>I really think that all of this DeFi stuff is playing with fire. If these tools scale large enough, it's easy to imagine breaking the right link in the system at the right time to cause catastrophic failures.
Substitute "software" for DeFi. Every single day we're playing with fire through low quality code and bad security practices. DeFi just exposes the real financial costs and consequences of terrible software development. How many countless dollars and hours and data have been lost through bad code?
- Canadians are happy to accept whatever wages they are given (the "smart" Canadians move to the US to get higher salaries)
- immigrants to Canada are happy to accept whatever wages they are given
With those two factors, you're not going to make a lot of money in Toronto unless you're working a US company (Google, Amazon, and so on) and even then it'll be less than US counter-parts.
Berlin is a better choice because you can easily travel around Europe and there are more markets. It's also a faster flight back to India if you're visiting family.
>However, once a Canadian citizen, there is a possiblity to get transferred to a Silicon Valley arm of a US company from Canada (using the TN visa) and hence receive a higher compensation.
This is what I'm talking about. The employer will dangle this prize in front of you for as long as they can and will continue to hold off on promotions and keep your salary the same for as long as possible. This is why Canadian salaries remain low, because there will be another sucker that comes along and will also be offered the same "we'll give you a promotion in a few years!" or "we'll transfer you to the US soon! very very soon!" line and they'll accept it.
>How would you compare between the two countries for building a career in tech for an immigrant?
Is immigration required? Because if not, all you need is a good internet connection, a good computer, and knowledge lots and lots of knowledge to distinguish your skills from others and get the higher freelancing rates.
"We'll empower you to easily sell your stuff" that leaves power and agency in the hands of individual companies.
WordPress + WooCommerce, PrestaShop and Magento already do that. Drop $10 to $20/month on hosting on DigitalOcean, install Wordpress, install WooCommerce, buy a cheap theme, buy whatever extra plugins you need, setup your payment system (PayPal and Stripe are supported), and you're off to the races.
And it's better than that, there's people with years and years of experience in modifying and creating plugins and themes so once you have enough $$$ from the basic setup, re-invest into the business and get better developer support for all the GPL'd plugins and themes you're using.
Shopify is just the next closed-source iteration of WordPress and Magento. WordPress has one of the largest platforms and they've taken over (and open-sourced) blogging, content management, learning management systems, and ecommerce. They and Magento are better examples of a platform than Shopify.
>My favorite conspiracy theory (which I totally believe) is that mattress stores are mostly for money laundering. No market can possibly support as many stores as there are, and every time I go by one, they're empty.
Here's more fuel for that fire.
If you look at Sears in the last 10 years, the number of shoppers seemed to dwindle and getting smaller and smaller. Except for a spots in each store, there wouldn't be many shoppers at all. So the economics don't make sense...and then bam they're going bankrupt.
Now look at rug stores; there are a few of them where I live (Toronto, Canada) and every single one, without fail, has very few customers and has a sale on. Usually it's "inventory clearance" or "going out of business" or whatever. But they just continue to sit there.
There are a lot of industries and niches in industries where the economics do not make sense on the surface but I suspect there's some perverse set of incentives that make it possible. Maybe some weird tax loophole, or some kind of government loan or grant, or some weird combination of laws (or lack of laws and regulation) that make it possible.
This is why whenever you build software, you basically should encrypt any and all data and you should be extremely careful when it comes to permission checks. Especially if you are a company or startup, there's no excuse for not burning through a few thousand dollars more here and there to build more secure software that doesn't result in privacy blow-ups like this.
I wonder if GDPR affects Twitter in this case and what % of their revenue can be taken as a penalty for treating users like shit.
It was more helpful to write "Given I have an non-existent file" than to write "(not (file-exists-p org-doing-file))". One can be read by others who don't understand Emacs-Lisp and they'll understand the concept, while the latter can only be read by Emacs-Lisp developers. With the Gherkin syntax I'm free to move my tests over to another text editor and implement code that's specific to the text editor. For example, I could use my tests to implement the package for VIM or Atom (something I might do on a weekend).
The best part is that you have the spec under version control and locked down instead of spread across.
At work no one is really updating the functional spec of our project and it means we have information that's falling through the cracks and is in separate emails or IMs. Executable version-controlled specs have to be maintained but at least they're in one spot.
Substitute "software" for DeFi. Every single day we're playing with fire through low quality code and bad security practices. DeFi just exposes the real financial costs and consequences of terrible software development. How many countless dollars and hours and data have been lost through bad code?