brtkdotse

I have a 20 year career of which 5 as a solo business :)

But you’re right, running a business in the US sounds _terrible_. Condolences. My assumptions were based on institutions not being hostile.

In that case the business idea wasn’t good enough. If you can’t afford the cost of doing business it’s not a viable business idea.

In the same category: “I can’t afford to pay more than minimum wage”

> ”can't afford to be taxes (sic) more than they currently are”

This is such a weird take. You get taxed on profits. If you don’t turn a profit you pay zero tax.

Oh, and payroll is not profit.

YouTube is perfectly fine and one of the few places on the internet where personalization actually works. Don't want ads? Fine, pay up for premium.

I’m planning for solar cells and looked into the possibility of running my house as a micro grid (ie disconnect it from the main grid) in case of a prolonged power outage. Turns out that unless you redneck engineer it, running your house without a main grid to synchronize to is very costly - among other things you need to supply your own grid grounding and that could easily run into the high €x000.

> I agree, but I don't think the problem is so much "the office", but rather how poorly cities are designed in the USA;

It’s the same in Stockholm, despite laxer zoning laws. Companies tend to cluster in particular places and housing around them becomes more expensive. We chose to settle down in a less expensive (as in 50%) area but on the other hand I had at least 50 minutes one way commute to the nearest job cluster.

You can build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem.

It obviously comes with a 20% paycut.

Have you ever seen a non-techie buy a phone? No one cares about specs.

Consumers buy €400 17” monstrosities with numpads and run them plugged in.

> it goes vroom vroom.

I thought the point was that it didn’t?

Payroll is a deductible cost and not taxed as profit

Autopilot sounds about as safe as driving while intoxicated, which makes Autopilot users massive egoists.

Sidetrack, what's a good collaborative wiki? I've tried a bunch but always found Confluence much more polished than other offerings.

Step 1 is not calling yourself a freelancer. That word is tainted by the likes of Upwork and Fiverr. It conjurs an image of someone who's desperate for work.

You're a contractor. Specialize, both in industry and technology. Especially nicheing down on a "boring" industry can give you work until you retire. Experienced devs with domain knowledge will always be sought after.

I’m all for scrappy bootstrapers but the middle aged adult in me just sees a licensing and insurance nightmare.

Audiophile equipment and the associated forums are a pretty fun rabbit hole to go down.

I prefer the version where this whole thing started with the elonjet kid wanting a Tesla to take the account down.

Normally, I’d agree. But on the other hand Musk has been working overtime the last few months to wreck his personal brand.

As someone who codes primarily to make a living rather than out of some innate passion, I’m perfectly fine with this.

When I change clients, I’m usually up and running within an hour because almost everything looks very familiar. Compare this to JavaScript development which can have any number of tool chain permutations.

Not the OP, but as I see it Klarna need a steady stream of cheap credit to be able to offer their services. If that stream gets less steady and/or less cheap, the whole calculation falls apart.

Not to mention sports teams.

I sometimes feel like I’m taking crazy pills when it comes to web development. This literally the functionality WordPress + a caching plugin has been providing for 15+ years.

~100€/h and I only do 6-18 month long contracts.

Have a link where I can read more?

Stack Overflow runs SSR with a half a dozen servers. How much more scale do you need?

So by spending thousands of dollars on developer time we can save dozens of dollars on server costs? ;)

> My servers should do as little as possible.

Why? It’s not like they wear and tear?

> people like decentralization

I submit that very few people give a shit about decentralization. They want their currency to work and not drop 90% of its value overnight.

Indeed. But it’s well documented that both Jobs and Edison were shrewd businessmen first, rather than technical geniuses.