Do you see anything about a signed agreement anywhere? All you have there is one sentence uttered by a British minister at a press conference, and for all you know, "military" assistance could mean exactly the same as for Ukraine: sending weapons.
Misleading exactly in the way I said: the wording used is “help”, not defend, and nothing is formalised. Ukraine is getting “help” as well, but it is not exactly NATO article 5 protection.
Depends what you optimise for I guess, maybe fine if you are looking for novel problems or starting a startup, but in general with regards to your career, I believe Patio11’s point on this is more accurate: you want to be part of the profit center [https://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/10/28/dont-call-yourself-a-pr...]
Except their revenues are £163m, so it’s not exactly like they do not have a revenue source. I think you are too pessimistic. I don’t have a split but would imagine the largest revenue source is the interchange fee? I would also doubt very much that their cost base is very optimised at the moment, so I would think profit is very doable. In addition, having used their business offering, I think they have a huge opportunity there, their product is very good.
> I would also doubt very much that their cost base is very optimised at the moment, so I would think profit is very doable.
I agree. Until recently they were literally paying users to open an account and recruit new customers. You could exchange up to £5000/month for free (now only £1000). And if you need to make a big single transfer, for instance while moving to a different country, paying one year of premium membership can still be cheaper than Transferwise's fee on that single transaction.
Europe is known to have really shitty profits from interchange fees. It’s not like North America, where these profits are a bit of a runaway train. We are currently talking about “interchange shrink” because we expect this ride to come to an end soon (aka loyalty programs are about to get really shitty, especially with the collapse of the travel industry)
For those who aren't aware, European interchange fees are regulated (In the EU, interchange fees are capped to 0.3% of the transaction for credit cards and to 0.2% for debit cards, no cap for corporate cards), which is good IMHO. Banking should be treated as a utility, lending and other services can be the profit center (as you allude to in your comments).
Margin compression is a thing for banks who haven't realized yet they're software companies that offer financial services now, and the moat continues to shrink (getting a banking license is hard, partnering with another bank in need of deposits less so). One must be willing to cannibalize margins to survive or be prepared to be left behind by those who are more efficient (and I admit that macro trends make this harder than in the past; "borrow at 3, lend at 6, at the golf course by 3" [1] is dead).
Disclosure: Part of my work is helping old banks attempt to turn into software companies, with wildly varying results depending on the org.
I like it - uses redis as a broker - supports crontab style periodic tasks.
I've usually had to build a small python cron runner using croniter in previous systems - which I think is a pretty clean solution - it just deferred tasks to rq workers. But having direct support in the lib might be nice.
Maybe because he is relaying stats which are not (widely?) reported at least in UK media, and by being “famous” his account is validated and we trust him to at least accurately relay information from Italy? Does not seem so unreasonable to me.
It’s in the thread: “Yes, it was reported yesterday by the authorities in the Italian television, the director of one of the major hospitals also reported a few severe cases with people under 30 otherwise totally healthy.”
There is so much misinformation out there about this situation, I think skepticism of any report is not an unreasonable position. The Italian media has been criticised for drumming up panic.
The health system is completely overloaded and unable to deal with this (1). And that's in a health system that was rated as one of the best in the world (2).
We just have to be careful with the information we use and the conclusions we draw from them.
From all we know, the mortality correlates with age. Only few deads younger than 50 were reported and we don't know what other diseases they suffered from.
I personally wouldn't use TV as a source of information in this regard but that's a personal preference.
Well, I currently find cough twitter quite informative. But I'd rather listen to epidemiologists and virologists. I'd also prefer a good weekly magazine, radio station or podcast because there people have more time/space to elaborate on their point of view. In TV, with very few exceptions, everything is crammed into very small portions that leave no room for critical discussion/appraisal.
