Not really, no. It depends on your situation. If you're fairly young, single, healthy, and have no kids, and can live cheaply, that difference in salary will quickly amount to a lot of savings.
Basically, the US is a good place to make a lot of money, esp. in the tech sector, as long as you avoid spending like a drunken sailor or getting married and having kids. Health insurance is expensive, but the much higher salaries much more than make up for that (but maybe not so much if you're supporting a wife and 3 kids). Education isn't an issue, or shouldn't be: the scenario we're talking about here is someone who's already out of college. (But here again, having kids will ruin the advantage, if you're paying for them to go to college.) Housing is overpriced in the US, yes, but it is in Canada too. If you think anyplace outside the Bay Area is bad, try looking at housing prices in Vancouver BC.
As for retirement, there's a reason so many US citizens become expats when they retire and move to places like Costa Rica.
Where the US really falls down is if you need a social safety net, if you have health issues (which can result in medical bankruptcy in the US), if you want to retire and not eat cat food, if you want to go to college without being saddled with enormous debt, etc. But if you have tech skills and can snag a high-paying tech job in the US, you'll probably save a lot more money for that time. But you should have an exit plan. A lot of people from places like India come here and work and live for many years, saving up a lot of money, and then go back home and live like kings.
The checks and balances don't work as designed, and haven't for a long time. Any time there's a government shutdown that lasts for more than a couple of days, that's proof that this is simply a system too flawed to keep.
A better system is a parliamentary system: in those, you don't have conflicts often between the branches, because the executive is chosen by parliament itself. And in the rare case there is a conflict, you can dissolve parliament, have a new election, then the new parliament can choose a new PM and life continues.
There's a reason every stable, advanced, democratic republic in the world has a parliamentary system instead of one like the US's. The US's system is more similar to those in Russia and Turkey.
They should get some nice recordings here in DC for the Metro system. They usually just have the drivers making announcements, and half the time I can't understand a word they said.
Sounds funny, but your theory is false. I use GMaps every day to drive to and from work, with a very simple route that's almost all on an interstate highway. Almost every day, it gives me the exact same route (which is so simple I really don't need GPS navigation at all for it). Sometimes, it gives me a different route because of an accident, traffic jam, construction delay, etc., which is why I use GPS all the time, but I see absolutely nothing to indicate that Google intentionally makes my route more complicated than it needs to be. (And yes, these delays are real: this road is under a lot of construction at the moment, and it frequently has crashes and traffic jams in places.)
The problem is that it would be mostly useless, because it'd be buried in a menu somewhere where you can't easily change it while driving.
The avoiding tolls thing is absolutely terrible that way. Thankfully, they finally put in a new feature where it shows you alternate routes, with and without tolls, and tells you if they do or don't have tolls. It took years for this to come about even though I had requested it many times, and it's plainly obviously needed. But before this, it was all-or-nothing, and it wasn't easy to change on the fly, and having it on was bad because it would frequently try to route me onto an expensive toll lane even though there was zero time savings, but for other routes a toll road was absolutely necessary.
They should have it weight left turns higher (as in worse) so that routes tend to avoid them. When I drive to work, I can take my normal exit, and only take right turns, or if I miss it, I can take the next exit, but there's a terrible left turn there with a very long light. Google Maps consistently says "1 minute longer" for this route: BS. It might be about the same if you happen to catch the light, otherwise it's 5 minutes longer. I feel like their algorithm really doesn't take this into account well.
>If you are successful as a one person business, it makes sense to scale it past a one person business.
That's not necessarily true. A lot of businesses just don't have enough demand out there to justify scaling up. For instance, suppose you make a business selling a custom LED set for a particular mechanical keyboard (or come up with some other obscure niche product); just how many people out there do you think are willing to pay for that? Larger businesses need lots of customers to pay for all the overhead, which for a 1-person side gig is essentially free (they're working in their spare time): you need employees you have to pay by the hour, regardless of demand, year-round; you need a building/commercial space; etc. You can get away with a lot of things as a 1-person side gig that you can't when you take on employees, and those costs are significant.
I'm guessing the idea is that a .com looks more "official", but I think that's becoming less and less over time as alternative TLDs get more uptake. This probably depends on your customer base though.
From his posts here, it looks like this is just a small side business for him, and he still works a normal day job. If UK customers are already a small fraction of his total customer base, it's not going to make any economic sense to start a subsidiary of a small moonlighting one-person gig just to retain those customers.
There's a lot of small businesses out there that just don't have enough market demand to be turned into something as large as what you're suggesting.
>The whole "they're a private company, they can do anything!" argument is growing weaker by the day as these companies have more influence in our lives
This simply isn't true at all, and if fact the opposite is true. The reality is that corporations are becoming ever more powerful, and voters are enabling this with their choices in the voting booths, and electing administrations that very much believe private companies should be able to do whatever they want. It's not getting any better, it's getting worse.
>But in almost all situations help is only one subspace call away.
Huh? No way; whether you're in a battle with 3 cloaked Romulan warbirds, or have an imminent warp core breach, you have minutes, at most, to get help. Other starships aren't that close by.
I guess some of us are hoping for a little more competence and actually doing some research, like, for instance, trying out these products in field tests to see how soldiers like them and use them and how effective they are with them before committing to a big contract.
That galaxy-class saucer separation thing was honestly not a great idea, and it was somewhat annoying when they used it in the episodes. The problem with it is that only the "stardrive" section has warp capability, so what good is it to be able to separate except for using the saucer as a last-resort escape pod in case of warp engine failure? The saucer is simply too slow to go anywhere in a reasonable amount of time without a warp engine: at sublight speeds, it would take years just to get to the closest star system. This is probably one of the most annoying things about Star Trek: they completely ignored speed-of-light issues like this too often. Using "warp drive" as a plot device to get the characters from system to system in a week or less at FTL speeds is fine, but if you're going to do that, don't fall back on sublight "impulse drive" as something that's actually useful for anything except getting into and out of orbit.
>Well, it worked on Star Trek. Then again, that was addressed in a Voyager episode when Tom Paris designs the helm in their new runabout with old fashioned buttons and switches because he wanted to actually feel the controls much to Tuvok's dismay.
I didn't watch Voyager much, and never saw that episode, but this is extremely disappointing. The ST:TNG Technical Manual (which came out before VOY) clearly addressed this issue, way way back in the early 90s. You can actually feel touchscreen controls, because they have miniature force fields/tractor beams that provide the same tactile sensation you get with mechanical controls. Didn't the writers of VOY ever read the TNG Tech Manual?
It's of course even more disappointing that a sci-fi TV show in the 80s/90s was able to address this important HMI issue in a book meant just for geeky fans, yet 25 years later people in the industry still don't get it. Of course, we don't have tractor beams or force fields to implement what they wrote about in the tech manual, but it does show the show's technical consultants were thinking about and aware of this issue back then, 15 years before slate-style smartphones were even invented, and that maybe we should not be using touchscreens for certain controls until we do have force fields or some other workaround.
>and I mean HATED the touch screen when it came to virtual potentiometers (one operator got up and walked away saying "this screen is a fucking piece of shit")
That operator was correct. Virtual potentiometers on a touchscreen are a horrible idea and miserable to use.
>Personally, despite my beliefs, I am not comfortable with corporations co-opting movements like LGBTQ pride on one hand (how many rainbow branded beer bottles have you seen this month?) and advocating policies that are diametrically opposed with the other.
Yeah, this reminds me of when I went to the DC Pride parade last year and saw a bunch of floats and participants from various corporations: banks, airlines, etc. I'm all for accepting LGBT people, but the corporate-ness of the festivities really disturbed me. What's next, a Million Man march sponsored by Nike, or a women's march sponsored by Johnson&Johnson? I don't remember MLK needing corporate sponsorship when he did his marches.
>but companies like Apple who try to be "woke" have no buisness advocating for equality at home while doing buisness with a nation that has imprisoned thousands of religious minorities in re-education camps.
How is that worse than doing business in a nation that has imprisoned thousands of impoverished migrants in concentration camps and has forcibly separated children from their families, to the point where many of them have never been reunited?
At least in China, the facilities for large-scale manufacturing all exist there. You need some tiny screws to build your laptop? No problem, there's a company in the same city that makes them by the millions; in America, you have to contract with some machine shop to make them for a fortune and you can't get the quantity you need for large-scale manufacturing.[1]
I once worked in a place where they wanted to hire a few contractors to help out, and I had to help phone-interview a few. I remember one guy whose resume claimed he was an expert in C++, so I simply asked him to tell me what a "class" was in C++. He couldn't answer.
Basically, the US is a good place to make a lot of money, esp. in the tech sector, as long as you avoid spending like a drunken sailor or getting married and having kids. Health insurance is expensive, but the much higher salaries much more than make up for that (but maybe not so much if you're supporting a wife and 3 kids). Education isn't an issue, or shouldn't be: the scenario we're talking about here is someone who's already out of college. (But here again, having kids will ruin the advantage, if you're paying for them to go to college.) Housing is overpriced in the US, yes, but it is in Canada too. If you think anyplace outside the Bay Area is bad, try looking at housing prices in Vancouver BC.
As for retirement, there's a reason so many US citizens become expats when they retire and move to places like Costa Rica.
Where the US really falls down is if you need a social safety net, if you have health issues (which can result in medical bankruptcy in the US), if you want to retire and not eat cat food, if you want to go to college without being saddled with enormous debt, etc. But if you have tech skills and can snag a high-paying tech job in the US, you'll probably save a lot more money for that time. But you should have an exit plan. A lot of people from places like India come here and work and live for many years, saving up a lot of money, and then go back home and live like kings.