rapht

Full transparency is probably impractical as soon as the product is complex enough, but whenever inside a product there is one "main component" (such as is the case here), that should be indeed be properly traced - and it would cut the crap from companies who slap their brand on a plastic case hiding mostly the same core component - sometimes at laughlingly distant pricing points.

> We're certainly setting a record at destroying this planet.

In the grand scheme of things, I'm tempted to say: if that's the price to pay to expand beyond it, then so what? It's not like it's the only planet in the Universe.

I especially like the bits about :

> 1. [...] You want to postpone a task? Please enter the exact date to postpone this to. Which project to add this to? Tags? Subtasks? The amount of things one can customize is really large, but making all this decisions has a cost

and also

> 5. Tasks are not the same. Get milk, write an essay, plan a vacation, reconnect with a friend. These are things of different magnitude, different emotional connection, different context and time commitment. Some tasks aren’t even tasks, e.g. simply items to keep track of or be reminded of. But TODO apps treat them the same. They get the similar looking rows neatly organized in a unified interface.

Obviously, combining 1 and 5 you have all the more issues relating to the need to make decisions between your different task categories, should you choose to manage that aspect too...

In all, the pain with TOOD apps/lists (for me) is not "getting the list done". It's actually "making and maintaining the list". What to put in the list? What not to put? When to update? What kind of details? What sources - Slack, emails, discussions, meetings, ideas? The overhead of just making/maintaining the list is what kills it.

You can think of it in even broader terms: being/staying lean, re-using tried and tested things, adapting your requirements to widely available solutions rather than developing custom solutions to fit your requirements, making everything work more efficiently, etc -- all those resource-minimization issues are "less" problems: not good problems to be working on when your raison d'être is "more" -- and that's the only raison d'être for a lot of people and actually for all businesses. (Obviously there are also specialists for doing "less" "more": unsurprisingly, they are generally paid a cut of savings.)

Hello, "limited liability company".

> IRS knows all the income data only in simple cases like salaried employees with W-2 forms. If you are business owner or contractor the things can be more complicated

If you already can avoid the trouble for 50% (?) of the people who are in the standard case, it's already a massive win.

The Beato Book ! https://beatobook.com/

Ah, financial gravity comes to unicorns. 20x EBITDA starts looking reasonable, instead of the previous 40x.

Meanwhile, in normal countries:

- salaried income is automatically submitted to tax authorities

- capital income going through financial institutions is automatically submitted to tax authorities

- the deductions that concern most taxpayers are managed automatically

And so it for 80% of taxpayers, tax prep is exactly 5 minutes, and for the next 10% it is 2 hours.

And then, Americans explain that bureaucracy is quite worse elsewhere.

To me, this relates to a broader subject: the way prices are displayed.

In Europe, laws basically mandate that what you as a customer see on a price tag or price list, is what you ultimately pay.

You don't have to do any guesswork, looking at the fine print, compute anything in your head. You pay the price that is displayed, and there should be no expectation from any one that you pay anything above that.

When I go to a restaurant, I'm not like buying the food on the one hand, and the service on the other hand, and everything that the taxes cover above all that. I'm paying the restaurant for dining, which includes the food, the service, and whatever taxes the restaurant has to pay.

The details are none of my business... and I shouldn't have to do any contorsions to compare prices between restaurants!

> I don't know why here in the west it's common practice to actually not pay employees enough and rely entirely on tips

It's really mostly the case in North America. In most of Europe, tipping is more an exception than a rule. "Normal" service (i.e. being nice to clients and appropriately responding to requests given the standing of the place) is expected to be included in the price. I tip only when I got really outstanding service, and even then, mostly as a symbolic gesture of appreciation (2-5% ballpark figure).

I'm not sure I agree.

You chose to require an SMS OTP for your customers. It is not straightforward at all that the burden of filtering your customers would fall on your provider and not on you -- actually, if the provider you chose does explicitly not provide that filtering, it's effectively on you.

(I have to say that if I were Twilio, I would not have added the "fraud prevention" toggle, because now they can be deemed to be providing that service.)

"Calling a cat, a cat", as we say in French: I really do not see what anyone would lose just putting the right words on each action -- and it's not even very difficult to define.

Can the user use the thing mostly without the provider? Yes = purchase, no = rental.

If all of sudden it's all "rentals" everywhere, what does it change -- apart from opening up an avenue for the people willing to actually sell the things they would otherwise lease, because consumers will prefer it that way?

There's a language issue which has not been tackled by regulators and which is actually the mere definition of what happens when I choose to "buy" or "purchase" something.

This is because until recently (by the timescale of "buying things") there were no intangibles to be bought or sold. An intangible is mostly a right to something - in other words, it's paperwork.

But some things are both tangible and intangible, i.e. that copy of the movie you have on your computer.

That's when the regulator should have stepped in to make precise use of words: you are decidedly not "buying" or "purchasing" a movie from Google Movies. You can only be "renting" it, on Google's terms, albeit long term.

Regulators should mandate the use of the word renting as soon as there is no tangible copy that you can use independently of the company that "sold" -- actually, "leased" -- whatever you "bought" from them.

Your private property is what it is, private.

Your business place, assuming a public business, is indeed that: a place open to the public by default.

In France (and, as far as I'm aware, most European countries), there is a very clear line: either your business place welcomes the general public, or it does not.

Once you fall in the first category - and, as soon as you're selling something in that business place, you are in that category - then you must have very strong arguments if you refuse to let a prospective customer in or even if you refuse to sell to a particular person the products or services that it is the purpose of your business to sell.

Those arguments usually boil down to either (i) some law preventing you to sell something to that prospective customer or (ii) that prospective customer actively disturbing the public order or presenting a high risk thereof (eg: they're a thief, they're drunk, they can't prove that they will be able to pay, ...). Of course there are provisions for specific settings, but which merely soften the (ii) to allow filtering on public safety grounds for places welcoming more than X simultaneous guests - including eg nightclubs and such.

Anything not in falling into these exceptions is just what it is: discrimination. And actually, this seems very sound to me. The fact you own a business puts you in the public world: you may not refuse to serve someone because you don't like them.

> So companies can flout the law for years, making massive profits, and continue to do so for as long as they can string along an appeal process? Seems like a pretty nice loophole.

Actually, they may yet receive a hefty fine. The court ruled on the principle: now, each lower jurisdictions may take action based on that principle.

Exactly. Also related is the definition of "net negative outcome": is that relative to a prior situation (i.e. could be a very good situation becoming a little less good) or to a value framework common to both groups allowing for an absolute interpretation?

My company is in the process of buying out a German group.

To do that, we needed to set up a new holding company which would own the target group's shares.

Without exception, ALL our advisors/lawyers (both in Germany and out) recommended that we just pay the services of an "offshore provider" to buy an existing shell company with an already established and registered proxy director, instead of going through the creation process of a GmbH. "It's the most complicated process in the EU, and a PITA for all individuals involved.", they said.

We followed their advice.

I know little by way of the crypto world, but I have to say that calling platforms like FTX, Binance, and others "exchanges" strikes me as very much misleading.

In traditional finance, the "exchange", as in "the New York Stock Exchange", only facilitates the calculation of market prices for a range of assets and the matching between sellers and buyers. Exchanges don't even manipulate money - that's left to other, highly regulated, professions, such as brokers.

Brokers hold your assets and sometimes lend you money, but are very restricted with what they can do with it unless they qualify as banks, which requires complying with an array of complex capital requirements.

So really, I don't understand: how are those entities not offering "investment services" and so not under SEC supervision?

All this just shows one thing : copyrighting / licensing "code" is meaningless... but of course that was already known by all those people who think that the US laws about copyright should not have been propagated to the rest of the world. "Code" is merely an algorithm put to work. There should be nothing inherently copyrightable about this, no more so than the recipe take a chocolate is just a way to put chocolate and a few other ingredients to work.

Aren't the costs of the US healthcare system largely driven by the cost of the healthcare workforce - basically, not enough trained personnel leading to the absence of competition, leading to doctors getting paid much more than they should? Of course it's going to be more complicated, with doctors' insurance issues and the price of meds into the mix, but still, how far does this factor goes into explaining the extraordinary cost of getting a basic treatment (let alone surgery) in the US?

An income is something you owe to your shareholders. So if you think of what you own as (+) and what you owe as (-), which is how debut/credit is conventionally shortcut, an income is a negative number.

This resembles to what we do in a very different field (finance) at my organisation for positions with less than 10 years of experience-- only the prep is time limited, at our offices,

If successful recruiting is not worth some of your best employee-hours -- which by the way should be the same people in charge in their respective fields -- then what is?

Teaching someone finance on a tight finance team is not easier -- finance (the real kind, not the automatable kind) is just as technical a field as programming.

What I think is different is that it's not so much deep, like programming can be, as wide -- meaning a skilled interviewer can correlate experience and technicity in a way that gives reasonable assurance.

This is not the case with more junior positions where you need to make sure technicity has actually been acquired by the candidate, lest it be just as you say a "net negative" for the team: for finance positions with less than 10 years of experience, we have a case interview. That case interview is not meant to be selective but just a check of capability. Only candidates that have passed phone screening and hiring manager interview get the case interview, which is also delivered by the hiring manager so gives a chance to see the candidate in another kind of situation.

From an employer's point of view there are many good reasons not to state a salary range, the 2 most obvious ones being:

- once you state clearly what your max is, why would your preferred candidate settle for anything less?

- why would you want to exclude good candidates willing to accept lower comp than what you thought your min was?

So then some places are a candidate's market... well maybe employers have to adapt, but I can see why they would not want to.

I wholeheartedly agree. I may add one thing though: it's probable that it is not only measurement bias for a simple reason: demographics. The generations that currently are the most numerous and have the highest purchasing power are baby-boomers and gen-Xers. That same generation witnessed the birth of pop-rock music as we know it and was the first to consume music en-masse. To a certain extent, it's no wonder that those 'old' (i.e. 60s-80s) recordings are those that get the most listened to. This is of course also true for movies and actors, for the very same reason: taste is widely known to be mostly formed by the time you're 25.

Yeah well... or just have parents requiring lights and phone off at 9pm.

Call me an elitist but this is where I like the French "Grandes Ecoles" system: - public educations gets you a 2 year intensive training leading up to a competitive exam with one branch towards engineering schools and one branch towards business schools - the competitive exam is the real deal, and it's not really "cheatable": you get your chair in a room with ample space for a few days, a few hours/day on row, and a guy in each room monitoring the exam, no cellphones, until you have taken all subjects - the results allow you in one or more schools, and of course accessing the really best schools implies outstanding level in the exam - ... and indeed, after that, you get the sesame and no-one cares if you chest while in school, actually nobody cares about your grades there, just that you get the diploma ...

As usual, the solution lies in peer-to-peer apps where there is no centralized provider that will have any responsibility or oversight. Wait... isn't that what infringers already use?