But of-course it matters, what it does it lowers your expected salary across the board. Sure, it's market rate on top of a government mandated minimum but that's a mandated minimum that is not supplanted by a higher wage (like the minimum wage law is irrelevant from point of view of your rate if your rate is higher than the minimum wage, though it is not irrelevant if you realise that minimum wage pushes many prices of products you buy up and thus robs you of your purchasing power all in the name of hiding inflation created by the government in the first place) but in fact the minimum mandated vacation days are actually part of your total compensation.

My point is that in a system where government sets minimum vacation days your hourly wage is lower than it would have been otherwise. If a government comes out with another law that increases the number of paid vacation days your employer will likely not reduce your salary directly right away (though I would) but instead most employers will work this out by reducing your bonuses / raises and by attrition, where the new employees would start with a lower hourly wage and/or other benefits and/or with fewer raises, etc.

Basically again, money doesn't come from nowhere, the law of conservation of energy still applies. Your productivity commands your total compensation and your government mandated vacation days are paid to you in lie of hourly wages.

I am correct in both, theory and practice not because of what you may or may not be able to negotiate with an employer but because your vacation pay is part of your total compensation.

Without laws and regulations it is up to you to negotiate. With the laws and regulations it is already negotiated for you, you have no choice but to accept part of your compensation in vacation/sick days rather than in hourly wage.

Before you make another comment on this, think, where is the money coming from to pay for your vacation? You think it's coming out of your employer or out of your own productivity? Obviously (well, it should be obvious) that it is coming out of your productivity. That means that you are compensated in those vacation days rather than any other form of compensation that you might have negotiated with your employer.

Your vacation days are just your wages that are not given to you as money.

The point is that you are getting fewer dollars / euros and under the guise of giving you 'something for nothing' the government is actually forcing you to accept payment in form of vacation days as opposed to anything else you might have negotiated on your own with the employer.

You are mistaken about money, prices and business in general. Money doesn't come from vacuum, it is generated by the business that produces something. Any business that has employees has to consider the total cost of labour, not only a salary, so when you are hired by a business you are paid a salary and if there are any other 'benefits' that come with that salary that is just part of your salary, this includes your vacation pay.

Business is not there to pay your wages, it is there to make the most money for the investor(s), this means that no business will be overpaying its employees above their market rate, and in cases where there are laws that raise labour prices (wages) with various laws and rules and regulations then all of these costs are counted towards your total compensation.

Your total compensation is just it. You can negotiate to be compensated in dollars, pieces of silver, gallons of milk, condoms or paid vacation days, but all of these are part of total price of your labour and where you get something, you lose something somewhere else.

Why this goes above the heads of average /.ers (and moderators here) I have no idea.

You can have all the vacation time you want anywhere you live, all you do is negotiate terms of your own contract. Vacation time is not something that government can force an employer to add on top of your salary, it is your salary, it is just a different way to pay you. You can get more money or more vacation time, your call. It is the same situation with anything that is mandated by a government that must be part of your employment contract. You want to get medical insurance through your employer then your hourly rate is going to be lower, same with any tax.

So you use a VM, marginal cost is near zero for a 4GB VM in todays world.

I'm nearsighted and have worn glasses on and off since I was about 10. I wore contacts through most of my 20s, but returned to glasses in my 30s.

Now that I'm in my 50s I'm in that stage where my near vision is starting to deteriorate and I'm slowly becoming far-sighted. The first real manifestation of this was when flying at night, when I was experiencing massive eyestrain reading charts in my lap, but could see outside the plane just fine. So I got progressives the last time I got new glasses, and I'm fine.

I don't wear glasses when I'm not driving or flying. I prefer a soft-focus world. :-)

Am I a candidate for laser eye surgery? According to the web sites, not really. I could get good distant correction, but would then need glasses for reading. Since I need glasses to drive and to fly anyway, I'm not sure this would buy me anything.

...laura

AWS started as a way to gain revenue from the spare capacity they had for cyber monday, but it's now ~200x the size of Amazon's actual needs and is its own revenue and profit center. If a new CEO wanted to at this point he could spin it off into a separate company with contracts to host services for Amazon. I'm honestly not sure what it would gain you other than access to a pile of capital to use elsewhere, but for the time being Amazon doesn't seem to be hurting for access to capital.

They're not selling goods below cost for the most part, it's just that their expenses eclipse their earnings from sales. This is largely due to capital investments in projects and shipping centers.

Lol, they're less than 1.7% of the retail market, a quarter the size of Walmart and only twice the size of the flailing Sears. Heck, as a percentage of the market they're significantly smaller than the old Sears catalog business used to be.

You don't have to login to use a Chromebook, you can browse as a guest. As to your comment about compilers, MS offers Visual Studio Online Basic for free.

Except Google doesn't track apps for education users.

That's probably a good thing since students shouldn't be static consumers of information and tablets are really subpar for most kinds of content creation. Add in the fact that a Chromebook costs half as much as even an ipad mini and overall the schools are probably making the rational choice.