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...
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.
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:
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.
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? "
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.