psv1's comments

> does it work equally fast and cheap when you send money to japan or australia?

Of course not. Not that I've ever had to do that in my entire adult life.

> a popular exchange like binance offers hundreds of coins and certainly all of the major ones, and probably more than any bank can offer. If you need one that is not in their list then you must be looking at a very weird merchant.

Decentralisation at its finest.

> You (most probably) did have to go (physically) to a bank and prove your identity and your credit record in order to maintain any credit card.

Didn't have to go there physically. And this is done once while with crypto exchanges you need to sign up for multiple ones because the quality and coins they offer vary so much.

> And it takes days to wire money to your bank account.

In the UK I can transfer money through my phone app (or online banking if I prefer) to any other UK bank account and the transfer is instant and completely free. Cryptocurrencies can't compete with banks that have their shit together when it comes to convenience.

To pay with my credit card online I just need to fill in the card details (which are often stored on the website anyway, or auto-filled by my browser). To pay with card in person, I just need to touch in my phone (at worst take out my card and enter the PIN if they don't accept contactless, which is exceptionally rare in the UK).

To pay with a cryptocurrency I need to:

1. Be using a service which accepts crypto. This immediately rules out the overwhelming majority of services people use, live or online.

2. Own the same cryptocurrency which the service accepts.

3. To have it, I need to register to a cryptocurrency exchange.

4. To do that I need to go through identity checks and often message support a couple of times for one thing or another.

5. Now I can use a payment method to deposit money from my bank account to the exchange. NOTE: This step alone is slower than the entire process of just paying real money with my credit card.

6. I need to wait a couple of days for the bank transfer to the exchange to clear. The transfer also comes with fees.

7. While I'm doing this the price of the cryptocurrency is fluctuating and I have no way to know which way it will go next and by how much.

8. Now I need to transfer the cryptocurrency from the exchange to my wallet - this process is different for each coin and each exchange.

9. A few minutes later, if I've followed the instructions correctly I may have the privilege to pay with a cryptocurrency from my wallet. I will pay a fee for this and the payment won't be received immediately.

And I'm capable of doing all of this because I'm a somewhat technical person who's used to following instructions written by other people and has a basic understanding of cryptocurrency. Neither the older members of my family, nor the younger ones who don't spend their entire day in front a computer will have the ability or interest to go through this.

So the receiver pays you for access to the service and the sender also pays you for access to the receiver?

I hate everything about this double-dipping-middle-man-in-an-otherwise-free-interaction business model.

Which field are you looking at? On the topics that I've been interested in - programming, math, statistics, ML - there many really good books that are completely free.

My concern about Google isn't big enough to justify going through this.

> I was skeptical, but I encourage you to give it a try if you haven’t before.

I have - I found the results far less useful than Google's, the whole experience far more frustrating and it noticeably slowed down my work.

First,

> "Amazon is a big company and they don't enter lawsuits they won't win"

this simply isn't what I said.

Second - my evidence? We're not in court and I'm not trying to prove anything to you. I just explained my thought process - if you disagree or if you think there's a flaw in my reasoning, you can point it out. Or you can move on and ignore what I've written.

> The "enough" here is zero.

No, it isn't. Legally it might be zero, but multi-billion dollar companies don't enter legal processes that last years and cost them millions just for the sake of it. This isn't the same as "you'll hear from my lawyer".

I don't know what evidence they have. Not sure why you decided that it's zero.

Imagine that they aren't suing simply because they lost. Imagine that there was actual evidence for corruption, and Amazon lost a $10-billion contract because Trump put his finger on the scale. How would the whole story look different from our perspective and on what basis did you decide that it's one and not the other?

Either company could have won the project - this isn't about their merit. It's about whether the decision was personally influenced by Trump because he hates Bezos.

Actually, only one of these companies has had its CEO personally attacked by the president.

There's enough evidence for Amazon to take legal action. Then the courts decide if it's good enough.

The original post is a good first source.

So how does being vegan and taking public transport contradict with being a software developer?

I really think that you're approaching this backwards if you decide "this is the values that I follow" and then try to change every aspect of your life to fit that vision.

I'm not a C++ developer but I really enjoyed reading this.

> It's time these big corporations get broken up.

Or you can create and enforce laws that apply when they abuse their monopolies. Breaking up a company because it's above an arbitrary size threshold is a dangerous precedent, and most likely it won't even address the problem at hand.

I think that's used in a completely different context.

I was incredibly unproductive during the first half of my 20s and procrastinated to the point of setting my career back a few years. Around the time I turned 26 I was suddenly able to actually do what I said I would, get stuff done, and in fact be extremely productive.

So even though I've overcome it myself, I have no idea what advice to give to someone who's struggling with procrastination.