The fact is a) an employee accepting such a position may not understand that area of the law, b) if Amazon chose to threaten an Employee it's quite likely someone working in the warehouse has no means to defend themselves and both parties know it.

Very few people are ever in a position to force you to do anything, and yet you may still be in no position but to accept their propositions. For example, perhaps you need to eat and keep a roof over your head and there aren't a lot of other opportunities in your area or fitting your qualifications. We have laws to protect people in these situations. Telling someone that they can't exercise their skillset and background for 18 months after they leave a position without otherwise providing due compensation is about as clear as an abuse of overwhelming power during a negotiation as you can get. Almost nobody would agree to that given a real choice, other than due to short-term need.

There are a lot of ways to get broadband internet which are a lot cheaper than selling a house. He mentions the nearest Comcast plant is 2500 ft away, and that he goes to a local Starbucks for their free wifi when he hits his cellular cap. So it sounds like there's a clustering of businesses about a half mile away, with broadband Internet. All he needs to do is make friends with a one of the businesses there, offer to pay half their monthly Internet bill if they'll mount an antenna on the roof, and mount a receiving antenna at his house. Best case it's about $150 for a pair of antennas and wireless bridges. Worst case it's $500-$1000 more to build a tower on his property to mount his antenna higher for clear line of sight.

He chose to sell his house instead of trying that.

Maybe the guy who bought his house ran into the same problem, and is also selling.

Pass a law that if a service provider says that they offer service to an address they must do so by law. No fines, they have to install service. If that means $30,000 in new cable to be laid, then so be it. The service providers will get their service maps in order really quickly and we'd have accurate coverage numbers for the country. .The service providers will get their service maps in order really quickly and we'd have accurate coverage numbers for the country.

This is the problem with people who typically see regulation as the solution to everything - they assume the best possible outcome for themselves. When in fact the best possible outcome for the company targeted by the regulations is what will really happen.

If your proposal were implemented, the best possible outcome for the company is that they simply discontinue providing coverage maps for the country, and require you to call in. You will verbally be given a quote with a disclaimer that quoting a price does not constitute a guarantee that your address is within their service area. And if you need that guarantee, you will need to subscribe for a year and put down a deposit so they can send someone out there to survey the location. If it turns out they can't provide service, they'll refund your deposit. But if they can service you, you're committed to the year's subscription (thus neatly preventing you from finding if another ISP also covers you).

How do I know? Because I just went through this trying to get Time-Warner cable internet at the commercial building I manage.

> but online businesses have nearly no start up cost at all.

Oh, my. Advertising, wages, travel, laptops or computers, and public facing online services rack up very quickly. Even without travel, most online startups _fail_. That day of "once you have made a profit" is fairly rare for startups.

Without specialized tools or services, which may be all software but cost time and money to develop, most startups have nothing to distinguish them from dozens of other startups with the same "paradigm shift" bright idea.

Indeed, and in some places of work (notably government) they still give 10-20 "ATV-dagen" (workweek reduction days) on top of the contractual amount of holidays. But keep in mind that wages have been decreased accordingly as well.

Exactly. And I see the same happening over here with teaching "critical thinking". It's important, but it got turned into the idea that questioning everything makes one a critical thinker. A college professor in history once told me he gave a guest lecture at a high school. The kids kept challenging him on points during his lecture, and at the end of class, the regular teacher proudly noted how critical the children were and didn't take everything from an authority figure at face value. To which the professor replied: "Yes, but it's a shame they know bugger all about history".

Some of this attitude carries over when these kids graduate and get a job. They're highly vocal and opinionated, but they are equally noisy on topics they have no knowledge on as they are within their own area of expertise. Thankfully, most of them quickly learn better, but sadly some of them are perceived as "strong decision-makers" (whatever the hell that means) and promoted to management, where their unfounded opinions actually do damage.

We tried this in the Netherlands in the 80s, and it didn't work. Only a handful of jobs were created; instead productivity was increased by 20% (let people work less but keep their workload the same, and don't pay overtime...over time, employers and employees figured out how to do the same job in less time) The effects of a shorter work week probably vary a lot between industries. In services, you may see hardly any increase, also because a lot of the work is knowledge work and communications, and adding extra people to the team to make up for lost hours will certainly decrease productivity. In manufacturing however, it may be easy to slot in extra workers working shorter hours, while increasing productivity is not something easily done.

And GP is right: hiring 5 guys at 80% instead of 4 full time guys may well increase overall cost, because of the effects of tax and wage regulations.

A coupe of examples:
- Light recipes. Especially in the living room where there are many lights all around the room, including some Philips Hue bulbs that can change color. Instead of having to set all of them for dinner, sitting around or movie night or whatever, 1 button does it all. And it works with the media player, put that on pause and the lights dim up a bit
- Heating in certain rooms is turned off when not in use, and turned on automatically when someone is there. This saves a little on the heating bill.
- Irrigation in the greenhouse is fully automatic.
- If I go to bed, I get a warning if there are still doors unlocked.
- When leaving the house, 1 button switches of all lights, heating and airco.
- Notifications on my smart phone in case a smoke detector or flood sensor is tripped. The smoke detectors will also trip all lights.
Stuff like that. Nothing life-changing, but those little conveniences do add up and if the hub is offline for whatever reason, we start missing them...

Fixing it by harmonizing VAT rates would require treaty changes and be politically hard to hand one of the big financial levers to the european central bank, especially given not all countries are in the eurozone - imagine the US forcing all state sales taxes to the same rate, set by the fed, and you get the idea.

The U.S. is even worse off. There are nearly 10,000 sales tax jurisdictions in the U.S.

The solution is to reverse who is responsible for updating the tax rates. There are a lot more retailers than there are tax jurisdictions. It's stupid to force every retailer do duplicate each others' efforts and update tax rate data from every tax jurisdiction every day. Instead, make it the responsibility of each tax jurisdiction to update their tax rate on a central database every day. Every retailer can then simply download an updated tax table from the central database at the beginning of every business day. That completely eliminates the duplicated effort and produces the most efficient economic system (for distributing sales tax rates at least).

A huge wall seems like an ugly and in-elegant solution. Building large mounds of forested areas would be much more attractive and useful (as a wildlife, tourist, and a tree resource). As a backup - build man made lakes at a higher altitude that can dump into the ocean in under 20 minutes and time the water dump to coincide with the tsunami.

If you watched video of the 2011 tsunami, you've seen that it isn't a singular wave which comes ashore and retreats back (there are such tsunamis, usually caused by local landslides, but this wasn't one of them). It's more like a 20 minute tide, inexorably raising the mean sea level so seawater went further and further onto land (relatively slowly too - a car could outrun it). So mounds and forested area would do nothing - the seawater would just go around them. Lakes of water dumped in would do nothing either, unless the volume of water in the lakes approached the volume of water coming in from the tsunami. Meaning you'd need a 250 mile lake, which creates the risk of an artificial tsunami should the restraining systems for the lake water ever fail.

The concrete barricade idea doesn't have to be ugly. Inevitably, every beach has a road parallel to it. In California it's highway 1 (Pacific Coast Highway, or PCH). They could simply elevate that road atop 4 stories of concrete. The beach could be accessed through tunnels in the concrete, with a mechanical door manually shut during a tsunami alert, and metal backup doors set up like one-way valves that automatically slam shut in the event of water pressure on the other side. From the beach side, you'd have a view of the ocean, beach, a contiguous concrete wall, and the mountains in the background. Maybe the tops of a few tall buildings, but it should be a simpler and uncluttered view that may actually be an improvement over the current cluttered cityscape. From the city side, you could only see the beach and ocean from taller buildings. But smaller buildings which lose their ocean view would be the ones most at risk from a tsunami anyway, so you're making a pure risk-based trade-off there.

If media is correct one of the pilots wanted to crash the plane, and used the cockpit security system to prevent the other crew from interfering. This was not part of the threat model, and that made the current security system work in favor of the attacker instead of the rest of the crew. Not good. It cost 150 lives.

I disagree that this was not part of the threat model. It obviously was part of the threat model since they thought to include an access code to allow someone outside to get in (and to counter that, they added an override for that inside).

You have to understand that almost nothing in life has a sharply defined line between the correct answer and wrong answer. Usually it's a very fuzzy line. That means there's no perfect answer which is exclusively correct. Something which reduces the risk from one threat increases the risk from other threats. You have to estimate the prevalence of the risks you're likely to encounter, and tweak your design based on those estimates. While you are not eliminating risk, you are minimizing it.

That's why a single example of a failure of a system is not necessarily evidence that the system was poorly designed. When UAL 232 crashed, one of the flight attendants was haunted because she had told a mother to put her lap child (a baby flying for free because the mother could hold it in her lap) under the seat in front of her for the crash landing as per regulations. The mother survived, the unrestrained child died. She led a multi-year campaign to convince the FAA to require all babies and small children have a purchased seat, so they could be strapped in in the event of an emergency landing. The FAA (correctly) recently declined her proposal. See, her thinking was limited to the singular incident of a plane crash. The FAA's thinking extended beyond that. Planes are a lot safer than cars. If you require babies and children to have a purchased seat, you increase the cost of flying. More people then opt to drive instead of fly. And consequently more babies and small children die in car crashes than would've died in plane crashes. So on average, an unrestrained child flying is a lot safer than a child in a car seat on a road trip.

It's exactly like vaccination - yes some people get sick and a few even die from the vaccine. But the overall benefit is so great that it outweighs the small negative consequences of the vaccines being worse for a few random individuals. This is also why anecdotal evidence is so dangerous, and unfortunately a popular line of reasoning among armchair quarterbacks with an axe to grind. They deliberately obfuscate the trade-offs to make their position sound more reasonable. (It's also a major difference I see between the thinking of engineers and scientists. Engineers are forced to deal with the real-world slop of nebulous risk conditions every day, and they get this concept of risk trade-off immediately. Scientists are used to dealing with experiments which minimize if not eliminate this uncertainty. They tend to be critical of solutions which trade-off risk, always believing there must be a way to do it which doesn't have a trade-off. And take a bit more convincing before they'll admit the trade-off is beneficial.)

How is it not anonymous? A wallet is just as anonymous as a numbered account, with the difference that no entity has a record of who owns which wallet (unlike bank accounts). Oh, I am sure clever law enforcement agencies are able to combine data and tie a wallet to a specific person, but for day to day cases, no one knows who owns wallet XYZ, and I do not need to present any proof of identity to get my own wallet. So: anonymous.

The transactions are public. But that has nothing to do with anonymity of the accounts.

Good for them. I'm still struggling to see what the benefit for me would be? I have little need for making anonymous payments, and international transfers are reasonably fast, cheap and convenient these days. One benefit is not having to give online merchants my full credit card details, but for local purchases iDeal (the Dutch banks' online payment solution) is better, and for international orders I can almost always use PayPal for that. Beats mucking around with out of date block chains and/or crooked exchanges (though some people would put Paypal in that category).