> so early websites couldn't even place text over images
I take offense at this! We weren't that stupid back then! We just put the text 5 times on the page, with position: relative, 4x in the outline color, each copy with a 1px offset in a different direction, and the final one in the text color. That trick worked with pretty early CSS.
I live in Austria and you can fire people for pretty much any reason. You have to give them 6 weeks notice, and there are some extra protections for people who are old or who have disabilities and who have been working for your company for a long time, but even then you can fire them.
You can even fire people for getting sick a lot.
And that's assuming you directly hire them as employees in the first place. Many people work via agencies or as contractors, and they have practically zero protections.
Maybe the statement isn't true for EU as a whole, but some member countries have far higher bar than what you describe. For instance in Spain the company must provide justification to the government before firing someone.
I don't know about the situation in Spain, but what a lot of people in Austria mix up is that there are different types of terminating contracts.
In Austria, the employer can terminate a contract immediately if the employee behaves in a manner that would harm the employer.
If the employee does nothing wrong, the contract can still be terminated, but you have to give notice 6 weeks ahead (or longer if the employee has worked at your company for a long time).
People get these things confused and think employees generally can't be fired without a reason, but that's not true. They just can't be fired on the spot without a reason.
Wow, I am genuinely shocked by this post. I had no idea. Honestly, I assumed that most central European countries have reasonably strong labour laws that make it difficult to fire employees. Let us assume that your post is (mostly) true. How does Austria have such a large, robust, stable middle class without strong labour protections, or a wide/deep social safety net? Or does Austria have the equivalent of "Flexcurity" from Denmark (easy to fire, but wide/deep social safety net for a moderate period of time)?
Labour protections doesn't mean you are protected from being fired.
You have to pay people the minimum salary depending on their trade, you have to give them 5 weeks of vacation, pay overtime, pay for health insurance and so on.
Employers can't exploit their employees, but employees still have to do their job.
But there is also a big area of the economy where employers ignore the law and treat employees like shit. For example, service workers are not generally treated well in Austria, and many are afraid of losing their job so they don't complain to the authorities.
Changing the work hours doesn't technically affect "salary" but it's a change in wages. I think your example mostly reinforces the point, but we should be using the word "wages" to be clearer.
I don't think I even paid them more per hour. The problem was that all the other companies only want to hire full time programmers, so I was able to hire them by offering a job with fewer hours.
Also, they complained that their previous job was super stressful because the sales people kept making promises to customers that were really hard to keep ("of course we'll implement this in two weeks") and so they were constantly scrambling to meet impossible deadlines.
Even hourly isn't good enough. If I shut down some service, I want to know right now that nothing billable is left over. I don't want to have to wait an hour and come back and check only to find I forgot to clean up some IP address.
Why can we not have a "billable items" dashboard which simply shows, globally, a list of all items in your account which are billable, and how much they will cost if left running for 1 more hour/month?
We recently flew to Gatwick and I was pleasantly surpised how quick everything was. Barely any waiting times, the hardest part was figuring out which train to London needs what ticket.
The issue is the duplicitous nature of the consent form.
If the consent form itself is like that, then you already have no trust in the site, let alone asking the question of whether or not a non-duplicitous consent form could or could not be trusted.
Every year I battle with a few permission related bugs in my app. Somehow macOS will randomly block some file accesses on some machines in some circumstances.
Take security scoped bookmarks. The only way that sandboxed apps can persistently access files outside their sandbox. It's an important feature. It's broken on some Macs. I know from logs that about 0.5% of my users run into this bug. It's been broken for years, and every time I report the problem to Apple they ask me for steps to reproduce or and Xcode sample project. I have no idea what to do, it's a bug in ScopedBookmarkAgent or in SecKeychain somewhere.
With Sequoia, they managed to break the feature for about 10% of users. That was apparently enough to get Apple to pay attention, so they fixed it in macOS 15.1. I think it's back to 0.5% now.
Somehow Apples own apps aren't affected by these bugs. Bugs that mostly affect 3rd party apps seem to slip through a lot more easily.
The security tech in macOS is unreliable garbage. And people praise it, they just think 3rd party apps are buggy. But for a lot of my bugs, the bug is in the macOS frameworks, but users come to me and complain.
It's no wonder that many developers don't sandbox their apps. It's just perpetually broken.
There's a global limit on the number of sandbox extensions (security scoped bookmarks) open at once. If it fails that's because someone is leaking them.
Hitting the sandbox extension limit is not necessarily a leak. There are a number of apps that deal with thousands of files at once and they will very quickly hit the limits. It's a perennial problem with anyone who makes professional, but sandboxed, software for macOS.
Yes, I should've said "can be". They are definitely difficult to manage. It doesn't help that people like to pass file paths or URLs across IPC and don't think of eg sending file descriptors over directly.
Hmm, who needs thousands of files at once (as opposed to serially)?
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