ProblemFactory

There is no secret trick or advantage to it. They buy the nicest car they can (barely) afford the monthly payments for, not one that makes most financial sense.

> What about the PCP convinces them (rightly or wrongly) that they can afford those cars?

At the end of the PCP plan, you don't get to keep the car (it's more of a rental than a purchase). Therefore the monthly payments on a 3-5 year PCP are going to be lower than on just a loan for the full price of the car. That makes it more "affordable" to people than actually buying a car - and the issue of what to do in 3 years time, when you will have no car, is conveniently forgotten.

> Someone needs to pay me to implement something that requires blockchain

It's difficult to find something that requires a blockchain, because the unique distinguishing feature of blockchains is the lack of any trusted central authority.

If you have a trusted authority, then you can do anonymous currency, money transfers, smart contracts, or anything similar 1000x more efficiently with a single server, an API, and some backend logic. All the distributed effort goes into making these possible at all without any central authority who can ban or filter transactions.

And for most real-world projects, having a government agency or tech company working as the trusted authority works just fine. It's only shady to illegal businesses where the lack of one is required.

The difference is that in software, you can go very far into production with an AWS account and a few blog posts on devops. There is no need to hire a specialist in wiring server racks or negotiating traffic peering deals up front.

All the IoT boards have made prototyping hardware accessible to "software people", but unlike AWS there is no smooth scaling curve from 10 to 10k to 10M customers.

Is technology really the slow and expensive part of boring tunnels? To me it has always seemed that tunnels are expensive because:

* Planning the traffic impact and how it interacts with other transport lanes, all the above-ground building work to make the tunnel useful,

* Emergency ventilation and escape routes, and all other infrastructure that goes into the hole,

* Avoiding any building foundation piles, unmapped tunnels, pipes and cables, re-planning and fixing them if you do hit them,

* In Europe at least, archeological surveys.

Anything is possible, but it gets much harder once the money is in circulation. If the hacker has time to buy socks & soap with the stolen funds, and convert some of it to USD on an exchange - then the soap merchant and exchange will not want their wallets "corrected".

Sorting out who should get their money returned and who gets to keep it would be infeasible.

"Sustainable salaries" won't fix this issue, as real estate is a competitive market. If you double the salaries of everyone who works in Manhattan, you will still have the same number of people living near work, just paying more rent. A salary increase only helps you move closer to work if other people don't get an increase and you can price them out.

In the end, there are only three options: build more housing where people want to work and live (but it has to be high-rises, not houses with backyards), better remote work options, or better transport infrastructure.

My comment, and the comments above it are all about C-style languages (C, C++, C#, Java).

Languages with very different syntax like Python are of course going to have different style preferences. Eg. Python doesn't have a ?: operator at all, just an inline if-else expression, so the entire discussion of "should you use ?: for control flow" is meaningless for Python.

Ternary is the only option if you are using "B ? X : Y" as an expression, want to get the value of X or Y.

If-else is the only option if you want to have multiple statements in a {} block, instead of only one function call.

So it seems more consistent to use ternary for expressions and if-else for statement control flow.

> If I get notices from pages/groups I dont care about anymore, I either unfollow or mute the next time their post annoys me.

I do that as well, but I think it's extremely rare among Facebook users. Everyone else I know either:

* Puts up grudgingly with "spam" they no longer want to see, or eventually

* Complains "Facebook is full of crap these days, I'm deleting my account".

A filter algorithm is a much better experience than manual unsubscribe for most users. With how easy it is to "like" anything you see on Facebook and the rest of the web, it is almost necessary to assume that subscriptions should "expire" unless the user keeps actively interacting with the page.

> If you have a page, Facebook wants to milk you, so they've got this weird algorithm that pushes your posts to only a small fraction of the page's followers, expecting you to start "promoting" them.

While this does enable Facebook to force brands to buy advertising, it is also an user-friendly change.

Nobody who I have spoken to about this thinks that "like/follow" = "I want to see everything they post" on Facebook. People like restaurants they had a nice dinner at and want to publish their support, it doesn't mean they want to see the daily special every day. Even if they "follow" you, it doesn't mean it should show up before a friend's holiday pictures today, and tomorrow there is already new content.

The reality is that most facebook users do not care about the posts from pages they like/follow, even if they pressed the button some time ago. An automated filter that keeps these posts from showing up is good for the user experience.

It's the same as "facebook friends" - they aren't real friends, just people you met once at a party in college. It might be interesting to see a post from them once in 10 years when they get married or move to a new country, but not their daily life. The same applies for brand pages - a like should give you once in 10 years access to their feed, but not more.

What are the realistic "extraordinary achievement" conditions of an O-1 visa?

The information online makes it seem that it is for olympic medal, nobel prize and oscar winners.

It seems strange that Google would have trouble with EU VAT rules for developer products. They seem to handle it fine for consumer-facing products like the Play Store.

Reading the source of libraries I'm using has been a real eye-opener for me. Even from very good documentation you can only learn how to use it, not learn how to write something similar yourself.

PyCharm is amazing help for it as well. Control-click on a function or class, and you will jump into its definition in the library source.

I think you could get 90% of the utility of semantic syntax tree diff by standard text diff + some simple rules.

For example preferring to split on empty (whitespace-only) lines. Almost all languages and coding styles use empty lines as a "semantic separator" marker.

VAT is just one source, but at 15-20% of government revenue, it is an important source. Most of it will be generated by business that physically happens in the country, and is unambiguously taxed there, but more and more of business is moving online.

Selling from low-VAT countries is a problem because it is a fictional accounting move. If you buy a product from Amazon.co.uk, delivered from an UK warehouse to an UK address - or from Amazon.de, delivered from a German warehouse to a German address - then it is still billed through Luxembourg. Even though by all non-accounting measures it is business happening inside the UK and Germany. The only reason for choosing Luxembourg is tax rate optimisation, not because there's an actual place of business there.

It's understandable that most countries in the EU would want to keep taxes on business that happens in their country to themselves. If VAT exists at all, then it makes sense not to gift it to Luxembourg. So the rules were changed to remove this accounting trick.

It is somewhat necessary, to solve the problem of Amazon, Google, Apple and others selling everything via low-VAT countries like Luxembourg.

But there would have been ways to make it much less painful to manage for small online businesses. For example a revenue limit (like 1M EUR) on cross-border sales before you have to start dealing with each country, or just an unified EU-wide VAT rate.

I have often thought of getting a part-time or virtual assistant.

But my main concern is that to be effective, they would need full access to my email. GMail doesn't have any way to grant limited access (for example no permanent delete), and even if it did, just read access to email would grant access to all my online accounts via password reset or magic link emails.

How have you organised this? Or how did you find an assistant you can trust with that access? Do you review their work, or assume it is all above board?

In 2014, USD/EUR exchange rate was around 1.35-1.40. In 2017, it has been around 1.05-1.10.

So assuming Apple originally prices things in dollars and converts for foreign markets, 1500 EUR in 2014 is the same price as 1900-2000 EUR today just based on the exchange rate changes.

> The main problem I heard with briandear's example is that people apparently didn't understand the coverage they had purchased.

While that's true, a part of the reason is the complexity of policies, and exclusions for situations which people consider "common sense" to be covered. Situations which are medium risk, but part of people's everyday lives.

For example, my travel insurance does not cover accidents which are "a result of drug or alcohol influence". My laptop loss insurance does not cover theft if it is "left unattended in a room with public access".

It might make sense to exclude getting high on unknown drugs in Thailand and stabbing yourself, or leaving your laptop on a truck stop cafe table while going to the toilet.

But at the same time, having a few beers while on holiday, and leaving your laptop on your desk at a startup office are both things which reasonable, responsible people still often do. And would not expect to invalidate their insurance cover.

Unfortunately nobody could explain to me the precise details of these clauses - what counts as a "result of" or "public access".

> You learned that people value effort over results.

People still value results, but they expect the price of things to be vaguely related to the cost of materials + time + small profit margin.

And in an efficient competitive market, prices are related to costs. If there were 5 identical providers of "web page updates", then the maximum you can charge would end up close to how much of your time it takes to run the script, and the customer would get to keep the surplus value.

If you are in a position to get away with value-based pricing, then you have to be careful to keep your costs secret, because otherwise you make people irrationally angry about being ripped off.

I think the argument is that people expect mobile and client-side web apps to continue working offline, and eventually sync and merge changes across clients. So you need a good solution for resolving inconsistent updates made by two offline clients. The same solution could be used for resolving inconsistent updates made on two database servers.

> But there was no stipulation that the job needed to be in tech or anything. So the whole thing might be a total waste of time and you would still have to fork away a cut of your salary when you find a job as a kitchen hand or whatever.

But isn't it objectively less "scummy" than charging money up front, which most universities do? Then if you fail to find a good job after graduation, you are still responsible for the full amount regardless of your income.

Some minimum threshold before the percentage is taken off would make sense - the "tax" would be insignificant income to the university but a high cost to someone working for minimum wage as a kitchen hand.

But restricting it to tech is not that obvious. Every office job in the modern world benefits from a) having some sort of degree paper, and b) having some tech skills.

> Tell me how this is different from the rest of the student loan industry. My student loan is until I've paid it all back, or I reach 65, or I die. It adds a top up to my income tax, taking 9% of everything over £17kpa earnt.

Student loan industry in the UK. In the US and most other places, income-based repayment is not a thing, the payments are due no matter how much or little you earn.

> 137.4%(!) of the profits for companies

How on Earth does that work? Companies have to pay all of their profit + more in taxes? Or is it some misleading figure which compares expenses like employment taxes to the profits?

"Uber is a play on self-driving cars" is a misleading but often repeated story.

When Uber started and raised its first investment rounds, self-driving cars were too far away to be part of a business plan. I doubt the latest investors take that view either - spending billions per year until self-driving cars happen is a way too expensive way to build up a fickle user base who will switch the moment a competitor offers 10% lower rates.

And when self-driving cars do arrive, there is no reason to believe that Uber will have exclusive access to them. Google and other software companies will be licensing the technology to anyone who pays for it, car manufacturers will be selling cars to anyone who pays for it.

It may kill taxi driver as a career, but there is no defensible advantage to Uber compared to Lyft, Hailo, Taxify, and so on.

The EU 14-day online returns is an extension of the older regulation against high-pressure sales tactics, like telephone sales, door-to-door sales, and booths on the street.

It allows you to change your mind if you made an impulse purchase, but not really to "test" a product. The returned item must be unused and in new condition, with any seals unbroken - generally if you open the box or rip any plastic bags the online retailer doesn't have to accept a return any more.

> > Choi sent forged wire transfer confirmations in order to induce WrkRiot employees to continue working for the company without being paid.

> I don't get it. How long can you fool anyone with this? A couple of days at most?

I have (briefly) worked with a few people like this in the past. There is no clever long-term plan to it, they are persistent "excuse makers". If a problem, like employees complaining about not being paid, comes up, they will find the quickest way to solve it for today by making up a new excuse.

And in their mind, they aren't even doing anything wrong - they honestly believe that the big sale or investment round will definitely close any day now, and they are just "motivating" the team to get through a slump.

I've seen this situation multiple times, and yes the developers involved were competent. They were even well-meaning, and wanted to build something for the benefit of the company, not just their resumes.

I think the tendency to over-engineer and over-polish comes mostly from getting too invested in one particular project or task. The developers have "professional pride" - they want to deliver software that has good architecture, high test coverage, easy to understand and maintain code, reliable, scalable, etc.

This means competent developers are very tempted to continue working on a project as long as there are possible improvements to it, even if these improvements do not make business sense. Nobody wants to admit that "cron job that fails once per month" is a sufficient solution when they can see a better solution, and go work on the next hacky cron job instead.

Lowest-bid tenders are kind of like democracy - a terrible system, but the best we have invented so far.

If someone is spending their own money, then going with a vendor that feels the most competent is going to deliver a better overall result than lowest-bid. But if someone is spending other people's money, then too much subjective freedom in choosing the vendor greatly simplifies corruption, and it's not obvious whether the end results will be better.

What lowest-bid tenders critically need is competent, motivated people working for the government writing the Request for Proposals. People who know the field, know the risks and complexities, and know the "tricks" used to underbid and overrun. People who write tenders that push an appropriate amount of risk and liability to the vendors - not letting themselves to be taken advantage of, but also not adding too many penalties that make vendors pad their estimates just in case and reach for expensive lawsuits if something happens.

If you have that, then there is a good chance that the bids will work out for all parties. But if not, then shady vendors will steamroll over the customer.

Attach the phone to a small weather balloon, and you can have a real "cloud hosted" setup.