What I think is shocking is that 99% of the software engineering world these days would have zero ability to comprehend this explanation. In my opinion, you could not be a real programmer without the ability to understand what your program is under the hood. You might be able to get away with it, but you're just faking it.
And yet, 99% of the people I've ever seen in the industry have no idea how any of the code they write works.
I used to ask a simple interview question, I wanted to see if potential hires could explain what a pointer or memory was. Few ever could.
What you're describing doesn't exist in Switzerland, which you could tell by doing a quick Google Maps view.
Nothing in Switzerland is cheap, least of all land. Practically nothing in Switzerland is flat either. What little flat land we have is used for agriculture and cities.
Turns out south-facing mountain slopes are nearly ideal for solar panels. From a quick Google Maps view, the country is about half that kind of terrain.
And nobody is going to convince me you can't find the same square footage as, my god, some radio dishes! somewhere in Switzerland.
I used to buy gold bullion as a sneaky way to get credit card points on the cheap (and then use them for first class flights around the world). You could usually do the trade profitably and quickly and quite safely with insured shipping via USPS. $50k at a time. It was a bit sketchy to have that much in bullion at home, and I quickly got bored of it.
Somehow when I was about 13 I ended up buying about 2k worth of silver in various places when spot was about $15 USD. One place was even an antique coin shop in my hometown. When spot went up to $20 a bit later, the same vendor bought it all off me at market price. Precious metals are a strangely easy thing to liquidate.
One of the strangest financial anecdotes of my life. To this day I wonder what the vendor thought seeing a literal child buying bars of silver bullion, then selling them at a 25% markup later.
There are various precious metal trading companies that will buy the bullion from you at close to spot if it's kept in its original assay and has documentation. If not in assay, they will have to test its purity and potentially remelt it so that adds to the spread.
Did the same with those $1 US coins when the mint was allowing you to purchase them for $1 free shipping. We would get as much as possible and then turn around and deposit into the bank.
why would you pay $1 each for $1 coins and turn around and put that in the bank? I mean what's the purpose? I could see if you were keeping them as collectors items that might be worth more in the future, but once dropped in the bank you're back to where you started??
It’s called manufactured spending and the idea is to be able to buy something and liquidate at the same price with no risk. The intent is to rack up points on credit cards for free travel or to manipulate credit scores.
So I'm basically reading this as putting blame for Iran's reprehensible regime and its crackdown on its citizen yearning for freedom on Britain and the US.
No… let's stop with this rewriting of history. The only party to blame for the awfulness in Iran is their evil regime.
While they use the same script, they are not interchangable. A person from Taiwan would recognize characters in a HK or Japanese newspaper but would not necessarily understands it. A good half would only make sense to someone who speaks Cantonese.
Also, several languages have moved from a script if iconographic characters to phonetic ones: for example Vietnamese and Korean, the former adopting a phonetic western alphabet with accents, and the latter developing a new phonetic script, hangul. Japanese developed two new syllables based scripts, hiragana and katakana, which are mixed with the old word characters (kanji). All these used to use Chinese styles characters prior to the switch.
No reason Chinese couldn't do the same. In fact, it did… pinyin is a formal phonetic alphabet for Mandarin Chinese that's based on the western alphabet with additional marks denoting the tones of the words. It's only hard I'm an educational setting, but you could use it anywhere!
Someone from Taiwan can read a HK newspaper no problem.
The pinyin phonetic alphabet only works for mandarin, while a unified written script applies beyond mandarin.
Learning written Chinese not only connects you across varying spoken Chinese languages, but also connects you with the rich history of Classical Chinese text.
The formal pinyin system is great, and should be used along side with the actual Chinese characters. But there is no reason to replace the rich written Chinese characters, which connects across space and time, with a narrow and hollow substitute.
And yet, 99% of the people I've ever seen in the industry have no idea how any of the code they write works.
I used to ask a simple interview question, I wanted to see if potential hires could explain what a pointer or memory was. Few ever could.