/iknowpeople: Too much text on the front page. I recommend hitting the user with your tag line and a few bullet points and then explaining more on a different page.
Thanks for your comment. I agree with you (and roundsquare) that the first point has problems. To give you some idea of what I was getting at:
The way I, and I suspect most gamers, play adventure games is to:
a.) Run through the room graph as far as possible, do everything obvious, and take everything that isn't nailed down
b.) Look at the list of "roadblocks" encountered, and figure out how to get past them
c.) On passing a "roadblock", go to (a.)
To my way of thinking, anything you can grab without solving a puzzle is as good as in your inventory, even if it's in a different part of the room graph.
The post was inspired by Saturday's playthrough of "Leather Goddesses of Phobos" - one of the few Infocom games I hadn't spoiled for myself in my youth, due to Activision's decision to omit it from the "Lost Treasures" collections. Anyway, at one point I was faced with this set of puzzles:
1.) How to get past Thorbast in space
2.) How to get past the ion beam
3.) How to get into the orphanage
4.) How to turn the enchanted frog into a princess
5.) How to capture the mouse
6.) How to get the headlight in Cleveland
I was stuck - it seemed that I needed something "extra" to solve any one of these puzzles. In fact 20-YEAR-OLD-SPOILER-ALERT every puzzle on that list can be solved as soon as you encounter it (assuming that you've previously grabbed everything that was lying around in plain sight) with the very possible and partial exception of (4.).
(BTW, how could that list of puzzles not make anyone want to play that game?)
Sort of. It would be at least as accurate to say that the UAW wants the US gov't to hand over $25B (or $50B, or $75B) to the big 3 s.t. all 4 entities (Ford, GM, Chrysler, UAW) can carry on with business more-or-less as usual, and stay out of bankruptcy court. Chapter 11 would likely mean bad things for the UAW.
It seems (and, of course, w/o seeing the books, it's awful hard to tell) that the big 3 just can't make money - despite making some pretty nice cars - due to labor costs that are perhaps 150% of market, and a bloated dealer infrastructure that can't be trimmed due to franchising laws. Plus, a lot of b------t mandates (CAFE, etc.) to make products people don't really want.
The Detroit bailout isn't about saving the jobs of the executive teams (who can always get other jobs, and hell, who tend to be highly incentivised to stick around through Chapter 11) or saving the US manufacturing base (it's not like all those factories will go poof overnight, or all those cars will stop being built and sold) or avoiding shocks to the economy, or preserving shareholder value (which has already been largely wiped out). It's about propping up an uncompetitive cost structure in order to serve special interests, with a side-order of do-gooder power-tripping meddling.
And none of it has a g-----n thing to do with how the big 3 CEOs travel around the country.
Sorry about the rant. But the idea that the unions are gonna get all huffy about the private jet angle, or indeed that this is some sort of "suits-vs.-line-employees" drama strikes me as wrong-headed; if the bailout doesn't happen, no one is going to be more unhappy than the UAW.
It would also have been in better style. Either use expletives, and spell them out, if you think that best gets your point across; or don't use expletives at all.
I recently looked at the bandwidth costs of S3 vs. traditional hosting, and found them less than compelling; in particular, they seemed much higher than those of shared hosting providers. EC2 has the same bandwidth pricing structure as S3, so I bet you can do better, especially since 500 isn't that large of a number.
Could you elaborate on this a little bit? The passive/active divide is a little fuzzy to me, especially since you apparently include "subscription fees from web apps" in the "passive" category. It seems to me that such fees will either be taxed as ordinary income (if they're coming into a pass-through entity such as an S-corp or some LLCs) or 'double-taxed', first at a corporate rate, and then at a 2nd personal rate when you transfer them from the company to yourself. (The combined effective tax rate generally seems higher than the pass-through rate.)
I can see the lower effective rate being justified a couple of ways: considering the effects of FICA/Medicare taxes, restricting consideration to cap gains (e.g. appreciation in publicly-traded stocks) or tax-free securities, etc. But I'd be interested in where you draw the line between "earned" and "passive" income, and how you conclude that "passive" is taxed at a "much" lower rate.
Another investment vehicle is owning a share in a LP/LLLP -- limited liability limited partnership. They're usually formed to own real estate or a chunk of infrastructure, such as a cell phone tower, or an offshore oil rig. As a limited power, you have no say in the active management of the company ... but you're also protected from liability. A general partner, usually a corporation, manages the asset and sends you money every so often. You get a K-1 and you report the income alongside with your LLCs and other passive income. And if the asset generates a loss, you apply the loss to your other passive income http://www.wwwebtax.com/deductions_z_other/passive_activity_...
As far as I know, venture funds are often structured this way, but don't quote me on that. I didn't really investigate it to thoroughly.
"Passive income" for me is defined in terms of how much time I have to spend for the income. If I have to spend a lot of time, that's active income.
My statement, "it is taxed much higher than passive income" is a broad generalization, something I shouldn't have written. I put in the internet subscription fee in there because I don't have to trade time for it, and I assumed it would flow through a sensible business entity. If so, legitimate business expenses are deducted before they hit the personal tax returns.
Going to a job and taking a salary on a W-2, the costs for earning the salary includes a car (usually car payments), automobile insurance, car maintenaince, fuel, toll fees (if applicable), parking fees (if applicable), lunches, daycare (sometimes), business-appropriate attire, grooming supplies, etc. Few employers will reimburse an employee for those expenses, so all of that it is coming out of pocket, money after earned income taxes.
In contrast, the costs for obtaining the internet subscription fees includes server hosting, development equipment, office supplies, books, sometimes travel/commute ... and just to make sure this isn't merely a rosy picture -- accounting fees, legal fees, state fees, state taxes, county taxes, health care, amortized office furniture, office leases ... you get the idea. A number of these expenses can be paid straight out of the income generated from internet subscription fees. You're taxed on what's left over, meaning that your personal income from the business is lower, you're taxed on a lower tax-bracket than you otherwise would have, even though you can do a lot more with the money. As a disclaimer, I'm not describing or encouraging a "tax shelter"; it isn't sensible to sacrifice profits just to be able to cut the amount of taxes you have to pay.
You're right about the corporate double-tax. If you're not actively involved in the corporation, then a dividend is not bad considering the time spend in it, even if it is double-taxed. I'm sure you're also aware that if the corporation compensates you through a W-2, say as a director or as a consultant, then there isn't a double-tax. You just have to spend more time.
So to conclude this, I shouldn't have said that earned income is taxed much higher than passive income. Instead, I should've said that bigger chunks of your earned income gets taken away than from your passive income. But my guess is that you already know this. The important thing about passive income is the time you free up, not the taxes you may or may not save.
"The routines in your code should be treated like tiny, highly polished diamonds, each one more exquisitely polished and finely cut than the next."
This makes no sense. Each routine can't be more exquisitely polished than the others. And if you try to make it make sense by interpreting 'next' strictly, to mean 'next in sequence', then it means your functions should get worse as development proceeds. Even if you replace 'next' with 'last', to try to turn it into a semi-coherent statement ("Each routine you write should be the best routine you've ever written") it's still bad advice: You should spend your time on the important questions, and not every function is equally important.
In my view, if you're going to do a business on your own, you have to be focused. Between the other parts of life that need some attention, the care-and-feeding of the business, sales, marketing, and promotion, there isn't that much time left for actual development. So, you need to pare down your problem space/feature set to the absolute minimum that provides real value to people. This sounds like what you're doing with your "consulting only, no development" approach to most clients.
In my case, the project I just finished prototyping (yes, this is a plug/request for feedback, although the product is of extremely limited interest to this community) solves a narrow problem in the electricity industry: Energy meter data is passed around in an obscure binary file format (MDEF) that few people can understand, read, or troubleshoot when they receive a broken file from a 3rd party. There's a need for a tool to wrangle this format, and I believe I can do one that's better and cheaper than anything out there, with a modest effort.
As for why I'm a solopreneur: I didn't know any good co-founder candidates, and didn't have a compelling sales pitch. ("Hey - let's quit our jobs, and poke around for a product that we can try to build into a successful business" is a little too honest!) I also didn't want any more of my life to drain away writing vbScript (long, long, long story) and, as the great Peter Gibbons put it: "I don't think I'd like another job".
I'm not philosophically opposed to growing the company, but it will have to be from a "given this problem, I need more people" angle, rather than a "let's enlarge the team, and hope something good happens" view.
"So, you need to pare down your problem space/feature set to the absolute minimum that provides real value to people."
This is very useful advice, it's a good rule to have in mind. I'm actually doing development, but I don't do active promotion of that as I can only do one project at a time, and projects tend to go for months. But as I keep developing on projects, I keep very focused on them and only a little consultancy work and some basic business meetings, sales, etc keep me out of full focus on dev. But I don't think I'm in the minimum yet, so I'll really think in what you said.
I also agree with you in prefering the "given this problem, I need more people" angle, for growing the company.
Thanks a lot for your useful and very interesting! advice, and good luck with your new project!
2.) No. (I usually apply, though.)
3.) No. (Doesn't seem like a good use of time to try.)
4.) http://www.fairoakslabs.com/iknowpeople/ or http://itunes.apple.com/app/iknowpeople/id349918351?mt=8