My theory for Tokyo is that its relatively low housing costs come from lax enforcement of zoning and building regulations, and lax enforcement comes from a culture of trust that doesn't exist in other comparably big cities.
+1 for The Death of Ivan Ilyich, it's a marvelous example of an author depicting something you (probably) haven't experienced and nonetheless convincing you that's what it's really like.
A somewhat rude answer may be that, despite being very old, University of Salamanca is not prestigious -- outside of the top 500 in all major global university rankings -- and is therefore more likely to be willing to employ somebody who can fake their way into appearing to be a high-impact researcher.
I don't think strenholme is saying that those casual relationships are morally wrong, but that they're only facsimiles of the connection found in a deep and long relationship (especially one formed when young), and that pursuing facsimiles maybe brings you close enough to the original that you keep pursuing, but not close enough to ever approximate the original, and if what you miss is the original, then this is not a path to satisfaction.
Interesting point, but surely the reasoning that they are "only facsimiles of the connection found in a deep and long relationship" is a major argument for regarding them as morally wrong?
If you believe you have a moral duty to be the best person you can then passing up that opportunity in favour of the facsimiles is morally wrong.
> If you believe you have a moral duty to be the best person you can then passing up that opportunity in favour of the facsimiles is morally wrong
Maybe a better statement would be that casual connections only offer facsimiles of the depth of a deep and long relationship, because the sheer accumulation of time and experiences with another person cannot be replaced quickly. However, you can also say that a deep and long relationship only offers a facsimile of the breadth of many shorter relationships, as one person can only offer so many things. If you change your passionate pursuit every decade, finding a partner with the same one each time might make that pursuit more fruitful. It's not how I personally feel, but "best person" is subjective like that.
I don't think this follows unless you think there is something particularly special about sexual relations per se. I'm monogamous but I don't see why people should avoid casual sex.
> You're either one of the few winners and get to live a comfortable life with a professional job, or you're off to WalMart or an Amazon warehouse, or Prison. The "kind of comfortable middle class life" is shrinking quickly. So it's not enough to just get straight A's. You need extra credit, get a 5.0 GPA, take all the "right" AP classes, have the "right" extracurriculars, and the "right" community service and so on. Otherwise you risk landing on the bad side of the career bimodal distribution.
This seems a little hyperbolic. The requirements you describe are probably true enough for top 20 universities, but they aren't true for top 100, and there still seem to be plenty of random white collar office jobs that hire people from merely medium-ranked universities.
Denmark values cultural homogeneity enough to mandate that children over the age of one in high-immigrant areas formally designated as ghettoes attend 25 hours per week of public daycare including instruction in "democracy, equality and major Danish holidays such as Christmas" under the threat of losing government benefits [1]. By western standards, this strikes me as a strong commitment to cultural homogeneity.
Let me introduce into the concept of the national minority of Germans and also Jews live in Danmark. (Both aren't typical Danish culture). Do you know the concept of national minorities?
See, I don't like Sam Altman either, but this habit of criticizing people for their faces seems wrong-headed. Isn't it his behavior that we should be criticizing?
I could be wrong but in these cases (or when people criticize voices, similarly), people are more put off by expressions than raw features. Nonverbal communication is high emotional bandwidth. I don’t begrudge someone disliking someone else’s self presentation.
> Because they don't think about the consequences, and don't want to.
This is a dangerous way of thinking about people who disagree with you, because once you decide somebody is stupid, it frees you from ever having to seriously weigh their positions again, which is a kind of stupidity all its own.
