jsankey

I see, I did misinterpret your point somewhat. The situation is still relevant to individual would be claimants, though. Even though Egypt and Sudan don't want to claim the region I don't think they're too keen on random third parties staking a claim either. You'd be surrounded unfriendly governments.

The reason Bir Tawil is unwanted is more subtle: claiming it would discredit a claim made to the more desirable neighbouring region: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hala%27ib_Triangle

Chilies are pretty simple to grow yourself, even just by using the seeds from a dried one. A happy plant produces lots of chilies and the freeze fine for most uses. They don't like the cold, though, so depending which part of Germany you're in you might need to keep it indoors (but still with access to a few hours of sun a day).

Exactly. It's analogous to the difference between big bang integration and continuous integration. The lesson there is: if something hurts, do it more often. Little steps let you know exactly what changed when something breaks.

Thanks for the reply Dean. It seems there is room to make this easier, although it can be hard to find and convince the market of that when there is something "good enough" out there. Hope you have some luck.

An idea, to take or leave: a very active niche for this kind of thing is parents of young children. Very young kids (babies/toddlers) in particular churn through a lot of "stuff" by growing out of it before it wears out. Parents are very active on a range of Facebook groups trading this stuff (though not usually for free, just cheap). In fact the groups are so active that I know people using them daily, and the biggest issue with offloading stuff is posting are lost in the noise. If you're looking for a nice to focus on this is a strong one.

Indeed, Freecycle have been operating in Australia for a long time. There are several other competitors too, the article doesn't make clear what Curbit's advantage/angle is. I'm all for the general idea and wish them well regardless, the amount of cheap stuff we buy and waste is astonishing.

The previous federal government in Australia introduced something along these lines: a carbon tax designed to be revenue-neutral. Compensation for lower income earners was worked into the income tax system (some also went directly to certain highly-exposed export industries).

Unfortunately thanks to incompetence in how this plan was sold by the previous government and an aggressive campaign against it by the opposition, that government lost the following election and now we have the worst of all worlds: carbon tax repealed (the only country going backwards in this regard AFAIK), compensation retained (the incoming government being too spineless to scrap it, despite themselves declaring a budget emergency) and a new braindead "direct action" policy where we now give tax dollars to polluters to encourage them to tone it down (stupidly inefficient and another hit to the budget).

You state things with conviction but no evidence. There is a big difference between the brain and therefore needs of a 4-5 year old and a 0-3 year old. I'm not sure why you assume you can infer anything about the needs of a toddler based on the way school works for older kids.

Here in Australia child care is also very expensive, and I agree this is a problem for disadvantaged families (there is some means-tested subsidisation but it only helps to a degree). However: the government has recently lowered the required educator:child ratios, despite the extra cost, because research shows it is important for education (and health, not just when young but into later life). More than this: the research suggests these improvements are most significant for disadvantaged kids.

For more info start here: http://archive.acecqa.gov.au/research-and-publications/.

It's not quite so simple. Many non-essential things are cheap (e.g. iOS games), and many essential things are expensive (e.g. housing, transport). The line between essential and luxury is also subjective. So you have to start categorising, and things get messy.

Nice straw man. I didn't even mention luxury tax, let alone promote it.

Certainly there are ways to mitigate the effect, I was just pointing out that the universality of a sales tax isn't all positive.

I took away something completely different. The OP gives herself permission to fail not because she doesn't want to put in the effort, or has any less desire to succeed.

The point is she doesn't want to be driven by fear. Fear is a powerful motivator but not necessarily a constructive one. Some people may find they lack drive without the fear of failure, but to me it seems the OP feels it more of a drag. Without the burden of fear she may feel more clarity and actually make better decisions, e.g. decisions that carry more personal risk but are better for the company/customers.

I don't think the GP was claiming it was more challenging. The point is making the tax flat doesn't help solve this key problem, so all you get is a less progressive system overall.

That's the problem, too -- it applies equally to necessities and luxuries. Sales taxes are regressive because there is a certain amount of non-discretionary spending everyone has to make, regardless of income, just to live.

But they were bootstrapped and very profitable for several years before taking any funding.

It takes less time to make 7 (or 3, or 12) perfect boiled eggs in a saucepan, it's trivial to do and to clean! I note your cooker also poaches eggs, though, which is much trickier in a pan (unless you have your own chooks, or a similarly fresh source of eggs).

I have a daughter approaching 18mo, so not that far ahead of you. Some thoughts:

* This is both more work and more fun than you can imagine :).

* Don't dumb things down too much. I noticed my daughter can often understand more than I "expect" at the time, so I take care not to e.g. simplify how I speak/teach too much (clarity and repetition is important, but they make leaps all the time so don't hold back too much).

* Lots of people will offer an opinion, myself included, but find your own way. Do what comes naturally (although I am not what you'd call a natural with babies, once I had one of my own it feels natural after all).

* If your partner is doing most of the care while you work (common for the Mums still these days) do not underestimate how hard/tiring it is for her! It is relentless work/focus that is much more tiring than a day in an office (despite also being full of fun!). Get home early to spend time with your baby and help with the evening routine.

* You will start to value sleep like never before. ;)

The single best thing we've done is split child care responsibilities evenly. After the first year (when my wife was off full time and breast feeding) we moved to 4 days of work each, with our respective weekdays off used to look after our daughter. This has made my bond with her a lot closer, and I have the experience/knowledge to split shared care time better with my wife (often there is one "default" parent who ends up doing too much work).

Many of these points are spot on. Thankfully 8 seems to have turned around for now; with such a small local market most tech companies are exporters and this has been crippling for many. There has also been an improvement in culture in the past 10 years, but it's a slow process.

Unfortunately the investment culture in Australia is a lot more risk averse. There are exceptions, but raising money for new tech here is much harder than it should be given the relative strength of our economy.

For bootstrapped companies of course this is less of an issue, the high cost of living and small local market are more of a problem. The beauty of software, though, is we can sell online into the large (and culturally-similar-enough) US market, which is where most of my customers have always been.

People making the argument that the pods are expensive are comparing them to the price of coffee per kilo. This totally misses the point by overlooking why people use pods: convenience. As you note to get a similar convenience level you need to pay someone else much more for a cup.

The business model is well-worn, just adapted to coffee. People are paying for the convenience. It's clear this isn't the cheapest way to make coffee at home, unless of course you value your time!

This is really interesting to me as I've just been solving the same ingredient parsing problem in my iOS app (Zest Recipe Manager) to implement smart shopping lists. Although I was tempted to use a statistical approach I opted to start with a more direct heuristic approach to see how far I could get (and to make sure I really understood the issues before trying a more generic solution).

The heuristic approach actually works pretty well, though with a significant amount of effort! A lot of ambiguities can be resolved with a custom algorithm of this kind. For shopping list support (where really the common cases matter most) the results are excellent. But there are ambiguities I have had to hack solutions to that would probably be better resolved via a probabilistic method. And there are cases where some actual NLP is required to properly detect extraneous descriptive phrases etc. I'm considering adding a statistical helper to my custom parser to take it to the next level.

The JetBrains suite of IDEs, all built on the same platform, support these and much more (Java, Python, Ruby, Scala, ...). With the exception of AppCode (for iOS) you can also get them all in the main release IDEA with relevant plugins.

That's what the I in IDE means: Integrated!

Your argument now amounts to "there will always be issues", which is correct but not useful. What matters is what those issues are, how important, and how severe at each point on the scale. We're now talking at such an abstract level that it's not really meaningful...

Yes it is, and if they get their way I believe it will be a disaster for both equality and long term growth here. They are aiming to move education and health to more of a user pays model (which makes no sense given the evidence worldwide) and continue their party's privatisation-by-stealth in both areas.

Fortunately they are not very competent and do not have full control of the parliament, so most of their bills have been blocked by minor parties.

Then how do you explain the low socio-economic mobility in the US?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socio-economic_mobility_in_the_...

The good news is everyone is getting richer (rising tide), the bad news is inequality is increasing and low mobility is nothing to be proud of. Like logicchains I'm Aussie and we fare better at the moment, though we're also starting to head in the wrong direction by these measures.

The post you responded to pointed to a problem with capitalism, but it hardly follows that this means they'd advocate for communism. More rationally you might suppose that there is some other way to curb failures of capitalism without jumping to other extreme. It is a scale, yes, but there is no reason to expect the best solution is at either end.

Let alone the fact that we are only talking about economic freedom now, which is only one of many interacting facets of politics that can't really be isolated.

False dichotomy. Communism (or whatever approximations of it we've seen) isn't the only alternative.

The inherent problem in any case is concentration of power, whether it be in the state or in megacorps.

As another datapoint from someone in your target market: cinder evokes burnt for me. Glowing coals aren't typically "gently" warm, for that matter (if I'm thinking charcoal or wood fire, I'm thinking awesome for cooking but high heat).

It could be cultural, I'm coming from an Australian perspective.