erik998

Those were my initial feelings as well. I guess the issue comes down to focusing on software development as a skill and having that skill rewarded in manner you can count on. Our industry is really similar to actors. They have SAG and their guild negotiates with the MPAA. So every studio needs to belong to MPAA. Every year they negotiate the daily/weekly minimum rates for actors with SAG. They are pretty flexible with different rates for indy films vs big budget films.

It's not so hard to imagine a software developers guild where they negotiate for a daily/weekly minimum for developers, dba's, qa's, devops, and such...

https://www.sagaftra.org/production-center/contract/810/rate...

If you are celebrity equivalent of a developer, then you can get paid more. There are no real restrictions. You don't see famous actors getting paid below the daily minimum. When they work for a big budget film they typically get x multiple times the daily rate. Also, if they want to work on an indy film they can agree to those minimum daily rates as well.

I think its flexible enough so if you want to work for a nonprofit you can just accept the daily/weekly minimum vs asking full price if you work for FAANG.

I don't think it's a crazy amount of protections but it sets aside a basic set of standards you can expect from job to job.

If your are making over 120k they suggest actors create a loan out corporation at that point...

https://firemark.com/2015/01/12/should-you-have-a-loan-out-c...

Can you imagine all the FAANG companies having to setup a Software Industry Association to negotiate with a Software Developers Guild every year? It seems plausible. It's probably in their best interest as well. These companies could just dump any social issues on to the union and just focus on making profits. The ability to lock out competitors might force other big software dev employers to join the association as well.

Those were my initial feelings as well. I guess the issue comes down to focusing on software development as a skill and having that skill rewarded in manner you can count on.

Our industry is really similar to actors. They have SAG and their guild negotiates with the MPAA. So every studio needs to belong to MPAA. Every year they negotiate the daily/weekly minimum rates for actors with SAG. They are pretty flexible with different rates for indy films vs big budget films.

It's not so hard to imagine a software developers guild where they negotiate for a daily/weekly minimum for developers, dba's, qa's, devops, and such...

https://www.sagaftra.org/production-center/contract/810/rate...

If you are celebrity equivalent of a developer, then you can get paid more. There are no real restrictions. You don't see famous actors getting paid below the daily minimum. When they work for a big budget film they typically get x multiple times the daily rate. Also, if they want to work on an indy film they can agree to those minimum daily rates as well.

I think its flexible enough so if you want to work for a nonprofit you can just accept the daily/weekly minimum vs asking full price if you work for FAANG.

I don't think it's a crazy amount of protections but it sets aside a basic set of standards you can expect from job to job.

If your are over 120k they suggest actors create a loan out corporation at that point...

https://firemark.com/2015/01/12/should-you-have-a-loan-out-c...

Can you imagine all the FAANG companies having to setup a Software Industry Association to negotiate with a Software Developers Guild every year? It seems plausible. It's probably in their best interest as well. These companies could just dump any social issues on to the union and just focus on making profits. The ability to lock out competitors might force other big software dev employers to join the association as well.

I think in general software developers can use something like SAG to enforce a basic daily minimum rate.

https://www.sagaftra.org/production-center/contract/810/rate...

Daily rates for developers, dbas, qa's and such...

The same guild could make special rate sheets for different stages of a firm. For example SAG has a daily rate sheet for indy films, a software dev guild could have one for startups as well. This could at least prevent abusive startups.

https://www.sagindie.org/signatory/

If you are a star developer equivalent to a celebrity actor, these would just be the minimum rates. There is nothing preventing a studio from paying more.

If anything this would resolve the use of contract labor 1099 misclassifications. If you are good enough to get paid above 120k you could have a loan out corporation and deduct more of your costs while still paying union fees.

https://abspayroll.com/loan-out-companies/

https://firemark.com/2015/01/12/should-you-have-a-loan-out-c...

This wouldn't be a an factory type union. It would be something like a professional union like SAG.

Read the rate sheets to get a better understanding.

It's not 6%. Im not talking about the employer's portion of social security taxes.

Go to http://www.esmartpaycheck.com/FreeCalculator/ Change cycle to annually (2019) and in column cp put in 250k.

the taxes I am talking about are: Federal Income Tax Withheld $61,363.50 State Income Tax Withheld (CA) $22,103.55

That's where you can make a substantial amount of savings by diverting that into a solo 401k and defined benefit plan. You need to pay taxes but you can knock that down quite a bit.

So from 250k down to 150k is your take home... imagine you can structure your business to save a substantial amount of that.

Health insurance ... ehh yea can be expensive but you can use an HSA and high deductible plan... That's why keeping obamacare laws are helpful. As long as you can get bumped off for pre-existing you are ok.

Screw the non cash benefits... Im sure many Sun and IBM employees enjoyed those same perks too. No FAANG company has a 25% match policy, they usually have 3% or some small matching percentage across the board for their 401k safe harbor provision... The same match for all employees.

People are catching on and making these calculations... Sure moving around FAANG companies might seem easy but just because company A pays you X doesn't mean company B will pay X+Z... It may seem like it in the hype but ask any former Sun employee making X why they can't find X+Z.

Options... that's where you might get real lucky. You got me there. That's something I am still learning about... But in your defined benefit plan you can just buy a basket of FAANG stocks.

Take a look at https://watsoncpagroup.com/kb/turbo-charged-401k-plans_302.h...

Here is a good example of how you can max out a solo 401k and use a private pension plan.

https://www.watsoncpagroup.com/kb/Turbo-Charged-401k-Plans_3...

The dumbest thing in the world is working at FAANG at high salary levels. Unless your are in the C-suite you are always in a precarious position. It's not easy to justify the high salary at a competitor all the time.

The best strategy is to get good amount of revenue via a solo S-corp and minimize your payroll taxes. Hell your defined benefit plan can purchase all the FAANG stock it wants. You don't want to be the Sun employee with many stock options that are worthless in a downturn. At least you can dump your stocks and have some flexibility in your own defined benefit plan.

One thing I would like to add... I created my own solo S-corp and started on the path of contracting. I have been successful enough to minimize my payroll taxes using a solo 401k (~18k max contribution and then my company can contribute 25% of my w-2 salary). Now I am at the point where I am investigating how to setup a defined benefit plan for myself to defer 75-100k in payroll taxes. Most likely a cash balance plan.

I think most employees at FAANG don't realize how much they really give up paying CA taxes and a significant portion of Federal taxes.

Then I realize why FAANG companies don't have defined benefit plans... The tenure of most employees would not make it worthwhile.

I wish we had something like the SAG-AFTRA rate fees for programming. We don't so I guess my solo way of doing things will have to do for now.

https://www.sagaftra.org/contracts-industry-resources

Look at those rates!

Digital Monetary Trust

oops... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Monetary_Trust

You definitely should cite... What if they are wrong... You can always blame the citation...

Polywater is the perfect example of why you should citate. Just because someone publishes something does not mean its correct, scientific, or proven.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywater

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/167/3926/1715?sid=8b4e...

Science takes time.

Write a good paper and cite, cite, cite! If your citations are ever demonstrated to be incorrect or fraudulent other researchers can continue work to disprove the citations and work on correcting the errors.

Where is DMT, Digital Monetary Trust? The DMT rand?

It should be there somewhere between 2000-2004

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Monetary_Trust

http://foreignpolicy.com is a good source... the digital subscription is worth the price. You need to pay for good curation. I like the links to source documents. They also provide names of officials. I highly recommend.

http://www.middleeasteye.net/ is another good site. good analysis and helps me understand what is really going on. They link to source documents. Very useful.

James Orlin Grabbe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Orlin_Grabbe

His Digital Monetary Trusts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Monetary_Trust

The End of Ordinary Money https://www.memresearch.org/grabbe/money1.htm

Cyc an artificial intelligence project that attempts to assemble a comprehensive ontology and knowledge base of everyday common sense knowledge, with the goal of enabling AI applications to perform human-like reasoning.

The project was started in 1984 by Douglas Lenat at MCC and is developed by the Cycorp company. Parts of the project are released as OpenCyc, which provides an API, RDF endpoint, and data dump under an open source license.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc

Prolog, Backward chaining, forward chaining, opportunisitic reasoning.

Not exactly Yubikey but USB Armory has some close features:

https://www.crowdsupply.com/inverse-path/usb-armory

The following example security application ideas illustrate the flexibility of the USB Armory concept:

    mass storage device with advanced features such as automatic encryption, virus scanning, host authentication and data self-destruct
    OpenSSH client and agent for untrusted hosts (e.g Internet kiosks)
    router for end-to-end VPN tunnelling
    Tor bridge [see this, for example]
    password manager with integrated web server
    electronic wallet [the Electrum Bitcoin wallet works out of the box on the USB Armory. It has been tested with X11 forwarding from Linux as well as Windows hosts.]
    authentication token
    portable penetration testing platform
    low level USB security testing

The discussion continues here as well:

https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2017/04/initial-respons...

Robert Paul Wolff @ The Philosopher's Stone left a touching story/anecdote on his blog:

https://robertpaulwolff.blogspot.com/2017/04/a-sad-day.html

I think this is the common practice in FL and part of the rules of being a realtor.

The whole situation sucks. The last thing anyone wants to do is consistently use an attorney to handle matters like these. Each and every day it seems like a necessity. I guess when leasing a place, add up all the months. It might be a good rule of thumb to always consult an attorney for any contracts with goods or services worth more $2000.00.

What sucks is finding an attorney that can advise you on such matters, deal with them, and litigate them for your refund + attorney costs.

I think the building might not be ready for occupancy. Maybe there is some holdup from a municipality, investor, contractor, fire inspection that is the cause of the real holdup. They really should just return your money but please remember, the person you dealt with also must deal with a large bureaucracy. Maybe the company she works for thinks everything is OK and they just had a series of bad tenants. When dealing with the company you need to remember that person has no incentive in telling you no. At the end of the day they just want a paycheck and will do whatever their bosses tell them to do, right or wrong.

I believe CoreLogic was spun off from First American.

https://www.corelogic.com/about-us/news/asset_upload_file346...

You may want to see if you are eligible to file a claim with your renter's insurance policy.

As for CoreLogic, you will want to use all the debtor's rights laws at your disposal. All those credit reporting laws apply to them, maybe small claims court would be a good avenue. Small claims courts will usually squash any unruly practices of a landlord.

The large rental management companies can be difficult to worth with as a tenant. At the same time its easier for tenants because they have more tools at their disposal especially in collecting minimal amounts of security deposits and timely repairs. They can be difficult when trying to break a lease, return deposits, or charging misc/extra fees. Sometimes there is no way around it. You need to go into the situation understanding you will lose money.

A good rule of thumb is more amenities => more fees => more problems!

Initially, there was also a college/university requirement. You had to be in a Boston area university. Then they added Ivy League schools. Eventually, any school with an email address ending in *.edu.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2007/jul/25/media.new...

At the time, many were under the impression it would continue as such to prevent the proliferation of middle school/high school students from joining and contaminating the site like MySpace.

Back then, MySpace had some horrible user interface experiences. Users would add javascript plugins and themes to their pages that provided too much individuality. At times, the changes were so drastic you could not tell if a user's page was on myspace without looking at the URL.

To this day, Facebook carries a signature look & feel and will never allow any drastic changes to the UI to accommodate a user's distinct style.

"We define a mobile DAU as a user who accessed Facebook via a mobile application or via mobile versions of our website such as m.facebook.com, whether on a mobile phone or tablet, or used our Messenger mobile application (and is also a registered Facebook user) on a given day. The numbers for mobile DAUs do not include Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus users unless they would otherwise qualify as such users, respectively, based on their other activities on Facebook."

What does that mean?

Why did they use the word "accessed" vs "authenticated"? Did the user leave a tab on their cell phone open after they logged into facebook?

Many users log in once and forget to logout... Does that continue to present itself as someone accessing facebook?

How many users access via the app? via the mobile web page?

If you take out people who used Messenger app what would this number be? Also, can I be a Messenger user and not a registered Facebook user?

Pay attention to the footnotes. It shows up on many pages of the presentation.

I would prefer knowing how many logged in each day. How many did something purposefully like look at a friends timeline, search a friend, look at possible friends. How many posted a comment, did a "like", clicked on an ad...

For me, it died when they dropped the *.edu email requirement.

I used it differently after that. I don't use it much at all any more. I have everyone's story hidden. I may pop back in to figure out a birthday date or some other fact about someone.

Many people use it like that now. They just block off a bunch of story/timelines and focus on a small subset of people.

You need to define work. Is the amount of time I spend learning a new framework/language also work? By that definition none of us are very smart.

If you mean to say work as defined by the specified project you need to determine if there is something else they are seeking that provides worth. Do they want to be seen as necessary? Do they need to learn the whole system/program to have a sense of job security. Some people love the whole idea of saying they have spent more time than anyone else working on the program/app at hand. It's BS I know but for the non technical manager those are the sweetest words.

It's not easy to make utilitarian calculations based solely off monetary units divided by time. Exchange value is never easy to determine. For you it may be easy to find another job that pays same or more for same monetary value divided by time. For others, it may not be so easy.

This is motivational. Whenever anyone feels like OP, just keep applying and looking for something else. Don't fall prey to the dues paying culture everyone wants you to suffer in... We no longer live in the 50's and all report to the local factory.

I think its funny... Everyone always says you don't need to go to college to code but immediately wants to impose a dues paying culture on everyone. Don't believe it. Don't fall for it.

People get lucky lots of times. Your best bet is too keep learning, network at meetups, and reach out to various companies offering any help.

Op finish school and look for a better job. Don't let them underpay you because they think you lack experience. Those arguments are foolish. Spend your nights/weekends reviewing job postings and reach out to people. You are the only one in charge of your future. Don't ever let someone else dictate your future or worth.

Not exactly, this assumption is subject to selection/survivorship bias. In the long run, it looks like it's the other way around. 30 years from now will we still be coding in Python/Javascript? I have much respect for the older cs graduates that did Pascal, Oberon, Lex, Yacc, Flex, and Bison, but do most employers pay any regard to their past education or experience?

https://www.wsj.com/articles/good-news-liberal-arts-majors-y...

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2014/01/22/see-how-liber...

http://www.aacu.org/nchems-report

I think what matters most is learning to be flexible and adaptable. You got to plan for a career or constantly learn and challenge yourself.

Who knows what the future will bring? Maybe one day construction sites will use kanban or scrum... Maybe one day construction projects will require architects, engineers, scrum masters...

You can hit up an arcade or gaming place during the day and play against each other.

https://playlivenation.com/

Most large companies have vendors. You can typically become a vendor via their supply chain management system. They usually have a web page where you can register your company, provide a list of services, and such. You also need to qualify by submitting liability insurance documents and such.

This is the best way to route around recruiters. It is hard work though. They usually have vendor fairs where you have a booth and give out brochures, advertise, network with internal managers...

In the US you can use a fictitious name dba "doing business as" name. You can also open up a bank account using a dba name. You may need to file taxes as a sole proprietor.

https://www.sba.gov/starting-business/choose-register-your-b...

I think this is called a "trade name" in other countries. Wikipedia has some examples for other countries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trade_name

Also, where did all the USDA prime meat go? I remember being a kid and seeing USDA prime in every grocery store as the standard meat for sale. Choice/select was always in a corner... Now when you go into any grocery store, USDA prime is missing or you need to ask for it. I believe only Costco sells it locally for me.

The linux kernel has so much more intellectual property to steal than your web app/phone app/sql queries. If your code is that valuable someone will buy your company. Everything out can be recreated. What can't be recreated is getting there first... Do yourself a favor, get there first, and fight to be first... All that myspace/friendster code isn't worth much if you don't get there first...and keep at it.

Is this similar to penny stock financing? Did you get many calls for these types of loans?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-12/josh-saso...

Would these types of loans aggravate the situation? Are these the companies with super high floats?

I don't think marriage is bad per se, but the courts are being used to criminalize people for not paying debts which I don't agree with. Maybe posting some deposit reflecting the average cost of a divorce prior to getting a marriage license would be sufficient to prove their commitment... Maybe return such a deposit after 10 years of marriage... If they get divorced before the refund is issued use those funds to pay for divorce...

I don't think it's right to encourage people to get married and apply a low bar for such a commitment. However when they want a divorce it's not as easy.

Child support is a different matter though. Criminalizing people for not paying does no one any good. It pushes people to work for cash paying jobs and just hides the problem. Criminalizing it just forces everyone in the situation into a poverty trap. It causes the parent being pursued for child support to resent the other parent or child.

http://www.postandcourier.com/archives/cost-is-high-to-jail-...

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/why-people-get-sentenced-...