Btw: my favorite word for speed bump is the Dutch "drempel". It is quite onomatopoetic. My favorite term for speed bumps in German comes from Comedian Helge Schneider. He calls them "Teerwülste" (tar bulges). I don't think you find it being used, but it fits the German style very well as it is precise and sober.

- International holding companies: if there is Coca Cola France and Coca Cola Germany that economically belong together, you might not be able to just merge them into one entity for legal reasons (both countries might require you to have a locally incorporated presence). So to ensure that both always have the same owners, you create an international holding company that owns both of them.

- Investment funds: investment funds (especially passive ones) are companies whose only business is to own shares in other companies. There is no "real" operating business.

- Feeder funds: sometimes, the law requires foreign investment funds to create a local shell company to be allowed to accept investments from local retail investors. In this case, the only purpose of the shell company is to fulfill local regulatory requirements with regards to the legal form if the investment vehicle and to provide investors with someone local that they can hold liable in case things go wrong. There is no real business in such companies.

In fact, it is often regulation that requires you to create shell companies. If you want to get rid of shell companies, you should start by removing regulation that requires the creation of shell companies with no real business except to satisfy the regulators.

If it is not possible to occur, then it should not be part of the API.

The only time I rethrow a checked exception as an unchecked exception is when the code is still under construction. The default of the eclipse code generator is to log and ignore caught transaction. I think wrapping into an unchecked one is the better default behavior for incomplete code under a "fail fast" policy.

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/02/09/sec-commissioner-breaks-with...

For example, the Canadian government froze the accounts of political activists during the Corona crisis. This shocked me. It shows that even countries that are perceived as free and democratic sometimes cannot resist to abuse their power. And the more power we give them, the more likely it is that a politician will abuse his or her power sooner or later.

When traveling to the US, it always strikes me how different public ads are. The US has more public ads and also much more aggressive ads. An ad for an injury lawyer would be unthinkable in Europa.

An interesting thing to note is that European countries tend to make rules to outlaw risky behavior in the first place, but have limited fines in case the risk materializes, whereas the United States tends to allow more risk taking, but imposes exorbitant fines if something goes wrong.

Both systems have their advantages.