Michael, I disagree with your point but I recognize your integrity. You just posted your name and city, and your HN profile shares more personal information.
I respect that you are willing to stand behind your claim. Best of success with your current venture.
Used to work at a payments company. Yes, you need to be *very* explicit in how you model currency amounts and precision. See also earlier post about Canadian rounding rules. Some of the "logic" is regulatory/compliance driven.
ref child post about stocks trading for 0.0001. Yes, those are real trades and (probably) fully legal etc, but I'm not sure the Fed recognizes currency amounts less than 1 US cent ($0.01), so the accounting rules and tax rules might not match expectations based on generalized floating point math.
Yes, because tidyverse should be called tidycurse. It's designed to be easy to teach, under the assumption that ALL you learn is tidycurse. Just don't use it!
US citizen and long-time expat calling bullshit on this. That's not the purpose of taxes and that's not how citizenship works in any other country except North Korea.
Looking at the list of "benefits" another person posted:
> The rights your passport gives you
Are no different than the rights an EU passport gives you, except when entering the US-- but then again, an EU passport gives you better rights when entering the EU, so this is not an exclusive.
> + the legal and embassy protections given to American citizens. Like the American civilians held in Russia that Biden recently traded Russian spies for.
Note that the US doesn't have jurisdiction outside of US territory, so it cannot give legal protection and explicitly embassies do not give legal advice. Yes, there may sometimes be trades like above, but on the other hand, if the US prisoners were not US people, they probably would not have been jailed by the Russians in the first place.
> You still have access to vote absentee,
Voting is a responsibility, not a benefit.
>as well as collect social security benefits.
Wrong-o! You only get social security benefits you have paid for. If you are living outside of the US, you are not contributing to soc. security.
> You can use US bank accounts and other institutions.
So can non-citizens. US bank accounts do not require citizenship. Nor does owning real estate. Nor forming companies.
You and your children have the right to return if you ever desire it.
Not sure why US citizens believe this. I've been in situations where there was genuine peril and the look of shock the US citizens had when someone from their embassy said the only thing they'd do is organize a convoy of private vehicles if everyone turned up at x time and place. They really expected the US army to turn up to save them. Honestly I don't think I've seen the US do any more than any other western country for their citizens in these situations.
I'm not an American, but I have seen similar cases from my own country. The reactions varies a lot. Some people are well connected or are lucky enough to get media coverage, that forces the government to act.
Example:
1. A "stoner" didn't have enough money to pay a bribe in India after a "random" drug search (small amount of cannabis) and spent several years in prison and was sick most of the time due to the conditions. Almost no reaction from the government... in the end someone in the Indian government pardoned him for humanitarian reasons because he had suffered enough.
2. Two upper-class young girls smuggled several kg of heroin and was caught. The government moved heaven and earth to get them to serve prison time in their home country.
Those old educational videos are a lesson in how to give presentations I think. There’s an art to the way they build up a fairly complicated concept step by step. The viewers are starting from zero after all.
The starting step is one that is impossible to misunderstand. From there, go one concrete step to another.
