lsc

That's what I described with the deep packet inspection. You could hook up an IDS and block users based on the IDS output, but like I said, the sort of people who like no log VPNs will not like that. At one point I set that up at my VPS company a long time ago, (of course, I was very up front about it and told my customers, and I was surprised that customers were really, really angry about it, so I took it down within a day or two. Sorry guys, I mean, I should have stuck with the traditional route of only examining packet headers.)

If you act in the usual way for an ISP and only examine packet headers, then you will need to react to complaints about your users. Those complaints can roll in up to a week after the abuse happened.

I could believe a VPN service that said it kept logs for a week. That seems possible. (of course, there's still the legal issues, but I personally haven't seen those, while I have been almost disconnected by my upstream for customer abuse before)

It gets worse, too, if I use shared IP addresses. So, the way my VPS company was setup, everyone had a static IP. And that was really pretty easy; an abuse report comes in saying that a certain IP did something at a certain time. As all my customers had their own IPs, all I had to do was make sure the IP hadn't been moved to a different customer recently, and I knew who to go after. Aside from that ill considered day-long experiment with the IDS, I didn't do any network logging at all outside of total packet/byte counts (outside of troubleshooting) because I didn't really have to in order to go after abuse. I knew what IP was owned by who.

But, in a shared-IP system? this is way worse. All your users are behind a NAT, right? so you get that same abuse complaint a few days after a thing happened saying that IP X did this thing at time Y to target IP Z. Well, all your customers are coming out of IP X, so that doesn't help you. In a NAT system, to manage abuse complaints without deep packet inspection, you need to log the headers from every connection. User X connected to IP Y on port Z, etc... It's the only way to trace back the abuse to the customer.

(Things get dramatically easier if every customer has it's own IP; then you just need to record who had what IP when. I don't know how many "no log" VPNs use NAT vs giving each active user their own IP. Of course, things get even easier with IPv6)

I don't just mean law enforcement, though that's probably a problem too, (though I have less experience with that one) I'm also talking about the normal abuse an ISP gets. Spammers, etc... From experience, your upstream will shut you down if your customers aren't well behaved.

I think this is... a common mistake people make. It's a common mistake I make, really, to look at a system for preventing a bad thing, see a hole, and then argue that system is worthless.

All systems have holes, and just 'cause a system has a hole you can see, that doesn't mean the system doesn't have value.A system that prevents 80% of the bad things it was designed to prevent can be really useful.

It seems like only comparing base makes it harder to compare smaller companies (which usually give you all your comp as base) with larger companies (where 30% seems to be rsu and bonus)

1. you are running this all as a sole proprietorship, with no separation of business and personal money. In that case? sort of. Your accounting is going to be complex as heck. if you have $100K of assets to donate, donating those assets can offset $100K of income. you are giving up an amount equal to what you are earning to avoid taxes, it's a lot like not paying yourself, and selling and living off of the assets you donated, except you avoid some of the extra taxes you would have paid on doing that. Also note, in this case, the stuff you have to pay FICA on is... complicated, and your charitable donations usually don't get you out of FICA (which if you are rich you don't care about, but we're talking about $125K/yr, and as you are paying employee and employer, thats 15% - without selling the company or without paying both corp income tax and personal capital gains for a dividend, it's hard to take money out of a company without paying FICA.)

Note, this is pretty unusual for people who know what they are doing. This is how I started out, and it was a real mess to untangle. Most people compartmentalize their businesses into several entities, and not just for liability protection (though that is nice, too) - Accounting works much better when your money isn't just one big pool.

2. this is the common thing. your businesses are their own tax entities. You have a LLC (often several) for your real estate, an S corp for your consulting/speaking income, C corps for a lot of your other businesses:

In that case? having a business entity I control that is taxed as a c corp donate a bunch of money is going to change taxation for that entity. Not for the personal money I pay myself.

I mean, you won't be buying right now, but you will be able to save money; if we have another big drop in housing prices, you will be all set: otherwise, you will just have to move when you retire. (which actually is pretty sad, 'cause those social connections are really important. but just saying, if you have $125K/yr, two people can live here comfortably.)

If it's really important that you have a lot of room, you aren't going to like it here. Really, I think that's the big difference.

My own impression is that as a sysadmin without a degree, I get like 2x here what i would other places, and yeah, housing is more than 2x, but... housing is a kinda small part of my budget. I save a lot more working here, and have access to a lot more luxuries that don't involve personal space.

Honestly, if you wanted to get me to move? Probably the best thing you could promise me is a job with an office... or even just the sort of large cubicle my job role rated in the mid to late aughts. I mean, my job pays really well, the food is good and people are nice to me, and I really appreciate it, but it seems like every year my desk shrinks. I think the parking spot they reserve for the car I don't use is allocated more space than the desk where I sit all day.

"pulls out only enough in salary to meet their expenses, makes an equivalent donation to charity to offset all their "income", and then pays zero in taxes."

and that's confusing, 'cause say I can live off $100K/yr. So I pay myself $140K (or whatever) and pay the taxes on that and I have $100K left to pay for groceries and rent or whatever.

Sure, my company maybe donated a bunch of money to some nonprofit I liked, and that decreased the company's tax liability. Maybe my company even lost money after the donations, and maybe I get to carry those losses forward... but that's not going to impact the personal income taxes on those wages I pay myself, or personal capital gains tax on the dividends I pay myself.

But that's a different thing from the tax liability on that $140K I took out to buy my groceries, and pay my rent.

I'm not a tax person, though I have been in the situation of paying both corporate and personal taxes- all I can say is that you need a properly licensed tax person in that situation, even if your business makes less than a google engineer.

I mean, there are a lot of places like this. This one has hippie culture, and most of their businesses are old economy, but there are a fair number of places like this that have different cultures and different business focus.

If you want to live in a utopian community, there are lots. I encourage you to find one compatible with your values and give it a shot.

Also, read "walden two" by Skinner.

Personally? yeah, I think renting a car is the way to go, if you want to evaluate how you will feel about the car later. A 20 minute test drive, to me, is like laying on a mattress for 20 minutes in a store and expecting to know what it will feel like to sleep on.

In a way, this is a lot like my mechanic; Like I pay the mechanic mostly for doing stuff, like they are supposed to figure out what to do through the service manual (I joke that the biggest difference between fixing cars and fixing computers is that the manuals for fixing cars are a lot better)

We've already got paths to take if the doctor steps out of the conventional path and screws it up as a result.

My general feeling is that "experimental" and "alternative" treatments are going to have a lot of stuff that doesn't work at all mixed in; I mean, that seems unavoidable; if you know it works, it's not 'experimental' at all. and because it's outside of conventional medicine, I'm not protected from bad choices through that convention the way I am with conventional medicine. Therefore, it seems like changing the incentive structure is reasonable; there's no real guide as to what the right thing to do is.

I mean, I think the real problem in misaligned incentives here is that there would be an incentive for the for-profit experimental treatment providers to keep things that should become mainstream "experimental" so that they could continue to charge for things that worked. But even so I still think my suggestion is better, at least for those paying for treatment, than the case in the story where people without medical expertise end up deciding to spend lots of money up front for treatments that explicitly are not generally accepted as effective by the medical community.

I'm just saying, going to a for-profit entity and saying "give me something experimental" and then paying the same on success or failure seems like a pretty bad idea to me.

But I'm a computer nerd, not a doctor. I'm not really in a position to tell the difference if you are giving me sugar pills.

Seems to me like we'd align incentives if I'll give you 1/10th that for every year I live past treatment, maybe for the next 20 years (say you have a 50% success rate; I'm not objecting to you taking my money if you can cure me, I just don't want to pay you if you don't) I mean, maybe even I put ten years of that in escrow or what have you up front...

I mean, that's the thing, it is experimental and experimental medicine seems totally reasonable if I'm probably gonna die with non-experimental treatment... but it seems like incentives are misaligned if a for-profit entity gets to offer up "experimental" treatment that I can't tell from sugar pills and they get paid regardless of efficacy.

(I think paying for conventional medicine regardless of efficacy is probably fine, 'cause I think there are standards treatments have to meet before they become 'conventional medicine' - and obviously, 'experimental' treatments don't have to meet that high bar.)

As a younger person, I used belt holsters for my cellphones. Around the time of the iphone 5, (incidentally, when I jumped on the apple phone bandwagon) i switched to wearing pants with a special cellphone pocket, which isn't big enough for the big cellphones, but velcros closed (which I think is essential, for phones are slippery and are far more likely to slip out when sitting in chairs designed for short people than a wallet or keys are) - also, the special pocket means no fishing around in your pocket for the phone.

Now that I carry a separate phone for work, man, I've had a hard time of it. but... why don't I just order a belt clip for the work phone? Done. $15, and it will be on my desk, most likely, when I get in to work on Tuesday.

First, 1% in income puts you around $450K/yr... and that's usually household, so if two software engineers get married and move to the bay area, they have a reasonable shot of making that cut mid to late career. (from what I've seen, if they get a job at a big company and then talk that company into transferring them, they have a good shot at keeping that ridiculous income and living somewhere where it means something. They have less of a shot at getting the really sweet raises and bonuses at those other places, though.)

I know a bunch of people in that box. For that matter, most of them would argue they aren't rich at all. I remember the other day, one of my co-workers, who I am fairly certain meets the above standard, was claiming that in the bay area, this salary is not rich, "just normal" - I explained to him that the median household income in santa clara county was like $70K/yr, and he was aghast. "How would you even live on that?" and he has a point... I mean, I lived on less than that when I was running a company and living here, but yeah, rent is nuts to the point where I know several people who would be 1%ers if they married someone of their own income who live with roommates.

(I still have to laugh at people who are literal millionaires who claim they are "just normal." - but I kind of see their point; I don't make quite that much, but it's really pretty reasonable to think that if I worked a little harder that I could.)

>wealthiest in US society are entrepreneurs who again created their own business- not rentiers living off of inherited wealth.

See... it's very often not entirely one or the other. Would Bill Gates be super rich if his mom wasn't on the United Way board with the chairman of IBM? I mean, I'm not saying that Bill didn't do any of the work or that it was all inherited... I'm just saying that his parents handed him... certain advantages, and while I'm sure his intelligence and hard work would take him far no matter how poor he was born, if he started where most people start? while I'm sure he wouldn't stay poor, it's pretty unlikely that he would have gotten so rich that you or I would know his name today.

Nearly all those 1%ers I work with? they came from families that were at least dentist rich, and were sent to really good schools. Nearly all the folks on H1B visas I know are really sharp, very educated and have parents who are very politically connected, and rich for their country of origin (even if not always rich by US standards)

Hell, compared to most of my co-workers, I grew up poor, but even I had parents who worked in the computer industry. I got several jobs at critical points in my career through neighborhood and family connections. I know people who are just as good as me who didn't have those family connections early in their career, and several of them fell out of the industry entirely in 2001; me? I got a job a company started by someone who had interned for my father, many years ago, and I worked through the dot-com crash. I mean, clearly my connections were not good enough to get me a job I couldn't reasonably do, but it certainly got me the interview, at a time when such things were hard to come by, and probably gave me a leg up over the other applicants who could hurdle the minimum bar. (Incidentally, a few years later, I started my own company, and hired a few of those less connected but just as good as I am people... It didn't work out; Business is a lot harder than it looks, and I don't have those sorts of connections, but it was really interesting how I became technically bourgeois (and not in the poor taste in lawn furniture sense... I mean that I owned means of production and employed other people, combining my labor and capital to produce a product) but at the same time, my income dropped precipitously. Like i made rent, sure, but the total revenue was about a L6 bay area SWE total comp number, there were were other employees to pay, datacenter bills, and servers to buy. So when I sold out and got a regular job, it was like a 4x raise for me.)

edit: More to the point, I think this idea that people don't work for money is one pushed by management at the expense of the workers, and when I hear employers putting that out there, I assume those employers are... bad to work for, because they think that by being manipulative, they can get you to work for less.

Usually, those employers have less pleasant cultures and pay less than employers who simply pay more than their competition.

The problem is twofold, for uber. First? they're losing money. If they raise prices to solve that problem, it's possible that a lot of people like me will... just buy cars again. I mean, I certainly prefer to be driven over driving, but I'm pretty price sensitive on the subject. Much more price sensitive than I am for most of the things I get from amazon.

Uber's second problem is that the difficult to compete with advantage they have, that is, that they are global, only matters to me when I travel. When I'm somewhere I've been a while, it totally makes sense to install the local taxi apps and take what is best, and most of my car hire use is in places where I am often enough to know the market. This week? Lyft is having a 25% off sale, which makes them cheaper than uber even counting the uber loyalty program and prepay discounts. Once the Lyft sale is up, I'll probably go back to Uber.

I suppose both the problems uber has come down to the same thing; the only difficult thing about replicating their business is that they are willing to lose money doing it. They just don't have a whole lot of a moat.

I'm glad I don't work for you.

wikipedia supports my usage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_tax

"A Pigovian tax (also spelled Pigouvian tax) is a tax on any market activity that generates negative externalities (costs not included in the market price). The tax is intended to correct an undesirable or inefficient market outcome, and does so by being set equal to the social cost of the negative externalities. In the presence of negative externalities, the social cost of a market activity is not covered by the private cost of the activity. In such a case, the market outcome is not efficient and may lead to over-consumption of the product.[1] Often-cited examples of such externalities are environmental pollution, and increased public healthcare costs associated with tobacco and sugary drink consumption."

The idea being to give everyone a tax credit equivalent to what they are probably going to spend on usage fees. The incentive structure remains, as they get to keep the money if you aren't contributing to the negative externality, and on average nobody is any worse off than before.

Text processing is not harder than figuring out what library to use this month.

These things change a lot... but they don't have to, and running things on computers would be easier/cheaper if they didn't.

As a technical individual contributor, what matters is what you can do, not how you feel.

Edit: Yes, yes, all absolute statements are wrong; Attitude does matter some for technical jobs. But what you can do is overwhelmingly more important than your attitude in tech jobs, just like your attitude is overwhelmingly more important in management and sales.

Yes, at interviews, you must act engaged, and you must display what you can do, and that is kind of sales, but it's really easy mode sales.

Sure, I mean, it depends on job role. In sales? yeah, that attitude is required.

(To be clear, even in sales, that attitude is not sufficient. While it is absolutely necessary to project that sort of confidence, that unshakable self-belief, it is not sufficient. You still need to sell. Attitude is sometimes required; it is never enough.)

More specifically to the person you are responding to? when it comes to individual contributor technical roles? As long as you are engaged and interested in the technical questions? It's cool. Having a ridiculous Tony Robins kind of attitude can actually hurt you there; Most technical people don't want to work with a person who's true calling was sales. When I'm interviewing someone like that, every instinct I have is telling me to get them out of the office. I mean, I do my best to overcome my prejudices, and I will still evaluate them on technical merit, but man, it's not easy.

I think that outside of sales and management (note, that's a big part of running a business) defeatist talk and feeling are kinda normal, and unless they are overwhelming for too long, not really a problem.

This is the difference with technical work. What matters is not how you feel or what you project, but what you can do

While getting out from under my business I was super depressed and engaged in a lot of "negative self-talk" in public. And yeah, it probably hurt me on selling that business (I mean, I think I still got a fair deal for what the business was at the time.) but just because I wrote like I was depressed online, as long as I kept going for interviews (and acting engaged during those interviews) I don't think it hurt my prospects as a technical individual contributor much.

I mean, sales is... a different world from technical work. And yeah, I am going to have to come up with a new attitude if I want to go into management ever again But as a technical individual contributor? Ability is key, not attitude.

I mean, I can get an amazon.co.jp and amazon.fr and amazon.es account, and tie them to different kindles, but each time I want to switch kindles, i have to wipe the thing, and get rid of my english books.

I'm totally willing to pay a premium for kindle convenience, and deal with not being able to loan books so easily, etc, etc, the kindle walled garden actually works really well for me in English but once you move out of English, it's just not convenient anymore.

I mean, they are gating some incredibly high-paying jobs. Sure, you gotta jump through some hoops to get it, but I'd argue that the coding tests are... well, they certainly aren't the hoops I find difficult.

I personally think the industry needs a lot more resistance to change when it comes to interfaces and other things humans have to understand.

I mean, I'm not talking about systemd in particular; I'm talking about in general about how interfaces change over time and people don't seem to take into account the cognitive costs of that change. Sure, ss is better than netstat and IP is better than ifconfig... but how much of that 'better' could you have done in a way that didn't toss away the historical knowledge so many people have of those tools?

And really, sysadmin tools are the least of it; I mean, they are operated by professionals, so if you want to pay for retraining (or pay the costs associated with there being fewer of us)

People change customer facing interfaces to no benefit all the time, forcing people who are trying to do other things to put effort into re-learning their interface.

I mean, my point is that interface changes are expensive, and should not be undertaken without a really good argument that they bring more benefit than the cost of retraining.

Yes, autonomous cars would make spreading out easier.

I think you underestimate what a difference riding in back makes.

Yes, yes, when you drive, you get angry and aggressive. I do too; my observation from taking ride share (I gave away my car and now almost exclusively use the rideshare) is that almost everyone rages out from time to time when they drive.

Sitting in back with a book is such a different experience. "Wow, I used to be like that?" I mean, it seems so weird to see someone get mad about traffic when you haven't taken the wheel for a month yourself.

Edit:

To be sure, if we don't get full level-4; if you still need to be the 'safety driver' and actually pay attention, that's a different thing, and yeah, that's a whole lot less useful.

And to be clear, I am not saying that I think we are close to full level-4. I'm just saying that if we get there? it will be wonderful in ways that weren't obvious to me until I switched from driving to being driven for quite some time.

Cultural change is... often rather harder than technological innovation.

I switched to amazon video... I can't say I'm always thrilled with the video quality, but amazon video usually has what I want to watch, and they make watching it low effort (They usually charge me a few dollars to watch it, but if I'm going to take two hours to watch something, a few dollars is the least of the cost.)

I mean, one could argue that I'd be better served by the netflix disk service, but I can't reliably predict what I'm going to want to watch ahead, and I don't have a convenient device for watching disks in the gym. (I know they exist, and I used to have one. But the kindle fire is a lot more convenient.)