crdb

It's a good point that prices in many countries are driven domestically (Australia!), however, I'd add/counter two arguments:

- there's a few papers out there (alas, I don't have them) that show that you can go as low as 4% active investors and still have an efficient market (although I'm not sure to what extent this extends to real estate purchases);

- even if the Chinese were not to touch real estate and stuck to treasuries, massive demand for treasuries would lower the cost of capital for everything else and therefore drive all asset prices (including and especially real estate) through the roof.

FWIW we recently went to visit some houses in Sydney, and 90% of those doing the tours were non-English-speaking Chinese. About half the agents were also Chinese, some with limited English skills. Anecdotes, not data, etc.

It won't because the main value of dug diamonds is rarity, which makes them perfect goods to display your wealth and status. Many of these goods are stored in vaults (some in freeports, areas of an airport carved out for fiscally optimized storage), and the only sign of a change of ownership is an extra name on a registry... but the whole point is to leave your mark on that registry.

So, the demand for these diamonds is not driven by their diamond-ness, just as the James Bond set Astons fetch higher value at auction than the same model sold at retail.

You can already see a version of this by heading to any jewelry shop and comparing lab diamond prices to the stuff sold by Tiffany's etc. Or just asking any young, not yet married lady in the street if she'd be OK with a synthetic.

Thought: s/encryption/guns/

Why do politicians not have identical positions on both guns and privacy? The root argument is the same: that citizen can, or can't, be trusted.

Yet almost all the pro guns are anti privacy and vice versa.

"[T]he public has access, thanks to the media, to news that they know as 'politics' or 'international relations', 'diplomacy', which only present [...] what we call 'the formal view'. The formal view always masks the 'real view', because the latter is almost always considered not receivable by a public that is not initiated (the widest audience) who would not be able to conceive of international politics in any other way than via the spectrum of ethics adapted only to social relationships between individuals." - Missions, méthodes, techniques spéciales des services secrets au 21e siècle, Lt Col X and Jacques Leger (generally quite a good book on modern information wars and opinion manipulation) http://www.amazon.fr/Missions-m-thodes-techniques-sp-ciales-...

I worked in several and I disagree. Take the fashion companies (Lamoda, Zalora, Dafiti... I think they're called global fashion group or something now): branded stuff has a 50% gross margin and the private label stuff up to 90%. That kind of economics leaves room for a lot of error and learning - basically, if you can get your costs under control, manage your inventory correctly and so on, you have a new Zara or H&M. So long as you can see this trend towards improvement, it's worth investing in (and will probably IPO eventually).

I used to think Rocket was operationally not that great, but then I started consulting with normal medium sized businesses and by comparison, they are regional leaders (dunno about global, as I haven't had any American clients yet, but based on my interviews with large Californian companies I won't name who still have interns do all their reporting in Excel, I wouldn't be surprised if Rocket was ahead there too). Same applies to marketing - the ones I worked in were surprisingly efficient with up to 10x the conversion rate I witnessed in competitors and a CPO perhaps 1/5th as high.

Could they do better than they are doing? Absolutely, but generalizing from FoodPanda ("pretty typical") or the Samwer "Blitzkrieg email" is like saying Uber and Palantir will end like Pets.com because they're Californian tech startups with VC funding pre-profit. They've made a genuine effort at building sustainable and sellable businesses globally and I learnt to respect that.

A few years ago, I opened and closed a company there with no problems. Did it again recently (post the various money laundering laws) and it was much more paperwork. When I flew to HK to get the bank account opened, they stressed I might not get it and that many foreigners could not get an account opened. 4 weeks later, HSBC denied me an account so the company lies empty until I decide to close it.

In a previous thread, someone said they managed to open an account so maybe it's on a case by case basis.

From my (limited, I Am Not A Lawyer, etc.) understanding:

First, it's expensive - you should count a good S$5k SGD/year if you go through an established player (e.g. Hawksford, who you are quoting), maybe a bit less otherwise. This ad infinitum, as you need a local director to keep the company open. And unlike in Hong Kong not so long ago, it has to be a real director - someone who theoretically can open bank accounts and hire people - so you're taking that risk too (the director will, conversely, be taking the risk that you might be a scammer or other criminal whose acts he'll have to answer for in court).

Then you have to put in S$50k in capital in order to be able to apply for a visa (EP) for yourself, should you want permission to work in Singapore (if not, you'll get taxed at home when repatriating profits); this visa will require, today, at least S$4-5k/month in "salary" (which will be taxed).

This also assumes that the Ministry of Manpower doesn't suddenly catch upon this very convenient way of getting yourself what is effectively an investor visa at a fraction of the investor visa cost (which they did two years ago with the EntrePass, which is today utterly useless for most foreign founders due to its requirement to have funding from a short list of approved VCs). Guessing what MoM wants and is going to do seems to be a bit of Kremlinology which HR directors love talking about as their special value add, but it is a bit opaque and the rules change with time, elections and special circumstances (like the famed riots last year, or the Ferrari and taxi incident).

The "plan" should you want to take advantage of Singapore's otherwise fantastic conditions for running a business is to get PR, which takes up to 3 years employed locally (depending on salary - someone on a high salary and from a "desirable" country might get it in 6 months). Singapore is fantastic... for local founders. Or if you're willing to pay.

The days where you could be in business for USD 1,500 and a flight to Hong Kong appear to be, unfortunately, over. I'd love to be proven wrong...

A lot of these fake X articles miss an important point: that advertisers do not pay for clicks/listens/impressions/"eyeballs"/"likes"/[insert obvious user action that you actually, in fact, do "pay" for] but for value delivered.

As an advertiser, I will first find a way to track orders and customers from a channel, then pay for that channel. My calculation is simple: the channel brings in X amounts of Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), and I pay Y for bringing in X. If X/Y is high enough to justify Y, I keep the channel. If not, I don't. In other words, if 9 out of 10 clicks from FaceBinGle are fake, but my CLV is $1,000 and acquiring that customer cost me $10, I'm going to keep buying those 10 clicks.

In fact, what happens is that an efficient advertising market will end up with an efficient price and channels end up having the same X/Y, whatever X is (can be CLV, can be Customer Acquisition Cost, can be Cost Per Order, can be Cost Per Visit, whatever the customer base is optimizing for).

Taking this to its logical conclusion, if the number of fake users does not affect the number or activity of real users, the only person who really pays for the fake listens is Spotify, because of the royalties paid to bands which have a fixed price per listen.

So as the average price per listen that Spotify can charge advertisers drops as listens become on aggregate less valuable and the CLV models adjust accordingly, Spotify is then incentivized to find a solution. Unless they've already baked the cost of just letting the scammers be into the economics of the platform. But "listen farms" should not, in and of themselves, scare away advertisers except for the very basic ones who have not yet come upon the principle of tracking ROI.

Thanks for the recommendation. These (FCH) reviews are awesome. Do you know any other such critics?

Awesome. At which point did these techniques crossover from Stockhausen etc., or did they independently appear on the "pop" music circuit?

Pax Americana started in WWII (which killed over 55 million people) and since then, there has been no global conflict of a similar scale. Cf http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/massacre.html (top result in DDG).

Whether you consider that global relatively free trade is not beneficial to the rest of the world is up to you, but as a citizen of the rest of the world who did benefit I'm quite glad the US did not go isolationist after WWII.

Regarding schools, whether the taxpayer's money is used appropriately is another discussion, irrelevant here since Americans, through their elected representatives, chose to spent the money in this way.

Funding-wise, last year's budget spent $100bn and this year wants $117bn on the Federal end for "Education, Training, Employment and Social Services" (see link above) of which $69bn in 2015 is for Education (see: http://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/obama-administration-2...).

The key is to look at the current budget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_United_States_federal_bud...

It can be split into three families of spending:

- defense, which benefits you globally via Pax Americana, free trade routes etc. and should you require it, "Captain Phillips" style rescue.

- "socialism", in the form of benefits that everybody has to pay for and that you can receive if you trigger certain situations (retirement, unemployment, etc.). Most expatriated Americans probably already benefitted from free education which is included here.

- "generally making the country locally better" (justice, environment, etc.).

Of these, only the latter doesn't directly impact Americans abroad. The first benefits you wherever you are; foreign citizen somewhat benefit from Pax Americana but there is no guarantee it will continue, whilst US citizen are covered globally with much more certainty. The second is a form of compulsory insurance for life developments that will probably coincide with repatriation. But that's about 7% of the budget (rough back of the envelope).

The question is why don't other countries tax their citizen abroad? I think it is mainly because they can't afford to enforce it (good luck, Estonia, forcing JP Morgan to give you access to their New York client data). If they could, with any degree of certainty, they would in a heartbeat. France proposes to do it every 6 months.

It's been a long time and I took a break from music until I could actually enjoy it again. I vaguely remember the track being (I think) "one more time" and so there was the voice/instrumental motif accompanying the rather limited lyrics, the motif that opens the song fading in and continues as the background, maybe the drum motif in the background, and the number of times it was repeated (I think over 200 times). There's also a timbral modulation some time later and some drum changes marking structural changes. And a bell at the end.

What is more interesting, and hard to really discuss if you are not familiar with the genre (which I was not and still am not) is why the song writers would use them and what they reference explicitly and implicitly and so on. I would love for anyone to tell me more about the song and its context!

Actually, thinking about music, or anything, like this is terrible. I read a book on Japanese architecture whose author (an awarded architecture professor from the US) I have forgotten which was basically listing as context-less observations everything she saw. For example "and this is a join typical of the suki-ya house, it's made by hand out of this wood and with these tools. Then it goes here. The suki-ya house has a table here used for writing. The walls are made with plaster over a bamboo mesh." etc. I learnt very little, although I knew a lot of factoids afterwards. But there are writers (like Marc Peter Keane [1]) who are much better, because they introduce everything with their meaning and where they stand in the tradition and mindset and history of the culture that produced it.

[1] e.g. http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Garden-Design-Marc-Keane/dp/0... which is actually a nice very basic introduction to how Japanese history shaped its aesthetics.

I always think of Churchill's 'You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.' when I hear this comment.

Critics also take a risk by staking out their opinion, which they know is fallible, subjective, and liable to attack. They take the risk because they value discussion and learning over the protection of their and the artist's egoes. It is a form of courage that should be praised, "man in the arena" notwithstanding.

Moreover, in many industries (if not all), if the critics stay silent, only the PR firms are sounding, which sucks for the consumer who becomes drowned in noise and unable to engage with the art.

Most arts require, to an extent, some prior knowledge. It is not so much that there are distinctions but that previous study and understanding is required to make the most of any art (including "pop" or "lowbrow").

A guest in my house this week is a big fan of very simple techno. I'm obsessively listening to and playing through Franck's Prelude, Chorale and Fugue after hearing Stephen Hough play parts of it at a masterclass a month ago which gave me a new understanding of and hunger for the piece. I do so with headphones because I know the sound bothers my guest. What little techno I have heard from his computer bothers ME a little because of the absolute paucity of content (I say this as someone who brought a Daft Punk track to an analysis class as a joke which turned into a 1h30 discussion on the only three elements we were able to isolate).

My taste has evolved from over 25 years of investing in understanding (classical) music, probably well over the 10,000 hours mark. He hasn't invested the hours (decades) so he doesn't appreciate the art, much or at all. And that's fine - he appreciates other things in life, in which he has invested time, and in which I understand very little. The content of the Franck is complex and high dimensional (if that makes sense) and requires that previous body of knowledge and experience to appreciate; in fact, as someone who has never played on an organ, I am probably lacking a fair amount of experience to make the most of Franck.

With that body of knowledge, you are able to judge and appreciate the piece according to objective standards. Without, you get the second graders and the tasting meal (and they did like the wagyu!). Untrained listeners will react to some of the harmonies. Take the famous hand jump chords [1]. A "man in the street" might appreciate the familiar chord progression. A pianist will react immediately to the genius of that hand jump that forces you to isolate the "melody" (and perhaps shaping the arpeggiated chord that ends up "naturally" leading to it) due to the physics of getting to that last note. I took a friend to that masterclass and he was as bored as I was fascinated.

From A Mathematician's Apology: "Mr. J. M. Lomas put this point more picturesquely when we were passing the Nelson column in Trafalgar Square. If I had a statue on a column in London, would I prefer the column to be so high that the statue was invisible, or low enough for the features to be recognizable? I would choose the first alternative, Dr. Snow, presumably, the second." [2]

That being said I think there is value in "man on the street" reviews. As such a man in the case of many fields, I would like to know how others reacted as a proxy for my own reaction. There is a place for Yelp, and for Michelin. One is wealthier for reading both.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq67nsDLucI&t=5m32s [2] http://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-Apology-Canto-Classics/...

(time to stick out my ignorant amateur neck for chopping)

I'm sorry if this feels like the wrong tone, but how familiar are you with Japanese aesthetics and philosophy? I am only slightly familiar, but my understanding is that kaiseki ryori is not about "tasty" but a form of philosophical statement by the chef (for example, seasonal touches referring to the impermanence of life), and also a means of linking with nature. For example, the rough, asymmetrical, and "used-looking" look of the tableware, in contrast to say the impeccable and ornate perfection of the Chinese equivalent, references wabi-sabi and is meant to both complement the seasonal and natural feel of the ingredients, and make you think about the bittersweet nature of ephemeral life. There might even be cultural references. In many cases you're supposed to get out still feeling slightly hungry. Each dish evokes a different feeling and the succession of feelings and the way in which they are executed are what a meal like Kikunoi is about. (dear Japanese readers please correct me)

It's like "no" theatre (not kabuki!): a highly formalized, stylized art form where the audience is expected to be familiar with everything already and is appreciating only the "how" not the "what" of the play. A no performance uses archaic language modern Japanese audiences don't even understand, but all the attendees know the words already. It would feel tremendously boring to an outsider (guilty!), with not much visually happening, whilst your Japanese host gets excited about the masterly way in which bending the head a couple of degrees down has utterly changed the implied feeling of the actor.

When I first travelled to Japan, I was frustrated by the lack of intensity present in, well, everything, from architecture to food (except fast food) and even fashion. My relatively frequent trips to Japan improved a lot after I took the time to read books to try and understand the local mindset, at least of Kamakura to Edo period Japan (when the warriors took over from the overly sophisticated aristocracy that ran the country from Kyoto in the Heian period). It is this refinement within the constraints of simplicity (with the tea ceremony the most extreme example) that makes Japanese arts so sophisticated. We sort of have it in the West too; Mozart is not impressive aurally in the way that, say, Rachmaninov or Liszt might be, but playing Mozart well (or something like Liszt's Pilgrimage Years) requires a lifetime of study and is appreciated for its subtlety and control and life experience more than the sheer block of sound and expressed ideas in the content.

Which bank would you recommend in the UK?

Adding another data point(s) there: I opened two HK companies (with much the same reasoning as you did), about 5-6 years ago and again about a year ago. The first time was smooth and the bank account happened without a meeting (at HSBC) although I didn't use the structure and folded it a year later.

The second time was a lot less smooth, I had to fly to Hong Kong to meet HSBC, and after they took a relatively annoying processing fee and grilled me on my business model (IT consulting), rejected my application with no explanation about 3 months later. The agent told us most foreigners were routinely declined these days although they didn't know why.

We thus opened a company in the UK instead (yes, it's still a great offshore location!). Fast (minutes on the Companies House website), cheap (< 100 GBP?) but the bank (Lloyds) hit us with a fraud check which months later is still not resolved, despite reams of paperwork travelling around and notaries public making a small fortune in certifying documents, and my co-founder being a UK resident. Lloyds asked us for more information than the Singapore Government did for my PR (equivalent to US green card) application. Since you can't do business on a personal bank account if you have a UK Ltd, that structure is basically inactive.

To help you answer that literally: according to Simon Mann who did it successfully twice and failed once [1], a successful mercenary invasion and peace-keeping effort in a country like Sierra Leone cost around 1 million GBP in the mid-1990s.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Cry-Havoc-Simon-Mann/dp/1743142307

Whilst I agree with the feeling, I think a lot of BI devs have a tendency to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Decision making is a complex process. The graphs and data fed to the executive via BI are just inputs to the deep net of his brain, which has been trained on the "data" absorbed over decades of experience. The objectives themselves are not simple to model - management is a delicate balancing act between competing stakeholders. The job of the BI professional is not to just produce what he is told, but to figure out what problem the person making the request is trying to solve, and then solve it in the simplest way possible. Occasionally this requires teaching them some things.

Taking an example: imagine you have an engine vibrating normally. You want to set up an alarm that rings if the engine vibrates abnormally - specifically, adding a new frequency to the existing signal (maybe it indicates a screw is coming off or something). You can feed the signal as is to your algorithm, or you can put it through a FFT in which case the "signal" is just a bunch of peaks at each frequency, and your algorithm is literally just a switch (if peak at frequency f reaches amplitude A, trigger alarm). The switch is orders of magnitude simpler, cognitively, than the algorithm that is fed the raw signal; it's also likely to be more accurate. Feature engineering is almost the most important part of statistical learning.

The executive is like the alarm - pre-processing the signal is your job. They are used to simple tools, usually univariate and linear, at a stretch, some can deal with simple polynomials. The better you pre-process the signal, the easier it becomes for the executive to make a correct decision by associating the new data to whatever decades of experience he trained his brain on.

A concrete example: let's say your CMO has asked you to give him vouchers and new customers for the last 6 months. He's clearly trying to establish the relationship between his voucher campaigns and new customers. You can give him the vouchers and the new customers, daily/weekly/whatever, and put it on a nice Tableau graph and give it to him and forget about it... or you can confirm that the problem he is looking to solve is indeed the relationship between his campaigns and new customers.

At which point you ask why new customers? And you find that he has a theory that gaining new customers is the best way to increase revenue, and the objective of the company is to increase revenue (due to incoming fundraising round whose valuation is based on revenue and revenue growth), but it is short term cash flow constrained (hence looking at vouchers instead of, say, marketing spend).

Since he probably doesn't know that a model can have more than one variable, you explain that to him and brainstorm what other variables might impact revenue growth. Assuming you're trying to predict new customers per income statement dollar and new customers per cash flow dollar, you might find that online marketing spend and season are two significant variables, and that there is a significant interaction term between vouchers and marketing spend of certain types. It's now your job to explain that "formula" - standard error of coefficients included - to the executive, and brainstorm what output is required to make him be able to quickly check how this input has changed over time (which might just be.. an alarm). You'll also have to explain the measure of fit you are using (R-squared almost always wins by virtue of being very intuitive).

And of course, this is what I identify as the gap that none of these BI products can ever hope to fill. You need someone technical with full grasp over all the data sources of the company - AND the implicit and explicit data model of the business - who also happens to be continuously involved with management discussions and at least moderately aware of the business. Most companies have a set up whereby the BI team is some sort of self-service restaurant where the executive swoops in, gets his request processed, and swoops back out. Many prefer hiring young, inexperienced BI staff because BI is seen as a cost centre, and because the way they "scale" requests is by adding headcount. One offshoot of this is that the executive starts wanting a Tableau, something will all the data neatly prepared that can be drag and dropped into the 1-dimensional models that he uses to pre-process his company data.

The upshoot is that it's not that executives are stupid, but more along the lines of GIGO. Without the tools required to make sense of the signals they receive, executives cannot make the right decisions even if they have the right experience and thinking. I suspect a large part of why more experienced executives are smarter is that they learn to spot trends over decades of experience based on very simple signals; for example, an experienced hedge fund manager will sniff out a fraudulent company much faster than someone who has just started, just by looking at the financial reports.

Yes things are different today, but not so different.

For example, he mentions in his books that people enjoy having something to read whilst waiting for a bus. I personally love long wordy ads in the metro or on the bus as they help me pass time between stops. Even when the content is utter crap.

He sold Rolls-Royce by going and talking to their engineers - at the plant! - and figuring out what made the cars special. Then he wrote a snappy line that captured the gist of it, and some text underneath for those interested enough to keep reading. The ad [1] is now a classic in the industry.

Interestingly, his position was that he would never do political advertising. Key to the success of his ads were telling the "truth" about the advantages of your product (sure, embellish it, but do not lie as you get found out) and he was disgusted by the fact all political campaigns were entirely made of lies and often attacks.

[1] http://bordiniuc.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/1ss01.jpg

I talked to an Australian magazine that will remain nameless where the executive on the other side of the table told me their business model was 100% sponsored content. I couldn't tell, from their website. Every single article was a sophisticated ad. He said they were doing fantastically and growing fast, users wanted that kind of stuff.

It reminds me of Ogilvy's book on advertising [1]; Ogilvy's experience taught him that informative ads that explained the advantages of the product were most successful with customers. Sponsored content is exactly that, and the opposite might be something like clickbait [2].

Sponsored articles are accessed voluntarily by the customer clicking on them and reading them, and returning to the site; they are unobstrusive being mostly made of text and of (relatively) higher editorial quality, with good photography and so on. I wonder if they are the future of advertising.

On the topic of being unable to filter advertorial content from, well, content, I don't think it's as clear cut as ads vs not-ads, since every writer has their own set of opinions and presents their world view only (with few exceptions). A necessary life skill is critical thinking, learning to dissect an argument, examine its assumptions and data, and come to an independent conclusion as to the point it is making.

[1] core principles are summarized in his "house ad": http://smartonlinesuccess.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/dav...

[2] famously (NSFW): http://www.lazygamer.net/general-news/a-history-of-evony-ads...

You're missing one more on the company side beyond TCO: there's definitely an element of multiplicative productivity from not only avoiding duplication of effort, but getting the stuff everybody does done incredibly well via a collaborative effort amongst those who all share the same problems, such that they can focus on higher value added work. E.g. database, OS, machine learning libraries...

A real life example might be a small town in an emerging country [1] where retailers band together and invest in building a road to the big city nearby. This greatly increases their revenue by bringing in a lot of traffic that wouldn't otherwise have bothered, even if the ROI on the road, if measured purely in terms of money in money directly out, is "negative".

[1] I read about this happening in regions of Iraq. I saw it in person in the state of Maharashtra in India, where Godrej is building roads and power plants in the region around its factories near Pune.

> If you spend $600k on four days of advertising anything using any medium (and then quit), the odds are that you will not meet your goals. It doesn't matter if you spend $600k on one thirty second television slot, a full page ad in the newspaper, or 10 million Facebook ads.

I disagree with you based on personal experience.

I know several companies with an online marketing cost per order of say (number fuzzed just in case someone links me, but order of magnitude), <$5 and average order size of $100 and gross margin of 40%, and average time between entry and purchase of an hour or two.

I've heard several instances at these companies of someone saying "let's make our end of month numbers look better" and subsequently blowing extra cash (sometimes millions) on online advertising with immediate results, and little change in company CPO. The budget is literally a function of what capital is at hand to be allocated to marketing. E.g. you don't want to grow too fast or you get operational issues, so you cut marketing spend a bit and sales slow down a bit so the warehouse can catch up.

At a (very high) CPC of $1 those $600,000 are up to 600,000 visitors... that's a lot of data to think about. Spending it in chunks, optimizing for ROI instead of fluffy "KPIs", and doing a bit of stats, is usually enough. As the original article effectively says.

What is true is that how "X" is doing (where X can be any marketing platform, channel, magic solution sold by slick suited, Rolex wearing sales guys) is impossible to generalize. I was fortunate enough to see the same methodology used in around 40 countries around the world and yield vastly different results: sometimes Facebook display ads are your best channel, sometimes they cost you 100x what you make back; sometimes Google is amazing, other times display retargeting is it. You should always try everything and make decisions once you have enough data.

And sometimes it even changes after a few years: e.g. a country which goes from blackberries to large screen touch phones with massive CPUs is going to see an improvement in display ads. So you keep dipping just in case. It's a high dimensional problem, further complicated by the quality of your own team (and evolution of the product) - as Ogilvy wrote at length, the intrinsic quality of the ad goes a very long way towards its success.

> nothing like the "500k salary and 2 million in stock" articles I hear about happening in SV

Amusingly, the only American software engineer I know who is certifiably taking more than 500k USD a year in base (i.e. cash, pre-bonus) salary lives and works in Boston.

Spot on.

(Been there done that, saving your excellent comment for future "let's rewrite this" situations.)

Also summarised well here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

I'd only add:

- nitpicking, but with Ruby on Rails, you'd probably use ActiveRecords (the ORM) to manage the data; by not enforcing constraints in the database itself, you'll get a tiny bit of orphaned data. Fine for an e-commerce website where customer service can send a voucher; sucks for the few students whose life is affected by your non-provably-correct solution.

- most non-technical users (most of the teachers I know included) confuse good and pretty UI. "Bad" legacy system usually means "not flat design/doesn't look like my iPad". This usually pairs with the idea that "it would just be a simple app, we can get it done for a grand".

Here's a simple counter-example. You're an e-commerce company, and in year 1, you can choose which js events/hits to track. For the sake of simplicity (and perhaps because prompted to do so by the Google Analytics tutorial) you only track product views (i.e. loading a product page) and conversions.

In year 5, you now process 5,000 or 50,000 orders a day, and you're wondering what the click through rate of your products is when they come up in a search. That's your "question", which will help you figure out which 100 of the 100,000 products you stock your customer will be interested in (because it's 10x as much data as conversion rate).

Guess what, those who installed Piwik and tracked the "impression" event/hit can now immediately play with it. You on the other hand have to start tracking it now and just missed on 5 years of data to explore which brands your customers like for example.

It wouldn't have cost you much to track everything - maybe $1-10k/year for an AWS server to host the Piwik database (it's a bit costlier if you're with Google - $150,000/year for Google Analytics Premium + $15,000/year for BigQuery to be able to query the hit IDs, and only starts tracking on the day you activate it).

Singapore has a great, well regulated, honest taxi industry with ample taxis just about everywhere and a plethora of ways to order them from apps to call centres and taxi queues. Yet I find myself using UberX practically all the time except if there is literally a free taxi flashing green right in front of me (and even then I'll hesitate).

Uber offers me these small things that stack up: - automatic transaction - google maps destination (one less thing to explain to the driver) - happy drivers, always - slightly higher air conditioning temperature by default (taxis like to blast you with cold air and you have to ask them to put it up) - lesser chance of a bumpy driver - a chance to meet and chat with a new person, who isn't necessarily a professional taxi driver, and from that a fun life story or two

And that's enough to make me switch and even evangelise the service.

Then I go abroad and I get google maps "taxis" with no need to take out foreign cash, and it's warming somehow.

Not in every country. Singapore is fine. The only riot in 40 years was over within a couple of hours as the police that was immediately sent on site outnumbered the rioters by an order of magnitude. You occasionally see panels on the road warning you that a pickpocket was active there 4 years ago, or maybe it was a car crash, and could you please phone the number if you have any information about it.

The country has at least four major religions and four official languages with considerably larger minorities than any European country, yet, has not seen a race-based breakdown in the rule of law in decades.

It's a failure of government when the rule of law breaks down. It's up to the citizen to figure out the problems and solve them with their votes and by talking to their elected politicians. What have you personally done politically to change the situation in your own country? Personally, I've given up and emigrated to a country with better individual rights.

I'm not sure closing all borders and living in autarky (which is where the UK and US seem to be heading) is a good long term choice. Not my countries, not my problem. It saddens me a little nevertheless to see so many great countries pick it.

What is important is that the rule of law and individual rights do not break down or become unequally applied. If justice and the police scale with the influx, refugees can integrate well and fast, even if their food and home practices might look different. If you let ghettos develop, you have a problem. In your example, the solution is not to let women or gays be oppressed, and not allow sharia courts to supercede the governmental ones. People can retain their views so long as they don't actually go on and infringe on the rights of others, if they do they go to jail.

Singapore even outright discusses how fast infrastructure and services are growing and sets the amount of immigration for the year accordingly. I suspect if Germany really was willing to take up the majority of the million Syrian refugees (and mass immigration from any other country in distress), it would make sure to invest accordingly and be able to integrate that many as the US has done in the early 20th century [1] (so much for history). If they get it right, it might be a huge economic boom and great long term move.

As for "the common German belief/societal structures", no culture is stagnant (and clearly not German values, if you look at the 20th century alone!). Even the US is a strange mix of a dozen traditions, cultures and habits which have blended into "American".

For example, most world citizen think of the US, not Italy, when eating a slice of pizza. People call a flat white Australian, but the Australian coffee culture which is spreading globally today is a direct descendant of Italian immigration to the country. Immigrants adapt to the local custom (cf "Chinese-American" food, secularisation of the second generation, etc.) and the country adapts to its immigrants.

[1] "between 1880 and 1920 [...] brought more than 4 million Italians to America" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_American) - this when the total US population in 1920 was 104 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1920_United_States_Census). How many famous Americans today, like Rudy Giuliani, Jay Leno or Madonna have Italian origins?