Well, one would argue that a country suffering from rapid currency devaluation would continue (and even accelerate devaluation) if people were able to trade in other countries' currencies easily (I don't think your universal panacea of BC trade happens anywhere, but lets just play along). What you're really saying is the savy locals get by on working/bartering in USD, Euro, raw BitCoin (more stable currencies), while everyone else at home can suffer with savings being eroded further by your selfishness. Seems about right for the BitCoin crowds.

"driving to/from job site is a good one"
Mind you I'm in Canada, but this is specifically NOT in the rules for allowable travel if to/from work sites if part of regular routine. Plus here, you have to log all hours travelled if you're expensing against a 'company car'. Travel as far as I have determined only applies between multiple job sites in the performance of said job (like plummer from one job to the next, but not to/from home. Maybe if your home is also your official office ... get a lawyer!). That said, most people I've known who expense their cars do literally no business with them, keep no log books, and have never been audited. Just beware that the law may come down hard on you if you're unlucky enough to be called on it.

I've been a contactor a long time and its great because my job category is richly paid and in demand. Now imagine -everyone- is forced to become contractors to get a job (why not if the 'distinction' is removed). The prospect for them is a lot less rosy. There are good reasons why we have employee laws. There are many contracts that do honor the loose distinction between the two, so I suggest finding those.

Universal apps: I've never seen one, so I can't say I'm crying over that. What's the point over them? Simplified deployment? Are they a new extension vs. exe to make it clear you're running a universal binary? If so, what happens if the native parts of the universal binary aren't supported by my architecture?

OneDrive: I could honestly care less about Microsoft's platform (though I apparently have something like 500gb gifted to me) but if I wanted to backup to OneDrive, One can use many tools to do the same job. I use Duplicati to backup and it works quite well for my uses and its free. Or are you implying that all your personal info is automatically being backed up? That's a brand new can of worms if that's the case.

I don't know about background services, but there was a right-click option in the start menu to turn cortana off (or at least get it off the bar).

I'm also not impressed, but the big f-you is not being able to edit the theme directly (like fonts / colors like I could do in previous windows). For some boneheaded reason, tweaking windows to the way I like it caused the 'highlight' color to be the same as the taskbar color, so everything highlight reactive in the start menu (basically everything but launchers) becomes invisible until you hover...

Its an oligopoly. You throw enough money in a pile and jump thorugh a millions hoops, and you too can start a bank! So why not be less crack-pot and more enterprising and start a bank today!

The largest payment cards by far are Visa and Mastercard, and they are quite active in Europe as they are everywhere else. But assuming you mean bank or nation congomerate systems, that may be the case (I don't know about the EU merchant wiring services personally).

The banks were fine-ish. Its the nation that spent themselves into the grave. The banks are just doing what they can to prevent complete economic collapse.

Facebook's alive and well. Hell, tghey make more money than ever, mostly because:
1. Users have no control over the narrative (to anything outside their social group)
2. Everyone and their dog (but not me) uses it
3. You can send each other useless (fb monetized) links to crap nobody cares about
4. Its an amazing diversion for people with no lives (don't forget pinterest / buzzfeed / instagram)
5. Its an amazing way to post how cool you are by posting all the amazing things you do, and like the amazing spread on the toast you just bought in Paris or something

Yes, because you know, rampent speculation is much more interesting than just hearing it from sources. The sad thing is, the Internet has manifested MOB justice just like we had hundreds of years before from uninformed emotion driven people. How many corpses will the internet leave in its wake before people can act sensibly? Oh well, good luck with -whatever new site- you depend on to spring up and be your nmew sounding board. But hell, it'll go the same way as this one beacuse people too busy tearing down others for a living rarely make enough money to pay the bills..

Anything to do with Uber (which is 99.999% about 'business freedom') attracts the libertarians who are far more active on slashdot than I've ever seen in the real world. Whenever you have libertarians espousing dogma, it turns into a holy flame war and only the victors are the ones who skimmed past the story (damn it!).

Yes yes, your libratarian rhetoric is nothing new, and your singular bile won't be winning any minds. But hell here's one.

You piss your neighbors off so much that they decide to deficate their pets in front of your house (lets say just outside of your property, another 'government established' boundary I may add) multiple times a day, why not. Your options are: assault/kill them, you could attempt reconsiliation, you could call the police to enforce laws and structure that you have no belief in, or you can put up with the reems of crap flowing over your lawn.

1. That is Europe, the home of angry mobs that get shit done, unlike the US where protestors wimper in the corner and accomplish essentially nothing (blame / support your political systems for reenforcing said outcomes)
2. They were protesting the lack of enforcing a law on the books, so its hard to complain about their reasoning.

If you want to complain about banning uber or supporting them, then for fuck sakes do it.

Its nice to see that there is some social progression being made in a country that has had such rocky times lately. Good luck to all the gay couples that can now be 'equals under the law'.

That's a little disengenuous. There's just fewer faculty worrying about that pesky 'teaching thing' and they can worry about what's really important, like Academic research, or not.

Frankly, I paid maybe $1000 / semester (+1k for books) at my state sponsered school and got a great job. 15 years later, I look back on the pathetic state of 'educational inflation' with outright distain.

As a professional java developer who's 'led a number or fairly large scale Java projects', you never realized the JDK includes a fully functional JRE without ad-crap installed? Color me suspicious.