Yeah, because litigation is the best social tool and we should be using more of it. How about, if you come down with something, it's your problem for not getting yourself vaccinated.

Any language platform needs to make system calls into the OS. For as long as all popular OS-es are written in C, all language platforms need to interoperate with C modules. C is the "lingua franca".

Alarmist article from a big corporation to set the stage for loose regulations on chocolate so that the masses can keep getting their 99cents "chocolate" bars (aka hydrogenated fat with dark-brown solids, corn syrup, emulsifiers and natural flavoring agents, whatever other non-cocoa crap - tastes like cocoa) and the company's pockets full.

If cheating is so prevalent, that a degree becomes the anti-pattern, employers would start sampling the non-degreed pool in order to identify employees who can do the job. The fact that this is not happening leads me to believe, that the whole Indian culture just doesn't care about "the work being done" and the society is content with very low productivity. This is not untypical for very stratified and nepotist societies where the piece of the pie is more important than the size of the pie.

If you mean "US Citizens" by "people", yes, US citizens must file with the IRS all income earned, even abroad, while being abroad, working for abroad, and all possible permutations of "abroad".

So you can tap on an icon to open the fridge door, maybe ???

that if it is not broken, don't fix it ! This is true for many things in life, and I'm glad we have such a trivial example for this wisdom as smart-phone upgrades. Please, leave it as it is.

Also, gentrification is a big factor - lower-middle and in certain coastal areas, middle class people are being displaced, seeking more affordable homes further from their communities and work. Although the housing market is still a mess on average, certain coastal areas have appreciated above their 2006-7 peak, due to the ultra-easy monetary policy of the Fed.

Or just make another free account in an year and have your limited number of friends switch to it. As someone else pointed out, people in the countries where WhatsApp is huge has never made an online payment in their entire live. To them $1 is just as unpayable as $100 - because they lack he infrastructure to make the payment.

It's clear that WhatsApp is proportionally popular to the cost of sending SMS, but how many of the penny-pinching users are paying customers? Or do they create new promotional/free accounts every year? How many of the 450M accounts of WhatsApp are just the same person getting a free account every year?

The whole business model of WhatsApp is based on the premise to be purchased by a rich Internet/Social Media company. They already sold to Facebook. If they start another one against their parent company, who's going to buy them again? Running something like WhatsApp is not a sustainable profitable business - you need the LBO end-game.

Which country takes gold for tax payments ?

Absolutely right. Bitcon in NOT a currency, until a country starts receiving tax payments in it. The definition of currency is "a system of money in general use in a particular country". Gold used to be a currency when countries would take it to settle obligations - now it's a commodity. Same with Bitcoin - it's a commodity and a store of value, and you still need to sell it for a currency to settle your capital-gains tax obligation on it.

Yes, it's clumsy, but Watts doesn't tell you readily how much you are paying for it. Consumers are billed for kWh, so to express the cost of the drain, they used kWh/day; example: 4.5 kWh/day * $0.20 per kWh = ~ $1/day

very simple. The bigger and older the company, the more proxy voter shareholders it has (traded on the secondary exchanges to millions to people who own only a handful of shares each). These shareholders have no clue what is going on in the company they own. They let the board and executives run the show unabated.

The real game is played at the board level and executives. The company itself is just a stage - nobody cares about the company in the long run - one can always incorporate another. The board and the executives care about the company as a mean to an end - to make money off it. How the money is made - it doesn't matter. Sometimes money is made by making product and selling it; sometimes money is made by selling out; sometimes by liquidating and golden parachutes.

A successful public company is that makes the board and the executives rich. Products, employment, etc. is just secondary effects, to make things look not too sociopathic.