Shaanie

India will as far as I'm aware get hit pretty hard by climate change too, which will be an additional hurdle for them to clear.

How do you suppose that would work? The only predictions possible are things which are virtually impossible to influence, like atmospheric events?

It's quite impressive to quote the guidelines to someone when your first post breaks a whole bunch of them.

If it loads pages, then it clearly works. Nobody claims it's a practical, competitive browser.

More choice as in more content available to choose from on Netflix?

The top 20% consumers consume a large majority of the alcohol, which means there are many Germans who consume reasonable amounts.

They don't criticize it, but believe UBI will "almost pay for itself" by not requiring aa much overhead. Which it won't, not even remotely close.

It's entirely possible there's no longer any single person in charge in practice, but rather a bunch of more or less individually operating cells - each with their own leader.

Did we though, or did we make a calculated decision that in a place with limited resources it'd be better for us to eliminate the competition?

FED is owned by private corporations?..

There's no problem getting a refund for apps in my experience, I've done it a handful of times when I've changed my mind and it was easy and fully automated.

I suspect it's not quite that simple. First, is there actually enough demand for ad-free TVs to make the option worth including? I personally probably wouldn't pay $20 to avoid ads in the home screen since those kind of ads are just a minor nuisance, which makes me question the size of the market for the ad-free option.

Second, what would the pricing be for the option?

If it's $10-20, that'd probably be fine, similar to what Amazon did for Kindle. But if it's more than that, then I bet the negative PR they would get for including the option outweighs the potential benefit to customers. "I would never buy an X, they're extremely greedy and want $50 just not to show ads. Crazy. I'll buy Y brand instead (which has ads but no 'corporate greed' option to not show them)".

I believe you may be conflating opinion with fact, unless you add some qualifier like "based on potential throughput" or some such.

If I buy something for $10 and it's worth $10,000 when you inherit it, you should (obviously?) be taxed on the increase in value from $10 -> $10,000 if/when you sell. The purchase price shouldn't be "reset" to $10k.

It'sutterly insane to me that the step-up basis exists in the US, it's such an obvious loophole that can fairly easily be closed without many adverse effects.

In my country (Sweden) if you don't know the purchase price, you can use an approximate purchasing price (e.g. for equities you are allowed to assume that it was acquired for 20% of the current value, so you'd be taxed on 80%).

But then you have X money tied up in some presumably illiquid art with questionable value. Seems better to just invest the X money from the start.

You hardly have to be rich to spend $300 a month on fashion, you just have to be not poor, and have it as a priority. Just because fashion isn't a priority to you doesn't mean it's the same for everyone. The same people that spend $500 a month on clothes might think buying a TV for more than $300 is unthinkable. Priorities differ.

America also just have way fewer refugees. Seems like it's around 60k a year, so less than 0.02% of the population per year. Sweden, for example, has had around 26k refugees per year (the last 10 years), which is around 0.2% of its population. At its peak Sweden almost took on a full 1% in one year.

Of course it's easier to integrate a magnitude fewer refugees, and there will be less issues overall.

I kinda doubt your output decreased by 20%. Probably fairly close to it, but I'm guessing you got slightly more done on the other days.

It's the same as working from home. Some people are way more productive at home, away from all the distractions in the office. Others barely get any work done at all at home.

Most people are nowhere close to working fully focused 8 hours a day, and may also benefit from more time to recharge. Others benefit less. The average probably matters more for the company (also shorter work hours will improve retention, or allow you to pay lower wages to compete etc).

Tax havens is a race-to-the-bottom thing, just like not caring about emissions. Or using slaves, if you want a more extreme example.

If your country's only advantage is to steal tax money from other countries, or provide cheap energy by burning coal, or cheap labor by using slaves, then it's perfectly fine to isolate that country to force it to stop. We obviously shouldn't just accept that everyone is worse off just so that a country with no other advantage can thrive.

I don't understand your point. Yes, there's a lot of unskilled jobs, possibly a majority of jobs. Far from everyone looks down on unskilled jobs, and nobody is saying they're not important.

Which is a perfectly fine counter-argument if you are, in fact, not going it right.

If you say you're doing continuous deployment because you deploy every Tuesday evening, it's perfectly fair to point out that that's not continuous deployment.

Of course, you should follow it up by explaining why as well, but many companies don't actually follow the agile principles.

Not how deductions work. Say 20% corporate tax, a 100% deduction (which is the normal business expense) means you don't pay any tax. A 135% deduction means you'd get to expense 35% more, avoiding those 20% for a "total saving" of 7% compared to a normal expense.

That's not a problem with Scrum, it's a problem with your team. If you're doing a bug bash every sprint, then your velocity is already including the time spent on bug bashes. If it's not in every sprint, you can reduce the forecast for sprints where you do them to account for it (similar to what you do when someone is off etc).

If you're competing within the team to complete as many story points as possible that's pretty weird. Is someone using story points as a metric of anything other than forecasting?

I'd wager the majority of software developers do not code at all outside of work hours, and the vast majority do not code more than an hour or two per month on average.

The "constantly coding on side projects" developer is pretty rare, in my experience, but tend to bubble together. (in startups, cooler tech companies or in the "innovation teams").

I suspect it's most content and not just some. I may prefer to watch a specific movie, like Heat (1995), but if it's not available on the streaming services I currently pay for I'm more likely to watch something else rather than pay 15 bucks (or whatever) for it.

For larger companies, there's a lot of "hidden" functions that you're probably not aware of as a customer. Just payment integrations in 100+ countries, with all the local regulations and reporting requirements is probably going to be rough to handle with a single team of 5 backenders. Then we have functions like marketing content management (every country has different copy and will probably want to be able to surface things slightly differently to maximize conversion), artist/podcast/audiobook tooling, the ad platform, hardware integration (for Spotify in your car/speaker etc), legal stuff (including GDPR and its equivalents), metrics & data analysis tools. And much more, and those are just some of the things you don't really see as an end-user.

I absolutely, 100%, agree that a small and focused team is the best way to get shit done, but for a large company the size of Spotify the amount of work is absolutely massive. I wouldn't be surprised at all if many teams at Spotify are small and tight-knit and doing great work at delivering kick-ass anti-fraud systems or moderation software to detect and report child porn etc.

Not to mention the obvious thing where the higher your revenue, the less percentual impact each employee needs to have to more than pay for themselves. While you might think it's ridiculous to have a full team dedicated solely to the main marketing page, that could be extremely worth it if that team increases conversion by 10%, as an example.

I wouldn't be surprised if Spotify moves a petabyte of images a day, I can't even guess the amount of data from their songs and videos. But obviously just moving data isn't what requires a lot of employees.

Have you ever worked at a company with more than say 1k employees that's active in more than one region? I'm honestly intrigued in your opinion, it sounds similar to what I thought back in uni before I had any work experience, but from your profile you don't look like a complete junior, so I'd really like to better understand how you can think Spotify could possibly operate with 5 backenders.

Obviously you don't need all those people. Almost no company apart from like one-man companies or dying companies employ only the people they need. You employ as many people as possible that generate additional profit, short or long-term. Do you need to hire a conversion specialist? Of course not, though if she costs $400k a year while improving conversion by 10% the payoff is absolutely massive, and you'd have to be an idiot not to hire her.

I'm surprised people don't realize this, especially on hackernews.