It sounds like you are not their target audience, which is fine, it just means a different service would be a better option for the way you value convenience vs privacy.
I don't know much about this ecosystem but do you see an opportunity for a business to supply these tools (or be the app store) for excel/google sheets addons?
There definitely is for excel. Both for consumer add-ins and internal business add-ins. I've thought about it, and even started on the idea a few times, but have given up. There are just so many components of the system that are outside of your control as a developer. Someone with the appropriate resources might be able to do something neat.
I've thought about selling my code snippet for handling payments on something like Gumroad or similar. However, it's not a great solution since people still need to sign up somewhere and then install add-on. Plus they need to subscribe on stripe with their same email that the add-on will use (since the code grabs their email programmatically). As I'm thinking through this, there could be ways to mitigate some of these issues but who knows!
There is someone that built something similar but for browser extensions (https://extensionpay.com/).
It can even be a problem if you do initiate the call. My mom got taken in by a scam where she googled "American Express phone number" and a scammer's website or paid ad (she isn't sure which it was) was showing at the top of the results with the wrong number.
Also possible if they gave malware on the computer, and it modifies search results in the browser. That’s always seemed like a serious vector although I haven’t heard much in the way of in the wild exploits.
It is, which means it targets higher net worth individuals. I just listened to a darknet diaries episode where they talk about how much these attacks cost to execute - some are $10-100k per target.
> The IRS publishes a quarterly list of the names of people who have renounced their citizenship or given up their green cards, but it only includes people with global assets over $2 million
It may be an arbitrary line, but if so, it's the IRS drawing it.
It seems like no one actually knows what the list represents.
> Gibbons expected that the list would include only "a handful of the wealthiest of the wealthy" motivated solely by taxes; however, the people named in the list turned out to have a wide variety of motivations for emigrating from the U.S. and later giving up citizenship, and few were publicly known to be wealthy.[7]
> ...In contrast, Andrew Mitchel, a Connecticut tax lawyer interviewed by The Wall Street Journal for its reports on Americans giving up citizenship, states that the list is required to include all former citizens. [15]
Why does the IRS publish the list of people renouncing citizenship? And why does it filter for people with global assets over $2M? I feel like I am missing something for this to make sense.
> The IRS publishes a quarterly list of the names of people who have renounced their citizenship or given up their green cards, but it only includes people with global assets over $2 million
This claim is total crap. The list includes all US citizens who renounce their citizenship, regardless of their net worth. [1]
You also cannot renounce your citizenship for tax dodging [2]:
> Persons who wish to renounce U.S. citizenship should be aware of the fact that renunciation of U.S. citizenship may have no effect on their U.S. tax or military service obligations (contact the Internal Revenue Service or U.S. Selective Service for more information).
So plan to become rich after renouncing (and without the IRS noticing).
E. TAX & MILITARY OBLIGATIONS /NO ESCAPE FROM PROSECUTION
Persons who wish to renounce U.S. citizenship should be aware of the fact that renunciation of U.S. citizenship may have no effect on their U.S. tax or military service obligations (contact the Internal Revenue Service or U.S. Selective Service for more information). In addition, the act of renouncing U.S. citizenship does not allow persons to avoid possible prosecution for crimes which they may have committed or may commit in the future which violate United States law, or escape the repayment of financial obligations, including child support payments, previously incurred in the United States or incurred as United States citizens abroad.
I read that as saying "If you owe the IRS money already, renouncing your citizenship isn't going to get you out of paying it".
>So plan to become rich after renouncing (and without the IRS noticing).
Do you have any other sources that corroborate this? I've certainly never heard of the IRS coming after someone for money they've earned after renouncing citizenship, except perhaps in complex cases involving international companies.
> You also cannot renounce your citizenship for tax dodging
You just pay an exit tax, which is a percentage of your total wealth. The exit tax only applies if your total wealth is over 2 million (or less than that if you haven’t been filing properly).
I am a senior engineer and have been programming for close to two decades. I picked up Factorio a few months ago and felt overwhelmed. I couldn't finish the tutorial. I think my problem is spatial relations--it is something I've always struggled with (how to arrange furniture in a room, solve a jigsaw, etc).
I don't think this is a detriment to my programming ability at all--spatial relations really never enters into architecting a large system. Of course you need to think about design constraints but none of them exist on a physical plane.
Factorio, on the other hand, requires actual spatial relation ability. You need to visualize how belts intersect and how to best position things so they dont interfere with each other. This is where I struggled.
If factorio interviews fill all roles with competent personnel, reduces hiring of incompetent people, etc., then it could be "good enough". Sure, you miss a lot of people who would also be good [enough].
They're not saying people who can't play factorio can't develop; it's the opposite. The hypothesis is surely that the can't+can't group has a large overlap.
Why not use starcraft instead and filter by apm and multitasking? You are sure to miss out on a few good candidates but you will filter out a lot of people who cannot manage 3 bases really effectively while watching the minimap, while designing custom build orders that can survive in the current meta. It’s like interviewing boxers on their blitz chess playing ability because you want “people who can think ahead under pressure.” Please.
Skipping candidates “just in case” is like not hiring women “just in case” they distract the men. Those defensive hiring practices destroy diversity, diversity of thought, and the chance for a human to be evaluated in a fair or rational way.
I don't think an arbitrary choice of test is "like not hiring women", but other than that yours is a valid criticism (personally I'd suspect it to bias for wealth).
I somewhat buy the anticipatory response elsewhere that essentially it's no worse than some of the other arbitrary choices -- basically, every style of assessment will miss some good candidates.
Also a senior engineer. I tried factorio demo out for maybe 30 minutes, but hated the fact that I actually have to walk the engineer around and do menial tasks like resource collection myself. Why can't I just do stuff with mouse cursor like in most other top-down strategy games? Maybe the game changes in later stages, but the demo seemed to be full of nonsense busywork that is prevalent in survival games.
Independent of the thesis of the article, which is obviously terrible, it does get much better very quickly.
The "gather resources yourself" stage is like the first 5 minutes of the game, more so to force people to automate; I actually think it's an intentional stylistic choice to demonstrate how they are different. Like the first technologies one gets automates all of the resource collection in the game (and later tier resources can't be collected by hand). It becomes a pretty good point and click strategy game very quickly. In fact after the first couple hours you can basically play the game from the map screen if you want, using blue prints to put down large buildings and spidertrons as units to move around, without moving your main character ever again.
The manual resource collection aspect becomes automatic once you have a basic factory setup.
There's also a mod called long reach[1] which allows you to do most things without walking around. If you want to give the game a second chance I'd look into that.
To give an analogy with programming. The demo is more like setting up your programming project, which can be a bit tedious. While the normal game play is more like thinking about the software you're building, defining good abstractions, thinking about how to structure your code both on a macro and micro scale, keeping things DRY etc
I agree with this - having watched the trailer and played the demo, Factorio looks to me like a game of managing logistics of transporting resources around, featuring a conveyor belt system that only works in 2D.
In another game, I'd consider that an annoying micromanagement feature.
They are highly custom shoes for highly competitive athletes and for them to meet regulations they need to be sold (or available at least, as I understand) to the public. Marketing such items, that probably have a very limited usable lifespan, as well as being fairly custom fit, wouldn't make sense to market and sell to the general public. Nike make their real money through said athletes winning major events and the additional value it then adds to their overall brand.
As an aside, the most expensive Nike's sold are the ones they make the least of.
Sometimes, yes. This is common in sneakers. There are lots of limited releases that will retail for < $200, and then fetch thousands in the secondary sneaker market because of rarity.
Getting a new sneaker on drop day is almost impossible. Nike just pulled its inventory from Amazon. They really do make it hard to buy shoes, so they sell fewer, but for oh so much more.
> Pkl — pronounced Pickle — is a configuration-as-code language with rich validation and tooling