It’s not about the protocols. It’s about business. We can have all the tech we want but until someone is willing to establish relationships with and pay the 3-4 middlemen involved in every single card payment it ain’t happening.

Did he actually recommend one? That said, it’s obvious the author favors Marginalia personally, but there’s no point pretending they don’t have biases. At least for me, making them obvious helps.

Idk, doing this “properly” would take an immense amount of effort and manpower. This feels more like a “let me get enough info for an educated guess” EDA process, which still seems to have taken a lot of effort and I appreciate it a lot.

Speaking from experience, those are business practice problems, not technical competence issues.

You do get what you pay for, but top line (counting the middlemen on both sides) Eastern European outsorcing rates are only about ~30% lower than US rates these days, and people still think of it as a cheap labor destination. So companies give you 25% allocation while pretending to give you 100% and such to make the math work out. Lots of shady business practices like that + outsorcing companies don’t really give a damn about your product. I imagine you’re thinking startups since we’re talking “apps” here, and the industry gameplan there has been to bleed them dry for a while now unfortunately.

But if you’re outstaffing and can actually manage the talent yourself, trust me these guys have no issue going toe-to-toe with US devs.

You bring up a valid point about why though (despite bad comp). My guess is free education up to and including your PhD, general technical inclination, differences in values (a lot of them straight up refuse to move or change their lifestyle for 4x the money for instance, almost inconceivable in the US). I do wonder if that will last though.

Of course it really depends on who you hire, there are also shit developers everywhere and you can get majorly screwed if you don’t know what you’re doing, and that becomes way more likely the moment you’re hiring abroad (information asymmetry is a removed).

Yes. Assuming that you can actually find clients and that those clients don’t have policies against hiring contractors directly (a lot of the big ones do). Those seem like low barriers to entry but the majority of developers don’t meet them (I used to be one, and most of my friend circle still is), much as LinkedIn would have us believe otherwise.

Solutions for individuals tend not to work for large groups (I got lucky, you might just be that good). These changes point to a systemic shift which could work out for the better but I really don’t think it will.

The truth is, except for niche requirements and expertise, one US engineer is not as good as 4 Eastern European devs (and I could get you those for the same price while making a hefty margin). Only the best are needed, the rest are competing in a market that doesn’t even cover their living expenses, and they can’t even negotiate as hard because they don’t have as many local jobs as alternatives. Moving down the value chain is never a good sign. Eventually you capture less profit no matter how you slice it.

Not saying that’s not the case for you, but I used to work for one of those foreign companies paying for US outsourcing labor.

@[email protected] has more of a point than this answer implies. The rates you mentioned, tend to be gross rates the outsourcing company makes (and there’s a growing number of them, compared to freelancers - which often aren’t really an option for various, frequently silly, reasons). If there is any stock comp, it usually does not pass through to the employee, while outsorcing company stock is, well… Outsorcing company stock (with some notable exceptions).

All in all, things aren’t so rosy all around, and they’re only getting worse. Takes some mean salesmanship to seel those rates nowadays, and it won’t work forever.

Don’t get me wrong, US software engineers are great - one of only 2 locations I go for these days (3 if it’s academic work). But this is a bad path to go down, and no amount of marketing is gonna change that in the long run (talking generations here).

No one is arguing any of the points above. But to quote the Wikipedia article:

While many developments failed to live up to initial lofty promises, most of them eventually became occupied when given enough time.[6][16]

Citation 16 is a Bloomberg article from 2 years ago in case you’re wondering.

Put yourself in my shoes, I can’t exactly propose edits to that statement based on a single youtube video of a ghost town existing.

Your conclusion ("How could they? ") does not follow from your premises, much as I agree with them.

Idk man, I feel like there were definitely a couple

I’m starting to believe this is a bad faith argument. Do you have anything addressing the specific point of ghost cities actually (not) being populated now?

For those that are too lazy to read:

• link 1: 39 buildings demolished for illegal construction
• link 2: 50 second clip of 7 buildings that were never finished being demolished (no context, other than the buildings being there for some years)
• link 3: luxury mansion development stalls due to missmangement/lack of funding, leaving people that paid for those homes without a property

Ok, now I get the link you’re trying to make, but it doesn’t fully adress my question.

The one thing that’s still leaving me prickly is simply saying Wikipedia is wrong because it’s editable by anyone. That’s like saying FOSS is insecure because it’s editable by anyone. Neither the conclusion nor the premise is correct in either case. There are hierarchies & access controls in both that often yield better results than the traditional alternative.

Wikipedia is a treasure, and while it is still vulnerable to brigading (far more so than FOSS), this is far from the norm (especially nowadays) and should be backed up with specific sources and rectified.

While I do agree with you that Wikipedia shouldn’t be cited directly due to this vulnerability, it acts as an excellent contextual citation aggregator, and quite frankly I’ve often found it more up-to-date and less biased than some of the crap that made it past the peer review process in my college days.

For instance, if what you’re saying is true (shortsightedness), people may over the years still populate those areas (the claim of the Wikipedia article is that a lot/most of the ghost cities did). If you have sources stating otherwise, please report the article for manipulation and include them there. If you don’t feel like it, post them here and I will do so, despite knowing absolutely nothing about Chinese ghost cities, because I believe this is important.

Please don’t dismiss such a shining example of human collective action so lightly. It’s one of the few things that makes me believe there’s still some good left in the world.

Not weighing in on either side of the discussion, but that’s a video that’s almost completely unrelated to the topic above.

It speaks to how overleveraged/poorly managed a lot of Chinese development was, leading to a borderline colapse of the construction industry, and largely leaves the subject of ghost cities unaddressed.

Or just be honest and say “I need to think about it.” Wins hearts and minds big time.

Sounds like a virtuous cycle to me

But what if your hard to explain kinks damn near kill you?

While increasing energy efficiency and available space, both of which can be used for extending EV range (by adding more batteries that deplete more slowly) - one of the biggest EV issues right now.

Or you could just fit a mini party bus inside a hatchback, whichever you prefer.

To your point though, one of the othe big EV issues is cost (both purchase and maintenance) - even if a large chunk of it is artificial. Wonder what the price tag and lifespan on these things will be.

Of course what could have happened is that that cut was way bigger then the usual Apple Pay deal.

Didn’t know they were so generous with the terms. But I meant the fees they charge merchants. At least that’s how the business usually works if I’m not mistaken. Biggest cut of the merchant fee goes to the issuer bank, a smidge to the payment network, and a smalish portion to the merchant bank. Apple usually takes a portion of the issuer bank’s cut (in this case GS)

That could be true, I don’t know honestly.

But then it’s an issue of bad fee structures, or rather overestimating defaulter numbers. It’s not like the amount of money you make from fees reduces as your interest earnings go up, so - if this is indeed the cause - the only thing I can conclude is that to meet their total projected earnings they assumed people would default en masse. Bad long term business and slim margins if you ask me.

At the same time I have a hard time not drawing a parallel between this and GS Marcus. Apple had nothing to do with the latter and both went under (effectively), with both being forays into regular consumer services for GS.

Then again I’m just an armchair general. What do I know.

That’s just mismanagement and inflated input costs. The average cc company is happy either way. Idk what it is with Goldman but they mucked up consumer banking too.

True, but the business still pays them plenty. It’s not so much that they lose money, it’s they they earn less.