DavidHm

Former Amsterdam resident here.

I feel a large part of this is the frustration with all the tourists just randomly wandering on the bike lanes without a care in the world.

It doesn't justify the behaviour, but it does explain it a little bit.

Don't worry, his bubble of denial is inviolable.

Nope, it's a post-scarcity economy.

This interesting.

I regularly take UberPool in London, and I have company maybe 30-40% of the times. I don't know whether this is a general thing in London, or my experience is an outlier.

So...what is that, first come first served basis?

I assume there's an upper limit on the number of students an university can take in for the first year, determined by staff and classroom availability.

That is fascinating.

Anecdotally, in European universities, bachelors are the "get in as many people as we can for the tuition fees", while masters are the "let's be as selective as we can get away with".

Have you ever thought that if all these reasonable people from Europe have the same opinion about the Roma, then maybe there's some reasonable facts that you are not aware of?

Luxembourg has a city-wide free wifi.

There's a bit of a difference on which government body enforces which rule.

In quite a few countries, taxi rules are governed by cities - so the municipality government is the enemy.

Anti-monopoly/ predatory pricing rules are at least national level - and if you are unlucky you can go against the EU itself, which historically has not been afraid to slap companies with gargantuan fines that would never be allowed from the pro-business USA SC.

Which is kinda surprising. With her board of directors stacked with people coming from the politics environment, you would think they can get better PR people.

How can airlines get away with that? Is it a US thing?

In Europe you get the tracker code of any luggage that you have checked in.

Problem with that is that if he had said he would resign after a Leave vote, many people would have voted leave just to get rid of him (and if you think this is uncharitable, think of all the people who voted leave as a protest vote against the London elite)

I think that is what he is saying.

Though he is saying that the ruling elites are ruling because they are smart, and not that the ruling elites are smart because they are ruling.

Madrid would have certainly blocked Scotland if it separated from a UK that was still in the EU (for obvious Catalunian reasons).

With the UK on its way out from the EU, an argument can be made that Madrid will be persuaded to let this happen.

The US doesn't know how to build submarines?

Some countries in continental Europe have amazingly pro-employee legislative environment. I know several people who don't read the fine print of of the work contracts, because they know that any clause that gives disproportionate advantage to the employee without due compensation will be considered predatory, and thrown out in an instant if it goes to the court room.

To be honest I always thought that Icahn was never in for the long term. He just went and raised a ruckus about wanting those $100B cash reserves distributed to stock owners.

I am honestly so perplexed by the bot mania.

Don't get me wrong, they have their uses, but how is this suddenly perceived as a multi-billion dollar market?

Taxi drivers pretend to be your Uber driver? How on earth do they expect to get paid?

Maybe. But the Jobs attire is not so special that people wouldn't wear it unless they were trying to emulate him. If I had to pick on dress to wear every single day of my life, it would probably be a grey turtleneck - pretty close.

That's...the title of the Economist article.

Well, the subtitle, but the real title is "Terms of enlargement", which is not really self-explanatory, is it?

To some extent I believe that clustering of good (and bad) things is inevitable when there is a central decision marker (or decision making body).

What I mena to say is once an area is nice (or has been designated as the next "growth" area), then nice properties/malls/services etc are going to go there. Industry buildings will cluster somewhere else, office buildings will cluster in a 3rd area.

Of course, it sucks to be a resident in area that ends up being the low-value one, but someone will end up having to get the short stick.

I tend to agree. From what I've read about her (and not in the puff-pieces at the height of the Theranos hype) she was indeed a much smarter than average young lady - but probably the team was not able to deliver on the original vision/ idea, and rather than admit defeat, they tried to cling on it for as long as possible.

Valuable input...but if you say that there is nothing written in the article that is wrong, I am not sure how you can say that the article is wrong.

Oh dear. I get what he was trying (I hope) to say, but that is such a horrible way to put it.

For reference - Netflix said it best in that masterpiece of an HR document - a pay rise should never come up as a topic, because you should already be paying your people close to the top of what the market thinks they are worth .

Turkey is considered a US ally. We don't use the term dictators for our allies. (see Saudi Arabia for example).

Of course insights are generated by facts.

But what I am interested in is the insights, not necessary the facts that led to them being created (as long as I trust the author who converted facts into insights).

So I am happy to read an article about the evolution of (random example) people's savings and investing behaviour. I don't necessarily need name dropping of the fintech unicorns who are involved with making it happen.

If you are interested in the general health of the current companies over the last few years, that would make sense.

But it does not properly assess the profitability of the industry - unless you think you can pick in advance who the survivors are going to be.

If you systematically ignore the companies that go bankrupt, you will have a picture of the industry that is far healthier than the reality.

Further - especially in the airlines industry - you can't even go back too many years with the examination of the current companies - because they are the results of many mergers. So you should also be including the companies that used to be, but got merged in the existing ones.

That makes sense, I would be interested to seeing that too.

For the purposes of assessing the industry's profitability though, we cannot exclude them - if losses are because they were badly run and lost market share to other players, then their losses will be offset by the survivals (who then buy them out).

If you think about it, this is not a gigantic loss, if you are interested in insights and not news.