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unity1001

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You didn't even use the word "BASED".

What?!

The common law derives from the medieval !Anglosaxon! feudal law, which is based on contracts, agreements, negotiations and precedents

This is the !very first! statement of the opening paragraph of my comment. Why are you saying that I have not said it. Have you not read the actual comment?

Why would they exist conceptually if they're not relied upon?

Why would they be relied upon if they exist, even further, why would they be the basis of the actual law?

In civil law, the law always supersedes anything else, including any agreement that any party makes among themselves. The agreements, contracts that parties makes in between themselves cannot affect the law and its decrees in any way, and actually any contract itself must be made precisely as how the law outlines them to be made and what permits them to have. To put it in historic terms, in civil law contracts exist because the law says they can exist and tells precisely how will they exist and to what extent, whereas in common law the contractual agreements that the parties made among themselves all the way going back to Magna Carta are the basis of the entire body of law - with Magna Carta being a contractual agreement in itself.

...

Also, regarding the below comment of yours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36205790

I will respond to that comment here because HN rate limits me, making any productive discussion totally infeasible, which is why I almost totally stopped participating on this platform. Seeing how it makes actual discussions impossible, I should altogether stop participating here. But here goes the reply:

the paper probably isn't what you were hoping for.

The term exists, its an important term in history, political science, diplomacy for a very long while, the very Cambridge university uses it itself. At this point you should be aware that even you would be able to find many references using the term. So dont sweat it. The rest of the world is not going to stop using it just because you people have a beef with some country that uses it.

...

At this point, seeing that you have claimed that I said various things I have not said and also claimed that I didnt say things that are the very first things that I said, I have no other option but to conclude that you are an insincere debater. Which concludes our discussion since I will spare both of us of a potential unproductive discussion by disengaging...

That's neat, the dead are welcome to their opinions. That doesn't change where or why it's used primarily by certain parties in their English facing media.

How does this justify removing an actual historic term from the vocabulary.

But it clearly has a different meaning in English.

It doesnt:

I'll admit error if you can find a source, that's not Russian

It amazes me how someone that claims any insight in the matters of law can ask for 'sources' for such a thing. It just feels crazy. Here you go:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24517581

Its not about the law, its not about the history, its the actual term used in an Anglosaxon source about how French saw the !rise of Anglosaxons! in 20th century.

This paper of the actual university of Cambridge is actually named "The Rise of the Anglo-Saxon: French Perceptions of the Anglo-American World in the Long Twentieth Century". It is the Anglosaxons using the actual scientific term to refer to the actual historic and political science concept.

The problem is I'm having a hard time finding one on my own.

Thats amazing now. The above was the first google result for me, an avid student of history. You were unable to find anything maybe its because you dont have much interest in that direction. Or, more likely, you were totally inundated with the actual propaganda war that very Anglosaxon establishment is waging against the actual historic term just because its current enemy used it to describe, well, itself...

Contracts apparently don't exist in civil law

This does sound like insincere debate. Where does in my comments it says that contracts dont exist in civil law. It says civil law is not BASED on contracts, agreeements and precedents. The common law is.

And no, the complications that are so beautifully and 'respectably' named in the common law dont exist in civil law. The law is always clear - if something is not covered by an immediate law, it is covered by a broader law that affects those cases.

Nowhere in my comment it says that criminals in other countries do not lie. Or the admission of guild is not considered evidence. It clearly outlines the differences in the legal systems and how the competent criminals navigate the former. If Binance people had any experience, they would be talking by using well rounded and vague words even among each other like how any exec in the US does, and they would avoid providing any such evidence. Moreover, they would easily be able to claim ignorance and deny any wrongdoing.

I recommend you read my comment again.

Long standing in what circles?

Long standing in history, long standing in diplomacy, long standing in actual freaking Louis XIV administration communique, long standing in practically everything.

No offense but just because you people have a beef with Russia at the moment and they are using the term, the rest of the world is not going to change how they speak so that you dont get offended.

I don't think I've seen an authoritative source elsewhere use it

Obviously you are not a student of history.

Ignoring the "Anglosaxon" buzzword

The 'Anglosaxon' term is a long-standing political science, history and diplomacy term. Its not something that can be ignored, especially because...

none of this is unique conceptually to US law

... it is.

The common law derives from the medieval !Anglosaxon! feudal law, which is based on contracts, agreements, negotiations and precedents. It can be 'interpreted' by the judge, who takes on the role of the feudal lord of the earlier times, and he or she can 'interpret' the law or precedents. The persecution or the defendant can negotiate any outcome. This trait of the common law system causes all the parties to open the 'bargain' from the maximum bets that they can imagine, assuming that it will be 'negotiated down' eventually. Which obligates the need for lying and denying that was mentioned earlier - if you deny any kind of wrongdoing even when caught red handed, you have a better chance of negotiating something better than if you were honest. The only sizable countries that use this law system are the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and NZ if you count as sizable. Along with a number of smaller island states.

The ENTIRE rest of the world uses the civil law system that descended from the Napoleonic law, which descended in turn from the French Revolutionary principles. It does not rely on agreements, contracts, negotiations or precedents. It cannot be 'interpreted' The law is made by the democratic parliamentary authority and it clearly outlines crimes and punishments and there can be no negotiation made. Even the reductions in sentencing or the modifications that can be done to the final decision on anything are clearly outlined. Including the benefits that confessing a crime brings. Whereas lying is penalized further. There is no 'negotiation' that can be done in any way. That is why civil law encourages confessions and telling the truth in contrast to the common law which allows you to negotiate.

Which is also the reason why the lawyers get upper middle class salaries and income in entire rest of the world but make obscene, irrational income in the US - when the legal system allows outrageous decisions, reparations, sentences that can only be negotiated through professional lying, posturing, playing down or up, personal relations in between the lawyers, prosecutors and judges, it encourages the mess that one can see in the US to happen.

In Europe, judges and lawyers and prosecutors function more like clerks - the law is clear and solid. The rewards and punishments are the same. Has someone done what he or she shouldnt have done? Yes. What is the penalty for this? This particular thing. That is applied. There is no 'negotiation' anywhere in the process.

This difference not only makes the Anglosaxon legal system quite different from entire rest of the world, but it also causes the social, economic and political life in the Angloamerican world and the rest of the world to be very different. A corporation can get away with destroying the environment or killing hundreds of thousands people with their product or the new drug. Even if they know beforehand what will happen and start to repress information and bribe experts to lie on their behalf to sell their product. Because, when they get caught, what will happen will be an eventual negotiation. In the rest of the world that does not happen - there is no way to negotiate down any sentence that may befall on your corporation, but most importantly, you, the perpetrator...

Thank goodness that criminals aren't very smart

No, the criminals are extremely smart. Its just that these were amateurs who didnt know that in Anglosaxon common law, you have to avoid being honest about anything and even deny any wrongdoing even if you get caught the act of murdering someone. Then you can exercise plausible deniability, claim incompetence or mental incapacity and you can negotiate your sentence. Any kind of honesty works against you in the US law as a result. That's how you end up with people who are total experts in their field testifying in courts that they "didnt know" that something they did would cause so much harm to something or somebody or the society.

As of this very moment, thousands of much, much bigger corporations are actually destroying the entire US society in a real way and not like these amateurs who were just shuffling some funny money. But the real psychos know how common law works. There wont be any trail of their wrongdoing, and when there is, there will always be plausible deniability in that trail...

And it wont work until California can stop what is called 'The Greyhound Express'. That's what some people in other states call the practice that some states have - offering their homeless a one way ticket to California or jail. They export their problem to California, and they criticize California for it.

Concentration also causes less energy to be sent to the digestive system because the energy gets diverted to the brain. Concentration is an evolutionary 'fight or flight' adaptation. Therefore when you are highly concentrating, its possible that your digestion gets impaired. Couple this with shallow breathing, then you would have even less energy available for digestion.

Which causes the food to be badly digested, leading to gas and even various syndromes that cause irritation & inflammation in the intestines and even the body in general. Because when a non-digested piece of food enters the intestines, the body can easily trigger the immune responses of the body, thinking that 'a foreign substance has entered the digestive system' (which is natural). This kind of digestive problems, IBS etc seem to be common in tech circles.

Gaming laptops are terrible and a bad deal... They will. Either cheaper or better performance for same price.

I found them pretty competent. An Asus ROG G17 easily gives at least ~80% performance of what the components would give if they were in a desktop. (RTX 3070, Ryzen 9). And does it with almost ~50% less power consumption...

Depends. A lot of techies still use Windows (AMD or Intel, depending), including in Europe where the purchasing power is higher. Apple people seem to be a certain subsegment of computer users even in Europe, and they may not necessarily constitute the large part of any significant engineering segment anywhere - unlike the US, where Apple usage is quite high in certain subsegments among the technical people.

Normal people around here (W Europe) dont even know about 'Windows'. They know about their 'computer'. And 'the Internet', which is actually the web browser in their laptop. These are not uneducated dumb people either. Any normal, non-techie person, including other white collar professionals. They mostly know about various software that is heavily used in business though - Excel, Word, Powerpoint etc. Or SAP etc, if they are more specialized professionals.

...

What Im thinking is that the reduction in demand of computers and laptops is because existing hardware has developed quite beyond the needs of the majority of users. An average, 75%ile gaming laptop that comes in for ~1500-1700 euros these days, is capable of running most AAA games with good quality visuals and performance. They are capable of running any game from the last decade and earlier. And they are as cheap as an equivalent desktop - which may or may not bring any visible performance and quality improvement. This is the most taxing application that the majority uses and other stuff like business software are in no way anything demanding compared to these, so why someone who bought a new laptop 2-3 years ago need another one today...

This could only change with a new paradigm like consumer-grade, locally installed AI applications or virtual reality bumping up the hardware requirements. Or, through (probably soon to be illegal) planned obsolescence.

Climate is not the air that you have inside your refrigerator. Its a system. If one part of it changes, the other parts will change in different ways to keep the system stable. So something cooling off somewhere does not mean that it will also cool where you are. It may rain more, it may be dryer, it may be much more hot, it may not have any effect or any combination of all of that may happen.

Climate change is basically pulling the levers in a slot machine. Better not to pull the lever at all.

What? You seem to think that offshoring/outsourcing => only hiring an external company to do the work. It isnt. Companies have been setting up local subsidiaries in offshoring countries to hire local talent there and offshore the work to their own subsidiaries. It didnt bring down salaries. Neither did contracting out dev work to external companies overseas.

Your qualitative data refutes your own argument: Leaving aside that you are using the average wages as a comparison, so that the wages of the guy in Sao Paulo or Bogota cannot be directly compared to - holy hell - the salary of a guy in San Fran, the numbers outright say that there isnt so much difference in between sending a job to Toronto vs sending it to some underutilized American state. To boot, the Midwest is not the only American region and the midwest is not so poor in technology sector, especially Texas. And amazingly, populated and highly talent-rich India is missing from that list, a top outsourcing location, and instead a random Bogota is in. Why not pick Aleut Islands - the average pay of a dev there would be much, much lower there due to the scarce presence of devs.

So who do you think that you will employ in Bogota and how many of them are there? All the top-tier talent that those countries have historically been producing before was flowing into places like San Fran or other tech hubs as immigrants. You think that if the kind of remote work offshoring that you imagine happens, you will be able to grab ~200,000 people from top talent tier in those countries? A number way above the population of many cities of those countries?

No. In such a situation, either the top immigrant talent now in SF will flow back to their homeland, still not reducing the price of the talent in those countries because there is no way in hell the education systems of those countries can churn out hundreds of thousands of tech graduates a year. So basically its another case of relocation of talent - this time, the immigrant talent goes back to their own countries to work for the same companies from there just like the American talent goes back to another US state to work for the same companies from there.

Take India as an example instead - a country that can actually educate that much talent and already has a large tech sector that is not only advanced but segments of it were actually geared to do the very specific thing that you are prophesizing doom about - getting the outsourced jobs of richer countries.

Did that change anything? Has the average pay in SF constantly increased over the last 2 decades or not? Has India been able to get American companies to outsource all development jobs?

...

Long story short, you are prophesizing doom about something that was already prophesized to happen, and just did not. Its not that American companies were not able to outsource to Bogota or Trinidad or Tobago before. They were. And it did not change anything. It seems like the already present reality of remote work stayed outside your radar for whatsover reason. But it existed, and it did not cause doom.

Tell that to my American colleagues who were by and large replaced by foreign colleagues in the last year.

$300k/year salaries and positions in SF may suffer until remote work brings down cost of living in the hellish real estate landscape and general prices, there is no doubt about it.

However I doubt that the loss of such positions are related to remote work - all the layoffs that we saw in the past year has been due to the companies trying to shore up stock prices due to the loss of the zero interest economy. Its not like they laid off 200,000 people and then hired 200,000 remote offshore devs in their place...

Because it is a non-factor:

Moving to a cheaper location allows them to cut a major % of the salary requirement due to living costs. Companies are already saving billions by creating satellite offices in cheaper states and providing remote work in that state or region - some even without requiring any days in the office.

When the salary requirement is reduced by cutting out the cost of living like that, what ends up being the salary minimum is not so much different from what the overseas dev would want. Its not like top talent in that country will work for the American companies for dimes so that American shareholders can have a payday. You either pay that dev something that will make it worth for him to not go for a major local company and lose the social status and perks associated with it (very important in many local cultures), or he will just take a more traditional career route and work for the local giants.

And its not like sloppy copy-paste work from juniors who accept $10-15/hour when they start their career was not available before. If any company that is worth its salt was not able to run a major tech business with such juniors before, they wont be able to run it now either.

Therefore what remote work in the US hurts is basically the outrageous real estate sector and its margins. Which is why they put pressure on companies for RTO through the politicians it backs...

It hasn't really been a reality the way it is today

Holy hell you seem to be spamming this around.

It may not have been a reality for you and the company that you work for. It has been a reality for a lot of people and none of the 'new factors' that you used in your comments to argue that 'this time it is different' are actually new. There isnt anything new about this remote work. A lot of companies were already doing it way before, including outsourcing overseas. The new situation and trends do not change that - in fact, it makes it easier for American devs to compete by avoiding living in expensive metropolises like SF and NY. Which is helpful to those who live in such metropolises too since it would put a downward pressure on the price of everything there. Something which the real estate sector would definitely hate, I gather. Hence the pressure on the major corporations regarding RTO from that industry and the politicians they back...

[remote work] hasn't really been a reality the way it is today. During covid, we were forced to implement norms and tools for remote working (like Zoom).

Sorry to break it to you, but those tools were around and the companies that were outsourcing were already using them heavily way before. So that's not a factor for anything being different either.

If remote work is established properly, then your remote job will end instantly and will be shipped to Canada or Latin America (if bosses care about timezones) or to Eastern Europe or India

That was already happening. Remote work doesnt change anything with that.

Moreover, dont think that the senior dev in those other places will work for American companies for dimes like that. They will want the equivalent of top dollar in their country and that ends up being closer to the cost of the remote American dev when the obscene real estate/housing costs and general cost of living in places like SF or NY are removed from the equation. If you dont give that remote overseas dev the competitive rate in his/her country, he will either go with someone who does or he will just follow the traditional, more respectable career track in his country - like moving to manager positions in a respectable local corporation or launching his own business.

And if the American company goes for junior devs who are actually willing to be working for dimes when they start, they will get sloppy jobs like how they get with such cheap outsourcing now. And at the moment those juniors gain some experience, they will either ask for competitive pay or they will leave and take the traditional career route.

I don't think I've ever had a Logitech mouse die on me

Likely you are not using the mouses heavily. I had many die on me. Especially my sweet, sweet G500 - the best mouse ever for people with large hands - actual large hands, that is. I repaired the clicker a few times by soldering in new clickers I bought online, but they wear off too fast.

That would be dumb - now not only they are losing talent, but they are also marking themselves as 'no go' for such talent by shutting off remote work. In future they could have to work as hard as Microsoft to change that reputation like how Microsoft had to work hard to change their reputation about Open Source software. (and still couldnt actually manage to do that).

Simply because it replicates the same inequality that was inherently built into the feudal system by companies that originated from industrial revolution copying it into the new production modes: The elites always had the right to 'working' remote, or not working at all. But the serfs, and later the 'employees' have always had to show up in the farms during feudalism so that the overseers could make sure that they were not slacking and therefore 'stealing from the lord' by their lack of productivity.

The factories/companies in the industrialized society copied this format and culture exactly as it was in late 18th and early 19th centuries. In this format, the benefits of the commons (in this case the capability of remote work that technology enables) is removed from the serfs artificially by forcing them to return to work just like how the unwilling serfdom was forced to go work in the factories by shutting the commons off to them by passing enclosure acts.

One could be inclined to think that in different circumstances. However large software businesses (especially German) are among the backers of the bloc that governs Germany and controls a significant part of Euparl. So you can easily conclude that they would want it to pass...

European here. If German SAP companies want to bankrupt themselves because of global cuts on ties on FLOSS, where almost every component has some dependency on these in one way or another, that's ok.

Note how the legislation is drafted to exclude the large open source projects that these companies mooch off of - like Linux. Both the large software companies and the projects that they sponsor can afford the fines.

But smaller software producers and open source projects that fund themselves through their users cant. So basically the law will kill smaller software producers and let the larger ones scoop everyone into their profitable SaaSes and installable software...

Are you selling that software in the EU or are you merely making it available?

What difference does it make... If small developers and software businesses risk thousands of euros of fines, decided arbitrarily by the courts based on civil minimum and maximum limits, open source and small software in the Eu will die and the only ones to benefit from this will be the larger software companies that can afford the fines - who will be scooping up all the users of these open source projects and small developers - like the German software businesses who back the current German government and the German contingent in Euparl.

Note how the draft is designed to exclude the software that these major software companies are mooching off of - like Linux. Its basically exclude what you benefit from, kill who eat into your profit margins and be happy - total American corporate style legislation...

it's possible for legislation to be terrible while conceived entirely in good faith

This is way too fine-tuned to destroy small software segments, open source and private developers included, for the benefit of large companies that will be able to afford the potential fines.

I think (maybe after some adjustments) this will be a boon to open source

How can arbitrary fines that will be decided by the judge and that can reach up to hundreds of thousands of euros from a few thousand euros per violation be a boon to open source...

Open source already has a problem funding itself. The funding comes from major corporate donors, who naturally decide the direction of the large projects they fund. The only Open source segment that successfully funds itself through its community members, users is WordPress, which remained free of corporate domination for a very long time as a result.

With this law, any small time open source software producer and any small time private software producer risk themselves and their livelihood for producing software, based on ambiguous rules. Which would make it very difficult and risky for small time projects or companies to produce software in Europe, and as a result benefit the big companies that can actually afford those fines.

This looks like a law crafted by the large German software business that currently dominates the German govt. and Euparl to hamper small time software for their own benefit. When the small open source projects and private software developers close up shop, the software and SaaS of these large businesses will scoop up their users.

To the contrary of being a boon to Open source, this may be the biggest, most well-coordinated attack against Open source in decades...

if the commute is no more than 15 minutes

If the commute is no more than 15 minutes, you are losing 30 minutes there and back every day, which is 10 hours every month, almost a waking day every month. Its still lost time. This is without counting the time lost in preparing for getting out of the house, settling in at work, and then doing the exact opposite when commuting back. Make each 10 minutes if you are someone who gets up and going very fast. You are now up to 1 hour lost every day, 20 hours every month. Almost and entire day or two waking days...