flexie

Isn't the problem that European tech companies are sold to American companies? There are and have been countless of European chipmakers but they are usually bought by Americans.

European companies grow to a certain size, and are then either sold to an established American company or relaunched from Silicon Valley with American investments.

I think most of this is tax driven. American tax rules allow venture funds and also private wealth to accumulate and grow easier than European counterparts. The American government simply allows its business and private individuals to accumulate money via off shore companies in the Caribbean. The US deliberately allows this.

I think everybody know this. But its something like 10 percent of the oil that is spent on non-fuel.

We had a total of 6-7 weeks of summer vacation / work from vacation location. In many ways that was due to covid-19, not despite of it. beforehand, both me and my wife would have to be near our offices. It was mostly to places we could reach by car, so not very far away.

Hasn't the last 8-9 months proven that the world goes 'round, money is made, innovation happens, vacations are had, with most people flying very little?

I now have close to 100 percent of my meetings online, and for me it has been far more efficient than meeting up physically.

Let's say 95 percent are killed. That still leaves around 400 million people. Let's say 95 of scientists are killed.

That might still leave around 4-500,000 scientists worldwide and millions of engineers, millions of medical doctors, tens of millions of technicians of different kinds. Sure, many of them will be in odd places like New Zealand, South Africa or Argentina. But that's likely where most survivors would be as well.

Just for comparison, until the 1940s the US and Europe produced around 10-20,000 doctorates per year. At no point back then did we have more scientists worldwide than we would have after 95 percent of scientists were killed today. And unlike back then, the surviving scientists would have knowledge of every scientific knowledge produced afterwards, either as personal memory or in books and databases.

It's quite possible the internet would survive as well. After all, it's designed for that kind of events. Thousands of libraries would survive. Millions of machines, vehicles, airplanes, computers, components etc. would survive. Wikipedia, the 100 most important scientific journals, the US patent organization database can easily be on a laptop and libraries around the world are making copies all the time.

Calorie counting: How do you do?

I mean, when I buy a sandwich, I don't know how many calories it contain. Not even roughly. When having dinner, I don't know how many grams of potatoes are in my plate or how much meat is on my plate. Do you guys weigh it?

I certainly don't know how much "a serving" is, and I do suspect that if my idea of a serving size was normal, I wouldn't need weight loss in the first place.

As for a): That might be true for a coast to coast flight vs. a coast to coast train ride. But most travelling is not that distant.

The population density in America as a hole is far smaller than in Switzerland, but the population density in NY State is almost double that in Switzerland. In fact, the population density on the US coasts, where most of the infrastructure is, is in the same range as in Europe. The cost of laying and maintaining a few train tracks over the sparsely populated US interior is not the reason it's more expensive in the US.

Railroads in Switzerland are built in extremely mountainous terrain with lots of expensive tunnels etc. and in expensive urban areas.

We have so few bones and skulls from back then that it is impossible to conclude anything.

Do we know that? Why not bears? And do we know if attacks on humans were common?

Then how can they say 1-20% risk of collision?

Question: This was posted half a day ago and was estimated to happen (or not) in less than 1.5 days from now. Now, or later today, when there is less time to the collision, can't they calculate with far more accuracy, whether the objects will collide?

Developers cost a lot more than typographers and delivery boys and you need a lot of them to run a modern online media. A developer on staff is sort of like a subscription that the newspaper pays.

The way to bring back advertisement to newspapers is to use antitrust rules and to start taxing search engines and social networks. When Facebook or Google runs an ad for my local gym, it is taxed in some remote tropical island (where it's usually not taxed at all). When my local newspaper runs the same ad, it's taxed locally. Basically, where I see the ad.

I don't like advertisement in newspapers more than the next guy but that was how our democracy worked. News media got paid. With that money they could do journalism. Now, most of that money goes to a handful of companies that do very little to keep a check on politicians.

True. But very few people knew on September 26, 1986. There could be equally large catastrophes avoided today that we don’t know about

I think it's likely that 81 percent of all people have experienced having something stolen. That doesn't mean 81 percent of us are thieves. Similarly, I guess 99.99 percent of us have experienced receiving spam in our email. That doesn't mean 99.9 percent of us are spammers.

We should not confuse perpetrators and victims.

From the several hundreds of men I know as friends, class mates, colleagues, I have never experienced a single one cat calling, groping, grooming or doing worse kinds of sexual harassment. In hundreds of parties and thousands of work situations, I've never seen it. Not even once.

I've seen both men and women circulating sexually charged jokes or telling such jokes in work environments, and I've seen both men and women comment on each others looks or hitting on each other, both when it was wanted and unwanted. But that's it.

Yes, that's just my anecdotes, but it seems far more likely to me that we are talking about a small percentage of men doing it all the time than most men doing it sometimes.

Is it smart that there is still a pilot in the plane? I mean, it's 2020 and this plane will probably not be built in large numbers for another few years. Are human pilots still better than computers?

I would think a plane could be lighter and react and maneuver more rapidly, pull more Gs, if there was no human inside.

This reads like a PR piece with some weird metrics: "AirBnB spending" and "based on a panel of spending data including more than 65,000 Airbnb transactions". What is that? The Y-axis is an index, not a metric with units. And why compare to one hotel chain? The linked analysis is not better, although it compares to 3 hotel chains. I am not sure that AirBnB's main competition is business hotels like Merriot, Hilton and Intercontinental, though.

Just tell us the revenues. Are they up or down? Bookings?

Think about the organisation that an army involving hundreds of people must have meant:

You have to gather them. There is no written means of communication yet in that part of Europe. There are not many roads yet. They live on farms spread out over vast territories. The article says there were 5 people per square km. Most are probably kids and half are women, so to find 1 able bodied man of fighting age you might need 20 people, which would require 4 square km. Now, if like in later ages the soldiers were the second and third oldest sons, you might find 1 soldier per 10 square km. To gather an army of 500 men, you would need a territory of roughly 100*50 km.

You have to feed them for days, weeks, or maybe even months before or between battles. Crazy expensive at a time where just feeding yourself is not easy.

They have to sleep somewhere, even if just in tents.

You have to provide some weapons and equipment, even if merely wooden clubs and spears.

Unless they are slaves, which some might have been, you may have to pay them or they need to be convinced they fight for their own sake, for example because a foreign people is invading their land.

The most obvious way to organize all that is to imagine a strong regional rulers, a class of local nobles, taxes, some sort of manorialism. Structures that are known later in history (or much further south in the bronze age). But maybe Northern Europe was also organized like that already in the bronze age.

I strongly doubt this, and especially the high percentage. Apparently, the numbers are based on online sale of legal templates. Maybe that took off, just like e-commerce in general.

Very, very few Danish tech startups are listed. There are literally years in between, unless you count NASDAQ First North. I guess this is the way to do it :-)

I don't think fear of diseases will drive it. I will be driven by profits. Companies have realized that you can have 1,000 people in what used to be a 200 person office by having them work from home most days. The savings are substantial.

Employees too will save. You can easily live 50-100 km away in a suburb if you only need to commute to work once a week or maybe less.

Of course, when employees don't have to pay dearly to live downtown NYC or centrally in London, companies will soon realize that they can pay them less as well.

You could argue that this could have happened without corona, but culture is hard to change. What many companies have seen now, is that virtually entire offices can work remotely, and that even sales people and mid level managers can do their jobs remotely.

Also, technology has improved. Bandwidth is far better today than 10 years ago. Companies use cloud solutions to a larger extent where before employees were hooked up to a local server room. The work station is now a laptop connecting via WiFi. 10 years ago, most used desktops with cat cables.

It has already started by companies continuing the lock-down by offering limitless or plentiful work from home days for employees. Then, they will fund proper chairs and desks at home, maybe part of the electricity bill. It's far cheaper than having to pay for your cubicle in NYC.

Growing companies will delay the plans of leasing more office space. They will introduce work-from-home policies in stead. Companies in financial trouble will get rid of the office more quickly than otherwise.

I thought that at least employees in their 20's would want to work in an office. After all, office life is a large part of your social life when you are a young professional. But in the companies I know of that did surveys in the last weeks of the lock-down on who wanted to return to the office first, even the young employees chose to continue to work from home. These were surveys involving hundreds or thousands of employees and more than 60 percent of the young employees wanted to work from home although the offices were in new class A buildings.

Yes, you will miss out of the part of your social life that offices did provide. But that will free up time for social life elsewhere. On your own terms. Yes, there are certainly things that are more efficient face-to-face. But how many hours did employees waste commuting to the office, talking to colleagues at the water cooler, attending meetings, going for lunch breaks etc.? Office life was never super efficient either.

Does the US not have anything like database rights for collections of data? What about unfair business practices?

At the end of the day, Genius has probably spent thousands of man years collecting the lyrics and Google free rides on that getting it all in seconds.

This business is only relevant due to tragic laws making divorce difficult.

In Denmark, you can divorce by electronic signature and without any reason. If both spouses agree, they can be divorced immediately. Immediate divorce is also possible in case of

- adultery,

- two year physical separation due to disagreements violence,

- sexual assault,

- bigamy,

- child abduction.

Otherwise, a 6 months separation period is needed.

In most divorce cases, no law suits are needed.

Mathias Rust was German, not a "Finnish teenager".

And many underdeveloped too: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

2 countries have less than 1 kid per woman 114 countries have less than 2 62 countries have less than 3 (20 of which are at less than 2.2) 21 countries have less than 4 18 countries have less than 5 11 countries have less than 6

Of the largest 6 (half the world's population): China has 1.6, India 2.3, US 1.8, Indonesia 2.0, Pakistan 3.6, Brazil 1.7.

A better question would be ‘How many years do we save’ because the vast majority of the people dying from covid-19 are old people who already suffer from one or more prior diseases.

The average life lost in Vietnam or Afghanistan had maybe 55-60 years left, had it not been for the bullet that cut it short. The average age of covid-19 victims is maybe 73 or so, and those people would in average have lived another 0-5 years (typically less than the average life span for men of 78.5 years because of the prior illness).

Yes, if we look at the bankruptcy scenario only (and provided the debt is not secured). But the shareholder is typically better off if there is an upside. What we saw in the last financial crisis is that large corporations quickly paid off their loans and the government - the taxpayers - missed out on the upside.

The natural way to give government ownership would be through convertibles so they could chose whether to convert.

Danish lawyer here.

The proposal only limits payments to companies that have received more than DKK 60 million (around EUR 8 million) in aid. So this is not your usual business owner. These are generally larger companies with a well paid management.

As for companies registered in tax havens, the EU has made an official list of tax havens, which will be followed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_tax_haven_black...

It's a short list and it doesn't include any countries where a large company doing business in Denmark would be registered except if they try to avoid taxes. Why should tax payers bail out a tax avoiding company?

The proposal was made by a party in the opposition, which is usually seen as most business friendly ("Venstre"). Interest groups representing the businesses in Denmark support the proposal. I think it's a common sense proposal. Paying out dividends to shareholders while receiving government aid basically means having the tax payers bail out the business owners.

I honestly think the proposal should go even further. The government should take a small ownership stake in companies that receive that kind of money.

Given that the population growth is around 80,000,000 yearly, or 1 percent, we are looking at a world GDP per capita decline of 4 percent.

Since large parts of the world's population barely had enough for food as it were, and that even in the first world, a lot of the production goes to create wealth for the few rich, and most people don't save much or anything to begin with, it's going to be felt.

And do we really believe it stops there? Will people actually want to travel and dine out as much as they used to once the lockdowns are over? Or will they be careful for months or maybe years to come? What happens when the virus really spreads in Africa, India, South East Asia and South America? Will they barely care because they are so young it's not dangerous to them? And what about the second and third wave in the first world? What if the vaccine or cure is not that easy to make and distribute so we don't have any before mid or late 2021?

Sad that Amazon is allowed to take an even bigger share of American online retail.

They are raising their wage to $17 per hour. That's around $3,000 per month in stead of their usual $2,500 per month.

Little vacation, few sick days.

Ridership plummeted to around 10-15 percent of normal last week, but you still have more than 500,000 daily riders.

Obviously, health workers and others still need to go to work somehow but although you take 90 percent out of packed NYC subway cars and platforms, you still have plenty passengers for the virus to continue spreading.