> The Azure pricing is at least as complex as AWS/GCP, plus the pricing tool seems worse. They also lag behind the other two major providers in CPU releases - Turin and Granite Rapids are still in closed preview at the time of writing this.
Small nitpick, but Turin-based VM's have been available for more than a month now [1], and they are a beast.
For a structured products introduction you may take a look at this one: https://sspa.ch/en/book/
It's a very simple book, very high level, but explains the most popular structured products in a very simple manner. If you can read a payoff diagram, then this is the simplest intro.
Looking at their website though, they seem to have some nice online material there also. For example this explains the 5 most popular products, and perhaps that's good enough for an introduction (really these 5 products cover 90% of the market anyway, though there's no limit to how exotic some bespoke structures can get): https://sspa.ch/en/lab/?underlying=CH0012221716&final_fixing...
In case you're interested in getting to get to learn about them on a deeper level I would recommend https://www.amazon.com/Exotic-Options-Hybrids-Structuring-Pr.... This book explains not only the products, but also the pricing dynamics and hedging too.
Despite its appalling Amazon reviews I consider this book to be a real gem when it comes to the introduction to vol trading (basically dynamic hedging of equity derivatives)
I assume exotic derivatives (binary, asian, barrier options...) and structured notes that predominantly use above said derivatives (autocallables, barrier reverse convertibles, accumulators etc.)
I highly recommend visiting the niagara parks power station museum on the Canadian side - they have a very interesting exhibition of the old power plant. You can even go down to the old tunnel and walk through it to see how the water was diverted back into the river, fascinating stuff.
The Welland canal is also very interesting. There's something really cool about seeing a large ship moving _on_ a bridge while driving under that same bridge with a car. Also, the city of Welland has some nice bike trails iirc.
A bit of off topic, but recently I started learning F# because my new team at work uses it heavily, and even though I love writing in C# and even though the latest C# features are really nice (especially love patter matching), I wish now C# didn’t have the curly braces and semicolons at all, and used instead indentation based grouping like F# and Python does. That is practically all I wish I had in C#… and discriminated unions, but let’s be honest, what are the chances of that happening? ;)
pythonnet works, we use it in a pretty large (Python) codebase, but I’m much more excited about https://github.com/tonybaloney/CSnakes, which allows using Python in a proper statically typed language - C#.
On a slightly unrelated note, I am absolutely thrilled about tonybaloney’s other project[1] that automatically generates C# bindings for python. Can’t wait for it to support complete class mappings and finally I will be able to use python ‘type-safely’.
I always thought that in a highly automated world, reducing the mandated working hours would be the solution to bring prosperity and peace, but there are some obvious problems with that. For example, in a global economy, nations compete with each other, and for developing nations, an average german producing for fewer hours, but consuming the same or even more resources, would be a great competitive advantage. For something like this to truly work I think it would have to be rolled out globally, or certain tariffs would have to be in place against nations that don’t follow the practice - and let’s be honest, certain nations do much worse things today to gain competitive advantage, and really nobody cares, most people love cheap stuff, however morally questionable the source is.
I just recently tried again Redis Insight after about a year and a half of a break, and boy it got so much better! It was useful before, but it’s even better now. Even small things like the ability to build a tree out of the keys if you use a separator, or syntax highlighting for a bunch of formats such as Json or MsgPack - just awesome. Though I did find it amusing that it has syntax highlighting for pretty exotic formats but not for xml? :) maybe it’s not a posh format anymore, but it’s still very common and would be nice to have it supported in the UI.
Kids were 7 and 2 when we moved. Probably the biggest factor in timing the move was their age - I assumed that if we didn’t move then, then we won’t ever do it, as the children would grow older and it would make reintegration really difficult.
One year on they are doing well, even learned a new language! And of course they do enjoy and always look forward to the frequent visits of friends and relatives.
We pulled a similar move last year - moved back to Europe from North America after living there for 10+ years. It was a very expensive and risky move, and just like you, I’m also unsure if it will work out great in the long term, but I can tell you I feel great, I am finally in the same time zone as my brother and parents, they can visit pretty much any time, and heck even when my in-laws are in town, and I see them having breakfast with the kids on a Sunday morning, I feel like my life is finally complete.
My personal experience is quite the opposite - globalization allows capital to move to the lesser developed and cheaper places, bringing jobs and education, and over time an improved quality of life, so that people who were before desperate to leave no longer feel it’s necessary. Sure, it’s not as simple, but just wanted to mention it, since it’s not as straightforward as it seems.
On a slightly related note, I’d rather point the finger at urbanization - in my short lifetime I’ve witnessed multiple small villages (1.5 - 2k population) pretty much disappear as the younger generation moved out for multiple different reasons.
Small nitpick, but Turin-based VM's have been available for more than a month now [1], and they are a beast.
[1] - https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/azurecompute/announ...