idiopathic

Just to echo your point… USA >> EU US GDP = $23.3 trillion EU GDP = $15.8 trillion even if you counted UK (to make Europe rather than EU) UK GDP = $3.1 trillion

When I was at college I read that Margaret Thatcher slept just 4 hours per night, and I was so envious, wishing I had that extra time every day. Three years ago my wife and I had twin girls and that meant very little sleep at night for me (night shifts were my responsibility as my wife still kept her paid job). In the last year the kids sleep fine, which means I get to sleep better, but strangely I still wake up after four hours without any need to. A few months ago I learned that Thatcher had twins as well :-)

Please drop me a line on [email protected]. I am CEO of a UK start up that uses Java.

"Conceptually, if very smart people did it, and other very smart people say it can't be done"

Don't forget the third part, which is what the author described, i.e. "not very smart people say they can easily do it themselves". They do not have to be able to do it, they just have to be able to convince the CEO to spend $1 million in salary on the internal delivery time to try to do it.

If I had to guess, it would related to Du.ae, the UAE's second telecoms company - they have a duopoly.

Gulf Co-operation Council countries – Bahrain (my country), Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and UAE.

They have separated citizenship from work visas. Anyone can come, they do not need to prove that they can do work that anyone else cannot do, and as long as their employer sponsor is happy with their work, they can stay and work. The governments compete on how quickly they approve the visas and how business-friendly they are in doing so.

The system works well enough that 60-80% of the people living in these countries are not from these countries. They work, study, bring up families and they go back home wealthier than when they left.

(I am missing out a lot of politics here, and there are plenty of things I would want to change, but the GCC does have the most open economy in the world, both for goods and for people.)

Disclaimer - I live in the UK, where my start-up is, because I grew up here as my father came to complete his studies and then became an academic here. I have lived and worked in the USA on H1-B visa and so know first-hand how bad that system is. UK has a similarly bad visa system, I am told, but I love the start-up ecosystem here.

Some historical background, which includes plenty of personal bias:

Governments, for all their posturing, love dealing with oligopolies, or even better, monopolies. They feel safer in making purchases from them. So around 2002, the UK government decided IT was so important, it was going to be done centrally for the whole NHS. They gave the job to Richard Granger, who then proceeded to divide England into five regions, each of which would have one vendor responsible for all software in the NHS for that region.

As part of that deal, they licensed MS Windows and Office. At that point, it became more expensive to use open source software than Microsoft's software. Then they standardised on IE6, and many vendors began using ActiveX.

When I ask departments to upgrade, they say they are going to do so, but first they need every single vendor to have signed off that their software works in the new browser. This will take a really long time.

Some will install a new browser for us, but this will actually result in a worse outcome for the clinicians because they have to use IE6 for most of their existing browsing, and then the other browser for us. They do not understand the point or the difference, and new browsers mean a different user interface, and they want to get on with treating patients rather than choosing between browsers.

The epilogue is that the UK government's national program wasted 12 billion pounds (about 20 billion US, ie the same amount the US government is also identically wasting to subsidise electronic health record purchases). And Richard Granger left the UK in disgrace.

He is now a consultant in... Australia :)

Let me tell you about the UK National Health Service. 1 million employees, they are literally saving people's lives every day, and all they are allowed to use is IE6.

What your statement shows is not a understanding of how to solve the problem for such a client, but a rather a complete lack of understanding. Check the audience metrics, check the real problem being solved, and leave the grandstanding aside.

And for the record, I hate IE (6 or otherwise) and never want to support it. But I am not going let me personal dislike for a technology get in the way of helping a client solve a really important problem.

Agreed, this was my same thinking when I was in the USA until 2008. Sure, my employer and my wife's both offered to get us a green card, but why wait? I had applied to YC earlier that year with an idea for a start-up that was based on my living in DC and was turned down. I went back to the UK, applied with a different idea that was more appropriate to the UK / Europe. That got funded by Seedcamp, and off we went.

I have no doubt that the USA / SV is a great place to start a company, but why waste your life trying to satisfy government bureaucrats that you should be allowed in when there are plenty of other places that want you?

If you are European, you can move to any of the hubs like London or Berlin. They might not be as brilliant as SV, but they have their own advantages, and the key for an entrepreneur is to get down and make use of these advantages. Folks in the Persian Gulf (I am from Bahrain) can move to any of the hubs there like Dubai or Bahrain, and there are plenty of gaps in the market that an entrepreneur can fill by starting a company. And of course the BRIC countries have huge growth for their own nationals to ride.

So why go through the headaches of government immigration?

(PS I am really sorry for entrepreneur that this story describes. I just hope fewer people have to go through that fate.)

I bought the Kindle when it first out and loved it but never carried it with me, and found it difficult to read at night - so as soon as reader version came out for my Android, I used that and never looked back.

Reading in bed with a smartphone is great because the light does not bother my partner, and after two minutes of my falling asleep, the phone switches off its screen as well. Any bed lamp I use keeps me awake rather than allowing me to fall asleep.

(I know I am the exception as I have been reading on Palm Pilot screens since the late 90s - it was the only way to make sure I could get enough reading time in medical school.)

Because of satellite television, I would say classical - everyone will understand you, and although you will sound formal in your speech, you will also be able to read and write.

However, you will have difficulty understanding the dialect of the person you are speaking to. And if you have a dialect that you should understand, I would say it should be Gulf Arabic (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, UAE and of course my own Bahrain).

Economic (thriving free markets, not just oil-funded governments) and military activity in the Arab world is concentrated in the gulf, so unless you are trying to be a tourist (Egypt), the real value is in Gulf Arabic. Note that most Arabic teachers are Egyptian or from the Levant, and will try and persuade you otherwise ;)

I wanted to add my opinion as an Arab (from Bahrain), which is nowhere as scholarly as yours (I am so in awe of your linguistic nerdiness, thanks for such a lovely article).

Egyptian Arabic is dominant in a similar way to American English, i.e. Egypt had the largest movie industry and population, and everyone else could understand Egyptians while Egyptians had no need to understand other dialects.

What is interesting is the impact of satellite television. These new stations have global audiences and content that Arabs want to watch as opposed to their national censored channels. But their solution to pan-Arab broadcasting is classical Arabic, not Egyptian Arabic, and so there is a resurgence of the use of classical Arabic outside of courts and classrooms.

It's not funny, it's inevitable - Arab and Israeli tribes were all Semites (which is why accusing Arabs of being anti-Semitic is annoying, as it implies that we are not Semites) they share a common genetic and cultural heritage, and their languages evolved from common roots. If you ignore the current crazies on both sides, Judeo-Islamic tradition makes far more sense that Judeo-Christian one does.

A couple of corrections I feel I have to make as an Arab.

> There are the diacritics to think about, but outside of the Quran they are simply ignored.

They are not ignored - when they are present, attention is paid to them. I think what you mean is that Arabic speakers, knowing what the diacritics are, do not bother writing them down. That is not because they ignore them, it is because we have paid such close attention to them when learning Arabic that we no longer need to be reminded of them.

> That's still a big problem for a universal language of the internet though, since written Arabic is highly non-phonetic.

Arabic is highly phonetic, and if being phonetic was a criterion for being universal language of the internet, English should be disqualified immediately.

On arrival in England at the age of 10, I had no idea how English people knew how to pronounce their words. Now I know that non-Arab speakers may think the same way about Arabic because we do not write down the diacritics by default... but it is easy to buy books that have these diacritics written, and thus to crack the code.

But English seemed designed to trap foreigners into mispronunciations, to the great amusement of my classmates. (Traveling to America after college, it was mostly place names that tripped me up.)

The $20 he mentioned is for cablers and phone techs, not for programmers, if I understood correctly.