4,019 karma · joined April 20, 2012
This blog post is about excessive paperwork, surprises, unnecessary income tax filings, and the franchise fee. And the fact that California is uniquely aggressive among states in pursuing this stuff against a startup.
This article is about income taxes, franchise fees, and absurd levels of paperwork.
Nobody benefits from excessive paperwork and overreaching bureaucracy, not even the unemployed.
I was not aware that hiring a remote employee there required that my business file an income tax return, which is completely unrelated to employment. My income is none of California's damn business if I don't sell anything there and have no other nexus with the state.
Plus, no other state has California's absurd franchise fee, even for small businesses with zero revenue.
You obviously can't do this if everything is electronic. You've got to reject electronic-only contracts outright.
First, don't edit the proposed contract itself. Instead, add a rider that specifically overrides the provisions you don't like. Something like "Intellectual Property. Work produced by employee shall be considered work-for-hire. 'Work" is defined as..." Then add a line to the bottom of the rider that says "If any portion of this rider is in conflict with the main contract, the terms of the rider will override the terms of the contract." The benefit of this approach is that you avoid the back-and-forth niggling over particular words in the main contract, and you often overcome the other party's resistance to changing the language their lawyers said had to be there. It's stupid, but it works.
The second technique is simply to say, "this contract isn't large enough to justify these provisions. If you would like to bump the contract, we can talk. Otherwise, no." This has worked for me in negotiating software licenses. I haven't tried it in an employment situation. It works because it forces the other side to acknowledge that their demands have costs, and they can have what they want only if they pay for it. They never do.
I am not a lawyer. Heed this advice at your own risk.
A man who studies ticks was bitten so many times that his body developed antibodies to tick saliva, which are now so powerful that they kill the ticks.
If a kid or parent can log in from offsite, it is not technically possible to force all browsers or systems to monitor and restrict activity. I can log in through Firefox (or curl, for that matter) and not have my activity sent to the school.
Also, there is absolutely no legal way the school could force the monitoring of activity from an offsite computer (unless it were school-owned), even if it were technically possible. To secretly and silently install spyware on a parent's computer when the parent logs into the child's account would violate so many laws and constitutional protections I can't even list them.
They suggested signing in with a different account, but when I do that, I get the error message "This account is not allowed to sign in within this network."
Here's a suggestion: instead of quoting your own rate, instead say "we charge X% over and above our hourly cost for AWS, Digital Ocean, etc." That kind of price transparency would go a long way for me.
I also wouldn't have to spend hours trying to figure out what instances you use, the hourly rate, what you're charging, am I getting ripped off, and redo the whole process every six months.
The studies could be showing that we use a smaller dictionary today.
As for the statement that my friends were smarter, this is just my subjective opinion, like everything else I wrote. Still, I think their subsequent careers show they had serious intellectual firepower. You know some of their names. I was lucky to know them.
The problem is the spectacular arrogance of the professors and their contempt for students. Anyone who gets to the level of ivy-league professorhood has reached the top of their profession, and has acquired an ego to match.
I'm generalizing here, of course, not all of my professors were full of themselves, but large numbers of them were, and more to the point there was a culture of disregard for the opinions of students. Over the years the University has sought to control, limit or suppress student ratings of courses, and professors were never penalized for getting a bad rating. They didn't care about the opinions of students because they didn't have to.
It's a lot like government. A person in this kind of organization does not advance by serving customers well. In fact, they often bristle at the idea that students, or constituents, are customers at all. Rather, they are sheep to be led or punished as appropriate.
Most of my friends at Princeton were considerably smarter than the professors who taught us, but we were young, lacked knowledge, depended on the good graces of professors to get the grades we needed for our future, and so lacked the tools to fight back against the substandard product we were being fed.
This, plus public conversations about courses or professors tended to be dominated by the few but prominent students who fawned, obsequiously like the courtiers, over the brilliant professors who filled them with inspiration and hope. We all threw up a little bit in our mouths when we heard this sort of embarrassment, but what could you say?
Again and again, I encountered professors who would assign readings that were unreadable, would promote their own work over better work by others, drone on about drivel, advance idiot theories, and treat the slightest challenge as an affront.
Nominally, Princeton isn't like that. Unique among universities, it has something called a "precept", which is a small group meeting once a week, led by a grad student or sometimes a professor, to debate and discuss the issues. It's a nice theory, but most students say little in precept, aside from a few suck-ups. We were so overwhelmed by the firehose of un-curated content gushed at us that virtually no one had done all the reading, and risked being exposed as the one who didn't know what he was talking about.
Things won't change until professors start losing their jobs over bad ratings.
All that having been said, my physics courses were pretty ok.
In fairness, I have found the compiler errors to be extremely helpful. They often tell me exactly what to fix. But honestly, they shouldn't have to do that. The syntax should have been obvious from the beginning, as it is in most programming languages.
I googled and did not find much pertaining to "ant financial" and "postgres". Perhaps your google-fu is better than mine...
>> systems you've never seen, for needs you know nothing about, for clients and users you know nothing about.
Perhaps you should make fewer assumptions about what I know.
Pascal was a great language, and I wonder how much we've lost by having it go by the wayside. It was strongly-typed, easy to read, cross-platform, produced native executables, and was lightning fast to compile and execute.
I say "was" a great language because it isn't widely used today. I miss it.
All documents should simply be dumped into a common repository. S3 would do fine. Define some standards for common document metadata so each document is identified by case, author, type, etc. Enable S3 version histories.
Then create an API for creating cases and uploading documents. This will require some controls, logins, security, and some facility for billing users for filing fees. If the court just provides an API, they can stop there.
Private companies who want to provide a user interface to lawyers and the public can do so. I'm sure that more than a few will make searches and document downloads free.
And that's it. If the government would just get out of the way, this could be done in six months to a year and would be very, very cheap.
But your point is well-taken. Hardware is cheap.