You do know that democracy doesn't mean that majority vote wins. That's just one way to be democratic. And it's actually a very sucky way. Because in all of the voting systems that we have across multiple countries, it means that the majority of votes don't count.
Think about it. All of the losing votes don't matter. And of the winning votes, only the ones required to win matter, the excess don't matter. In systems with more than two on the ballot, it's possible for 75% of the votes to not matter. And in systems where geographical regions elect municipals, which in turn elect nationals, because each region is a different size, it's possible for the national to win with even fewer actual votes.
The end result is that in a country of 30 million people, if 2 million people want something, they might still be the minority and never get it. Ever.
I like your animal analogy. Let's take it one further. You're on vacation sharing a hotel room with two friends. There are three of you. Do you sleep with the blinds open or closed? An entire third of you wants them closed, but two thirds wants them open. So do you punch the one guy in the face and tell him to get out? Do you force the one guy to sleep uncomfortably for a week?
Instead, consider an alternate form of democracy. We'll sleep with the blinds closed for one day, and open for two days. Oooh, complicated.
In a four-year term, maybe we'll have this government for three years, and that government for one year. You know, since a quarter of the population -- over seven million people -- want the second guy.
There are many other ways to go about things too -- that don't require seven million law-abiding citizens to want to leave.
You don't need to stick with the only thing you've ever been taught. You can innovate something better.
For the scenario to occur, not every teacher needs to be 60, just one. And in my scenario, the teacher is perfectly fit to have a weapon. But if you don't know why 30 12-year-old boys would try to take a gun from a 60-year-old teacher, then you've no idea what teachers learn in teachers' college.
Much of what a teacher does isn't teaching, it's controlling a group of 30 people who don't want to be there. It's not difficult to disrupt a class as a student -- in a way that doesn't hurt anyone, and in a way that doesn't warrant any sort of disciplinary action, but in a way that stops the whole teaching-learning thing from being effective. Currently, one slip-up by the teacher wastes a few minutes or the remainder of the class -- of teaching. It doesn't kill anyone.
No, and entire unnamed country is stupid because they've based their political system purely on the basis of resisting change. "Checks and Balances" were designed to ensure that no single person could screw things up. They have the side effect of ensuring that no million people can improve it.
That's the only problem.
So when you watch the episode of All In The Family from 1972 that discusses gun control and mass shootings, you discover that it's identical to last month's coverage by CNN. 40 years have gone by, and absolutely nothing has changed, not by one inch.
So because nothing can change, no one can try to attempt to fix a problem without a known-perfect-in-advance solution. And since no such solution is known in advance, the problem simply persists effectively unchanged. And all without anyone even trying anything.
Until you address old guns, and gun collections, no law on new guns matters at all. Not one little bit. Until you address different states having different laws, again, laws don't mean anything if you can cross a line and legally dodge them.
Until you address the fact that any 20 year-old will have access to any parent's gun collection -- welcome to being a family member -- a gun licence has zero meaning when the unlicenced family member (resident or non-resident) has equal access.
It's been suggested that a single lone teacher, surrounded by a classroom of children should carry a weapon. As though thirty 12-year-old boys wouldn't be enticed by a gun, or wouldn't be able to subdue a 60 year-old grandmother of four, or that the teacher would use the gun to protect the gun from the children -- by what, shooting them as she would an intruder?
There's a waiting period for a person buying their tenth gun. Does that make any sense to you? You don't remove their old guns if they suddenly aren't fit to buy a gun.
There's the ability to buy guns without a background check -- making any background check completely useless.
Most countries have fewer than 10% of the shootings that the U.S. has. Some as few as 1%. And most of those are drug, gang, and domestic violonce, which don't count to public concern.
The only problem is that you aren't able to even try to change anything, even if TEN MILLION people agree on something.
But hey, you've got one more month. I said last month that you guys have until the end of January (I actually said the middle, but I've been convinced to extend my personal due date) to do something, anything, I don't care if it works. If 20 young children are killed in a school, that ought to be enough to try something. If it isn't, just tell me how many children need to be killed by how many bullets before it's enough for you to do anything. I won't judge. I just want to know what that number is, so I don't need to ask again, and I can just wait for it happen.
a) it's a weapon that kills things and protects things outdoors, mobile, high-impact, without professional maintenance. Software doesn't have a chance, let alone cemputers and electronics in general.
b) old guns. do you intend to get them all back? will the new gun not protect the user from an old gun? will millions of old guns still be allowed to kill children?
c) screw-drivers exist. hobbyists exist. enthusiasts exist. do you intend to run around auditing people's gun collections to ensure that they haven't be tampered?
d) paper-photographs can fool A.I. vision sensors, but they don't stop bullets.
e) that's not security. it's just retarded.
f) might think about fixing the actual problem instead.
Like I just said in your other thread, I chose a business that required little capital, and I had my own money. Not my family's. Mine. When I was twelve I went door to door offering to rake leaves. I got many repeat clients. Then I chose an area with huge properties, and got paid better money. Then I learned to build web-sites when HTML 0.9 was new. And I got paid to type at a desk -- with the one computer in the school library that I volunteered to maintain for the school.
So with zero dollars, I had people paying me hundreds. Then family friends noticed the web, and asked me to build sites for their businesses. Then I got paid in thousands, and still had zero expenses -- though I bought a computer, which lasted 10 years. I eventually learned Perl, and rented a shared server for $40/month per client -- paid for by the clients.
Now my business has about $5'000 per month of expenses. And I couldn't be happier.
I chose a career with low start-up costs, and I used the money I earned raking leavings when I was 12. My business started with $400/month of expenses. The first few clients covered that, and I had savings to cover me. I've always owned my car -- buying cars that I can afford is a principle with me. I've always lived in a house that I can afford too. And in my world, "afford" means that I'm accumulating savings.
How long have you been working that you haven't any savings whatsoever? Perhaps you should just go out and get a better job. Or perhaps you should have started your own company long ago.
Again, you don't need someone else to give you a job, nor to give you their money. No you won't be able to start your own particle accelerator research company. But there are hundreds of small business services that don't need more than ten thousand as startup capital. And you've got friends and family right?
Hey look, if you don't have friends that'll believe in you, and you don't have family who'll help you, and your current employer doesn't pay you enough to have any savings, and you've over-spent on your car and your house and your lifestyle, and no one will give you venture capital, then maybe you simply aren't someone to believe in.
All the more reason to show the world that you can. There are other business ventures that require $40 of start-up capital. I think you can scrounge that easily enough.
I'm in agreement. I'm a little less focused on success, so I'd say that not every month would be "intensely hard", but certainly many would. And the no vacations thing is more about the love of the work than the lack of the time. But yeah, it's all there. But it's not just hard, and it's not just intense. It looks hard, and it looks intense, but it's always exactly what you want to do, so it's not difficult and it's very fun and rewarding. Especially the 12 hour days.
As someone whose done it more than five times in his life, I can tell you that there really are only three skills that one needs to be an entrepreneur of a small business.
The third one is a self-motivated attitude, which doesn't really count because it amounts to wanting to do what you're doing, and that's why you started in the first place.
The second is to realize that you don't need to jump all of the hurdles at once. You can solve one problem at a time as you encounter them. And shifting your business into a slightly different direction is a valid option. So navigating the client-space is a skill. To see what's working, what isn't, which clients to drop, and which clients are worth keeping. This can be easy if you monitor where dollars come and go, or where time comes and goes. It's not too difficult, but it's not very easy either.
The first is the big one. Most people don't realize that when they are really good at their jobs, everything's been set up for them. For example, my father's a fantastic executive. But payroll is done for him, hiring is done for him, product design is done for him, etc. etc. etc.. When you roll your own, you need to be capable of making EVERY decision from the pizza dough to the pizza toppings. You can't every say "whatever, anything's good" because you're still the one who needs to choose. So you need to be capable of making trivial decisions that don't matter, as well as big decisions that do. Along those same lines, you need to be able to do a semi-decent job at each stage of the process. So I build internet applications and business web-sites to automate human tasks. It's not good enough that I can program great web-sites. I need to design databases, talk to clients, choose suppliers, handle invoices, do the testing, plan the design, select colours, etc. etc. etc.. I'm responsible for every element of the path. That's difficult for most people -- soup to nuts.
Oh come on. If you're a technical person, you know exactly what "extremely rusty" means. It means that you're in the 98th percentile, and not the 99th. It means that you've lost confidence in the skills that you used to have, that'll come back in three days of trying.
But more importantly, it means that no matter how many times he mucks up on day one, he'll be able to fix it on day two. So if a project that should take a week, takes two weeks, and he only charges for the one, then it'll take a few months to get going at full speed, but it'll happen.
He's not a coward. He just hasn't done it for a while. The good news is that five years ago, high-end network hardware is basically what smaller businesses are using today. I mean, that was the draft version of 802.11n, and now it's no longer a draft. Cisco things haven't changed that much. And either way, it's all so very well documented in this industry that he'll learn it in a matter of weeks.
And besides, you know the mantra of a small business: "Yes, I can do that." No one ever said "Yes, I know how to do that.". We pick things up very quickly. That's what makes us technical people.
The question in any small business is only one of two: "Do I know more about it than the client knows?" or "Can I do it much faster/better than the client can do it?", If either answer is yes, then you're set.
Then you don't work in an office building. He's said that he's highly skilled with something. That something is used in most office buildings. There are hundreds of office buildings each with hundreds of offices each with dozens of desks in my city alone. Each of those desks has an employee who lives in or near that city. I'm sure some of them are his neighbours.
As a small business, he doesn't need a thousand clients. He needs three. Maybe ten. Any small business takes two years to get rolling. If you don't think that he can apply skills over that period of time to acquire a few clients, then you must not think much of his skills.
And keep in mind, he doesn't need to use the top-end of his skills on day one. Let's say that he can design and build routers from paper-clips to manage thousand-node networks. Well he can still start off assembling networks for a business with two dozen desks. Think about how well he can differentiate between linksys and dlink hardware. And imagine how well he can plan for scalability. And imagine how few problems he'll have, and how rarely he'll make a mistake. Those are all very well sellable skills.
Stop thinking that someone else has a job for you. Start creating jobs for someone else. If you're over the age of 30, your community needs you to create jobs, not take them.
You've got an interesting world of experience. Cross-industry experience no less. Start your own company -- don't let the big word fool you, it's meaningless. You'll pay far fewer taxes, you'll be able to get free and very inexpensive employees from schools, co-ops, interns, neighbours, and anyone willing to "start at the bottom".
It needn't be a big company. Just you and a physical assitant is all you need. And you want the physical assistant a) so you can shift your business into a different path to be flexible in five years and b) so you can worry about business admin stuff like client relations and invoicing and c) because someone should cover for you when you're on a beach somewhere enjoying life.
Clients don't tend to ask for credentials -- I own and run a programming company, and no client has ever asked. They ask about skills. You've got 'em.
And since it's your business, you can get just about any client by offering to do the work and not collect any money until the end. It's only a risk if you don't know what you're doing. If you do, you manage to buy a new client with nothing more than delaying payment by a month or two. That's effectively free client acquisition.
Dude, just dive in. Expect to pay $2'000 per year on accountants and lawyers, just to get it off your plate and so your government talks to them instead of you. You don't need insurance unless you're punching holes into walls -- and those premiums aren't a big deal either.
Get decent business cards, and give them to your neighbours. Each of them works in an office building somewhere. And each of their employers needs networking done at some point.
Take small jobs, they turn into big jobs. Take small clients, they turn into big clients. Take clients with bounded projects that have a start and an end. They'll become your best repeat business. Don't spend more than 25% of your typical month on a single client (with many exceptions of course).
Small business helps small business. Talk to other small business owners. Even your competitors. It doesn't hurt my business to help my small-business competitors. It just improves both of our small businesses vs the many many others. If you've got no one to talk to, talk to me.
I used to say the same thing, but since I program something different every day, I can't remember 300 projects any better than I can confuse them.
But either way, you're not asking him to use it. You're asking him to walk you through it. If one line of code yields twenty-seven sentences of explanation, or if ten lines of code yields three words of explanation, then it'll be obvious to everyone.
Remember, it's not about right or wrong. It's about whether or not everyone's happy with the explanation. If they are, then they only need to learn to read it. If they aren't, then it really doesn't matter anymore.
if no one else can, the solution might be to teach the others. don't make someone stop writing code that works just because others aren't good enough to read it. either hire better readers or teach them. otherwise you're angling to have the most easily-read code, as opposed to the most something-else code. and since the client doesn't pay based on code legibility (that's not true for all projects, but for most), you should be optimizing your code for its functionality, or its flexibility, or its size or something that matters to the client.
Yes, different is bad. But it can be solved in either of two directions. You don't need to change the code. You can change the developers.
So you define what good code is -- in my world, that's code that you can read two years later within 10 minutes -- and then you make everyone use that style.
It's not about the syntax, or the conventions. It's about the end-result.
You double-down. You take two-year old code that he's writted, and you ask him to walk you through it today. If he can, at reasonable speed with reasonable prep, you lose and you'd better start learning to read his code which conclusively isn't bad it's just different.
So instead of planting millions of trees (these days, in most places, paper comes from farmed trees), you're going to destroy the tree-planting business, and wind up with fewer trees on the planet. What a swell idea. You know there are more chickens than ever before right? I eat about 100 chickens every year. Chickens are probably the most successful bird species on Earch.
And whereas I can have tend pages of paper on my desk, I can't have more than six on my screens -- and I have six thousand dollars of screens on my desk. And I still can't highlight or sketch a diagram on my screens with any degree of ease and precision.
And as for the environment, you're going to replace farmed and then recycled and then composted paper for electricity and plastic and garbage and mercury. Again, good idea.
I certainly see how Google benefits. But not how humans nor the environment benefit at all.
great job saying nothing with no argument to explain why. Maybe you should try putting your name onto your opinion; that may improve the specificity with which you make an argument.
and it allso benefits greatly from the fact that other stars exist. however, we're talking about DIRECTLY benefiting. Not butterflies in Japan. My clients are not courthouses, not do they build roads.
and if you believe what you're saying, you might try putting your name onto it.
Slashdot Mirror
You do know that democracy doesn't mean that majority vote wins. That's just one way to be democratic. And it's actually a very sucky way. Because in all of the voting systems that we have across multiple countries, it means that the majority of votes don't count.
Think about it. All of the losing votes don't matter. And of the winning votes, only the ones required to win matter, the excess don't matter. In systems with more than two on the ballot, it's possible for 75% of the votes to not matter. And in systems where geographical regions elect municipals, which in turn elect nationals, because each region is a different size, it's possible for the national to win with even fewer actual votes.
The end result is that in a country of 30 million people, if 2 million people want something, they might still be the minority and never get it. Ever.
I like your animal analogy. Let's take it one further. You're on vacation sharing a hotel room with two friends. There are three of you. Do you sleep with the blinds open or closed? An entire third of you wants them closed, but two thirds wants them open. So do you punch the one guy in the face and tell him to get out? Do you force the one guy to sleep uncomfortably for a week?
Instead, consider an alternate form of democracy. We'll sleep with the blinds closed for one day, and open for two days. Oooh, complicated.
In a four-year term, maybe we'll have this government for three years, and that government for one year. You know, since a quarter of the population -- over seven million people -- want the second guy.
There are many other ways to go about things too -- that don't require seven million law-abiding citizens to want to leave.
You don't need to stick with the only thing you've ever been taught. You can innovate something better.
For the scenario to occur, not every teacher needs to be 60, just one. And in my scenario, the teacher is perfectly fit to have a weapon. But if you don't know why 30 12-year-old boys would try to take a gun from a 60-year-old teacher, then you've no idea what teachers learn in teachers' college.
Much of what a teacher does isn't teaching, it's controlling a group of 30 people who don't want to be there. It's not difficult to disrupt a class as a student -- in a way that doesn't hurt anyone, and in a way that doesn't warrant any sort of disciplinary action, but in a way that stops the whole teaching-learning thing from being effective. Currently, one slip-up by the teacher wastes a few minutes or the remainder of the class -- of teaching. It doesn't kill anyone.
No, and entire unnamed country is stupid because they've based their political system purely on the basis of resisting change. "Checks and Balances" were designed to ensure that no single person could screw things up. They have the side effect of ensuring that no million people can improve it.
That's the only problem.
So when you watch the episode of All In The Family from 1972 that discusses gun control and mass shootings, you discover that it's identical to last month's coverage by CNN. 40 years have gone by, and absolutely nothing has changed, not by one inch.
So because nothing can change, no one can try to attempt to fix a problem without a known-perfect-in-advance solution. And since no such solution is known in advance, the problem simply persists effectively unchanged. And all without anyone even trying anything.
Until you address old guns, and gun collections, no law on new guns matters at all. Not one little bit.
Until you address different states having different laws, again, laws don't mean anything if you can cross a line and legally dodge them.
Until you address the fact that any 20 year-old will have access to any parent's gun collection -- welcome to being a family member -- a gun licence has zero meaning when the unlicenced family member (resident or non-resident) has equal access.
It's been suggested that a single lone teacher, surrounded by a classroom of children should carry a weapon. As though thirty 12-year-old boys wouldn't be enticed by a gun, or wouldn't be able to subdue a 60 year-old grandmother of four, or that the teacher would use the gun to protect the gun from the children -- by what, shooting them as she would an intruder?
There's a waiting period for a person buying their tenth gun. Does that make any sense to you? You don't remove their old guns if they suddenly aren't fit to buy a gun.
There's the ability to buy guns without a background check -- making any background check completely useless.
Most countries have fewer than 10% of the shootings that the U.S. has. Some as few as 1%. And most of those are drug, gang, and domestic violonce, which don't count to public concern.
The only problem is that you aren't able to even try to change anything, even if TEN MILLION people agree on something.
But hey, you've got one more month. I said last month that you guys have until the end of January (I actually said the middle, but I've been convinced to extend my personal due date) to do something, anything, I don't care if it works. If 20 young children are killed in a school, that ought to be enough to try something. If it isn't, just tell me how many children need to be killed by how many bullets before it's enough for you to do anything. I won't judge. I just want to know what that number is, so I don't need to ask again, and I can just wait for it happen.
a) it's a weapon that kills things and protects things outdoors, mobile, high-impact, without professional maintenance. Software doesn't have a chance, let alone cemputers and electronics in general.
b) old guns. do you intend to get them all back? will the new gun not protect the user from an old gun? will millions of old guns still be allowed to kill children?
c) screw-drivers exist. hobbyists exist. enthusiasts exist. do you intend to run around auditing people's gun collections to ensure that they haven't be tampered?
d) paper-photographs can fool A.I. vision sensors, but they don't stop bullets.
e) that's not security. it's just retarded.
f) might think about fixing the actual problem instead.
Like I just said in your other thread, I chose a business that required little capital, and I had my own money. Not my family's. Mine. When I was twelve I went door to door offering to rake leaves. I got many repeat clients. Then I chose an area with huge properties, and got paid better money. Then I learned to build web-sites when HTML 0.9 was new. And I got paid to type at a desk -- with the one computer in the school library that I volunteered to maintain for the school.
So with zero dollars, I had people paying me hundreds. Then family friends noticed the web, and asked me to build sites for their businesses. Then I got paid in thousands, and still had zero expenses -- though I bought a computer, which lasted 10 years. I eventually learned Perl, and rented a shared server for $40/month per client -- paid for by the clients.
Now my business has about $5'000 per month of expenses. And I couldn't be happier.
I chose a career with low start-up costs, and I used the money I earned raking leavings when I was 12. My business started with $400/month of expenses. The first few clients covered that, and I had savings to cover me. I've always owned my car -- buying cars that I can afford is a principle with me. I've always lived in a house that I can afford too. And in my world, "afford" means that I'm accumulating savings.
How long have you been working that you haven't any savings whatsoever? Perhaps you should just go out and get a better job. Or perhaps you should have started your own company long ago.
Again, you don't need someone else to give you a job, nor to give you their money. No you won't be able to start your own particle accelerator research company. But there are hundreds of small business services that don't need more than ten thousand as startup capital. And you've got friends and family right?
Hey look, if you don't have friends that'll believe in you, and you don't have family who'll help you, and your current employer doesn't pay you enough to have any savings, and you've over-spent on your car and your house and your lifestyle, and no one will give you venture capital, then maybe you simply aren't someone to believe in.
All the more reason to show the world that you can. There are other business ventures that require $40 of start-up capital. I think you can scrounge that easily enough.
I'm in agreement. I'm a little less focused on success, so I'd say that not every month would be "intensely hard", but certainly many would. And the no vacations thing is more about the love of the work than the lack of the time. But yeah, it's all there. But it's not just hard, and it's not just intense. It looks hard, and it looks intense, but it's always exactly what you want to do, so it's not difficult and it's very fun and rewarding. Especially the 12 hour days.
As someone whose done it more than five times in his life, I can tell you that there really are only three skills that one needs to be an entrepreneur of a small business.
The third one is a self-motivated attitude, which doesn't really count because it amounts to wanting to do what you're doing, and that's why you started in the first place.
The second is to realize that you don't need to jump all of the hurdles at once. You can solve one problem at a time as you encounter them. And shifting your business into a slightly different direction is a valid option. So navigating the client-space is a skill. To see what's working, what isn't, which clients to drop, and which clients are worth keeping. This can be easy if you monitor where dollars come and go, or where time comes and goes. It's not too difficult, but it's not very easy either.
The first is the big one. Most people don't realize that when they are really good at their jobs, everything's been set up for them. For example, my father's a fantastic executive. But payroll is done for him, hiring is done for him, product design is done for him, etc. etc. etc.. When you roll your own, you need to be capable of making EVERY decision from the pizza dough to the pizza toppings. You can't every say "whatever, anything's good" because you're still the one who needs to choose. So you need to be capable of making trivial decisions that don't matter, as well as big decisions that do. Along those same lines, you need to be able to do a semi-decent job at each stage of the process. So I build internet applications and business web-sites to automate human tasks. It's not good enough that I can program great web-sites. I need to design databases, talk to clients, choose suppliers, handle invoices, do the testing, plan the design, select colours, etc. etc. etc.. I'm responsible for every element of the path. That's difficult for most people -- soup to nuts.
Oh come on. If you're a technical person, you know exactly what "extremely rusty" means. It means that you're in the 98th percentile, and not the 99th. It means that you've lost confidence in the skills that you used to have, that'll come back in three days of trying.
But more importantly, it means that no matter how many times he mucks up on day one, he'll be able to fix it on day two. So if a project that should take a week, takes two weeks, and he only charges for the one, then it'll take a few months to get going at full speed, but it'll happen.
He's not a coward. He just hasn't done it for a while. The good news is that five years ago, high-end network hardware is basically what smaller businesses are using today. I mean, that was the draft version of 802.11n, and now it's no longer a draft. Cisco things haven't changed that much. And either way, it's all so very well documented in this industry that he'll learn it in a matter of weeks.
And besides, you know the mantra of a small business: "Yes, I can do that." No one ever said "Yes, I know how to do that.". We pick things up very quickly. That's what makes us technical people.
The question in any small business is only one of two: "Do I know more about it than the client knows?" or "Can I do it much faster/better than the client can do it?", If either answer is yes, then you're set.
Then you don't work in an office building. He's said that he's highly skilled with something. That something is used in most office buildings. There are hundreds of office buildings each with hundreds of offices each with dozens of desks in my city alone. Each of those desks has an employee who lives in or near that city. I'm sure some of them are his neighbours.
As a small business, he doesn't need a thousand clients. He needs three. Maybe ten. Any small business takes two years to get rolling. If you don't think that he can apply skills over that period of time to acquire a few clients, then you must not think much of his skills.
And keep in mind, he doesn't need to use the top-end of his skills on day one. Let's say that he can design and build routers from paper-clips to manage thousand-node networks. Well he can still start off assembling networks for a business with two dozen desks. Think about how well he can differentiate between linksys and dlink hardware. And imagine how well he can plan for scalability. And imagine how few problems he'll have, and how rarely he'll make a mistake. Those are all very well sellable skills.
Stop thinking that someone else has a job for you. Start creating jobs for someone else. If you're over the age of 30, your community needs you to create jobs, not take them.
You've got an interesting world of experience. Cross-industry experience no less. Start your own company -- don't let the big word fool you, it's meaningless. You'll pay far fewer taxes, you'll be able to get free and very inexpensive employees from schools, co-ops, interns, neighbours, and anyone willing to "start at the bottom".
It needn't be a big company. Just you and a physical assitant is all you need. And you want the physical assistant a) so you can shift your business into a different path to be flexible in five years and b) so you can worry about business admin stuff like client relations and invoicing and c) because someone should cover for you when you're on a beach somewhere enjoying life.
Clients don't tend to ask for credentials -- I own and run a programming company, and no client has ever asked. They ask about skills. You've got 'em.
And since it's your business, you can get just about any client by offering to do the work and not collect any money until the end. It's only a risk if you don't know what you're doing. If you do, you manage to buy a new client with nothing more than delaying payment by a month or two. That's effectively free client acquisition.
Dude, just dive in. Expect to pay $2'000 per year on accountants and lawyers, just to get it off your plate and so your government talks to them instead of you. You don't need insurance unless you're punching holes into walls -- and those premiums aren't a big deal either.
Get decent business cards, and give them to your neighbours. Each of them works in an office building somewhere. And each of their employers needs networking done at some point.
Take small jobs, they turn into big jobs. Take small clients, they turn into big clients. Take clients with bounded projects that have a start and an end. They'll become your best repeat business. Don't spend more than 25% of your typical month on a single client (with many exceptions of course).
Small business helps small business. Talk to other small business owners. Even your competitors. It doesn't hurt my business to help my small-business competitors. It just improves both of our small businesses vs the many many others. If you've got no one to talk to, talk to me.
I used to say the same thing, but since I program something different every day, I can't remember 300 projects any better than I can confuse them.
But either way, you're not asking him to use it. You're asking him to walk you through it. If one line of code yields twenty-seven sentences of explanation, or if ten lines of code yields three words of explanation, then it'll be obvious to everyone.
Remember, it's not about right or wrong. It's about whether or not everyone's happy with the explanation. If they are, then they only need to learn to read it. If they aren't, then it really doesn't matter anymore.
if no one else can, the solution might be to teach the others. don't make someone stop writing code that works just because others aren't good enough to read it. either hire better readers or teach them. otherwise you're angling to have the most easily-read code, as opposed to the most something-else code. and since the client doesn't pay based on code legibility (that's not true for all projects, but for most), you should be optimizing your code for its functionality, or its flexibility, or its size or something that matters to the client.
Yes, different is bad. But it can be solved in either of two directions. You don't need to change the code. You can change the developers.
So you define what good code is -- in my world, that's code that you can read two years later within 10 minutes -- and then you make everyone use that style.
It's not about the syntax, or the conventions. It's about the end-result.
You double-down. You take two-year old code that he's writted, and you ask him to walk you through it today. If he can, at reasonable speed with reasonable prep, you lose and you'd better start learning to read his code which conclusively isn't bad it's just different.
So instead of planting millions of trees (these days, in most places, paper comes from farmed trees), you're going to destroy the tree-planting business, and wind up with fewer trees on the planet. What a swell idea. You know there are more chickens than ever before right? I eat about 100 chickens every year. Chickens are probably the most successful bird species on Earch.
And whereas I can have tend pages of paper on my desk, I can't have more than six on my screens -- and I have six thousand dollars of screens on my desk. And I still can't highlight or sketch a diagram on my screens with any degree of ease and precision.
And as for the environment, you're going to replace farmed and then recycled and then composted paper for electricity and plastic and garbage and mercury. Again, good idea.
I certainly see how Google benefits. But not how humans nor the environment benefit at all.
great job saying nothing with no argument to explain why. Maybe you should try putting your name onto your opinion; that may improve the specificity with which you make an argument.
Like I said. You might want to change your tax laws.
Don't just respond to one sentence. Stop quoting things and start having your own full opinion that can stand on its own.
Next time, read harder.
read harder. no one's talking about not taxing income.
Hmm, someone not willing to put their name onto their opinion. Hmm, I'm not willing to waste my time reading it.
judging by the scores, it's just you.
If you won't associate your words with your name, then I'm not interested in reading them.
Might want to introduce yourself, if you're going to express an opinion. If you aren't willing to put your name on it, you probably don't believe it.
you've totally missed the whole company vs citizen issue. read harder.
and it allso benefits greatly from the fact that other stars exist. however, we're talking about DIRECTLY benefiting. Not butterflies in Japan. My clients are not courthouses, not do they build roads.
and if you believe what you're saying, you might try putting your name onto it.