Start with file. Explain that a "file" is something you could staple together if it were printed. A directory contains either files or directories, so the next step is to put them in manila folders in a filing cabinet. All the tax files go in one folder, labeled "Taxes". The folders labeled "Taxes" and "Insurance" and "Bank Statements" all go in the top drawer of the filing cabinet, which is labeled "Financial".
If she can't get that, why worry? She can find her stuff, and that's all that matters.
Unless your app has no language at all, you're going to have to hire a translator. Hiring a minimally competent translator for one hour will cover every single word in your app. What is that, $40/language?
Smartphones don't appeal to you? Or they're overpriced for what you get?
As far as I'm concerned, smartphones are magic incarnate. If you had told people thirty years ago that the average person would be able to carry a device weighing under 5 ounces (140 g) that would be able to show video, talk to any phone in the country, search the world's libraries automatically, give you the news, send instantly-transmitted messages to anywhere on earth, with unlimited phone number lookups and the ability (once you found a place you wanted to go) to direct you to the front door of the shop you're looking for (and allow you to see it before you get there), all while you walk around, or even while you drive at full speed on the freeway, I for one would never have believed it possible.
Elderly people are still people. Give them a reason to learn something, and they will. I've seen it mentioned several times that the Kindle has been a massive success in the senior citizen crowd, in no small part because every book becomes a large-print book that they don't have to find their reading glasses for.
Or consider the reaction of people now in their late 60s to, say, the Internet. It was a maybe thing, until they realized that it meant they could actually have relationships with their grandchildren regardless of where they live.
To be fair, it's pretty obvious when a hammer is going to cause damage. 'rm -rf ~joe/*' and 'rm -rf ~joe/*' are pretty close to one another. And usually computers were first encountered at work - where people are paranoid about screwing something up.
And they can (and will) fry a machine from time to time. Only feasible solution is to set them up with something that can boot, nuke, and reinstall (e.g., a bootable Norton Ghost DVD that has their entire basic Windows install ready to go) on a computer that contains no information of value.
It could be any number of things. It's only intuitive because you know how to use iOS, much like the iOS on/off sliders. Why not just have the word "Add..." on that button? You've got "Edit" on the left, after all. Really an odd paradigm switch, from text to symbols.
Please explain to a clueless user just what it is that I'm losing. The books appear to work equally well in ePub or Mobipocket, regardless of which was the original format. As for the back end, why would that matter to the end user? Genuinely curious.
They will almost certainly just phase this out by refusing to allow you to keep it on a month-to-month basis rather than actively trying to change people's contracts mid-stream. You'll have your unlimited bandwidth until your two years is up, and then goodbye.
Your idea isn't necessarily the worst one I've ever heard, but I'd point out that rail, power, and phone lines are generally maintained by private companies, not the government. (The TVA and some little municipal phone systems come to mind as public or semi-public systems.)
Suit yourself in your assessment of me; it's entirely possible that I'm just an Epsilon-Minus Sub-Moron shifting the elevator up and down, while the guy who troll-mods me is truly brilliant. But if you think witch hunts can't happen in educated society, you really need to take Psych 101. Or study history. Or both.
He did work for the city government. Personally, I think that strikes by government employees should be illegal - you do not have the right to hold the rest of the population hostage. I don't think of private-sector strikers as heroes, but they're not ipso facto criminals.
Depending on where you work, violating procedures may in fact be a violation of the law. I know that's the case in health care and finance, where federal laws require you to adhere to all workplace policies.
You've got the basic idea: higher taxes mean that people stop doing the marginal work, because their net pay isn't worth it to them. This is the ultimate problem with really high marginal tax rates that riverat1 didn't understand - why high earners become relative underachievers when the rates get too high. It's not that people are turning down money that's offered for doing the same work, it's that they're not willing to work harder to make more.
They don't need your pity; they're doing fine. The problem is that these are the people who create jobs, both directly by hiring and indirectly by buying stuff like second homes, ski boats, etc. Do you really want the engines of job creation to stop trying to do just a little more?
I do have issue with one thing:
whether the take days off many people couldn't ever afford
Most small business owners work six (and often seven) days a week. Every week. Most people don't. (I don't. But I do know a few small business owners, and not a one puts in less than sixty hours a week.)
Speeding tickets aren't what keep me going slow. They never have been. It's the risk to raising my auto insurance that i worry about. If all I had to pay was the speeding ticket, you'd be looking at Evel Knievel here.
Once you get above 200k, things stop looking so good. When my wife and I were both medical residents - with no savings and $300k of non-home debt, at the ages of 34 and 32 - we were living in the world of deferred student loan payments. The next year, I made too much for my student loans to be deductible. When she starts working as a physician, we won't even be able to deduct our mortgage interest due to the AMT. And yet they won't let us go back and contribute to our IRAs for the ten years we were too poor to do so.
Some states do, in fact, charge sales tax on essentially all things purchased. HI, ID, KS, LA, MS, ND, OK, and SD tax essentially all transactions (per Wikipedia.) I live in Mississippi, and I pay 7% sales tax on everything I buy except for a few big-ticket items - cars are taxed at 3% (tax due on initial titling of a vehicle that is completely separate from the vehicle licensing tax, which is about 2% of value per year), homes are merely assessed property tax. In my municipality, there is a 2% extra tax on food served in restaurants to support the convention and visitors bureau.
Most people who make over $250k/year are in some form of business in which their income is directly proportional to how much they work - lawyers taking on cases, doctors taking on patients, contractors taking on jobs. When those people are trying to decide whether to expand the business, or take the weekend off, the marginal income matters a lot. $2000 is a lot of money when you make $50k. When you make $250k, it's a lot harder to decide whether you want the money or your weekend. And when you are going to lose half of it to taxes anyway, why bother?
They already do. My parents paid property taxes year after year after year. Neither my sister nor I ever attended a single day of public school in our hometown. (She did go to a public university.) And, despite having a household income that was within $1000 of the median US household income every year, they paid for private schools, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Start with file. Explain that a "file" is something you could staple together if it were printed. A directory contains either files or directories, so the next step is to put them in manila folders in a filing cabinet. All the tax files go in one folder, labeled "Taxes". The folders labeled "Taxes" and "Insurance" and "Bank Statements" all go in the top drawer of the filing cabinet, which is labeled "Financial".
If she can't get that, why worry? She can find her stuff, and that's all that matters.
Unless your app has no language at all, you're going to have to hire a translator. Hiring a minimally competent translator for one hour will cover every single word in your app. What is that, $40/language?
Smartphones don't appeal to you? Or they're overpriced for what you get?
As far as I'm concerned, smartphones are magic incarnate. If you had told people thirty years ago that the average person would be able to carry a device weighing under 5 ounces (140 g) that would be able to show video, talk to any phone in the country, search the world's libraries automatically, give you the news, send instantly-transmitted messages to anywhere on earth, with unlimited phone number lookups and the ability (once you found a place you wanted to go) to direct you to the front door of the shop you're looking for (and allow you to see it before you get there), all while you walk around, or even while you drive at full speed on the freeway, I for one would never have believed it possible.
Elderly people are still people. Give them a reason to learn something, and they will. I've seen it mentioned several times that the Kindle has been a massive success in the senior citizen crowd, in no small part because every book becomes a large-print book that they don't have to find their reading glasses for. Or consider the reaction of people now in their late 60s to, say, the Internet. It was a maybe thing, until they realized that it meant they could actually have relationships with their grandchildren regardless of where they live.
Why not just have "Add" as a text label? As you say, context is clear; it's the switch from language to symbology that would throw people off.
To be fair, it's pretty obvious when a hammer is going to cause damage. 'rm -rf ~joe/*' and 'rm -rf ~joe /*' are pretty close to one another. And usually computers were first encountered at work - where people are paranoid about screwing something up.
And they can (and will) fry a machine from time to time. Only feasible solution is to set them up with something that can boot, nuke, and reinstall (e.g., a bootable Norton Ghost DVD that has their entire basic Windows install ready to go) on a computer that contains no information of value.
It could be any number of things. It's only intuitive because you know how to use iOS, much like the iOS on/off sliders. Why not just have the word "Add..." on that button? You've got "Edit" on the left, after all. Really an odd paradigm switch, from text to symbols.
Please explain to a clueless user just what it is that I'm losing. The books appear to work equally well in ePub or Mobipocket, regardless of which was the original format. As for the back end, why would that matter to the end user? Genuinely curious.
They will almost certainly just phase this out by refusing to allow you to keep it on a month-to-month basis rather than actively trying to change people's contracts mid-stream. You'll have your unlimited bandwidth until your two years is up, and then goodbye.
Your idea isn't necessarily the worst one I've ever heard, but I'd point out that rail, power, and phone lines are generally maintained by private companies, not the government. (The TVA and some little municipal phone systems come to mind as public or semi-public systems.)
Work on your sarcasm. This is a nice start, you've got some real promise here, but it just goes a little too far to be believable even for a Slashbot.
Suit yourself in your assessment of me; it's entirely possible that I'm just an Epsilon-Minus Sub-Moron shifting the elevator up and down, while the guy who troll-mods me is truly brilliant. But if you think witch hunts can't happen in educated society, you really need to take Psych 101. Or study history. Or both.
You got the electricity. I didn't get a public education. See the difference?
He did work for the city government. Personally, I think that strikes by government employees should be illegal - you do not have the right to hold the rest of the population hostage. I don't think of private-sector strikers as heroes, but they're not ipso facto criminals.
violating procedures
Depending on where you work, violating procedures may in fact be a violation of the law. I know that's the case in health care and finance, where federal laws require you to adhere to all workplace policies.
They don't need your pity; they're doing fine. The problem is that these are the people who create jobs, both directly by hiring and indirectly by buying stuff like second homes, ski boats, etc. Do you really want the engines of job creation to stop trying to do just a little more?
I do have issue with one thing:
whether the take days off many people couldn't ever afford
Most small business owners work six (and often seven) days a week. Every week. Most people don't. (I don't. But I do know a few small business owners, and not a one puts in less than sixty hours a week.)
Fuck you, downmodder. Go worship some idiotic pile of shit like communism. It'll make it easy to identify you when we need to weed out the worthless.
Speeding tickets aren't what keep me going slow. They never have been. It's the risk to raising my auto insurance that i worry about. If all I had to pay was the speeding ticket, you'd be looking at Evel Knievel here.
Once you get above 200k, things stop looking so good. When my wife and I were both medical residents - with no savings and $300k of non-home debt, at the ages of 34 and 32 - we were living in the world of deferred student loan payments. The next year, I made too much for my student loans to be deductible. When she starts working as a physician, we won't even be able to deduct our mortgage interest due to the AMT. And yet they won't let us go back and contribute to our IRAs for the ten years we were too poor to do so.
Some states do, in fact, charge sales tax on essentially all things purchased. HI, ID, KS, LA, MS, ND, OK, and SD tax essentially all transactions (per Wikipedia.) I live in Mississippi, and I pay 7% sales tax on everything I buy except for a few big-ticket items - cars are taxed at 3% (tax due on initial titling of a vehicle that is completely separate from the vehicle licensing tax, which is about 2% of value per year), homes are merely assessed property tax. In my municipality, there is a 2% extra tax on food served in restaurants to support the convention and visitors bureau.
Most people who make over $250k/year are in some form of business in which their income is directly proportional to how much they work - lawyers taking on cases, doctors taking on patients, contractors taking on jobs. When those people are trying to decide whether to expand the business, or take the weekend off, the marginal income matters a lot. $2000 is a lot of money when you make $50k. When you make $250k, it's a lot harder to decide whether you want the money or your weekend. And when you are going to lose half of it to taxes anyway, why bother?
Whatever, Pollyanna.
They already do. My parents paid property taxes year after year after year. Neither my sister nor I ever attended a single day of public school in our hometown. (She did go to a public university.) And, despite having a household income that was within $1000 of the median US household income every year, they paid for private schools, too.
My precalculus teacher in high school had
E) None of the above
as the fifth choice for every single problem on the test.