privateprofile

I have the opposite experience, where Oracle would allow/offer discounts up to 80% of their price list, making the actual list pretty much useless...

I find it strange that no one mentions London, property prices have soared in the past 20 years [1] with money laundering playing a key role [2][3][4][5].

Nowadays, football clubs appear to be a better option, as they allow easy laundering of billions instead of millions...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/property-prices/london/

[2] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/london-prope...

[3] https://money.cnn.com/2015/07/28/news/london-real-estate-mon...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/may/20/uk-foreign-...

[5] https://www.newsweek.com/how-russians-launder-stolen-money-r...

It's also blocked by default by uBlock Origin, fortunately.

I think it has (sadly) become common for people/companies to adopt software just/mostly because it came from Twitter/FAANG or whatever company that is high on hype...

> Are you comfortable with that single client of your employer having a strong incentive to make your job redundant so they can try to hire you under worse terms (as you suddenly lost your job)?

I understand what you mean, and that situation doesn't seem desirable either, but I think that that is very uncommon when compared to companies trying to retain/squeeze employees using contracts with employment restrictions.

> I'm amazed that the contract Star Theory had with Take-Two didn't have a clause prohibiting Take-Two from poaching employees like this.

I'm amazed that people sign contracts accepting this kind of restrictions to their lives.

That's (fortunately) illegal in the EU country I live in, as it creates artificial barriers in the job "market", i.e. it is illegal to limit people's access to work. Still, cartel practices like not hiring from "friendly companies" abound.

> If I hire a consultancy company to build something for me, would I normally be able to directly hire the employees who did the work?

I see contracts imposing restrictions like this all the time where I live, and people sadly just nod and accept, but these clauses never hold up in court as no company has a right to decide where people can or can't work.

Having worked as a consultant, I'm repulsed by the idea that I'd need my company's permission to leave and go work for a client. Especially because the provision stinks of "cheaper than actually investing in people retention". If the issue is intellectual property transfer, that's what an NDA is for.

Israel has mandatory service for women and men, and has presently one of the most advanced armed forces.

I'm moving away from gmail in favour of protonmail, so far I've experienced no issues.

I've emailed my contacts informing of the switch, and I'm passively migrating important accounts/services; in fact, this forced me to consider which services are actually important and worth receiving e-mail from. If I go a couple of months without getting e-mails from some service and nothing bad comes from it, then I probably won't ever read it anyway and it's not important.

As soon as their mobile app is better, I'll likely switch to their paid service, although a private calendar and a corresponding quality app would make the 5€/month seem like better value for money.

> Some will proclaim "But they'll owe China! That won't end well!"

That's being "proclaimed" in that case because there's increasing and obvious evidence of that country's government using debt being to control governments, political decisions and societies:

- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/25/world/asia/china-sri-lank...

- https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/02/re...

- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-16/are-china-cheap-loans...

- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2018/...

- https://qz.com/1223768/china-debt-trap-these-eight-countries...

Any guesses to why aren't Super Micro or other affected parties taking legal action, if it was a hoax like what's reported in this case?

And was there any legal action from Super Micro or other affected parties, like in this case?

Which companies were taken over illegally by organized groups in Australia?

Because the OP's list was likely referring to a very different reality than what you imagine: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jun/24/russia.interna...

Not sure if Linux excels on this globally, but I have an elderly relative doing all their email, web browsing and basic docs on a 2003 IBM Thinkpad running Lubuntu 16.04, with basically zero issues. Everything, including the old ATI X300 graphics card, worked out of the box.

I also have a younger relative using a 2008 Dell d630 for all his schoolwork, running Ubuntu 16.04. Again, the old Nvidia Quadro worked out of the box.

Not sure if your comment is trolling or just due to ignorance, but https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Magnitsky

Quite likely, the US got a few billionaires that are now a bit richer at the taxpayers' expense.

US General Smedley Butler explained it in simple terms in "War is a Racket" [1]:

"War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. That many admitted their huge blood gains in their income tax returns. How many other war millionaires falsified their income tax returns no one knows.

How many of these war millionaires shouldered a rifle? How many of them dug a trench? How many of them knew what it meant to go hungry in a rat-infested dugout? How many of them spent sleepless, frightened nights, ducking shells and shrapnel and machine gun bullets? How many of them parried the bayonet thrust of an enemy? How many of them were wounded or killed in battle? "

[1] https://gutenberg.ca/ebooks/butlersd-warisaracket/butlersd-w...

Could you expand on why you, if I understood correctly, distrust CyberGhost?

It's getting hard to identify a trustworthy VPN provider, and CyberGhost seems to rate decently on thatoneprivacysite.net; in which, incidentally, I'm unsure whether to trust, although its VPN evaluation vectors do seem pretty appropriate and complete.

They delivered value to the business. That's the only thing that matters.

Except this is an engineering blog post, so the engineering part actually matters.

And, as demonstrated in the article [1] linked around this discussion, there were better engineering approaches that would have been even "better for business", as being more efficient means lower costs per transaction and/or higher throughput.

[1] https://medium.com/@buckhx/unwinding-uber-s-most-efficient-s...

> Losing money per transaction is dangerous.

Is that not just a form of dumping, and should therefore be illegal/regulated?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)

A story of people who view art as a trophy, or as an ultimate symbol of wealth?

Similar to what they do with/in Tibet: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-16689779

"ETL developer" was (and still is) the industry term for more than 10 years before this new wave of buzzword spam came along (i.e. when "data science" was "data mining"). Most of these roles focused on using low-code tools like SSIS to build business-focused data transformation workflows faster than with any code intensive approach (e.g. Hadoop ecosystem and derivatives).

Business intelligence consultant/developer was a blanket term used either for 1) people that can model and translate business requirements into data platforms/components; 2) poorly targeted recruiting; 3) more rarely, to describe people that work both in 'frontend' (reporting and dashboarding using tools like PowerBI, who are "data analysts" in newspeak) and 'backend' (ETL developer).

"Data Engineer" today is, sadly, too often synonym with "solving solved problems using an unnecessarily complex approach and toolkit"; and then there are the cases where the volume or complexity of the data actually justifies the cost of using "big data" platforms. Not to sound harsh; the article discussed here illustrates my point using "simple" unix tools: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14401399

For anyone interested in this destructive industry, here's an interesting report: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/aug/30/how-the-us-frac...

That's false. Tor Browser actually advises the user to keep the window at the default size to avoid it being used as a fingerprinting vector.

> That's like saying social media shouldn't be allowed to compete with traditional news media.

Social media companies could be allowed to compete with traditional news media, if they were obliged to abide by the same standards, principles and legal regulations that apply to traditional news media companies.

In most EU countries, any newspaper spreading the kind of garbage you see on Facebook could (and probably would) be called to a public hearing in parliament and risk being shut down, and further legal action, if it was proven that it was publishing stories without doing proper due diligence.

"From the very beginning, Zuckerberg has shown a pattern of deflecting and discarding things and people that don’t conform to his worldview or his ambition. In the same way that Zuckerberg discarded people like the Winklevoss twins and Eduardo Saverin in his quest to launch his revolution, he’s endeavored to shake off our fears about attacks on privacy and mishandled data. When we discover that our private information isn’t actually private, we feel betrayed.

And that’s why I believe I was right about Mark Zuckerberg—and why every one of us knows a little bit what it feels like to be a Winklevoss."

It does not seem to me that governments will spend assets better than the best of the wealthy elite, just move it to someone that is much more unaccountable.

It seems to me that history shows that a wealthy "elite" will spend assets in order to, directly or indirectly, increase its own wealth; and will do this without answering to anyone, many times not even the Law.

Whereas a democratically elected government will/should spend assets to increase its society/voters' wealth, and answers to its voters regarding how their money is spent. What's tough about this system is that it requires voters and taxpayers to be active in monitoring their government.

I absolutely agree. Essentially, corporations with huge revenue streams get major tax advantages that are not available to local companies in exchange for "creating jobs".

It turns out that each of those jobs is so costly to taxpayers that the only real benefit is for the politicians that announce the "partnerships" (and the receiving company, obviously).

Here's a couple of interesting articles on the matter:

- https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/02/us/how-local-taxpayers-ba...

- https://www.theguardian.com/cities/ng-interactive/2018/jul/0...

That, and the fact that the government has decided to keep giving away EU visas to people from geographies that are notorious for corruption (e.g. Brasil, Angola, China) in exchange for meager (500K€) real estate "investments" [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/18/portugal-golde...

Gentrification, mass tourism and special privilege for some people that can afford to buy entire buildings are causing major social issues: - https://www.euronews.com/2017/09/19/lisbon-s-tourism-magnet-... - http://www.theportugalnews.com/news/president-promulgates-te...

People using words like "prosperity" either don't live here, or especially don't work for a living here...

Even before that (in 1953) they seem to have been directly responsible for the trouble they're now getting from Iran, by deposing a democratically elected government and installing a friendly puppet (to whom they supplied the nuclear technology that is now frowned upon) that quickly got overturned by the current regime: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Operation_ajax