dschuler

Any option in Euros is about 30% more expensive than buying the same in the US or Hong Kong (which is pretty crummy, but possibly related to taxes and the cost of doing business in the EU).

EDIT: I don't mean VAT/sales tax, I've considered sales taxes in the comparison, but also exchange rates of $1.18/1€. The difference is almost exactly 30%. It looks like the cost of doing business in the EU is much higher, and/or Apple chooses to price their products however they want by region.

Same! Mid-2012 rMBP. Turns out I could upgrade the AirPort card with a used one from ebay for $20, as well as the SSD (although that was maxed out at 1TB with mSATA). Eight years later, it's still a good computer.

Exactly, he couldn't avoid expatriation taxes on anything he currently owns.

(https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/expa...).

Certainly, that’s true. There are many ways to hurt others with words, even avoiding definitions that would be against the law in Germany.

This is a bit personal, but my brothers and I grew up in Germany with a father who was verbally and emotionally abusive. However, he didn’t break any laws regarding offensive speech at least.

Ironically legislating against offensive speech protects people from superficial harm of “offense”, causes a chilling effect by curtailing “offensive” speech (what can you say about a corrupt cop in Germany or France without breaking the law?), and does little to prevent actually emotionally abusive speech.

Obviously my views are biased by my own experience, but I think the US is two _centuries_ ahead of the curve here while Europe still struggles with the ghosts of former monarchs.

Good catch, I should clarify - one could rightfully argue that free speech is not available to all if the legal system is not affordable to everyone. It’s a serious shortcoming of the justice system.

Could you expand on what you mean by that? I assume you don't mean someone giving someone else the middle finger.

According to the one law in this link (German law §90 StGB), offending the president of Germany carries a penalty of anywhere from 3 months to 5 years prison. This can even apply in private matters.

Speaking of Austria, blasphemy laws still apply there and were upheld by an EU court when challenged two years ago [1].

[1] https://humanism.org.uk/2018/10/29/european-court-of-human-r...

There is actually _less_ legal protection for speech in Germany than the US.

For instance, it's against the law to insult a government official like a cop (Beamtenbeleidigung). This could mean saying something like "damn cops" in earshot of the police - it doesn't take much.

You could argue that courts aren't as accessible in the US as they should be without deep pockets (rightfully so), but fundamentally free speech _is_ much better protected in the US.

EY (one of the Big Four accounting firms) has an office in Chennai, India where they do US taxes for public corporations. Of course they're part of the bigger company (EY) that has offices in the US as well, but the example you gave already exists.

It’s not totally clear to me either, but maybe it’s a 32-bit value treated as a 34-bit value with a precision of 4 seconds (so left-shifted two bits elsewhere), since the whole term has the least significant two bits cleared with ‘& ~3’. No idea what the (2^31-1) term is doing though.

I've been considering a Mac Mini as an alternative to a laptop.. would you mind expanding on the hardware glitches you've been encountering? Is it any faster than a laptop or about the same?

I've used Migadu for a year now with a paid plan, and I kept having to debug deliverability and DMARC problems.

They ended up changing their setup instructions, but didn't send out an email about it - when I updated everything, things still didn't work, their support answer was something like "welll you deleted your default DMARC selector [according to our instructions], here I fixed it for you duh". As the author says, their new pricing is "competitive", so I need to switch to a larger provider in the next couple of days with similar pricing.

Just offering my 2¢ in case someone else doesn't want to deal with DMARC issues all year either.

Do you think your company will go back to WFO eventually or will some of the WFH changes stick?

You write very well, it flows in a way that reminds me of Bukowski.

That's funny, the exact same thing happened to me!

The way you said that reminds me of a Wes Anderson movie, somehow it’s funny but endearing at the same time.

I used to rent my parking space to my neighbor Mrs. SEO (a less common Korean name I suppose).

I don't know much about it, but I think it's usually provided by pressurized bleed air from the engines.

There are cabin pressurization test carts for use on the ground, as well as start carts to provide bleed air for starting engines, and bleed air in turn can supply cabin pressurization in flight, although this probably requires some rigging on the ground.

Interestingly, they switched to electric compressors for the 787 [0] because those no longer provide bleed air from/to each engine to simplify the plumbing.

[0] https://aerosavvy.com/aircraft-pressurization/

For me it’s easier to think of sensitivity as being “sensitive to the true positive” without saying much about false positive or negative.

A sensitive test will catch many positive cases. It may or may not have false positives though, eg a test that’s always gives the right answer vs a test that always returns positive no matter what.

A specific test will give you few positive results when the true answer is negative. You could use it to rule something out. One test might say “patient has A or B condition”, and a second test with high specificity may then rule out A or B, leaving B or A, respectively, as the probable condition.

Very creative idea, I wouldn’t have thought of that.

So standard pressure at sea level is 29.92inHg, a 737 MAX can sustain 39k ft altitude indefinitely I suppose, where the exterior air pressure would be 7.66inHg. The cabin is normally pressurized to the equivalent of 8k ft, giving 26.63inHg. The fuselage could withstand a pressure differential of 26.63inHg - 7.66inHg = 18.97inHg (at least, possibly more).

That’s 63% higher than regular pressure at sea level. Not bad.

If you gave each patient a full economy row, that’s about 60 patients per plane, so 48k patients across 800 grounded 737 MAXs.

A test might have a high false positive rate, ie “low specificity”, but can still have “high sensitivity”.

That would mean that while you catch most cases of the virus, you’d also get a bunch of false positives. Flipping a coin as a hypothetical test would give false positives and negatives, or low specificity and low sensitivity.

It is possible to recover from a stall without MCAS, but the handling characteristics have changed. The requirement is that the force on the yoke increases with the angle of attack, but in the case of the MAX, the stick force becomes lighter at a certain point. As I understand it, Boeing was mainly trying to avoid training pilots for any changes.

Apple did something similar with their ceramic/gold composite watch - there's some good info here:

https://leancrew.com/all-this/2015/03/apple-gold/

Unsurprisingly, paying a huge premium for a watch with less gold in it wasn't very appealing to people. Interesting idea though.

After using them many times, they tried to charge me for a rental car I couldn't pick up from a disreputable agency (they wouldn't let me see the car, but demanded I sign a statement claiming no damage, along with a 1000€ deposit).

The management style seems oddly European here (I guess it's a Dutch company), since "growth at all costs" in the US usually means to err on the side of the customer. Interestingly, Europeans like to copy virtually everything from the US, often without being aware of it, but there's always something lost in translation.

How do you move it around if you can't use a pipette?

Or if you say "well, you can't", do you know how the manufacturer gets it in the bottle?

10.14.5 is Mojave, and we're still waiting for the latest 10.14.6 Mojave source. Their open source repo seems to be about 6 months behind at any time.

Did you have Adobe Creative Cloud installed by any chance? I had the same issue, and found out after several reinstalls that Adobe’s core sync finder extension was the cause.

There were two names, but it might be confusing to use the other one, even though that’s what the company was called. I still have a bunch of their shirts that one of the Bens gave me :)

I'm surprised anyone still runs their business on a Google dependency. I was trying to use Google maps for Android ca. 2012 - they acknowledged the bugs I filed a few months ago. If a Google product is a dependency of your business, you must get ready for a potential change or switch out said dependency. E.g. Crashlytics for a more recent example.

Well, they _did_ warn him about the cat litter issue.

All jest aside, I wonder what he could have done differently (not taking sides here, just speculating).

One option would have been to live among the public in the UK, and let himself be extradited to Sweden, then the US. This act alone would have drawn attention to the fact that people in the EU can - under some circumstances - be extradited to the US, which would have been alarming to the general populace in Europe since the US still has the death penalty. The possibility that he would have been imprisoned in Sweden instead would have been weighed against indefinite house arrest in the Ecuadorian embassy - for 7 years in this case.

In any event, I think we'll learn quite a bit about international relations work in practice.