People in the west are so used to freedom of speech and so focused on problems with social media. They miss the fact, that many authoritarian governments in Asia see freedom of speech in social media as a threat. They are not banning Facebook to improve quality of life, they want to limit freedom of speech.
People in the west are also incredibly naive about issues around speech, and even more naive about the effects of propaganda, which ironically is what dominates most western media these days.
For example, if you can say a thing, but someone with more money or influence can say the opposite thing so loud that no one can hear you, do you really have a voice? Yes, you have free speech in that you don't get retribution from the government, but you surely don't have fair speech. Effectively you have no voice.
If only your local independent reporter carries a story, and none of the major players do because they coordinate to limit what you see, do you have free speech in practice? When maybe 1% of the population hears the independent reporters, and 99% just listen to the propaganda?
Also as others have said, letting people have free reign to spread both home grown and foreign propaganda is pretty naive and as we've seen in the last several years, has a huge impact.
This is not to advocate for banning speech like you see in many authoritarian governments, but the west needs to be smarter and think deeper about what free speech actually means. At what volume do you get to speak? What consequences to your speech are allowed vs forbidden? Who gets a voice, citizens, everyone in the world including foreign adversaries? Who gets to speak anonymously? Everyone? Just citizens
People who have never seen propaganda in action don't understand: it cannot work (the way these states want it to work) in the presence of real information channels, even if that's just private conversation. That's why socialist states arrest people for just talking privately to an agent about the government.
So yes, you have free speech if major news players coordinate whatever. If on social networks you get banned. Absolutely. That's problem 1 for authoritarian regimes. This is not something any authoritarian nation will relent on even slightly.
Second they have a problem with there being any "players" at all. Because you do get different perspectives, most of which don't match the governments. Compare the news in Israel with the "news" in Russia, or with Al Jazeera and you will see the difference. In Israel, there's maybe 5 major channels. But they hate each other. Pro and contra the war perspectives are represented. In Russia, there is no anti-war perspective. In Al Jazeera there is no one questioning how the government is spending money, there is no discussion on viewpoints, on anything in the middle east. There is no discussion of corruption either, in either Russia or Qatar. None.
This illustrates the problem of propaganda: everyone knows it's bullshit. Every Russian knows Russia is less democratic than a US TSA inspection. Everyone knows everything in Qatar is entirely, 100%, corrupt.
Propaganda will fail, certainly in the eyes of the government, if there is some, any way to get real information. And it doesn't matter if it's not easy. This is how it's always been in the US, because now people have some seriously rose colored glasses on how "true" US newspapers were in the early parts of the 20th century. Reality is that in the US bullshit always dominated the news cycle. This is not new.
Yes, and it's shocking to see people cheer it on. An oft-heard refrain is about the legal right of the first amendment of the US constitution preventing the government from blocking speech, but that is based on the natural right of freedom of speech, as Hobbes and Locke would differentiate. Social media platforms are at such a scale in the modern day that they are essentially the public square, so the government blocking them is akin to blocking free speech in the legal right itself.
Some might say, you can publish elsewhere on your own domain, but again, it's like barricading the public square and only allowing one to speak in the middle of a forest; if no one but the trees listen, what is the point of the natural right to free speech?
I don’t really think of social media companies as being the public square. They are more like private clubs, just with really low standards for membership.
IMO the bigger problem is the total lack of a public square these days.
The internet is more pseudonymous than we’re used to dealing with, compared to the in-person public square. People behave in ways that would normally cause their acquiescences to use their freedom of association, and avoid them. Online attempts at a public square tend to be pretty annoying, as a result.
These private clubs are the de-facto quasi-public square, is my point. In virtual space, the government is not hosting some sort of public social media so people are forced to use private corporations' services to voice their thoughts.
> Social media platforms are at such a scale in the modern day that they are essentially the public square
This is a ridiculous assertion.
The local Costco is "at such a scale in the modern day" that it, too, is essentially a public square. It's still private property, though. If you show up in Aisle 6 trying to convert people to Mormonism, a Costco employee will ask you to leave and stop harassing their customers. Yes, the same principle applies to Twitter, Facebook, X, Truth Social and Instagram.
What gives you the right to leverage their private property as your soapbox? Because people on the sidewalk won't listen, and that hurts your feelings? They have a business, if you are using your speech in any way to obstruct the conduct of their thoroughfare then they can have you ejected. The cops will not listen to your tirade against multinational burger tyrants, they'll drop you off at the drunk tank. Your speech will never be unconditionally protected, not online or in real life.
It's not McDonald's either, a singular location does not serve billions. The difference between a physical and virtual location is one of scale. As for your other paragraph, the point is that these corporations have gotten so large and people depend on them so much that being banned on them is essentially akin to being exiled from the ability to have free speech in modern society, whatever restrictions you want to reasonably put on them. What is the alternative you want people to use if, like Nepal, the government bans social media platforms, that I have not already addressed?
With your linking of that xkcd, it's clear you're misunderstanding my point about legal vs natural rights, as I stated initially.
Many places in the USA, but not everywhere, have sidewalks around the parking lot that are going to be publicly owned so you can set up with signs and a megaphone there.
One thing the "west" ie the USA needs to understand (well they'll know very shortly) is that the right to consume propaganda from your countries enemies is not the same as being able to criticise your government for doing a bad job/breaking the law/killing it's own citizens.
Facebook et al is not a neutral platform, it is a vector for other states, and non state actors to whip up outrage and division.
> many authoritarian governments in Asia see freedom of speech in social media as a threat
Yup, because it is a threat.
see Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia to name just a few. all have had large scale unrest transmitted and amplfied by facebook. Now are they nice governments? no. did facebook help bring democracy? also no, they helped pinpoint activists and let the government(s) kidnap them.
The indian anti-muslim movement is properly being whipped up by the BJP and others, using facebook to get to the people that don't have TVs. Facebook is a big part in why they are still in power.
> Facebook et al is not a neutral platform, it is a vector for other states, and non state actors to whip up outrage and division.
I would feel better about this type of activity being regulated. There is quite a bit of room for facebook to live up to higher standards and regulation to prevent that sort of behavior with out banning.
Might also be more a of a hassle to write and enforce the laws though than out right banning though.
The result of that for a country with a small market though might be facebook/similar voluntarily leaving the country/market though.
my general impression is that the greatest concern for china is people getting riled up about anything, and that leading to civil unrest. like what's happening in indonesia right now for example. therefore any kind of content that could get people upset is restricted. so effectively this means no doomscrolling. wechat has something that works like tiktok, and the content there is all positive, uplifting, educational or entertaining. probably just a addictive, mind you, but never once i have seen something that i would want to keep away from my kids.
If free speech in America goes away, the rest of the world will suffer for it as well.
People get worked up about "hate speech" a very arbitrary thing, that changes over time, but they don't realize the slippery slope that creates if you try to police speech.
The things I've seen Australians and even British people arrested for posting or commenting on online is absurd. The people who support it are fine with it, until they're the ones being reported and getting into trouble, and handcuffed for making a one off remark that otherwise seemed innocent at the time.
Remember, these governments eventually can and will use AI models to monitor your speech. People around the world should seriously advocate for free speech more now than ever.
Also remember, the key thing in America about free speech is that the government has no say in what speech is allowed. You still have consequences for your speech from others.
Ref. the UK ('British people'), there's currently a thing where peacfully protesting a ban will get you arrested (I have a lot of sympathy for the police in this case, whatever they do will be wrong in the eyes of one side or the other).
One thing that annoys me is when a police officer, even here in the US clearly does not agree with a law. I was under the impression in one of my government classes in college that police officers could in fact choose not to arrest someone, but a lot of the time they opt-out of making that decision for whatever reason. I never looked if in the UK it's similar, but it always bothers me more when a police officer is "just following orders" especially when at least here in the US, they can just not charge someone at their discretion, because sometimes the law is just wild.
We also see it with judges. Our system isn't perfect, but it allows for people who strongly believe a law is unjust to step in.
What part of the President threatening financial sanctions and jail time for speech makes you think we have this?
To the degree the American experiment has shown anything about free speech, it’s that it may not work uncensored broadly. At the end of the day, we voted against it.
It should be valued now more than ever. We are the only country that has it to the extent that we do. Unfortunately, that's not the only amendment we blindly violated.
> should be valued now more than ever. We are the only country that has it to the extent that we do
And it’s causing lots of problems with questionable benefit. Millions of people with no medical training and the critical thinking skills of a first generation LLM debating vaccines online is not productive.
I thought this [1] New Yorker profile of the chief justice of Brazil's Supreme Court was a fascinating and thoughtful analysis of how tech giants interact with less-powerful countries. Surely we all agree that free speech is not absolute (e.g. we could probably agree that there should exist some boundary with respect to libel, threats/violent speech acts, national security, corporations as legal persons with free speech rights, the right or duty of platforms to regulate content, influence of money in politics...) and that therefore states have a legitimate interest in regulating free speech.
The "free speech" of tech platforms also comes with colonial power structures in which the tech company makes these decisions and imposes them on countries.
and the governments of the west are most supportive of authoritarian and military regimes. Why are they silent over what is happening in Pakistan? Pakistan election was stollen by Pakistan army in day light robbery. And what happened before the election is another story. Pakistan is going through worst form of its human right/freedom of speech/democratic abuses since its independence and west seems to be careless. Just because people of Pakistan support a person who is nationalist. So, for them a dictator is better than him.
Democracy/free speech/human rights are tools for west, not a moral high ground. Hypocrisy at its peak. :)
What freedom of speech? The "first world countries" in Europe are slowly turning up the surveillance state to not let people online if they don't provide their IDs, they want to surveil every private conversation you have at home, if it uses the internet in any way, they'd love banning encryption, VPNs, etc... but you have freedom of speech? Except when talking about thinks that are deemed "pro enemy" (Russia or whoever it is this time around).
Come on, we're living in extremely authoritian governments that pretend to be something else.
Democracy cannot survive unless we find a way to ensure we know when are listening to the people that are part of our demos and NOT people that are outside of it, actively trying to destroy it.
We had freedom of speech in the west before the Internet. That speech was not anonymous.
I did. Your point puts national security of a boogeyman us vs them as paramount.
Your point gives the authoritian the ability to use "the red scare" as tactic to ensure no subversives appear. No one to challenge their power. We must monitor all to find "the infiltrated enemy".
Your bullshit is not new. It's been done all throughout history and it's always just an excuse to suppress threats to individual power. Political parties are proscribed because "they're working for foreign actors and we deem them to be treasonous".
> Anonymity is not a prerequisite to freedom of speech.
I couldn't disagree more. The vast majority of papers the founders of the US published to argue against tyrannical government were written anonymously.
> Broken lives of people harassed by anonymous trolls on social media are the dark side of anonymity.
This is a cliche "think of the children" argument. Stripping away anonymity is a gargantuan problem, and enables authoritarian regimes to punish dissent. Trolls are a very minor problem comparatively.
> Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.
This is essentially saying "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions when you do things I don't like". It's an oxymoron. The responsibilities a free populace have are moral and civil, they aren't about giving away anonymity to governments.
> This is a cliche "think of the children" argument. Stripping away anonymity is a gargantuan problem, and enables authoritarian regimes to punish dissent.
So we agree: authoritarian regimes are a gargantuan problem, not stripping away anonymity.
> Trolls are a very minor problem comparatively.
Online predator almost killed my child - this is not a "very minor problem". At least not for me.
> This is essentially saying "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions when you do things I don't like". It's an oxymoron.
It is not bout things _I_ don't like but things that _we (society)_ don't like. In my country nazi symbols are forbidden in public space and I think it is a good thing.
So yes - "freedom needs to come with punishments and restrictions".
> The responsibilities a free populace have are moral and civil, they aren't about giving away anonymity to governments.
Why not? There are countries which governments are elected by citizens and are _trusted_ by citizens. Why would I want to be anonymous if I _trust_ people I elected?
Almost killed your one child. Authoritarian governments have murdered many more.
At some point the disingenous concerned parents need to start dealing with their own parenting instead of pretending we need to live in 1984 just because your bad parenting requires it.
Your way has many more deaths of government dissenters. Stop using "death" as a scare tactic. Much like the "war on terror" supporters, it's a fraud.
I don’t know about any deaths (or imprisonment) of government dissenters in Poland (where I come from). Do you know any?
Maybe oppressive government and lack of freedom of speech is a problem in your country, I don’t know that and I’m sorry for you. My suggestion would be though, that you try to fix your government instead of anonymously requiring online anonymity because you’re afraid of your own government.
I guess here in Poland trying to protect people from theft and violence is more pressing issue than freedom of speech.
My suggestion is that you learn about history. Because suppressing the ability to write anonymously and have private unmonitored conversations is paramount for political dissent. I'm sure you can find a moment in the history of Poland where having to look over your shoulders when you said something against government policies was a thing. Or are you blind to your own history?
> I guess here in Poland trying to protect people from theft and violence is more pressing issue than freedom of speech
I guess you're the kind that learned from the tactics of your oppressors from both sides and want to implement those in the guise of safety.
You don't need to remove civil rights to prevent theft and violence the same way you don't need to nuke a city to combat rape.
Tackle the real problem instead of removing the most fundamental of rights so you can suppress speech and dissent you dislike, which is all this is.
Very easily it becomes, you can't say this about party B or party A, you can't have this political position.
Give me a break.
Again, all these things posted by people who don't share their full name and address. Do it, the government will share yours anyway, voluntarily or not.
> Tackle the real problem instead of removing the most fundamental of rights so you can suppress speech and dissent you dislike, which is all this is.
But the real problem is oppressive government. My government is not oppressive - my government is here to help me and help the society to maintain civil rights.
The view that it is the government that is against civil rights is anarchistic and... wrong. In reality it is the opposite: the only way to maintain civil rights is to have the rule of law and the government that protects them.
What's more: anonymity itself has to be guarded by... the government (and that's what you require). So your logic is twisted: you trust your government to protect anonymity while at the same time you don't trust it to protect freedom of speech.
"trusted government officials" is such a funny line. Clearly you haven't seen how government workers work. Hint, they're usually not paid all that well and are not to be trusted.
In any case, if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to worry about, dude. Isn't that the line?
Clearly you can't live up by the standards you want to impose on others.
> Anonymity is not a prerequisite to freedom of speech.
That's disingenous bullshit. From the likes of people who use their power imbalance to pretend their propaganda is truth and dissent is dangerous.
"Freedom of speech is ok but what you're doing is different" is the first step
> Broken lives of people harassed by anonymous trolls on social media are the dark side of anonymity.
You only need to pay attention to history to see what political totalitarianism means when there's no anonymity.
It's way worse than online trolls.
> Freedom must be accompanied by responsibility and accountability.
Said the dictator, who was accountable to no one. Those who hold the power shield themselves from accountability and want to use it as an excuse to prevent dissent.
Democracy for quite some time thrived in US (and for some shorter time in other western countries) even though there was no anonymity while free speech was guaranteed by the state.
In other words: anonymity is not a solution for lack of free speech. I should be free to say whatever I want without being forced to hide behind a nickname.
Secondly: I think you are happy to not being the target of online violence. I have experience with teens on the brink of suicide caused by it.
Ah. This is it, folks. You're a liar and you project your lies. Incapable of realising how people have lived shit in history.
Go google "disappeared people in military dictatorships" and maybe, just maybe, you'll learn something about authoritians and how they dealt with "subversives".
Not everyone here lives in the US.
Your account is 17 hours old and you want to find the "enemy within". Aren't you the enemy within?
Demosntate you're not a foreign actor, according to your own rules, post your full name and address. Or maybe that's a stupid thing to do and anonymity is valuable?
I actually am a foreign actor (effectively like your own president). I'm British.
Jones is a rabble rouser, as is most of the "right" in the US. You'd do well to learn how to spot them, and like your president, he's only interested with stuffing his pockets with money.
Enjoy your fascism - comes with a free side of disappearing people. I'm sure you'll be Pinchoeted in no time at all based on your narrative once it's all locked in.
And equally, we in the west are so used to genuine free expression of ideas we assume everyone who speaks is real and genuine. Meanwhile, outside actors are weaponising social media to divide us, errode trust and spread conspiracies. There are worse things that banning American media platforms - look at what they are doing to America.
Inside actors are also spreading misinfo, rage bait, propaganda and general degeneracy of culture. They're blaming outsiders while doing the same or even worse.
>They are not banning Facebook to improve quality of life, they want to limit freedom of speech.
Please post your evidence of this regarding Nepal. Also, are you suggesting that Nepal has an authoritarian government? Picking up a book may be helpful, as they literally abolished their authoritarian government in 1990 and their monarchy in 2008.
I don't think you read the post you are commenting about. Article says explicitly what is the problem with problematic content. It explicitly mentions rape and incest content.
Is this content legal, or do you just personally find it objectionable?
Because, no offense, nobody cares what you find objectionable. You could've replaced "rape and incest content" in your comment with "silly content" and it would've had the same impact.
Not that I don't think rape or incest are objectionable, of course I do. I just don't think I or you get to make that determination. I'm self-absorbed, but not that self-absorbed. That's a collective decision that should be made.
Trade, education, health services and IT saw jobs losses. More jobs in leisure and hospitality. Impact of tariffs is still not clear, also not clear how the tariffs will look like. I suspect uncertainty plays a role. Employers reluctant to hire if they are uncertain about future. Good thing it may justify lowering interest rates
I’m 100% sure there are many badly written inefficient crawlers that are wasting server resources and resources where they run but I use feed readers a lot and it is very hard to find well maintained feeds. Many servers also use cache related headers incorrectly or don’t use them at all.
key piece of info at the end, looks like they are leaving the spending on datacenter to OpenAI
> Microsoft’s alliance with OpenAI may also be evolving in ways that mean the software giant won’t need the same kind of investments. In January, OpenAI and SoftBank Group Corp. announced a joint venture to spend at least $100 billion and perhaps $500 billion on data centers and other AI infrastructure.
IMF forced them to drop, but if they want to use crypto as legal tender, why use BTC which has high transaction fees? Why not something with low or zero fees and efficient chain? There is million of crypto out there and most open source, so govt could even launch their own coin on top of existing chains.
3rd world currency is often barely worth the paper it’s printed on. Making it crypto removes even that value.
Seriously though, the reason is that they can do digital currency without crypto just fine.
For example there are many popular payment operators in Africa who provide money transfers and micro-payments on phones. M-PESA launched in 2007 and has tens of millions of users:
These successes don’t usually get reported because they lack the exciting novelty of crypto, even though they are much more popular and usable. They are actual free market solutions, not coin casinos built around libertarian dogma. And for that reason lots of people don’t want to know.
The lower the transaction fees, the lower the decentralization, security and usage. There has been no new breakthrough that gives "efficiency" without sacrificing other important factors.
so this gives an average yearly salary of 230k. Very close to FAANG senior salary with much more risk, effort and (probably) worse life-work balance. OP quit from google in 2018 and ran some other business, and this is his biggest sale so far. I think it shows how hard it is to make better money outside FAANG even when extremely talented and lucky like OP. But it's probably more about lifestyle choices.
I am very surprised no one factored - starting own company can be much more realistic to achieve than landing $400k/year gig at FAANG - it is not like one walks into a lobby and gets a job.
Keep in mind stories of people telling how they were passed on by some big name corp just to go on to build something big.
If you are maximizing income, go work for the company that pays you the most.
If you consider other things then it's not that simple:
* control on which project you work on
* choose your cooworkers
* choose your office location
* return to office policies
* choose process and bureaucracies
It's about how many degrees of freedom you want.
It’s not worth it. Neither is freelancing. One of the appeals of freelancing was being able to work from anywhere in the world and still make money, but with wider availability of remote jobs that advantage evaporates.
Working for a good company is still the best most consistent way to make good money and have a good life.
Depends. Are we talking hours? Because if so, then most companies barely give 2 days worth of work per week. And in many cases, people probably work half of that, maybe 4 or 5 hours of actual focused work per day.
A freelancer spending very little time working probably isn’t making much money. But an employee who spends little time working, is still bringing in those same paychecks, week after week.
interesting to reconcile this with calls to tax the rich. maybe we should be rewarding such effort after all? think about the tens of thousands of jobs created from people working at Google who'd make L3 or less at Google working twice as much...
Speaking as a small business owner/entrepreneur myself, there are lots of tax deductions available to people like me that aren’t to some collecting a salary. And that’s without doing any of the borderline or outright illegal stuff that I see many other business owners do, such as taking fancy vacations, leasing luxury cars, or buying real estate for personal use but writing them off as business expenses. The IRS basically now lacks the resources to go after most such cases, and even if they’re caught, the penalty often just amounts to paying back the avoided taxes. There’s really very little incentive to play by the rules. I’ve had CPAs tell me outright that I’m leaving money on the table by not using some of these so-called tax minimization strategies. Anyway, it’s all kind of beside the point because “tax the rich” as policy covers so much ground that it’s impossible to discuss the pros and cons without specifying what specific proposal we’re talking about. My point is simply that business ownership and entrepreneurial activity are already quite well incentivized/rewarded by the current tax code.
I can also attest that in my local small business community I have been met with puzzlement and suspicion for not engaging in expense fraud and PPP fraud. Deviation is almost completely normalized.
1. The Trump era automatic 20% deduction for LLC or corporate income. Totally unjustifiable, it's 20% off your revenue for everyone with a company for no public policy reason that I know of
2. You can mostly avoid paying into SS/Medicare by taking the large majority of your compensation via distributions, not salaried income
It encourages paying more wages, but it’s still a 20% giveaway to the business owners for paying themselves. I know that my own effective tax rate went down a couple percent when QBI took effect. If the idea behind the requirement to pay reasonable wages is to get more SS/Medicare tax revenue, then QBI more than offsets any gains. Plus the business owner can tweak their own numbers to determine what’s the most advantageous mix of W-2 vs K-1 income. It’s another advantage not available to regular wage earners.
Yeah, in general the big tax advantages from a limited company mostly relate to the ability to be flexible with how you get your compensation, as there are a bunch of ways to minimise tax paid/get government support.
The millionaire farmer near us (in Ireland) got state support for sending all his kids to university because of this kind of flexibility, while my parents (wage earning suckers) didn't.
Of course it’s against the law, and so is not obeying the speed limit. And both are being done every day widely and more or less blatantly with little to no chance for consequence. In fact you’re probably more likely to get a speeding ticket than to be audited. Hence the CPAs who would recommend some of these “strategies” as long as there’s even the slightest plausible justification, because in their experience there’s very little risk for pushing the envelope.
my very first exposure to this was paying for parking. i worked at a large private university which had a beautiful but very big campus. ofc for some reason the institution decided that employee's had to pay for their own parking, which i disagreed with on moral grounds and the fact that parking was so far away it was like a 20 minute walk just to get to my work space...so i did an experiment where i basically never paid for parking in my entire 4 years there.
it would have cost me about 2 grand to diligently pay for parking. the actual expense from tickets? about 100 bucks maybe 200. and some of them got automatically thrown out just by challenging them. now towards the end of my time there i did see a guy get towed as he was walking up to his car. i started paying for parking then.
Interesting, I had the exact opposite experience as a student at a public university in California. There were meter maids patrolling the parking lots constantly, and it was common for people to be ticketed within minutes. It must have been a huge revenue driver for the school. The enforcers were so zealous I received multiple tickets despite having a valid annual pass displayed clearly in my window, which I then had to burn time fighting to get dismissed.
I'm not sure I follow what you're saying. People who work at Google should pay more/less tax? Or that people who start companies should get more tax breaks (or pay more?)
I'm European so I don't really click with the obsession some places have with avoiding tax, so you may have to explain it like I'm 5 :-)
Lol, Europe is the home and crown palace of tax evasion, look to the Netherlands, Ireland, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Andorra, Gibraltar, Isle of Man, Jersey...
In Europe most average people are happy to pay tax, despite there being a number of tax havens as you point out. I'd say most people have a low opinion of them. Versus the USA particularly, where it seems many people dislike paying tax.
I have no idea what you're talking about. I don't know a single person happy with the tax rate or the general performance/effectiveness of government spending. Practically every single restaurant, bar or other kinds of brick-and-mortar shops is evading VAT and income tax, it's so normal that when I was buying winter tires this morning, they straight up asked me whether I need a receipt or want to skip the VAT over phone. Every single aspiring entrepreneur I talk to asks me how to incorporate in one of the tax havens and otherwise lessen the tax and bureaucratic load. My city is full of immigrants from western EU countries who wanted to pay less tax.
You're not in Western Europe, which is where more people tend to be happier to pay tax (particularly the Northwest/Protestant areas), because they believe they'll get the benefit from paying the taxes.
OTOH, look at places like Italy where there's more evasion, because people don't feel that they get anything back.
Even when I visit the west and tell people I pay 10% income tax with healthcare and social insurance included, they immediately ask me how hard is it to move.
Especially funny with Germans who still believe they are richer than the eastern part of Europe, but a SWE working for the same US company from here makes 10-20% more due to lower tax. The faces they make when they finish the mental calculations are incredible.
Yeah, that's fair. I can totally see why people without family commitments et al would move.
I'm not massively happy about the amount of tax I pay, but I do like living in a relatively prosperous society without too much suffering, so it's fine I suppose.
The thing is, I don't see a relatively prosperous society without too much suffering when I am visiting the west or north of Europe... At least not more than the east, and definitely not enough to justify the tax hike.
Generally, the east of EU is much safer and while it's poorer and that is its own kind of suffering, there's nothing like the bombings, muggings, general dirtiness everywhere, etc. I feel perfectly safe any time during day and night in Warsaw, Poznan, Prague, Brno, Bratislava, Ljubljana... Definitely not in Paris, Berlin, Brussels and so on.
I think a big part of the difference in tax acceptance between the USA and Europe might be that European populations per country tend to be a lot more homogenous.
In the USA I think you get a lot of resentment over people paying for populations who they don’t feel they themselves are part of. Whereas in Europe it’s more plausibly a “there but for the grace of god go I” situation, where the person using some form of government assistance may plausibly be your second cousin.
Of course no one talks about this directly because it’s wrong think. I suspect this is also why a lot more right wing people are anti tax and left wing people are tax accepting. On the left you have less of the in group out group sentiment, for whatever reason.
Depending on how he managed things, possibly tax advantaged; especially if he could take advantage of the Qualified Small Business Stock (QSBS) tax exemption - 100% capital gains with no taxes.
Money wise, FAANGs are more like 2x of $920k with comps. If the output is guaranteed, and stress is kept at 2x FAANG, it's like trading stress and the thrill and difference in experience for money. I would choose this.
>so this gives an average yearly salary of 230k. Very close to FAANG senior salary with much more risk
this is just bad analysis, and as part of that you don't understand risk.
Financial risk is the variance of the expected outcomes, it is not a component of the expected value. The risk that you will fall short is always balanced by the risk that you will strike it rich; otherwise, you have calculated your expected value wrong. Expected value does not include variance, it's the missing factor.
your faang salary is your upper bound on income, is the cost you bear eliminating the risk; the risk the entrepreneur takes is rewarded by the option on vast riches.
You are looking backward as if you could have guessed a priori what would happen. If you could guess looking-backward-in-advance that you'd wind up with a faang salary running your own gig, definitely worth "the risk".
I don't understand this. Afaik the parent argues that the 230k/yr is a lucky outcome of starting a business, far more people end up with less or nothing. And this "winning" situation of gaining 230k/yr is barely in range of a "sure" outcome of being employed at Google. Concluding that if even a successful entrepreneur is set to gain less then an employee at faang, entrepreneurship is not a sound decision for fang employees. How is risk portrayed wrong here?
because he portrayed risk as "the risk of losing money", but that is not a proper definition of risk.
it's easier to understand the concept with the stock market because there is a market price (there is not a market price for startups). If a stock in the market has a price, what does it mean to say that it's a risky stock? that it might drop? No, not if you say that to the exclusion of the risk that it might also go up.
If a company has a price in the market, and you are an omniscient who can definitively say that there are a bunch unaccounted for factors that increase the probability that that stock will go down, what you would conclude (because you are an omniscient who also understands risk) is that the price of the stock is wrong, not that the riskiness has been mis-assessed.
This is an important area of finance, it's the basis, or rather the inescapable conclusion, of option pricing, the famous Black-Scholes model. It turns out the option price calculation does not contain any of the probabilities of what might happen to the stock/company in the future, the option price is only based on the variance of the outcomes. How can that be? Turns out the probabilities (the expected value) have already been accounted for in the market price of the underlying security. If a market is fairly pricing stocks, riskyness means degree of variation in outcomes.
There is a probability in variance, the probability "that you will wind up away from the mean". the FAANG salary is the mean, with no risk, meaning you aren't going to fall below or go above. He called out the other option as "risky" and somehow decided that the outcome this founder experienced was the upper limit, had no chance of being higher. He had no basis to think that, and his analysis is basically Monday night quarterbacking. "Since you didn't make the field goal, you shouldn't have tried, should have tried for a touchdown instead", ignoring that on average it's easier to get a field goal.
He used retrohunt service which is part of virustotal https://virustotal.readme.io/docs/searching a service that allows developers to scan files for vulnerability. Apparently, virus total stores files and allows third parties to rescan these files later. Sounds like a vulnerability of this service and terrible practice. How can you expose your user files to any arbitrary access? Of course you should not put your secrets into file you upload to some virus scan, but how many users know that file they upload will be accessible publicly?
Your link just says they store the scam result which can be accessed without submitting the file.
>VirusTotal stores the analyses and report. This allows users to query for reports given an MD5, SHA1, SHA256 or URL and render them without having to resubmit the items (whether URLs or files) for scanning
> what could be considered ADHD/light asperbergers
could be considered, or did you get a diagnosis from a specialist? Self diagnosis is not reliable. If you don't have an official diagnosis you can't be certain you really have ADHD. There may be several differe tfactors relevant for YOU that make keto diet work for you. Same diet can be harmful for similar people who have ADHD.
Professional diagnosis is not reliable either. ADHD and autism are often misdiagnosed as one-another, especially in girls.
> If you don't have an official diagnosis you can't be certain you really have ADHD
A lot of the time, the mental health professional making the determination doesn't have specialty in ADHD/Autism. All they're doing is looking at symptoms and making their best guess. Which is exactly what people are doing when they make a self-determination. In many cases, people with high-functioning autism know more about autism than the people who are supposed to know. And it's not like the diagnoses can be validated when we're still figuring out what autism even is.
Professional assessors should know much more about the condition for which they are assessing and its signs than any one person who may or may not have the condition. A professional should also know the other conditions with similar symptoms.
I learned about ADHD for six months until I first consulted an expert about the possibility of my having it. He was able to recognise symptoms in me that I hadn't noticed.
If you knew anything about how "diagnosis from specialist" works in practice you wouldn't dismiss self dismiss diagnosis so easily. "The specialist" usually spend a few hours at most on the diagnosis (if even that) while people who self diagnose live with the symptoms their whole life.
It would be such an easy world of you could go to a doctor and get answers but it's not the world we live in unless it's common cold (and even then a lot of doctors can't be bothered and prescribe antibiotics just in case).
You gaslighted yourself by claiming you don't have ADHD/aspergers anymore. The only explanation is that you either never had it, which is closer to what you said or that you still have it, which is ignoring what you said.
there are other factors here. Children diagnosed with autism at the age of 5 must be adults now to determine if they can live alone. So they were diagnosed at minimum 13 years ago, with many diagnosed much earlier. Autism diagnostics is much more common now than it used to be, especially in families with higher economic status. Diagnostics tools evolved, more kids are tested and tests capture more kids. So I think this number will be completely different in 10-20 years from now. In my experience as a parent of ASD kid, many kids now considered ASD would not be considered ASD 20 or 30 years ago.
