mseebach

> Wire transfer fees are a set amount, usually around $40, not a percentage of the total amount transferred. You can do the math to figure out at what dollar threshold sending wire transfers through your bank becomes cheaper than using Transferwise.

Absolutely do the math, but keep in mind that fees are not the only fees when doing FX: few banks will use the spot FX rate for wire transfers, they'll typically add a spread of about 3%.

This has happened very rarely to me, but when it has, the head purser would usually be carrying the manifest or an iPad and clearly referencing it. That takes the creepiness out of it. It's a nice, but ultimately not terribly important, touch that they make a bit of an effort to personalise the greeting.

On one or two occasions (flying to a short stay at an outstation, and catching the same crew on the return), the attendant clearly recognised me, and made a point of saying hello, welcome back (not by name though, that would have been creepy). That's rare, and not really to be expected, though.

I think there are two nuances missing here: First, it's easier to ask forgiveness -- this is a descriptive statement, it doesn't say better. Second, this is predicated on getting forgiveness. If what you do isn't relatively easy to forgive, you lose a lot, eg. getting fired or otherwise formally sanctioned. It's certainly neither easier, nor better.

If you "predict" that it might not make a bestseller list, it's not a particular leap to predict that it wouldn't make it past a publisher, either?

I am making no attempt to quantify this, I simply have no data, but it seems the argument is that today it is relatively more fashionable to write a book about black women doing something that is traditionally thought of as something white men would do, regardless of the "classic" qualities of the work. If it is the case (and I have no data to argue either way) that such a fashion means that a mediocre book about black women doing something (not saying the particular book is good or bad, I don't know it) gets published instead of a really good book about white men doing something, that could certainly be considered "diminishing the literature and cultural products of the West".

But there has always been literature pandering to political fashions, and fashionable literature has always enjoyed an edge over unfashionable literature. Some of it is good and has stood the test of time, and some (most, probably, this is a power law domain) of it pretty bad, and totally forgotten. It's easy to look at the literature that survived from 20 years ago and compare with whatever flash-in-a-pan is being hawked by publishers right this minute and see all kinds of diminished products.

That is a bad look for Marriott, for sure, but if you disqualify establishments for unfairly firing a low-level employee, you should get used to travelling a lot less. This particular situation just happened to be well publicised.

There's already a very easy and commonly deployed way to save on a concierge: don't have one.

> It's one thing to trust Amazon or Google, but now you also have to trust the hotel and its staff, the physical security of the device, and all the previous guests of the room.

You already had to do the physical trust thing. These devices are a new challenge because they could be remotely compromised.

The good thing about places like that is (a) they don't actually care about the money, it's a rounding error. For some smaller firms paying someone for three weeks of not working (regardless of fault) could actually be a problem. (b) They also have a legal department who's invariant is "don't get sued for breach of contract because of a stupid mistake that a small cheque can make go away".

But, of course, the author is perfectly within his rights to just not pursue this, and I have no idea what processes he'd been told to expect for this -- it's just strange that he would emphasise something he doesn't care about in the post.

In which case the correct answer is to sit tight for a bit until you understand the deeper problem. And then you fix the deeper problem, and then you fix the process.

In theory. In practice, the code will often have corner case behaviours that eludes any of the tests, yet are still important.

As an aside, as I understand it, refactoring was popularised as a response basically to this conundrum - it's a technique for reorganising code without changing its functionality. So you can gradually "rewrite" your two page function without losing the accumulated knowledge.

The bit about the manager and director is in the main article. There's nothing about pay, but they're presented as entirely sympathetic and angry about the system on his behalf.

As for "fishy", I find it very strange that someone writes an article emphasising twice that they're out three weeks of pay, but then couldn't be bothered to do anything about it. There's breach of contract, this isn't a long and arduous appeals process, it's open and shut, and if it isn't you have a lawyer deal with it, and recoup expenses, too. And if the guy just doesn't care about it, then why does he mention it twice?

And for the purposes of this, and the other sub-thread that is incredulous about this, this is not an American thing: If you're a contractor in Europe, and you don't get paid, and you then don't do anything about that, then you don't get paid. There's no process that automatically fixes things when the aggrieved party doesn't ask for them to be fixed (and yes, even in Europe, there's a bit of annoying process and paperwork to deal with).

He elaborates a bit in the comments - it seems he's entitled to the money, but couldn't be bothered: "So I had to do an appeal, and go through a long process that I did not care much to go through. I had a mind in quitting after all."

Sounds very strange that he wouldn't care to do a bit of paperwork, which he from the sounds of it could probably well justify to do on company time, with the manager and director being supportive. Or get the agency to do it for him, and bill them for the trouble. Or whatever. Something smells a bit fishy about that part of the story.

So, this is about legalisation - I can totally see medical rescheduling working (and nobody seems to have countered Sajid Javid's announcement yesterday). It's a step in the right direction, but it's still a while to go to undo most of the ills of the war on drugs.

Yeah, well it's either that, or the significantly simpler explanation that involves very simple electoral maths: the tories are going to get exactly 0 voters to cross over on this policy, but tons of core tory voters might stay home on election day.

And, pertinent to the name, such a bottle will often have a handle built in.

https://siestaspirits.com/products/jim-beam-kentucky-straigh...

> FileVault use largely happens on more or less insecure computers, so it is an interesting case.

That's not a good idea, an encrypted filesystem is only as secure as the computer you decrypt it on. Yes, of course, if you're carrying a USB drive around with you, it's strictly better that it's encrypted than not (protection against theft and loss), but it's not exactly difficult to imagine that a public computer should have malware installed.

For the leaker/whistle-blower scenario, disk encryption is your absolute last line of defence. When the MiB comes knocking, you absolutely want all your drives fully encrypted, but the vast majority of your security efforts should be spent on not getting identified in the first place. But what you don't want is for the MiB to find out that you're using the computers in a certain library, go there and install keyloggers and only come to your house once they have your passphrase.

If you decrypt an encrypted filesystem on an untrusted computer, it's game over already then. And assume that your passphrase is compromised as well.

That's not what's being contended. If you claim something about your product, that claim should be true, including it's geographical origin.

But that doesn't answer the question: does Cheddar cheese made in the village of Cheddar have some intrinsic, inimitable quality that can't be achieved outside of that village?

(And industrial producers do indeed plop down large factories in certain geographies so they can churn out large quantities of bland product, yet slap a geographical origin label on it, so it doesn't even protect against that).

The French has always had an oddly low confidence in the power of the quality of their products. The AOC is not a magic incantation, the "proper" Camenbert has indeed as described survived being mass produced across the world. Now there's an adjustment to the AOC rules to allow pasteurised milk, and behold, there are already people working on a quality-label-scheme that is even more "pure" than the original AOC.

It would be quite useful in a general sense to develop a technique to transfer modest amounts of data over a voice call - location, obviously for 911, but also for plenty of other applications where installing an app (never mind developing it) is overkill. Such a technology could also be used for automatically transferring reservation/membership numbers when calling customer service, or even enabling some kind of secure challenge/response for calling your bank.

I suppose it could work with some kind of low-speed acoustic modem combined with an "intents"-style protocol. You'd hear a short sequence of beeps, your phone would vibrate and show a dialog "Caller wants to know your GPS location", and when clicking OK, your phone would send back your location. In the other direction, when initiating a call with metadata, the receiving party would play a beep when ready (like a fax) and your phone would play off the metadata for the call -- this would basically be implemented like query string parameters on the phone number URL.

You don't come off as someone who is even remotely interested in being convinced of anything. Celebrating your downvotes and declaring "the truth hurts" does not invite debate.

I'm away from my computer, but if I recall correctly, there's a world bank report from a few years ago (read the report, not the coverage of it). And for a more lightweight intro to the area, Hans Rosling is an excellent communicator, and he has a couple of TED talks and YouTube videos, as well as the GapMinder website. (Or, had, he sadly died recently).

Yes, you're basically wrong about those things, some more than others, but on the balance, wrong.

You're not displaying any willingness to study the basics of the 350 years of scholarship that supports the position that you so strongly disagree with. Believe it or not, I do actually understand the objections to this narrative (and while there are compelling points raised, I just don't think they're powerful enough to overturn the fundamentals), because understanding things means studying both sides in good faith. Factual knowledge does not "democratically rise to the top" of Quora. It's an interesting platform for surfacing alternative points of view and anecdotes, but we're some distance from actual knowledge.

For the record, I caught and appreciated the sarcasm -- but it's very difficult to pull off in writing.

I you're taking "fear" slightly too literally for the purposes of this idea.

In a way, in the extreme, it is literal: in a healthy democracy, the citizens are so comfortable in their sovereignty that they would be willing as a last resort to forcibly, physically remove a despotic leader. But healthy democracies also have strong institutions that will check such a leader and eventually replace him peacefully - so this fear is mostly theoretical.

In the more symbolic sense, the "fear" is simply to be understood as the citizens having the absolute power to get rid of their leaders through the democratic process. If you want to be a leader, and if you want to stay in office, you basically have to keep the people happy (very broadly speaking, of course), there are no shortcuts in the long run for this. It's "fear" in the sense of "fearing the next election".

It's common, to the point of being an age-old popular culture trope, for people turning 30 to be very nostalgic about their late teens/early 20s.

You changed. So did I. The world did too, for sure, but the 17 year olds of today will miss the pure and uncorrupted world of 2018 when they turn 30.

No, that is indeed not what I meant to say. I meant to say that you're wrong.

The fact that capitalism had lifted billions out of poverty is uncontroversial, very broadly accepted (and there is plenty of evidence). Of course you can disagree with that, but exhibiting a minimal grasp of the argument you're disagreeing with makes it a lot easier to take your concerns seriously.

And sometimes you're just wrong. You seem to have a profound misunderstanding of the mechanisms by which capitalism lifts people out of poverty. It has nothing to do with what capital "wants".

Meaning is incredibly fickle, certainly not an inherent quality of pretty much any work.

The work you do today seems to enable a range of businesses to get on with doing whatever it is they do by letting them leverage some incredibly powerful technology. That sort of enablement seems like something I'd find meaningful. But you're not me, and I'm not you.

If you want to work on more deep technical problems, for the sake of the technology itself (at the cost of being rather further removed from the real-world applications your work enables), go look for that, that's perfectly reasonable. But be careful about assuming that this will necessarily feel more meaningful.

A spill of diesel is less immediately dangerous than a spill of the same amount of gasoline, but will still burn if it has a wick (you don't want your clothes soaked in diesel). But it's quite rare, I believe, as fuel tanks are well protected, so I don't think it translates into a statistically significant difference in safety between cars running on these different types of fuel.

I don't think "identify" in your quote is meant in the same sense as GP. I read the quote as meaning merely that they weren't confused about their sexuality, but weren't willing to let that define them any more than eg their hair colour.