151–160 of 196 posts
Okay so, I have to say, at first this was a pretty feel-bad story for me. I then noticed a tidbit of information in another article about it that somehow made me feel different: Cole Summers didn't know how to swim. He was out on the water in a kayak, with no life jacket, with only an autistic child for company - and didn't know how to swim. Somehow it stopped feeling like a tragic accident and more like carelessness…
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Mexico is of course full of some lovely places, but cartel violence has been increasing since around 1990 (so 30 years) and has spiked quite dramatically in the past 20 years.
And the difference between "fly into a tourist zone" and "drive across the border into 'real Mexico'" is a huge one. If you do it, you should know quite a bit or have a local so that you can notice situations before they begin. Sure, the chance of actually being beheaded by a cartel is probably relatively slim, but it's a risk you don't need to take.
I speak fluent Spanish and have traveled all over these areas and I think the original poster’s idea that Mexico is now off limits is about 95% media fear and hype at best.
But hey if they want to stay home in Waco or Uvalde or wherever they live to avoid violent situations that is certainly their choice.
I feel like there is a huge elephant in the room here of how shitty Utah’s support system evidently is. No money to assist his disabled parents and his autistic brother. This whole family was living in desperate, grinding poverty, and that gave this kid a super strong urge to try and get out of it instead of having a childhood.
I feel like there is a huge elephant in the room here of how shitty Utah’s support system evidently is. No money to assist his disabled parents and his autistic brother. This whole family was living in desperate, grinding poverty, and that gave this kid a super strong urge to try and get out of it instead of having a childhood.
I disagree with this sentiment. You wish to take away the very condition which made him uniquely special. He seems like he was enjoying his childhood. Adversity breeds character and this kid had more than character than some entire classrooms.
TLDR America’s most remarkable kid didn't know how to swim at age 14 and drowned while kayaking not wearing life jacket I dunno, but I find that remarkably stupid, but I guess US has different standards for what's remarkable.
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This isn’t really true except for random edge cases. The people leading countries go to school and get law degrees. People leading business got college degrees or worked in business for decades. You can pull edge cases like Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard, but even then he spent a lot of time in his 20s running his business.
If you define 'leading countries' narrowly enough, everyone in that category becomes a random edge case. Less flippantly, you should expect people running high-variance strategies to be overrepresented at the top. The people leading countries may go to school and get law degrees, but if they stay the path of doing what everyone else does but better, they end up an unremarkable partner at a law firm or something, not…
I mean, do we believe any of this? An 8 year old isn’t running a business and selling to restaurants in a different state. No business would purchase from an 8 year, no business would ship goods from an 8 year old, no bank gives a loan to a 9 year old. The list goes on and on. Incredibly sad that a child has died, but this reads as pure fantasy.
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What's weird to me is that somebody would have such a hard time accepting verifiable facts about a gifted outlier who happens to be remarkably young but also reads Hacker News on a Sunday night, presumably because they see themselves as someone who is involved in the tech/startup economy. The whole reason that there's a story here is because it's exceptional. If he hadn't been an outlier, there would be no story. The…
> What's weird to me is that somebody would have such a hard time accepting verifiable facts about a gifted outlier who happens to be remarkably young Where are the verifiable facts? Where are the citations? You may see the story as just a list of 'verifiable facts,' but that's absolutely not what it is. I'm not saying I think the whole thing is made up, but it isn't simply a collection of attestations that any indiv…
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>(One of my favorite anecdotes on this subject: One of the best entrepreneurs I know went down to Mexico and hitchhiked all over when she was 18 years old. And every family that picked her up told her that what she was doing was very dangerous and that she was very lucky to be picked up by that family, instead of someone more dangerous. But at the time she was very innocent. 20 years later I ran into her and I was li…
Likewise my 2nd generation German-American aunt hitchhiked by herself from Morocco to Cairo (and spent time in many, many places in-between) in the 1970's for about 6 months and had no issues at the time. Places certainly do change.