30% feels like a decent bargain if you finally get to take the other 70% out of the duffel bags/safety deposit boxes. Especially if that enables you to spend it on things that mitigate risky behavior, such as lawyers.
Consider most people legitimately needing to launder money likely already have a lot of it and aren't necessarily looking for a bargain.
Check out something the historians call "presentism". It's really enlightening in regards to helping think about why past breakthroughs were not fully realized.
Etsy anecdote from someone generally outside of their main market:
I have ordered something off of Etsy 3 times. 2 of those times, there was a minor "customer service" level issue. Once, I accidentally put in the wrong zip code and, after the package was returned to the seller, I was refused any refund (it was "my fault" -- too bad). Another time, I was shipped the wrong item and the back-and-forth between the seller to replace the item ended up taking more time than I was willing to spend on said $15 item and I gave up.
In the first case, I did reach out to Etsy, and was told to resolve the issue with the seller. After much back-and-forth, with the seller insisting it was my fault for typoing the zip code and there was nothing they could do short of re-ordering (and re-paying) entirely, I ended up convincing them to let me directly Paypal them shipping costs for the second attempt at shipping, which went fine.
This process took entirely too much time (especially when one thinks of experiences with Amazon -- where they resend stuff in orders-gone-awry right away, without any question, or significant delay).
My main impression of Etsy is: there are some cool items in its unique/niche marketplace and I would like to buy stuff off of Etsy more often in general, but the site is largely irrelevant to me as a "place to shop" because of the lack of an empowered Etsy customer service level between the buyer and seller -- protecting and advocating for both parties. Of course, not all sellers are at fault here, and I'm sure many Etsy sellers (probably the majority?) facilitate minor order issues brilliantly. This is just my personal experience.
I would feel a lot better about Etsy if I knew I had someone with the power (at Etsy) to help when something unexpectedly went wrong with an order, regardless of where the fault lies. I kind of felt like it was a cop-out by Etsy to place all customer service expectations on the buyer and seller directly.
Anyway, I like the concept of Etsy a lot (I helped my 67 year old mother open an account to sell her embroidery!), but I can't spend 10+ emails worth of time over 2 weeks trying to fix minor order issues, which, in my personal anecdotal experience, has been the case exactly 66.6% of the time.
If Etsy promoted a strong customer-positive service vibe -- as the empowered middle-person between the seller/maker and buyer -- I'd feel a lot better about trying again to buy stuff via it.
And this isn't an entirely buyer-sided argument. I would hope that Etsy sees customer service as a boon to both seller and buyer, and would make life easy on the seller as well as the buyer when these small "consumer snafus" show up. For example, not wasting the sellers time, or charging them fees, or being stingy about refunding fees, when minor things like this happen. It seems self-evident that a protected seller -- one who doesn't have to worry about Etsy putting them through the ringer over a minor order mistake -- would make a happier seller. Which seems like it would naturally trickle down to happier buyers as well.
For some commutes, particularly to Capitol Hill and the University District, or into South Seattle or the airport, Link Light Rail is much better than the buses, largely due to it being entirely separated from street traffic for its entire line.
I think the bigger problem with naming is simply being consistent. Ask 5 developers what the variable name for an important filehandle should be and you'll probably get at least 3 answers. As long as everyone is consistent, even if the names get a little sketchy here and there, that consistency goes a long way for code with a long lifetime.
English degree with focus on "modernism/postmodernism" literature, literary criticism, and philosophy. University of Washington, Seattle, 2006.
I never expected to go back to school after high school because it was so boring. It wasn't traumatic, I had lots of friends and many good times and learned one or two things, but it was mostly just a poor use of time. And they made me wake up so damn early.
I got my first full time job in IT at 17 and had almost 5 years of experience (tech support -> jr. sysadmin/datacenter stuff) before taking my first sociology class on a whim with a friend, expecting to hate it. Much to my surprise, they treated me like an adult, and I had a great time. Seattle Central Community College was a very good school for me.
I got an AA in a 7 quarters (1 calendar year = 4 quarters, by the seasons, more or less...) and had a high enough GPA that I was automatically accepted into a BA program at UW in the math department. Shortly after, I switched to modular logic. Shortly after, I switched to philosophy. Shortly after, I switched to and settled on English, and spent almost 3 years completing it (while working part time) and took it pretty seriously. I did all of my homework and went to the vast majority of my classes and even took notes and went to office hours and study groups.
5 years of full time work in a 100% OSS datacenter/ISP (with root) left me with (significantly?) more skills than your average BA CS/CE grad (and having interviewed a lot of them, I am pretty confident in this). One big exception being algorithms and not as much programming experience. But I had a lot of practical "real-world day to day stuff" knowledge.
For that reason, I purposefully only took the one required "computer" credit I needed as part of my humanities degree. I was able to talk a nice CS teacher into letting me into a 3rd-year level Java class to improve my OO skills. I met none of the prereqs (like, not even remotely close), but within 10 minutes of talking to him in his office, he waived them all and let me take it. I think I got a 3.2.
The English dept. was great and I had a great advisor and so many great teachers and fellow classmates. I ended up taking mostly night classes because they had more adults and were a significantly more interesting group to me. I drifted toward English because "I like books" and, for some reason, really enjoyed reading all of those painful literary tomes and busting out all of the essays. So many essays. I did well and was dean's list almost every quarter. I stayed 2 quarters longer than I needed to, on purpose.
After graduating I immediately went back to IT and have been doing ops (OSS system/network engineering) ever since -- about 10 years of it. Still working on our own hardware in datacenters across the world, complimented by cloud services here and there. Stuff I was doing as a 12 year old (ie: minicom to talk to stuff via serial) is still stuff I do at least once or twice a year.
I mean, I guess I briefly looked into the job market that an English degree usually veers towards. Teaching? Writing? Journalism? Technical writing? Manage a bookstore? IDK. But realistically, since I was planning on staying in (expensive) Seattle, the choice to go back to IT-land was pretty obvious.
The last thing I'll say is, you'd be surprised how useful an English degree is in the IT world. I mean, English is basically taking this big pile of words, trying to make sense of it all, and then trying to use them to state interesting things about people or objects or whatever. Software, on the other hand, is often about sifting through a lot of documentation, working with a lot of different APIs and config syntaxes and databases and init systems and revision control and centralized configurations and dynamic scaled platforms. Then putting it all together into something useful for some developer for some company (ie: their platform!). Or something terrible -- like an ad server.
No regrets what so ever. If/when I retire, I may go back for an MFA, and maybe even a PhD in English lit!
Anecdotally speaking, in the last 2 years, I've seen 3 ex-Twitter (as their most recent position) people apply, and none of them made it passed the second phone interview, which was the first real technical one.
I didn't do the interviews myself, but I watched them, and I was very unimpressed with the applicants.
I can say this about most (70%) Amazon people too... (and am in Seattle, so we see a lot of them).
Might be a Chrome issue? There is something that locks scrolling about 500ms after the page loads. No overlay or anything, just a totally unresponsive picture of some sad kids.
Overall though, this is pretty pathetic on their part.
This page is so poorly designed that I -- an engineer with 15 years experience and a mid 6 figure salary -- can not figure out how to read the actual article.
Why are newspapers trying this hard to implement shitty webUX gimmicks? Give me the words.
Sure there is: racist and sexist white males making decisions and developing a workplace culture that prevents them from attaining those positions.
And the sooner people accept this, the better for everyone.