mirajshah

you forgot:

  Amazon, 1,528

> How it works in general is that the business visionary has a close relationship with one bank, and the ability to sponsor a lot of friends and family in the old country.

in both this article about donut shops and the article about Bay Area motels, the "business visionary" grants personal loans to other immigrants who were already settled in the U.S. to bootstrap their own _separate_ businesses.

definitely exists in India to a large degree. I personally find it annoying that actual refusals don't carry much weight, because they are most often interpreted as rituals of politeness towards an eventual "yes". sometimes, I actually just want to say "no".

the same reason you trust external companies to do all sorts of other stuff for you: specialization. in the average case, they can probably do it better than your developers because it's their primary business.

Not sure if you read the linked article:

> The 70 kilogram remote sensing satellite is to be used for agricultural, climate, mining and environmental observations, allowing the Horn of Africa to collect data and improve its ability to plan for changing weather patterns for example.

Yes, I think you haven't been following Linux closely enough. Ubuntu, at least, has been very aware of this problem for years now. Their "software center"/package management is probably close to as seamless and mature as the Mac "App Store". The caveat remains that many common paid apps (e.g. video games, Microsoft Office) are not compatible with Linux, but that doesn't seem to affect you.

mods (@dang) can you do something about this unsubstantiated and inflammatory comment

I think you assume that the insurance market is competitive. In the U.S. it is not.

Yep, also I think the barriers to entry for the insurance market are extremely high. Not only is there a huge fixed cost of actually negotiating rates with every individual doctor/hospital, there's also the fixed cost of getting individual employers to consider you for their business. These and some other factors leave the insurance market with just a few insurance providers, who can let prices run away and simply charge higher premiums/deductibles without fear of competition from a "start-up" insurance provider.

Don't you have to adjust Amazon's 2.8 billion for inflation?

Dry pasta likely cannot be made to hold up to a hot beverage though, can it?

If you or anyone else are not generalizing how are WiFi SSIDs relevant to anything?