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Can you imagine if the CEO of Telegram was a US citizen? It wouldn’t just be HN people losing their minds.

Does anybody have experience using this in a real-world setting?

I can understand the desire to never, ever have to deal with Zookeeper again, but does the ergonomics promise of sequin hold up?

They’re all covered by identical regulations.

Culturally, though, small retailers may still believe that credit card fees are higher than they actually are.

They may be concerned about refund and chargeback processes.

Or, their gateway either cannot offer credit cards on their POS terminals for technical or compliance reasons, or the retailer simply hasn’t enabled the payment methods.

It’s not regulation in NL that blocks small retailers from taking V or MC.

Wait until you hear about German SME e-commerce and “open invoice” billing. So much trust from the vendor!

“Shrinkage” is the generic term I have heard for stock losses of all kinds in retail and distribution channels.

In many jurisdictions, cash payments can allow the retailer to avoid on-paying sales tax or VAT, as well as mark stock shrinkage as a loss for their own tax purposes.

Countering this would require very careful auditing of electronic toll records and paper receipt processes, which are in most cases trivial to evade if well-prepared.

And you can’t always be sure that the shrinkage - without the cash - is reported to the manager of the retailer by the person on the till, especially if an unofficial handwritten receipt is provided by the cashier.

I recall seeing a situation involving a very large champagne purchase on New Year’s Eve in cash for 25% off and a “till receipt problem”.

The EU GDPR has requirements for processing (including storage) of personal data (much larger scope than US PII, but still nowhere near all data) in jurisdictions with legal adequacy for data protection.

It’s not quite data sovereignty like India’s regulations around payment transaction data but it does theoretically limit where you can store EU personal data.

You can find the current GDPR adequacy list at the EU’s EDPB site. https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/data-protection/i...

If they said it over a megaphone during an incipient riot, and it would have led to an arrest warrant and charges laid, it would probably have happened as well. A good thing too.

Social media isn’t a consequence free zone.

The BaFin regulatory failure was pretty spectacular too, despite the lid that the German establishment tried to put on it. Not so much has leaked out so far, mainly because prosecutors have declined to take much action against the regulator or its employees and officers, however what is known is pretty damning.

First, they ignored early - like TEN YEARS - and relatively continuous warnings about fraud at Wirecard.

Then they legally targeted journalists who pointed out misconduct at Wirecard (!!!)

Then they banned short-sellers from shorting Wirecard (!!!!!!) and indeed in internal memos mentioned that short-sellers were Israelis and British citizens in some kind of bigoted justification for the ban. Gross and disgusting, but perhaps par for the course in some levels of the government there.

They tried to cover up malfeasance within their own org, including at least one, but probably more employees undertaking insider trades on Wirecard before its failure.

But don’t be too worried about the poor chauffeur-driven bureaucrats at BaFin!

They’ve since reorganised and added more senior employees to an already bloated and ineffectual regulator who are culturally in bed with the regulated entities.

The gravy train must continue.

(Just reviewing what happened through internet searches has caused steam to come out of my ears again. What the actual fuck was BaFin doing all those years?)

I think that the standard translation into UK English of “Betriebsrat” is “Works Council” [1].

I’ve never been highly convinced by these organs, since they seem to be colonised by folks who want to become Very Difficult to Fire, and who ultimately fold to any poorly thought-through management decision that impacts the lives of employees.

I’ve come to that both as an individual contributor and as a senior manager, but YMMV.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Works_council

They’re multi family apartment buildings. Rather like those in the Eichample, but with a different exterior style, and of course without the famous block chamfer.

Whatever happened to Eiffel?

Just left behind by the March of Java?

Civil war, foreign military incursions, mass population displacement, famines, warlordism might explain some of the medical challenges on the ground.

Add to that uncontrolled mining, forest cutting and extractive industries, reserves of in-demand “mobile phone” minerals, and the warlords: unprecedented contact between displaced populations and displaced and under pressure wildlife and you’ve got great opportunities for animal-to-human disease transmission, above and beyond the basic human-to-human kind.

It’s a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe and we’re all just plugging our ears saying “La la la” or “is hygiene especially bad over there?”.

Expect more.

Edits: autocorrect corrections

Wait… what?

> His mother was a stay at home mom, taking care of the eight children.

What happened in Anhui to the One Child Policy?

For the rest, this reads like a paid-for hagiography, not a biography as promised.

I’m genuinely not sure what to make of Kevin Xu’s substack, Intercomnected. This post seems … sponsored … but another couple I sampled don’t seem to have the same breathlessness. Maybe just fanboying?

Even in small cities in Spain, central areas are high density with three or four storey mix residential buildings.

I chose a random small city in northern Catalonia called Vielha and viewed it on Goggle Maps, there they are. They look different to Eixanple apartment buildings, but they are there in the centre. Population less than 6k.

Chose another, Gironella, a bit further south; population around 4k. One less floor on the multi family apartment buildings in the old centre, and a much higher ratio of SFDs to MFDs in the settlement as a whole, but still there.

How many should I sample to convince you?

The crucial conversations occur between human beings who have met or worked often enough to have created a social connection.

Think about how absurd it is to argue that Zoom is enough to sustain family or intimate relationships over the long haul.

Zoom isn’t enough. Having that walk with a potential client, that colleague or that supplier might well be.

It sounds just like a co-op or an employee-owned business.

Now, I love me a good union - and there’s something to be said about a healthy tension between management and labour in terms of keeping management a bit more honest, just like management and capital - but in smaller orgs, a co-op will probably do the job.

Genius name for the software: Akkademia

Anybody know how unique the blood vessels in our nose are? I smell (intended) a lucrative tracking business model!

Merchants seldom submit L3 data with transactions for stupid legacy tech reasons. The card schemes encourage them to do so with bips off scheme fees for doing so, but it’s a minority of transactions I think with even L2 data.

“Cue” as in call an actor to begin their part of a play. But “queue” is also fair play!

I had understood that there was some kind of Brythonic language attested in the Scottish Borders.

Cumbric? At least until the victory of Anglo-Saxon languages there three or four centuries after the Roman withdrawal.

So yeah, not quite (modern) Scots Gaelic but part of the same family of languages. And not at all recently, but potentially hundreds and hundreds of years of language contact in domestic and community use in some parts, as early Scots was first forming out of a continuum of Northumbrian English dialects.

Thank you for this very honest comment. It means more to to me than I was expecting it to when I started reading it.

Were there any moments on the journey of growing up that stick in your mind as being turning points in your path from techno-determinism to whatever you describe yourself now?

I’m really interested in how we can intervene earlier in people’s journey to provide bigger horizons, rather than just waiting for enough experience to build up…

Then the AI marketing term is going to be cursed like 3D TV is, yet the tech itself more useful.

It exists in non-modern Russian and modern languages - such as Ukrainian - Cyrillic alphabets in various forms, sometimes with top and bottom horizontal strokes, sometimes just like this.

Please don’t correct the title, it’s delightful as it is.

It’s too early to say whether it is “for good”, unless you’re talking about atmospheric oxygenisation - that one almost certainly has an end date!

If this great science fiction scenario were to come to pass, I’m pretty confident that it wouldn’t be only the FDA that would be pushed to the side.

The impact of a population in an organised, technologically advanced society being one standard deviation of intelligence higher than a strategic rival population … would be immense.

Even if just temporarily boosting intelligence, something like a militarised Flowers for Algernon scenario is pretty terrifying.

Yep, I’ve seen the tripling rule in scale-ups and it was brutal as it kicked in, each time. At a certain point we began to anticipate it.

Yeah, that’s a funny spelling of Breukelen, now an exurb of Amsterdam, NL.

Security should not, in general, have anything but awooga-awooga red lights and sirens break-glass write/change/delete/shutdown access to prod infrastructure or systems, or indeed anything that could compromise them. I’d argue that access to read or copy sensitive data is almost, but not quite as dangerous without extensive controls and internal monitoring too…

IMO there are no legit reasons except politics, empire building, NIH and toxic relationships for such a such a crazy state of affairs.