I wonder how they plan to impose compliance on entities that have no legal presence in India, accept cryptocurrency payments, and take no PII as part of the signup process - all of which I believe apply to Mullvad.
Monero users are more likely to be the type to use a cold wallet, and a ban on cold wallets is unenforceable (especially for Monero, where transactions can't be traced) as it's kind of like holding cash, except that there isn't anything to be found physically.
The hard part is getting the monero in the first place to put in your cold wallet. The main two options are (1) use an exchange, all of which are either being monitors or blacklisted by india (2) exchange cash in person, good luck doing that in a country that is actively suppressing it
There are platforms like Bisq, which can be used to purchase BTC (although you need a small starting amount of BTC as a minimum security deposit) and then used to swap into Monero. It is both tricky to monitor and difficult to block as it works over Tor. Although I suppose having to go for something so 'exotic' just to privately buy crypto is in itself going to turn away a lot of people.
I thought it doesn't matter if it is known you bought Moreno. When you spend it, that spend can't be traced back to you? Wasn't that the whole point of Moreno?
But if India makes it illegal to obtain monero, then you won't get to that second step of getting to use it. Controlling the on-ramps seems to be the easiest way to regulate crypto, as we saw when Canada started cracking down back in February
If you're able to exchange rupee for another currency, you can always mail the cash to them. I admittedly don't know how feasible or how difficult that is to do though.
> Is there any government in the world that's currently able to enforce such laws?
People talk about crypto like offshore bank accounts and cash never existed.
How does the revolutionary leader of a Sub-Saharan country who suspects the deposed leader has funds in an offshore bank account in a jurisdiction that doesn't even recognize the incoming regime get the money? Violence.
In hyper-legalistic societies like the U.S., yes, the police may sometimes have trouble finding proof that survives court scrutiny. (Though I'd guess most people aren't practicing good opsec around their crypto.) But that isn't most of the world. I don't see the Indian police having any trouble arresting and searching someone on reasonable suspicion of operating a hidden wallet.
There is a lot to unpack in this comment, but in general the situation described here is specific to certain kinds of organizations, with lamentably poor leadership and management cultures. If management views the employer-employee relationship as some sort of zero-sum game - they have already lost that game.
In companies with mature (which doesn't mean old - a relatively young company can also be well-run!) structures, the criteria for promotion are not nebulous. I struggle to see the wisdom in setting goals for an employee's promotion without the intention of rewarding them for working hard to meet those goals.
In general, I would encourage anyone who is in a working situation described above to look for another job - and ask about the management and leadership philosophy when you interview! As interviewers, we are comfortable asking hard questions, I don't see why being a candidate should be any different. Is there a structured feedback system in your company? What is it, and how closely does your team follow it? When was the last person in your team promoted, and how long were they in their previous role? etc.
> and ask about the management and leadership philosophy when you interview!
Is this really useful though. They will always tell you what you want to hear, just like you say what they want to hear.
> I struggle to see the wisdom in setting goals for an employee's promotion without the intention of rewarding them for working hard to meet those goals.
Because low level managers don't really have the power to grant that promotion and are not in position to properly explain why they lost out the promotion to a peer from another team. There are a whole of unspoken things that factor into a promotion like gaining favor by pumping your manager/VP by giving them credit publicly, thanking them for their support ect.
> Is this really useful though. They will always tell you what you want to hear, just like you say what they want to hear.
100% it's useful.
First, not everyone is going to just tell you what you want to hear. I for one am entirely transparent in interviews, often criticizing the org. Hiring someone who doesn't like the culture is an absolute disaster.
Second, you should ask the same question to every person that interviews you. If you get a bunch of different answers you're probably getting bullshitted, or they just don't have a consistent answer across the org for what you are asking. That's valuable info either way.
Third, ask questions that don't have a "right" answer. If you ask "do people who work here care about the mission?" you're going to get a yes every time. If you ask "what would you say is the biggest source of motivation for you and your team?" you'll get lots of varied answers. I know because I've asked that question and gotten countless different ones.
For the leadership/management question they have no way to know what answer you are looking for when you ask about the management philosophy. If they give a nothing answer like "we try not to micromanage" then you push. You'll either find out what it is or you'll find out that the people you are asking don't know, which suggests that there isn't one.
> and ask about the management and leadership philosophy when you interview!
In theory, I agree. The reality is these orgs are crap for a reason...they drink too much of their own Kool Aid, they don't realize they have blindspots, etc.
The point being, good luck getting a transparent and honest answer as that's the antithesis of their philosophy.
True - this is why it's important to structure your questions in a way that makes it harder to BS - same as when interviewing someone, ask about specific instances of things.
It's been a while since I've been a candidate, so I kinda winged it in the above comment, but if you want to be balsy (and why not!) you can ask something like "Can you tell me about the last time you had to give negative performance feedback?" You might want to preface such a question a bit to qualify your reasons for asking it, but that sort of thing is not easy to BS.
Understood. It doesn't hurt to ask. I do agree. I'm just suspect of honest replies. They might not BS in the true sense. They just don't know what transparency and honesty is.
Full disclosure: I just left a marketing agency that wasn't 25% of what they said it was. I had asked questions and the answers didn't match what was actually happening. Nice people. I don't think it was intentional per se. But they were so not self-aware that they had little idea how far off they were.
A lot of orgs don't control their promotion cycle.
Imagine a local unit with the budget given for promotions from global is announced after the yearly promotion discussions of all team leaders happened.
So they had to come up with some form of ranking so that the cut off can be made based on the available budget.
So even if 15 people had done all that their team leads said would be necessary for a promotion the decision hinges on some internal ranking as well as a globally decided budget.
Trump can’t do complex things. However, just looking at hn comments gives me the impression that there are enough people in the industry who will be willing to help him out.
I bet you cried when it was proven Trump paid low taxes for his hundreds of millions in income, while also believing, without even a twinge of cognitive dissonance, how every one of his business ventures hemorrage money.
The reason he paid low taxes is precisely BECAUSE of the huge losses - they were greater than the income - one follows there other, there is no contradiction.
Of course, we will see how inflated those losses were in the course for the NY AG investigation.
> N26's co-founders Valentin Stalf and Maximilian Tayenthal have argued for an alternative, saying they believe the traditional German works council excludes international employees
This is patently false. I work at a medium-sized startup in Berlin, which is very international, with many of my colleagues speaking little German. We have recently created a Works Council (with support from the management) - and the council includes non-german speakers. It is certainly more work, as the work of the council involves a lot of german law - so training and documents need to be translated - however it is possible, and we have nothing even close to the resources of N26.
I think they meant "international employees" as in "employees of non-german N26 Subsidiaries", not "non-german speaking employees of german-N26 entities".
Which, of course, is also a laughably bad argument, since there's nothing that prevents N26 from voluntarily granting those employees similar protections they'd enjoy if they were employed in Germany.
Exactly that. Our works council is doing everything bilingual. for our none native speakers. None the less it isn't allowed to represent the colleagues from the office in the Czech Republic as they are employed by a Czech subsidiary. A company could theoretically offer the same protections/conditions voluntarily. but the works council can't enforce that.
It is little known that the EU has already introduced provisions to form transnational (European) worker councils. The conditions are 1000 employees in total and 150 employees in at least two member countries each. Their powers are way more limited than German or Austrian worker councils though. They only have a right to be informed of company policy and its performance. Anybody knows whether N26 fulfils the size requirements?
> there's nothing that prevents N26 from voluntarily granting those employees similar protections they'd enjoy if they were employed in Germany.
That sounds like a two-tier system to me. Inside-Germany employees having a say (backed by formal power) on their priorities; outside-Germany employees having no say.
A works council, like a union, does not always act unambiguously in the interests of all the employees. It's not that clear cut, because issues are complicated. What is good for some employees is bad for others.
If N26 decided to grant outside-Germany employees similar protections as inside-Germany, would the outside-Germany employees have an equal say and equal right to vote on what they want, or would only the inside-Germany employees actually be represented because the formal process is limited to just them?
It would be possible to structure codetermination in a legally binding way that employees no matter where in the world have the exact same rights (barring laws in other countries restricting such a thing). As that goes beyond what German law requires most companies would probably not agree to that but it clearly shows how hollow the statements of management in this case are.
(It should be noted that the relevant German law considers "Betriebe" and "Betriebsteile" as the unit where employees are represented, so each individual location of a company is usually considered separate and employees at one location have almost no say regarding employees in other locations. In that way, the lawmakers had the same thought process as you)
That's a little bit complicated. Yes, the law behind German works councils (Betriebsverfassungsgesetz) only applies to workers employed in Germany (Territorial principle), but the Federal Labour Court (Bundesarbeitsgericht) has ruled that international employees could also be govererned by the German works councils, if international employees are integrated into the German part of the company and are really depended on management in Germany (»„Ausstrahlung“ des Inlandsbetriebs« [1]). But it's a narrow definition.
But the law doesn't forbid applying agreements between the management and the works council (Betriebsvereinbarungen) to employees outside of Germany.
This seems like a terrible way to architect an application. No longer do we have a simple Customer data class, but a hybrid monstrosity that grows every time a new use case involving a nullable field is introduced.
I would much rather prefer to have a use-case specific class that takes care of notifying a Customer of something, and a @Nullable annotation on the Customer fields that can be null. Then:
- Every use case can decide how it wants to handle those situations, and express it in a clear way
- Every use case can be modified or deleted independently without having to do surgery in some huge object
- The code is clearly readable without having to jump through levels of indirection and polymorphism to get to the actual logic
This really needs to be higher, and the paper actually read by us, as it addresses the nature of the work, the study size and methodology, as well as sociological issues. All things that these other comments speculate about
Crucially it's not IT, the work is a call centre travel agency (and it's also in China).
"First, the job of a call center employee is
particularly suitable for telecommuting. It requires neither teamwork nor in-person face time. Quantity and quality of performance can be easily quantified and evaluated. The link between
effort and performance is direct. These conditions apply to a
range of service jobs, such as sales, IT support, and secretarial
assistance, but they are far from universal. Second, the firm can
closely monitor the performance and labor supply of the employees thanks to its extensive centralized database. Team leaders and managers could generate a report from the database of
the performance of the team members daily and easily detect
problems in individual employees’ performance. Third, the
extent of WFH was limited, so that it did not require a significant
reorganization at the workplace. Team leaders continued to supervise their teams with a mix of home and office workers without
any major reshuffling of team membership."
Geez, a call-centre? I thought "virtual call centers" are common nowadays, i.e. you can be at home doing laundry, when the phone rings, it will say "Call for $COMPANY", you pick up and say "Hello, $COMPANY, Angela speaking, how may I help you?"...
