All of which total make a max 10% of your salary- if you spent every cent you make. Which you can't, as you already spent 30% on other things, reducing it to a max 7%, and would be reduced further by savings. Your numbers are pure garbage. Continuing to lie just makes you look like a fool.
No, they don't. They pay rent to the owner. The owner may take them into account when deciding on a price, but that's still not the renter paying taxes.
If you want to play games like that, then nobody pays taxes. Why? Because I just take taxes into account when making my salary demands and ask for appropriately higher wages. And my employer takes that into account when setting prices on goods/services and raises prices. And buyers take that into account when making their salary demands, etc. You can circle forever.
Bottom line- the guy who gets the bill from the government pays the taxes. Anything else is sophistry.
Ah, yet another idiot who believes in false equivalence. While neither party is perfect, you have one party that refuses compromise, wants to legislate what I do in my bedroom, wants to enforce Christian beliefs, and wants to take away protections we've fought for over the last century while enacting monetary policy that will make the rich richer and shrink the middle class.
The other party has a few boneheaded ideas and a tendency to put money into good ideas without adequate execution, I'll admit. But they don't want to regulate my private life, they honestly want to help people, they're willing to discuss their differences rather than stick to them like religious tenets, and they actually understand science and economics.
Yup, pretty easy choice there. Until something better comes along, I'll go with them.
First, thats not 60% in income taxes, so you're already lieing.
Secondly, the max federal rate is 35%. That's not counting deductions, which anyone with that level of income has.
Real estate taxes- you don't pay real estate taxes to rent. You pay them on property you own. If you're talking about still owning a mortgage, that's your fault for taking one. Also, your real estate taxes are unreasonable. My mother owns a 300K house in the IL suburbs. Taxes on it are 3K/yr. Even if you own a million dollar home in a higher tax rate, you aren't going to surpass 12K. 40K is just flat lying.
So, any arguments with even a remote basis in reality?
So if you made more than 500K, you may have paid a 44% marginal rate. Of course, that doesn't mean a 44% total rate- the top rate is only for money over a certain amount. If the tax rate goes from 30% to 35% at 100K (numbers made up) and you made 150K, you'd pay 30% of the first 100 and 35% of the last 50, for a total of 47.5K, or 31.67% overall rate. This is assuming you have absolutely no deductions, including the personal deduction. Realistically if you have that much money, you're sheltering at least 20-30% of it in real estate or other deductions, so you're unlikely to pay more than 20%. The last year I made 150 I ended up paying about 20% federal taxes.
TL;DR- OP is a liar who completely made up his numbers.
Lets see. TARP was signed into law by Bush and had a lot of Republican votes behind it. So they both think companies are too big to fail. Republicans all vote for corn subsidies, because a lot of their votes come from rural areas run by farmers. And the Republicans enact a hell of a lot of corporate welfare- they just mainly do it in the form of tax cuts, loopholes, shelters, and the military industrial complex.
As for social programs not doing anyone any favors- wow you are fucking brainwashed.
Its always cheaper to expand via cash than debt, even with rates this low. Cash has a 0% interest rate (in fact, it has negative the rate of inflation), debt has a positive one. A buyback means that they don't have immediate (or short to mid term) uses for that money.
Don't get me wrong, I admire the decision. Much better than sitting on cash MS style. But as an investor it tells me that they don't have big ideas and that I'd rather put new money elsewhere.
The difference is that dems showed willingness to compromise- they admitted cuts as well as tax increases were neded, and were even willing to discuss cuts to social security. The republicans were not even willing to discuss more revenue. There is no equivalence here, one side is worse than the other.
If they had ideas, they wouldn't be doing a share buyback. A share buyback means they have more cash than they have good ways to spend it, so they'll buy shares back to decrease the pool of available shares, thus increasing the ownership percentage of a single share (thus its value). The combination of that plus a dividend increase means that they have more money than they can possibly use.
Unfortunately its hard to build a lite version. There's almost no features that can be removed without making the app useless. And you can't advertise if you don't look at it- no click throughs.
If you have an android phone, I wrote an app, TextSoundly, that automatically detects when you're moving at driving speeds and turns on voice texting/response.
THe problem is that when you sell it based on strength of buzzword, you sell it to people looking for a buzzword. So they'll treat it like they do a buzzword- half understanding half not, so they implement the wrong parts in wrong ways. The end solution is just as bad, possibly even worse and you wasted a lot of time doing it. You do more harm than good.
You can't solve a management problem that way, not reliably and not for long. The solution is to replace the manager, or find a job with sane management- when enough people do that they'll figure it out. Or they'll fail, either way it isn't your problem.
Umm, no duh? Once again, is there anything that means anything in that sentence? At absolute best it says "too much process is bad", which is a tautology- if it wasn't bad it wouldn't be too much.
*If you spend 6 months...
And in reality nobody ever spent 6 months just writing docs before writing code. On the other hand most agile projects fall way to hard on the other side- absolutely no documentation. Architecture doesn't appear- at least not good, clean, usable architecture. You have to think that stuff out beforehand. Its good to have the freedom to change it where it isn't meeting your needs, but spending large amounts of time constantly refactoring things because you didn't think things through up front is also wasteful. Part of the art of software engineering is figuring out where that line is.
*PMs are your customers.
No, not really. Not even close. My PMs represent a subset of my customers. Who aren't the same as my users. Listening to them is a good idea. Giving them what they want unfiltered is a bad one. And neither of them are necessarily the user, who also needs a seat at the table. But guess what- I don't interact with the PMs anymore at an agile company than at a non-agile one. The amount is relatively unchanged.
*Early delivery- has as many minuses as pluses. Ever work on software that had a meaningless deadline 3 months in and need to scramble to meet it? Iterative development gives you that fun ever couple of weeks. Plus you get to show the customer half finished software and get yelled at for it not working when you know you won't have it working for months. There's situations where this is actually worth the costs- heavily GUI software where the user really deeply cares about the look and feel of the UI, is paying by the hour so you have infinite time to tweak it, and doesn't have a lot of dependencies that take a long time. There's also situations where its a miserable failure- backend software where you need to do heavy calculations and heuristics for your result where the results will need to be massaged for weeks. Or anything where you're doing actual research, and not just development. A real project needs to weigh these factors and decide which set of problems is a better one to have.
Here's the problem- you, and a lot of other agilers, seem to think you've found something new and creative and preach it as a programming religion, and the solution to all problems. It isn't any of those things. The ideas have been around for decades. They're mostly being applied in the same way they always have. And some of the common practices are good for some types of situations. Some aren't. And those can switch up depending on the personalities of the team, the customer, the company, and the type of problem you're solving.
You throw out the baby with the bathwater with a lot of practices recommended by Scrum, XP, etc. Particularly the utter lack of documentation, design, and forward planning. And rather than listen when people try to give you feedback all you say is "you're not doing it right".
You want a real development methodology, I'll give you one. Think about what you're trying to do. Think about what the customer and user wants. Think about your team, their skills, and how they interact. Think about common practices and whether they fit those other things. Then choose the ones you think will work. Implement them. When something starts causing you problems, change something to fix it. In a reasonable timeframe, evaluate if that fixed it. Keep it or alter it based on that. Repeat.
The problem is that this doesn't follow a preset plan or a nice 4 bullet points manifesto. It requires people actually work at it. Its much easier to say "we're going to be Agile" then adopt a bunch of processes (and yes, daily scrums, automated unit tests, tdd, etc are all processes and may or may not be a good fit for you) and treat that as holy writ. Then when things change and
None of which have anything to do with a majority of agile I've seen
*Individuals.. blah blah blah
Yeah, I can't even tell you what this means. I doubt anyone else can either. Its marketing drivel that sounds moderately impressive, but has no real effect on how any company does anything.
*working software over documentation
Even when doing agile the absolute most effective companies I've seen have lots of documentation. Those that didn't either had 1 or 2 amazing developers who were the documentation (have a problem? Ask Gabe), or they failed miserably.
*Customer collaboration blah blah blah
Yeah- I've worked at multiple companies doing agile. Never talked to a customer. Wouldn't want to- we hire technical PMs for a reason. My company wouldn't want me to either- I'm too blunt and too honest.
*Responding to change
Everyone responds to change. And the general response by most agile places is the same as in non-agile- try to save room later in the schedule to meet the final release date you want for feature X. Because regardless of all the hand waving, there's still always a roadmap where you have features planned out for the next X quarters.
Here's what agile actually means in industry- that there's going to be some attempt at organizing work into X week batches. That's it. Do that, and they consider it agile.
I've worked at 2 startups that were sold for 125M and 225M, each making more than 5x the invested capital. At neither of them would seeing anyone there at 9 be more than an extreme rarity. 8-9 hour workdays were the norm.
No, those are things that agile *claims* to do. Whether it does that, what else it does, and how well it actually does those things varies greatly. "Agile" in my experience is usually just a buzzword meaning iterative development of any sort.
So in other words statistically insignificant. That's in line with all the startups I've worked for- we didn't lose people unless we fired them with very few exceptions.
Its not like this is an original idea. Written versions of the golden rule, which is pretty much what you're suggesting, date back over 2000 years. The reason it isn't a law is that its too vague to be useful and too full of holes to actually work for more than 30 seconds.
No, it doesn't. A free market has a precise definition. That's one requirement of a free market. There are others. One is low barriers to entry- that people can easily become suppliers in the market. Without that, there's an imbalance in power between suppliers and consumers allowing slightly monopoplistic pricing. Another is perfect knowledge- that all sides have full knowledge of the product and the market. This is impossible unless you're a doctor in healthcare.
Actually free markets in general are impossible, its like an ideal frictionless pully or massless string in physics. Some markets do a better job of modeling it that others, but healthcare is really far off.
How do monopolies override free will? They became monopolies because everyone gave them money/bought their product. They're the personification of free will.
How do secrets override your free will? I can't keep my sex life a secret? My political opinions? My vote? My bank account number?
Sorry, the real world has nuance. You can't solve all problems with a few simple and far reaching rules- you'll either fail to solve problems or actively cause them. There's very few areas of perfect black and white, and lots of areas where protecting one person's rights means violating another's. Life is messy.
GOP and dem are what other countries would consider coalitions. There's major factions within each and internal power struggles. The Tea Party is the far right faction of the GOP, and is roughly equivalent to a minority party in other countries. And they hold up quite a bit of legislation.
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All of which total make a max 10% of your salary- if you spent every cent you make. Which you can't, as you already spent 30% on other things, reducing it to a max 7%, and would be reduced further by savings. Your numbers are pure garbage. Continuing to lie just makes you look like a fool.
No, they don't. They pay rent to the owner. The owner may take them into account when deciding on a price, but that's still not the renter paying taxes.
If you want to play games like that, then nobody pays taxes. Why? Because I just take taxes into account when making my salary demands and ask for appropriately higher wages. And my employer takes that into account when setting prices on goods/services and raises prices. And buyers take that into account when making their salary demands, etc. You can circle forever.
Bottom line- the guy who gets the bill from the government pays the taxes. Anything else is sophistry.
Ah, yet another idiot who believes in false equivalence. While neither party is perfect, you have one party that refuses compromise, wants to legislate what I do in my bedroom, wants to enforce Christian beliefs, and wants to take away protections we've fought for over the last century while enacting monetary policy that will make the rich richer and shrink the middle class.
The other party has a few boneheaded ideas and a tendency to put money into good ideas without adequate execution, I'll admit. But they don't want to regulate my private life, they honestly want to help people, they're willing to discuss their differences rather than stick to them like religious tenets, and they actually understand science and economics.
Yup, pretty easy choice there. Until something better comes along, I'll go with them.
First, thats not 60% in income taxes, so you're already lieing.
Secondly, the max federal rate is 35%. That's not counting deductions, which anyone with that level of income has.
Real estate taxes- you don't pay real estate taxes to rent. You pay them on property you own. If you're talking about still owning a mortgage, that's your fault for taking one. Also, your real estate taxes are unreasonable. My mother owns a 300K house in the IL suburbs. Taxes on it are 3K/yr. Even if you own a million dollar home in a higher tax rate, you aren't going to surpass 12K. 40K is just flat lying.
So, any arguments with even a remote basis in reality?
It puts you in the top 3% of the country. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affluence_in_the_United_States.
I'd call that rich.
Try again. The max tax rate in new york is 8.97% on people making more than 500K. Source: http://taxes.about.com/od/statetaxes/a/New-York-income-taxes.htm
The top rate for federal income tax is 35% for 2012. Source: http://taxes.about.com/od/Federal-Income-Taxes/qt/Tax-Rates-For-The-2012-Tax-Year.htm
So if you made more than 500K, you may have paid a 44% marginal rate. Of course, that doesn't mean a 44% total rate- the top rate is only for money over a certain amount. If the tax rate goes from 30% to 35% at 100K (numbers made up) and you made 150K, you'd pay 30% of the first 100 and 35% of the last 50, for a total of 47.5K, or 31.67% overall rate. This is assuming you have absolutely no deductions, including the personal deduction. Realistically if you have that much money, you're sheltering at least 20-30% of it in real estate or other deductions, so you're unlikely to pay more than 20%. The last year I made 150 I ended up paying about 20% federal taxes.
TL;DR- OP is a liar who completely made up his numbers.
Lets see. TARP was signed into law by Bush and had a lot of Republican votes behind it. So they both think companies are too big to fail. Republicans all vote for corn subsidies, because a lot of their votes come from rural areas run by farmers. And the Republicans enact a hell of a lot of corporate welfare- they just mainly do it in the form of tax cuts, loopholes, shelters, and the military industrial complex.
As for social programs not doing anyone any favors- wow you are fucking brainwashed.
Because if an app I used did it, I would immediately uninstall it for being fucking annoying. I'm not going to push that onto someone else.
Its always cheaper to expand via cash than debt, even with rates this low. Cash has a 0% interest rate (in fact, it has negative the rate of inflation), debt has a positive one. A buyback means that they don't have immediate (or short to mid term) uses for that money.
Don't get me wrong, I admire the decision. Much better than sitting on cash MS style. But as an investor it tells me that they don't have big ideas and that I'd rather put new money elsewhere.
The difference is that dems showed willingness to compromise- they admitted cuts as well as tax increases were neded, and were even willing to discuss cuts to social security. The republicans were not even willing to discuss more revenue. There is no equivalence here, one side is worse than the other.
If they had ideas, they wouldn't be doing a share buyback. A share buyback means they have more cash than they have good ways to spend it, so they'll buy shares back to decrease the pool of available shares, thus increasing the ownership percentage of a single share (thus its value). The combination of that plus a dividend increase means that they have more money than they can possibly use.
I considered talking ads for about .5 seconds, then rejected them. I don't like text ads, audio ads would be annoying as hell.
Unfortunately its hard to build a lite version. There's almost no features that can be removed without making the app useless. And you can't advertise if you don't look at it- no click throughs.
If you have an android phone, I wrote an app, TextSoundly, that automatically detects when you're moving at driving speeds and turns on voice texting/response.
THe problem is that when you sell it based on strength of buzzword, you sell it to people looking for a buzzword. So they'll treat it like they do a buzzword- half understanding half not, so they implement the wrong parts in wrong ways. The end solution is just as bad, possibly even worse and you wasted a lot of time doing it. You do more harm than good.
You can't solve a management problem that way, not reliably and not for long. The solution is to replace the manager, or find a job with sane management- when enough people do that they'll figure it out. Or they'll fail, either way it isn't your problem.
Also, they aren't pissing on your leg- they're adding to your leg's liquidity.
*Software is written by people...
Umm, no duh? Once again, is there anything that means anything in that sentence? At absolute best it says "too much process is bad", which is a tautology- if it wasn't bad it wouldn't be too much.
*If you spend 6 months...
And in reality nobody ever spent 6 months just writing docs before writing code. On the other hand most agile projects fall way to hard on the other side- absolutely no documentation. Architecture doesn't appear- at least not good, clean, usable architecture. You have to think that stuff out beforehand. Its good to have the freedom to change it where it isn't meeting your needs, but spending large amounts of time constantly refactoring things because you didn't think things through up front is also wasteful. Part of the art of software engineering is figuring out where that line is.
*PMs are your customers.
No, not really. Not even close. My PMs represent a subset of my customers. Who aren't the same as my users. Listening to them is a good idea. Giving them what they want unfiltered is a bad one. And neither of them are necessarily the user, who also needs a seat at the table. But guess what- I don't interact with the PMs anymore at an agile company than at a non-agile one. The amount is relatively unchanged.
*Early delivery- has as many minuses as pluses. Ever work on software that had a meaningless deadline 3 months in and need to scramble to meet it? Iterative development gives you that fun ever couple of weeks. Plus you get to show the customer half finished software and get yelled at for it not working when you know you won't have it working for months. There's situations where this is actually worth the costs- heavily GUI software where the user really deeply cares about the look and feel of the UI, is paying by the hour so you have infinite time to tweak it, and doesn't have a lot of dependencies that take a long time. There's also situations where its a miserable failure- backend software where you need to do heavy calculations and heuristics for your result where the results will need to be massaged for weeks. Or anything where you're doing actual research, and not just development. A real project needs to weigh these factors and decide which set of problems is a better one to have.
Here's the problem- you, and a lot of other agilers, seem to think you've found something new and creative and preach it as a programming religion, and the solution to all problems. It isn't any of those things. The ideas have been around for decades. They're mostly being applied in the same way they always have. And some of the common practices are good for some types of situations. Some aren't. And those can switch up depending on the personalities of the team, the customer, the company, and the type of problem you're solving.
You throw out the baby with the bathwater with a lot of practices recommended by Scrum, XP, etc. Particularly the utter lack of documentation, design, and forward planning. And rather than listen when people try to give you feedback all you say is "you're not doing it right".
You want a real development methodology, I'll give you one. Think about what you're trying to do. Think about what the customer and user wants. Think about your team, their skills, and how they interact. Think about common practices and whether they fit those other things. Then choose the ones you think will work. Implement them. When something starts causing you problems, change something to fix it. In a reasonable timeframe, evaluate if that fixed it. Keep it or alter it based on that. Repeat.
The problem is that this doesn't follow a preset plan or a nice 4 bullet points manifesto. It requires people actually work at it. Its much easier to say "we're going to be Agile" then adopt a bunch of processes (and yes, daily scrums, automated unit tests, tdd, etc are all processes and may or may not be a good fit for you) and treat that as holy writ. Then when things change and
None of which have anything to do with a majority of agile I've seen
*Individuals.. blah blah blah
Yeah, I can't even tell you what this means. I doubt anyone else can either. Its marketing drivel that sounds moderately impressive, but has no real effect on how any company does anything.
*working software over documentation
Even when doing agile the absolute most effective companies I've seen have lots of documentation. Those that didn't either had 1 or 2 amazing developers who were the documentation (have a problem? Ask Gabe), or they failed miserably.
*Customer collaboration blah blah blah
Yeah- I've worked at multiple companies doing agile. Never talked to a customer. Wouldn't want to- we hire technical PMs for a reason. My company wouldn't want me to either- I'm too blunt and too honest.
*Responding to change
Everyone responds to change. And the general response by most agile places is the same as in non-agile- try to save room later in the schedule to meet the final release date you want for feature X. Because regardless of all the hand waving, there's still always a roadmap where you have features planned out for the next X quarters.
Here's what agile actually means in industry- that there's going to be some attempt at organizing work into X week batches. That's it. Do that, and they consider it agile.
I've worked at 2 startups that were sold for 125M and 225M, each making more than 5x the invested capital. At neither of them would seeing anyone there at 9 be more than an extreme rarity. 8-9 hour workdays were the norm.
No, those are things that agile *claims* to do. Whether it does that, what else it does, and how well it actually does those things varies greatly. "Agile" in my experience is usually just a buzzword meaning iterative development of any sort.
So in other words statistically insignificant. That's in line with all the startups I've worked for- we didn't lose people unless we fired them with very few exceptions.
Its not like this is an original idea. Written versions of the golden rule, which is pretty much what you're suggesting, date back over 2000 years. The reason it isn't a law is that its too vague to be useful and too full of holes to actually work for more than 30 seconds.
No, it doesn't. A free market has a precise definition. That's one requirement of a free market. There are others. One is low barriers to entry- that people can easily become suppliers in the market. Without that, there's an imbalance in power between suppliers and consumers allowing slightly monopoplistic pricing. Another is perfect knowledge- that all sides have full knowledge of the product and the market. This is impossible unless you're a doctor in healthcare.
Actually free markets in general are impossible, its like an ideal frictionless pully or massless string in physics. Some markets do a better job of modeling it that others, but healthcare is really far off.
How do monopolies override free will? They became monopolies because everyone gave them money/bought their product. They're the personification of free will.
How do secrets override your free will? I can't keep my sex life a secret? My political opinions? My vote? My bank account number?
Sorry, the real world has nuance. You can't solve all problems with a few simple and far reaching rules- you'll either fail to solve problems or actively cause them. There's very few areas of perfect black and white, and lots of areas where protecting one person's rights means violating another's. Life is messy.
GOP and dem are what other countries would consider coalitions. There's major factions within each and internal power struggles. The Tea Party is the far right faction of the GOP, and is roughly equivalent to a minority party in other countries. And they hold up quite a bit of legislation.