r3un1

There is! `expect()`

If I get GP's argument, a more appropriate analogy would be that some life jackets are filled with lead and you can't necessarily tell them apart. That is to say, presenting yourself to the external world carries an inherent risk as well as the potential for reward.

I think that DeepMind being an Alphabet company makes this even worse. My first reaction was to read the blog post to see if there is a (go related) reason for the name choice.

I'm afraid that you are comparing apples and Walmart.

Unicode is a standard for encoding characters. ISO is an organisation that _creates_ standards for just about anything.

Unicode became a standard as a result of beating other competing standardisations. ISO declares that whatever they came up with is the standard, no competition required. Hence the effectiveness of the business model.

I think the idea is that a lot of the perceived instability in the economy is _caused_ or at least much amplified by the nature of stock markets. Changing how one thinks about stocks and what the ideal of a "healthy" company looks like might alleviate some of these problems.

Security through obscurity has different merits depending on the context.

In software, it is a really bad idea to hope that your code is so obscure that no attacker will find a security flaw.

IRL, on the other hand, unknown positions of assets are often critical (the uncertainty whether you know about all the adversary's nuclear silos being a huge part of the nuclear deterrence policy). There is just so much resources you can throw at discovering underground pipelines.

It is true that there is a lot of diversity in local payment methods, but you can easily cover most of your potential customers by simply offering credit/debit card, bank transfer and paypal options. It's more than enough to get you started.

As for the supposed insane amount of regulation, the majority of international trade is regulated at the EU level so it's quite unified. Not to mention e-commerce which is completely regulated by the EU.

I am not saying that there is not a considerable amount of particularity that may be hindering small startups in fast expansion across Europe but I would find it quite hard to believe that it is much of a factor for the likes of Apple and Amazon.

Well you kind of have that. It's called the central bank (Federal Reserve Bank in the U.S. case) that processes bank account transfers without any restrictions that would go against the First Amendment. The extra stuff that you get with private companies such as Visa, MasterCard and PayPal is just that -- extra.