This is both absurd and obscene. I could think of a million better ways to spend the money and benefit people or ecosystems if I had 10 or 20 million $ burning a hole in my pocket. Shame to the people spending this kind of money on such trivial and useless things, and to Bugatti (and other brands) for humoring them. It makes me really sad to know there are people who would rather blow these amounts and waste the money.
Luckily, you don't have to be super wealthy to do this! If you have ~$7k in your bank account you were planning on spending on things beside food and shelter, you can easily save a life in the developing world instead.
An alternative is that this money goes into buying 10 apartments, pushing their value up, and making even more money for the buyer. Buying this $13m car will transfer money to dozens of employees, subcontractors and shareholders in Bugatti. "Blow this amount" and "Waste the money" = the money is put into circulation. If the buyer doesn't "Blow the money" then they either keep it, or invest it and gain even more money from someone else.
On what exactly? I feel like we don't have a shortage of people able to execute, but rather a shortage of good ideas or ideas we are willing to invest money in.
In this case there are probably some highly skilled people involved who were able to increase their know-how (doing research to make the car somehow be xxM$ worth) thanks to being funded by whoever bought the car, but the whole exercise generates probably very little intellectual value outside of this context.
So easy for you to be sanctimonious from the comfort of your internet perch. How about you post the entirety of your purchasing history for the past year here and we will pick through it and decide which of your transactions are "absurd and obscene"?
Or maybe you can realize that moralizing about what other people do with their own money is the absurd and obscene thing.
Someone with less money than you could say the same thing about a lot of your purchases from your discretionary income. The people paying for a $13m Bugatti are likely spending a lot in taxes which is generally how society has agreed upon people benefiting society through their spending. You could argue for higher taxes but that probably doesn't impact much spending for these people who own 80+ cars and have $13m+ to buy a car with.
Don't think of a Bugatti as a car. Think of it as a piece of art, because that's closer to what it is. Many of their customers will either never drive the car or drive it a half dozen times or less.
There may come a time in the future where Bugatti makes cars that aren't even drivable. It won't matter. People will still buy them. They could make an engine block out of solid gold and sell it and people would buy it just for the novelty.
I agree. When you see them IRL, luxury cars are inspiring, because they're engineered to be the best they can be, with attention to every detail. They may be impractical as transportation, but they're beautiful in many dimensions. They're not just about human capability, but about aspiration. The joy of being free on an open road, speeding past everyone else, not because one's better than them, but because it's possible.
Really the opposite of what I was trying to say lol. I’m saying the engineering is bananas. Totally impractical and barely functions outside of a super narrow range of specifications for a short time. They are just showpieces, like some ridiculous sculpture. You are never going to drive something like this on the open road and speed past everyone lol. If you drive them at all you just see them stuck in traffic in LA or weaving in between Toyota Camrys on the way high dangerously and for no reason. It’s more like a piece of fancy jewelry.
But hey, that’s how you know it’s art. Two people can look at the same object and think the same thing for two different reasons.
then make 10 or 20 million and do something better with it.
I hate this argument of "I could have done something better with x", it's reeks of authoritarianism. Yes, there is a better way to spend money, if you decide what "better" means, which you don't, because it's not your money.
Anyone who puts things in terms of Warhammer 40k armies probably knows a great deal about spending large amounts of disposable income for little to no actual benefit. :-)
Most likely not only are they aware but they have probably paid 10’s of millions in taxes, donated 10’s of millions to charity and created jobs for 100’s if not thousands.
The idea that they get money for nothing and spend it all on luxuries is very misguided.
Fortunately, many of us live in free countries and are free to spend our money as we choose. At the least, the money going to bugatti with benefit the people who helped design and build the cars. Maybe those aren't the people you think should be helped, but after all we are free.
I don't have the freedom to spend $13M as I see fit... I don't think if your spending budget were 1/100,000th of mine, you would consider us equally free.
> These allegations are false. Hidden at the bottom of the article, is this: "Public prosecutor Walder of the Competence Center Cybercrime contacted me, saying he had been misquoted". In other words, the alleged source (a public prosecutor) has also supported our denial of these false allegations.
Ah, what a brave new world of clickbait and amateur "journalism" we live in... The "source" was probably asked for a quote five minutes before the article went live and the "publisher" has no incentive to correct it because all they care about is that people visit the site and load the ads so they get a few cents per 1000 views.
Good luck ProtonMail or any other entity caught in these "reporters" and "journalists" antics.
Meanwhile, in the US and Canada, you are forced to sign clauses that gives your employer full ownership of anything you invent ever while employed and you have to ask your ~parents~ employer if you could please do something else on the side. Good for Sweden, these feodal rules are dragging everyone down.
When I first learned about this type of contract I couldn’t even believe the concept. How can anybody think it’s ok that a company can claim and kind of ownership over things an employee does in his free time? I have signed up for 40 hours a week and not for being fully owned by the company.
What happens if you work another job and invent things there? Do the companies own each other’s stuff?
There is often a clause which warrants that you have no conflicting obligations, though if you make a habit of signing these there likely is a conflict. The real solution is to severely limit these terms to reasonable scope. Some are written to be absurdly over-broad.
I like to frame it in terms of reputation risk to the company. If they own the contents of people's creative hobbies outside of work then I am happy to put "Copyright $COMPANY" in big letters on my amateur porn website... Surprisingly few companies have thought about it that way.
You can do work on the side without disclosing your employers trade secrets, I would hope. There is nothing mysterious about yet another CRUD web application. Besides, confidentiality is covered separately and an NDA can stand on its own.
I suspect employers love restricting your right to have a side hustle so that they absolutely totally own you. If you have no other means of income besides your job they can lean on you pretty hard and there isn't much you can do about it if you like having a roof over your head.
If someone wants to trade their employer's secrets, there are MUCH easier ways to do so than creating their own side business. This looks like a straw-man argument.
It's meant to be struck out but HN doesn't do strikeout text. I meant that just as when you were in school and needed a hall pass or note from your parents to be absent, once you're an adult you need a formal authorization from your employer to work on anything else than your job during your employment even if it's on your own time.
Surely this is down to the individual employer? Some companies try to add clauses like this to contracts here in the UK but thankfully they're generally not enforceable.
Speaking as an employer, what my employees get up to in their own time is their business as long as they get their work done when they're supposed to.
In theory, yes, In practice, nearly every single US employer has this somewhere in their contract automatically by default -- the only way a company doesn't, is if someone explicitly got it removed.
Also, in much of the US, the clause is enforceable, so companies have basically no incentive to remove it.
Count your blessings, every US and Canadian work contract (hell, even some contracting/consulting agreements) I have ever seen or signed had a no-compete and a clause prohibiting you from doing anything else than working for your employer.
Actually in Sweden you have this also. Most people just have it removed from the contract. In the US it is the same. or you get a version that instead just says they own anything done during company time or using employer resources.
My (Swedish) company tried this. I got it crossed out after I pointed out that that meant they also had legal responsibility for anything I produce out of work hours.
This has been going on with Apple for as far as I can remember. Apple puts out a new product, a significant number of people are affected by what seems to be a manufacturing defect, Apple suppresses mentions of it as much as they can, and a year or two later, they offer some kind of a remedy (usually free repairs) to whoever didn't rage sell or return their defective product. And because their machines are barely repairable, users can rarely fix the issue themselves.
This seems to work well for them, people keep clamouring for more overpriced apple hardware and are happy to run on Apple 's treadmill to buy the new iteration every year or two, while running the risk of getting a lemon yet again. So I'm guessing that's a valid strategic decision for Apple and that's why it continues unabated.
I... Don't get this mentality. Yes replacing 25k worth of contents isn't that big a deal (although it would suck), but in a fire there are other costs that dwarf your contents. Think about how much your building/unit is worth. If the fire started in your place, you could be responsible for all these damages (and especially your neighbour's). Can you afford to repay a whole new building for you and your neighbours + their contents? How about living out of a hotel for a few months while the place is being repaired (which repairs you'll have to cover too) and potentially paying your neighbours' bills for that as well? How does that compare to a 1000$ deductible and a 300$/year premium? To me it's a no brainer. If you really want a low premium, get a 2 or 5k deductible, 5k contents, and shop around. You'll also get added protection like third party liability which is usually minimum 1 million $ and covers any damage you'd do to other's property. Of course no-one wakes up thinking they'll set their house on fire or flood the unit under them. And yet that happens every day. I don't know anyone who didn't have insurance and who got struck by a fire/flood/other damages say that they regret nothing and wouldn't buy insurance if they could go back in time.
> Yes replacing 25k worth of contents isn't that big a deal (although it would suck),
This would be absolutely devastating to most people in America (and the world). Being able to tank a $25k loss without any insurance help is a very privileged position.
I don't have a point of contention with your comment. I just wanted to make that observation, because I think it can be easy for many of us to forget it.
I doubt it’s accurate. Most people underestimate their contents, personal property and clearly in this case their liability risk. As much as people want to hate on insurance, it is in fact an enabler for economic stability.
I'm sure that most of that 25k wouldn't need to be replaced. Clothes, dishes, furniture would be the main items. And for me, 90 percent of my closest really needs to be purged.
In an apartment or house fire, you've lost _everything_. Picture your bathroom in your mind and think of everything you need to replace just in that one room.
Toiletries and soaps.
Towels and washcloths.
The shower caddy and the shower curtain.
The plunger.
The cleaners under the sink.
The books on the back of the toilet.
Now do the same calculation in your kitchen, your bedroom, your family room. The couch, those chairs, a TV, your mattress and box spring and bedsheets and blankets, dishes and glassware and silverware, pots and pans, and so on. Even if you own cheap stuff, that all adds up very quickly into a loss most people can't readily absorb, even when you factor out the pile of stuff you don't wear any more and really ought to donate. I think we could inventory a lower/middle-income renter's belongings and spend $25K pretty easily.
I'm not sure a house fire would be the best way to purge your closet, though. As funny as a sitcom with that plot would be, I'm sure there's a better way in reality.
If you feel overwhelmed by the prospect of purging, try doing it a piece at a time. Even make a game of it: when you get dressed in the morning, you also need to pick an item. That item goes into a box near your front door.
When the box is full, go donate it, burn it in the back yard, what-have-you.
That's a plot point that is used a lot, and it's not really a sitcom thing. More of a hero's journey get-him-Jack-Reacherized sort of event.
I had it happen once in a move: At 23, all my possessions got squeezed into 6 packages (5 of which were media mail), a bookbag, and a checked luggage. Everything else got thrown out or given away. I'd been living in a furnished room. At the new location, the only thing I needed to replace was a computer monitor.
I begrudgingly get insurance for certain things because I hear enough times how insurance will find a way to avoid paying for even those supposed protections. I hear that plenty times from homeowners where insurance refuses to cover anything they should have paid for due to improper evidence and it’d have been cheaper to save and invest the money spent instead of going through the adjusters while, say, waiting for a new roof. Then there’s the costs once you do eventually file and receive a legitimate claim for your liability (the primary upside of group insurance as a policyholder) and many insurers will refuse to carry you going forward. So it’s almost a one time benefit for many. On the flip side, insurance fraud exists but is definitely prosecutable while I don’t think I’ve ever heard of someone winning against an insurance company’s lawyers for being denied a claim unjustfully.
This is a serious topic, and it turns out that the relationship of insured-insurer is just really complicated.
Moral hazard and adverse selection are real issues insurance faces: that being covered makes the insured more reckless, and that people with higher risk self-select to sign up for insurance.
OTOH, insurance companies make more money the less claims they pay.
I think serious topics need to be discussed a lot more because the things that cost Americans the most day-to-day are housing, healthcare, and arguably insurance (when it doesn't work for them) - all of these things are "complicated" and it's as if we stop being able to talk about anything substantive anymore as a society. Forget the death of long form journalism, how about longer, serious discussions? Every other person I talk to about these things just doesn't seem to care and it's pretty much "X is hard, let's go shopping" left and right, including from people that are otherwise rather educated and smart. We seem to be too exhausted for whatever reason to learn enough to act rationally, which is rather important for a capitalist system like we have. This tendency goes all sorts of ways from political topics to nonsense like anti-vaxxers and so forth.
Nobody ever liked shopping for insurance. Nobody ever liked trying to find a job. Nobody ever liked "find a market niche" and "marketing their unique skillset." The Neoliberal fantasy is that all life choices are reducible to consumer decisions, and people love to pull out their spreadsheets and calculators and make those decisions in the most rational way possible, and it just isn't true. We want healthcare, we don't want to shop around for health insurance every single year, terrified that we will die (or be bankrupted) if we make the wrong decision. We want meaningful work, we don't want to negotiate terms on 85 different freelance contracts per year. We want government services, we don't want to stand in line at 87 different agencies and try to understand the difference between SNAP and CANF or the DMV vs the DPS vs the County vs the City. We want a home, we don't want to read the tea-leaves of what the Federal Reserve is doing with interest rates and what the Case-Shiller index says this quarter. We want a good education for our children, not a consumer choice amongst 3 different competing charter schools.
In general, we want to run our lives like people instead of like miniature conglomerates. Peoples' tendency not to want to live like automata is not the problem: the problem is the system they are trapped in which forces them to live as automata.
Sadly, even worker's compensation insurance that the state runs and that one is required to pay into by the state is the same way. I only wish I could stop paying the premiums to these crooks because I sure as fuck can't get treatment for the injuries I sustained on the job. If I have a few thousand dollars to get a lawyer and pay witnesses and get super lucky, maybe I could get treatment but I'd rather spend that money on actual healthcare than gambling on insurance. Some insurance is just a scam to steal money (Washington State worker's compensation) indeed. That's how America treats its workers steal from then and leave them on their own to deal with their pain. Insurance my motherfucking ass.
We have filed a few claims over the past 10 years, including:
Water damage due to a sudden burst of a pipe. Required expensive drying of walls, replacement of part of the drywall and replacement of the flooring. Dealing with insurance was extremely pleasant.
Burglary of house. Lost laptops, camera, time machine, diamond earrings. Similar experience. Surpringly, the rule was: if you want to be reimbursed in cash, you get the current value (which is close to zero for a 6 year laptop). But if you buy a new laptop, you get the original purchase price reimbursed. “Hello new MacBookPro!” Zero complaints about the insurance.
Insurance paid for all of a new roof after my 14 year old roofing was struck by a hail storm. I’ve heard of others having problems with various aspects of insurance, though, and given the size of the insurance market, statistical patterns or data would be more useful to read than posts by one or two people on HN.
I tried finding data on insurance payout/refusal rate when I was considering switching to a cheaper but lesser known car insurance company. It doesn't seem to exist. So much for consumer choice.
Insurance companies, to my knowledge, almost always pay out for "normal" claims on standard policies, with some reasonable exceptions. That's why when they don't, it's news. You may not get all that you think you deserve, or you may get more (after the 2011 tornadoes, our insurance paid for a new roof, although only about a third was damaged by the falling tree).
I have a very hard time understanding why do people cut corners and do not follow safety instructions to the T. They're there for a reason, so why ignore them? Same thing why I'll never understand why people bitch about OSHA. They exist to save your limbs/life, why on earth would you ever berate them for that? It's literally the best thing workers have to protect them, because their employers would value money over safety a lot more if OSHA didn't exist.
So as someone who has spent some time with and around physical workers - because all of this safety stuff takes time, and time is money, so if you can trade a little bit of safety for some extra time, then it seems like a good trade off.
Like, I worked with people who climb industrial chimneys professionally(for inspection, cleaning, etc). Now, in the UK the safety code requires that they have to clip in to the ladder they are climbing with a safety harness every 2 steps. So take two steps, attach one clip to the step above you, remove the clip from the step around your waist, repeat until you are at the top. Now - this might be a safety procedure, but literally no one follows it - simply because if you wanted to do that, it would take you 30 minutes to climb a 100m tall chimney. And these guys have absolutely zero fear of heights so for them cliping in is stupid anyway.
I imagine the same logic applies here - sure I could mount the blade guard....or just cut the plank carefully like I did 1000 times before already...."what am I, an idiot?".
Those are good points - and match what I've seen with arborists who climb trees, prune, and do full removals for a living - chunking trees down from the top, oftentimes while they're in them.
A lot of safety procedures and best practices diverge wildly from those in other industries. I get the impression it's probably the same way with chimneys in the UK, given that industry's long history. [1]
In arboriculture, the following weird things are acceptable(-ish, depending on the country):
- The climber is often supported by a single non-redundant rope, unlike rope access in other fields where two ropes are required.
- "Riding the ball", or using a crane to hoist a human load, is done in exceptional circumstances.
- Some critical PPE gear is often hand-made, it's very common for climbers to splice their own ropes.
- Even the most die-hard chainsaw-safety advocates will grudgingly acknowledge that sometimes situations call for one-handed use.
Some of these industry practices are in direct-conflict with more broad OSHA and/or EN safety standards. It isn't that the industry disregards safety - most climbers and crews I know are very safety conscious. Rather, the situations are different enough that the risk-mitigation calculus arrives at different answers.
Where a ladder climber may be not-always attached to the ladder, in the tree-care industry, that's utterly unacceptable.
So, weird/dumb question, I don't know if you have the answers to this, but why don't ladders have round tubular hand rails? Like, no residential or commercial ladder i've seen has hand rails, so I'm always gripping tightly to the sides or the steps.
But this seems stupid. Anyone with hands will realize that sliding your gripped palm around and up a round tube in a neutral position (that is, with your palms facing each other, not facing down) feels more secure then hand-over-hand on the steps, which don't give good grip anyway because the lip of the step faces down, not up.
Unless the ladder is anchored to something, it’d probably just fall over backwards if you put any weight on such a rail. They get unbalanced if the load isn’t kept forward.
At least over here, in maintenance ladders over a few stories high there's a central C shaped track where you attach a metal car about the size of a fist. Then you attach your harness to the car. The car can't come out of the rail. It also has a mechanism that it only moves if you pull it outwards.
Makes climbing really easy and safe. Technically you don't even need to use your hands for anything .
Sure, but not every chimney/antenna/building in the country is fitted with those. Quite often it's just a straight ladder with no extra safety rails going straight up 100-200 metres. In that case the basic principles(clipping in every 2 steps) should apply - but like I said, are frequently ignored because of the time they would take.
Yes this is a huge issue. The solution really is to make safe ladder-climbing more convenient and inexpensive, so that people can and will choose to use it.
I do not do work-at-height, but my (unoriginal) proposal for a simple solution is to run a steel cable from bottom to top, anchored at both ends. This is cheap and low maintenance. Then a worker can bring their own cable-grabbing fall arrestor with a progressive-tear lanyard. Attach yourself to the cable at one end of the ladder, and climb up/down as you would normally until you reach the other end.
I grew up cutting firewood with a 1m diameter buzz saw driven by the power take-off of the tractor via a long belt that would be more than happy to consume your loose clothing or hair with you still attached. The single safety guard for that whole contraption was barely worthy of the word (it was mainly to give you something to put the wood against). Cord after cord was cut with that saw, and both my father and I still have all of our limbs and fingers.
If that buzz saw didn't kill me, I'm not fiddling with that stupid safety guard on the table saw/lawn mower/high-amperage device; I've got shit to do, I know what I'm doing.
(In reality, I personally use every safety feature of every cutty/stabby/choppy powered device I own. I'm not getting any smarter or attentive in my old age.)
Speaking of complacency around giant spinning blades, I was putting on cedar shingles last year, and wondered how they were made: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3HBfj423cc
Oh man heavy machinery(esp tractors and PTOs) are a whole nother class of things that can kill you in the blink of an eye.
PTO Guards, ROPS, 4WD(almost no tractors have brakes on the front wheels, so running a loader downhill can be really dangerous). All things I'm incredibly thankful for.
I can answer that I think, although I certainly don't agree with the reasoning.
The answer is twofold: number one is 'oh, these instructions are overly cautious, my expertise trumps them', and that is compounded by the fallacy of 'well, I've done it and seen it done for x years this way and have never had a problem'.
Because risky behavior doesn't always lead to disaster, and people get complacent. You cut a corner on safety one time, and nothing happens, so you do it again. Eventually it catches up to you.
