inflagranti

You mean like this: https://www.trtworld.com/life/breakthrough-nerve-stimulation...

But he's also a middle-aged white guy, so surely that's a wash?

Hope that illustrated the silliness of this line of argument.

At least in the UK the vaccine passports are made available through the NHS App, and stored AFAIK the same way any other health information on your person is stored already. At least they show up the same way like all other healthcare appointments, prescription s, etc. The only unique things are the QR codes to "export" that information - the validity of this is not checked against a (separate) database to my knowledge.

Other countries that have nationwide systems should have been able to do something similar - of course there's a good chance they didn't, but that's really not an argument against Covid passports but against bad security practices.

My impression was rather it's consensus that the vaccine provides more predictable immunity, which is the most important thing if you want to set policy. So recommendation in most countries I checked is to get the vaccine, even if you had Covid, cause it's the same dose for each patient and we have much better data on efficacy, whereas immunity from infection is much less predictable and traceable.

I'm pretty sure Samsung is leader in sales, maybe second when it comes to profit though.

In any case, issue with Tesla is that's it's priced to just not be the leader, but the whole car market and then some.

If there are already trends that other car manufacturers area outselling Tesla, clearly trajectory is not towards even market lead.

For how long though? In my personal experience only one out of 5 people from Western Europe are still in US after 4 years, the rest moved back home.

Except salaries in London are not at all competitive with US especially if you factor in cost of living, unless you get into Fintech.

How was the UK gov blocked from running trains? From what I read some lines actually did get nationalized again after how poorly Virgin & co run some of the lines.

For sure privatizing them in the first place was a pure UK decision with - IMHO - predictable outcome.

The difference is that direct democracy doesn't scale.

I hear that every time Switzerland is mentioned. I've yet to see a strong argument to suggest why it wouldn't scale in this day and age.

What I think doesn't scale is centralized systems like France, where all money flows to Paris and rarely any back. Switzerland on the other hand is extremely federated, to the point each canton, often smaller than average cities, have their own school system. Most tax money stays on the local level and didn't go to Bern. This independence IMHO is the critical factor for scaling that would work for moch larger countries.

As to the homogeneity: US has one language any natively born American speaks. Switzerland has 3, with a considerable political divide between the French and German spanking areas. Finally Switzerland has 20% Foreigners vs 10% in US. So again I would very much challenge you there.

Did I miss it or was there no mention of companies like Transferwise at all?

From a laypersons perspective this seems exactly how the "private sector stepped in" to fix the problem, with a solution that's actually out there and working well, without the need for blockchain or other form of digital currencies.

That seems to me still too conservative. What about Transferwise, which actually offer easy and cheap cross-border, multi-currency transfers right now?

And both Switzerland and Norway have a wealth tax.

This is the commonly assumed tension but I think it's a slightly false dichotomy.

The choices are not just between concentrating an obscene amount of money with individuals vs concentrating an obscene amount of money with a handful of bureaucrats.

Why have a system that allows so much money to be concentrated with any kind of entity in the first place and put everyone else at the mercy of their philanthropy? MHO handing all that money to the government instead of a billionaire class is just changing from private trickle-down economics to nationalised ones.

As soon as your having someone deal with billions of dollars a couple thousands become a rounding error and your local concerns become benign, small picture issue. But for you having that 3000 available to finally fix that pothole on your street is critical.

Worker co-ops, taxes on municipal level and wealth taxes might be ways to prevent extreme concentration with any entity.

This can very easily be solved by making it inflation adjusted (i.e. the value increases with inflation every year). This happens for instance with many social contributions in Switzerland and is IMHO the only reasonably way to set such value.

The word "cowardly" seems completely inappropriate here. First off, the second crash clearly was only harmless by pure chance, it could have easily killed someone - would you have written the same in such case? Secondly, how many other countries' national postal services are even running experiments like this at all? And above a major metropolitan city nonetheless! This is exactly the right reaction, temporarily suspend in the name of safety, address the issue, and then resume.

I think the point of disagreement regarding the "link" is not that there is none, but that it seemed to be nothing peculiar about facial recognition.

If Apple sent a security camera picture of the robber together with information from the stolen ID to police, and police the same would have happened. So the core issue here is that the validity of the ID was never questioned, not the use of facial recognition. That might just have amplified / accelerated the identification of the wrong person.

From my understanding the Switzerland negotiated clause re Romania and other late joiners was timebound, which is why it was acceptable.

English speaking country, stable and predictable legal framework, cosmopolitan city.

English speaking being the only real differentiator here and probably the most critical reason. However that only goes so far. And what for sure has changed is that we're down from 20+ currencies before to one huge single market with mostly the same currency.

How that all factors in is impossible to say, but to argue that nothing has/will change seems equally unrealistic as the over-the top reporting of the media suggesting the UK banking sector will collapse. Things will go on, but my bet would be there will be a considerable hit.

So you're happy to have no PC to access Hacker News, for sure no Smartphone, not even a "dumb" mobile phone. No YouTube, Netflix, Amazon. Yes things worked back then but I doubt many people would want to roll back all technical progress since then. Brexit is the legal equivalent to that and any deal IMHO can merely be an attempt in damage limitation at least for the foreseeable future.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

Ironically, your single statement was actually "nonsense on all accounts" as Theranos definitely was valued multiple billions at some point.

Wasn't Theranos multibillion valued at some point? Not trying to imply anything about Stripe being fraudulent, just evoking an extreme example of clear overvaluation to put such numbers into perspective. Stripe might also very well not have made much sense for Irish banks and a lot for US ones. Time will tell whether that was a mistake.

Here's a classic German one where a group of comedians pretend to be the 'most disgusting' Finish band, singing Finish gibberish mixed in with mostly proper English and some random German words like 'Müntefering' (a German politician) to round it all up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWYHfjMIY8w

The brilliance is they record a whole music video just for an elaborate prank on the poor presenter by playing this supposedly Finish superstars acting extremly obnoxiously and drinking beer in the studio...

Is this the average doctor or some specialist? The fact that some specialists can hugely profit from the system the same way the hospitals, pharma companies and insurance do, is likely port of the point of the previous comment. The important takeway is the average doctor does likely also not see much of that overhead money that goes to the pockets of a couple individuals and already rich companies.

Why does this get nowhere the attention than the initial piece? Is it that the mob has made up it's mind and cannot be tamed anymore at this point?

It looks from the other side of the story (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1s3ymjWo7lQJxsrf0uDEurJZ3FBe...) you were totally right and really do not deserve those downvotes. But the mob has spoken.

That's an extremely limited and dare I say outdated view of what constitutes a friend. One of my best friends I only see irregularly once a year at best, sometimes not for years, yet we always get on great when we see each other. That to me is a great friendship, that you know you'll always get along. I don't think it's your place to decide who someone views as a friend and how their relationship should look like.

OP clearly states he met the person online and they communicate online and that might involve irregular but deep, friendly exchanges and meeting up once in a while. I.e. exactly a kind of communication Facebook is supposed to facilitate, yet it completely failed him here which is absolutely valid to criticize and call out.

There are similar shady companies in Germany that try individual scams surrounding phantom bills, sometimes for phantom services, but it generally stops at that company and selling dept is not a thing. Most countries also don't have central credit scoring entities like Equifax which scare people into avoiding bad credit history and more likely to just pay.

Or you delegate to people who can? Or at the very least don't change anything you don't understand!? The root cause of course is the MBA type without the technical background being put in charge of engineering teams in the first place.

I rather have to convince my bank I'm me as they have much higher security standards generally than the phone companies so less chance of someone else convincing them they are me.

Well whatever the exact impact it can't be that the police can't be bothered to validate the main evidence trail. Or not type shit by hand that is electronic in nature in the first place for crying out loud! There's just no excuse for such mistakes. What if they raid a wrong house because someone put in the GPS coordinates wrong!?