I was already working remotely, but I'd quit a job of several years because of a disagreement.
Someone wanted to give me work, but they preferred to give me a job through a company-based contract rather than being an employee (for work permit reasons). It was pretty straightforward to make that happen from my side. Once I was in that game of "you contract for some of my time, but not all of it", I just carried on.
That someone found me through word-of-mouth / personal recommendation, which is also how everything after that has come along.
I don't market myself particularly hard, but I like to think that my reputation is "brutally honest".
One of the things that has repeatedly pushed me off WhatsApp has been their very aggressive stance on this: I've several times stopped using it because "you need to update your app or this will all stop working in 7 days" and I've not been in the mood for jiggling the apps round on my tiny phone to be able to perform that update: the 7 days has passed, and I'm off WhatsApp again until such time as I "need" it.
Be happy disengaging from the game with non-competitive responses like "yeah probably no one will use it, but mostly I just want to have fun" or "Yeah it sounds like a waste, but I get my paycheck".
The National Health Service in the UK has this as a strong stereotype; and it is true in some places. But the only two times I've used a UK hospital, I've been done within 24 hours.
Part of me wants (without any evidence) to say this is not to do with the socially provided/not socially provided difference, but with how that benefit is provided.
I've lived in the Netherlands where the state healthcare took the form of (mandatory, price-fixed) insurance which you used by buying medical care and paying for with your insurance. That allowed me to use any hospital in NL or indeed the world (with the proviso that it was same, cheaper than NL).
There are ongoing battles in the UK to let that kind of "market portability" happen, but the way that the NHS bureaucracy works makes it hard; and maybe its the lack of that end consumer choice which lets things sometimes get so slow. (I think that's a similar complaint to HMO users in the US)
Now I don't really know how well it works in practice but the european model for VAT (the rough equivalent of sales tax) is basically this: if you're a small business, you don't have to collect VAT for the place you're sending the goods; but if you don't, you have to collect it for your own location (rather than collecting nothing). And over a certain business size, you do have to collect it for the destination.
The EU has fairly uniform VAT rates (around 20%), so then there isn't a huge difference to where you charge the tax, and so end consumer prices don't vary by a huge amount.
Maybe the much more variable rates in the US plus what seems to be more easier ability to move jurisdictions would lead to sales tax jurisdiction shopping a more than in europe.
Yesterday I accidentally browsed the terms and conditions of galois.com and discovered that I'm not authorised to view their website without a written licence (as I have a professional interest in their area of business and my viewing of their site is not personal and/or non-commercial).
I've written to them asking for a licence as I don't want to fall foul of UK laws that might put me in prison for 2 years for accessing their servers without permission.
I think the main rage people get here is when they get data on their phone and so can make a much more of a "like-for-like" comparison between various means of delivering 132 characters delivered to/from a mobile device.
I mean of the user experience, not of the very different backend networks in place.
the EU doesn't have a single VAT, or a even a single VAT rate. Each country can choose its own. But if you sell from country A to a resident of country B, you have to charge your country A VAT (in most end-consumer situations) just like you charge to a country A resident. (unless you get real big, then you have to collect country B VAT instead...)
its interesting (to me) that they avoid collecting sales taxes in various US states, but that (at least for AWS) they are compelled to collect VAT for all EU states because they have a presence in at least one of those EU states...
Someone wanted to give me work, but they preferred to give me a job through a company-based contract rather than being an employee (for work permit reasons). It was pretty straightforward to make that happen from my side. Once I was in that game of "you contract for some of my time, but not all of it", I just carried on.
That someone found me through word-of-mouth / personal recommendation, which is also how everything after that has come along.
I don't market myself particularly hard, but I like to think that my reputation is "brutally honest".