>I really think that all of this DeFi stuff is playing with fire. If these tools scale large enough, it's easy to imagine breaking the right link in the system at the right time to cause catastrophic failures.
Substitute "software" for DeFi. Every single day we're playing with fire through low quality code and bad security practices. DeFi just exposes the real financial costs and consequences of terrible software development. How many countless dollars and hours and data have been lost through bad code?
- Canadians are happy to accept whatever wages they are given (the "smart" Canadians move to the US to get higher salaries)
- immigrants to Canada are happy to accept whatever wages they are given
With those two factors, you're not going to make a lot of money in Toronto unless you're working a US company (Google, Amazon, and so on) and even then it'll be less than US counter-parts.
Berlin is a better choice because you can easily travel around Europe and there are more markets. It's also a faster flight back to India if you're visiting family.
>However, once a Canadian citizen, there is a possiblity to get transferred to a Silicon Valley arm of a US company from Canada (using the TN visa) and hence receive a higher compensation.
This is what I'm talking about. The employer will dangle this prize in front of you for as long as they can and will continue to hold off on promotions and keep your salary the same for as long as possible. This is why Canadian salaries remain low, because there will be another sucker that comes along and will also be offered the same "we'll give you a promotion in a few years!" or "we'll transfer you to the US soon! very very soon!" line and they'll accept it.
>How would you compare between the two countries for building a career in tech for an immigrant?
Is immigration required? Because if not, all you need is a good internet connection, a good computer, and knowledge lots and lots of knowledge to distinguish your skills from others and get the higher freelancing rates.
"We'll empower you to easily sell your stuff" that leaves power and agency in the hands of individual companies.
WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento already do that. Drop $10 to $20/month on hosting on DigitalOcean, install Wordpress, install WooCommerce, buy a cheap theme, buy whatever extra plugins you need, setup your payment system (PayPal and Stripe are supported), and you're off to the races.
And it's better than that, there's people with years and years of experience in modifying and creating plugins and themes so once you have enough $$$ from the basic setup, re-invest into the business and get better developer support for all the GPL'd plugins and themes you're using.
Shopify is just the next closed-source iteration of WordPress and Magento. WordPress has one of the largest platforms and they've taken over (and open-sourced) blogging, content management, learning management systems, and ecommerce. They and Magento are better examples of a platform than Shopify.
>My favorite conspiracy theory (which I totally believe) is that mattress stores are mostly for money laundering. No market can possibly support as many stores as there are, and every time I go by one, they're empty.
Here's more fuel for that fire.
If you look at Sears in the last 10 years, the number of shoppers seemed to dwindle and getting smaller and smaller. Except for a spots in each store, there wouldn't be many shoppers at all. So the economics don't make sense...and then bam they're going bankrupt.
Now look at rug stores; there are a few of them where I live (Toronto, Canada) and every single one, without fail, has very few customers and has a sale on. Usually it's "inventory clearance" or "going out of business" or whatever. But they just continue to sit there.
There are a lot of industries and niches in industries where the economics do not make sense on the surface but I suspect there's some perverse set of incentives that make it possible. Maybe some weird tax loophole, or some kind of government loan or grant, or some weird combination of laws (or lack of laws and regulation) that make it possible.
This is why whenever you build software, you basically should encrypt any and all data and you should be extremely careful when it comes to permission checks. Especially if you are a company or startup, there's no excuse for not burning through a few thousand dollars more here and there to build more secure software that doesn't result in privacy blow-ups like this.
I wonder if GDPR affects Twitter in this case and what % of their revenue can be taken as a penalty for treating users like shit.
It was more helpful to write "Given I have an non-existent file" than to write "(not (file-exists-p org-doing-file))". One can be read by others who don't understand Emacs-Lisp and they'll understand the concept, while the latter can only be read by Emacs-Lisp developers. With the Gherkin syntax I'm free to move my tests over to another text editor and implement code that's specific to the text editor. For example, I could use my tests to implement the package for VIM or Atom (something I might do on a weekend).
The best part is that you have the spec under version control and locked down instead of spread across.
At work no one is really updating the functional spec of our project and it means we have information that's falling through the cracks and is in separate emails or IMs. Executable version-controlled specs have to be maintained but at least they're in one spot.
>...programmers are often thought of as "professionals," like doctors or lawyers, and not part of the "working class." But this is misleading. Most programmers are neither self-employed nor employed in an organization where they have a meaningful say, and most can't expect any kind of tenure or partnership status, no matter how long they work.
>...Programmers are typically hired at-will, and are not generally accepted to have any professional obligations that could supersede management's authority, nor the ability to do research or pro bono work on company time. Management styles range from the likes of Dilbert's pointy-haired boss to a hierarchy so flat that it's almost invisible--until it's time for somebody to get fired. Still, for most programmers, management authority is a constant.
Professionals without authority.
I like this highlight of collective bargaining:
>the right to contribute to open source projects or veto the release of insecure, privacy-violating or otherwise unprofessional code.
Sure would be nice if the red flags we raised would actually have an impact.
>Most important, however, might be the idea of solidarity.
This is something that Michael O Church mentioned in a blog post; how the managers always say nice things about one another whereas programmers always slag one another and always blame the last guy for crappy code instead of trying to build each other up. I once had two senior devs basically force me out of projects; where did they end up? at different companies 1 year after I was forced out. where did the executives end up? they merged the company and gained some $$ or completely cashed out. Solidarity would have been the better choice.
At another place, the devs weren't listened to and juniors/contractors were hired to develop a project. The devs had to deal with the mess that was created. What happens on the next project? They aren't listened to again and can't even flag down the fact that the previous project has generated like 0.001% ROI.
That's okay. Free/open source software in general is still considered to be utterly radioactive but there's enough developers out there willing to work with and on it that it isn't a problem. There's no reason why we should let corporations direct what we use and work on all the time ;)
If you're complaining about the legality of incorporating the leaked code, you aren't ready for a world where free software rules. The end game of free and, to a lesser extent, of open source software is to live in a world where copyright and patents no longer apply to software. Basically, software will be treated like mathematics.
Incorporating the leaked code if it is indeed highly useful brings us closer to that world. It's forced expropriation but I think we need some of that, especially since companies like Oracle are trying to limit how much open source software they produce.
I wouldn't be surprised if there's an outlaw version of FreeBSD or IllumOS that's released over Freenet or Bittorrent or patches are encrypted and traded over IRC if the leaked code proves to be very useful. In fact I would hope that that happens.
Basically we need socialism. Everyone should be guaranteed a standard of living (including a house and food) at a certain level that will increase as our productivity increases. The freeloader "problem" won't be seen as a problem. We should actually be looking it as the model for the future...how can we increase productivity such that we can support as many people as possible who want to be lazy or who want to pursue what they love?
Along these lines, it doesn't fit to equate unpaid internships to serfdom. Serfdom involves effectively permanent, near total servitude to a landowner for most aspects of life.
Uh, wage slavery? How much of a person's salary is spent just on the basics such as food and clothing and gas and education?
The minimum wage is a horrible stain on a free society. It traps people with low skills out of work and cements them into an underclass that's much more difficult to break out of. It prevents business that are operating on the edge from continuing to operate. It's a classic example of do-gooders riding in and creating damage.
This is how the system is structured; there is a permanent underclass that will accept any wages. Even more educated people will lower their wage expectations when the economy appears bad. This means that companies can get cheaper labour at any time to pick up slack or as replacements if their current workers get too uppity and demand a living wage.
it locks out people who are in a worse situation - unempployed.
Unemployed is only bad if it means starvation or homelessness. In a socialist, communist, or anarchist society unemployment would be okay. Unemployed workers wouldn't starve, they would still be allowed to live, and they could take part-time jobs/unpaid internships and learn new skills without worrying about making ends meet.
There are much better avenues that would be cheaper and have more positive effect on people: basic risk, valuation and business skills being taught in early high-school, television campaigns that encourage people to think about how their labour is used, what they could do to make themselves marketable. Mechanisms to get people speaking English more effectively. Lower taxation. Effective technical colleges.
So your solution is to train people to become effective human resources for businesses to consume? That doesn't help. We already do that.
You're saying that workers need to learn how to be better workers so that they can prosper. You're saying that they should make themselves as appealing to businesses as possible and somehow, you're assuming that this will give them higher wages. The only reason people get higher wages is because they demand them either through a union or through an informal agreement with other workers that they won't work for less. This is true in the IT industry and is one of the reasons why IT workers don't see a need for a union. We all have agreed never to work for a shitty wage. We know that we can just take our skills elsewhere or start our own company or whatever because we stand up for ourselves.
It's hilarious that Miguel thinks RMS is fear-mongering when there is rightly something to fear. RMS has it right when he says,
However good or bad the CodePlex Foundation's actions, we must not accept them as an excuse for Microsoft's acts of aggression against our community. From its recent attempt to sell patents to proxy trolls who could then do dirty work against GNU/Linux to its longstanding promotion of Digital Restrictions Management, Microsoft continues to act to harm us. We would be fools indeed to let anything distract us from that.
It isn't fear-mongering when there is something to fear. Miguel also has a short memory and doesn't remember all the times Microsoft has spread FUD about GNU/Linux and free software.
Substitute "software" for DeFi. Every single day we're playing with fire through low quality code and bad security practices. DeFi just exposes the real financial costs and consequences of terrible software development. How many countless dollars and hours and data have been lost through bad code?