wuputah

Per the IRS:

> The federal government does not recognize an LLC as a classification for federal tax purposes. An LLC business entity must file as a corporation, partnership or sole proprietorship tax return.

As for your suggestion that all pass-through income is W-2 income - that would never work. It implies that all business "profits" were paid to its shareholders (that's what payroll / W-2 income is). A cash distribution to its owner is not the only thing a company chooses to do with its profits!

I disagree unless the payment you are making to yourself as distributions is fair compensation for services provided to the company. A company's purpose is to make a profit, and if you are distributing profit to yourself, then there is no reason to pay FICA on that income. The "fair market salary" is important because if you are forced to pay yourself arbitrarily more (like you suggested), it would be in the best interest of the person to instead hire someone to do his job for him (at fair market salary) and simply collect the profits. (In fact, this could be the long term goal: hire someone to manage the business and retire on the profits!)

If you'd like to know why it's "fair" for people to be allowed to pay income tax and not FICA tax on profit, then you need to look at the C corporation code. Under this system, the corporation pays a corporate income tax, and then can pay profits to its shareholders as dividends, which are then also subject to a second tax. You'll note that there is no payroll tax in this system. The purpose of an S-corporation is to avoid this "double taxation" for very small companies and instead use the personal income tax code, which may be (but is not necessarily) cheaper for the shareholder. This is not a loophole: it is by design.

It is also worth noting that just because the taxes are paid through the personal income tax code, that doesn't mean that person received that profit as a cash distribution. That money may very well be put to a different purpose, e.g. investing in the business in some way which is not yet tax deductible (like a large capital purchase), in the bank as float, or invested in some way.

In the case mentioned in the article, I certainly agree the owner was not paying himself enough by W-2 for his services, particularly if he was the sole employee and otherwise received that income as a cash distribution. He is obviously an experienced CPA who would be paid much more on the open market, and as a CPA, he should have known better.

While we're here talking about physics: another big reason why buses are safe are because of their high mass. I was in one accident while on a school bus - another car hit the bus head-on while the bus was stopped. The kinetic energy of the 1 ton car travelling at say 30 mph - 1/2 * m * v^2 - was absorbed by the bus. I won't step through the math, but because of the high mass of the bus, the resulting velocity of the bus+car was quite low (it also helped that the change in velocity was mitigated by brakes/tires/friction, as the driver was ready for the impact).

In any case, as a passenger on the bus, the result of the impact was quite minimal - there were no injuries on the bus, and the bus actually drove off afterwards (with no passengers and a bit of sheet metal scraping the pavement).

Granted, it's a different story if the bus hits a tree or is hit by a tractor trailer doing 70 mph.

Another reason why buses are safe? The bus is operated by a trained professional, most of which have years of experience driving the bus for hours every day.

The 'made out of meat' is definitely a reference to a short story ( http://www.terrybisson.com/page6/page6.html ) which was also made into a short film ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaFZTAOb7IE ). Great stuff.

(Of course, SPAM® is also a meat product. Supposedly.)

I hate to support Microsoft on this one - I was actually checking the rules to see if they forbid you from dual-licensing it - but you pulled this out of context. The license only allows them to use your code to evaluate who won the contest, and use it in promotional materials. Now, the latter part is a bit murky, it seems they have a license to publish a screenshot of your solution. But nevertheless, they are not claiming ownership of your work.

The full text is below:

Other than what is set forth below, we are not claiming any ownership rights to your entry. However, by submitting your entry, you are granting us an irrevocable, royalty-free, worldwide right and license to: (i) use, review, assess, test and otherwise analyze your entry and all its content in connection with this Contest; and (ii) feature your entry and all content in connection with the marketing, sale, or promotion of this Contest (including but not limited to internal and external sales meetings, conference presentations, tradeshows, and screen shots of the Contest entry in press releases) in all media (now known or later developed)

http://web-ngram.research.microsoft.com/spellerchallenge/Doc...

Expecting to be paid what you bring in - or even remotely close (like enough to cover overhead) - is a frequent misconception of how capitalism works. Good companies have revenue of $1M/year per employee. Great companies have _profits_ of $1M/year per employee. Do you think you contributed $1M to your company's bottom line last year?

Remember that the goal of all for-profit companies is to generate profit, and that profit is either returned to its shareholders (known as dividends) or re-invested in the company with the hopes of raising the value of the company (and hence the share price). You can get a piece of that pie by taking your hard-earned money and investing in the company you work for. Some companies even let you do this at a reduced price (stock options) or, if you're lucky, include a stock award as part of your compensation. If you're not a shareholder, you shouldn't expect to see any part of the profit: you haven't taken on the risk of investing in the company. (Yes, some companies do have profit sharing as part of their compensation, but that's typically a different way of saying "you get a bonus if we can afford it.")

Granted, many of these concepts are non-existant when you're working for a start-up (where generating revenue, let alone profit, is stalled for months or even years), but the end goal is the same.

The gold standard of availability is generally "four nines" - 99.99%. To me:

99.5% (or less) = unacceptable 99.9% = average 99.99% = exceptional

0.5% downtime = 216 mins/month (almost an hour a week!) 0.1% downtime = 43.2 mins/month 0.01% = 4.32 mins/month

Getting to that last level is certainly very hard, I hope Heroku will get there, but the service is relatively new, fairly cutting edge, under active development, etc. I would not entirely expect them to reach "four nines", but I hope it is their goal.

I do like the idea, but a cursory look at their 'receipt' and where the numbers come from showed a pretty large flaw: half of social security and medicare is paid for by employers. Unless you consider your salary to be an extra 8.65% than it really is, you're not accounting for all the taxes the government receives based on your paycheck. Although this is really a "hidden tax" on your paycheck, most people don't think of it as part of their salary (which is why they do it this way).

There's also other types of taxes paid by non-individuals, like corporate taxes, estate taxes, and the like.

In any case, it means the numbers in their receipt for SS and Medicare are off by a factor of 2, so you should evaluate this only based on the idea, not on their actual numbers. (Not to mention there are likely an abundance of other problems with this method, like spending that is not part of the budget, or when the government is over-budget and issues bonds to pay for it.)

Great example. I delivered newspapers for a summer, and I realized that the cost of the newspaper was about the same as what I made for delivering it, as I got paid per subscriber. This doesn't factor in the fact that I was working for a third party company, whose goal was to made a profit on the operation.

So, it seemed the paper actually pays more just to get the paper delivered than the subscriber paid for it. Advertising pays for everything else.

(I'm curious how newsstands and other outlets work, but I'd have to guess that the papers/magazines are provided at very low cost as well, with most of the price on the sale going to the stand operator.)

First: completely, totally awesome. Stubhub was the only interface that came close to this, and this is way more powerful than that.

One suggestion: I wanted to check out the 'price forecast' feature, but had to create a site-specific account, where I immediately stopped. Is Twitter OAuth/FBConnect or OpenID on the horizon? It really lowers the barrier to getting an account created.

The 99% figure is obviously a generalization, but it's well known that most startups fail. Amongst the ones that don't, only a few are bought out by someone like Google, or go on to succeed in bigger ways. Additionally, only those with substantial stock positions in the company make out well on these pay days - the rest of the people who worked for the startup are making a salary.

In short, most people are making a salary, and of those that try to found their own company, most will end up failing and making less than they would have if they took a salaried gig. That is the risk of founding a company.

That was fixed some time ago. It is very marginally slower to use Symbol#to_proc now (a constant time difference to actually create the Proc), but not enough to warrant a change in practical use.

Background workers only cost you money (5¢/hour) when they're running. It's prorated to the second. You can avoid running one constantly by using pedro's "autoscaling" branch, meaning you can run a few hours of background processing--which should equate to hundreds or thousands of jobs--every month for a few nickels.

http://github.com/pedro/delayed_job/tree/autoscaling

Pedro is a Heroku employee, so this use is totally fine by them, although the branch is not officially supported software.

[I'm friends with a few guys there, but I don't work there.]

They don't. They both cost 5¢/hr per process. The only difference is, you get 1 'foreground' worker for free (per application), but not any 'background' workers.

In my opinion, Bundler deprecates the need--or at least the need in most cases--to use gemsets. They are still a great feature to give you great control over exactly which gems are installed for testing purposes, but once you switch your applications to using Bundler, there's rarely a need to keep each project in its own gemset.

What Bundler does is establish a container for all gems (and ONLY those gems) that your application needs to run. This is much like an automatic, application-specific gemset.

It also solves the difficult problem of resolving your applications dependencies, locking your gems to a particular set of dependencies to assure consistency across environments and deployments. This is a very critical feature and really showed its ugly head when Rails 2.3.8 was released. Users suddenly found their projects breaking because one gem would load the latest version of activesupport installed on their system (e.g. activesupport-2.3.8) while Rails would require exactly version 2.3.5. Bundler solves this problem by determining that 2.3.5 is the correct dependency and locks the application to only load that version.

It is exactly because of this feature that gemsets are now rarely needed. A large repository of gems will no longer cause you pain and hassle, as Bundler will pick and choose (or install) whichever gems you need to run the project. No more manual management of gemsets. Hooray!

Presumably, yes. Although there are formulae to convert water use to an amount of energy consumption (which takes into account processing, pumps, etc), they are probably referring to the energy to heat water. 1 watt for 1 year is (1W * 24h * (365d/year)) * (1Wh/1000kWh) = 8.76 kWh, or ( * 3412 BTU/kWh) about 30k BTU. The average bath is about 50 gallons, or ( * 8.35 lb/gallon) 417.5 lb. 30k BTU is enough energy to raise that much water by about 70°F (30k BTU / 417.5 lb). By that measurement, the Guardian takes baths 46.6°F hotter than their tap water. If that is too cool for you, you can take a smaller bath.

It's worth noting that the conversions here assume you can transfer the kWh with perfect efficiency to heating water, while in actuality, all heating systems will be somewhat inefficient. It will actually take more energy to heat the water, regardless of the energy source used by the water heater.

Edit: whoops, I originally misread and used 1.5 years and 1.5 baths. Calculations changed.

While the article makes a point that I'm inclined to agree with after two years of running my own business, I stopped reading when they mentioned that World of Warcraft is a game of "swords and hobgoblins." World of Warcraft does not have hobgoblins. Ok, well actually, they're being added in Cataclysm, but I doubt the author knew that.

Then again, maybe my downfall was too much World of Warcraft.

Gotcha, that works, and was mentioned in passing. Mongo still makes me nervous, but otherwise looks very promising.

Actually, from Rails, to ASP.NET MVC, to ASP.NET MVC again ("because it was getting too complicated"), then to Rails.

I'd also be very hesitant to use MongoDB as a main datastore as it has no durability model - the 'D' in ACID. I hope they've at least changed the setting, or don't mind losing their last 60 seconds of writes when their EC2 instance goes down.

http://www.mongodb.org/display/DOCS/Durability+and+Repair#Du...

Note that Mongo compares itself to MyISAM, but that is infrequently used now because of its lack of durability amongst other things - no transaction support, etc (most apps use InnoDB).

Where is the downrate button? Sigh.