Try “sustained movement and activity levels due to human-scale urban environment”

The calle de jordán, a short street in central Madrid, encompasses the entire cycle of human life. On one block is a fertility clinic, an increasingly common sight in a country obsessed by its shortage of babies. A block further down is a day centre for pensioners, advertising services like memory training and help with mobility. It is common to see women in their 60s gently leading their 90-something mothers up to the door.

But a geographic cluster of relatively poorer countries are also conducive to longer lives: Spain, Italy, France and Portugal. (Three nearby microstates, San Marino, Malta and Andorra, make the top 20, too.) The oldest person alive is a Spanish woman, Maria Branyas Morera (117), who succeeded a French one. Health and long life correlate unsurprisingly with gdp per capita. Why does southern Europe outperform the usual link between wealth and health, making the average lifespan in Spain (85.5 years in 2050) longer than that of the average Dane (83.5)?

Many point to the “Mediterranean diet”—fish, whole grains, fresh fruit, vegetables and olive oil. Critics, though, point out that diets differ widely from Portugal to Greece. Besides, researchers find that today’s Mediterraneans do not stick to their namesake diet. Plazas in Spain are full of people eating fried fish and salted ham, washed down with beer at hours some might consider unseemly. Spaniards drink more booze and smoke slightly more than the European average, and are among Europe’s biggest cocaine users.

Dan Buettner, who has written several books on areas where people live long, notes that to understand why people grow old one must look not at today’s habits but at those of half a century ago, when people ate “peasant food”, dominated by grains, beans and tubers. A recent study of the “blue zone” (a designation for areas that feature many centenarians) in Sardinia found that the diet included “famine foods”, such as bread made from acorns and clay and a cheese made with insect larvae. The most notable fish product was salted, dried mullet ovaries; inland shepherds rarely ate fresh fish. Diets today increasingly include Western processed foods, but “cultural inertia” keeps them somewhat healthier, says Mr Buettner.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington recently issued projections for longevity by country in 2050. Among the top 20 for living to a ripe old age are rich ones like Switzerland and Singapore. East Asia is also represented by South Korea and Japan, longtime longevity leaders. That shepherding past points to another factor: movement. Spaniards lead western Europe in steps per day at 5,936, according to a study from 2017. (Italy, France and Portugal are less impressive.) The study found that countries with “activity inequality”—a few prolific walkers but many couch potatoes, as in America and Saudi Arabia—had the highest obesity rates. Those where everyone moved a reasonable amount, as in Spain, had low ones. That evidently reduced mortality from obesity-related diseases.

Why do Spaniards move so much? Spanish cities, and even tiny pueblos, are densely populated; hit the city limits and you are often in empty countryside. Neither culture nor regulation favour sprawling suburbs, so even with abundant land, Spaniards live on top of each other. Paris and other places aiming to create “15-minute cities”, where most necessities are within walking radius, could learn much from Spain. The same study that looked at “activity inequality” examined urban America, finding that dense cities like New York and Boston had greater (and more evenly distributed) levels of activity than sprawling places like Atlanta and Phoenix.

But stressing diet and exercise misses a piece of the puzzle. Spain’s walkability is also good for social life. Cities are built around plazas where friends, family and co-workers sit, eat, drink and talk. That turns out to be good for you even if you sip vermouth and eat crisps at noon. Reams of research show that social contact is critical for physical and psychological well-being.

According to a recent survey by Gallup, a pollster, and Meta, a social-media company, 76% of Spaniards say they feel “very” or “fairly” socially supported. That is above average, though not top of the table. Jon Clifton, head of Gallup, says his firm’s research shows that Spaniards are fairly unhappy and disengaged at work. He quips that a headline in El País, a newspaper, got it more or less right: Spain is “the best country to live in and the worst to work in”. But work is not everything. Spaniards are fourth in the world when asked whether they have seen friends or family who live near or with them in the past week (Greece was second). This may be the unexpected upside of the fact that many young southern Europeans cannot get good enough jobs to afford to move out of their parents’ homes. Family bonds remain tight, including in trying times like the financial crisis and the pandemic.

Southern European countries do not score highest on happiness—that title has long been held by Denmark and Finland. But happiness assessments weight long-term life satisfaction more heavily than short-term smiling and laughing. Those sorts of gleeful emotions are reported most often by Latin Americans. And, metaphorically and physically, a line drawn from Helsinki to Buenos Aires would pass through Spain. That country has European levels of wealth (the best predictor of happiness) and health care (which keeps people alive), while also sharing cultural traits with Latin Americans: living for the moment and treasuring friendships and families. These are not just good in themselves. They keep you going, too.

Fun fact: argument and discussion can be synonyms, but they can also have distinct meanings.

It’s amusing to see this much projection. You say that I can’t read, then proceed to misunderstand a basic sentence. You say that you don’t respond because you think I will insult you, then resort to name calling.

Let us find something better to do with our lives, ok? Have a good one.

There is no argument, dear child. There is only a value judgement being made by a silly cartoon and you suffering because you refuse to admit that you do not share those values.

Why you need to resorting to name calling and hiding yourself behind “others” just to avoid facing this uncomfortable truth, I do not know.

I argue many people don’t care about “software freedom” and MIT is better for those people.

Which is completely besides the point of the post and carries no value in the conversation.

P.S: you are still talking about “other people”. Can you try to make any value judgement and own it? How about “I don’t care about software freedom and prefer to get free stuff”?

If you want to talk about fallacies, here are some good examples:

we would just handwrite an inferior solution from scratch rather than handle the bureaucracy.

Bandwagon Fallacy

If it was so much better, that it justified the price, it would outcompete the free one anyway.

Failure to understand basic microeconomics

I did not write 90% of the things you claim I did.

That is true and at the same time does not contradict my point. The whole discussion is about how MIT-style licensing is not as effective for software freedom as GPL licenses. And because you do not have anything to stand on to make an argument against the statement, you keep bringing points that do not address the main issue. When asked directly what you would do, you refuse to give a definite answer.

The GitHub page would be the initial place to get started. It works as a separate service that needs to run alongside your Lemmy docker stack. You will need a reddit API key to allow users to login/register via Reddit.

I just advise to wait a bit because the current release is still working based on Lemmy 0.18.3 database schema. I will update it later this week.

So what is your argument? Who is responsible for the decision-making process that leads to “hand writing an inferior solution”? Why do you think that this at all acceptable and reasonable?

You’ve been writing nothing but opinion-as-fact and resorting to wild rationalizations to justify your preferences, now you want to couch yourself under the questionable ethics of “it’s done this way and I can not fight it, so it must be the correct thing to do”?

Let’s make a simple test: if you were in charge and had the choice between spending some $$ to dual license a GPL package or to pay for the development of a GPL-only system vs paying $$$$ to do it in-house because you did not find a MIT/BSD package that does what you need, what would you do?

we would just handwrite an inferior solution from scratch rather than handle the bureaucracy.

What company are you working for whose leadership thinks that it is a better use of their time to reimplementing FOSS solutions just because they can’t get it “for free”?

Yeah, you are right. Looks like no one was subscribed from my instance, so it is not getting updated. If I go there directly, there are more posts.

There is no fundamental problem in working for free either. It’s second-order effects that we should worry about. Those who are “working for free” because they “just want have software being used by people” are diluting the value of the professionals and in the long term end up being as detrimental as professional designers or photographers who “work for exposure”.

If you ask me, the reason that is so hard to fund FOSS development is not because of bureaucracies, but because we are competing with privileged developers who are able to afford giving away their work for free.

I’m pretty sure that I got paid to work on GPL software, and I am pretty sure that said software would never have been developed if I wasn’t going to be paid for it.

What I don’t like is that the title minimizes the contributions of the MIT developers.

It’s not about the contribution. The MIT license still lets people study and share the code. It’s Free Software. The contribution is still there. The “problem” is that those contributions can be taken and exploited by large corporations.

You answer are reasonable justifications for why MIT is used, but they also work pretty well to illustrate the title of the post: If you are doing MIT, you are working for free. If you are working with GPL, you are working for freedom.

GPL means big corporations just won’t use it.

Great. No corporation is working on software for the freedom of its users.

they will just search for an alternative or make their own.

Or pay the developer to dual license, which can and should be the preferred way for FOSS developers to fund their work?

Would you be interested in coming over to [email protected]? Now with football season starting the instance is going to be one of my main focal points to work on the new Fediverser features.

No, the LW one is even more dead. No posts for almost an year.

It’s a string of my own posts at [email protected], even though we are on week of the finals and the Celtics are close to winning their first ring since 2008.

Sure :) Like I said, pretty easy: https://doc.e.foundation/devices/FP3

Yeah, I installed /e/OS on my FP3 and it was quite easy to install and update it. You won’t be able to run stuff that depends exclusively on Google Play services (most notably banking apps) and for a while I had some issues to get a stable GPS (fixed later at some point), but aside from that I was happy with it.

I was thinking of breaking main into !news, !highlights and !talk. Football@soccer seems a bit redundant (and schizophrenic in terminology)

You have higher costs as you manage 10+ instances.

The costs of running the instances is sunk already, because I run them on the same infra that I use for my projects, and it’s not a couple of hundred dollars per month that is going to make or break things for me. The worst case scenario is “I go back to a full-time job and Communick becomes yet-again a side-project/hobby”. The case where any of these instances become big enough to the point that it demands more from me is better than any of the current situation.

(begware is) another model that can also work (most of the instances have celebrated their first birthday recently).

I honestly don’t see it this way. Activity through the network has been abysmal. Operating an instance at this level should be incredibly easy, but even then we have things like bigger instances having issues with lack of moderators, basic federation issues between the larger instances mostly because of network latency… all that show that we should be collectively putting a lot more resources into this if we truly want to have a credible alternative to Reddit and Facebook Groups.

If anything happened to the most popular 10 instances, Lemmy would probably die overnight.

I don’t want to sound too pessimistic, but Lemmy feels pretty much dead already. My feed is mostly content from the communities that I’ve been posting + the two of three stubborn users (like yo)u who have been trying as hard as possible to make something out of it.