speleding

Profits = revenue - costs. Costs include depreciations and write offs of investments, and capital costs (what they pay to service debt), before you get to a taxable profit for accounting purposes. It's going to be many years before they pay taxes, if ever.

They do have to pay Value Added Tax on their sales in many countries (all of the EU), but not in most of the US. (The basis for Trump's claim that the EU is robbing the US. Sigh.)

> management ... literally just status updates and asking when things are going to be finished.

True. But there are many people whose productivity slumps unless they are asked for progress updates every day. You have to offset this against the people whose productivity slumps BECAUSE they are asked for updates every day. In large orgs with unknown quality of people I guess it's not impossible that middle managers add value.

When I worked as a strategy consultant in the Netherlands (albeit decades ago), the rule of thumb was that any organization that had not seen a reorganization for five years would accumulate at least 10% of dead weight. (Mainly due to very strict labour laws that make it very costly to fire someone.)

ASML has 44,000 staff total, not sure how many are managers, but the 1,700 number does not strike me as particularly ambitious for a reorg in a company that size.

I would like to be opted out by default. I'm worried at least one of those new services is going to get overrun by spammers, and if I'm opted in by default they could use the gateway to whatsapp to spam everyone else.

Not sure whether you would call this technical, but the difficulty lies in allowing third party access and still prevent spam.

The reason Whatsapp won out over competing services in the first place (over here at least) was that they managed to be both free and relatively spam free. All free alternatives quickly got subsumed by spam (even non-free SMS has a spam problem nowadays).

We've been storing jobs in the DB long before SolidQueue appeared. One major advantage is that we can snapshot the state of the system (or one customer account) to our dev environment and get to see it exactly as it is in production.

We still keep rate limiters in Redis though, it would be pretty easy for some scanner to overload the DB if every rogue request would need a round trip to the DB before being processed. Because we only store ephemeral data in Redis it does not need backups.

The difference can be explained in large part by urban design: many US shoppers need a car to drive to the supermarket and only go there once a week or less. In Europe you live much closer to a supermarket, so you go more often and get more fresh food and less frozen or canned.

Some Americans are surprised to learn that many supermarkets inside cities do not even provide parking, everyone walks or bikes there. People go to the supermarket every day.

Yes, it's not just homeless people with this bootstrapping problem. When I first arrived to the US in the nineties as a student I needed a social security number, for this I needed a P.O. Box (they did not accept the dorm house as address). For the P.O. Box I needed a social security number. Most international students ended up breaking the deadlock by making up a social security number.

Well, just add "puts caller" in the function to find out. You can do this in your own code, but also you can also just briefly patch the library you're working with, if that's where the process is.

By the way, the generated identifiers are more a rails thing than a ruby thing.

I've done quite a few MySQL setups with replication. I would not call setup "extremely easy", but then, I'm not a full time DB admin. MySQL upgrades and general trouble shooting is so much more painful than AWS aurora where everything just takes a few clicks. And things like blue/green deployment, where you replicate your entire setup to try out a DB upgrade, are really hard to do onprem.

I don't like this change. There are a lot of SaaS business that allow you to create a CNAME along the lines of "saas_app_name.yourbusiness.com". For example Fastmail and Zoho do that, our business offers that feature as well. When you arrive at our site we do a redirect to a proper https URL.

But a browser will not accept a redirect from a domain with an incorrect certificate (and rightly so), so this will start failing if https becomes the default, unless we generate certificates for all those customers, many thousands in our case. And then we need to get those certificates to the AWS load balancer where we terminate https (not even sure if it can handle that many). I think we may need to retire that feature.

If your database has a hardware failure then you could loose all sales and customer data since your last backup, plus cost of the down time while you restore. I struggle to think of a business where that is acceptable.

The complexity of AWS versus bare metal depends on what you are doing. Setting up an apache app server: just as easy on bare metal. Setting up high availability MySQL with hot failover: much easier on AWS. And a lot of businesses need a highly available database.

Just today I got an ad for a new theater show in town I'd like to see, I might have missed that if it wasn't for the targeted ad. Did they "manipulate" me into seeing it? I guess so. Do I mind? No, I'm capable enough to decide for myself.

The popup never lets you choose to see fewer ads. It's a common misconception by lay people that you will see fewer ads if you block cookies, but that's not happening of course. So you may as well get relevant ones.

Your girlfriend was somewhat right though: if you click "Reject all" they cannot show you targeted ads, and will show you generic ads instead. That's why I always accept the tracking cookies, for me the price of the privacy incursion is worth seeing more relevant ads.

I always consent as well. They can show much more relevant ads when you consent to cookies. If I block cookies I get generic ads about stuff I don't care about.

A power supply can operate most efficiently if its power output is close to what it was designed to supply. Typically, a PoE switch has a large power budget to take into account the myriad devices that might be connected to it.

If you have one small PoE device connected to a large PoE switch then it would be less efficient compared to a non-PoE switch and a small separate power supply for the device.

I agree that running servers onprem does not need to be hard in general, but I disagree when it comes to doing production databases.

I've done onprem highly available MySQL for years, and getting the whole master/slave thing go just right during server upgrades was really challenging. On AWS upgrading MySQL server ("Aurora") is really just a few clicks. It can even do blue/green deployment for you, where you temporarily get the whole setup replicated and in sync so you can verify that everything went OK before switching over. Disaster recovery (regular backups to off site & ability to restore quickly) is also hard to get right if you have to do it yourself.

It's the one place we still use user-agent sniffing: if the built in date picker works we show that (iPhone / iPad), otherwise we do a JS picker.

My elderly parents have managed to destroy more than one iPhone / Mac (dropped a glass of wine on the keyboard on the last one). Using the "Restore from iCloud" is a god send to get all their messages and settings back. So I'm willing to go through some pain / privacy invasion for that.

I like the concept of "luck surface area". Sure, I started out with a bunch of luck. But the harder I work, the luckier I get. You have to put yourself into a position to cash in on your luck.

I agree that the tone of arguments of many proponents is not helpful. That obscures the fact there are relatively easy things that can be copied from the Netherlands to make a city more walkable that are not expensive. Chiefly: start making a division between "streets" and "roads", where one is just for destination traffic with shops and houses, and the other is a through way to get from one neighborhood to another with as few traffic lights as possible.

People love to get rid of traffic along their house so it's easy to get buy-in from the public to convert their area to a neighborhood without through traffic, even when that means they have to navigate a few blocks to get in and out of their neighborhood. This results in more traffic pressure in the surrounding area, but that's not as bad as you think because you can remove a lot of traffic lights if there are fewer roads in and out of a neighborhood. Slowly build up to more and more of these areas.

If the only cars in a neighborhood street are from people who live there then traffic intensity is low enough that no bike lanes are needed there and kids can play in the street. Finally, if all that works, you can start stringing neighborhoods together with dedicated bike lanes, away from streets with cars. Bike lanes that are not part of a road are surprisingly cheap because road wear scales with the third power of vehicle weight so those rarely need resurfacing.

Dutch person with a car here: Like many people, I own one because they can be very useful to transport heavy stuff, and there are several low density areas where it's a pain to get by train, like visiting family in nearby Belgium. But for most of my trips biking or public transport is just quicker. I drive maybe twice a month.

You can have walkable neighborhoods and still allow some cars. They can only enter a neighborhood at low speed as a destination, to park there. To get from one neighborhood to another you have normal roads and highways. The Netherlands does this (although they have a lot of public transport as well. And bikes of course)

Pff, there has been a 50 kW osmotic plant operating in The Netherlands since 2014, how is this news?

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osmotic_power

I would like to challenge the notion that you absolutely need state of the art fabs to win a war. Most military gear uses "proven technology" several generations behind SOTA. When push really comes to shove there is a lot you can do with the chips you already have and nationalizing the fabs under your control.

The dependence on oil from the Middle East is comparatively a bigger problem for the West (though not for the US with its shale oil reserves).

Ah that explains it, thanks, I missed that.

A solar water heater is just a black box with a tube running through it. Many houses here have one, because they're much cheaper than PV panels to generate similar kW heat. But a sibling comment pointed out they want to go up to 900 °K, you can't do that with those, of course.

I'm surprised that they use the PV power for heating coils instead of using heat pumps. I'm sure they've run the numbers and considered it too expensive or too much maintenance hassle.

However, if that's the case you would think that you can cut out the PV step as well and use direct heat from the sun to heat the dirt, by running water hoses though the dirt and through solar water heaters. Should be cheaper and more efficient than the sun -> PV -> heat coils cycle.