295 karma · joined March 5, 2012
No one has mentioned the jobs to be destroyed in catering, nor the fact that catering jobs pay far better than restaurants for all the people making the food!
There have been occasional attempts to enforce the law - IRS recently made noises in 2014/15.
The challenge is that it's taxable to the employees but hard to track and prove, it's for relatively little money per employee, and the firms argue that it's for their benefit to secure information/improve productivity/build cohesion...
Google can and will fight far harder than the IRS is willing to on this issue and the IRS isn't entirely sure that they'd win. The IRS can spend resources in places to make a much higher return with an almost certain chance of success.
So no effective taxes on meals.
To make it happen in your company, follow the Google and Uber strategy. Just do it and deal with the law later.
Your ability to pay any fines later may be different from Google's and the chance that one of your employees will call the tax office on you may be dramatically higher because Germany.
To build a company you have to talk to lots and lots and lots of people.
So one reason funders try to make it hard to talk to them is to see if you can grind out all the conversations you're going to have to have with people that you have no connection to. Hire staff, lease buildings, sell products, get more investors, get accountants/lawyers/bankers, develop channel and consulting relationships....
So make connections with people. Get to know your local angel community (whether or not they write actual checks there are people who think they are angels), find people from your school or area that have built a company, find people that are in your space (customers, competitors, experts...). Meetups, conferences, twitter, hn, slack channels, youtube+++
I know a firm that got a capital markets fintech funded by pitching a commercial real estate investment firm (who bought strip malls and such) and getting $5MM from them. Not someone who would be in your top 1000 prospects but it worked and it was all just from talking to lots and lots and lots of people.
Everyone has different needs, different existing environments, different service expectations+++
So you can't effectively stick to one price for the "large" tier. Given the differences in complexity and capacity consultants are needed. Startups can't build in-house service teams - the economics are misaligned. Not that you can get away from consultants if you buy from Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, or IBM...
Plus there are issues in terms of pricing and domain expertise across different industries - Federal, Education, Health.. legal issues in what your pricing can be and serious issues around their compliance environment means you need different teams of people to serve different verticals.
If you really need HA you are going to call anyways to negotiate. No one puts 15000 licenses on a credit card.
As others have mentioned, John Edwards had great success as a lawyer suing over cerebral palsy, claiming that it was caused by actions during delivery. While possible, most cases are caused by other factors such as infections, IVF, or low birthweight.
At trial, you have a sympathetic plaintiff with large needs vs a "rich" doctor and hospital. They might have caused this, they have insurance. So you systematically get very large verdicts against defendants who are unlikely to have done anything wrong. Edwards was very good at theatrics and not good on science.
Trials that rely on science and math are not great to take to a jury. Even discussions here get emotional when you deal with subjects like appropriate risk analysis and tradeoffs. Saying that you have a formula to only fix defects that kill more than x people or cost less than y per life saved is a great way of losing at trial and getting destroyed in a thread. It's also how every company and government makes decisions around safety - where stop signs go, guardrails, drug approval, armor in tanks...
Getting tort law right is hard - you want true injuries to be compensated but discourage people that are looking for lottery tickets.
Accounts payable, for example, gets lots of these things as an expected part of the workflow, as does legal, and various parts of management.
PDFs have had problems of their own.
Many of the people that you most want to secure are the same people who need to be exposed to the outside world. CEO and CFO HAVE to deal with random people, as it's the job, but they are the most dangerous. If someone needs a 5 step verification process that takes days to communicate with your CEO, then you are not going to get may new clients or investors.
Is the image very busy? I may know that I'm going to want to use it along with other assets or in presentations - how is it going to affect that? How do the colors and shapes used compare to other assets it will be used beside, how will it work in different mediums? Bright yellow isn't great for projectors or for legibility.
One example - a global accounting firm introduced a new framework. They had a diagram that had core elements, supporting concepts, and overarching concerns. It would work fine at full size on a laptop but was very poor for display on a low res projector to an audience of 100. This design was core to the effort and would be used in very many situations with projectors to large audiences.
I may say that I want to look like James Bond skiing - you design me a yellow ski suit very similar to the intro of The Spy Who Loved Me. I'm horrified because I want a look similar to the all black look of Daniel Craig in Spectre. My inability to communicate about design created a problem but I can judge on whether or not you've achieved my goal.
Translation across domains is VERY HARD.
I'm not artistic, don't have that kind of creativity, and can't use words that would be helpful to you.
I can only tell you whether or not I like it and give a fumbling attempt to explain why.
This is why I (or my company) hired you: to do something that we can't.
It is incredibly hard to do the translation between designer language and client language. I've worked with some graphic designers who are absolutely amazing at taking my malformed mumblings and using them as effective critiques and requests. But not many people can do that and it leads to frustration on both sides.
This is why those who can do the translation can make incredible money and run their own firms. Just like how people in other industries (accounting, law, coding...) who can translate across domains make more money and run firms.
Just think of them as Stalin's New York Times - willing accomplices to Soviet genocide.
Popular cloud hosts with a freemium option are a bad idea for personal vpn.
Personally it's handy as my ISP lets me watch tv on any device on my home network. They did it badly because it breaks if I change the SSID.
But you're not truly paranoid unless you're using tor or a vpn to get away from your ISP's network. Your efforts mostly are an annoyance to yourself but no impediment to other.
The historic building is far too small for what's needed in the location now. The building can't be brought up to modern standards with any sort of rational budget. So we have adaptive reuse - wildly popular in many areas such as the historic docks and warehouses in London, disused steel mills, etc
Facadism allows you to keep a great street level architecture while dramatically increasing the density and utility of the area. Useful in London, where you couldn't build up until very recently, but especially in North American cities where there are very few old buildings since they aren't that old and the cities were dramatically smaller than they are today.
So accept facadism or widespread annihilation of historic fabric.
They're dangerous to the firm and bad for the people's involved careers.
Best rule for everyone is no relationships between co-workers and if one happens both people are fired.
It's far, far too easy to tweet or facebook something. A passing emotion with no commitment. If someone writes a letter they have put a lot of effort in and are seriously involved in the issue. They might even do something as outdated as vote or talk to their neighbors.
That's the kind of behavior that is dangerous to a politician and gets noticed. So written letters and phone calls are the best way to get a politician's attention.
So if one is planning a tax regime, you should think long and hard about the first and second order effects of your planned taxes. Unfortunately too many in government and politics don't think about this.
Very different from using all of your resources to self fund it.
POF was a minimalist app in a well trodden market. You shouldn't raise VC to do something like this, and you shouldn't be able to (though yes it happens far too often).
There are many problems and markets that just don't fit this approach.
The other issue is philosophical. You seem to want proof that a company should exist and require extraordinary evidence against a law. I want proof that a law should exist and require extraordinary evidence against a company. As a shorthand its France vs America. You'll note that we're not using Minitel bur rather a board hosted by a VC operation who shares a mindset with the founding team of Uber.
AWS was not great in its first 5 years. Its capabilities 5 years ago were pretty good but nothing compared to today.
Google is bad at long term development, especially with Ruth Porat at CFO. Microsoft is mixed - for every Xbox and Hololens there's a Courier.
One thing missed in chatbots is that X dot AI is a chat bot that works pretty well. There are others that are similarly domain limited where the current interaction model is an email thread or a text conversation. These tend to be doing well.
We've seen this in reports after GDPR go live where Google's advertising market share went up: they had the resources to demonstrate compliance as well as a better ability to get consent (google vs random ad exchange asking for your consent.. google vs a restaurant you go to a few times a year..).
People announce good intentions and create laws and regulations embodying these intentions. They don't look at what the second and third order responses are likely to be, just at what they consider bad behavior and what looks to be a first order response to that. It is very, very hard to create laws and regulations that will have the actual effect that you intend but it is very easy to write laws that have good names and have superficial appeal.
Whether the subject is market structure, privacy, or taxation, far too many supposedly intelligent people adopt or accept the superficial response rather than the well thought through one. You wouldn't accept that approach in your code but you're happy to accept it in national and international governance.
People are then shocked that they don't obtain their desired results and argue for new, improved, superficial laws and regulations.
Be consistent!
You claim that a person on the ground is going to get better identification but they need to be hidden rather far away so that they aren't noticed and aren't hit. This reduces the typically achievable accuracy substantially from the theoretical maximum. Manned aircraft can't stay on target because of refueling needs, speed, and how loud they are, so you have very narrow windows of opportunity. Most ordnance from manned aircraft are also much larger than those used by drones, so manned aircraft typically have larger blast radius and can kill many more unintended people.
So while their can be narrow specific situations where FAC + F35 can deliver more precision, overall a drone provides much more precision and less danger to others.
This is obviously an emotional situation and many people don't believe that it is valid to kill specific individuals, as many others have claimed on this thread.
They also leave no room for "cheap" campaign promises and new initiatives that politicians can announce and display to the media (repeatedly). We'll give a tax credit for low emissions vehicles to save your children's lungs and the planet! An incentive to finance homes for nurses!
Tax is just code. Poorly architected code with lots of documentation that obfuscates rather than illuminates.
Politicians love to nudge through the tax system as it seems cheap, costs are obscured as, and there's no project to fail like there is if you try to build something. You end up with perpetual scope creep and "minor" additions.
Then you get people politicizing the outcomes - "bad people" are taking advantage of a good program, or a "bad company" isn't paying as much as someone thinks they should in an ideal world. If you are going to live in a nation of laws rather than the whim of some functionary you need to let everyone do what is legal, rather than just preferred individuals or classes.
The second tier firms operate very similarly to the Big 4 but are an order of magnitude smaller. They'll do audit work for public companies, just not very big ones. Or they'll do pieces of work for bigger firms. But companies can still be public with revenues of only a few hundred million and they'll be far more price sensitive than Google or Goldman.
Just like in cloud computing or AI scale has serious advantages for accounting firms and it is difficult and expensive to try to make the jump to the top tier. Better to stay in your target market in terms of client size, geography, and what price you charge, than to try to drastically change your business. Far too likely to lose your existing business and not succeed in the new one.
No customers, no investors, and all your cash gone before your appeal is heard.
Block all EU traffic. Just cut the transatlantic cables.
They have to protect sensitive client data. Need to protect against illegitimate leaks of data. And the universal way that they communicate with clients, opposing parties, regulators? Email.
You can't force the SEC to accept your new encrypted cloud solution, nor can you require opposing counsel to use YOUR solution. And communicating with hostile parties is the entire organization's reason for existing.
"Simple and reasonable" IT approaches to problems frequently break down when faced with people whose job it is to deal with other organizations.
The EU itself is hyping up how fearsome this law is to win approval from their citizens and politicians. As well as to strongly encourage firms to take this change seriously.
But I am at fault for taking the EU seriously rather than being blase. I am fearmongering for trying to explain why businesspeople who are not in the EU are afraid of its actions and are afraid of a brand new law that grants a huge amount of discretion to prosecutors and judges.
What I know is that the EU can capriciously change its mind and go after the biggest companies for billions of dollars. I know that I don't have the resources to prove my innocence in a foreign country. I don't even have the resources to understand the charges against me, since legal translation is expensive and I could be faced with actions in any or all of the languages of the EU. If I get a package of documents in Estonian or Bulgarian I won't even know that I'm facing charges!
Claiming universal jurisdiction against every company in the world with a reverse onus of proof is a dangerous and malevolent tactic. Because it's your local government that you have confidence in, you're comfortable with it. I doubt that you would be so blase about a similar approach by the US or Japan.
Proving this can be expensive and is risky. Who knows what any individual judge in any EU country will decide is "reasonable"?
Companies can easily be destroyed by filing multiple charges against them. Guilt, innocence, or reasonableness doesn't come into it: the process is the punishment.
Look at Amanda Knox (Americans tend to think she's innocent, Brits tend to think she's guilty) - after appeals the Italian Justice System found her not guilty of the murder of her roommate. She still spent almost four years in prison in her early twenties and had to spend a huge amount of money on lawyers to arrive at this result. Just because you eventually get what you see as the right result doesn't mean you won't go through hell to get there.
A major reason why Americans are having such a big problem with GDPR is because the EU system appears to change its interpretations and decisions abruptly, with retrospective effect. You set up companies in certain jurisdictions thanks to their tax rates and how transactions are treated. You follow every aspect of national and EU law. These arrangements are widely known, are accepted as legitimate practice, and they continue for decades. The EU commissioners change - suddenly your corporate arrangements are wildly illegal and you are subject to penalties and back taxes stretching over a decade.
If staff changes and they say that they will interpret a rule differently going forward, you can adjust your behavior to comply. New legislation, sure abide by it. But when the rules change and your behavior 15 years ago is now viewed to be illegal you can't do anything. Retroactivity is accepted in Europe but it is explicitly unconstitutional in the US. It's a major reason why the US is not currently part of the UK.
So the GDPR is terrifying because of the massive discretion granted to judges and prosecutors in every EU country and their habit for changing their interpretations. On its face it's not too threatening, but the fines are massive, there are no hard rules, and you can't be sure that today's interpretation will be tomorrow's.
Facebook and Google will manage - they can write billion dollar checks and get the US government to protect them. Many of us can be completely wiped out by a $20MM fine. Just a court case would be existentially threatening in terms of the resources it requires and its impact on fundraising and gaining customers.
One of Prop 13s benefits from a planning perspectives is that your property taxes are isolated from the decisions of your neighbors. So if adjacent properties turn into condos or commercial, you won't see your taxes rocket, so you have less of an incentive to oppose development.
CEQA and the California Coastal Commission are weapons that NIMBYs use, but what drives NIMBYs in CA is the same as everywhere else. The hippy/champagne communists of SF just make it stronger (damn those evil developers making a profit! boo hiss!!!!) and elect malevolent local politicians, but it's the same drivers as anywhere else.