Hermel
Hermel on Hacker News
The German language demands a more precise and sober style, whereas English tolerates more sloppy expressions. One common technique to work around that is to just use English terms when there is no catchy German one. In German marketing, this is done all the time. So in your case, you are fine sticking to speed bump.
Btw: my favorite word for speed bump is the Dutch "drempel". It is quite onomatopoetic. My favorite term for speed bumps in German comes from Comedian Helge Schneider. He calls them "Teerwülste" (tar bulges). I don't think you find it being used, but it fits the German style very well as it is precise and sober.
Free speech is much more restricted in Europe than in de United States.
No, the fundamental issue with carbon credits is its economics. It would be much healthier to set a fixed price for carbon emissions. This price should be based on the externalities caused by the emissions. In the worst case, the price is the cost of extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere again. Such a fixed price, a carbon tax, would help the industry because it would make production costs more predictable, and it would be much more fair than carbon credits assigned to those firms that hire the best lobbyists. When fixing the emission quantity instead of its price, the price of carbon credits tend to either go to 0 (if there are too many) or infinity (if there are not enough) at the end of a credit period, which is total nonsense. However, for politicians, carbon credits are much more attractive because being able to distribute them gives them power.
More and more countries are implementing an "exit tax" when wealthy people try to give up their citizenship. Also, the US authorities make it increasingly hard to do so. I wouldn't recommend anyone to become a US citizen. Once you are in, it is very costly to get out again.
There are various valid use cases for companies without business. Examples include:
- International holding companies: if there is Coca Cola France and Coca Cola Germany that economically belong together, you might not be able to just merge them into one entity for legal reasons (both countries might require you to have a locally incorporated presence). So to ensure that both always have the same owners, you create an international holding company that owns both of them.
- Investment funds: investment funds (especially passive ones) are companies whose only business is to own shares in other companies. There is no "real" operating business.
- Feeder funds: sometimes, the law requires foreign investment funds to create a local shell company to be allowed to accept investments from local retail investors. In this case, the only purpose of the shell company is to fulfill local regulatory requirements with regards to the legal form if the investment vehicle and to provide investors with someone local that they can hold liable in case things go wrong. There is no real business in such companies.
In fact, it is often regulation that requires you to create shell companies. If you want to get rid of shell companies, you should start by removing regulation that requires the creation of shell companies with no real business except to satisfy the regulators.
Technically, the state does not have the monopoly on money. The majority of the money supply is created by commercial banks through credit. But the commercial banks are so strictly regulated through capital requirements that the de facto decision about what purposes the banks are allowed to print money for is under centralized control. The ECB even thinks about using capital requirement rules to nudge banks towards green investments, which would be a departure from their mandate of monetary stability.
> I disagree -- this is the correct thing to do if you believe it is not possible for the checked exception to occur.
If it is not possible to occur, then it should not be part of the API.
The only time I rethrow a checked exception as an unchecked exception is when the code is still under construction. The default of the eclipse code generator is to log and ignore caught transaction. I think wrapping into an unchecked one is the better default behavior for incomplete code under a "fail fast" policy.
Depends on your position and motivation. I myself am always reachable and read my emails day and night. I enjoy being involved with my company just as others enjoy checking their personal emails every hour.
So why do even the official website of the European commission and the European parliament have a cookie consent button? One would assume that they are not "capitalist services".
I think it is about curation.
No, it is very productive. From this principle, one can derive many important properties of an optimal legal system, most notably that laws should be technology-neutral. If a law needs to be changed every ten years, then it is not a very well-designed law.
No, a good legal system cannot be outrun by technology. A good legal system provides sound foundations based on principles. Fraud is fraud, regardless of whether it is committed offline or online. Just like source code, legal code can be more or less well-designed, and it can yield more or less desirable outcomes. And in this case, the outcome the US legal system produced was much worse than "not perfect". The law failed to provide legal certainty and the authorities failed to provide clarity as well. Let's hope the courts will do their job -- a process that unfortunately can take many years.
A good legal system provides legal certainty. It has clean and concise laws that are straight-forward to apply. In case of uncertainty, the responsible authorities should provide guidance on what they believe is the right interpretation. None of this has happened in the case at hand. The applicable (?) laws are not clear and the responsible authorities refused to provide guidance. This is poison for innovation and entrepreneurship as it makes doing business in the US unnecessarily risky. Resolving these questions in court should only be the measure of last resort as this process is slow and costly.
Exactly, so Page and Brin might think that they can pull the same trick again.
And this agency problem is partially caused by regulators and "good governance" rules who demand that the board is "independent" from the shareholders. But this makes them have less skin in the game and diminishing the effect of fines!
Like in chess, the moves that you could play matter as much as the moves that you do play. So even if I don't need cash, I still appreciate the possibility of using cash in case my bank of government locks me out of my accounts.
For example, the Canadian government froze the accounts of political activists during the Corona crisis. This shocked me. It shows that even countries that are perceived as free and democratic sometimes cannot resist to abuse their power. And the more power we give them, the more likely it is that a politician will abuse his or her power sooner or later.
If taken literally, this would mean that the founders could not even do their groceries any more, right?
Still banned in Germany: ads for lawyers, ads for doctors, ads for cigarettes, ads for gambling, and ads for drugs that need a prescription.
When traveling to the US, it always strikes me how different public ads are. The US has more public ads and also much more aggressive ads. An ad for an injury lawyer would be unthinkable in Europa.
I would say both are over-regulated, but maybe not as overregulated as Europe.
An interesting thing to note is that European countries tend to make rules to outlaw risky behavior in the first place, but have limited fines in case the risk materializes, whereas the United States tends to allow more risk taking, but imposes exorbitant fines if something goes wrong.
Both systems have their advantages.
That's the key!
The Play Store and the App Store do not even have a search filter for games without in-app purchases. I'm sure that is on purpose.
I have the opposite problem: there are more and more profiles on Facebook and Instagram that impersonate me in order to scam people. However, Facebook does not delete them even after having the profile reported by multiple times by different friends. This week, scammers even setup a fake Instagram profile to impersonate my mother! It's still online despite having been reported by half my family...
In most countries, medical images are not subject to copyright at all as they lack a creative dimensinon and artistic expression.
Not really. Even from a point of view of an experimenter with perfect information, the entropy of the system declines over time as fewer and fewer bits are needed to describe the system.
For example, start with a Glas of warm water and an ice cube in it. Over time, the ice will melt and the range of different temperatures of the molecules decline. Consequently, you need fewer and fewer bits to describe the complete state of the system. It takes fewer Bits to encode all the velocities of a million molecules that all move at a similar speed than to encode all the velocities of a million molecules that move at very different speeds.
The more similar the state of the molecules becomes, the shorter a text becomes that has to describe the complete state of a system. Therefore, entropy is decreasing even from the point of view of an observer with perfect information.
In most other countries, such a poison pill would be illegal as it violates the principle of equal treatment of all shareholders. Also, in most other countries, the decision to issue new shares requires a shareholder vote and cannot be done by the board alone.
By definition, low taxes are not a subsidy. It is the trains that are heavily subsidized. The main reason behind the price difference is that there is plenty of competition between airlines for a given flight, eg Paris-Berlin, but no competition for the same train connection.
Sometimes, re-inventing something is easier than trying to find it somewhere else.
> international mindset
The international mindset is to be tolerant with non-native speakers. I find it perfectly ok when a German company uses expressions that hint at their origin. Similarly, I'm not bothered when a British company uses British words or a Texas company uses expressions that are typical for their region.
What triggers me, however, is when people misspell expressions in ways that reveal that they have no clue about where the expression comes from. For example, if someone tries to sound smart by using the latin expression "per se" but actually spells it "per say", that reveals to me that they are probably not as educated as they want to appear.
It's unethical if you believe that people should be free in expressing their opinions. (Yes, I know that freedom of speech in the US constitution concerns the government and not companies, but I'm talking about freedom of speech as a general value. I find it unethical to suppress someone's ability to freely voice their opinions regardless of whether the government or a private entity does it.)
Of course they are free to do what they want. But if they do something unethical, like removing content for political reasons, I'm also free to criticize them and for example demand a refund if they lured me into a subscription by claiming I would be able to listen to Joe Rogan.
Also, you are making wild assumptions about the contract between Joe Rogan and Spotify. Maybe there's a clause in there that they will not only license his shows, but also make them available to their users? In that case, removing the episodes would be a breach of contract.
I hope you understand a little better now.