It's good that you are putting aside the debate and focusing on your own situation.
Homeschooling is a huge time commitment. It's a defining lifestyle choice. It can work well or not. I know because I've seen and done both.
If you are correct, and I'll come back to that in a minute... if you are correct about your wife not wanting to let go, that in my experience does not work out well for the kids. In my experience it leads to a lack of independence in the kids. I've seen kids who were so carefully managed that the only control they had over their own lives was when they were misbehaving. It escalated as they got older.
On the other hand I've also seen kids who enjoyed their homeschool/co-op school lifestyle and thrived in it.
We married and planned on homeschooling. But (much longer story short) after awhile we realized that we hated homeschooling. It was clear that we and our children would be better off making the best of our community schools, in spite of their reputation. This has worked out well for us. And yet I know other families who still homeschool and are doing fine.
So first of all, this is a decision for you and your wife to make. It's like deciding what state to live in. Florida isn't objectively better than Arizona in any meaningful way. (We could discuss it on slashdot though.) The outcome will be what you make of it.
Which brings me to the real point. You did really well in school. You thrived. Your success today is largely based on your education.
Your wife is bringing a very different perspective to the decision.
I advise you to put aside your preconceived notions about why your wife thinks this way.
You and your wife must be an extraordinary people. Otherwise, why would people who chose such different life paths have managed to meet and get married? Yet, a puzzle, you aren't on the same page on schooling your children. Investigate.
I also advise you to look at what attracts you to your wife, and look at this disagreement you have about homeschooling, and see them as related. Look at this as some kind of anomaly to study. Get to know your wife better. Come from the perspective that she is awesome so this must be awesome too, if I only knew.
Roads are something we all own and have a right to. So it hope it remains possible to manually drive a car on them, if for no other reason than for transportation during emergencies.
However, everyone here seems to assume that an auto-car has a driver in the driver's seat. Why exactly?
In my auto car I will turn the driver's seat around and talk to people. Or I'll sit in the passenger seat so I have lap room to do some work on the way to work. I may not even be in it. My car will drop me off at the front door of my office. I don't care where it parks. It can go fill up or charge somewhere far away from my office. It can go run errands for me to pick up stuff I bought online and/or rent itself out to make deliveries or taxi for awhile.
In fact, we may have destroyed the mass market for individual car ownership.
Contracting through your own corporation can be easy. I have two organizations that help me with it. A CPA firm obviously, and a PEO. PEO stands for Professional Employment Orgainization. I love my PEO, which is why people don't use them. Imagine that on a t-shirt.
PEO's are a good deal. They take you, your corporation and your contracting money and make you legally into a W2 employee. You pay them a fee per pay cycle to do it. They administrate your health plan (sorry, no volume disounts, at least in my US state), retirement, withholdings, and if you do end up hiring another person later, they make sure you do everything just so, so you stay out of accidental legal trouble.
Furthermore, you get to design your own pay cycle, I have a two week one (not bi-monthly mind you, two weeks). It's nice. You get to set up everything the way you want so it's favorable to you. I just have to tell the payroll guy how much to run every two weeks and the direct deposits happen. There's a little bit of bookkeeping you need to do once a year for the CPA, but that's really tiny.
Between your PEO and your CPA you'll have a couple of meetings up front and then you're good to go.
I'm a little surprised more contractors don't use a PEO now. Maybe because PEO is a horrendous acronym.
It's not just the incompetent that have lost their jobs- it's also the ignorant young guys who might have become good programmers if given half a chance.
It's not like you don't have the whole stinking internet available help you, let you hack on production code, or promote projects of your own creation.
If you can tolerate a startup environment there's a glut of python positions IMHO.
Boo-hoo-ing about the inability to find good programming work in the climate of 2007 is asinine. Outsourcing is a lot more narrow than the whiners would have us believe.
Since it's fashionable to bash H&R Block in this thread, I thought I'd do some good and help you all pick a good independent CPA. I did and never looked back. I made one error. So I hope I can help the next geek avoid a pothole.
Assume that sometime in the future you might want to quit the day job and run your own technology company and make your million, a la Paul Graham. You will want someone to help you with money and advice.
Your CPA, if he's good, will open the door to untold riches and contacts. So while any qualified CPA ought to be able to handle your filings, what sets them apart is their Rolodex. Mine was only okay this way, and I'm not switching to another until I have a really strong reason.
So, all that said, if I were to go CPA shopping today, I'd ask more than one candidate:
"I can imagine that in the future I will want to build a company building technology in the [Real Estate] industry. [Fill in your weird talent or special license.] I'm going to come to you and ask if you know any interested investors. If I did that today, what would you be able to do for me?"
Compare and contrast the answers and you should find a CPA that will make you very happy.
Someday when you have that company and will get a SCARY letter from the IRS. You will immediately call your CPA and that's the last you hear of it.
We have dedicated 3d ASICs on our graphics boards now, we're considering physics ASICs, now AI ASICs? It's time to end this silliness and start shipping FPGA's in consumer products!
It doesn't help anyone if we throw around terms like "mine" and "yours" when dealing with real estate. I only know basic US real esate law. The idea of "it's my house" is intuitive. It is also false. (here)
Land is scarce, especially land in proximity to other desirable land. When you "have title," I emphasize, "have title" to land, you have certain rights over that land, possession, enjoyment (use in any legal manner), control, exclusion (keep others from entering), and disposition (transfer interest). You also have rights to the air above, ground beneath, and rights to use adjacent bodies of water.
Because land is so scarce, it is valuable, and these rights are partitioned in all kinds of ways. The rights are not only sold piecemeal, groups of the rights can be divided piecemeal between multiple people with different kinds of transfer abilities.
And have I mentioned various kinds of leases and wills?
One of the functions of local government is to maintain a database of who has title to what land in a given area. But these rights can be partitioned with such complexity that it is a serious undertaking to answer the question of exactly who has which land interests on a given parcel, which may itself have been divided!
So what is the local government to do? They maintain a database of "deeds". Deeds are contracts which transfer rights from one party to another, or correct errors (spelling anyone?) in previous deeds.
In other words, title is determined by examining a natural language log structure filesystem. Futhermore, the records in these databases only go back, what, 60 - 100 years? You think you own your home, but there may be a valid legal interest infringing yours.
Do you see why you need title insurance?
My intution is that they tried to simplify things in Canada. The simplification was probably to "clarify" ownerships by giving the government more authority to assert exactly who has title. This "favors" the mortagage company in these exploited cases. I think the intention was to reduce risk for everyone involved. Inadvertently they have introduced a legal vulnerability.
And you thought your OS vendor was a little slow to respond.:-)
I'm a real esate agent in the US. I don't think that scam would be as easy to carry off here. Loan companies have less power and would probably be out of luck. When people default on loans here the loan companies often have to work for over a year to get title to the home and resell it. It is so expensive for them that they will often sell a home with a poorly performing loan at a steep discount just to get out without paying all the legal fees. The details vary from state to state.
Even if a homeowner found themselves in this situation, instead of petitioning a central government agency (which has now power except to record deeds), they'd have a ton of private parties exposed to the transaction to sue, including private title insurers, covering the owner's interest in the property, a meaty legal target indeed.
I don't doubt that precautions were taken. In fact, I think given the nature of what they did and the condition the patients were likely in to begin with, their results are extraordinary. Their research should continue. I expect their results will improve. But it should be noted, that it is a crude invasive procedure, just not the cutting kind.
Explain to him that you need to chat with him about an important matter, and that you'd like to buy him dinner and talk it over. (It's a him right?)
Over dinner be honest and explain what you are and aren't able to do for him in the future, maybe even why, you have really appreciated his business until now, you don't have the time you used to have to help with the "other" systems, etc.
A free meal goes a long way towards smoothing these things over.
This is almost in the ballpark of reasonable behavior in the grand scheme of things. Considering this is a gigantic buearacracy, it's standard behavior, regardless of party.
Consider this rationale: The American synfuel folks have a role to play in developing alternatives to oil. If the credit dies due to oil price fluctuations, they die. Killing them off isn't going to help anybody if USA is serious about energy independence. Therefore, tweak the rules as a stopgap measure, then do something more permanent in 2007.
Furthermore, we are talking about a corporate tax. People think that corporate tax somehow "sticks it to the man." This is ridiculous. The tax is always passed down to Joe Consumer, only it is hidden, folded into a purchase price. The fact that some supplier in the chain pays less in taxes is public record. All parties negotiating with them are privy to the record and can use it against them. In a competetive environment, the savings will show up at the final sale.
It's probably was the most expedient way to handle the situation.
A republican running in Utah is going to have a better chance of winning anyway. Hey, it would be nice to see two pro-tech-freedom candidates running against each other!
A lot of good could be done by "us" (whatever that means) getting behind a promoting Gnu Radio. Gnu Radio turns the whole DAC/ADC issue into a freedom of speech issue, muscling a constitutional issue over the law, and buying "us" time to make software defeat the technical mechanisms.
By promoting Gnu Radio "we" get to highlight the neccesity of freedom of communication, the benefits it could bring in disasters, etc. It would be a welcome distraction from the usual piracy debates.
I live in Indianapolis and make a nice salary for around here. If I had to live on my current salary in the Bay Area or New York, I'd probably be living in a two room apartment and commute 2-3 hours a day. Here in Indy, I live in a 2800 square foot home 20 minutes from work on a good day.
The thought that my company would be acquired and I'd have to move to the Bay scares me.
If I read correctly, the "DRM" on this machine is largely that you can put whatever you like in the portable device, but you can't take stuff off, only delete it. Since you always have your dish DVR as your backup, that has a certain simple appeal.
Of course you can crack the usb interface all day, blah blah blah, but the "one way" approach is the most sensible thing I've heard of in this space, especially since it is just an extension of a larger backup device.
I'm a (not gay) guy and I find the same things offensive, but for the reason that my wife deserves better.
It's the same as movies and tv. They folks making the games suddeny have to clean up their act to attract a larger market. (simple economics rescues morality; go figure!) I, for one, am glad.
Slashdot Mirror
More importantly indeed.
It's good that you are putting aside the debate and focusing on your own situation.
Homeschooling is a huge time commitment. It's a defining lifestyle choice. It can work well or not. I know because I've seen and done both.
If you are correct, and I'll come back to that in a minute... if you are correct about your wife not wanting to let go, that in my experience does not work out well for the kids. In my experience it leads to a lack of independence in the kids. I've seen kids who were so carefully managed that the only control they had over their own lives was when they were misbehaving. It escalated as they got older.
On the other hand I've also seen kids who enjoyed their homeschool/co-op school lifestyle and thrived in it.
We married and planned on homeschooling. But (much longer story short) after awhile we realized that we hated homeschooling. It was clear that we and our children would be better off making the best of our community schools, in spite of their reputation. This has worked out well for us. And yet I know other families who still homeschool and are doing fine.
So first of all, this is a decision for you and your wife to make. It's like deciding what state to live in. Florida isn't objectively better than Arizona in any meaningful way. (We could discuss it on slashdot though.) The outcome will be what you make of it.
Which brings me to the real point. You did really well in school. You thrived. Your success today is largely based on your education.
Your wife is bringing a very different perspective to the decision.
I advise you to put aside your preconceived notions about why your wife thinks this way.
You and your wife must be an extraordinary people. Otherwise, why would people who chose such different life paths have managed to meet and get married? Yet, a puzzle, you aren't on the same page on schooling your children. Investigate.
I also advise you to look at what attracts you to your wife, and look at this disagreement you have about homeschooling, and see them as related. Look at this as some kind of anomaly to study. Get to know your wife better. Come from the perspective that she is awesome so this must be awesome too, if I only knew.
Happy hunting.
Roads are something we all own and have a right to. So it hope it remains possible to manually drive a car on them, if for no other reason than for transportation during emergencies.
However, everyone here seems to assume that an auto-car has a driver in the driver's seat. Why exactly?
In my auto car I will turn the driver's seat around and talk to people. Or I'll sit in the passenger seat so I have lap room to do some work on the way to work. I may not even be in it. My car will drop me off at the front door of my office. I don't care where it parks. It can go fill up or charge somewhere far away from my office. It can go run errands for me to pick up stuff I bought online and/or rent itself out to make deliveries or taxi for awhile.
In fact, we may have destroyed the mass market for individual car ownership.
I don't care if it interacts in "interesting" ways. Do my housework. Also, mow the lawn.
Better instructions...
http://www.hpmuseum.org/srinst.htm
Contracting through your own corporation can be easy. I have two organizations that help me with it. A CPA firm obviously, and a PEO. PEO stands for Professional Employment Orgainization. I love my PEO, which is why people don't use them. Imagine that on a t-shirt.
PEO's are a good deal. They take you, your corporation and your contracting money and make you legally into a W2 employee. You pay them a fee per pay cycle to do it. They administrate your health plan (sorry, no volume disounts, at least in my US state), retirement, withholdings, and if you do end up hiring another person later, they make sure you do everything just so, so you stay out of accidental legal trouble.
Furthermore, you get to design your own pay cycle, I have a two week one (not bi-monthly mind you, two weeks). It's nice. You get to set up everything the way you want so it's favorable to you. I just have to tell the payroll guy how much to run every two weeks and the direct deposits happen. There's a little bit of bookkeeping you need to do once a year for the CPA, but that's really tiny.
Between your PEO and your CPA you'll have a couple of meetings up front and then you're good to go.
I'm a little surprised more contractors don't use a PEO now. Maybe because PEO is a horrendous acronym.
It's not like you don't have the whole stinking internet available help you, let you hack on production code, or promote projects of your own creation.
If you can tolerate a startup environment there's a glut of python positions IMHO.
Boo-hoo-ing about the inability to find good programming work in the climate of 2007 is asinine. Outsourcing is a lot more narrow than the whiners would have us believe.
viper-mode + vimpulse. Visual mode in emacs. Twisted!
I pledge, solemnly, to only sue people with deep pockets.
Do you feel better now?
Since it's fashionable to bash H&R Block in this thread, I thought I'd do some good and help you all pick a good independent
CPA. I did and never looked back. I made one error. So I hope I can help the next geek avoid a pothole.
Assume that sometime in the future you might want to quit the day job and run your own technology company and make your million, a la Paul Graham. You will want someone to help you with money and advice.
Your CPA, if he's good, will open the door to untold riches and contacts. So while any qualified CPA ought to be able to handle your filings, what sets them apart is their Rolodex. Mine was only okay this way, and I'm not switching to another until I have a really strong reason.
So, all that said, if I were to go CPA shopping today, I'd ask more than one candidate:
"I can imagine that in the future I will want to build a company building technology in the [Real Estate] industry. [Fill in your weird talent or special license.] I'm going to come to you and ask if you know any interested investors. If I did that today, what would you be able to do for me?"
Compare and contrast the answers and you should find a CPA that will make you very happy.
Someday when you have that company and will get a SCARY letter from the IRS. You will immediately call your CPA and that's the last you hear of it.
We have dedicated 3d ASICs on our graphics boards now, we're considering physics ASICs, now AI ASICs? It's time to end this silliness and start shipping FPGA's in consumer products!
Disclaimer: just a puny US real estate agent.
:-)
It doesn't help anyone if we throw around terms like "mine" and "yours" when dealing with real estate. I only know basic US real esate law. The idea of "it's my house" is intuitive. It is also false. (here)
Land is scarce, especially land in proximity to other desirable land. When you "have title," I emphasize, "have title" to land, you have certain rights over that land, possession, enjoyment (use in any legal manner), control, exclusion (keep others from entering), and disposition (transfer interest). You also have rights to the air above, ground beneath, and rights to use adjacent bodies of water.
Because land is so scarce, it is valuable, and these rights are partitioned in all kinds of ways. The rights are not only sold piecemeal, groups of the rights can be divided piecemeal between multiple people with different kinds of transfer abilities.
And have I mentioned various kinds of leases and wills?
One of the functions of local government is to maintain a database of who has title to what land in a given area. But these rights can be partitioned with such complexity that it is a serious undertaking to answer the question of exactly who has which land interests on a given parcel, which may itself have been divided!
So what is the local government to do? They maintain a database of "deeds". Deeds are contracts which transfer rights from one party to another, or correct errors (spelling anyone?) in previous deeds.
In other words, title is determined by examining a natural language log structure filesystem. Futhermore, the records in these databases only go back, what, 60 - 100 years? You think you own your home, but there may be a valid legal interest infringing yours.
Do you see why you need title insurance?
My intution is that they tried to simplify things in Canada. The simplification was probably to "clarify" ownerships by giving the government more authority to assert exactly who has title. This "favors" the mortagage company in these exploited cases. I think the intention was to reduce risk for everyone involved. Inadvertently they have introduced a legal vulnerability.
And you thought your OS vendor was a little slow to respond.
I'm a real esate agent in the US. I don't think that scam would be as easy to carry off here. Loan companies have less power and would probably be out of luck. When people default on loans here the loan companies often have to work for over a year to get title to the home and resell it. It is so expensive for them that they will often sell a home with a poorly performing loan at a steep discount just to get out without paying all the legal fees. The details vary from state to state.
Even if a homeowner found themselves in this situation, instead of petitioning a central government agency (which has now power except to record deeds), they'd have a ton of private parties exposed to the transaction to sue, including private title insurers, covering the owner's interest in the property, a meaty legal target indeed.
I don't doubt that precautions were taken. In fact, I think given the nature of what they did and the condition the patients were likely in to begin with, their results are extraordinary. Their research should continue. I expect their results will improve. But it should be noted, that it is a crude invasive procedure, just not the cutting kind.
Wiping out the immune system is invasive. It is probably impossible to know when you have avanced melanoma, but how many of the 15 died of a cold?
Explain to him that you need to chat with him about an important matter, and that you'd like to buy him dinner and talk it over. (It's a him right?)
Over dinner be honest and explain what you are and aren't able to do for him in the future, maybe even why, you have really appreciated his business until now, you don't have the time you used to have to help with the "other" systems, etc.
A free meal goes a long way towards smoothing these things over.
This is almost in the ballpark of reasonable behavior in the grand scheme of things. Considering this is a gigantic buearacracy, it's standard behavior, regardless of party.
Consider this rationale: The American synfuel folks have a role to play in developing alternatives to oil. If the credit dies due to oil price fluctuations, they die. Killing them off isn't going to help anybody if USA is serious about energy independence. Therefore, tweak the rules as a stopgap measure, then do something more permanent in 2007.
Furthermore, we are talking about a corporate tax. People think that corporate tax somehow "sticks it to the man." This is ridiculous. The tax is always passed down to Joe Consumer, only it is hidden, folded into a purchase price. The fact that some supplier in the chain pays less in taxes is public record. All parties negotiating with them are privy to the record and can use it against them. In a competetive environment, the savings will show up at the final sale.
It's probably was the most expedient way to handle the situation.
Not only does it smack of slavery, their use of the term "unique elements" reminds me of "peculiar institution."
This is old news. Even rebublicans are tired of Hatch. Steve Urquhart has talked of running for Hatch's seat and even got a little endorsement from Mark Cuban.
A republican running in Utah is going to have a better chance of winning anyway. Hey, it would be nice to see two pro-tech-freedom candidates running against each other!
In Utah!
A lot of good could be done by "us" (whatever that means) getting behind a promoting Gnu Radio. Gnu Radio turns the whole DAC/ADC issue into a freedom of speech issue, muscling a constitutional issue over the law, and buying "us" time to make software defeat the technical mechanisms.
I've written about it on my weblog.
By promoting Gnu Radio "we" get to highlight the neccesity of freedom of communication, the benefits it could bring in disasters, etc. It would be a welcome distraction from the usual piracy debates.
I get the worst, worst software almost always from Apple.
But I'm not bitter.
No joke!
I live in Indianapolis and make a nice salary for around here. If I had to live on my current salary in the Bay Area or New York, I'd probably be living in a two room apartment and commute 2-3 hours a day. Here in Indy, I live in a 2800 square foot home 20 minutes from work on a good day.
The thought that my company would be acquired and I'd have to move to the Bay scares me.
--
Darrin
I'd like to introduce you to a new friend:
Humor!
If I read correctly, the "DRM" on this machine is largely that you can put whatever you like in the portable device, but you can't take stuff off, only delete it. Since you always have your dish DVR as your backup, that has a certain simple appeal.
Of course you can crack the usb interface all day, blah blah blah, but the "one way" approach is the most sensible thing I've heard of in this space, especially since it is just an extension of a larger backup device.
I'd buy this if it was under $200.
I'm a (not gay) guy and I find the same things offensive, but for the reason that my wife deserves better.
It's the same as movies and tv. They folks making the games suddeny have to clean up their act to attract a larger market. (simple economics rescues morality; go figure!) I, for one, am glad.
So where does one find real scientific research published?