archenary

IANAL and have no affiliations to Plaid. My takeaway from the article and [0] is that Plaid violated privacy laws because they provided insufficient disclosure with respect to the collected data, not that they are selling data to third parties.

Edit: Update [0] to source

[0] https://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2021/05/11/plaid-federal-e...

1/ Yes, there are companies like Tata and Wipro who game the system to hire software developers at below market rate. This is absolutely a problem that should be addressed. Outright banning H-1B does solve the problem, but it is nowhere near optimal. For many skilled talents, H-1B is the only path to work in the U.S. Banning H-1B is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

2/ No, there is no systemic difference in compensation for non-U.S. citizens at FAANG and equivalent. Compensation packages are formulaic. No one gets +/- X% just because they are a citizen or immigrant. If Google one day decides to pay H-1B 20% lower, they would lose out on a ton of qualified candidates to, say, Facebook. It'd require the entire conglomerate of FAANG, and whom they consider "peer" companies, to agree to suppress compensation for this to work [1]. It would also require everyone involved in the hiring process, many of whom were immigrants, to be onboard. I simple don't believe companies who compete for top talents would find this tradeoff worth it. I might just be living in a bubble, and am willing to be proven wrong. Just show me the data.

3/ Many successful companies are founded or led by immigrants who now happily call the U.S. their home. These are success stories that the country should celebrate, not chastise. You might think that Larry Page could've founded Google without Sergey Brin. You might be right, or wrong. The fact is we only have reality to observe. We don't have counterfactuals to compare against.

[1] I know about the Steve Jobs no-poach email. That was also 13 years ago.

Happy Fastmail user here. I love it for the snappy web client. It's only after I switched that I realized how slow Gmail felt.

I did this recently. It's pretty straightforward.

First, do a one-time import from Gmail. Fastmail has an import tool that does this over OAuth. Took me ~45 minutes to import ~50,000 emails.

Next, setup IMAP and SMTP on Fastmail for your Gmail account. This way, you can continue to receive and reply to emails sent to Gmail, using Fastmail as the client. When replying to an email, Fastmail defaults to the right sender (identity) based on whom the email is sent to (abc@fastmail.com or abc@gmail.com).

An alternative is to setup email forwarding in Gmail, so you get a copy of emails sent to your old address.

If you don't have a custom domain, I highly recommend getting one and use that going forward. There might come a day when you want to migrate off Fastmail. With a custom domain, you just need to update the MX records.

Sync.com claims to be end-to-end encrypted [0]. Is there any indication they are not?

[0] https://www.sync.com/your-privacy/

The author explained this (quoted below). Even though FB doesn't control Libra (protocol), they do own Calibra (digital wallet). If Libra takes off, Calibra stands a good chance of becoming the default way of transacting in Libra. FB then becomes the de facto leader and holds outsized influence over the direction of the project/industry, much like Gmail/email, Chrome/web and Google/web search.

> And this is when this bet would pay off for Facebook (and the second point I missed in my earlier analysis): the implication that digital currencies will do for money what the Internet did for information is that the very long-term trend will be towards centralization around Aggregators. When there is no friction, control shifts from gatekeepers controlling supply to Aggregators controlling demand. To that end, by pioneering Libra, building what will almost certainly be the first wallet for the currency, and bringing to bear its unmatched network for facilitating payments, Facebook is betting it will offer the best experience for digital currency flows, giving it power not by controlling Libra but rather by controlling the most users of Libra.