bxc

I was already working remotely, but I'd quit a job of several years because of a disagreement.

Someone wanted to give me work, but they preferred to give me a job through a company-based contract rather than being an employee (for work permit reasons). It was pretty straightforward to make that happen from my side. Once I was in that game of "you contract for some of my time, but not all of it", I just carried on.

That someone found me through word-of-mouth / personal recommendation, which is also how everything after that has come along.

I don't market myself particularly hard, but I like to think that my reputation is "brutally honest".

One of the things that has repeatedly pushed me off WhatsApp has been their very aggressive stance on this: I've several times stopped using it because "you need to update your app or this will all stop working in 7 days" and I've not been in the mood for jiggling the apps round on my tiny phone to be able to perform that update: the 7 days has passed, and I'm off WhatsApp again until such time as I "need" it.

Be happy disengaging from the game with non-competitive responses like "yeah probably no one will use it, but mostly I just want to have fun" or "Yeah it sounds like a waste, but I get my paycheck".

That's what an easy to edit personal website feels like.

The National Health Service in the UK has this as a strong stereotype; and it is true in some places. But the only two times I've used a UK hospital, I've been done within 24 hours.

Part of me wants (without any evidence) to say this is not to do with the socially provided/not socially provided difference, but with how that benefit is provided.

I've lived in the Netherlands where the state healthcare took the form of (mandatory, price-fixed) insurance which you used by buying medical care and paying for with your insurance. That allowed me to use any hospital in NL or indeed the world (with the proviso that it was same, cheaper than NL).

There are ongoing battles in the UK to let that kind of "market portability" happen, but the way that the NHS bureaucracy works makes it hard; and maybe its the lack of that end consumer choice which lets things sometimes get so slow. (I think that's a similar complaint to HMO users in the US)

Its a value added tax, so no, 13% doesn't get taxed every time money changes hands. Only the added value.

Symlinks don't work on all filesystems, so don't always work.

Now I don't really know how well it works in practice but the european model for VAT (the rough equivalent of sales tax) is basically this: if you're a small business, you don't have to collect VAT for the place you're sending the goods; but if you don't, you have to collect it for your own location (rather than collecting nothing). And over a certain business size, you do have to collect it for the destination.

The EU has fairly uniform VAT rates (around 20%), so then there isn't a huge difference to where you charge the tax, and so end consumer prices don't vary by a huge amount.

Maybe the much more variable rates in the US plus what seems to be more easier ability to move jurisdictions would lead to sales tax jurisdiction shopping a more than in europe.

I see they picked up on 'bi-weekly'. I'd never thought of it as an Americanism but it is ambiguous and should be banned for that reason.

Yesterday I accidentally browsed the terms and conditions of galois.com and discovered that I'm not authorised to view their website without a written licence (as I have a professional interest in their area of business and my viewing of their site is not personal and/or non-commercial). I've written to them asking for a licence as I don't want to fall foul of UK laws that might put me in prison for 2 years for accessing their servers without permission.

although there's more to the story, the headline itself sounds so 1990s. (soon you'll even be able to order pizza online!)

I actually use this as the primary authentication mechanism for sites I rarely/occasionally visit... password reset at every login!

if you're interested in ssh-like functionality and http, I just wired browserid into my shell server for in-browser logins: http://benctechnicalblog.blogspot.com/2011/07/browserid-in-b...

I think the main rage people get here is when they get data on their phone and so can make a much more of a "like-for-like" comparison between various means of delivering 132 characters delivered to/from a mobile device.

I mean of the user experience, not of the very different backend networks in place.

There's some talk of SMS over GPRS. I have no idea how widely that is deployed though.

If we're making inappropriate price comparisons, that 14mb is half a cent of hard-drive space. A whole 3 characters worth of SMS!

the EU doesn't have a single VAT, or a even a single VAT rate. Each country can choose its own. But if you sell from country A to a resident of country B, you have to charge your country A VAT (in most end-consumer situations) just like you charge to a country A resident. (unless you get real big, then you have to collect country B VAT instead...)

its interesting (to me) that they avoid collecting sales taxes in various US states, but that (at least for AWS) they are compelled to collect VAT for all EU states because they have a presence in at least one of those EU states...

real world analogue: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_House_Rule

In NL? You're required by law to have health insurance and the insurance companies are required to give it to you. Assuming you're there legally.

yep, the broken-dutch vs clear-english appears to be my experience too - if I'm in the right mood, I'll tease dutch people by speaking full speed english around them when they don't want to speak dutch ;)

now I've made two comments on this thread which make amsterdam sound kinda negative; so now I feel that I have to say that, no no amsterdam is a cool place to live ;)

well, NL is pretty expensive to live in if you're earning USD; the tax burden is high if you're used to the US (though there's some offset because that tax includes what would be private medical insurance in the US); and people are forever grumbling about how hard it is to find places to live in Amsterdam. So maybe there's a reason for that.

The meeting on 6th July in their event planner is labelled as 'weekly' though that would mean there should be one in a couple days too (?)

Even if you try to learn dutch, you won't easily find people who want to speak it too you, tbh. (at least that's my experience after a few years)

There are other ways of dealing with "fake real numbers" (which is what doubles are)

One example is interval arithmetic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_arithmetic

None of them seem very mainstream: the predominant thinking is that floats are "the right way" to badly approximate real numbers, that works well enough except when you're working with pounds and pence, when "everyone" knows the right way is to use fixed point...

That's not going to help the above associativity problem, but it fits in the theme of "LAAAA LAAAA LAAAA lets gloss over the bits of floating point that don't follow the rules"

They do have an understanding of how the internet works. You type what you want into google and you get it. Maybe its not how the internet worked before, but hey its nice to have to not keep downloading HOSTS.TXT.

> Someone sold a huge amount of Bitcoins. The market acted accordingly.

It doesn't seem very free market to rollback the market and cancel all the free market trades that happened.

I've been a remote worker for maybe 5y now. I realise now that I've spent more time working remotely than I have in an office. My experience with getting hired on various jobs has been: the people with who(m?) I've worked remotely with before (for example, because they've been somewhere else at a different organisation) have absolutely no problem (and are enthusiastic even) about hiring me, and the people who have not interacted with me in that way, and especially not worked with remote workers before are really very wary indeed - but the enthusiasm of the people who have worked with me remotely is enough to overcome that. There's clearly a division, and clearly people can move from one side to the other, but it seems very individual: people are happy for me to work remotely rather than for "staff in general" to work remotely. So there's a reputation thing going on - but it doesn't seem a reputation that is widely understood - its a reputation understood only by a set of people who've had the experience. I don't really know how that reputation can be propagated and understood by others without the hard sell from someone already in there...

"small increase" - the exchange rate against the dollar has risen from under a dollar when I first looked to 6ish - it's almost tempting to trade in my single bitcoin for cash (the reality of the market being that I have nothing else to spend it on...)

facebook has ipv6, on wwww.v6.facebook.com

www.v6.facebook.com. 3600 IN AAAA 2620:0:1cfe:face:b00c::3

Maybe on ipv6 day they might put that on the main www.facebook.com name too - no idea.