And the counterpoint to this is that, since it's _so_ hard to hire in the Bay Area, many companies from down there have opened engineering offices up here in Seattle.

I've lived in Seattle since 1994, and getting interviews and jobs here has always been easy. Today, it's really easy. Just show up at any sort of networking event and announce that you can write code, and you'll be swarmed by people who are hiring. Really. It's not quite the Bay Area (or at least it's not what I think the Bay Area is like now), but it's still booming. I haven't sent out a resume for a long time and I'm constantly getting email from recruiters.

I suspect the number of slashdotters who assume that robots will quickly be better than humans is close to 100%.

True, but we know that human drivers slaughter vast numbers of humans every year.

In the embedded systems world, you can turn more optimization into cheaper hardware into (lower prices/higher profits). It's not dead.

Knowing something about _houses_ is almost irrelevant. Knowing something about _land_ is useful.

The sticks you pile on your investment are not the investment. The land is.

Whether or not it's a _good_ investment is a different question.

"As long as you do not get paid from the EU you do not need a work Visa."

Sure about that? When I was looking at the situation in Ireland, the answer seemed to be "it depends - you need to talk to us." The laws just aren't set up for remote international working.

You do not want to assume that you're going to fly under the radar. As a working professional, you do NOT want to be in a situation where it's hard for you to travel to country X because of visa violations when you were younger.

The link you posted only compares a part of Europe with the United States; Europe is much larger than that. Western Europe != Europe.

There are time limits on how long you can stay on a tourist visa everywhere (something like 6 months for Americans in the EU, and you can't just leave and come back to reset the clock). Plus, it's not really clear that you can legally do what you're talking about; countries haven't adjusted to the new reality of working from anywhere. You may find that you need a work visa to do this, even if you're not making money in the country.

Why would you need ribbons? Manual typewriters will make a physical impression on the page - it's good enough for teaching.

The original post was pretty clear about this: yes, they intend to destroy the phone multiple times. Remember that part about the OP submitting multiple claims previously?

"Insurance" is a great buy if you're paying less than 100% of the value of the item - if you _know_ you're going to use it. You're just buying n phones for something like $(1.3n).