This sounds strange.
Banks typically hedge their fixed rate loan portfolio because there aren't many equivalent long-dated fixed-rate funding sources available to them.
If the US market is such that borrowers can repay early or renegotiate long-dated fixed-rate mortgages without penalties, the banks are practically guaranteed significant losses when fixed-rates decline.
Do US banks just charge higher spreads than European ones to compensate for this? That sounds undesirable, similar to tax loopholes: everyone pays more to compensate the enlightened few that actually take advantage of something that _everyone_ would want to do.
The US mortgage market is essentially backstopped by the US government. Banks can sell the fixed rate mortgages to a government backed bank at a guaranteed rate and so don't have to hold the interest rate risk on their books. The US government (both parties) has long believed that home ownership is important and have a lot of policies to encourage it, this is one of them.
You can repay early in the Netherlands as well. A friend of mine works for a major bank to hedge the risk of their mortgage portfolio. He mentioned once that the biggest risk for Dutch banks is not the risk of default, but risk of early repayment. This always surprised foreign investors when they did due diligence to invest in Dutch mortgages.
There are ways they use to hedge for this risk. I don't know if this is desirable, but that is probably the case in the US as well.
> What used to be a common journalistic intent of "let's find out who else this might have happened to" is completely gone, replaced by sensational clickbait titles.
> > A similar incident occurred last year when a Canadian Tesla owner was told it would cost $26,000 to get a replacement battery for his vehicle, Fox Business reported.
Unless you're based in some lawless jurisdiction, a privacy policy absolutely does protect users. If you believe otherwise, it's probably not a good idea to verbalise that opinion, especially if you are offering mailbox services :)
Might be a stretch for cloud services generally, but for public dns resolvers there's definitely an argument to be made: a) you pay nothing for the service, b) providing the service costs money, c) the provider benefits indirectly from the added insights and market power of user traffic
This would be good advice, if not for the fact that that approach essentially means you become just another politician. Being _aware_ of office politics is important; _focusing_ on it means you're a politician. Just focus on doing the best job you can, and if that's not what's rewarded at your place of work, leave.
Do you have a source for either of the numbers? Not sure a credible source even exists for the figures we are looking for, but I would be surprised if they showed the difference to be that large nationwide. A quick search gives me significantly lower medians for the US (maybe you wanted mean?).
Even with reliable figures, you definitely cannot just "do the math yourself pretty fast". You are ignoring a whole bunch of things like cost of living differences, working hours, working environment, anything that comes on top of the "gross" like employer pension and insurance (not just health) contributions. For example, the average working hours in developed Europe is 10-20% lower than in the US[1].
Also, as others have mentioned, you can't really take one specific profession and extrapolate. The European labor market is definitely less free-market and by design slower to adapt to shifts. There is a cultural preference for more equitable pay even at the expense of the so-called meritocracy. Software developer salaries in the US have perhaps increased faster than other professions, and less so in Europe. Maybe that's unfair, but the inequality that results from allowing labor markets to move at market-speed causes its own problems.
It can't be assessed by a single dimension, but it doesn't have to be. A high quality engineer absolutely can rank the technical competence of other engineers in his field (not just computer science) with a high degree of certainty, and that's all you need.
The "it's complex" argument is similar to the "it's a tradeoff" argument in that both are easily abused to justify any bad decision.
This is setting a very low bar for entrepreneurs. What else should be only a "mature company" problem? Should startups also not have to care about doing a good job in other fields orthogonal to the product itself like recruiting, marketing, governance, accounting, security? These are all things that come with the territory of starting your own company. Managing your own finances is just one of them, and it absolutely should be the startup's responsibility. It can delegate if it wants to, but "I'm too small to address it at all" is just naivete or incompetence.
These programs should have been blocked by the EU before entering into force.
When you're part of a free-movement union, you shouldn't be allowed to create such programs without the consent of at least a majority of member states (maybe that did happen and I'm just ignorant to it), since otherwise you are unilaterally making immigration policy for the whole EU.
On the other hand, the free movement union might have taken significantly longer to establish if it started with "all citizenship and immigration laws are repealed and from now on all citizenship and immigration decisions are going to be made in the European Immigration Agency in Brussels". The EU started loose and aims for closer links over time.
I have never seen a terminal solution that allows to have the terminal in fullscreen mode and still have a way to have a user defined writing area which can be resized on the fly.
I have experimented with various distraction free vim plugins but they were all fragile and cumbersome.
If you have a solution, a screenshot would be very interesting.
I haven't maintained a Vim config in a few years now (more of an Emacs man now), but I do remember using Goyo in college. Looking back at it, I think it might scratch your itch as far as Vim plugins go, it even allows you to resize the area on the fly.
Goyo is one of the plugins I experienced as brittle and cumbersome. IIRC it creates the centered text area by creating 9 windows. The outter 8 to center the one in the middle, which is used to edit the text.
In my attempts to use it, that created a bunch of issues.
does it have spellcheck? text-to-speech so you can have it read back to you? A browser window would have those things (on a mac, and I assume there's equivalents in windows)
Funny, Firefox on Mac sure doesn't integrate with the native text to speech, or offer it's own without plugins as far as I can tell. Gee it's almost like all browsers aren't exactly the same
