beachstartup

that's funny. i sold my slashdot account in college for decent money (for a college kid) because i had a < 100 uid.

no, being rich is having. in order to get rich, you must do.

many smart people overthink, constantly, and to a fault. it usually manifests in the form of 'what if something goes wrong???' and spirals from there.

any rich person will tell you, things go wrong constantly, and at the worst possible time. the only important thing is your confidence in your ability to fix things when they break.

almost everyone is doing that.

> Different speed limits for different drivers could result in a "lower-class" driver being an obstruction for others. I don't think that would work out

what i'm really saying is that you should be able to test for a higher speed limit in the US. slow drivers will be slow regardless of what the limit is, and unsafe. i've driven on the autobahn in the no speed limit sections (primarily around munich) and there were still slower, unsafe morons occupying lanes they shouldn't have been. maybe tourists.

remember, in the US we have very low speed limits of ~100kph pretty much anywhere. i think it should be higher. people routinely drive 145kph here in southern california, enforcement of 100kph is arbitrary, which is not healtyh for respect for the law in general.

> If so, how would I go forward with asking the people about this without seeming high risk?

to a business owner/landlord, asking how much it costs to exit the lease does not mark you as high risk. it just means you know what you're talking about, and they are free to set that value to whatever they want in the contract.

through legislation, i.e. the recent push toward universal basic income.

personally i think in today's world in which 0.1% owns pretty much everything or at least controls ownership of everything, it's an unavoidable eventuality, but it's not going to be an easy process of getting there.

[in the US] i'd prefer the voting age be 21, the driving age be 18, and the drinking age be 16, or none at all. basically, we have it backwards.

i also think there should be different classes of driving licenses with different speed limits, but now we're just indulging in crazytalk.

running a company results in many of the same kinds of situations.

lots of people are crazy. they walk among us!

there isn't always one. some people are rich, remember?

> I can't rely on OSS as a pillar of my business.

'professional' people don't need $10k to be your personal bitch on a 3 day deadline. if you asked me, i would hang up the phone. not even worth the oxygen to respond, because you don't even exist in my world.

try cold calling a corporate lawyer, or surgeon, to do that. the realistic price is more like $50k, and anyone with half a brain or a shred of personal dignity is going to ask for it up front and with no contract.

lots of companies do it. look at farm workers or car washes or -- allegedly -- amazon's very own warehouses. not to mention the overseas factories that build everything they sell.

there's a whole section of society that minimum wage laws simply don't apply to and everyone looks the other way while enjoying the benefits.

someone like bezos basically just enjoys complete non-accountability and even high praise and wealth for putting an api in front of literally everything he can think of, including illegal labor practices.

i suspect the danger is if they don't position the piece correctly, the hammer drops on it, and something goes flying or shatters and mauls someone.

this is almost certainly illegal, but they paid someone to look the other way, because it's cheaper, and faster (and hence more dangerous/problematic) to do it this way.

> On the other hand, I wonder why they do this? This can only hurt Java

because they can. because it makes money. because it works. because the people who choose to base their entire technology stack on proprietary software are used to paying exorbitant fees for stuff that's available for free because they don't have any confidence in their own ability to solve problems.

i mean, the real question is: why wouldn't they do this? everytime i see ellison's megayacht parked in santa monica bay when i drive up pch i know exactly why.

> I hope you don't use AWS then

wait, how'd you know??

yeah, i guess it is.

this is also the same reason why 'overqualified' is an actual concern.

people at the bottom of the totem pole view money as simply a scarce resource -- when it becomes somewhat more abundant, you have other things to worry about and it becomes a means to an end of hiring and retaining good, reliable people.

one way of doing this is not to substantially underpay someone who's worth a lot more on the open market, because eventually it will bite you in the ass.

that's my point.

waaaaay back in the 90s.

i remember having a stark realization one day that i probably couldn't get hired to do the same damn job again with any reliability, so thats when i took things into my own hands and started a company so i could deal with a different set of problems other than ace-ing stupid interviews.

that was right when i heard questions about interviewees being left in a room alone for 30 minutes, were being asked idiotic questions like "how many ping pong balls..." or being put in uncomfortable situations on purpose to test their reaction, dumb riddles, or any of a number of other non-work-related questions.

as someone who now has interviewed hundreds of people and hired dozens, i can unequivocally say that the above techniques are a stupid, idiotic, fucking dumb and counterproductive waste of time for hiring good people _for anyone who does not have the time and luxury (read: cash) to indulge in it_.

i would fire anyone who worked for me that insisted on doing interviews like that, because we are not google or mckinsey or goldman sachs and we do not have a never-ending supply of money.

the boom in "old geek" job boards is the market correcting itself. smaller companies have known about it for a LONG time, because we don't have access to the genius-level kids that churn out code 80 hours a week. tough luck for us, too bad, so sad.

our team is exclusively 35-60. i wouldn't hire a non-genius 25 year old to run anything critical. nope, no way. sorry, kids.

it wasn't so long ago that nobody did this for tech, because we had a self-selecting industry that paid smart people very well, and those banker and consultant kids looked to us with a certain level of envy because we could naturally, seemingly effortlessly (not really), do what they studied years and years to do, which is make over 100 grand in your early 20's without really trying. those days are almost over. the b-school invasion is in its 2nd decade now.

NO. NO NO NO.

the tech industry does NOT need a union.

what could hypothetically be argued is the need for the equivalent of the medical board, or bar, or cpa, cfa, engineering license, etc. and it would be a legitimate debate, but no clear cut answer exists.

you'll note that all of those bodies have ethics and competency standards and none of them are unions, meaning none of them negotiate contracts on behalf of their constituent members.

i DO NOT (DO _NOT_) want a union negotiating my business relationships for me, and exclude me from my own industry if i refuse to let them.

the more language- and thought-policing you try to push, the more of a right-wing backlash (i.e. trump) you will see from the public at large.

they ask, and some people stupidly answer.

people in general don't think young disabled people are any less disabled. when they see a young person limping around nobody thinks "what a fake". wtf? where did you get this idea?

your friend's dad is just ashamed, and that's his way of lashing out. he's a mental midget.

and besides, when has anyone seen every disabled parking space taken up? places like hospitals have a huge amount of disabled spots so this barely ever happens.

well, most people check craigslist, no matter what their station in life/career.

> We converted from filing as LLC to LLC filing as S a few years into the company, and it didn't really change much for us.

yeah, so why switch if you don't have to

the managerial overhead is not worth the difference (remember the professional fees required to run all this stuff). if my company made more revenue, i'd probably feel differently.

at the end of the day it comes down to how much revenue vs. overhead vs. capital structure you feel comfortable with.

owners generally do not pay themselves large officer salaries, because of the w-2 tax rates which can be extremely high in a state like california. this also muddies up the discretionary compensation numbers when a potential buyer comes along and assesses the P&L on the company. this w-2 income is also taxed twice -- the state takes its cut with payroll taxes and unemployment/disability insurance. if you add sales tax into the mix, an owner is paying upwards of 50% taxes on this money if he decides to buy something nice -- not smart.

to get non-payroll money out of a c-corp and into the owners' pockets, it will be taxed twice, first as corporate income and then as dividend income on the individual owners' tax return. if you have a way around this that doesn't involve laundering money offshore or to shell companies, i'm all ears.

for a smaller, closely held private company with no institutional investors, an LLC taxed as a partnership or something similar (not an s-corp) will yield a lower effective tax rate for the owners of the company and more closely represent what actually is going on.

investors want to invest in a delaware c-corp usually because all of the laws and case precedence are favorable to them.

for those who don't know, quality of life in LA is entirely dependent upon your commute. your life can either be the single best big-city experience in the country, or a hellish, dystopian nightmare that will send you into a suicidal depression.

i'm not joking. if you move to LA, plan ahead.