> openly gay German politician (Jens Spahn) had to give up his position (although he had it coming because his other political scandals) because he used a surrogate mother in US to have a kid with his husband.
That's misleading. The issue was hypocrisy. Spahn was a chief advocate against surrogacy. He publicly supported a motion keeping surrogacy illegal in Germany while simultaneously secretly using a surrogate mother in the US. That's not a great look.
The reason he had to give up his position was not his hypocrisy. If that’s the case then 99% of all politicians would have to give up their positions.
Even if he was a supporter of surrogacy, he would still be forced to step back because surrogacy is illegal in Germany. Further, there was no debate or discussions on making surrogacy legal after that incident by the so called all other liberal progressives parties like Greens or the left that pretends to be all for women’s rights and equality
When Boris Johnson had to step down for throwing parties in No. 10 while simultaneously enforcing strict COVID-19 lockdowns, did you also perceive that to mean that British people are just really anti-partying?
> The reason he had to give up his position was not his hypocrisy. If that’s the case then 99% of all politicians would have to give up their positions.
Over the last few weeks, I've noticed you sharing many such misinformed framings of current news in Germany. May I ask why?
> Even if he was a supporter of surrogacy, he would still be forced to step back because surrogacy is illegal in Germany. Further, there was no debate or discussions on making surrogacy legal after that incident by the so called all other liberal progressives parties like Greens or the left that pretends to be all for women’s rights and equality
Just like the last few times you claimed "there was no debate" on a topic in Germany: yes there was, it just doesn't follow your caricaturesque understanding of leftist politics.
Yes, I do! Spahn is infamous for doing lots of illegal stuff, and none of it resulted in him stepping back, until the surrogacy story. His constituents and his party publicly criticized him for his bigotry and asked him to step back. Which part do you have trouble following?
If you were mildly familiar with the situation, you'd know that.
> Sharing the government propaganda site’s link as a source has to be the joke of the year.
Since the article is essentially a collection of quotes, each of which is easily verifiable by following links, you'll have to be a little more specific about the "joke".
> I’ve shared no misinformation on Germany, besides the hard cold truth. Only suicidally empathetic leftists like yourself would find that to be misinformation.
You literally keep claiming variations of "nobody talked about this/that topic!", but in each instance I can attest that you're completely wrong. My own views have nothing to do with the fact that public discussions did happen. I'm sure you'll bring up some arbitrary threshold to justify yourself, but your comments are misrepresentations, and your attack makes it seem very much deliberate.
> There was no debate on surrogacy after he resigned[...]
I don't know what to tell you, but there was - anyone can easily look up the online discussions, and the many news articles covering the public debate.
> it was as if surrogacy was used as a tool and then discarded when it doesn’t benefits the lefties
See, this is where your bias becomes undeniable:
1. The majority of complaints about Spahn's bigotry did not come from leftists. Why aren't you mentioning how his own voters complained far more?
2. You're assuming that leftists should behave according to your cartoonish understanding of their views. Being "pro-women’s rights and equality" does not logically imply that one should advocate for surrogacy, unless you presuppose that your subjective views on surrogacy are objectively correct.
But since you've already branded me as a "suicidally empathetic leftists", I won't waste more effort explaining this - it's trivial to find discussions and philosophical texts on all this.
100%. It was so funny to see how for years, everyone on HN was harping on about how well a smaller iPhone would sell. Then Apple finally released the iPhone mini and nobody was buying it, so they had to kill it after a couple of iterations.
Basically, try to do the opposite of what HN is saying and you might just create a successful product.
I kept an iPhone Mini until an App I need for work started consuming so much memory it became unusable on it (iOS would kill it after 15s). Even then, I raised ticket after ticket with support to get them to fix their app – which they did, then slipped again, for months.
Now I own a 17 pro, which feels like a brick in comparison but has 12 GB of RAM instead of 4.
interesting, I didn’t notice it also hat 1TB storage and 12GB RAM. But the size is maginally smaller only. Still, I agree, would probably have been a better fit.
> Then Apple finally released the iPhone mini and nobody was buying it, so they had to kill it after a couple of iterations.
And by "nobody", you mean "actually a lot of people, just not as many as the bigger model". It's ok to have a model that meets a less common, but still extant, need in the market. If everyone followed Apple's logic on this, people with very small or very large bodies would have to go naked because companies would go "that size doesn't sell as much, we have to kill it" rather than (as actually happens) charging more per unit to make up for the overhead of lower volumes of sales.
"Try a different smaller form factor every couple of years" is a reasonable strategy. First Mini, then Air. Supposedly they're gonna refresh the Air next year, we'll see. But even if they don't: we're well into the "keep phones 3 years or more" era of the smart phone. You don't need an exact match for every phone for everybody every year.
> "Try a different smaller form factor every couple of years" is a reasonable strategy. First Mini, then Air.
The iPhone air has a 6.5" display. That's bigger than the base iPhone 17 (6.3") and the iPhone 17e (6.1")
You're probably thinking about the thinness of the phone. iPhone air is 2.4mm thinner than iPhone 17, but I don't think anyone is asking for that, as most people use a case which makes the phone thicker.
Yeah, it's smaller in a different way than the mini was small.
But the thinness isn't actually the appeal. The key thing is that it's a lot lighter. (And yes, a case adds weight as well as thickness. But if you start from a lower baseline, you still end up in a lower place.)
But I think you do need some level of consistency to retain customers. Churning models, especially given Apple's otherwise-excellent retention metrics and mechanisms, seems like a self-goal by almost encouraging those buyers to switch after 3 years.
If you bought an iPhone Mini or an Air, but that model is gone at T+3 years, that's a lot more likely to result in you looking to Android, than if you bought an iPhone 13 and want to upgrade to an iPhone 16/17.
My estimate is very much anecdotal as well, but at my office alone there are three iPhone mini users than (used to be four until they switched job), only one AirPods Max user. I think this year I have only seen one other person wearing them. Much harder to see the exact model of phone people use without staring in a bad manner.
> I don't get that mentality. Millions of units, shares many parts with other models, OK margin. This is no reason to kill a product.
At 2% of sales, the opportunity cost is the reason to kill the product. Keep in mind this still needs design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution resources.
> At 2% of sales, the opportunity cost is the reason to kill the product. Keep in mind this still needs design, manufacturing, marketing, and distribution resources.
All this is true for many other products, specifically cars. Ford makes the Bronco Sport anyway, and they make money on it.
I get it, Apple has much better margins than Ford. And maybe a iPhone 18 Mini would reduce total margin for them. But if they move a couple of million units, it absolutely would make money.
> Ford makes the Bronco Sport anyway, and they make money on it.
The current Bronco Sport generation was introduced in 2021 with minor changes in the ensuing model years. Ford USA sold 134k Bronco Sport in 2025, of 783k SUVs (17.2%) and 2.1M total USA vehicles (6.4%). the Ford E-series truck with 3.2% Ford Truck sales or 2.0% total vehicle sales may be a better comparison. It also is a design introducted in 2021.
phones are more likely mostly new designs in each model year, but we can wait for the teardowns to see.
Of course, they never even brought it to the US. It has no chance there, there's barely a market for lowslung station wagons, and close to no market for EV wagons. Always was a niche in the US, while it was always the primary family vehicle in Europe.
And yes, VW is fighting for survival. The things they are killing are the low volume models specific to the Chinese market (because absolutely nobody in China is buying any VWs) and a lot of the variants and overlaps they've accumulated over the years. They'll continue making less than 100k iD.7s, and will be happy to do so (it's modestly profitable).
Society doesn't do anything of the sort. This is just diffuse irrational thinking. People invest their wealth where it will make the most profit for them and if a marginal dollar investment into the regular iPhone brings more profit than one into the iPhone Mini, then the owners and shareholders will ask the CEO why their money is flowing into suboptimal productions. People put their money investing in Apple in the hopes of a good return on that investment. If you want them to produce something that doesn't give them a good return, you'd have to pay to compensate, ie the price would rise but people wouldn't be ready to pay that. Otherwise you're asking people to subsidize for your enjoyment some luxury product as if it was charity. Willingly foregoing profit for the sake of someone else is subsidy or charity.
6/230 seems closer to 3%. And while the number is relatively low, it seems to be a niche where they might lose customers to other platforms. It must have been unprofitable/very expensive to maintain that they killed it.
OTOH, it's Apple, so users would rather buy a bigger iPhone and complain than switching brands (see other comments here), in which case Apple loses nothing.
It was an lower spec, gimped version to be fair. No one in the market for a new phone on launch day is excited to buy a lower end, worse battery & camera version that's missing multiple features present on the other versions.
Way to bury the lede. Being able to average 80%/yr returns takes talent and skill and is a type of work. The type of work, by the way, that is rewarded with millions at finance companies in NYC, or even more if you launch your own trading shop.
I’d sooner eat crow than work for a living again - and this ain’t work. I just think while I’m out for a hike, driving, whatever, and decide to make some investments in X, Y, Z next time there’s a decent looking moment to realise and reallocate some profits.
Plus, the kind of investing I do would never fly in a hedge fund - I’d just make the risk desk piss itself with laughter.
In Germany, for many years we had been told that climate change is the most important thing ever, that we need to change our habits or else the world will go down, that if we don't act now, we will all be doomed. Then the Ukraine war happened, and suddenly nobody was talking about climate change anymore.
I'll admit, I'm a simple man and I don't know the science behind all of this. But as a citizen, it does feel confusing how one day you're being told that we're all going to die unless we change something, and then suddenly even though nothing changed, it seems to be fine after all.
Plenty of people in Germany (on all social/political levels) still talk about climate change, and have done so without pause before, during and since Ukraine.
If you think that everything "seems to be fine after all", you're in for a very rude awakening.
Is that your perception, or do you have data to back this up?
For context, here's one source saying public concern for climate change has fallen in Germany from 42% to 34% from 2022 to 2025, in line with other European countries. [0] This was a study done by a German sustainability non-profit.
Here's another source stating that globally, news coverage about climate change has diminished by 38% from 2021 to 2025. [1]
Here's a third source stating that the share of German citizens who claim to be "very concerned" about climate change has dropped from 50% to 33% from 2019 to 2025. [2]
It is not stated explicitly in the article, but the implication seems to be that fame causes a higher mortality risk.
Whereas my intuition is that there are traits that help you become famous (competitiveness, savant syndrome, prioritization of success over happiness, etc.) that also raise your mortality risk.
That’s probably a factor in some way but my intuition is it’s the lifestyle itself that’s the dominant risk.
The control point is comparing to less famous musicians. I’d assume many of which have similar personality traits and desire for fame. But when it doesn’t materialize, their personality traits arent causing them to die early.
The lifestyle of constantly partying, drugs, sex, little consequences, money, excess, etc. Versus the less famous musician who has to function like an adult, stresses over their mortgage, etc. Is sure to have a variance with respect to mortality.
I agree with this. Tony Hsieh (founder of Zappos) also ended up dead because of the lifestyle enabled by his wealth, and he wasn't a famous musician. The wealth also led to lots of hangers on around him that didn't care about his well being, just personally benefiting.
> The lifestyle of constantly partying, drugs, sex, little consequences, money, excess, etc.
I don't know how much truth there is to it, some musicians are famous for that, but touring is far from easy, musicians move a lot and have to give their best every time when they are on stage. Especially singers, as their body is their instrument, they can't really afford to be out of shape. I am sure that after big public events like concerts, the thing musicians really want is to get done with it and go to sleep, not party all night. There may be drugs involved, but I'd expect it to be more about enhancing performance than recreation.
And that would apply to all professional musicians, famous or not. For most, I'd say what is excessive is their job, not the life of partying famous people are said to have.
> The control point is comparing to less famous musicians.
Maybe, although an alternative explanation would be that those musicians with the strongest traits are the ones that succeed, and that same strength of those traits also leads to early mortality.
On the other other hand, success in music is at least partly luck.[1] So there should be some not-quite-successful musicians who are similar in most respects but actual success.
Anything is possible. But wouldn’t that kind of also mean those traits are necessary for talent? For recognition? For art that is appreciated?
I don’t know if I buy it myself as being a big contributing factor. The lifestyles of famous people are well known to be indulgent. So that seems like a more direct explanation. But anything is possible
I think this is a very valid hypothesis but it's hard to control for in experiments, since if these traits are necessary to become (or stay) famous, we don't really have a control group.
Even if you don't do all the drugs and have an agent running around slapping McDoubles out of everyone's hands the health effects of simply living on the road and touring are not great.
I wonder how these results would stack up against something like pro baseball players or pro cyclists - both have a very long season (6 month season for baseball, even longer for cyclists). Maybe a bit like touring bands.
Three main differences that come to mind...
- athletes repeat this annually (famous touring musicians might take a year or two off to record new material).
- athletes likely live a healthier overall lifestyle because being extremely fit is part of the job. Plus the teams have embedded MDs and other health support staff (some musicians will, some won't).
- athletes usually retire from their primary sport in their 30s, so only ~20 years of touring on the high end, where musicians can tour into their 50s or 60s (or beyond for a few).
It cuts both ways - in those environments, very unhealthy lifestyles (high stress, drug abuse…) are quite common, if not the norm, so even people starting with healthy lifestyles are under significant pressure.
1) It's in the title: "The Price of Fame" implies that there are downsides to becoming famous, rather than there are downsides to having traits that might make you famous.
2) While the abstract merely claims "associated with" (which is correlation not causation), the phrase "beyond occupational factors" implies that the authors felt they removed important non-causal factors, hinting at likely causal relationship.
And yes, any causality implications are completely unfounded, and so this paper is of low quality.
Probably. I was going crazy working there, I grew to really dislike it. But from a purely selfish $$ POV, it's likely I would have got caught in one of the rounds of layoffs or been able to take this latest voluntary layoff package.
Unless the frustration led to bad performance reviews, which could have happened.
My mental health would have suffered, but holding on another 1-3 years would have probably led to me being 5 years closer to early retirement.
It was also 2021/2022, when the job market was completely bananas. The temptation to leave and get a decent paying remote job was very high. And at the time I felt Google was doing a very poor job of remote work, at least on the teams I was on. And they made the hybrid in-office unpleasant (floating desks, nobody else there, just a weird vibe).
My story is the same as yours, and the same timing, but it was Meta. I missed out on a LOT (!!!!) of money by quitting, but I don't regret it at all. The place was rotten.
I'm actually now at Google and things are just fine and peachy.
.. and that's YT's problem? This is like being angry with Apple, because an app developer created only an iOS app and didnt create an Android. What did Apple do wrong if a developer chose to only create an iOS app?
YouTube is the system, you've not heard of "don't hate the player, hate the game"?
If I "blamed" the creators, you'd be telling me it's not their fault, they're just incentivised by the system, they're just playing the game.
But when I "blame" the system, you're telling me the system is not at fault, that it's individual choice to choose a near-monopoly on video discoverability that is propelled by and heavily benefiting from the same company's actual monopoly of search.
Is it "YT's problem?"? No, it's to YT's massive benefit, it's my problem when I have to suffer through adverts.
Alphabet is the fifth largest company in the world, has earnings higher than most countries' GDP, and is established to have engaged in illegal behavior as a monopolist. It's fair to say they're closer to "the system" than "a player".
Not that this was part of the suit, but the whole practice of giving things away for free and subsidizing them with stalking and ads obviously distorts or completely destroys markets, so yes they can be blamed for doing that. The behavior of these companies is so bad that people in a recent thread were claiming things like chat services (where a single computer can provide service for millions of users) cannot be sustainably run by charging money.
This bit of information makes the entire thread hilarious to read.
Bunch of hackers using adblockers that modify the client-side UI to cheat Google out of money and then complaining loudly about a minor UI convenience. How dare Google not optimize for them!
I say this as someone who uses an adblocker myself. But come on.
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