It's not that it must be registered (incorporated) in Germany. It's that for tax purposes if the company is run from Germany it will be considered "permanently established" and treated as resident there. Permanent establishment laws are often quite surprising to people doing business across different territories.
> If I've got a long, random, unique, securely-stored password, I don't actually care about having a second factor
I'm not comfortable with my entire online identity being protected by a single line of defence which is a company that I'm paying a few dollars a month to. Not having to type 6 digits off a phone is a pretty minor convenience for me.
Do you then avoid syncing any passwords to your phone to avoid having your two factors in the same place? (And similarly, avoid syncing SMS to any devices where you do have passwords.)
I'm more than happy to pay for DRM free epubs. I won't pay for a crippled rental of a book that only works on amazon or adobe blessed devices and can be confiscated on the whim of a corporation who won't be answerable for it.
Sure, I use Home Assistant running in a little raspberry pie in the lift.
There is an Octopus Integration that exposes current prices (and much else) to HomeAssistant.
There is another Integration that works with my solar panels and another that works with my batteries and can change mode (self use, force charge, force discharge etc.)
So from there it’s really just a question of setting up some if-then automations to turn on smart switches, charge the batteries if prices go negative.
You can also gradually add more nuanced automations like turning on water heaters if the panels are generating more than 1kW and the batteries are over 90% charged.
There's very little reason that Google should have been protected from the evidence of its wrongdoing being made public. That's not extrajudicial punishment, that is public record. Justice should be seen to be done as well as done.
Who can know how appropriate or not the remedy was when the evidence is hidden?
For full disclosure: I'm neither a google employee nor a US citizen.
Sure, there's a strong public interest in having proceedings on record. US civil cases are supposed to have a presumption of openness, which the judge weighs against other interests, like protecting trade secrets, confidential business information, privacy of third parties, etc.
The public record argument is fine; it's just a different argument than the extrajudicial punishment advocated by the original post.
The public interest is in judging the trial process, not in judging the defendant.
Suppose the government charges you with murder, searches your house, and finds your sex toy collection. At trial they present some elaborate thesis about how you used a sex toy to kill someone, but do not convince the jury, so you're found not guilty. The public has a legitimate interest in judging that the trial was handled with integrity and that the correct verdict was reached. They do not have a legitimate interest in judging you based on whatever private information presented at trial might in some way embarrass you (eg, photos of your sex toy collection). On balance, it could be that the public-record interest does in fact justify making public the evidence of the sex toys, but you have to justify it on those terms. The transparency is not itself intended to be punitive.
We are talking about an extremely powerful corporation in an antitrust case not a person. It does not need to be defended in this way, which is a level of protection rarely afforded to individuals.
There is a definite public interest in understanding how Google conducts itself given the reach and impact it has.
There is no way for the public to have confidence in the trial process if it is conducted in secret, and given the outcome every reason to question the process.
I'm surprised anybody objective would defend this.
I read it as "stop asking me the same thing over and over again, I've already told you". It's a shame that the no doubt hundreds of UX people at Netflix are so sloppy.
The last two paragraphs talk about "harried parents", and "world doesn't revolve around children." sounds like having kids is a burden and resentful of the impact of people having kids on his life.
Its quite a lengthy rant about a minor UI inconvenience.
There is also a problem with the "never ask again" option. How long is never? Someone who does not have children now might well in a few years time.
It wouldn't be surprising that de-regulation is good for innovation in the US, because "regulation" in the US almost always means corporate capture of a market through political bribery.
Regulation in territories where it is harder for corporations to buy politicians seems to be far more successful at driving improvements.
This is very true, and I think an underappreciated point specifically for utilities, so I hope you don't mind if I expand quite a bit on your excellent point. What "deregulation" means in Texas is that there's a competitive market for electricity generation, and that those who invest in the cheapest methods of production can make profits, and those who made poor investments can lose money. This "deregulation" is merely what we think of as "normal" in market economies, where normal competition allows for greater economic efficiency.
We are in an era where clean energy is the cheapest energy, and the biggest impediment to the transition is merely being allowed to put the energy on the grid. Go around the country, and the queue to get interconnected to the grid is one of the biggest stumbling blocks. Another huge stumbling block is the procedure for acquiring new electricity generation assets, typically done through IRPs for five years out, based on out-dated data. This is the "standard" regulatory regime in the US, though its highly fractured and there are many many variations.
In this highly "regulated" environment, the corporations have already completely captured the market, and have often bribed the Public Utility Commissions to achieve their own goals.
Deregulation in Texas means less corporate capture, more of a chance for smaller startups to deploy, and a faster energy transition now that the cheapest technology is clean technology.
I can't believe people are using Texas as a positive example of deregulation after they demonstrated quite enthusiastically how broken their system is. A competent electrical system can handle sustained freezing temperatures without massive blackouts. Texas can't. (No, I can't believe they'll do any better next time. There were no market consequences for incompetence.)
IMHO it's not useful to look at a huge and complex system and say "it's all good" or "it's all bad." Texas has a great system for choosing which energy to deploy, but not such a great system for ensuring capacity. The aspects of their system that speed the energy interchange are not the same aspects that cause deadly blackouts.
Texas is an energy-only market right now (payments only for kWh delivered), but adding a capacity market could help (payments for ensuring the ability to deliver electricity), and capacity markets are common in other energy markets around the US. And another thing that would have helped even more clearly is cleaning house at the ISO that didn't follow any of the guidelines from the massive outage from nuclear and gas that happened more than a decade ago. But the ISO failing to do what it's supposed to do is the regulators not doing their job. Regulators regulating what they have the power to do is clearly important in any system.
if one blackout from a freak storm in thirty years is your litmus test, I'd like to know where you live because I'm willing to bet the track record isn't substantially different -- except maybe in how it was covered.
Capitalism is always looking for ways to make complex, expensive work simpler and cheaper. Why wouldn't it?
The thing is it doesn't really matter what tools you use. The problems are complex and they don't become simpler just because you use an LLM. We will gain a bit of efficiency and then spend that gain on whatever new problems LLMs throw up plus the constant stream of new problems the world generates.
Software engineers are not getting replaced by LLMs any more than they are by UML, visual programming tools, RPA, MDD, code generators or any of the other fads that have come and gone over the years.
Supply of the kinds of services under discussion here is rarely limited in any practical sense, so scarcity does not play.
> The way things should be priced is based on the value it gives you. If your service makes me or saves me $100 of value per month, I should be prepared to pay up to a little below $100 for it.
This ignores opportunity cost. Very few buyers have infinite cash, they do tend to have infinite ways they could spend money though and many of them will give a far better return than a couple of percent.
In reality if you're adjusting your pricing to try and extract the most you think you can get away with from the customer, you will lose a substantial number of buyers - and probably more so with buyers who have a technical mindset.
