mjnaus

Here is how to Be a Better Entrepreneur RIGHT NOW... don't read link bait fluff like this and get to WORK!

No, of course it does not. Revenue is NOT profit and I would say that Facebook's burn rate is quite high, so their profits might still be a hugh disappointment.

If you need something like this to guide you through life, you're a bit sad...

What's wrong with making your own decisions based on passed experience?

Have a go with merchantplus.com. They're in the process of getting me one (I am pretty sure it's with Chase Bank); I am in the same position as you (non-US citizen with a US company) and I have already been pre-approved.

We're likely to end up with a worse rate then US citizens would, but it's still better then no merchant account.

Southern Thailand (originally from The Netherlands)

And just as fast as the first populist post went up, up goes another one...

I am having somewhat of a hard time figuring out how this "stimulus plan" helps the economy, as it appears it's intended.

If a startup is able to reach profitability within three months, this startup surely wouldn't need Mark Cuban's money to move forward and create jobs at some point in the future. They would have a rather big chance at succeeding even without this extra cash.

Mark presents this initiative as doing something for the greater good and the economy, however investing in companies that need to be profitable within three months (assuming funding will stop if they don't reach profitability within that time frame) is not exactly a risky investment and looks more like an easy way into something new for Mark.

Like one of the commenters to the original article points out: why the heck does running such a simple animation takes up 92% of my CPU capacity on my MacBook?

The initiative is very nice indeed, but this needs a lot of work.

I guess many people around here would agree that ideas are a dime-a-dozen and often times change during execution. However, I completely understand that you're feeling bummed, I would be too...

And even though others are working on it, that doesn't mean you shouldn't! What is keeping you from going ahead as planned, even if it's without YC?

Seriously? Are we still on this?

Did you, by any change, invest any money in "semantically correct" web development? Take a chill pill...

Nope, doesn't sounds like the tone of the article to me. It seems he merely states it makes no sense to rigidly hang on to "being one of the cool guys" and spend hours, if not days, getting your layout done using only DIVs.

Since, in my opinion, the users of a website determine it's success; most of the things you mention seem irrelevant or otherwise disputable. Do you have any proof to back up your claims that DIV based pages are better indexed by search engines or increasingly cashed as compared to table based layouts?

And usability and accessibility, come on! How is a DIV based page more accessible (what do you mean by this anyway?) or more usable then a tabled layout from the users point of view?

Really? Care to name a few?

The US government has "outsourced" control of the money supply to a cartel of private banks who have, as far as I know, no restrictions on the amount of money that they're allowed to create.

Common consent doesn't have much to do with the real value of precious metals.

The reason why gold and silver are "valuable" and the dollar is not, lies in the fact that gold and silver can not be created "out of thin air". This was exactly the reason why, in better days, currency was backed by gold or silver, thus transferring the intrinsic value of precious metals onto the currency.

No, we don't. No matter how you look at this, gold is not "created". Cold is extracted from gold mines, the only thing humans can do it try to find, but they simply can not create it.

Key here is that the total amount of gold on this planet is finite - not the production or extraction rate - making it truly valuable. Same thing applies to other natural resources such as oil, natural gas and diamonds.

In my world, goods and services I purchase are the final goods, not the money I need to purchase them.

About "collecting en masse", I guess time will tell. You might be right, for those holding large amounts of dollars (China for example) a "run on the US government" would be a bad thing, they're better off unloading their less valuable currency gradually and exchanging them for something with intrinsic value such as gold and silver. And in the mean time, the dollar will keep on loosing it's value.

Next to buying small amounts of gold and silver, I have made a couple of lucrative forex transaction. Since I receive my income in euros in Europe and live in Thailand (baht rate is connected to the dollar), I have been able to increase my income quite a bit when the dollar hits new lows.

I never stated that the dollar would be completely worthless, I only stated that it's backed by absolutely nothing.

For all the same reasons, it does not matter that the US government accepts dollars. It matters what you will get back for those dollars. When, if ever, people will come to collect en masse, the US government will have no means what so ever to pay of those creditors, in other words, the government becomes insolvent and the dollar plunges.

It is actually its finite amounts that make it valuable. Anything that can be produced at will not hold up as a currency.

Yes, I have. I have placed certain bets against the dollar. There is not a single doubt in my mind that the dollar will keep loosing it's value - with some minor exceptions in the short term.

With all the billions of fresh created money (created out of thin air) being pumped into the US economy at the moment, the real devaluation of the dollar will pick up speed.

What you just said means absolutely nothing: "backed by the taxing power of the US government". First and far most, when everybody comes running to the US government to cash in on their dollars, there is no taxing power between heaven and earth powerful enough to satisfy all the creditors. And what do you imagine the government paying them with?

For regular folks your statement is even more airy; when they start to figure out that their precious greenback has nowhere to go but down; are they gonna call their local representatives and ask them to change the dollars into gold (oops, no can't do, no more gold standard!) or euros/yen/whatever?

Face it; the dollar is backed by NOTHING! And thank god most people don't realize this because we would be in a much deeper hole then we are now.

And what logic and evidence exactly are you referring to?

I think that largely depends on what product is being sold and what market you're in.

Cloud9 sells software to tour operators and other travel suppliers and, unfortunately, our potential customers are not very internet savvy, making it rather difficult for us to reach potential customers.

What exactly are you selling? Our company sells software the SaaS way and distribution has never been as easy!

>>Success or failure at anything is all about making the right tradeoffs. Advice should focus on helping you weigh those tradeoffs intelligently rather than dictating absolutes.

Very well said indeed!

Yep, unfortunately addressing key issues won't make any president popular with the ruling elite in the U.S. And since those are the ones providing most of the campaigning funds for presidential candidates, guess who Obama will be loyal to... If only Ron Paul would have made it...

Bla bla bla.... What I just heard is a whole lot of nothing. Building a "green economy", very nice and all but it's time leaders in the U.S. start addressing the bad underlying fundamentals (greed, the sick focus on bigger and better, a debt financed addiction to consumption, a monetary system and money supply controlled by a cartel of private banks, a failing currency, etc).

They probably picked up some 10+ million $ in VC money, were instantly covered by Techcrunch as the next big thing in URL production and will soon get bought by Yahoo.

Is there anything that sets you aside from the hundreds of other intern sites out there?