You can make the exact same argument about employers paying different rates depending on the country the employee is based in, and for all the same reasons.
Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US? Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.
Equally, a person incarcerated in New York City doesn't have the same living costs as a person who has to live in New York City, so you could reasonably argue that any "Cost of living premium" that a company offers to NYC based employees doesn't need to apply to a person who doesn't experience those higher costs.
> Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US?
Yes, and that reason is that people in most of the developed world are free to say yes or no to job offers based on their individual preferences. And, it just so happens, in Thailand and India there are many people who will happily say yes to offers that people in the US would say no to. The cost of living explanation that companies give is illusory; the reality is that they have to pay enough to get people to say yes.
Now, you might ask why people in different countries say yes to offers at different compensation levels. But I think the answer is self evident: people will say yes to offers when they believe that there are lots of other people who will say yes to it. Under those circumstances, saying no won't earn a higher offer but cause the company to give the job to someone else.
Ultimately, then, regional prices are set by what the locals are generally willing to say yes to.
Except prison has some very key differences from living freely in another state or country. You cannot leave and so don't have a choice about where you work. Even if cost of living is low in prison, you often still have to pay for being there and wages are far less than the cost. A prisoner will be released one day and their cost of living will skyrocket overnight. Do we want motivated hard working people leaving prison with nothing so they end up back in the same environment that got them there in the first place?
>Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.
What a complete bs. If anything, in India it costs MORE to achieve a similar standard of living than in the USA. In India you can spend 3 times what a US worker gets paid - and you'll barely have enough money to get the same level of security that that worker gets.
Companies don't care, they pay the minimum amount that they think will interest the worker for long-term employment. And since in India or Thailand the workers don't have such a wide choice in work - they will be paid less, just enough to get them. And they pay the Americans just enough to get them, it is just happening that for Americans this amount are several times bigger. That's all here is.
Is that true still? I don't go searching prices in foreign markets, but something like the RPi being a UK piece of kit seems like it would now be more expensive in the US compared to UK simply based on recent tariffs being applied.
Sure, but how much of your wage do you spend buying electronics? The vast majority of my salary goes to fixed expenses like housing, food, healthcare, energy, and transport. Those are all highly location-dependent.
In location A you might spend 80% of your salary on fixed expenses, whereas in location B you only need to spend 20% of that same salary to pay for those expenses - leaving you with far more money for discretionary spending.
For sure, but that doesn't justify doing that per country. If you live in SF you could be spending 80% on fixed expenses, but I'm sure that in the US there are places where you could be spending 20%. This applies to other countries as well.
Most companies doing cost-of-living adjustment do it on a finer scale than just country. Someone in SF will indeed be paid more than someone in Dustbowl, USA.
UK here, and we don't print return labels for Amazon. We just take the package to the local store, and they scan the returns barcode on my phone which then prints a shipping label right there, and also doubles as an electronic receipt of where I handed over the parcel.
Dislike of a particular aspect of a product doesn't need to be concrete/provable - a vague feeling of "I don't like this so I won't use it" is all it takes.
With Pocket in particular, the bundling with Firefox moved my impression of it from "this is a potentially useful tool" to "this company feels like they need to force their product down my throat by bundling it with a browser - I don't know why they're doing that but it makes me not want to keep any data with them"
In the early 00s there were a number of text services providing the same function. I got banned from one for the questions "What is the collective noun for a clitoris?" and "What is the resonant frequency of a clitoris?"
Great write up! While this one probably isn't for me, it's planted the seed of an idea. I have a new kitten who we've just started allowing free roam of the house at night, which is fine until dawn when she thinks we all need to be awake and starts running around like a mad thing at half past stupid in the morning.
If I can make one of her noisier toys smart, maybe I can get Alexa to call her downstairs by turning it on, thereby giving us some peace without locking her away all night.
(And yes, the original text is decades old and it's quite obvious that the negotiation team stldecided to keep the existing process and therefore take the same legal framework)
Original text being collection of decades of individual collective works is key here. If we update this part to modern standards, why wouldn't we update all of the others too? And how long that process might take...
The point where is: The brexit agreement is not the forward looking thing, it is taking the status quo and extending it. The EU can go and improve it (if they see need) but requiring something differently/newer in Brexit negotiations causes more trouble. It is a complex transition already and brexit negotiators don't have a mandate to renegotiate EU treaties (which would be the consequence)
Yea that's what it seems like to me too. Though it's fascinating to see where you can end up with one incorrect core belief and a large engineering team behind you.
Looks very much like that, doesn't it. It reminds me of an awful job I had in uni, where we had a sales trainer come in, and to him literally everything you could possibly think of was selling (or an opportunity to sell if was an interaction of any kind).
This seems pointless. The fact that it's not primarily a chat app means nobody is going to use it for day-to-day messaging - you already have to have payments in mind before you start a conversation. So if you want to use it to request payments for an existing group chat, you've got to switch context and invite everyone into this separate chat app just to allow payments.
Or you can just drop a paypal.me link into the chat you're already having.
Lol yeah it's kinda funny - you need to log in with your Expensify account, so that immediately cordons it off to only work usage for me.
Also I tried it out and the app literally doesn't allow you to send payments yet, it does nothing but basic text chat and asking people to build it for them on Upwork because "it's open-source" - honestly reading it I thought this was some kind of early April Fools joke.
Is there a good reason why a developer in Thailand or India should be paid less than their colleague who works on the same team, but is based in the US? Many companies believe so - there's a significant difference in the cost of living between those two employees, and employers believe it is fair to adjust the salary to provide a similar quality of life to both.
Equally, a person incarcerated in New York City doesn't have the same living costs as a person who has to live in New York City, so you could reasonably argue that any "Cost of living premium" that a company offers to NYC based employees doesn't need to apply to a person who doesn't experience those higher costs.