salvadors

The output of this code is also relevant — not just its source.

The vast majority of people in the world are capable of having fun whilst not doing either of those things.

I guess you don't find sex fun either?

Is there a detailed explanation of the plan available online?

> He might even figure out how to do something he hasn't done at AMZN and that's turn a profit.

You mean like the $645MM profit they made in 2008, the $902MM profit they made in 2009, the $1.15BN profit in 2010, or $631MM profit in 2011?

Or is all that nullified by the $39MM loss in 2012 (due to LivingSocial)?

With physical voting you need more than observers at the counting itself. One common means of electoral fraud is to introduce boxes full of pre-cast votes for your candidate into the counting process.

One of the cities it gives for Estonia is "Pjarnu", for Pärnu.

But then it also thinks the capital is "Tallin", rather than Tallinn.

> What kind of reality do you live in where malicious intent to cause harm to someone or some group should not be a crime?

It depends somewhat on what you class as malice. Starting a business is usually a deliberate attempt to cause harm to competitors, and success at it may well cause thousands of people to lose their jobs, etc.

This is said in the most sarcastic voice imaginable, right?

> try to explain to tax authorities why you're not paying payroll taxes for servers if you're a restaurant. Instead many companies will have to increase prices.

What would most likely happen is that one set of restaurants would increase prices, whilst another would try to avoid doing so, by trying to find ways to reduce service costs (e.g. customers place their order at a machine, rather than with a human). Some of each would be successful, some would not. But over time the trend is towards more and more low paid jobs being pushed back to the customer themselves. In many countries minimum wage has been a key factor in killing off many jobs, (e.g. as pumping gas.)

Also, if minimum wage is raised to above your current wage, you're now competing for it with people who were in that higher wage bracket before. If a business now has to pay someone, say, $10 an hour instead of $7, they will be able to get people with more experience / skill for that price, making it harder for people to get entry-level jobs in the first place.

> If you're making the equivalent of $50 an hour, an hour spent agonizing over how to save $25 is a net loss for you.

Only if you would have spent that hour working instead, and if you would actually earn an extra $50 (net) for working that hour (many people wouldn't), and if that potential hour's work is now lost to you.

It's pretty rare for all three of those things to be full, and most of the people I've ever met who have been in that scenario have learned pretty quickly that working every hour possible isn't really a fun way to spend your life.

The returns on your investments may certainly vary under lots of circumstances. But if you're able to living on under 50% of your income, then we're simply talking about how good the outcome will be — not whether it'll be good or not.

Income is only a part of the picture when it comes to poverty. Assets count too. Not having to pay rent or a mortgage because you own your house outright makes a significant difference, for example. Most people could have higher disposable income on a much lower salary if they didn't have to meet rent/mortgage, make car payments, service historic debts, etc.

> I guess I am the only person in the world still using Winamp.

Well, one of the 30 million people still using Winamp.

What about the risks of driving?

security issues?

No law can prevent all such tragedies. But failing to have prevented this one doesn't make the law stupid, or worthless. It does successfully prevent other cases. What happened with your sister is certainly horrible, but you can't generalise from that to every case.

You can have them forwarded to real email, which doesn't announce that it's been read.

OTOH, Latvia and Estonia have both done very well with austerity.

They may be trying to say that, but they actually said the opposite.

It means that a lot more than $66,000 worth of product and services had to be sold to pay for one simple mistake.

Even Microsoft don't have 100% gross margin.

> If someone transfers $50,000 from my personal bank account to someone else's bank account, it's pretty easy for it to be undone.

That depends on the timeframe. Once the money has been moved out of that new account again things start getting much harder.

People should have lots of good things to say about Hitler. To completely demonise him, and turn him into something completely 'other', ignoring how hugely popular and effective he was, makes it too easy to pretend that what happened was a freak aberration, rather than something we need to be actively vigilant against happening again.

Under UK law, if you receive money in error, you have to have a good faith belief that the money is actually yours. To claim that you thought that the bank was deliberately choosing to give you more money than you asked for (rather than it simply being an error) stretches credulity a little too much.

See, for example, a family who were jailed for exactly this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/jan/16/rebeccaallison2

Citations welcome to this being different in other countries.

It did talk of "obligation for a completely transparent government" (emphasis mine).

If you asked an ATM for $50 and it gave you $100, do you think you're entitled to keep the extra $50?

>> it's every blogger's dream his / her work will once be self-sustainable. Traffic without active (social media) involvement. I do the writing, Google does its magic, the readers to the rest.

Weird writing/typos aside, I find this concept confusing. What does it mean for writing to be self-sustainable?

Prices sometimes also change depending on which site you're visiting. Generally these are just a few pennies, but I've seen differences of more than two or three pounds between the .com and .co.uk prices for the same book, even though theoretically they should be exactly the same.

Yes — Amazon certainly has significantly more data, but Goodreads' data is deeper, because it's not restricted to items bought from Amazon. Goodreads has a much better picture of what I read than Amazon could ever get simply from my purchase history (even if they cross-match with bookdepository). Being able to mine the Goodreads data too should enable them to make even higher value recommendations. (Note: I'm not claiming this is why Amazon bought them!)

I'm obviously just too used to the interface! I do have an issue with the fact that adding a book to your "to-read" list is the default, and gets a huge button of its own on every page, but, yes, I guess if you're not used to the concept that the whole thing revolves around putting books on virtual shelves, then it's not necessarily obvious that you click the little "books on a shelf" icon to put it on your "Read" shelf, or the "Currently Reading" shelf, etc.

I'm pretty sure that the context here isn't about providing people with a constant income, but simply taking your comments at face value:

Why would that be so bad? Why is it essential for everyone to have a job?