perneto

No. The UK has some of the worst tech wages in Europe, esp. on a cost-of-living adjusted basis. Switzerland is on par or better than the US. Other countries fall on a spectrum in between.

FYI this isn't limited to Europe; Canada also pays much lower than the US. (The Seattle vs Vancouver comparison is especially striking). Elsewhere, Singapore is comparable to Switzerland and the US. I'm not sure about NZ and Australia.

On the same topic, https://www.scribd.com/doc/55945011/An-Introduction-to-Stock... has detailed advice on what to do as a startup employee in the section about options. (tl;dr: early exercise, 83(b) election, ask for nonstatutory stock options instead of incentive stock options).

Ceylon, because after you've seen union types you wonder why they aren't implemented in every statically typed language.

Of course! No need to rush.

Now that there is an apparently superior alternative, do you plan to do something to eliminate the existing enum pattern explained at http://ceylon-lang.org/documentation/1.1/tour/types/#enumera... ?

Could you outline the differences between Scala and Ceylon constructors, for readers not familiar with both?

Actually, the new IDEA 9 now has a free, open-source version, with most of what you'll want. There's still a commercial version with some more features enabled. http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/features/editions_comparison_m... NetBeans' profiler is great though. IDEA doesn't have any - I use YourKit, a 3rd-party commercial profiler.

I've long been thinking that something like Coda (the distributed filesystem from CMU) would be the best option in this space. Coda keeps the data, but lets nodes locally sync some of it for offline use. It's been around ages, too. Has anyone thought about it too?

djbolivia.ca - he even has a few mixes expressly made for programmers.

It's worth noting that the practice of the groom's family paying the bride's family is nothing new in China - at least according to my flatmates from Hong Kong. The rationale is that the parents invested time and money into their daughter's upbringing, but since she's leaving their family to join the groom's, she won't be supporting them in their old years. There's still no pension system in HK - there's one in mainland China though.

This sounds inspired by SEDA (Staged Event-Driven Architecture). http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~mdw/proj/seda/ It was about time someone made good use of it, too!

Is there more info available? The white paper is nice, but not too packed with detail.

The report uses two metrics of economic mobility: absolute mobility, and relative mobility. Relative mobility is unitless because it's an elasticity: it measures how much parent income influences children income.

This is from note 13 in the report. Also, the authors didn't come up with this themselves. The data comes from here: http://www.iza.org/en/webcontent/publications/papers/viewAbs...

This explains nicely where the use of elasticity comes from.

Do you have other data that contradicts these conclusions?

A lot of people in the US seem to believe this - it's the essence of the American dream after all.

But if you actually take a look at the Wikipedia article, you'll see this: "France, Germany, Sweden, Canada, Finland, Norway, and Denmark all have more relative mobility than the US, while only the United Kingdom is shown to have less mobility [1]" [1] http://www.economicmobility.org/assets/pdfs/EMP%20American%2...

It's still possible that the majority of millionaires in the US be self-made (although I'd argue that a middle-class born Web entrepreneur cashing out is far from self-made - see other comments about the importance of a middle-class upbringing).

But that doesn't necessarily give the US a very high economic mobility: here, like often, it's easy to only look at a few extreme cases and forget the averages.

The way I see it, the American dream is but a myth perpetuated by the wealthiest: if I believe I'll strike it rich someday, I won't want more high-income taxation or estate taxes... even though there's actually very little chance it'll happen.