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nagi2k4

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I use a MBP at work and just bought a Surface Book 2 to use for side projects. It's everything I want a MBP to be, good battery life (you can go almost a full day on a single charge), a touch screen that works exceedingly well, and function keys that are...keys. Using the stylus also changes your workflow, instead of screen shotting, opening in preview, and annotating, you just kind of draw on the screen and share the image.

Only major downside I've run into is that there do not seem to be any native terminals for Windows that even come close to rivaling iTerm 2. Cmdr is decent, but has some weirdness around colors and ligatures; Hyper is also decent, but has some rough edges. Suspect that'll change as more devs start needing decent *nix environments to develop on.

Something worth noting is that FATCA essentially makes it impossible for an institution to remain "FATCA compliant" if they have any financial relationship with a non-compliant entity. Sure, they can have such relationships, but the U.S. Treasury department can then impose a 30% penalty on any transaction that passes through a U.S. bank. Given that the vast majority of international payments are made in USD, that 30% penalty is going to be very painful for any bank that purposefully decides to be non-compliant.

The end result of that will be that the global financial system is going to be bifurcated into "compliant" and "non-compliant" institutions. Believe me, most banks/insurance companies/financial entities will find it worth their while to eventually become compliant.

The reason that more countries aren't complaining about this (and most are actually entering into bilateral enforcement agreements with the U.S. Treasury department) is that they'll then be able to get access to the same sorts of information on their own citizens that the U.S. is getting on their own as a result of FATCA.