PRs I'd rather render the diagram from the executable state machine itself — at least then drift in the chart means drift in behavior, and you can't review one without the other.

If he sticks with the project until he grows out of the impulsive phase, hyprland will be in a much better place.