marcinzm

> but that's not the point

You made it a point, not me. If you're going to try changing the goal post when proven wrong then there's no point in talking further.

> Europe lacks Billionaires not Millionaires.

It lacks both.

The US has 8.5% millionaires. Germany has 4.1. France has 5.6. Norway has 5.9. The UK has 5.8. Once you include the rest of the EU it goes even lower.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...

edit: And in the US there's no need to start a business to be a millionaire. You can become one by just working a regular job. Sales, consulting, tech, finance, etc. jobs can even pay you $1m per year.

My view is that the US startup culture exists because of wealth inequality at the $1-$20m net worth level. Wealth inequality is socially incentivized at that level because of the lack of a decent social safety net. If you don't save money then at 50 you may end up homeless on the street due to bad luck. But if you don't get bad luck then you end up at 50 with a large amount of money that you don't have much to do with. So you start investing some in riskier things because who cares.

US founders not from wealthy backgrounds can often get $500k from friends and family. I doubt those in the UK can do so.

There's massive massive social costs due to this in the US so be careful what you wish for.

You've fallen into the classic trap of thinking about the very very very tiny of people who are billionaires. Very few people are billionaires. Very few startup founders will ever be even if they succeed.

Life changing money is going from $50k/year to $1m/year. Not from $1b to $2b.

The vast majority of tax burden and complexity hits the middle class.

> When Apple was founded, the tax rates were %70.

It was 35% on capital gains.

If you take advantage of the larger number of tech company jobs in the US and were in a non-tech company in the UK then you can make 500% more.

A quick Google search will return many: https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/city-london-chief-says-brex...

TLDR: They're not moving to Frankfurt but they are moving out of the UK.

If that's adjusted for cost of living and inflation then isn't that hiding the actual economic changes? If GDP falls then cost of living would likely go down and vice versa.

> Yes we have many comments on HN talking about how harmful the US VCs attitude is because they force good businesses into choosing between being unicorns and not getting funding.

Most of those are people complaining about a business having to make changes because it took $50+m in funding and now needs to justify it. The business was only "good" because it got $50m and didn't need to do things like charge enough money. If it hadn't gotten that $50m then those people wouldn't consider it such a good business or even know about it.

I'm not too familiar with this but as I understand it you you may have the disk encrypted with a key that is loaded from some other server at boot automatically. The key server may then require a manual un-seal to un-encrypt it's own key storage. If you steal the server and it loses power then the key is gone. Of course, there's ways around this like switching the server to a battery and possibly then literally freezing the RAM to dump it.

Poland had a quarter of Germany's per capita GDP in 2010. You're basically saying that German acted like a developing nation in term of it's energy strategy. That's not a positive argument. When you don't have money then you do whatever you can to survive. When you do have money then you need to think about the future. Poland's GDP is now half of Germanys so it's doing just that since it now has the money to do so.

The US probably bought uranium because of fears it’d otherwise get sold to North Korea, Iran or terrorists. Just like it basically financed the Russian space program for decades to ensure those rocket scientists didn’t take a nice salary from Iran.

The US imports uranium from 12 countries and has its own deposits. Plus you can stockpile it. It was probably more to prevent Russia from selling to terrorists than a dependency.

So which boogey man controlled their uranium access and made them shut down all their plants?

Management monopolizing organizational / social capital is itself a sign of a fairly unhealthy organization. So you might get a couple quarters of pain but then you'll end up with a better long term organization.

Having too many also causes endless politics, empire building, meetings, etc, etc. Much more expensive than too few. They need to justify their existence somehow and since they can't directly drive features and you can only optimize a team so much that eventually ends in bureaucratic hell.

> In Japan

Are you suggesting other countries replace their whole cultures with those of Japan?

> Modern bathing practices are a textbook example of an unsustainable lifestyle based on fossil fuels. Hot water production is the second largest energy use in many homes (after space heating and/or cooling), and much of it is used for bathing or showering. 2 The modern bathroom also uses a lot of water and adds extra energy use through space heating and waste-water treatment. Building and renovating bathrooms requires resources, too.

This is something that uses around 10% of our electricity production (it that) and 10% of our square footage. You'd cut that in half maybe.

If that's unsustainable then so are a massive number of other things so I'd like to see what the author thinks is a sustainable society. I'd guess if you cut all the ~5% waste sources you'd end up living in something akin to MegaCity One. And if all those 5% sources aren't unsustainable but this one is then why?

I get it, it's a click bait line which I fell for but that doesn't mean I have to like articles like this.

So you're expecting these people to have the deep knowledge of human psychology to know ahead of time that this is likely to cause them long term PTSD, and the impact that will have on their lives, versus simply something they will get over a month after quitting?

> very little (if any) of the user data we process today will be relevant to a nation-state actor in, say, 30 years.

30 year old skeletons in people’s closets can be great blackmail to gain leverage with.

edit: As I understand it this is a popular way for state actors to "flip" people. Threaten them with blackmail unless they provide confidential information or do some actions.

The per capita GDP of Germany is $52,745.76. The US is $81,695.19. The EU as a whole is $43,194. Median household income is $38,971 in Germany and $80,610 in the US.

When people cost twice in one place versus another companies will focus on more expensive but less people intensive approaches.

The problem is that the person asking the question is a flawed easily biased human just like everyone else on this planet. Someone with a strong opinion that they disagree with will leave a more negative opinion than someone with a strong opinion they agree with. So it's not a question on passion or tech but on reading the interviewer and then figuring out how to sell them.

The article says they spend around $150k/year on infra. Given they have 8 DevOps engineers I assume a team of 50+ engineers. Assuming $100k/engineer that's $5 million/year in salary. That's all low end estimates.

They saved $100k in the move or 2% of their engineering costs. And they're still very much on the cloud.

If you tell most organizations that they need to change everything to save 2% they'll tell you to go away. This place benefited because their previous system was badly designed and not because it's cloud.

Cloud isn't about comfort lock in but dev efficiency.

In my experience organizations that end up this way have a very much non blame-free culture. Can be driven by founders that lack technical skills and management experience but have a type-A personality. As a result no one wants to point out a bad decision because the person who made it will get reprimanded heavily. So they go down a path that is clearly wrong until they find a way to blame something external to reset. Usually that's someone who recently left the company or some tool choice.

AWS provides forecasted spend and other alerts. People just don't use them and then complain.

Only after it all imploded did the government go after them.

Until that moment it did the exact opposite including opening criminal investigations into the journalists calling it a scam.

If a government says do X and I will cut your takes by Y then is doing X immoral?

Given Wirecard I wouldn’t assume the EU equally prosecutes or tracks crimes for EU and non-EU companies.

I said historically and unions do not form overnight. Although even right now outside the Bay Area, the pay from big tech is significantly higher than other software engineer roles.

Historically big tech provided amazing compensation and benefits compared to everyone except some finance companies. Why unionize and potentially risk a very good thing?

For context, the NY Times does not provide amazing compensation or benefits.