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thesimon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NO8V72pDw1o

> My name is Nathan Fielder, and I graduated from one of Canada's top business schools with really good grades.

It's the opening line of the directors previous TV shows

Re:How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs on Monday August 24, 2026 @07:30PM (#49427234)
Can't comment on all European jurisdictions obviously, but a 1 person LLC/Ltd. is not a great shield in Germany. Usually they'll still consider the owner/director liable because they were making those executive decisions.
Re:How Europe is killing makers and micro-entrepreneurs on Monday August 24, 2026 @07:22PM (#49427170)
> for which every consumer also pays.

Idk, at least in Germany paper and (plastic) recycling is free. I only have to pay for organic trash and trash to be burned.

What about banking apps and stuff? Does the device binding still work or do you need to set it up again?
> I have QR enabled payments available across maybe 10 different countries

Any experience or rec's for Thailand?

> Hopefully they allow foreigners some track to access UPI in the future.

https://havemony.com

Not cheap and only to business QR codes (so proper shops which probably will take credit card anyway), but it works.

> the limitation of tourist wallets is that they can't be utilised for P2P payments - exactly what UPI is most used for across the country

Same issue in a lot of Southeast Asia. After jumping through all hoops to get the correct app, id verified and paying a hefty fee, it was still a gamble if the restaurants would have a business QR code or a personal one.

One time in Laos I was on an island that didn't have an ATM, almost no cards were accepted and I had run out of local currency. So I ended up asking for the QR code before ordering at the restaurant to make sure it would work out.

In India it's super annoying when taking autos because the drivers won't have change and in 99% of the cases they have a personal code. So I just ended up using Uber with credit card, much less hassle.

I don't know, central banks seem super afraid of money laundering somehow. But just allow me to spend $100 or what, I just want to buy a quick coffee or a fruit from a street vendor, not a Rolex.

Re:Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns on Thursday July 23, 2026 @05:06AM (#49018765)
> Why would you do this to your business?

Maybe they hired someone to get a website and they were sold this AI slop?

I've seen a lot of SMB in my area get terrible AI slop websites recently. After looking at the footer some "web agency" sold them. They claim to sell "hand crafted, no framework" websites, but it looks super terrible.

Re:Is The Economist Always Wrong? on Wednesday July 08, 2026 @03:32AM (#48828755)
I would love to, but no official Kindle publishing exists and at least the open thingys out there kinda suck. It's okay, but I don't like the formatting.

Maybe write a better Economist->Kindle transformation with Claude or something to make it better.

Matt Levine described it well (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-05-21/spa...)

> The deal, with SpaceX, is that Elon Musk runs it however he wants, and he does weird stuff, and you have to trust him, and if you don’t like it you can’t complain.

> When SpaceX acquired xAI a few months ago, did a special committee of independent directors approve the transaction? Did Musk recuse himself from negotiations? Was the price set by independent valuation experts using a rigorous process? Did outside shareholders sue to block the deal? Stop. Musk wanted SpaceX to buy xAI, so it did.

> [...] Surely SpaceX has created all that shareholder value more because Musk does what he wants than in spite of Musk doing what he wants; it is hard to accidentally create $1.75 trillion of value. SpaceX’s shareholders signed up for this deal — letting Musk cook — and have been rewarded;

These stores are a big thing in Portugal as well, but doesn't really seem to be a thing in Germany. Closest I guess would be Action [1].

[1]: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_Nederland

Yeah, Kalshi can't pay. 17 CFR § 40.11

> A registered entity shall not list for trading or accept for clearing on or through the registered entity any of the following:

> (1) An agreement, contract, transaction, or swap based upon an excluded commodity, as defined in Section 1a(19)(iv) of the Act, that *involves*, relates to, or references terrorism, *assassination*, war, gaming, or an activity that is unlawful under any State or Federal law.

Polymarket doesn't seem to care too much.

Makes it tempting to buy paid captcha solving just to enjoy life more
Re:AI is making me dumb on Thursday May 14, 2026 @06:22PM (#48142053)
> Yeah, there's the nice thoughts like "we wouldn't know how to maintain our app" -- but Claude would do a decent job in a single dev's hands, or "AI will potentially change the application unintentionally and introduce bugs" -- but proper observability, testing, and further prompting could fix those things in minutes to hours.

I was thinking about that the other day when I was automating a workflow: I hooked up Jira to Claude so that bug reports would automatically get a pull request. Opus 4.7 is pretty good at it. And compared to dev costs it's still quite cheap.

It's nice to not be distracted by simple bugs, but aren't I killing my own job?

Re:The Locals Don't Know on Monday May 11, 2026 @06:39AM (#48093258)
I'll be visiting next month so can't comment yet if it is any good, but kayaking Sydney Harbour sounds like a lot of fun.

Lots of tour operators doing it, deals on BookMe and Groupon.

Re: on Monday May 11, 2026 @03:22AM (#48092006)
> Runs against your regular Claude Code subscription (Max plan recommended) — unlike /ultrareview, which charges against your Extra Usage pool.

How expensive is it to run in your experience? In $ or tokens?

Re:Computer Says No on Tuesday March 03, 2026 @09:02AM (#47232457)
> This is a great insight. For software engineers coding is the way to fully grasp the business context.

> By programming, they learn how the system fits together, where the limits are, and what is possible. From there they can discover new possibilities, but also assess whether new ideas are feasible.

Maybe I have a different understanding of "business context", but I would argue the opposite. AI tools allow me to spend much more time on the business impact of features, think of edge cases, talk with stakeholders, talk with the project/product owners. Often there are features that stakeholders dismiss that seemed complex and difficult in the past, but are much easier now with faster coding.

Code was almost never the limiting factor before. It's the business that is the limit.

Re:Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn on Monday December 29, 2025 @09:34AM (#46421139)
Same in Germany and basically all of the EU.
Re:Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn on Monday December 29, 2025 @09:32AM (#46421123)
DB machines have been accepting all sorts of cards for a long time (Visa, AMEX, Discover). Local vending machines might vary though.
Re:Kidnapped by Deutsche Bahn on Monday December 29, 2025 @09:29AM (#46421095)
> They are forced to (at least try to) make a profit for their shareholders [...]

Not true. Shareholder primacy is not as huge as in Delaware.

And in the end it's the government that owns all shares and thus can decide how much profit the company should make.

> when seeing labels that talk about kWh/day

That's at least kinda reasonable. I'm always amused when I see TV energy labels that state

xx kWh/1000h

Re:Dark Patterns: Buying a Bahncard at Deutsche Bahn on Thursday October 09, 2025 @10:19AM (#45528079)
Can complain to your local MEP about that. They updated the passenger rights regulation recently, but still kept this/

Regulation (EU) 2021/782

> Railway undertakings may introduce a minimum threshold under which payments for compensation will not be paid. This threshold shall not exceed EUR 4 per ticket.

Sadly the MEPs cared more about railway companies than passengers.

Re:Dark Patterns: Buying a Bahncard at Deutsche Bahn on Thursday October 09, 2025 @10:16AM (#45528038)
> and can only be cancelled in small windows a long time before auto-renew

any examples?

> Amazon/Walmart

They are also in the advertising business. Walmart cleared $4 billion last year.

https://www.adexchanger.com/commerce/walmarts-ad-business-cl...

Re:Can you smuggle data in an ID card photo? on Tuesday May 06, 2025 @03:24AM (#43902578)
> In Germany there is a discussion

The discussion concluded with it being codified into law. How it's gonna work apparently is that the image will be stored E2E-encrypted in the cloud and at the photographer you'll get a barcode that contains the URL to the image and the key to decrypt it. To upload the image into the cloud, the photographer will need to use a secure ID card to sign in.

https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/BSI/Publikat...

Was kinda interested in building software for this, but it feels like you need to pay a lot of people for fancy audits.

Re:What If We Could Rebuild Kafka from Scratch? on Friday April 25, 2025 @01:57PM (#43796667)
> HaystackDB is accessed through a RESTful HTTPS API. No client library necessary.

That's cool, but but I would prefer to not reinvent the wheel. If you have a simple library, that would already be useful.

Some simple code or request examples would be convenient as well. I really don't know how easy or difficult your interface design is. It would be cool to see the API docs.

Re:Ryanair – when every page is a dark pattern on Friday July 19, 2024 @07:26AM (#41005125)
> Well yes, Ryanair itself put their flights on Amadeus

Pretty sure 99% of OTAs don't book Ryanair flights through Amadeus, but through screen scraping.

Re:Hertz to Sell 20k EVs in Shift Back to Gas-Powered Cars on Thursday January 11, 2024 @10:22AM (#38953397)
Rented a Polestar 2 multiple times from Hertz in the summer. It included both a home-charging cable and a charging fob.

The Hertz charging fob is quite expensive though, cheaper to signup to something like EnBW, which you can use for almost all charging stations [0].

Supercharger in Germany are almost all open to third-party cars as well, though not as cheap as EnBW.

[0]: https://www.enbw.com/elektromobilitaet/produkte/ladetarife

Re:I digitalized Berlin's registration form on Tuesday September 19, 2023 @08:01AM (#37568739)
> it is super duper easy to register a car online.

If you are in possession of the title of the car, yes.

However if you lease a car, the leasing company will just post the lease to the Zulassungsstelle so that you will not be in possession of the title at any time. So it will require you to go there in person.

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