thailandstartup

I worry about road traffic accidents and heart disease. You might like this book -

"The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things"

http://www.amazon.com/Culture-Fear-Americans-Afraid-Things/d...

$900 p/m. Easy to cut back to $500 a month for a smaller place, or $300 to lose the view too, or $200 to lose the location too. You wouldn't want to go any lower than that though.

Thailand has an education visa program - you need to be learning something for a minimum of 4 hours/week to qualify. Technically, it can be pretty much anything, but languages are popular. People do the visa run thing too - every sixty days I think.

Costa Rica sounds like a good destination - I may check that out one day.

About $35000 here in Thailand gives me a lifestyle that I think of as lavish and decadent, but I guess the OP would consider frugal and cautious. 120sqm condo beside the sea, eat out every night, tennis and language lessons. I could probably cut the budget down to around $20000 in a pinch and still live comfortably. The major downside is that there aren't many hackers about.

I read a story about how some government organization in the UK was giving them to drunk girls outside clubs to help them get home. Apparently, at the end of boozy night, it's a lot easier to get home in a pair of flip flops. Maybe that's a market.

Maybe incorporate offshore (Belize, Panama, Seychelles), and work from Costa Rica. Zero tax, and no sea-sickness issues. Might be a problem to get investment, or sell your startup though..

For bootstrapping, the main problem I found with taxation and incorporation is the bureaucratic overhead - it becomes the top idea in your mind for a time and distracts from building your product. So the trade off might be worth it.

I think that we do overpay for this liquidity. Both in terms of economic rents extracted, and the wasted resources poured into the competition. I wonder if there might be a way to keep most of the liquidity but at a fraction of the cost

I believe it is inherently more difficult - http://www.pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

Also the Fed can print money. Which is how the story inevitably ends.

It seems to me that the problem is created by economists winging it. I'd rather see a financial system designed and run by engineers.

No, I think this is a problem for the free market.

I keep hearing that there aren't enough scientists and engineers, but then I look at the pay for a graduate with a B.Sc., and it's a low starting salary - if there were really a shortage, the starting salary would be higher. Supply and demand. Paying students to become engineers would shift the supply curve, decrease quality and drive down starting salaries.

I found that moving to opt-in from double opt-in increased subscriptions by about 70%. I also find double opt-in an annoyance as a subscriber.

Yes, I've found that it is possible to change the 'top idea' in my mind, just by noticing that I am thinking of it, and choosing to not think, or think of something else in that moment. This seems to cause thinking about it to occur less frequently.

Ask a user for his e-mail address (newsletter subscription) while he is waiting for a download. This works well for me.

I wonder if creating a local wifi hotspot with a captive portal would be a good way to jump-start these hyper-local groups. So a user logging onto the local open wifi hotspot is re-directed to the local group, which might be Yahoo or Google group - or even a local noticeboard/forum that is accessible only from that hotspot.