> Mercator is the most-widely used projection (Google Maps uses it, for one), but it was created in 1569 during the age of exploration. It's mostly good for sea navigation. Any straight line drawn on the map represents a constant compass bearing.
It's also good for knowing how much daylight you get somewhere or whether someone there is likely to be awake right now.
> It's also good for knowing how much daylight you get somewhere or whether someone there is likely to be awake right now.
The former is correlated with distance from the Equator (and knowledge of the seasons) but surely other than Dymaxion all the maps we care about do have an Equator and North->South ?
The latter is correlated with Longitude, and again other than Dymaxion surely all these maps will be the same in that respect ?
Particularly in practice with Artificial Light humans tend to live by the clock, which is thus dependent on local "time zones" and not strictly East-West position.
> This seems to have happened in history; ideas proposed by lower status folks were less accepted until higher status folks reintroduced them
> For example, Richard Stallman’s software concept wasn’t accepted until rebranded as “open source”.
Richard Stallman graduated from Harvard and worked at MIT. If it was necessary to rebrand his ideas, it's certainly not because he wasn't elite enough.
> Semmelweis’s hand-washing was rejected until Pasteur and Lister’s reintroduction
Semmelweis’s results were already treated as obvious in britain during his lifetime, and Lister worked in that tradition.
The most important thing I remember from Impro is that we all have habits we adopted as children that we still use as adults, even though they no longer work.
> My first company, Freshflow, is valuable enough that walking out of Germany would trigger a massive six-figure exit tax, on gains I have not even realised, purely for the privilege of leaving.
Without this "exit tax", every founder of a successful business would have a huge incentive to leave and to realize the gains elsewhere. It's not a tax for the privilige of leaving, but for the privilege of building a company. I can see only three alternatives to this:
- Abolish the capital gains tax entirely.
- Make defering it impossible. Force people to pay immidiately. No "exit tax", but people have to pay for unrealized gains.
- Tax people when they realize their gains in a foreign country.
It should be possible to move within Europe, then when the liquidity event happens tax me from the countries where I've lived, proportionally to the time I've lived there.
If you want to move out of Europe, you get the exit tax as before.
A fourth alternative is to leave, and a fifth is to not start a company at all.
Now you understand why the USA deploys 3-4x the amount of VC capital compared to the EU. And prior to the current administration, entrepreneurs mostly wanted to get to the US.
Are you aware that the US charges an exit tax if you choose to renounce your citizenship? And if you do not renounce it, they will tax you no matter where you live in the world?
Yep, and it’s still worth it for a multitude of reasons. Business formation is easy in the US, and taxes are generally lower than other places. Current administration not withstanding, most people don’t want to leave once they get to the US.
A summary is always an expression of distrust: I don't trust the author not to waste my time so I need a summary. It's strange that a website would offer an AI generated summary of a text that it paid someone to write.
It's very odd to me how at my work's MS Dynamic 365 interface American-English spellings are red-underlined while British is not (e.g. color/gray but not colour/grey are underlined). The company is American-based and there are no dialect/country selections available.
> The approval of draft rules by the economic committee of the European Parliament comes after three years of wrangling between the ECB and banks, which have been concerned about deposit outflows and lost revenues and sought to limit the scope of the project.
This kind of thing is why I'm optimistic both about Bitcoin and fiat currencies in third world countries like Brazil and India.
It's also good for knowing how much daylight you get somewhere or whether someone there is likely to be awake right now.
reply