Off-topic, but: this is possibly one of the world's dumbest rebranding exercises. I forget now how many years ago they made the change, but I've never heard anyone outside the company itself refer to it as just "Wise" without adding "(formerly transferwise)".
Really? You don't like the pea-soup on vomit color scheme?
I've been a loyal user of wise for more than a decade, since I used them to pay for my cross-currency wedding, and I can accept the name change since they wanted to show they were more than just money transfer (but just make it "bankwise", ffs), but the new brand style was a disaster.
Notice they dialed it down over time,it's now more neutral than at launch, so someone must have listened to the complaints.
They also switched to the peculiar slanted round font ("wise sans"), and padded every page with whitespace so it has a much lower information density.
The actual experience past login never had much so yeah it's not as much a change as the public branding.
But mostly, it's the light-green-on-dark-green text which I dislike, and I _think_ they dialed down its usage compared to e.g. the brand announcement[0] and how the blog looks[1] compared to the main site. Then again, de gustibus.
I think it's kind of a status thing that you can afford a short word ___domain like wise.com. But yeah, in conversation I still call them transferwise.
Yes. Exeter is a city in England. Co-op (short for “co-operative”) is a chain of grocery stores that was originally founded on principles of shared ownership [0].
Jein, as we say in my part of the world. Working on IT projects in German-speaking countries I’ve quickly found that English is often the lingua franca of a team made up of both German native speakers and random other Europeans. Euro English is not the same as British English: you get a crazy mix of both British and US idioms not to mention an influence from the Indian English dialects when team members have family roots on the subcontinent. British English is one of the dialects spoken and understood in Europe but not the only one and probably not even the most widespread.
To be fair, the question of whether it’s historically accurate is irrelevant because the film obviously doesn’t depict real events with real cardinals… even to the viewer who knows nothing about who is who in the real-life Catholic hierarchy, the terrorist event that triggers a major plot twist should be a big clue that this is a fictional thriller, not a documentary. Apart from that, the setting is contemporary so history has nothing to do with it.
So it’s a gossipy political thriller where the setting is the Vatican, not the White House or the House of Lords. The question remains: is it a reasonably faithful depiction of the way a real papal conclave operates, in both procedure and the negotiation/clique-forming/decision-making process? Catholic friends of mine who know much more than I do about what goes on in Rome actually have the opposite fear: that it is all too realistic and exposes too much about the power games that go on instead of earnestly seeking the good of the faith, and of the faithful. If that’s the case, then in the long run it can only be good because, as Christ Himself said: “you shall know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:32)
Edit: to be fair, there are some flashbacks in the film to historical events taking place in Latin America, IIRC these are also fictionalized but yeah, I could imagine someone who knows the history of that particular situation being able to say that it's innacurately depicted; however that's not the key theme of the film's narrative, which is a contemporary papal election. By contrast the film "The Two Popes" does deserve the historically-inaccurate tag, because it depicts a meeting between two real-life people which definitely never happened and is purely the imagination of the playwright who asked himself "what if?" In that case, I do wish that the film would preface itself by making it clear that it is purely a flight of fancy in order to explore ideas around faith, theology and succession because I'm sure a lot of people really do believe that Francis did have private conversations with Benedikt and received his endorsement.
My experience in both UK and EU is that a heck a lot of "freelance" aka "B2B contract" style work does indeed come via recruiters. Either they charge the client an upfront "finders fee", or the invoicing goes via the recruiter who adds their margin to the monthly bill before passing it on to the end client. So yeah, perfectly valid for a freelancer to work via recruiters even if that's not your personal experience.
I'm no longer UK based, but from what I can observe at a distance, it's transformed the market rather than killed it. Listings for contract roles seem to be labelled either "inside" or "outside" IR35 depending on the requirements and conditions. So yes, whatever contracts are available are probably on average much less tax-favourable to the contractor than before the changeover, but whether that's affected the overall market volume I couldn't say.
I found the answer to the "when and why" question via ChatGPT, after multiple web searches failed to turn up anything useful, and even after discovering the specific release that included the change (2.46, by the way), learning that the top result in Google for "git 2.46 release notes" leads to a 404 in Git's own Github repository. Nice.
For anyone else interested in the "when and why", this StackOverflow answer [1] to a tangentially-related newb question summarizes and links to some of the specific commits, and this GitHub blog post [2] announcing what's new in that release, does describe the change in amongst a bunch of other stuff.
Still, I would hope that for the sake of the millions of users out there who don't welcome the cognitive dissonance, confusion and breaking-out-of-flow that this kind of (lack of) communication produces, maintainers of such popular tools may think a little bit when updating their docs with such a significant change and perhaps call out the change front-and-centre.
Sing a song of sixpence, a pocket full of rye, four-and-twenty blackbirds, baked in a pie…
I had schoolteachers who still spoke like this in 1970s Yorkshire. I don’t know if it was a regional dialect thing or a generational thing across all England, but among the over-40s back then it was still pretty common to hear German-style backwards numbers in English.
It’s hilarious that an English language website has so many enthusiasts for the regional differences of their favourite foreign languages while all pretending that English is monolithic and consistent everywhere. Try driving around the north of England for an hour or two and see how many different words for bread roll you encounter. Baps, barm cakes, oven bottom muffins…
In my experience, people mostly tend to hyperbolize the differences between their local dialect and "everything else" for patriotic reasons. Usually, they give some singular words that are vastly different as examples (I suspect you can find such examples in most languages and most regions), and ignore that 99% of the vocabulary, plus the grammar and most daily sentence constructs, are equivalent (modulo the accent). A standard example in German is how the outermost bread slice is called, which differs completely from region to region, town to town, and sometimes even family to family [0].
Off-topic, but: this is possibly one of the world's dumbest rebranding exercises. I forget now how many years ago they made the change, but I've never heard anyone outside the company itself refer to it as just "Wise" without adding "(formerly transferwise)".