All the factors you listed are a huge component of Steam’s success but are mainly for the benefit of consumers. Lack of offline installers is something that makes the vast majority of suppliers comfortable with putting their game on Steam. A platform ideally wants to capture as many consumers as possible but also needs to capture as many suppliers as possible to create a rich marketplace. Negotiating the balance of consumer vs supplier demands is what makes Steam successful as a platform.
Of course they are. Violent threats and admitting illegal activity on social media can lead to arrests in the US. By being so unspecific your comment does not really foster good discussion on the topic. You should describe what kind of posts they are being arrested for and which laws/protections in the UK you are specifically criticizing.
This is confusing to me, does this mean Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify will be in violation as well? None of these companies allow subscription or digital goods transactions in their iOS apps.
I’m not sure why Patreon couldn’t replace the “subscribe” button with a “wishlist” button within the iOS app. They could add a link that opens your wishlist in the browser too. It turns what should be 1 click into 3, but it seems far more sensible than accepting the 30% fee.
Admittedly, I also wondered about this. I'm taking Patreon at their word (for now), but I would welcome Apple making some kind of statement indicating that Patreon is allowed to disable payments in the app.
And if it is true that they're not allowed to disable payments, I would also love to know what's special about Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify (other than their size) that would allow them to "get away" with the same behavior.
I would guess most of your exposure to business travel is within tech or consulting, which rarely require last-minute booking. I would imagine most last-minute bookings for business travel come from people in sales. I’ve seen many sales people find out a prospective client is open to meet and immediately hop on a flight just to potentially make a sale. The opportunity cost is worth it even for small businesses. My exposure to this was for wholesale and retail distribution of consumer electronics but I’d imagine that this would apply to any business with a sales team.
About half of the work trips I've been on, the tickets were booked at most a couple days in advance. The most expensive ticket I've ever bought was an economy United cross country flight to LAX for $1500 (booked about 14 hours in advance) and I've done a lot of vacations to Europe. We booked it last minute because we didn't know when the project would be ready to deliver and once it was, we had to deliver ASAP. I was on the ground in LA for about 12 hours before flying home. Awful trip. Largest ratio of dollars spent to enjoyment received I've ever experienced.
I use Spotify Premium and Apple Music. I consistently find the audio quality of Apple Music to be miles ahead of Spotify. I don’t even use any audiophile-level gear.
This is probably one of the most interesting comments I’ve ever read. Can you share more details about the digital identity and currency product you were working on and for which government was it intended for?
Thx. I can be candid because I'm not talking about any institution or client in particular, but there has been more than one and less than six I've worked on directly as a security architect over the last 15-20 years. The details of the identity or currency aren't really that interesting, as if you understand federation protocols and maybe some standard cryptogrphic/security protocols with tokenization, the implementations are compositions of those.
However, what I can say is that engineers are not lawyers, so we tend not to understand the regulatory systems in place, and the lawyers you would need to untangle this stuff aren't technologists. That's changing post-covid, where western governments in general are taking a "so sue me," approach to imposing technology and mandates over top of privacy norms and regulations, and there is a young generation of lawyers who grew up online (and with cryptocurrency, bitcoin is 11 years old now) who can pick up things like protocols.
The vaccine passport system and covax was quite a gambit as it was an international digital id scheme intended to subsume other efforts that had stronger technical requirements. The central bank digital currency (CBDC) stuff we're hearing about now is an artifact of a few related factors, but what CBDCs are really going to look like in my opinion is the CUC in cuba, or a kind of government/public sector scrip, or the peso in argentina or venezuela that has an official dollar peg and price controls, but there's a huge grey market for USD. Reality is from a state perspective, power is zero sum and human suffering is just managable, and the technology changes of the last two decades have sidelined government as an authority, so they're all trying to reassert themselves. It's going to look clumsy and dumb and it will destroy a lot of wealth and value, but they don't care so long as they think they have secured the reins.
Of course, nobody ever secures the reins so the demand for authority is infinite, but that doesn't stop anyone from trying. Economists, politicians and so-called experts who tell you they can manage an economy don't tell you the part where they run it in to the ground and rule over the ashes, as once you give them secured control, it doesn't matter how well it works. Their promises and arguments are to persuade you to give in to them, because their logic reduces to, if we have power, what do we need your consent and approval for?
If I were hedging, I would figure out what the grey market commodities will be in response to a CBDC that doesn't pass the H&B test I described above. Precedents I would reference would be times in history where govts declare a "bank holiday" and replace bank deposits with treasury bills, or seize deposits of FX and reserve currencies and "buy" them from citizens with the new pegged currency with greater national controls.
The scenario I speculate about is NZ/AU/CAN use a long weekend or "banking system outage," to replace citizen cash deposits with the new CBDC with the flick of a switch and the stroke of a pen, similar to India banning certain cash denominations and taking high denomination bills out of circulation. Assets that facilitate capital flight out of these places will be at a premium, imo. (good news for the art, wine, jewelry, collectables, precious metals, equine, super cars, and other portable alternative asset markets, imo. The big auction houses will probably do well this year.)
Dark stuff, but you spend enough time in security, and everything is within a degree or two of these historic sea changes.
In this scenario do you just sit at the bar and start working? I’ve never been at a bar where this wouldn’t be very strange. But I’ve only been to bars at night on the weekends.
thinking it’s a flex is missing the interesting point. Which I believe would be that PTO should be progressive and be accrued by hours worked. There shouldn’t be a requirement to be a “full time” employee before PTO is accrued because businesses can easily have people work slightly less than 40hrs/week with minimal loss to operational efficiency. If PTO accrued over hours worked regardless of full time status, businesses would have much less incentive to circumvent the system.
Let’s say we have a system where 40 hours worked = 1 day PTO:
- the business may choose to split the 40 hours among 4 employees working 10 hours each.
- however, needing to hire more employees to cover the same 40 hours (which one person alone could have handled in the legacy system) increases training and recruiting costs 4x (worst case hopefully) for each role.
- instead of circumventing the PTO “cost” altogether, the businesses would be forced to budget for it no matter how creative they get with staffing.
- budget-wise, the increased cost of PTO would effectively also be increasing the hourly wage. Further forcing businesses to scrutinize the roles they offer and question if it is really necessary to have a human being perform that function.
