they dont necessarily give the google bot this version of the page. its perfectly ok to prerender the page with something like phantomjs and send the crawler the prerendered pages. this was , to my knowledge, quite common with angularjs apps that relied heavily on seo/google juice.

Backpack is basically a network for tax evasion and smuggling stuff. sounds ... fishy.

Airbnb is also a network for (hotel/business) tax evasion too.

I think you are over simplifying the complexities involved with this analogy . Backpack seems to break a lot of laws explicitly. I would rally love to see what the founders have researched about different destinations and airports.

Many (if not most) of AirBnB's major markets explicitly forbid short term rentals without a hotel or bed & breakfast permit and associated taxes, yet AirBnB lists and drives business to them seemingly indiscriminately without so much as asking for such paperwork.

What's the complexity? Airports and felony charges instead of evictions and injunctions?

well at least in germany you are supposed to declare this income. but that is the same with any form of rent that you gain based on your property. so it doesnt matter if i rent out a property that i own for the whole year via a classified ad in the newspaper or for 1 week via airbnb.

declaring income is one thing, but hotels in most areas collect specific hotel taxes levied by a municipality, and airbnb people aren't collecting and remitting specific hotel taxes.

The typical AirBnB location is not a commercially-zoned, licensed hotel. Municipalities can update their laws to be more relevant if they feel they are losing tax revenue.

Municipality tax relevance is a far cry from international laws that are already in place.

"Municipalities can update their laws to be more relevant"

Or... people could comply with the current municipal laws and not run commercial enterprises in non-commercially-zoned areas, or even just respect whatever HOA or landlord agreements they are party to.

Again, enforcement is up to the municipality, and Air bnb is cooperative: https://www.airbnb.com/help/article/481

HOA and landlord contractual agreements are not the same as municipal laws and are frivolous to the conversation about international import laws. Mentioning them makes it seem like you're scraping for excuses to attack air bnb.

you dont know the german BGS ... if you dont have a receipt for anything electronic that doesnt look like its 5 years old you are basically fucked. additional to the tax you have to pay you get a hefty fee because its treated as tax evasion. you can do a lot of stuff ... but not tax evasion.

Hmm .. This is expected though! The customs in developed countries are far more stringent . But I m not sure if this is targetted at European customers at all . Is the price difference between USA and Europe big enough for any one to try this service ?

But thats not the case in developing countries. Products priced at an affordable cost in USA , could be insanely expensive in developing countries.

MBP Retina 15", top of the line $2,499.00 in the us, 2,499.00€ ($3,327.94) in germany . its exactly the savings range that they are targeting

Wow ! That's huge, I did not expect such a big difference between prices in Germany and USA . Thanks for pointing this out -

1. Are these due to local taxes in Germany ? 2. Is this price difference common in other parts of Europe as well ?

i just checked this particular item but all the countries that use € are all 2499€ and the others (uk, swe..) are about 2500€. i guess the difference here comes from the actual curreny differences.

i think its mostly taxes, because when i add the 19% VAT that i would have to repay when entering germany with a us bought laptop (i think laptops are toll free, not sure ... but some electronic devices have tolls) im at ~$3000

Don't forget trade within the EU is "free", so I - being located in the UK - could buy a laptop in Germany and import it free and legally (bar shipping costs). Therefore, the arbitrage would be simple and legal. Importing from the US, on the other hand, carries significant import charges as I found out the other day when I imported a BeagleBone Black.

Hmm.. But are the prices any different for products inside the EU ? Or are there any states that levy a lower purchase than others .

Import duties may be different if you're a business doing large quantities vs. a single person buying a single thing for personal use.

is there a reason that you are serving the site from a server and not from something like s3/cloundfront/etc?

Everything is on a CDN, but don't I need at least the index.html file hosted on a server where the domain resolves?

a least S3 has an option to turn a bucket into a static web host. i run multiple angularjs apps directly from S3 via cloudfront without any servers.

and there i was hoping they were removing dropbox from their bandwidth limitations.

i dont have sick time. i just stay home when im sick and need a doctors notice if its above 3 days. but thats pretty much german standard

i've heard great stuff about oauth.io . they try to provide an abstractionlayer that handles the various different implementations (often buggy or not to spec) of oauth.

that might be true, but I don't like idea of having a MiTM. That's an additional point of potential security issues

i think its fully open source[1] and you can host on your own

[1]https://github.com/oauth-io/oauthd

Can someone please explain why there is a distinction between Anime and TV Shows? Its my understanding that Anime are either in a Movie Format (Standalone) or in a TV Format (Series).

They're probably just making it clear that they'll populate their database with information for anime as well as for western TV shows. There's a very smooth distribution system for fan-translated anime so many people watch a lot of anime before it has aired outside Japan, and would want a database that keeps track of such viewing.

Anime and TV shows are like series, but Anime is the style (Japanese most of the time) and Anime has Anime Movies and Anime TV Shows, Anime OVA, etc

but isnt that just a categorisation like Crime, Drama, Comedy? Anf if not: how are other (non japanese) animated movies/series (justice league etc) treated?

Anime has it's own categories like Angst Ecchi Battle Royale edit Bullet Time Calling Your Attacks Collateral Damage Gunfights and a lot more. There are multiple websites that only feature Anime, and zero websites with full content about all three TV, Anime, Movies