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Seems to intersect with my experience. The best guys I've worked with had test...to some extend...especially in places that did some work you could easily get wrong by not thinking about a small edge case. Yet, none of them had or pursued 100% coverage as they were all clearly aware of that there is no actual benefit in that number, but that it can also mean harm by heavily slowing down dev speed and tying down your feature set because you're too lazy to always port some useless tests.

Don't remember where I heard it, but I was told that Starbucks has actually decent quality beans that they overroast way too far. What a waste. Your experience seems to agree with what I heard.

I might have looked at what they wrote through the "Germany"-lenses.

While increasing solar is certainly a success, falling short in wind, hastily getting out of nuclear years ago, heavily using coal, failing to even install a high capacity power line from the north to south to bring wind energy to where it's needed...Nimby-ism everywhere. Local state politicians that do nothing but populism aka Nimby-ism on a state level. Explosion of bureaucracy. You mention "getting everything ready". This just implies seeing the big picture and having a plan. Knowing our political system I have my doubts because it feels like it's too static and, if at all, rather reactive than active.

I'm sorry, sometimes I get taken away by negativity because of all of this and I forget to look at the bright (and sunny) side.

I think its twofold. On the one hand, people don't like the CEO types that are present everywhere, hyping up anything and who always must give their five cents. The likes of Musk and Sam Altman. I include myself in this group, I for example hate how people literally still buy into the Elon Musk is our world's iron man narrative.

On the other hand, if it's about companies, I think the issue is more complex. Partially it might be jealousy of Silicon Valley (I know MS is not based there) and their working environment and salaries. But it is also criticism of the tech bubble. Developers outside of that small region are no idiots either...and sometimes they get tired of the vibes being sent out by all the SV hype people...like anything there is great and will change the world and anything not from there is unimportant and dull. I think yes, there are some world-changing things happening in the valley and also in those companies, but a big chunk of the rest is just overabundance of capital that people just need to park somewhere so they throw it at idiotic startup ideas. This capital was generated by reaping in profits (Meta, Google) from all over the world by avoiding taxes through questionable corporate constructs. See google, they make money by selling ads. They only can do that because of the population in their target country and how much those people can spend. This again depends on domestic investments like infrastructure and education, payed for by taxes that google don't contribute to.

This is at least my source of scrutiny when looking at all those players. But to be fair, I don't hate (all of) them.

Wait, you guys basically have similar problems? I thought it was only our politicians who were incompetent. Well...I'm sure they are more incompetent than yours for sure, but at least we're in the same boat there!

For anyone reading this who has never been to Germany: Apartments can also be present in villages. Some rural ones only consist of single family homes, but there are also multiple-family apartment buildings in some villages (no high-rises or big complexes of course).

So "if you live in an apartment, you're in a city" is an incorrect statement.

To me, the opinion about nuclear power kind of feels like the subject of homeopathy in Germany. It feels like in the general population there is a whole that can only be filled by non-science and quackery. The most reasonable people that usually believe in science just get emotional and ignore facts in favor of a vague feeling of defending their beliefs no matter what.

Fun Fact: Air traffic controller strikes also count as force majeur

Actually, once my flight (to Europe) was delayed by like 4h because they had an air traffic controller strike in another country THE NEXT DAY and kind of shuffled their plane fleet across the continent to make it work. Airline denied me my (i think it was 600 Euros) compensation using the force majeur strike argument. That was the only time I went to one of those services that went to court for me for like 30% of my claim. They really did go almost all the way until the airline took the very last exit before a trial.

Sometimes I like consumer rights.

Yeah or it's just the capital that has been there in abundance. Spawned from the defense industry, thriving through the money made in the 2000s and after by creating profits all over the world (ads!) and then evading taxation as much as possible while funneling the money back to the valley and hiring the world's best talent to keep that first place.

The small business owner pays taxes because what else can they do? Big corps go through tax-havens and relocations and don't do so, while profiting off of the infrastructure paid for by taxes (=> enabling customers over seas to even buy iphones). Traditional companies ship physical products and/or employ more people in the respective countries, while they also try to evade taxation I think those circumstances make them a much better subject to it though.

Really, the more I keep on talking to my friends in the Valley the more it boils down to the money factor. Salaries, VCs and all the likes. I don't say Europe shouldn't be less business hostile, but one should see the Valley the way it is and realize that just buy changing the laws and trying to copy it Europe can't succeed. They should find their own path.

That you should be forced to have a miserable commute, spend less time with your family and be a happy little worker drone.

Oh and you'd thank management each day for allowing you to spend your precious little free time raking in profits of which you will get a share in form of a salary, yes, but a much smaller one than the work you contribute should entitle you to.

Can speak from personal experience: This seems true. I observed management following trends (both technology and HR) from the valley.

One manager even said (while roaming the empty hallways on a a day where not many teams have their team-office-day and also during lunch time):

"People should come back to the office. I've visited facebook (sic) not long ago and there were so many people at their desks, being busy working. Such an inspiring environment"

This is the level of competence we have to deal with.

edit: Oh I forgot to add: They explicitly don't seem to follow the trends of paying salaries in the ranges of hundreds of thousands of dollars or making offices attractive like providing free food/snacks and other amenities.

In my personal environment I have many people that don't live in the city they work in, for various reasons. They do, however, live in the range of like 1h-1.5h away. 1.5h on a daily level, speaking from experience, can really make or break a (family) life.

I'm all with you. They wanted us to go to university. They wanted both partners to have jobs to support a family. Now they want to force those workers to live close to work (for the most part so management can watch butts-in-chairs) again.

This can only be prevented if employees stand and fight together.

You say that...I fear that myself. But it's like the prisoners dilemma I think...if that happens, then some places will indeed allow work from home and snatch those high-performers just off the market.

I have no opinion about measures to take or not, but what can be said is that this access to the markets was bought with industrial espionage, technology theft and questionable cooperation practices (cases where some company basically just changed owners overnight and kept all the workers and machines and so on).

All this was of course known, but knowingly or not, the Chinese played the westerners weakness perfectly: greed.

As much as the tracking I fear the access control.

Made some stupid comment online while being drunk? We take your ability to by transportation passes/plane tickets...

IIRC this is already happening in China.

You seem to argue strongly in favor of deception, but justifying that it's ok if all the other measures against false convictions are in place (lawyers, police who work by the book...).

To me, it's like wearing a safety belt. I mean, if all your driver assistance systems work and all the other drivers pay attention and drive perfectly, you shouldn't need it, right?

Sweet. That makes my bathroom breaks after the day I had genuine Mexican food a sport, too.

Did you ever find out what it did there exactly? Like, what it collected and what the "gifted person" wanted to do with that data?

edit: Thanks for the write-up btw. Was a nice read, although a bit short (which is the story's fault I guess)

> How likely is that?

Well, having been in Paris: There are many times and places when all the shared bikes are borrowed.