My wife is a judge and she is not alarmed. She is terrified. We are green card holders and came back to the country 16 years ago. Tonight was the first time we had a conversation about leaving this place for good.
Dictator-like behavior has a polarizing effect, which is generally the precursor to large realignments (and possibly violence). On that note: please be careful!
"The more you tighten your grip, the more star systems will slip through your fingers." - Stars Wars Episode 4
Large realignments are the fallout: those who benefit from the dictatorship will be in favor of it. Dictators also have difficulty maintaining their grip on power.
It's very interesting that we perceive this (public) shutdown as "dictator-like" behaviour while the US uses gag orders, laws and secret courts to force (tech) companies into complying. If you don't want to, you have to shut down your company (see Lavabit). Yet Brasilia is "anti-technology" (sic) because they're not abusing their power in secret.
Be cautious, I had a close friend have their Green Card seized while crossing the border back from Canada into the United States, even though he had documented evidence that he had spent 95% of the previous three years in the United States. He was a consultant, and traveled a lot, but thought he would hang out in Vancouver, BC for a while. Even though he only returned to Vancouver for a few days at a time, before going on the next engagement, and all engagements were in the United States, with a US employer, (And he was a Stanford Graduate) - they seized his GreenCard because his household goods (Mattress/clothing), had left the country more than a couple years ago, and used that as evidence of being away from the United States.
Lesson learned - Sometimes the border staff gets caught up on stupid technicalities. Be aware of them, and don't use common sense.
You really only have to set foot in the US once every six months. My wife (now a US citizen) and I would have to make trips to the US every six months to keep her green card alive.
There is no such thing as a Brazilian green card. Green card is a figure of speech that is mostly used to refer to US permanent residency. Other countries often just call it PR.
To further aid confusion, "Green Card" in Europe means a certification from your motor insurance provider that extends motoring insurance to the rest of the "green card countries" (which is basically Europe)
Very urgently needed PR, if one considers the pace at which the country is turning into an Orwellian total surveillance state (most recent data point: CISA bill hidden in the federal budget bill).
This is certainly a move in the right direction and I'm glad a startup is caring about its employees like that.
"What is your startup's parental leave policy?"
In my country 6 months leaves (with full payment) are mandatory for mothers. Mothers also gain job stability soon as they get pregnant and cannot be fired due to their time off. I live in a 3rd world country and it really blows my mind developed countries allows such short leaves. In my company we give the mandatory 6 month leave, we also pay medical bills if there are any and 12 month health insurance for the baby (some employees choose their own insurance plans, some don't cover pregnancy). There is an option to give only a 4 month leave, but it's very expensive and most companies don't even consider that.
I'm a father of one (and expecting the second). I think 6 months is not enough. Yes, paying salaries for employees on leave adds costs, but this is diluted in the company cost and there are tax breaks over it.
In the US, there are chicken-and-egg challenges all over the map that obstruct the adoption of such policies in small businesses. The big challenge is the out-of-control medical costs that pressure policy decisions elsewhere in the decision matrix.
A typical natural birth procedure alone in the US, with the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context) around $10K. If you go to C-section due to typical child birth complications (can happen to even the most well-prepared and assiduous couples), it triples and can easily hit $40K. If there are additional complications, it can easily hit $100K and rapidly go up from there depending upon the specific set of complications.
If your startup has fewer than 50 participants in the company group health plan, even a completely normal natural child birth in one year will cause a rate rise the next year that is higher than it normally would be. On top of that, there are the costs of supporting parental leave: none of the expense is granted favorable tax treatment at the federal level (and not at the state level in my state).
For businesses with very high revenue per employee like in the tech industry, these intersecting facts don't sink the feasibility if the business leadership makes a commitment from the outset and plans their budgeting with the commitment in mind. I'm glad that AeroFS is publicizing this, adding to the trend of similar family friendly policy stories out of other tech companies in recent years.
But for small businesses in other sectors and even more marginal tech companies, these realities on the ground are just brutal on the odds of such policies making out of "gleam in the eye" stages. From a statecraft perspective, I'd be really interested in finding out if front-loading the expenses of encouraging family formation via tax breaks and incentives to mitigate the costs that employers currently bear, would compare favorably to the back-end costs (including externalities, where most of the back-end ramifications come from, starting with costs of monetary policy decisions partly made in reaction to a greying population) of dealing with an inverted population pyramid. That opens a whole other can of worms of whether or not an inverted population pyramid is desirable or not in the first place.
The reason to hire someone from the company's perspective is to address work overload. If a start-up hires a tenth employee with amazing skills to address back-end server development, there was a need for back-end server development. When three months in the employee says their wife is having a baby in a month and wants to take the full allotment of FMLA, what is the company's role in this? The employee was the best and hired to address an issue, losing them for three months in a start-up environment would be a mission critical event. The company can A) hire a temp worker to fill in, who will either be let go when the employee comes back or hired on or B) go without a back-end developer, a position that is still mission critical.
The employee is doing best in their interest, but what about the company? A large profit margin company can go out and hire another employee, tech sector is great about this. Low profit margin companies will be unable to address this.
Here we have a situation where well-to-do companies are badgering middle to low profit margin companies into a government move. The European companies are hemorrhaging jobs because of the worker benefit packages (France, Greece, Spain) to China where the wages and benefits are lower. The middle to low companies leave and the barrier to re-entry is made worse by movements like this.
Yourapostasy brings up a good point about front loading government tax breaks to encourage children.
> the distorting lens of the unfortunate US insurance landscape, costs (for whatever "costs" mean in this distorted context)
On the topic of distorted costs, I nearly flipped out last night when I got the statement for my recent polysomnogram. The sticker price, if I walked in uninsured, would have been $8750. My insurance company is paying $616, and I am paying $15. I think it is abhorrent that the facility just ignores 93% of the sticker price just because I have insurance. I saw similar massive write-downs on my arm surgery. I imagine a C-section is the same.
Which becomes even more mind-boggling when, if your insurance declines it for whatever reason or there is a problem processing the insurance and it's not caught in time, you get a bill for $6,000 after a "discount." But typically by the time those letters arrive you've already got $1,500 in fees and charges.
The typical billing experience for anything non-trivial in US hospitals is batshit crazy.
One visit can generate three or four bills from different people and institutions. Some of these bills they'll tell you to ignore if you call about them because insurance is covering all or part of it, but they sent the bill before that was sorted out, for god knows what reason. Don't worry, you'll get more, corrected (hopefully? maybe?) bills later. Then explanation of benefits letters arrive, which look sort of like bills but aren't. Almost certainly, at least one of the billing people and/or the insurance folks screwed something up and you'll get to spend most of a day on hold with insurance and a hospital or test processing company or whatever sorting it out. If you miss anything in this mountain of mostly-useless paperwork you may find late notices in your mailbox a month or two later.
Now you get to try to figure out whether the charges on those late notices were legit, or whether they're the result of some seemingly-alway-incompetent hospital billing department's error. While racing against the date on which it goes to collections, and while fees and such accrue.
By four months out you finally, maybe, know what your total costs were/are, after hours of dealing with it and filling half a filing cabinet drawer with documents.
Now, consider that most procedures will include several visits generating a similar number of bills in the months leading up to it. You'll being bombarded with this garbage non-stop for months on either side of the Main Event. You'll also have some follow up appointments and/or tests. Fun!
Basically everyone involved either doesn't care about doing their job correctly or is actively trying to steal your money. Half the time they don't know WTF is going on. You or your loved ones get to deal with that while you're sick or recovering. We call this health care. Some people prefer to pay a premium for this "service" instead of having single-payer or a national healthcare service because... that would make us less free?
That's how bad it is with insurance. Without is, I'm sure, much worse, though probably less complicated.
I had my gallbladder removed in 2009, and was lucky in that at the time I had what is still the best insurance I've ever had. The sticker price of the procedure was approximately $50k (ER visit + admission + emergency surgery the following morning), of which I paid less than 1%. But the amount I did pay was split between the hospital (at least two separate bills), the surgeon (who was a contractor for the hospital and billed separately), and my insurance (who paid something in full but two months later decided I actually owed them $20 for it). This is not counting the $100 ER copay which was refunded to me 90 days after I was admitted (ER copays are typically waived if you're actually admitted to the hospital for non-US folks).
I was barely out of college at the time so had my parents look over everything and it was as far as we could tell correct. But still a mountain of paperwork, and I did miss a legitimate bill and end up paying a $30 late fee on a < $100 bill, which was frustrating.
In England we're currently having a crisis in A&E units with unprecedented volumes of patient ("winter crush"[1]) and a shortage of nurses. Targets are being missed. 95% of people who turn up at A&E must be seen and treated, or admitted into a ward, within 4 hours. At present only about 92% of patients meet that target. At its worst only about 89% of patients met the target.
The trip to A&E would cost you your petrol money or cab fair. The treatment in A&E, and the hospital is free at the point of delivery[2]. The hospital might send you home with a month of medication which would again be free atpod. A regular prescription would cost £8.05 per item per month although there are many exemptions and many people don't have to pay for meds.
If you wanted to pay for your hospital visit you can. You get your own room and a free telly, maybe a bit more nursing and a few more HCAs. (In the NHS beds you possibly have a telly that you pay to use.)
The weird thing is that we get all this while we spend less per capita on healthcare than the US government. Free healthcare is cheaper than the US system. And you don't need to get rid of private provision either - so anyone who wants to pay at the point of delivery can.
[1] more people attend A&E in summer. But the people who attend in winter tend to be iller and to need a hospital admission.
[2] see how I nearly avoided "it's not free you pay for it in tax" comments
Yikes. I'm in the UK, and while we had everything covered on the NHS in the end, we inquired about the costs of an elective/scheduled C-section (which the NHS does not offer - you do get a C-section if it is medically recommended, but not if you want it just for the "convenience"), and a C-section carried out privately by one of the top surgeons in the country at one of the top hospitals would have come out well under half the number your quoted for the US.
For reference, my first-born was a non-elective C-section in the US and my total cost for the stay, including the OB performing the procedure and 2 nights in the maternity ward was also under half the number quoted. Admittedly, I can't recall if that was the negotiated rate from the insurer, or the amount actually billed, but I don't remember them being wildly different.
I got some java contracts in my consulting company, some of them are startups. If you are building a SPA you should check out JHipster, they have plenty of information on why they chose certain tools over others.
If you are building a normal, server-side rendered app Spring-boot+data+mvc and thymeleaf (or freemarker) are usually what small companies use for fast development. Investing into IntelliJ Idea is really helpful.
There is no need to rewrite. What exactly is taking long in the development? Maybe I can help with some tips (I'm SCEA/SJCP/etc)
Edit:
> there would already be a dozen open-source versions we could use or adapt quite easily.
That never materializes into actual usable products.
Following in my father's footsteps, I became a commercial pilot really young, before quitting to pursue tech, I had logged a couple of thousand hours. I still fly teach at a flight school for fun.
"TV news increasingly reported sensationalistic stories of the dangers of ballooning, and public opinion started turning against baloeiros."
This statement made my blood boil since me and other 13 people almost got murdered by those "artists", this is what happened:
In 2009 I was flying a cessna caravan with 14 people on board. We had IFR clearance on 35R in SBSP. Since this was a precision landing you don't exactly pay attention to what's outside. At around 7500ft out of nowhere a balloon was in an odd position right above the airplane, without much time to think we "dove" a bit to go under it, only to be surprised by some kind of basket full of fireworks, attached to the main ballon with a single line. We hit the line, luckily it broke and both the balloon and the basket didn't get stuck in the airplane. The line got into the right wing 2cm short of a tank.
This balloon fell in the urban area of a city with 11 million of residents.
My story is just one out of thousands, which will not make into that documentary.
I think Orlando International Airport, FL is probably one the worst places in the world to rent a car. What they do in that airport is immoral and also illegal in pretty much everywhere I've been. This is what usually happens:
- You rent a car online, the website gives you a price and reservation You are not charged, when you get there, you are charged at least two times the original amount you saw on the website even when the reservation clearly states the amount will not change. (That happens in all reservation websites)
- They know you are probably coming from a long flight and use that as a tool to make you pay and go away; That said, I saw them purposely making lines longer at every rental booth, at the same time. When I asked why they were doing that they said '... we are closing some unneeded booths at this time'. They want you to be tired. They even had one employee, not using an uniform, which clearly worked for all companies, he was the one coordinating the lines.
- All car rentals practice the EXACT same price. They created some gimmicks (GPS/insurance/amenities) to change the bottom line a little bit, but the price is exactly the same, they even share the parking space and employees, it's all a big lie.
- Somehow there is not a single car rental near those airports every time, I think that's intentional;
- I've been to some of the worst airports in Africa and was better treated in those countries than in that airport while renting a car;
- They will try to push you into the crappiest car they have, they will give you a better car if you complain. They somehow thought I would put my family to travel around florida in a 10y/o crown victoria.
I don't have a doubt the Orlando Airport car rental is some kind of cartel.
This is probably one of the few times assembly is more readable and easy to understand than C. Many years ago I used to teach OS classes at a local university, we would build a simple bootstrap using NASM. The source code includes 32bits (a20 etc) and GDT iirc:
Going into protmode in the boot sector is extremely early. Most OSs I've seen will stay in realmode (or "unreal" mode) for a little bit longer, so they can use the BIOS to setup some more stuff before making that leap.
Also noticed a minor optimisation:
mov AL, [SI] ; pega um byte da string e carrega em al
inc SI
Could've been replaced with a 'lodsb', saving 2 bytes. Ditto for MOV BH/MOV BL with MOV BX. :-)
Actually, I really prefer writing that in C rather than asm: You can use bitfields to define the GDT, IDT, Page Directories and so on. Doing everything is ASM is a PITA, for debugging and for readability.
(I am a teaching assistant at one of these courses and hate when students do everything in asm.. but they are allowed to do as they want, as long as it works as specified).
> People on here claimed it was "impossible" because of how credit cards work
Hi,
Definitely not impossible, but if you are following the ISO you might end up running out of numbers somewhat quickly or having to reuse them, which I'm not sure it's very safe. But it really comes down to how many users you will have.
The IIN (first 6 digits) are fixed and only one can be issued for each company, etc.
"when the TSE granted access to more than 10 million lines of code for five hours."
The software itself is very small. They are counting the OS, etc.
The software could be safer. But this whole story about those machines involves ego and fights for notoriety between government-run universities, departments and the opposition in place, which changes from time to time. Not exactly FUD, but an exaggeration of the facts.
The problem is much bigger than the specific process used or the findings in the verification. If you look at what they found in the code in the short inspection, you would shiver. For example, vote secrecy was protected by storing votes in a shuffled order, where the shuffle was determined with the random seed srand(time(null)).
But still, the problem is the principle: the system is the only source of truth, and if there is fraud, or a bug, that changes votes, it is undetectable and impossible to prove. TO have the fate of 200M people depend on such premise is absurd.
The electronic system must change, but this will only happen if there is awareness and sound technical discussion by the population.
I'd say republishing these findings from 2012 - which have never been accepted as true - right on elections day is the exact definition of "spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt" :)
As we move programs we use into the browser, window managers become less important. But we also lose some functionality offered by window managers. Maybe the "next browser" will be so intrinsically attached into your OS window manager there will be virtually not difference between an installed application and a website, their windows will behave the same way.
Slack.app may be an example of how browsers will work in the future.
> Maybe the "next browser" will be so intrinsically attached into your OS window manager there will be virtually not difference between an installed application and a website, their windows will behave the same way.
My wife has a successful career in federal court and I'm a CTO/Co-founder of a startup that became a medium-sized company. The impact of having a baby in our careers was insignificant.
Yes we split the responsibilities, but being really honest, if you fail in whatever you are doing because of a baby, you would fail without it either. I would even say that a baby might even make you a bit more ruthless when it comes to making money and doing things in general.
Yes, you won't have time for yourself, you will sleep less and will look miserable for a while. But I'm pretty sure raising a baby is the greatest thing I'll ever do in my life.
That said, to be a power mom you just need a power partner.
It's really great that it works out for you, but PLEASE,
> if you fail in whatever you are doing because of a baby, you would fail without it either.
For most people, it's literally like saying "If you fail in whatever you are doing because you don't get enough sleep, you would fail with enough sleep anyway."
> The impact of having a baby in our careers was insignificant.
That depends entirely upon your minimum standards of parental involvement. Many would argue that the wet nurse/live-in nanny set qualify more as custodians than parents, per se.
To each his and her own, but you're being a bit myopic.
> That said, to be a power mom you just need a power partner.
We did hire a nanny, we both work 7 and 8 hours a day the rest is spent with the baby. As our baby sleep almost half of the time we aren't home, we lose just 4 or 5 hours of parenting time on weekdays.
Not sarcastic at all, What I was trying to say is that most power moms are really moms that have support of their partners.
You are talking to a guy who moved to the US from Denmark for nine months before my wife and son came over here so not casting any judgement here just a heads up.
Your baby wont continue being a baby and before you know it they are awake most of the time when you are not around and asleep when you are.
I see many parents who end up seeing their kid for maybe 1 hour a day after they reach the age of 3.
In almost every household, at least one parent works 40 hours/week. Is that person not parenting? Are you aware how many hours are in a week? That children go to school?
