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Dropbox is going brogue

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Re: Dropbox is going brogue

#81

Post by Kudos »

pbiggar wrote: post #79
Kudos wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, there's around half the number of native Chinese speakers (~60k) as there is native Irish speakers (~120k).

Ah, the numbers in my head we 90k Chinese speakers and 60k Irish speakers, but I couldn't figure it out from the reports on the census. Do you have a reference I can look at?

In actual census (2011) numbers, it's 15,000 Chinese speakers (presumably as a grouping) and 1.7 million Irish speakers, 110,000 of whom speak it on a weekly basis outside of education.

The number of Polish speakers just about beats Irish with almost 120,000.

Re: Dropbox is going brogue

#82

Post by w1ntermute »

pbiggar wrote: post #43
rpm4321 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they say natively, I think they mean as a primary language. My impression is that there's only a small percentage of people on the West Coast who speak it daily, but Gaelic used to (and may still be) required in a lot of schools as sort of a token secondary language (kind of like Latin in US Catholic schools, or Hebrew schools for Jews), and a fair amount of official government business was/is done in Gaelic. ED…

Irish person here, I can't speak much Irish and I cannot think of a situation that would ever require me to, since leaving school (though since I live in San Francisco now, its even more unlikely). We're required to learn Irish throughout school (all the way til we finish secondary school), and even need to pass Irish exams to get into university. Government business can be done in Irish, but its very rare. When you…

Why is there a lack of interest in linguistic revival? Asserting independence from the UK has been a big theme in Ireland for a long time. Wouldn't re-embracing the Irish language be one prominent way of doing that?

Re: Dropbox is going brogue

#83

Post by pbiggar »

w1ntermute wrote: post #82
pbiggar wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Irish person here, I can't speak much Irish and I cannot think of a situation that would ever require me to, since leaving school (though since I live in San Francisco now, its even more unlikely). We're required to learn Irish throughout school (all the way til we finish secondary school), and even need to pass Irish exams to get into university. Government business can be done in Irish, but its very rare. When you…

Why is there a lack of interest in linguistic revival? Asserting independence from the UK has been a big theme in Ireland for a long time. Wouldn't re-embracing the Irish language be one prominent way of doing that?

There is an interest, which is why we are forced to learn it in school. Ironically, this forces a very large amount of the country to start to hate Irish (why are we learning this, this isn't useful, etc). IMO, making Irish optional would be a good step to making people actually want to learn it.

Re: Dropbox is going brogue

#84

Post by toyg »

patrickk wrote: post #78
toyg wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I said "India of Europe "... I was in Dublin last week. Compared to Milan, Paris, London or even Manchester, the Irish cost of living today is much lower. I know quite a few people who moved to Dublin to work in IT, then bounced off to England looking for higher wages. Of course it's not India, it's still an European country with a noticeable welfare state, but I'd argue that you won't find better English speakers fo…

"... but I'd argue that you won't find better English speakers for the same amount of money anywhere in Europe. " Wow, I must admit I've never heard this opinion expressed before. That was why I was surprised in my previous comment. All you hear in Ireland is that "wages are too high, we're not cost competitive" blah-blah-blah. I've heard that you can get programmers in places like Germany, Scandinavia and parts of E…

I do IT consulting, with a background in sysadmin, probably more customer-facing stuff than the average developer.

For this sort of relatively labour-intensive sectors, places like France, Germany and Nordic countries are way too expensive. Eastern Europe is a hit & miss, safest being Czechia, but they're also a few more hours away from the US (in terms of flight and timezone), and they're not as dirt-poor as in 1989 anymore, so prices have gone up. Southern Europe (Italy, Spain, Greece, Portugal) would be great, except their English is lousy, tax arrangements are byzantine, their salespeople will screw you at every turn, and their approach to customer-service can be borderline disgraceful (and I can say that, being one of them! lol).

I don't think Irish wages are too high -- they certainly went up in the last 20 years, as the country improved dramatically and sort-of aligned with other EU members, so the economy has to rebalance a bit, but that was to be expected. Overall, the Irish system still provides very good value for money, I'd say.

Re: Dropbox is going brogue

#85

Post by toyg »

alexkus wrote: post #69
eccoli wrote: post #34

So basically, dropbox makes a public announcement to tell the world (and the shareholders) they're now engaging in tax evasion in Europe to make better profit. Hopefully they'll have a better story for the european authorities later on, not like starbucks, amazon or google: http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2012/11/13/starbucks-goog...

"better profit" but only in the eyes of accountants, for a while. The money you've paid less tax on is still offshore. If you want to bring it back to your country then you have to pay tax on it (minus what you've paid already overseas) so it's not just a simple scheme to minimise tax. If you need the money to maintain cash flow then you've got no real choice but to pay full whack on it to get it back into the US. Wh…

... or, at one point, they say "fuck it" and go invest in the tax-friendly haven of the day in some burgeoning Asian market.

Re: Dropbox is going brogue

#86

Post by onetwothreefour »

lvh wrote: post #56
ed209 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

technically it's not illegal, but completely immoral. Imagine if I channelled all my PAYE taxes through an offshore company, who would pay for our health system, infrastructure etc.

So, any company expanding from the US to Ireland is "completely immoral", because it's Ireland?

They're not expanding to Ireland. That's the point. Now they route all transactions from non-US customers through the Irish subsidiary and keep their money over there. They pay up 15% or whatever the tax rate is instead of the 35% over here. They keep the profits there waiting for a tax holiday, then move the money back when that happens. They can probably even claim the 15% as a foreign tax credit during the tax holiday.

Pretty simple. :)

While not illegal, it's a little bit dodgy. But it's what everyone does these days, so why not?

Re: Dropbox is going brogue

#87

Post by onetwothreefour »

7777 wrote: post #6

> Wusstest du schon, dass Dropbox ihre Nutzer in 175 Ländern Somehow 25 countries got lost while that sentence was translated into German.

It's as if a bunch of Americans wrote a bunch of ill-informed translations in an attempt to make this about translations, and not about tax avoidance. :)

Re: Dropbox is going brogue

#88

Post by w1ntermute »

pbiggar wrote: post #83
w1ntermute wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is there a lack of interest in linguistic revival? Asserting independence from the UK has been a big theme in Ireland for a long time. Wouldn't re-embracing the Irish language be one prominent way of doing that?

There is an interest, which is why we are forced to learn it in school. Ironically, this forces a very large amount of the country to start to hate Irish (why are we learning this, this isn't useful, etc). IMO, making Irish optional would be a good step to making people actually want to learn it.

I think learning it as a foreign language makes it difficult to truly internalize it. I recall reading that in some countries, they teach STEM classes all in English, but liberal arts/social science classes in their native language. You get to use both on a daily basis in both the spoken and written form, rather than only in one class.

Re: Dropbox is going brogue

#89

Post by pbiggar »

w1ntermute wrote: post #88
pbiggar wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an interest, which is why we are forced to learn it in school. Ironically, this forces a very large amount of the country to start to hate Irish (why are we learning this, this isn't useful, etc). IMO, making Irish optional would be a good step to making people actually want to learn it.

I think learning it as a foreign language makes it difficult to truly internalize it. I recall reading that in some countries, they teach STEM classes all in English, but liberal arts/social science classes in their native language. You get to use both on a daily basis in both the spoken and written form, rather than only in one class.

Funnily enough, its not taught as a foreign language. That would be much better, because most Irish people only care about being able to speak it. Its currently taught like Latin is - a lot of rote learning of tenses and conjugations, then literature and poetry study.

My grandaunt is a famous Irish poet - her work is part of the curriculum. When she tutored me she focussed on reading from newspapers and speaking out loud, because going straight to literature makes no sense.

Re: Dropbox is going brogue

#90

Post by w1ntermute »

pbiggar wrote: post #89
w1ntermute wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think learning it as a foreign language makes it difficult to truly internalize it. I recall reading that in some countries, they teach STEM classes all in English, but liberal arts/social science classes in their native language. You get to use both on a daily basis in both the spoken and written form, rather than only in one class.

Funnily enough, its not taught as a foreign language. That would be much better, because most Irish people only care about being able to speak it. Its currently taught like Latin is - a lot of rote learning of tenses and conjugations, then literature and poetry study. My grandaunt is a famous Irish poet - her work is part of the curriculum. When she tutored me she focussed on reading from newspapers and speaking out…

Oh wow, that's even worse. Why would anybody be interested in that, especially children?

I learned Japanese as a foreign language in college, and very little time in class was spent on grammar, and not much time was spent on reading/writing. We spent the vast majority of our time on the spoken language, which we learned in the context of simulated real-world conversations. The result was that while we were weak in the written language, our pronunciation and grammar was top-notch.

We had no trouble subsequently teaching ourselves the written language (though children might not have the initiative to do that). But if we had not properly learned the spoken language in class and the grammar outside of class at the same time, we might not have had the foundation necessary to progress with the written language. It's much more difficult to teach yourself the spoken language than reading/writing/grammar.

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