dnh44

Regarding the church tax, if you move to Germany you'll be ask what religion your are and unless you answer atheist you'll have to start paying a church tax and it appears to be quite a hassle to get out of it.

https://www.settle-in-berlin.com/stop-paying-german-church-t...

Oxford University has a covid risk calculator which might be compelling?

However be careful it may backfire because if he is healthy then his odds of dying of covid will be way less than his odds of dying in a car crash this year.

https://www.qcovid.org/Calculation

It's not considered likely that he killed himself; he died mysteriously on his boat. The inquest ruled that it was probably an accidental drowning.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell#Death

In the UK lots of companies shut down between Christmas and New Years. Some of our suppliers in Europe also shutdown for a couple weeks in August.

I'm actually a bit surprised that you haven't come across it before because I've always been under the impression that these winter and summer shutdowns are pretty common.

We tried using Flexport a couple years ago and my impression was that they were a mediocre freight forwarder with a nice web app. They were also considerably more expensive. I have no idea how they are now; maybe we'll try again in a year or two.

The Chinese government already has full access to all the data of Apple's China user base.

iCloud in China is already run by a state owned company so at least in the case of China nothing will change.

https://money.cnn.com/2018/01/10/technology/apple-china-iclo...

>It's an artifact of wishful thinking. People will go to great lengths to avoid thinking about the fact that some people are better than others; it's the biggest "inconvenient truth" of our culture.

I'm not sure if the whole book smart / street smart thing is a good example of what you're saying. Wouldn't that just be an example of people becoming well adapted to their environment (or in fact manipulating their environment)?

>but it isn't the one that makes me the most money and is not my 'favourite' OS

Is it your favourite OS because it makes you the most money, or does it make you the most money because it's your favourite OS?

Just adding a bit more information about what the links are.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afghanistan:_The_Great_Game_–_...

I've not read the book or watched the documentary myself but I've had it recommended to me by lots of people and the documentary won a BAFTA in 2012 for best factual series.

I too thought of moving my business to Spain until I started speaking to friends and acquaintances that had businesses in Spain. Lots of horror stories.

Just an FYI but the minimise window animation can be changed in settings. As can the icon zoom and bounce.

I’ve got two macs, one from 2016 with 8gb of ram. Running a single electron app on that computer results in the rest of the system becoming totally unresponsive making any sort of multitasking impossible.

I'm not massively into the whole wsb thing but I found it funny so I got the emoji domain diamond-hand-rocket-moon.ws

If it's audio or text only and no real names I'd be interested.

The conversation in the thread is quite interesting and thoughtful I think. And it's relevant to everyone since we are all getting older.

Well, they could always try putting pressure on the tech giants in other places via other means in order to get them to acquiesce to these sorts of anti-privacy measures. Maybe via things like anti-trust measures which seem to be popular.

No it's not like building a bridge. It's like thinking you're building a bridge but then the client decides he needs it to be moveable so then you have to give it legs so it can walk. Then the client's manager decides he wants it to be able to get to the moon so you then have to strap rockets and parachutes to it. Then after it gets installed and someone finally speaks to the users you realise all they needed was a canoe.

The garbage collection business in NY is notorious for being run by the mafia. "Cleaning" is a euphemism for the hitman business, at least in movies or pop culture.

That's really depressing and I sort of wish I hadn't asked now but thank you for sharing.

The tech community has loved operating system flamewars since at least the usenet days. This blog post serves as pretty good bait to draw in contestants so I assume that people wanting to engage have upvoted it.

Care to share where you were when your mic was cut and what your questions were?

It's not okay that he should need permission for such a thing I don't think.

Yeah it seems ridiculous doesn't it. Getting thrown in jail for giving a talk doesn't seem like something that should happen anywhere that considers itself as free. It's outrageous really.

>In my mind there was weird post Soviet innocence in the 90s where the West felt invincible and many believe Western style democracy would take over the world within decades.

This viewpoint was well described (and I think influenced) by Fukuyama's book "The End of History and the Last Man"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...

Another frustrating point for me is when the decision makers / stakeholders and the users don't overlap.

One of the first bits of paid work I did was for a printing company that made business cards among lots of other things. They would manually create a CorelDraw document with a page full of cards for each employee, taking the contact information from an excel spreadsheet. The data entry for making cards for 100 people would take several days.

I was able to automate this for them with a pretty simple VB.net script. Several days of boring mind-numbing work per month were reduced to a couple button clicks and a few seconds of CPU time. It also eliminated all typographical errors on the part of the printing company.

I never touched vb.net again after that. I had no interest in the technology at all and there was nothing particularly interesting about the work itself. However saving people from having to do a bunch of boring work is extremely satisfying. And it saved the owner money which feels great too.

I find that being empathic towards my users not only makes the work more fulfilling but it also allows me to design better products. As a human with human interests you should at least give it a try.

I'm sorry but I'm going to provide negative feedback here which I feel kind of guilty about because clearly a lot of work has gone into building this.

The first thing I didn't like is that from the photos on your website it didn't look like it has a mac-like UI.

I downloaded it anyway to have a look and then noticed the application is 460 megabytes. Mail.app and MailMate are each only 28mb. I'm guessing a web based technology was used to build the app which also means that it's going to run really slow on one of my older Macs.

Finally when I launched the app the first thing it did before even opening a window was ask me for my admin password in order to make a modification to my keychain. I clicked cancel at that point and the program didn't open.

iCloud is a tool that lets my parents just that. This means I don't have to do it for them and no one has to worry about losing years of photographs due to a device failure.

edit: I guess my point is that different people have different computer skills and I think it's great that the tools now exist so people on the lower end of that spectrum can sort this out themselves without having to ask for help.

Your comment really resonated with me. I love the feeling too and would set the alarm for even earlier just so I could snooze for longer. What I eventually realised though is that doing this really fucks with your last couple hours of sleep which would make me tired for the rest of the day.

What I do now if I crave that blissful "in bed" feeling is just go to bed ridiculously early, like 12 hours before actually having to get up. What I found is that laying in bed half awake 2 or 3 hours before I have to get up is ten times better than hitting the snooze button every 10 minutes.

Additionally I get out of bed actually feeling physically good now so I've got a lot more energy throughout the day. At first I would just sleep 10 to 12 hours, but after a while I'd start waking up naturally 7 to 8 hours after going to bed.