harha

Ah thunderbolt, yet another standard that started with a promise of simplicity but requires a lot of digging to understand what actually works.

For me some things worked better than expected (5K + 4K monitor at 60Hz, even though it states only one 5K or two 4K monitors), some things don't (work laptop detects the hub, but the displays stay blank.

Some jurisdictions are great at protecting all the wrong people

The parent post argued Apple only cares about tax benefits in Ireland. To me it’s a perfectly valid reason to operate in a country, it’s on the countries to provide an environment where local businesses benefit from low taxes, and not only large corporations like Apple.

They're running a business.. it's not like you can't buy any Apple products in Ireland, running a retail store is likely not worth the hassle.

As for taxes that's on the EU and member countries for having such a complexity that only massive corporates can benefit, rather than simplifying and making it worthwhile to operate for businesses of all sizes.

A current challenge is moving eSIMs around.

yeah but are they? it's not like there are five European search providers competing equally for the users. On the other hand, there's a bunch of quasi monopolies, e.g., Lufthansa on many routes in Germany after other airlines collapsed, or Datev for accounting (which interestingly you can't even buy but have to go through a tax advisor).

If you consider the per seat cost compared to commercial, I don’t think making it a bit more expensive will move the needle.

A lighter‘s more dangerous than a bottle of wine on a plane I’d say

Always surprising how airports in South America and Asia manage not to have issues with this.

I actually find the idea of the chaos that would unfold after putting my toddler in one seat and then going somewhere else to sit quite amusing. Haven’t had the chance yet, but I’m not paying a high fee for a seat on a short flight.

Edit: just adding to that, pretty sure flight attendants or other passengers would gladly resolve the issue that the airlines created.. it’s just not practical with small children

One of my favorite courses at university was energy policy analysis, where we played around with the EPPA model (developed at MIT) [0]. We made changes to certain parameters to see how things might work out, e.g. if cost of energy storage is reduced 10x.

Lots of fun, but I unfortunately never managed to find anything similar to do in my job.

[0]: https://globalchange.mit.edu/research/research-tools/eppa

I'd say barriers to entry - being an established party gives you more revenue, supporters to do campaigning, influence, etc.

One place that tries to do it better in my opinion is Switzerland. It has a lot of controls to reduce the ability of politicians to act poorly and limits the power of higher levels (if something can be resolved well locally, there's no need to have a higher-level regulation). A lot of process is thought through and in place to enable direct voting on issues. Additionally, it has many levels to get engaged, which lowers the barriers to entry, by being able to have an impact on a local level.

I don’t think the voters are the problem. I think the established parties keep growing in all the worst ways, and I don’t think any decent candidate would be able to be successful in this setting.

Would happily work with voters to figure out a path forward.

Quite difficult to be engaged with the selection of candidates. It’s really quite the struggle to find someone halfway decent these days

As an upside, once you’ve pissed off enough customers, you can also quit and provide them with an alternative that packages an open source tool with some enterprise features with marginally better terms

Haven’t been to Aspen, what I’ve seen in Europe though is that the locals either own the establishments, work there or are friends with owners and typically either earn in line with the high prices or get preferential treatment from the owners. No need for the complexity of a tax and intervention when people can figure it out themselves.

Kind of exists already as tourist traps and is preferable to me than another tax.

Always interesting to see how these small screens can display a relatively large amount of information so nicely.

This is creating bad incentives - now the billions of dollars relying on that have no interest in fixing the issue and they'll do the same for other projects.

I mean it's cool, but how about getting some basics like punctuality and cleanliness right first.

Even more fun: how to get rid of a company

> Originally, the year started on the first day of Spring: the Equinox.

Nowruz [0], the Persian New Year, still does today.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowruz

The amount of paperwork to rent in Germany is just silly, so the landlord can have a higher likelihood of getting the agreed rent paid. That’s an additional cost when I want to rent a place and I’d rather not have a that at the cost of being kicked out when I don’t pay.

might be worth fixing the problem all together by making it easier to kick out people who don't pay rent.

Sort of - I’m thinking like a college dorm, it’s probably easier to install shared showers and kitchen (they might even already be there) - rather than individually per unit, along with some other useful shared spaces like libraries.

Or fixing the problem of bad regulation - you can always uplift living standards when money is cheap, right now there's a chance to operate more efficiently, rather than create more debt.

One idea would be to convert spaces to something competing with airbnb, with the added value of being near offices.

Agree - especially annoying that there’s no reasonable and cheap plan across countries, checkout and search isn't much easier than getting a SIM card at the airport

Incredibly annoying - advertised "better than SIM", but really just a massive inconvenience.

The only good use-case (for the user) is buying travel eSIMs.

Except for Germany and the UK where trains are also quite bad, security usually doesn’t take too long. Boarding is typically 15 mins before the flight, but then again airports are usually more comfortable to navigate than train stations since you get rid of your large luggage in the first step

In theory end to end shouldn’t make a big difference for short routes, but if you want to get somewhere reliably just don’t take Deutsche Bahn