...so here's one from a guy who owns a startup and will shortly be offering equity to one or two senior-level people I'm going to need next year!
You aren't a greedy bastard for being interested in equity. If you're a normal person, you have a decent but incomplete idea about how startups...well, start, and who gets equity and why. And why shouldn't you? I wouldn't know half of this stuff if I didn't run a startup. You see the place doing really well and you want a piece of the action because you've been a significant part of that. This is a normal human impulse.
But several other posters are correct when they say that the time to ask for this stuff was up front. Companies (like mine) offer equity because they can't afford salaries and benefits early on and are promising you a piece of the pie if and when the company takes off. We use contractors as well, but they're remote and for specific projects -- if you show up to an office every day and don't have specific projects, then yeah, your company might get in trouble with the IRS, as others have suggested. But that's not going to help you (rather, your boss may need to convert all of you to employees ASAP, which may cost him a bundle depending on what state you're in).
There aren't many rules for small companies about how much equity you can get and when. If you really are indispensable, then your bargaining position is this: you can come to another company (like mine) and get hired on account of your experience being a startup ninja IT guy, quite possibly with equity. The likelihood of this happening is probably the only thing that might cause your boss to give you equity in your current job, because you are essentially asking for the reward even though you didn't risk as much as an equity partner did. Here I disagree with those posters who say 'your job was at risk just like theirs,' and yes, that's true, but that's not the point -- an equity partner is risking more than just losing their job; they either started the business or accepted below-market compensation to work there, meaning they gambled lost income from a 'real' job in exchange for equity. You, on the other hand, were paid at market or above market (contractor) rates, so while you don't have employee benefits and probably didn't make more than you otherwise might have made at a salaried job, you didn't make less.
You might try to split the difference and ask for a very small amount of equity. Just explain to your boss that you really like your job, you're committed to the company, and you feel that you've earned a little stock. If you really are as vital as you say, then they'll at least entertain the idea -- I would -- but that's your gamble.
You're exactly right, but the point of the comparison was not that aviation is totally unaffordable today (it isn't - I'm hardly wealthy and I could afford my private cert, though more than that would hurt the bank...) but that it's a lot less affordable than it was, and that there are fewer people in it -- so it's important to the industry and to aviation technology that somebody out there is still making money.
"I'm rich, so I can buy my morality. See, when you have enough money, you don't need to reduce usage. You just pay others to clean up for you."
You are suggesting that it is immoral to burn fuel. Or, rather, to burn fuel for a purpose that you (or somebody?) doesn't approve of, or doesn't deem important enough.
It isn't. You're free to disapprove of it, and you're free to tell yourself that Google's founders are going to murder the planet because they flew to Tahiti, but that's got nothing to do with morality.
Okay, maybe not a screeching halt, but it'd get the wind knocked out of it (again). In the 60s, you could buy plane for a little more than a car cost; now a new 2-seat trainer will set you back at least $110k. Dozens of aviation companies sprung up from the 40s to the 60s, and even in 1980 we still had over 800,000 pilots in the US; today that number is under 600,000.
I spoke to a guy a few weeks ago who learned to fly in the late 70s and rented most of the planes he flew for $30-ish an hour. I just finished my private pilot cert and the cheapest plane around here (Lehigh Valley, PA) is about $86/hr, +$30 with the instructor. Aviation gas is about $6/gallon.
Small airports and flight schools don't make a lot of money teaching guys like me on two- or four-seat trainers, just like airplane companies don't make a lot of money selling them (Cessna even stopped production for a decade or so in the 80s). One of the few remaining markets with any margins left is business jets. I get that journalists can stir up populist outrage by talking about jaunts to Tahiti, but what would you rather rich people do with their money? Keep it? Spoil their kids with it? They're keeping pilots and airport attendants in their jobs, and if you're upset about the amount of fuel burned for such a frivolous adventure, well, the only way we're going to get better fuels and more efficient engines is if the people making them have money to invest in those things.
Sorry, this is BS. I am a one-person company that has been around for several years (growing soon to a more-than-one-person company) and we are MS partners and use their SPLA (Software Provider Licensing Agreement) to get our clients access to things like SQL on the cheap. We use the Web edition of Win Server 2008 on our two servers and our annual expenses for MS products with maybe ten clients needing SQL licenses are maybe $700, which we collect back in the form of hosting fees.
We started out with MS just because SQL Server did a few things that we needed that MySQL didn't do back in '03/'04, and that's no longer the case -- so I'm not saying this to knock OSS. But MS software does not require 'shitloads of cash,' at least, not for a web shop.
IAAP but IANAAE (I Am a Pilot but I Am Not an Aeronautical Engineer)
Other than a 'hey, that's cool' factor, I don't get what the big deal here is. There's not a lot of information in the article or the video, but the suggestion is that this is some kind of breakthrough in powered flight.
A little bit of background: Even a small, single-engine airplane will burn 6-8 gallons of aviation gas per hour, and AVGAS is about $6/gallon (in the US - probably even more in Europe), and this is one of several reasons why aviation is increasingly inaccessible -- in the US alone, we had about 800,000 pilots in 1980, but today we have under 600,000. You won't rent even a two-seater for much less than $90/hr, which turns into $120-130 if you have a flight instructor there too.
So there is a lot of attention on alternative power sources for airplanes, but the big problem is weight. Most single engine airplanes already have weight issues -- a lot of your 4-seater aircraft like the Cessna 172 may have spots for 4 people, but (particularly with Americans these days...) you're unlikely to get 4 adults in there without going over max takeoff weight, even if you dump out half your fuel.
So in the practical category of 'planes with people in them,' this isn't really relevant -- the thing is a sailplane with a solar-powered assist and has probably had every ounce of material removed that can be removed. It's still pretty cool, since there are definitely uses for long-endurance UAV aircraft out there - but even small airplanes aren't going to be using solar (not enough juice) or batteries (too heavy) anytime soon. There are some concept electric designs out there, but the ones I've read about are either too slow or can't stay up for very long. The HB-SIA can only operate under very calm wind conditions (50 km/h won't go anywhere at altitude with a head wind) and with a lot of extra separation done by ATC as the article says.
The market does adjust to supply and demand by lowering prices. Prices came down when music went digital and they go down even further after an album has been out for a while -- just like the scenario you're describing. But this is market supply and demand, not piracy; one of the big questions about piracy is how many of these people would have otherwise bought the music legally if they couldn't pirate it (answer for most people I knew in school: not one of us, but that's not always going to hold up). Even so, the suggestion that the market should reduce prices because of piracy isn't logical or sensible -- if anything, it would raise prices, since the people who make and produce music now have to spend a lot of time and money chasing down pirates (or at least, they feel they have to).
'Sole ownership' is not granted by the public; it is granted to the creator of the piece. The issue of whether copyrights should be extended has really got very little to do with music piracy -- sure, there are people who pirate really old songs and movies and so on, but that's not where the action is. I'm not sure you understand planned economies versus capitalism. Freeways and fire departments are not socialism; they're government services and they're found in just about every type of government from the Roman Empire on. In the most basic sense, 'socialist' simply means a government that prioritizes the concept of social good over individual liberty; that's not to say that capitalism doesn't value social good, it simply finds that most socialist systems are so inefficient as to not be the best means of achieving any social good.
What you're really talking about is simply property rights -- specifically, intellectual property rights. These are all over the map in socialist countries, as basic socialism doesn't necessarily make any assumptions about property rights, even if collectivist or communist governments aren't going to respect them. There is no segment of 'the market' that says media should be free; the market is apolitical (outside of property rights and contract enforcement) and says that media should cost what people are willing to pay for it. I don't think that makes the whole world fucked. I think I'd rather live today than under any of the other government schemes mankind has devised, whether you put me in modern day Europe or in the US.
After production costs are recouped is when they make the profit, which is why most people get out of bed in the morning. If the only interest is to recoup production costs, the quality of the entire market will go down the toilet, because there is no reward for doing an excellent job - if you pay for the endeavor, you're done, right?
The point of selling music, of selling anything, is to sell a whole heck of a lot of it. The notion that it's somehow wrong or evil to continue selling it after you've recouped production costs is... well, communist, really.
with a nearly infinite supply, the value of the product reaches near zero.
You flunk Economics 101. The value of the product is what the market will pay for it. You're talking about the cost to produce it, specifically the marginal cost to sell one extra album. That is indeed near zero, but that doesn't make the production cost zero - only the marginal cost, and that's got only a very small amount to do with the retail price.
1. copyright is way too long and currently goes against its original intents of going to the public domain in a timely fashion. 5-20 years is more than sufficient. it was never meant to create dynasties or let someone milk one work for their entire life.
They don't believe that this is true. Why would they argue in favor of this? It's not in their interests to do so. Do unions come forward and say 'wow, our pensions just cost way too much. We'll voluntarily give them up.' Does management come forward and say 'you know what, we should give people more paid vacation.'
What group of human beings behaves like this? Maybe conscientious individuals, but never groups of individuals, whether you're talking corporations or governments.
And they're the ones indiscriminately attacking people without sufficient proof of their guilt.
Which is why they've lost most of their cases and flushed a lot of money down the toilet in the process.
But offers for cash settlements are nothing short of blackmail and extortion.
No, they're offers for cash settlements. It's very nice to think about the poor little old lady who has no idea what an mp3 is getting one of these and feeling bad for her, and yeah, in those cases, send 'em packing. But it's not 'doing business with the mob,' because the mob came by whether or not you'd done anything wrong for a protection racket. These guys are coming by because they have evidence that you have done something wrong. Maybe it's not correct, but what is their alternative? Everybody on Slashdot knows how widespread music piracy is, but then we're all shocked, SHOCKED that anybody is trying to do something about it. It's their job to protect their copyrights and their IP. I think they go too far sometimes, and that they don't really understand the market -- which is why I think the RIAA will eventually fall apart, because the day will come when we won't need big labels. But until that day, and for so long as bands are falling all over each other to get signed with a label, the labels are going to try and keep people from doing this stuff.
And you know what? Seems to me that it's working. The freewheeling days of downloading music are long gone. You can still do it but the risk is a lot higher. Everybody I know has been buying stuff off iTunes for years now.
I don't dispute that there are scumbags in the organization and that they've used some scumbag tactics. I just don't think it's because they're evil masterminds. I think it's because they're clumsy and they don't know better, and that's why our grandkids won't know what the RIAA is.
I absolutely agree that copyright should be limited far more than it is now. But that's a problem with our political system (one of many) - declaring that you don't agree with the law is well and good but it doesn't justify taking music you haven't paid for. Because you're exactly right - that would make us no better than them.
Any profit-making organization is going to do what it can to legally extend its profits as long as possible. It's rare to find one that will willingly sacrifice them to be 'good' (as Google tries to be) - as a company owner myself I think about this more than most people, but my business is small enough that it's not a decision I face anytime soon.
Our elected officials seem to have no problem seizing property or regulating all kinds of commerce in the name of the public good. Wonder why they don't cut down copyright as well? Oh yeah...doesn't win you any votes.
Why should it be my mission on Earth to try and make the RIAA die?
I like small artists and I buy directly from the ones I know, but sometimes I open my wallet for mainstream artists. Do you seriously imagine that even a statistically significant number of people care about the RIAA, much less will actually alter their behavior to try and destroy them?
I'm no fan of the RIAA suing little old ladies and twelve-year-olds, but all the profess musicians I know are not OK with people getting their music for free and are quite comfortable having the RIAA or anyone else go after the people who are downloading it without paying for it. What they care about, and what I'm happy to oblige them on, is cutting out the increasingly unnecessary middlemen and providing a direct line of purchase to the artist.
When I was in college and downloading music was new, I (and everybody I knew) did it. Then we grew up and got jobs (well, most of us got jobs) and realized that it was, in fact, getting something for nothing, and that no matter how many window/front door/car analogies you make, that is usually ripping somebody else off, even if you don't call it 'stealing.'
The fruits of other people's labors has a price - whether or not you feel like paying it. But to answer your inane question, yes, just about everybody buys music these days.
Relatively speaking, it isn't hard to build public infrastructure. It's hard to maintain it.
California did a great job building a lot of that stuff when they were flush with cash. Now they're in the unglamorous 'keep the wheels turning' phase and people are fleeing the state in droves. My inlaws are leaving (also for Texas); I'm doing the same thing but on the East coast, leaving New York... also for Texas. My business, and my inlaws' businesses, are coming with us. I don't expect our anecdotal evidence to persuade anyone, but the census ought to. Here's just one example (pardon the terrible wallpaper):
The UC system is a great example. It was the pride of the state, and rightfully so. Then it got about a billion in the hole, which is not really a whole heck of a lot, except that they have a good hundred billion in unfunded pension obligations and pay their public sector employees more than just about anywhere else. That's fine, too, but it's a zero-sum game. If you want to add enormous hurdles to firing public employees ($50k-$100k+ to fire a teacher in LA - http://lifeexaminations.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/tenure-problem/) -- for one employee! -- then that's going to have consequences elsewhere.
Texas has its share of problems, like a 2-year $27 billion defecit (which is about half of California's, since it's over two years, but still bad). But it's very difficult to fix California's problems, because the things that the state is spending money on are small things (like job protection) that effect huge numbers of people -- you can't even talk about them without being called a union-busting tyrant; look at LA's mayor, a former union boss himself, in hot water over the same issue.
It's a great irony that California is home to so many people who talk about sustainability in design and economics but who purposefully keep their eyes shut to the costs of their decisions and their priorities, because I think they're not necessarily wrong in several areas. But to ask 'do you think California misses you' is not only arrogant, it's ignorant: California is hemorrhaging people. There are still a lot of people there, and a lot of good ideas, to be sure -- but to look at what is happening in California and conclude that it's anything other than that it is very much in decline is pretty tough.
Texas definitely has a problem, but arguably it's not quite as much of a fundamental structural issue as CA and NY. I was in NY from 1998-2010 and they definitely have one of the most top-heavy, ungainly governments around.
Texas passes a budget every two years, so I assume that their $27 billion shortfall is therefore over a two-year period, whereas California's $26 billion deficit is one year. Even were that not the case, the real problem in California's case (and NY's) is unfunded pension liabilities. Texas is a Right to Work state and isn't on the hook to the same extent for public pensions. That's the big elephant in the room for a lot of states (Illinois is up there with CA and NY) -- they've got serious problems now, but they're going to get a heck of a lot worse.
In other words, I'd much rather have to fix Texas' problems than California's or New York's.
That still doesn't solve the employee side. What about the waitress who takes minimum wage to work in the ultra-rich bar & restaurant where everybody can afford to smoke? The fact that they're rich doesn't give them the right to damage somebody else's lungs.
That's not a solution; that's just another revenue stream. Taxing something may well decrease its use, but you're talking about 'how do we get people to smoke less.' I actually don't care if people smoke less. I just don't want them smoking in public around me.
I remember when the incident you're talking about with Texas came up. Wasn't it the case that Texas basically invited them to come to TX in the first place with the promise of no sales tax, and then turned around a couple of years later and reversed course?
Even if not, the problem is the fundamental structure of Sales tax - not Amazon's unwillingness to pay it. No company that does business online wants to collect sales tax, and I'll tell you why, as a small business, I am interested in Amazon's case: because if Amazon has to collect tax for not just all 50 states but every county in every state where sales tax is variable (and sometimes even on the local level), you've just driven up the cost of business to the point where it is no longer feasible to start an online business in your garage/bedroom/basement because you need very sophisticated software to handle the collection side and an accounting team to handle the payment side: small business owners like me already have to learn a lot about accounting (which is fine, and even perversely fun sometimes) but if we had to file returns with every state with which we did business? omgwtfbbq.
If you left it up to me, I'd replace sales tax entirely with a Federal sales tax that had a state reimbursement system. I don't mind collecting tax and passing it on to the government for you. I mind having to spend twice my annual gross income calculating and then delivering that tax to every state in the union.
It is always important to remember that the #1 health risk to the obese is not heart problems or diabetes, it is misdiagnosis
What? Are you kidding? Where is your source for this as your '#1 health risk'?
I see your point, which is that, since an obese person has such a high risk of both heart problems and Type 2 diabetes, it's probably very easy for a doctor to rule out less likely issues that nonetheless may very well exist. But that is a far cry from the '#1 health risk is misdiagnosis.'
You are completely under-representing the very serious health risks to obesity and equivocating the entire issue -- 'you can decide, if you wish'? It isn't a decision. Human beings don't get to decide for themselves whether something is a risk; they merely decide whether the risk is acceptable, given the reward.
Health insurance policies in some states (the ones that are allowed to ask you questions like this) do charge higher premiums if you ride a motorcycle. No need to tax it - the people paying your bills already account for it, when the government allows them to.
They can't charge you higher premiums for being obese, at least not directly -- they have to wait until you actually start making claims. They can charge you higher premiums for smoking, I guess because it's much easier to villify smokers than obese people. It's how decisions are made when they're made by politicians -- 'who can we go after without repurcussions?'
Same reason you have astronomically high hotel and rental car taxes (in San Francisco last month, renting a car for less than 24 hours from SFO - car rental was $50; taxes and fees were $70). The state gets away with it because the people who pay those taxes aren't their constituents - you can tax tourists all you like. Doesn't mean it's a good idea or doesn't have repercussions -- it just means that the politicians won't have to face them.
I'm a free-market conservative but make an exception for things like this precisely because I think it's a very clear and easily-defined exception that isn't the start of a slippery slope.
A public place of business ought to be free to do largely whatever it likes so long as that freedom doesn't directly harm others. 'But you're free not to show up,' you rightly point out, and yes, that's true, but completely impractical. Figuring out where you draw that line -- at what point does your individual behavior affect other people so much so that the state needs to step in? -- is a very difficult question.
But secondhand smoke isn't an annoyance or an inconvenience. It's a direct harm to the medical well-being of everyone in proximity to it. This hasn't been in question for a long time.
And what about the employees? 'They can just get a job elsewhere.' Also not a reasonable expectation. Maybe if you paid extra for your employees' health care, regular check-ups, limited shifts, you could equalize the picture a little more, but that's tricky.
The general conservative view of government non-interference in our daily lives absolutely depends on acknowledging the cases where it is necessary for the state to put its bloated, debt-ridden foot down.
If a corporation is a person for legal purposes, it should be a person for taxation purposes. Why is this not the case already?
It is the case for a tremendous number of small businesses. Single-member LLCs are 'disregarded entities' for tax purposes, and the owner/single member pays personal income tax on all business profits.
I know you're talking about big companies, but other posts have explained why it would be a logistical nightmare to tax a huge corporation as a person - just remember that huge corporations get out-size media attention because of their size and impact. But there thousands and thousands of small businesses out there who don't have any bean counters - just their owners, and we pay taxes like everybody else (more, in fact, since we have to pay self-employment taxes).
GDP and housing prices are completely different things. GDP is basically population times economic output. Both of those things are factors in the housing market, certainly, but to pretend that nobody knew we were in a housing bubble is ludicrous.
It's the bank's job to be honest with you about the deal you're signing. If they tell you something that is patently not true (as we know happened in some cases) then they need to be busted. But it is not the bank's job to advocate on your behalf. The bank issuing you a mortgage is not your financial adviser.
In most markets, there is a built-in defense against this kind of thing, because your basic bank is only going to lend money to somebody it thinks can repay the loan. But when society (via the government) decides that it is going to let the banks off the hook for these mortgages in the name of helping out people who otherwise can't afford houses, all of a sudden the bank gets all the reward and a lot less of the risk. To a small extent, I think we could have done this without screwing up the system too badly -- there's an NY Times interview with Clinton's housing director where he basically says that home ownership was around 45-50% and Congress/Clinton wanted that number to go up, because people who owned their home were happier, lived stable lives, etc. So we have:
- The market decides that, with what houses cost in the mid-90s (when most of this got going), 45-50% of people can afford to buy a house; the rest rent, or are homeless. - Gov't gets involved and pushes that number up to 50-55% with initial success. It makes sense if you think about it, even for a conservative grump like me: there is one group of people who can afford a house and one group of people who definitely can't, but there is a gray area where people might be able to afford one but banks are unwilling to take the risk in loaning them money, driving up their interest rate and effectively pricing them out of home ownership. Seems like a win-win to help these people out, right? - Gov't realizes this is a wildly popular thing to do and decides it ought to push the ownership rate toward 70%. Some people at some banks go 'this will never work' but too many higher-ups at too many banks see the money to be had and decide, hey, this is what government wants, who are we to stop them?
I know you were referring to the genuine criminals (sleazy mortgage brokers, banks who outright falsified paperwork, etc) but the number of genuine bad actors versus the number of foreclosures doesn't add up. Most people were not defrauded or lied to. Most people bought houses they couldn't afford with money they didn't have but they were being encouraged to do it by everyone else involved in the process -- especially the people whose job it had been to put on the brakes. Trying to figure out exactly how much blame belongs with the banks and how much belongs with the government is probably a futile exercise because the government doesn't want people thinking about its role in the process and so doesn't have much interest in going after the banks.
So what's the lesson here? Seems to me that 'a small government program with firm boundaries can do a heck of a lot of good, but if you let it grow too big, it will eff everything up.'
There are obviously shops out there that try to say that they own everything the employee does. In most places this is not legal and even if it is, you're an idiot to sign them.
I run a shop that does youth sports management web applications. The only time I care about what my employees doing in their spare time is when it's directly relevant to their job. If you work for me and then you turn around and write your own youth sports application in your spare time, I'm going to sue your pants off because you have access to our code, our libraries, our ideas, and our clients' business needs and you can't pretend that you aren't using any of those things in your new and competing product.
But if you write a game or a web app that clearly has got nothing to do with your job, such that the only tenuous connection I can establish between your work for us and your free time project is that you became a more competent programmer while working for us, that's awesome for you and good for us because it means you're improving yourself and making an extra buck. If you make so many extra bucks on the side that you quit your job, well that sucks for me, but you earned it.
There are definitely some gray areas here. Like what if you start working in your spare time on an app that competes with us and then quit your job a month later? Then you get the 'hair salon migration rule' - if you took our stuff (even our abstract stuff) or solicit any of our clients to leave with you, then we go to court. But let's say you quit your job because you think the company sucks or that I'm a jerk and then a year later you start working on a competing product. Forget the law for a moment -- what does your gut tell you is the right answer here? For me, if you've been gone for a year, the only connection between what you're doing now with what you did for us a year ago is that you clearly learned a lot about the business from us, but unless you actually swiped any of our code, 'knowing how the business works' is not a crime. I don't want to police what you do after you stop working for us unless there's a very real concern that you've stolen our mojo.
The analogy to what MS is doing also seems to be a little bit of a gray area. Our company makes niche software so there's not a huge sphere of relevant work out there. but if your job for MS is WM7 development, that's a bit different. It's tough for you to say that your free time WM7 development has got nothing to do with your professional WM7 development, and MS is basically saying that we'll compromise with you -- rather than having to figure out (probably in court) whether or not your work is yours, theirs, or a conflict of interest, they're just saying 'go do what you want, and if what you want happens to be similar to your day job, we'll sign off on it and let you keep most of the revenue.'
From a business perspective, that seems pretty reasonable to me.
The United States hasn't even charged this guy with anything, and the inquiry we did have concluded that we pretty much can't charge him with anything unless he induced Private Manning to break the law, and it doesn't appear that that he did.
There are politicians here who want him in jail, sure. But the actual putting-people-in-jail apparatus does still nominally require a) charges and b) evidence, unless we think you've taken shots at us or have a bomb, but for some reason the world is a bit persnickety about just going around locking up that group.
Assange is a narcissist scumbag who would like to believe that he actually uncovered smoking guns in his Whole Pile 'o Slightly Embarrassing Diplomatic Cables. You guys are all skipping to the end of this conspiracy theory. What exactly has Assange uncovered that we a) didn't already know or b) was spectacularly revealing? Every news outlet has gone over the wikileaks 'trove' and while it's made a lot of people's lives difficult and led to recalling an ambassador here and there, the 'the dudez kn0ws our sekretz, keeel him' talk is fantasy.
What a bunch of conspiracy theory nonsense. 'Parties and candidates fixed outside of elections in various channels'? You mean channels like primaries, which in 2010 were so contentious that we got goofballs like O'Donnell in Delaware despite what the power-brokers in DC wanted?
We have the largest anti-incumbent wave in the United States in recent history. To say 'nobody cares' and that 'results don't matter' just shows ignorance.
Chris Dodd is one of many old-school politicians (and both sides of the aisle have them) who knew that he couldn't win another election precisely because he's in bed with so many special interests -- and Barney Frank, which is not a good name to have on your resume these days. It's shouldn't surprise anyone that he's going to head up the MPAA. He's a political deal-broker and a crook. Those are probably the biggest qualifications to run the MPAA.
Slashdot Mirror
...so here's one from a guy who owns a startup and will shortly be offering equity to one or two senior-level people I'm going to need next year!
You aren't a greedy bastard for being interested in equity. If you're a normal person, you have a decent but incomplete idea about how startups...well, start, and who gets equity and why. And why shouldn't you? I wouldn't know half of this stuff if I didn't run a startup. You see the place doing really well and you want a piece of the action because you've been a significant part of that. This is a normal human impulse.
But several other posters are correct when they say that the time to ask for this stuff was up front. Companies (like mine) offer equity because they can't afford salaries and benefits early on and are promising you a piece of the pie if and when the company takes off. We use contractors as well, but they're remote and for specific projects -- if you show up to an office every day and don't have specific projects, then yeah, your company might get in trouble with the IRS, as others have suggested. But that's not going to help you (rather, your boss may need to convert all of you to employees ASAP, which may cost him a bundle depending on what state you're in).
There aren't many rules for small companies about how much equity you can get and when. If you really are indispensable, then your bargaining position is this: you can come to another company (like mine) and get hired on account of your experience being a startup ninja IT guy, quite possibly with equity. The likelihood of this happening is probably the only thing that might cause your boss to give you equity in your current job, because you are essentially asking for the reward even though you didn't risk as much as an equity partner did. Here I disagree with those posters who say 'your job was at risk just like theirs,' and yes, that's true, but that's not the point -- an equity partner is risking more than just losing their job; they either started the business or accepted below-market compensation to work there, meaning they gambled lost income from a 'real' job in exchange for equity. You, on the other hand, were paid at market or above market (contractor) rates, so while you don't have employee benefits and probably didn't make more than you otherwise might have made at a salaried job, you didn't make less.
You might try to split the difference and ask for a very small amount of equity. Just explain to your boss that you really like your job, you're committed to the company, and you feel that you've earned a little stock. If you really are as vital as you say, then they'll at least entertain the idea -- I would -- but that's your gamble.
You're exactly right, but the point of the comparison was not that aviation is totally unaffordable today (it isn't - I'm hardly wealthy and I could afford my private cert, though more than that would hurt the bank...) but that it's a lot less affordable than it was, and that there are fewer people in it -- so it's important to the industry and to aviation technology that somebody out there is still making money.
"I'm rich, so I can buy my morality. See, when you have enough money, you don't need to reduce usage. You just pay others to clean up for you."
You are suggesting that it is immoral to burn fuel. Or, rather, to burn fuel for a purpose that you (or somebody?) doesn't approve of, or doesn't deem important enough.
It isn't. You're free to disapprove of it, and you're free to tell yourself that Google's founders are going to murder the planet because they flew to Tahiti, but that's got nothing to do with morality.
...without these guys.
Okay, maybe not a screeching halt, but it'd get the wind knocked out of it (again). In the 60s, you could buy plane for a little more than a car cost; now a new 2-seat trainer will set you back at least $110k. Dozens of aviation companies sprung up from the 40s to the 60s, and even in 1980 we still had over 800,000 pilots in the US; today that number is under 600,000.
I spoke to a guy a few weeks ago who learned to fly in the late 70s and rented most of the planes he flew for $30-ish an hour. I just finished my private pilot cert and the cheapest plane around here (Lehigh Valley, PA) is about $86/hr, +$30 with the instructor. Aviation gas is about $6/gallon.
Small airports and flight schools don't make a lot of money teaching guys like me on two- or four-seat trainers, just like airplane companies don't make a lot of money selling them (Cessna even stopped production for a decade or so in the 80s). One of the few remaining markets with any margins left is business jets. I get that journalists can stir up populist outrage by talking about jaunts to Tahiti, but what would you rather rich people do with their money? Keep it? Spoil their kids with it? They're keeping pilots and airport attendants in their jobs, and if you're upset about the amount of fuel burned for such a frivolous adventure, well, the only way we're going to get better fuels and more efficient engines is if the people making them have money to invest in those things.
Sorry, this is BS. I am a one-person company that has been around for several years (growing soon to a more-than-one-person company) and we are MS partners and use their SPLA (Software Provider Licensing Agreement) to get our clients access to things like SQL on the cheap. We use the Web edition of Win Server 2008 on our two servers and our annual expenses for MS products with maybe ten clients needing SQL licenses are maybe $700, which we collect back in the form of hosting fees.
We started out with MS just because SQL Server did a few things that we needed that MySQL didn't do back in '03/'04, and that's no longer the case -- so I'm not saying this to knock OSS. But MS software does not require 'shitloads of cash,' at least, not for a web shop.
IAAP but IANAAE (I Am a Pilot but I Am Not an Aeronautical Engineer)
Other than a 'hey, that's cool' factor, I don't get what the big deal here is. There's not a lot of information in the article or the video, but the suggestion is that this is some kind of breakthrough in powered flight.
A little bit of background: Even a small, single-engine airplane will burn 6-8 gallons of aviation gas per hour, and AVGAS is about $6/gallon (in the US - probably even more in Europe), and this is one of several reasons why aviation is increasingly inaccessible -- in the US alone, we had about 800,000 pilots in 1980, but today we have under 600,000. You won't rent even a two-seater for much less than $90/hr, which turns into $120-130 if you have a flight instructor there too.
So there is a lot of attention on alternative power sources for airplanes, but the big problem is weight. Most single engine airplanes already have weight issues -- a lot of your 4-seater aircraft like the Cessna 172 may have spots for 4 people, but (particularly with Americans these days...) you're unlikely to get 4 adults in there without going over max takeoff weight, even if you dump out half your fuel.
So in the practical category of 'planes with people in them,' this isn't really relevant -- the thing is a sailplane with a solar-powered assist and has probably had every ounce of material removed that can be removed. It's still pretty cool, since there are definitely uses for long-endurance UAV aircraft out there - but even small airplanes aren't going to be using solar (not enough juice) or batteries (too heavy) anytime soon. There are some concept electric designs out there, but the ones I've read about are either too slow or can't stay up for very long. The HB-SIA can only operate under very calm wind conditions (50 km/h won't go anywhere at altitude with a head wind) and with a lot of extra separation done by ATC as the article says.
The market does adjust to supply and demand by lowering prices. Prices came down when music went digital and they go down even further after an album has been out for a while -- just like the scenario you're describing. But this is market supply and demand, not piracy; one of the big questions about piracy is how many of these people would have otherwise bought the music legally if they couldn't pirate it (answer for most people I knew in school: not one of us, but that's not always going to hold up). Even so, the suggestion that the market should reduce prices because of piracy isn't logical or sensible -- if anything, it would raise prices, since the people who make and produce music now have to spend a lot of time and money chasing down pirates (or at least, they feel they have to).
'Sole ownership' is not granted by the public; it is granted to the creator of the piece. The issue of whether copyrights should be extended has really got very little to do with music piracy -- sure, there are people who pirate really old songs and movies and so on, but that's not where the action is. I'm not sure you understand planned economies versus capitalism. Freeways and fire departments are not socialism; they're government services and they're found in just about every type of government from the Roman Empire on. In the most basic sense, 'socialist' simply means a government that prioritizes the concept of social good over individual liberty; that's not to say that capitalism doesn't value social good, it simply finds that most socialist systems are so inefficient as to not be the best means of achieving any social good.
What you're really talking about is simply property rights -- specifically, intellectual property rights. These are all over the map in socialist countries, as basic socialism doesn't necessarily make any assumptions about property rights, even if collectivist or communist governments aren't going to respect them. There is no segment of 'the market' that says media should be free; the market is apolitical (outside of property rights and contract enforcement) and says that media should cost what people are willing to pay for it. I don't think that makes the whole world fucked. I think I'd rather live today than under any of the other government schemes mankind has devised, whether you put me in modern day Europe or in the US.
After production costs are recouped is when they make the profit, which is why most people get out of bed in the morning. If the only interest is to recoup production costs, the quality of the entire market will go down the toilet, because there is no reward for doing an excellent job - if you pay for the endeavor, you're done, right?
The point of selling music, of selling anything, is to sell a whole heck of a lot of it. The notion that it's somehow wrong or evil to continue selling it after you've recouped production costs is ... well, communist, really.
with a nearly infinite supply, the value of the product reaches near zero.
You flunk Economics 101. The value of the product is what the market will pay for it. You're talking about the cost to produce it, specifically the marginal cost to sell one extra album. That is indeed near zero, but that doesn't make the production cost zero - only the marginal cost, and that's got only a very small amount to do with the retail price.
1. copyright is way too long and currently goes against its original intents of going to the public domain in a timely fashion. 5-20 years is more than sufficient. it was never meant to create dynasties or let someone milk one work for their entire life.
They don't believe that this is true. Why would they argue in favor of this? It's not in their interests to do so. Do unions come forward and say 'wow, our pensions just cost way too much. We'll voluntarily give them up.' Does management come forward and say 'you know what, we should give people more paid vacation.'
What group of human beings behaves like this? Maybe conscientious individuals, but never groups of individuals, whether you're talking corporations or governments.
And they're the ones indiscriminately attacking people without sufficient proof of their guilt.
Which is why they've lost most of their cases and flushed a lot of money down the toilet in the process.
But offers for cash settlements are nothing short of blackmail and extortion.
No, they're offers for cash settlements. It's very nice to think about the poor little old lady who has no idea what an mp3 is getting one of these and feeling bad for her, and yeah, in those cases, send 'em packing. But it's not 'doing business with the mob,' because the mob came by whether or not you'd done anything wrong for a protection racket. These guys are coming by because they have evidence that you have done something wrong. Maybe it's not correct, but what is their alternative? Everybody on Slashdot knows how widespread music piracy is, but then we're all shocked, SHOCKED that anybody is trying to do something about it. It's their job to protect their copyrights and their IP. I think they go too far sometimes, and that they don't really understand the market -- which is why I think the RIAA will eventually fall apart, because the day will come when we won't need big labels. But until that day, and for so long as bands are falling all over each other to get signed with a label, the labels are going to try and keep people from doing this stuff.
And you know what? Seems to me that it's working. The freewheeling days of downloading music are long gone. You can still do it but the risk is a lot higher. Everybody I know has been buying stuff off iTunes for years now.
I don't dispute that there are scumbags in the organization and that they've used some scumbag tactics. I just don't think it's because they're evil masterminds. I think it's because they're clumsy and they don't know better, and that's why our grandkids won't know what the RIAA is.
I absolutely agree that copyright should be limited far more than it is now. But that's a problem with our political system (one of many) - declaring that you don't agree with the law is well and good but it doesn't justify taking music you haven't paid for. Because you're exactly right - that would make us no better than them.
Any profit-making organization is going to do what it can to legally extend its profits as long as possible. It's rare to find one that will willingly sacrifice them to be 'good' (as Google tries to be) - as a company owner myself I think about this more than most people, but my business is small enough that it's not a decision I face anytime soon.
Our elected officials seem to have no problem seizing property or regulating all kinds of commerce in the name of the public good. Wonder why they don't cut down copyright as well? Oh yeah...doesn't win you any votes.
Accidentally posted this AC before. Reposting...
Why should it be my mission on Earth to try and make the RIAA die?
I like small artists and I buy directly from the ones I know, but sometimes I open my wallet for mainstream artists. Do you seriously imagine that even a statistically significant number of people care about the RIAA, much less will actually alter their behavior to try and destroy them?
I'm no fan of the RIAA suing little old ladies and twelve-year-olds, but all the profess musicians I know are not OK with people getting their music for free and are quite comfortable having the RIAA or anyone else go after the people who are downloading it without paying for it. What they care about, and what I'm happy to oblige them on, is cutting out the increasingly unnecessary middlemen and providing a direct line of purchase to the artist.
When I was in college and downloading music was new, I (and everybody I knew) did it. Then we grew up and got jobs (well, most of us got jobs) and realized that it was, in fact, getting something for nothing, and that no matter how many window/front door/car analogies you make, that is usually ripping somebody else off, even if you don't call it 'stealing.'
The fruits of other people's labors has a price - whether or not you feel like paying it. But to answer your inane question, yes, just about everybody buys music these days.
Relatively speaking, it isn't hard to build public infrastructure. It's hard to maintain it.
California did a great job building a lot of that stuff when they were flush with cash. Now they're in the unglamorous 'keep the wheels turning' phase and people are fleeing the state in droves. My inlaws are leaving (also for Texas); I'm doing the same thing but on the East coast, leaving New York ... also for Texas. My business, and my inlaws' businesses, are coming with us. I don't expect our anecdotal evidence to persuade anyone, but the census ought to. Here's just one example (pardon the terrible wallpaper):
http://activerain.com/blogsview/1546143/the-mass-california-exodus
The UC system is a great example. It was the pride of the state, and rightfully so. Then it got about a billion in the hole, which is not really a whole heck of a lot, except that they have a good hundred billion in unfunded pension obligations and pay their public sector employees more than just about anywhere else. That's fine, too, but it's a zero-sum game. If you want to add enormous hurdles to firing public employees ($50k-$100k+ to fire a teacher in LA - http://lifeexaminations.wordpress.com/2011/03/31/tenure-problem/) -- for one employee! -- then that's going to have consequences elsewhere.
Texas has its share of problems, like a 2-year $27 billion defecit (which is about half of California's, since it's over two years, but still bad). But it's very difficult to fix California's problems, because the things that the state is spending money on are small things (like job protection) that effect huge numbers of people -- you can't even talk about them without being called a union-busting tyrant; look at LA's mayor, a former union boss himself, in hot water over the same issue.
It's a great irony that California is home to so many people who talk about sustainability in design and economics but who purposefully keep their eyes shut to the costs of their decisions and their priorities, because I think they're not necessarily wrong in several areas. But to ask 'do you think California misses you' is not only arrogant, it's ignorant: California is hemorrhaging people. There are still a lot of people there, and a lot of good ideas, to be sure -- but to look at what is happening in California and conclude that it's anything other than that it is very much in decline is pretty tough.
Texas definitely has a problem, but arguably it's not quite as much of a fundamental structural issue as CA and NY. I was in NY from 1998-2010 and they definitely have one of the most top-heavy, ungainly governments around.
Texas passes a budget every two years, so I assume that their $27 billion shortfall is therefore over a two-year period, whereas California's $26 billion deficit is one year. Even were that not the case, the real problem in California's case (and NY's) is unfunded pension liabilities. Texas is a Right to Work state and isn't on the hook to the same extent for public pensions. That's the big elephant in the room for a lot of states (Illinois is up there with CA and NY) -- they've got serious problems now, but they're going to get a heck of a lot worse.
In other words, I'd much rather have to fix Texas' problems than California's or New York's.
That still doesn't solve the employee side. What about the waitress who takes minimum wage to work in the ultra-rich bar & restaurant where everybody can afford to smoke? The fact that they're rich doesn't give them the right to damage somebody else's lungs.
That's not a solution; that's just another revenue stream. Taxing something may well decrease its use, but you're talking about 'how do we get people to smoke less.' I actually don't care if people smoke less. I just don't want them smoking in public around me.
I remember when the incident you're talking about with Texas came up. Wasn't it the case that Texas basically invited them to come to TX in the first place with the promise of no sales tax, and then turned around a couple of years later and reversed course?
Even if not, the problem is the fundamental structure of Sales tax - not Amazon's unwillingness to pay it. No company that does business online wants to collect sales tax, and I'll tell you why, as a small business, I am interested in Amazon's case: because if Amazon has to collect tax for not just all 50 states but every county in every state where sales tax is variable (and sometimes even on the local level), you've just driven up the cost of business to the point where it is no longer feasible to start an online business in your garage/bedroom/basement because you need very sophisticated software to handle the collection side and an accounting team to handle the payment side: small business owners like me already have to learn a lot about accounting (which is fine, and even perversely fun sometimes) but if we had to file returns with every state with which we did business? omgwtfbbq.
If you left it up to me, I'd replace sales tax entirely with a Federal sales tax that had a state reimbursement system. I don't mind collecting tax and passing it on to the government for you. I mind having to spend twice my annual gross income calculating and then delivering that tax to every state in the union.
It is always important to remember that the #1 health risk to the obese is not heart problems or diabetes, it is misdiagnosis
What? Are you kidding? Where is your source for this as your '#1 health risk'?
I see your point, which is that, since an obese person has such a high risk of both heart problems and Type 2 diabetes, it's probably very easy for a doctor to rule out less likely issues that nonetheless may very well exist. But that is a far cry from the '#1 health risk is misdiagnosis.'
You are completely under-representing the very serious health risks to obesity and equivocating the entire issue -- 'you can decide, if you wish'? It isn't a decision. Human beings don't get to decide for themselves whether something is a risk; they merely decide whether the risk is acceptable, given the reward.
Health insurance policies in some states (the ones that are allowed to ask you questions like this) do charge higher premiums if you ride a motorcycle. No need to tax it - the people paying your bills already account for it, when the government allows them to.
They can't charge you higher premiums for being obese, at least not directly -- they have to wait until you actually start making claims. They can charge you higher premiums for smoking, I guess because it's much easier to villify smokers than obese people. It's how decisions are made when they're made by politicians -- 'who can we go after without repurcussions?'
Same reason you have astronomically high hotel and rental car taxes (in San Francisco last month, renting a car for less than 24 hours from SFO - car rental was $50; taxes and fees were $70). The state gets away with it because the people who pay those taxes aren't their constituents - you can tax tourists all you like. Doesn't mean it's a good idea or doesn't have repercussions -- it just means that the politicians won't have to face them.
I'm a free-market conservative but make an exception for things like this precisely because I think it's a very clear and easily-defined exception that isn't the start of a slippery slope.
A public place of business ought to be free to do largely whatever it likes so long as that freedom doesn't directly harm others. 'But you're free not to show up,' you rightly point out, and yes, that's true, but completely impractical. Figuring out where you draw that line -- at what point does your individual behavior affect other people so much so that the state needs to step in? -- is a very difficult question.
But secondhand smoke isn't an annoyance or an inconvenience. It's a direct harm to the medical well-being of everyone in proximity to it. This hasn't been in question for a long time.
And what about the employees? 'They can just get a job elsewhere.' Also not a reasonable expectation. Maybe if you paid extra for your employees' health care, regular check-ups, limited shifts, you could equalize the picture a little more, but that's tricky.
The general conservative view of government non-interference in our daily lives absolutely depends on acknowledging the cases where it is necessary for the state to put its bloated, debt-ridden foot down.
If a corporation is a person for legal purposes, it should be a person for taxation purposes. Why is this not the case already?
It is the case for a tremendous number of small businesses. Single-member LLCs are 'disregarded entities' for tax purposes, and the owner/single member pays personal income tax on all business profits.
I know you're talking about big companies, but other posts have explained why it would be a logistical nightmare to tax a huge corporation as a person - just remember that huge corporations get out-size media attention because of their size and impact. But there thousands and thousands of small businesses out there who don't have any bean counters - just their owners, and we pay taxes like everybody else (more, in fact, since we have to pay self-employment taxes).
GDP and housing prices are completely different things. GDP is basically population times economic output. Both of those things are factors in the housing market, certainly, but to pretend that nobody knew we were in a housing bubble is ludicrous.
It's the bank's job to be honest with you about the deal you're signing. If they tell you something that is patently not true (as we know happened in some cases) then they need to be busted. But it is not the bank's job to advocate on your behalf. The bank issuing you a mortgage is not your financial adviser.
In most markets, there is a built-in defense against this kind of thing, because your basic bank is only going to lend money to somebody it thinks can repay the loan. But when society (via the government) decides that it is going to let the banks off the hook for these mortgages in the name of helping out people who otherwise can't afford houses, all of a sudden the bank gets all the reward and a lot less of the risk. To a small extent, I think we could have done this without screwing up the system too badly -- there's an NY Times interview with Clinton's housing director where he basically says that home ownership was around 45-50% and Congress/Clinton wanted that number to go up, because people who owned their home were happier, lived stable lives, etc. So we have:
- The market decides that, with what houses cost in the mid-90s (when most of this got going), 45-50% of people can afford to buy a house; the rest rent, or are homeless.
- Gov't gets involved and pushes that number up to 50-55% with initial success. It makes sense if you think about it, even for a conservative grump like me: there is one group of people who can afford a house and one group of people who definitely can't, but there is a gray area where people might be able to afford one but banks are unwilling to take the risk in loaning them money, driving up their interest rate and effectively pricing them out of home ownership. Seems like a win-win to help these people out, right?
- Gov't realizes this is a wildly popular thing to do and decides it ought to push the ownership rate toward 70%. Some people at some banks go 'this will never work' but too many higher-ups at too many banks see the money to be had and decide, hey, this is what government wants, who are we to stop them?
I know you were referring to the genuine criminals (sleazy mortgage brokers, banks who outright falsified paperwork, etc) but the number of genuine bad actors versus the number of foreclosures doesn't add up. Most people were not defrauded or lied to. Most people bought houses they couldn't afford with money they didn't have but they were being encouraged to do it by everyone else involved in the process -- especially the people whose job it had been to put on the brakes. Trying to figure out exactly how much blame belongs with the banks and how much belongs with the government is probably a futile exercise because the government doesn't want people thinking about its role in the process and so doesn't have much interest in going after the banks.
So what's the lesson here? Seems to me that 'a small government program with firm boundaries can do a heck of a lot of good, but if you let it grow too big, it will eff everything up.'
There are obviously shops out there that try to say that they own everything the employee does. In most places this is not legal and even if it is, you're an idiot to sign them.
I run a shop that does youth sports management web applications. The only time I care about what my employees doing in their spare time is when it's directly relevant to their job. If you work for me and then you turn around and write your own youth sports application in your spare time, I'm going to sue your pants off because you have access to our code, our libraries, our ideas, and our clients' business needs and you can't pretend that you aren't using any of those things in your new and competing product.
But if you write a game or a web app that clearly has got nothing to do with your job, such that the only tenuous connection I can establish between your work for us and your free time project is that you became a more competent programmer while working for us, that's awesome for you and good for us because it means you're improving yourself and making an extra buck. If you make so many extra bucks on the side that you quit your job, well that sucks for me, but you earned it.
There are definitely some gray areas here. Like what if you start working in your spare time on an app that competes with us and then quit your job a month later? Then you get the 'hair salon migration rule' - if you took our stuff (even our abstract stuff) or solicit any of our clients to leave with you, then we go to court. But let's say you quit your job because you think the company sucks or that I'm a jerk and then a year later you start working on a competing product. Forget the law for a moment -- what does your gut tell you is the right answer here? For me, if you've been gone for a year, the only connection between what you're doing now with what you did for us a year ago is that you clearly learned a lot about the business from us, but unless you actually swiped any of our code, 'knowing how the business works' is not a crime. I don't want to police what you do after you stop working for us unless there's a very real concern that you've stolen our mojo.
The analogy to what MS is doing also seems to be a little bit of a gray area. Our company makes niche software so there's not a huge sphere of relevant work out there. but if your job for MS is WM7 development, that's a bit different. It's tough for you to say that your free time WM7 development has got nothing to do with your professional WM7 development, and MS is basically saying that we'll compromise with you -- rather than having to figure out (probably in court) whether or not your work is yours, theirs, or a conflict of interest, they're just saying 'go do what you want, and if what you want happens to be similar to your day job, we'll sign off on it and let you keep most of the revenue.'
From a business perspective, that seems pretty reasonable to me.
The United States hasn't even charged this guy with anything, and the inquiry we did have concluded that we pretty much can't charge him with anything unless he induced Private Manning to break the law, and it doesn't appear that that he did.
There are politicians here who want him in jail, sure. But the actual putting-people-in-jail apparatus does still nominally require a) charges and b) evidence, unless we think you've taken shots at us or have a bomb, but for some reason the world is a bit persnickety about just going around locking up that group.
Assange is a narcissist scumbag who would like to believe that he actually uncovered smoking guns in his Whole Pile 'o Slightly Embarrassing Diplomatic Cables. You guys are all skipping to the end of this conspiracy theory. What exactly has Assange uncovered that we a) didn't already know or b) was spectacularly revealing? Every news outlet has gone over the wikileaks 'trove' and while it's made a lot of people's lives difficult and led to recalling an ambassador here and there, the 'the dudez kn0ws our sekretz, keeel him' talk is fantasy.
What a bunch of conspiracy theory nonsense. 'Parties and candidates fixed outside of elections in various channels'? You mean channels like primaries, which in 2010 were so contentious that we got goofballs like O'Donnell in Delaware despite what the power-brokers in DC wanted?
We have the largest anti-incumbent wave in the United States in recent history. To say 'nobody cares' and that 'results don't matter' just shows ignorance.
Chris Dodd is one of many old-school politicians (and both sides of the aisle have them) who knew that he couldn't win another election precisely because he's in bed with so many special interests -- and Barney Frank, which is not a good name to have on your resume these days. It's shouldn't surprise anyone that he's going to head up the MPAA. He's a political deal-broker and a crook. Those are probably the biggest qualifications to run the MPAA.