deirdres

Basically anyone who washes their hands frequently (ie all medical personnel, food handlers, etc.) or does manual work with ungloved hands (including home gardening) can later in life have fingerprints so abraded as to be unidentifiable. Using a lot of hand lotion, as anyone with dry hands might, also tends to flatten the ridges. Any requirement for fingerprints as a biometric can render systems inaccessible for entire classes of people - it's a growing problem in banking for the elderly, for example.

Very true! But it's a lot warmer and the day/night seasonal change is not so extreme.

I'm told (by tax specialists) that nowadays the situation is that you pay the taxes in whichever country has the higher taxation rate, but nothing in the other country. That will be fine - I'm ok with paying higher taxes when I'm getting better services, like a good public health system that works for everyone.

In 1999 I was earning $135k from a US-based job while I lived in Italy. Thanks to the tax treaty, I did not pay US income tax on the first $85k of that, but I paid Italy for it. I paid BOTH COUNTRIES on the remainder. Lost over 55% of my income to taxes that year. I was not thrilled that a lot of it was going to the Berlusconi government.

Ah, but the weather... yes, I know it doesn't rain as much as people think (I've been there at all times of year) but it is awfully dark for awfully many hours in the winter.

Both of us had good-to-great health insurance in the US thanks to our employers. But there's the rub: it's tied to employment, and if you lose your job for any reason, you either do without or pay (very expensive) COBRA. In Australia, everyone has Medicare (public health for all ages), and we currently also have supplemental insurance ("gap coverage") from my employer.

Having met a number of Netflix employees (and knowing one extremely well), I don't think this is actually true. YMMV.

Sexist, homophobic, etc. speech or behavior is less and less tolerated in most serious office environments, not least because it opens up a company to harassment lawsuits. That being the case, I wonder what all the very big serious companies that sponsor the Linux Foundation think about the level of harassment that is apparently tolerated in the communities they sponsor.

Forcing adults who would automatically think "trucks for boys, dolls for girls" to think about their choices is, in itself, valuable. As a child I was given dolls because I was a girl. I had absolutely no interest in dolls. Nor in trucks. I wanted building toys, animals, and dinosaurs.

If the child is too young to express a preference, you don't need to choose between (eg) dolls or trucks - baby toys need to be primarily something that can't hurt the baby. If the child is old enough to express a preference, you can ask the child or their parents.

The previous discussion refers to the slideshare and did not include the new blog post and video.