pathy

There might be benefits other than the wage that make up for it.

I am not sure about Russian healthcare and so forth but free healthcare, education, childcare (cheap at least) and such might make up for it.

I tend to go to a forex company if I have to exchange before traveling, never do online banking for it.

I am not sure how the kiosk fx companies does it but moving money around is always a risk. They can probably charge as much as they like but it is that they cannot exchange unlimited amounts, you have to show how you got the money when exchanging above certain amounts. Money laundering regulations makes up a lot of the regulations in that area.

Bitcoin fluctuates wildly though, and exchanging it is hardly quick for the most part. Both brings down the attractiveness for consumer-type fx.

Airports are location monopolies so companies that operate at them have no incentive to provide cheaper services. They can operate at a healthy (for them) margin and the customers will still come. There is a reason those airport sandwiches are expensive!

The rates are always terrible, they have to make money. It probably equals out over time but having the freedom to withdraw smaller amounts without an extra charge is convenient. I am not a great fan of carrying around a lot of cash.

The answer does depend on where I am heading but in my experience I usually exchange a smaller amount at home (at a forex company) and later just withdraw from ATMs. This is especially convenient if you got a debit/credit card with no extra charge (beyond exchange rates) for withdrawing outside your country.

Exchanging at airports is usually a bad deal, worse rates than else where in my experience.

Forex is a rather regulated field, some countries more than others. There are always concerns about risk (robbery, fraud and so forth). For the most part you can pay with your card, so you no longer have to carry around very large sums of cash.

>This is a prize given by the Central Bank of Sweden, not really an unbiased source.

It is indeed sponsored by Riksbanken but the ones who actually choose the 'winners' are The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

>They have a clear agenda to propagate, and it is more about how to get more money for them for central planning than about economy.

Everyone has an agenda. And I don't think you understand how the Swedish Central Bank operates. Central planning has nothing to do about it. Last I checked their primary task was to maintain the inflation at ~2%.

>One Bitcoin user created an exchange which completely solved the problem of violence in the drug trade.

Except he also ordered hits on his enemies, or at least tried to. Feels violent to me.

>That’s what’s threatened by taxation, regulation and intimidation.

If bitcoin will have any chance of becoming a legitimate currency it will have to be regulated and most importantly taxed. Bitcoin doesn't somehow make you exempt from paying taxes just because it is a digital currency.

On the flip side, I agree that bitcoin can serve as a useful tool to conduct experiments that may be hard to conduct with other currencies and that opens up very interesting possibilities.

From the article:

"According to the latest data we have, 24.8% of American households had zero or negative net worth"

So basically if you have a net worth of more than $1 you are wealthier than ~25% of America.

Which is, as we can see in the GP, is hard ;).

Whatsapp - broken encryption Google Hangout - NSA Texts - NSA (and others) Facebook Messenger - NSA iMessage - probably NSA, though I don't know.

and so forth. Most commonly used text services are woefully leaky.

Let's be honest, I'd rather have NSA snoop on what on my texts than a criminal. Both are bad but NSA is at least slightly better.

>The magazine Economist is part owned by the Rotschild banking family and it's reporters are attending Bilderberg meetings every year. Articles in the news paper are not signed so you do not know who wrote them.

So? Why does it matter if Rothchild's own part of The Economist. Who cares if they attend Bilderberg, many influential people do. If I recall correctly, it is a good mix of politicians, Banks & Insurance and media.

As for the anonymous nature of their pieces: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/09/ec...

Usually you can fix at anywhere form 3 months to ten years.

Currently SBAB (one of banks) offers 3month list rate at 2.9% and 10 year at 4.47%. Though that 10 year fixed rate right now would be quite insane. Most likely not going to be a good choice all things considered.

Eh? I just looked at the list rates of a few of the Swedish banks and all the short term interest (3 month fixed) were below 3% while the 2+ year fixed were 3.2% and up.

Quite far from 4% and if you have decent finances you can get lower than that. Even at 4% it is a far cry from the rates of days of old.

Banks are profitable, sure. But also remember that the credit loses on mortgages in Sweden are practically zero, that contributes greatly to profitability.

Lastly, why would it be a fair system to have to lend directly from the central bank, you would not pay REPO rate as individual borrowers are significantly more risky than huge banks...

@tqbf ('tptacek)

@patio11

@Ramit (of I Will Teach You To Be Rich fame)

@alexisohanian (Reddit Co-founder)

@brennandunn (Planscope)

@GSElevator (Hardly mind blowing but amusing)

@thestartupspace (Swedish Startup Space, a blog but puts out good content, but I am biased towards Swedish tech stories)

That is all I could think of right now. You could always follow me(@Chronoo) but I doubt you would get any mind blowing tweets ;).

Swedish politics is by and large irrelevant here.

Robert Ohlén's political stance has little to do with this story.

>Gaming is one of the last legitimate refuges of Windows dominance.

What about pretty much all larger businesses in the world? Windows sure dominate the corporate space.

Definitely!

We should see a good spike in Starbreeze's revenue as well as both Payday 2 and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons have sold well and received good reviews.

I expect there will be a fair few mobile/casual game companies coming up once the devs over King start creating new companies. Candy Crush has been such as success that we will probably see more along that line in the future.

Not to mention that they make up around 40% of the Swedish Game Dev revenue and 70 all of the profit. Though, most other devs are actually owned by EA et al. So there is probably some Hollywood-style accounting going on

http://www.dataspelsbranschen.se/media/134049/spelutvecklari... Swedish only sorry, page 6 & 7 for the numbers

Mojang actually is even more profitable than stated in the article. Unbelievably profitable.

Mojang AB[1]'s profit is 324m SEK after taxes (39.3% profit margin before taxes) but they also paid out a lot money to Notch Development AB [2] (Which is 100% owned by Notch) in licensing fees. Notch Development AB had 637m in revenue, (almost?) all of it from the licensing fees from Mojang, with a profit of 467m (97.24% profit margin before taxes)

Mojang AB is owned by Notch, Carl Manneh and Jakob Porsér while Notch Development is soley owned by Notch. That is some good future proofing of his assets, in case of disputes or whatever down the line.

[1] http://www.allabolag.se/5568192388/Mojang_AB

[2] http://www.allabolag.se/5567597686/Notch_Development_AB

Technically correct again but in this case it really is close enough :).

Nitpicking, 48k is close enough for the point to still be valid.

You are technically correct though.

> This whole ordeal makes me feel like I am behind the China wall.

Have you tried surfing the web in China? The problems we face here are nothing like the great firewall. You just cannot compare the censorship in China and friends to anything we face.

In the future we may end up like China but for now it is not even close.

Could it be that you have not adapted your resume/cover letters and so forth to the American market?

There are regional differences between what should/shouldn't be included in a resume, like a picture of yourself, your age, your family status and similar things. A resume not tuned for the local market may disqualify from some positions in the hiring manager's mind.

Finding a job in a new city is never easy but a capable programmer has a better chance than most others! Have you tried any visiting any local meetups, conferences or co-working spaces?

This sounds akin to sitting in a sauna during the winter then hopping into ice cold water and back into the sauna.

I've always heard that could be bad for your heart but I have no proof beyond what people say. Rapid changes in temperature must be a well researched area though?

I believe he means that the (Australian) customers love PayPal, not the merchants.

It might be a disadvantage for the merchant to use PayPal but the customers in Australia on a whole may prefer PayPal to other payment solutions online. The perception that it is safe or what not. If the customers don't perceive your service as a safe option they probably will not buy your product.

Snowden is nothing more than a political pawn for Russia. Once he landed in Moscow he had little power over his own destiny.

Snowden didn't get asylum in Russia out of the goodness of their hearts but rather Putin wanting to annoy USA and score anti-USA points on home turf. It has nothing to do with "doing the right thing" It is a political game, nothing else.

It is naive to believe anything else. It did, however, benefit Snowden, it is probably better to sit in a Russian quasi-house-arrest than a trip to an American prison.

FH was set up to be a safe haven for CP and other illegal/semi-illegal content. Anonymously on TOR. Good luck serving them a notice about hosting that content. It was never meant to be anything else. Let's not kid ourselves, it was not a white hat business.

Comparing it to a normal service like a road provider or a hotel is just laughable. They have legit business. FH was primarily used for unsavory business. That totally changes the equation. The intent behind the service is pretty damn important.

Practically everyone in Sweden takes a year off before starting university. To get motivation back, to travel, to work a bit and so forth.

Usually you don't really know what you want to do in life (or even what to study if you choose to go to university) when you are done with high school. Taking a year to experience new things and enjoying yourself is great excuses to take a gap year.

I took a gap year, got my drivers license, worked, went to Munich for three months to study German. Great time and gave time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Or at least partly figuring out what I wanted to do.

Exactly this.

mtgx's logic is severely flawed. The intention is, if nothing else, very important. Let's not kid ourselves, he knew what he was hosting and what kind of content he was facilitating the distribution of.

Oh please, there is a significant difference between knowingly (let's not kid ourselves) hosting such unsavory material and accidentally sending it along.

The intent of Freedom Hosting was clearly to host questionable material.

I've almost always used Wordpress for everything. It is simple to use, easy to customize and has a lot of plugins etc that may be very useful depending on your needs.

Why reinvent the wheel so to say. Wordpress is widely used and seems to do the job well in most situations. Especially if the users responsible for the blog are non-technical, don't make it harder than it has to be to write those posts.