sbacic

I'm fairly sure I'll still be paying taxes when I go out to eat with my family or go camping with friends. It's just not going to be as much as if I had spent that time working.

I can't comment on the US in particular - I neither live there nor does my comment pertain to it specifically.

Rather, it was an observation of two things:

1. That high taxes do not necessarily correlate to extensive and quality public services.

2. That it is possible to find a better deal by hopping across borders.

Taken together, they put the whole "you need to pay back society" spiel into question.

If you want an example, look at the EU. Taxes are uniformly high in the EU but there is a drastic difference in the quality of public services (and as a consequence, your chances in life).

I intentionally didn't want to name countries because this isn't about Canada or the US - it's a global issue and taxes (sadly) do not correlate to the level of public services.

> I love this logic, if you're going to take some of my money away I will do nothing instead. Really? Bullshit.

Is it? Why is it so hard to imagine that higher taxes on risky ventures might cause somebody to go "Eh, not worth it, I can make better use of my time - like spending it with friends and family"?

> The idea is that people got rich in part due to all the nice infrastructure we have, and so we could tax some of the income they made off that infrastructure to pay for it all.

This sounds solid until you realize that country B next door has lower taxes, better public services or in some cases - both. Does the GP question make sense then?

Would your argument still stand if this hypothetical corporation had no employees but the owner?

That is, do you take issue with the fact that one person, employing many, profits much more than the people he employees or that he profits much more than his fellow man on the street?

My main issue with Storybook is how much trouble it is to get everything else running with it. Need next-image? Routing? i18n on demand?

Tough luck - you'll need to implement it for both the app you're building and Storybook. And sometimes implementing it in the app itself is the _easy_ part. Nevertheless, I feel like it does improve the dev experience and intend to keep using it. You just need to know when to cut your losses and not use it for more complex use-cases.

SEEKING WORK | REMOTE Europe

Front-end developer with over 4 years of freelance experience, mostly on greenfield projects but also occasionally with established codebases. Used to working alone with minimal supervision or in small teams. Have a good eye for design, a strong focus on code quality, good communication skills and some experience in technical management.

Technologies: React, GraphQL, Typescript, CSS3/HTML5, Git, styled-components, Formik, Jest, Storybook, TailwindCSS, NextJS, SASS, TailWindCSS, etc...

Blog: www.slavenbacic.dev

Github: www.github.com/sbacic

Email: bacic dot slaven at gmail.com

CV: available on request

Balkanization had nothing to do with it - the problem was that communism valued loyalty over ability and promoted people according to that principle. After Yugoslavia fell apart, the new political parties, both ruling and opposition, simply changed colors while maintaining the same patterns of behavior.

Sadly, nothing. Even if we were to elect a capable government, there would still be a large segment of the population that would resist any change as long as it conflicts with their economic interests.

I'm afraid we're talking into a societal, environmental and cultural catastrophe and that nothing will change until it's too late.

> I'm sure that can be alleviated with with and good leadership, however.

I very much doubt it - one of the reasons we are in this mess is some 80+ years of human capital devastation - we have nowhere to draw experts or leaders from anymore.

> I remember the streets were so empty we would play football.

We did this as well. There were a lot less cars and a lot more children back then. Now it's the opposite.

I think that at some point we'll wake up to the cultural and environmental devastation we've wrought and do something about it. Hopefully it won't be too late by then.

As another Croatian, I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I'd like other people to experience the breathtaking beauty of my country. On the other hand, considering all the negative externalities and the rampant devastation that comes with our brand of tourism I'm not sure I want any more tourists coming. I especially don't want tourists buying holiday homes here.

Yes - I was very close to pulling the trigger and buying one of the new M1 Macs. It seemed like Apple had finally delivered a device worth paying top dollar for. Then this fiasco with iCloud scanning happened.

I don't mind the invasion of privacy so much as the idea that, even after paying so much money, the device is still not really "yours".

I'm not so sure. Obviously, more competition means lower prices, but software has proven very resistant to that bit of conventional economic wisdom, with a few exceptions of course (namely, places with very high CoL).

What's happening here is disintermediation - the employees in SEE and EE have realized that they can cut out the middleman (their local employer) and work directly with foreign clients. This makes the lower cost of living the employee's, rather than the employer's, competitive advantage. It also means that these local employers now have to compete on two fronts - for labor with their foreign competitors who have greater purchasing power and for gigs with their former employees who can offer the same services but with lower overhead.

The next step will be that these newly minted freelancers will realize they can charge more and raise their rates. Lower CoL is a huge advantage here - you can wait for months for the right gig to come along while your competitor in NYC can't. In the end, I think the rates in the WE and the US will drop all around the board while simultaneously rising in cheaper areas until an equilibrium is reached.

Half of the modern web stack is there because it makes development <INSERT POSITIVE ADJECTIVE> to work with. The problem isn't SASS per se, it's that we have half a dozen tools with overlapping functionality because we can't nest CSS selectors (or some other, fairly trivial benefit) with no clear, overwhelming winner out of the lot of them so we have to know all of them. And then we have highbrowed discussions over which one is better for a particular project (hint: it doesn't really matter).

I just wish we'd settle on one, _finally_ solidify the web layer and get on with doing productive work.

I think it comes down to one of two things; the first is ignorance. If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. If you only know about React and Sass, any layer beneath that is a complete mystery and not something you'd even consider as a solution because you're not aware of it.

The second, and my preferred theory, is that the modern web stack has not adequately followed increasing user requirements, forcing us to take much longer to develop what seems like trivial new features. It's not that i18n, or larger images or maintaining state in the browser is some huge, insurmountable problem that can't be solved. It's just that our tools are so woefully immature that we spend more time wrestling with them than we do actually working on the features we're being paid to work on.

And for what? For some vague illusion of choice that for the vast majority of people doesn't even matter? I don't care if I use Redux or one of the bazillion different variations on the idea. Ditto for Sass, Tailwind or what have you. The web layer needs to solidify already, give us a decent bedrock to build our apps and websites on and just get out of the way.

SEEKING WORK | REMOTE Europe

Front-end developer with over 4 years of freelance experience, mostly on greenfield projects but also occasionally with established codebases. Used to working alone with minimal supervision or in small teams. Have a good eye for design, a strong focus on code quality, good communication skills and some experience in technical management.

Technologies: React, GraphQL, Typescript, CSS3/HTML5, Git, styled-components, Formik, Jest, Storybook, TailwindCSS, NextJS, SASS, TailWindCSS, etc...

Blog: www.slavenbacic.dev

Github: www.github.com/sbacic

Email: bacic dot slaven at gmail.com

CV: available on request

Anxiety, mostly. It has gotten so bad that I woke up in the middle of the night and had to take a moment to remember what I was feeling so anxious about. Turns out it was - nothing. For perhaps the first time, I had nothing to be anxious about and I _still_ woke up with anxiety.

I'm fairly convinced it's either genetic or inherited behavior at this point. To be fair though, that level of conscientiousness is a real asset when it comes to programming.

> My policy: OOP is like salt. Use little and that's great. I only allow a single inheritance layer, and ideally no inheritance at all.

That's been my observation as well - there's no free lunch and DRY isn't free either, certainly not if you use inheritance chains to achieve it.

I'm starting to think that the only programming axiom that will survive in the end is KISS.

SEEKING WORK | REMOTE Europe

Front-end and UI developer with over 4 years of freelance experience, mostly on greenfield projects but also occasionally with established codebases. Used to working alone with minimal supervision or in small teams.

Looking for short to medium term work (1 week to 3 months).

Technologies: React, GraphQL, Typescript, CSS3/HTML5, Git, styled-components, Formik, Jest, Storybook, TailwindCSS, NextJS, SASS, TailWindCSS, etc...

Blog: www.slavenbacic.dev

Github: www.github.com/sbacic

Email: bacic dot slaven at gmail.com

CV: available on request

They won't and I'd argue that that is part of the plan.

I'm not sure I buy into it - I don't think it's necessary that even simple use cases need to be complicated in order for the whole to be flexible.

The simple use cases should just be plug and play. If you want a different solution: here are the tools, here is the documentation, have fun.

I think that the whole discussion around low-code is missing a pretty fundamental issue: most programming libraries suck.

If I need, say, authentication, why do I need to install a library and then read a bunch of documentation on how to use it? Why can't I simply plug it in (just like low-code!) and have it automatically work?

I think there is a lot of room to improve developer tooling and that the effort spent there would produce much greater rewards than developing a higher level abstraction, such as a pluggable authentication widget aimed at non-programmers.

This is all contingent on said leetcode riddles actually helping with candidate selection. If they aren't, you've just limited your pool of potential candidates for no reason whatsoever.

> Do companies say "Right, I'm not going to make an extra billion this year because I'll be taxed at the EU average 20.7% tax rather than the US 21%"

No, but their owners might go: "Given the risk, the potential returns and the taxes that I'd need to pay on said returns I'm better off putting this money into real estate, finding a cushy low-stress job and enjoying life instead."

Because the rewards just aren't there. Amazon is a company started by some guy in a garage and less than 30 years later it is one of the richest companies in the world. Something like that just isn't going to happen in Europe - you'd be crushed by high taxes and regulation long before you reached that level.

Some Europeans will say that's actually a feature, not a bug. But look at what businesses are being started instead - neighborhood pubs and apartments for rent to tourists. Low-growth, low risk businesses with quick returns. What kind of jobs are these businesses going to create?

I remember reading once that tech companies, on average, lobby less that traditional industries, such as fossil fuels and finance.

I wonder if the lesson they will take from this is that, rather than reform, they should invest more in lobbying. Considering how much money and influence on the public opinion they have, that's a rather scary thought.

I find it interesting how all of these articles keep mentioning Ireland specifically when there are countries in Europe with even lower tax rates.

I suspect that the reason is that Ireland is not only offering a very competitive tax rate, but also providing quality corporate services at the same time. And I think that that is the real issue - that you can get first class corporate services for much less than in other countries, making people ask - why should I pay more for the same - or in some cases, more for less?