Silicon Valley is about the only place you can have your startup fail, walk down the street a few blocks, and have a nice safe job to tide you over until you decide you need to do another startup (if you do). In other words, there's a job safety net that is not there elsewhere (the article as much as admits this, for London).
The other issue with any place other than Silicon Valley: Silicon Valley is where most of the VC's are located, and it's where most of the VC's prefer their companies be located, so that they have the option of an acquisition as an exit strategy for the companies they fund. Other locations, not so much.
Jimmy Wales has a pretty safe gig, which allows him to live anywhere he wants, without having to get more funding, and without having to worry about money too much at all, or about having to get another gig. So he can live anywhere he wants to live, and it's kinda OK.
I'm personally OK with London as a very nice place to live, if you've got a steady income, and so on. It's an amazing place. But I think you would have a difficult time getting Series A funding there, compared to a 15 minute drive to Sand Hill Road. To get some sense of the absolute importance of this:
Do you remember any of the people in the Bush Senior cabinet? The Reagan senior cabinet? You're really prepared to trust that all these people and all future cabinet members are always going to be rational?
Nope. But I don't have to. Just like I don't trust all countries to be rational actors, all it takes is enough of them to stomp on the ones that aren't. And yes, I trust the bulk of them to be rational actors, and that's really all it takes. Even were that not the case, we always have anyone in the SAC-NORAD chain of command down to the Lt. playing cards with the other Lt. in the MCC for the duration of their 24 hour tour.
Call me about their use of metric when they are capable of manufacturing a Boeing 787. Until then, I think I will go with the high technology solution which actually produces working carbon fiber aircraft.
I don't know about being logged in, but my home page has Verbatim Google search rather than raw Google (and Verbatim set in my search prefs--which requires being logged in, for when I don't access it from my own page form). Quotes help too of course for specific purposes, and -uselessresultterm as well. I do wish for original Alta Vista back though.
Verbatim FTW.
It gets you *almost* back to the pre-Google+ days, when they took away the "+" sign as a search modifier.
The complaints about punctuation are relatively bogus, as that's not stored. It was never stored, even in Altavista.
On substitution of search terms, they always, if the give you substitute results based on a spelling correction, they give you the option of searching for what you asked for exactly, or you can force the issue up front with quotes.
I also miss Altavista, but you had to be something of a lexicographer (i.e. you effectively "think like a search engine" and do your own categorizations, rather than relying on the search engine) to get better results out of it than the average person, who is a relatively poor classifier, gets out of Google doing their classifying for them.
There's no difference in the destination for car pools and driving kids around. Are you going to claim that, if I summon an Uber driver to go to the airport, that the Uber driver was on his way to the airport anyway?
Uber is not a ride-sharing service, since the passenger determines the destination. That doesn't make it evil or sinister or anything, as there are plenty of ways to hire a driver to go to a destination, but calling it "ride-sharing" is wrong.
"Can you drop Carol and Benji at the mall on your way to pick up the rest of the kids? I'm running late, and they wanted to see a movie..."
Different destination. Soccer Mom -> taxi conversion achievement unlocked?
As a small business owner myself, I don't have sympathy for those that run companies on the edge because anything can happen to wipe you out. They should have gone to their bank and tapped their line of credit or gotten a bridge loan. If they are not in the financial position to have access to either of those sources of cash, they should not have gone into business.
I will also point out, Mr. AC California legislator, that you have the extra margin of your assemblyman salary to fall back on for float, or to pay off the line of credit from the unexpected tax burden which was impossible to plan for, unless you were in on the back room deals that resulted in the retroactive tax in the first place.
She's lying about her "it wouldn't have mattered".
Part of the "valid user credentials" is the system from which the login request is originating.
If only certain authorized machines, or machines within a certain building, or on a certain network, are permitted to log in using the credentials that were obtained, they would still not have been able to log in remotely.
Additional restrictions, such as time windows during which certain credentials may be used could also have further constrained the attackers.
She's obviously relying on the technical ignorance of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee membership to try and "pull a fast one".
It's too bad these guys do not have competent technical advisors in the room with them to tell them the questions they need to ask to elicit the truth.
They're not ride-sharing, though. They would be ride-sharing if there was no difference in the car's route with or without a passenger, but as the passenger says where to go, it's not ride-sharing. That's kind of the definition.
So car pools and van pools should also have to license as taxis, because they do not go directly from the origin driveway to the destination, and instead detour to pick up additional passengers?
How about soccer moms, or parents who take turns driving kids to other sports, music, or other extracurricular activities?
If you are going to cite deviation of route as an overriding reason, then you need to be prepared to include any group of non-blood related persons.
Chain of command is a reason. Mental illness is a reason. Religion is a reason. Human error is a reason. There are plenty of reasons to think that nuclear weapons are a continuing danger to our safety. Whether they are more or less dangerous than the threats of disease or climate change is another debate.
Anti-nuclear nuts out to prove that nukes are dangerous by setting one off to prove their point... is a reason.
Ah, so it never applied to you. You heard their stories and assumed how horrible it must have been when the big bad wolf came for their livelihoods. I am glad they got out of running a business because it is not for the weak. If you are an SP or LLC with pass through, and you are not able to make it with a personal AGI of over $250K, something is very wrong.
Actually, it cost me $132,000 personally. I keep enough float that it's not an issue, but I'm pretty sure I could use that money better than the California government can use it.
Considering business get to deduct their expenses, it sounds like poor planning on their part, being over stretched with debt.
Uh, how in the HELL do you PLAN for a RETROACTIVE tax?!?!?
As a small business owner myself, I don't have sympathy for those that run companies on the edge because anything can happen to wipe you out. They should have gone to their bank and tapped their line of credit or gotten a bridge loan. If they are not in the financial position to have access to either of those sources of cash, they should not have gone into business.
Obviously, you don't run a cash flow business; you don't run a small car mechanic, or a hair salon, or a laundromat or a Subway or Quizno's franchise.
Tech companies offer the 401k for retirement purposes. RSUs are used as form of incentive compensation. If these people are using an RSU for retirement purposes, they need to find a competent financial adviser. If people don't understand the risks with RSUs and sign the grant agreement, they only have themselves to blame. Worst case, reject the grant.
You can't possibly retire in California on a 401K, or even a 401K + social security. If they raised the contribution caps SUBSTANTIALLY, then yes, maybe you could, but unless you are a total fiscal idiot, you have to realize that 401K + SSI is not even going to cover the property tax on a home in San Francisco.
Wow, that is some type of crazy. This is the sky is falling trope that the conservative and libertarian groups like to throw around. The wealthy have not left in droves. Elon Musk still lives in Bel Air, Tim Cook still live in Palo Alto, Larry Ellison still lives in Woodside. The people leaving the state in droves are in the bottom 50% and those hitting their retirement age, and this is due to the cost of living.
The people you are citing have more money than God. They aren't "millionaires", they're billionaires, and they can take the hit, since most of their income is sheltered anyway.
But where's Eduardo Saverin living again? Oh yeah, he gave up his US citizenship because he was (effectively) paid $67M by the state of California alone to do it (and another $30M or so by the fed).
Small business and family consequences: "It's really going to hit the small business owners and the young family that's trying to accumulate enough to raise a family, maybe send their kids to private school. It'll kick them in the teeth." http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
Historical study for "millionaire tax" in Maryland: "The Change Maryland study found that the tax cost Maryland $1.7 billion in lost tax revenues." http://www.cnbc.com/id/4812044...
Now you're down to trusting the rational decision-making of a low-level grunt who's been stuck below-ground in a silo, watching every day for the launch order to come down. You think they train those guys to be skeptical of the orders they're given?
Yes, they train "those guys" in that.
The specific class at the United States Air Force Academy in which the train them in this is Law 220, and the unit within this course is called "Military Dissent and Junior Officers", and they are taught how to properly respond to illegal orders. Without a declaration of war, which requires the approval of congress, and without it being a retaliatory strike for an exiting strike in progress, the order would be illegal.
In case you were wondering, Law 220 is a Core Course, and passing it is a requirement for graduation from the USAF academy, which is itself a requirement for becoming a commissioned officer qualified to act as a "missile jockey".
But I think if the president were to issue such an order without a clear and present threat, it's more likely that it would not come down to the missile jockey; instead, he'd be wrestled to the floor by his senior cabinet, followed by anything ranging from a "The president is gravely ill" to a "The president tripped and fell on his letter opener" announcement, to explain why he was no longer presidenting.
I'm pretty sure the same would apply in Russia, China, and North Korea.
The venture capitalists and others trying to prop up the current tech bubble.
Only Mark Cuban from "Shark Tank" is doing the "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Chicken Little dance, and he's basically a media company guy, and really has dick to do with tech, so his opinion isn't worth a hell of a lot when it comes to tech.
To make it clear: just because a small number of companies have very large valuations, and all the tech blogs are screaming about unicorns farting rainbows, doesn't mean we are in a tech bubble.
For example, why was WhatsApp worth $18B?
If you base it on revenue, it wasn't. Period. But if you base it on the value of SMS and MMS services income in (mostly foreign) markets that it destroyed in the last fiscal year, it destroyed about $9B in revenue for telephone companies. so $18B is worth 2X revenue destroyed, then its valuation makes a lot of sense: it's worth ~$9B/year in *leverage* over these telephone companies. Facebook needs this, if it wants to achieve additional marketshare by growing its available customer base.
Question: how the hell do you think he was able shove internet.org down the throat of reliance communications in India?
These valuations are based on more than "grab as many customers as you can before someone else does, then figure out some way to monetize them", which was the Netscape model, and the model everyone at the time was using before the dot-com collapse. They are based on the value of leverage. This is why so many of these companies are being acquired for vastly more than they could possibly IPO at: they are being acquired for their value as leverage, not on their revenue.
If you've got a $1.25T/year industry by the balls, and all it cost you is $18B, you got a deal.
They are not commercial drivers. They are contractors.
They are not a taxis service. They are sharing a ride in their personal vehicle.
This is, in fact, one of the reasons I think Uber will never go "driverless cars": it will sink their rideshare-not-taxi business model, if Uber owns the vehicles.
And contractors need to take special precautions as well. Uber basically needs to work out a fixed term contract, then kick the driver off Uber for some time - it must be clearly obvious they are contractors and not employees, and are completely free to pursue other jobs in the meantime.
It's on a per-driver basis, yes, so Uber needs to make sure drivers know they cannot work for Uber for more than X months without taking time off, or finding alternate work (e.g., for Lyft) because they need to show independence from Uber.
Excellent point on the term of the contract.
I'm not sure about their contract terms, or if this is part of their general contract, or if the contract has a "right to change terms" clause on behalf of Uber.
California desperately likes to convert contractors to employees on technicalities wherever it can, and the usual target is high income contractors, since it nets them tax revenue, payment to the workers comp fund, and so on. The higher the income the contractor, the higher the take on the part of California.
They also have to be looking at the sunset provisions on the federal subsidy of the ACA, and are realizing that they are going to have to come up with that money themselves from somewhere, and given prop 13, and the commercial property tax dodge (thanks, Kaiser Family Foundation!) that makes almost all commercial property immune from having the property tax rebased, that money is not going to come from property taxes.
Retroactive for the current year for personal income over $250K for a single filer ($500K joint). Prop 30 was on the Nov 2012 ballot and would be retroactive from Jan 2012. If your AGI is over $250K, you are not poor or middle class, even in Silicon Valley. Your sob story doesn't make sense.
Name a Subway sandwich shop that does not have > $250K AGI. Name a Laundromat that doesn't have > $250K AGI. Name a Quickie Mart that doesn't have > $250K AGI.
You can't? That's right, because small businesses have AGI's above that, but you, as the owner, are lucky if you take home $60K. When you buy or start a small business, you have not bought yourself a small business, you have bought yourself a job; one that pays about half what a recent college graduate would get as a starting salary at Google ($100K-$120K).
Further, these are *cash flow* businesses; what this means is that what you don't take out to pay your income taxes + food + transportation + mortgage + kids braces, gets immediately plowed back into the business. You can have a *huge* AGI, and have nearly no net profit to show for it.
And guess what? You pay your taxes quarterly out of net profit, and *then* any leftovers which haven been eaten up in day to day operations, *you put back into the business, under the reasonable expectation that the state of California is not going to come back to you with a gun in their hand and say "this is a stickup!".
I have a bunch of friends who run small businesses. Three of them -- roughly 20% of them -- had to close their businesses and sell off the capital assets of the business in order to pay this surprise retroactive tax; they are now working for other people, and the savings they had put into getting their business up and running in the first place: just gone. Two more decided to try and stick it out by getting second mortgages on their homes; if California comes back to the well... they will lose their houses over it.
I have other friends who had paid taxes on exercise-and hold stock options, and RSUs; guess what? they had to pay gain. Guess what else? They had to convert some of that stock -- which is basically their only retirement plan, because it's not like tech companies offer pensions these days -- and pay *short term capital gains tax on that conversion, instead of being able to hold it until it was long term and the tax rate was lower, which meant they had to convert even a larger chunk to cover the difference, and to cover the tax on the conversion. So basically, they got taxed 3 times on an asset that they technically have not even realized yet.
Do you know the difference between theoretical value and "Mall Money"? Apparently, you don't, so let me spell it out to you: Mall Money is money you can take down to the mall and spend on something. Theoretical money is an unrealized gain, and it's imaginary until you convert it from a financial instrument into cash (at which point you pay tax on it).
You think prop 30 taxed only CEOs and "wealthy mother fuckers who deserved it", as one person is quoted as saying in the run up to the vote; that's not the case. The wealthy people had already moved their cash into tax free municipal bonds and other non-taxable instruments by the time it was an idea. Or they moved out of state before it passed, so it didn't apply to them. Hello, Austin! Hello, Tahoe!
A lot of people lost their small businesses over prop 30. Other people lost their homes. The cut off was too low, and the people behind prop 30 *knew this* and went ahead with it anyway, so that they could buy these assets at fire sale prices.
Guess what the state realized in tax revenue?
About what the California parks and recreation department had squirreled away and was hiding from the people of California.
It was a totally unconstitutional ex pos facto tax, and it wasn't needed, if the people currently in government weren't cheating the people of California and fudging their numbers. It was nothing more than a property grab by the actually wealthy from the seemingly wealthy. Disgusting.
I don't understand this analogy. Car analogy anyone?
I'd post one, but... most small shop car mechanics are independent contractors. They own their own tools (like Uber drivers own their own cars), they carry their own insurance (like Uber drivers carry their own insurance), they set their own hours (like Uber drivers set their own hours), they can decline a specific job (like Uber drivers can decline a specific job), they can work for other shops (like Uber drivers can work for other car services or elsewhere), and they have a written contract (like Uber drivers have a written contract).
So really, there is no car analogy that supports the GP's proposition.
Or they might actually care a smidgeon about the labor in their state rather than simply deepthroating corporate cock like you do?
Apparently you were not in California when prop 30 went through, and the state came after everyone for retroactive income tax, which applied to the labor in the state as well as small businesses operating on a cash flow basis, to be paid with money they no longer had in hand.
This is just another money grab. Someone has to pay to gold plate the public buildings, you know, instead of spending the money on the people of California.
If the vast majority of the new generation manage to piss off future employers, what are these businesses going to do, not hire anyone at all? Because they certainly aren't going to start hiring 50 year olds.
This strategy seems to be working for military and police agencies not hiring white hats who were formerly grey hats or black hats.
Oh wait. The government keeps getting their computers successfully attacked... guess it's not a great strategy after all. Never mind.
"Hi, Facebook! Belgium here... we'd like to have ubiquity in surveilling our own citizens, like you have, but we're too stupid to build it ourselves, so we'd like a copy of your blueprints, KPLZTHX!"
That's a laugh, especially since their claim essentially reduces to Assange has been denied speedy justice without taking notice of the fact that Assange is a fugitive from justice. The man is a study in pathology.
The guy definitely has the "winning" personality of another Hans Reiser, which is to say, classic narcissistic personality disorder; he's about as likable as anal ulcers, but it's also pretty clear that Sweden is acting as a cat's paw for the U.S. because of information disclosed on Wikileaks.
Suppose I was a high IQ person in a tech firm with access to people who are actually doing machine learning in a practical setting? Since the comparison is university learning versus on-the-job learning, not university learning versus autodidactism.
Then the employer has a choice of having his machine learning people who are already trained either *doing machine learning*, or wasting their time teaching you *instead of doing machine learning*. Unless you are proposing that you would just shut up and observe and not ask questions? In practice, there is no such thing as zero loading for apprenticeship programs.
In other words, you are asking that they sacrifice the location in the timeline of their time to market window in order to train you, in the hopes that you will contribute long term to the company. Predominantly, such training would be sufficiently long-term that this would represent a substantial investment by the company, with no guarantee of your indenture to the company for a sufficient length of time to pay back that investment.
Additionally, it would require that the time to market window be large enough that it would only pay them back during the term of a single delayed project, were projects to be measured in terms of decades, rather than a couple of years, since the cost in the time window could only be made up within the lifetime of the delayed project, were it a long term project that would then benefit from the presence of the trained apprentice, prior to the end of the window.
This is elementary queueing theory.
The fact of the matter is that highly technical fields are not the same as plumbing, electrician work, carpentry, or similar blue collar labor, and are not amenable to apprenticeship programs.
What if the Russians let the Syrians know about this spy they've outed, and some Syrian who then knows gets captured by ISIS and tortured for information?
I have it on good authority from the people that have criticized the U.S. government for using water-boarding, and from president Obama himself, in the executive order he signed outlawing the practice, that no useful information comes from torture. So that won't be an issue.
Unless you don't want me to believe president Obama?!?
The U.S. Department of State normally handles travel advisory updates to U.S. citizens traveling to North Korea via email over the 3G network to mobile devices owned by the citizens, routed through the embassy in China. All other consular services are generally handled through the Swedish embassy in North Korea, including an agreement requiring their notification within four days of an arrest or other detainment of a U.S. citizen.
I suspect that the U.S. will potentially be prohibiting travel.
Slashdot Mirror
Silicon Valley is about the only place you can have your startup fail, walk down the street a few blocks, and have a nice safe job to tide you over until you decide you need to do another startup (if you do). In other words, there's a job safety net that is not there elsewhere (the article as much as admits this, for London).
The other issue with any place other than Silicon Valley: Silicon Valley is where most of the VC's are located, and it's where most of the VC's prefer their companies be located, so that they have the option of an acquisition as an exit strategy for the companies they fund. Other locations, not so much.
Jimmy Wales has a pretty safe gig, which allows him to live anywhere he wants, without having to get more funding, and without having to worry about money too much at all, or about having to get another gig. So he can live anywhere he wants to live, and it's kinda OK.
I'm personally OK with London as a very nice place to live, if you've got a steady income, and so on. It's an amazing place. But I think you would have a difficult time getting Series A funding there, compared to a 15 minute drive to Sand Hill Road. To get some sense of the absolute importance of this:
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/ar...
Do you remember any of the people in the Bush Senior cabinet? The Reagan senior cabinet? You're really prepared to trust that all these people and all future cabinet members are always going to be rational?
Nope. But I don't have to. Just like I don't trust all countries to be rational actors, all it takes is enough of them to stomp on the ones that aren't. And yes, I trust the bulk of them to be rational actors, and that's really all it takes. Even were that not the case, we always have anyone in the SAC-NORAD chain of command down to the Lt. playing cards with the other Lt. in the MCC for the duration of their 24 hour tour.
Call me about their use of metric when they are capable of manufacturing a Boeing 787. Until then, I think I will go with the high technology solution which actually produces working carbon fiber aircraft.
I don't know about being logged in, but my home page has Verbatim Google search rather than raw Google (and Verbatim set in my search prefs--which requires being logged in, for when I don't access it from my own page form). Quotes help too of course for specific purposes, and -uselessresultterm as well. I do wish for original Alta Vista back though.
Verbatim FTW.
It gets you *almost* back to the pre-Google+ days, when they took away the "+" sign as a search modifier.
The complaints about punctuation are relatively bogus, as that's not stored. It was never stored, even in Altavista.
On substitution of search terms, they always, if the give you substitute results based on a spelling correction, they give you the option of searching for what you asked for exactly, or you can force the issue up front with quotes.
I also miss Altavista, but you had to be something of a lexicographer (i.e. you effectively "think like a search engine" and do your own categorizations, rather than relying on the search engine) to get better results out of it than the average person, who is a relatively poor classifier, gets out of Google doing their classifying for them.
There's no difference in the destination for car pools and driving kids around. Are you going to claim that, if I summon an Uber driver to go to the airport, that the Uber driver was on his way to the airport anyway?
Uber is not a ride-sharing service, since the passenger determines the destination. That doesn't make it evil or sinister or anything, as there are plenty of ways to hire a driver to go to a destination, but calling it "ride-sharing" is wrong.
"Can you drop Carol and Benji at the mall on your way to pick up the rest of the kids? I'm running late, and they wanted to see a movie..."
Different destination. Soccer Mom -> taxi conversion achievement unlocked?
As a small business owner myself, I don't have sympathy for those that run companies on the edge because anything can happen to wipe you out. They should have gone to their bank and tapped their line of credit or gotten a bridge loan. If they are not in the financial position to have access to either of those sources of cash, they should not have gone into business.
I will also point out, Mr. AC California legislator, that you have the extra margin of your assemblyman salary to fall back on for float, or to pay off the line of credit from the unexpected tax burden which was impossible to plan for, unless you were in on the back room deals that resulted in the retroactive tax in the first place.
She's lying about her "it wouldn't have mattered".
Part of the "valid user credentials" is the system from which the login request is originating.
If only certain authorized machines, or machines within a certain building, or on a certain network, are permitted to log in using the credentials that were obtained, they would still not have been able to log in remotely.
Additional restrictions, such as time windows during which certain credentials may be used could also have further constrained the attackers.
She's obviously relying on the technical ignorance of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee membership to try and "pull a fast one".
It's too bad these guys do not have competent technical advisors in the room with them to tell them the questions they need to ask to elicit the truth.
They're not ride-sharing, though. They would be ride-sharing if there was no difference in the car's route with or without a passenger, but as the passenger says where to go, it's not ride-sharing. That's kind of the definition.
So car pools and van pools should also have to license as taxis, because they do not go directly from the origin driveway to the destination, and instead detour to pick up additional passengers?
How about soccer moms, or parents who take turns driving kids to other sports, music, or other extracurricular activities?
If you are going to cite deviation of route as an overriding reason, then you need to be prepared to include any group of non-blood related persons.
Chain of command is a reason. Mental illness is a reason. Religion is a reason. Human error is a reason. There are plenty of reasons to think that nuclear weapons are a continuing danger to our safety. Whether they are more or less dangerous than the threats of disease or climate change is another debate.
Anti-nuclear nuts out to prove that nukes are dangerous by setting one off to prove their point ... is a reason.
Ah, so it never applied to you. You heard their stories and assumed how horrible it must have been when the big bad wolf came for their livelihoods. I am glad they got out of running a business because it is not for the weak. If you are an SP or LLC with pass through, and you are not able to make it with a personal AGI of over $250K, something is very wrong.
Actually, it cost me $132,000 personally. I keep enough float that it's not an issue, but I'm pretty sure I could use that money better than the California government can use it.
Considering business get to deduct their expenses, it sounds like poor planning on their part, being over stretched with debt.
Uh, how in the HELL do you PLAN for a RETROACTIVE tax?!?!?
As a small business owner myself, I don't have sympathy for those that run companies on the edge because anything can happen to wipe you out. They should have gone to their bank and tapped their line of credit or gotten a bridge loan. If they are not in the financial position to have access to either of those sources of cash, they should not have gone into business.
Obviously, you don't run a cash flow business; you don't run a small car mechanic, or a hair salon, or a laundromat or a Subway or Quizno's franchise.
Tech companies offer the 401k for retirement purposes. RSUs are used as form of incentive compensation. If these people are using an RSU for retirement purposes, they need to find a competent financial adviser. If people don't understand the risks with RSUs and sign the grant agreement, they only have themselves to blame. Worst case, reject the grant.
You can't possibly retire in California on a 401K, or even a 401K + social security. If they raised the contribution caps SUBSTANTIALLY, then yes, maybe you could, but unless you are a total fiscal idiot, you have to realize that 401K + SSI is not even going to cover the property tax on a home in San Francisco.
Wow, that is some type of crazy. This is the sky is falling trope that the conservative and libertarian groups like to throw around. The wealthy have not left in droves. Elon Musk still lives in Bel Air, Tim Cook still live in Palo Alto, Larry Ellison still lives in Woodside. The people leaving the state in droves are in the bottom 50% and those hitting their retirement age, and this is due to the cost of living.
The people you are citing have more money than God. They aren't "millionaires", they're billionaires, and they can take the hit, since most of their income is sheltered anyway.
But where's Eduardo Saverin living again? Oh yeah, he gave up his US citizenship because he was (effectively) paid $67M by the state of California alone to do it (and another $30M or so by the fed).
Other people moving out of state due to taxes:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/20...
http://www.sfgate.com/business...
250 companies:
http://www.cbn.com/cbnnews/fin...
Small business and family consequences:
"It's really going to hit the small business owners and the young family that's trying to accumulate enough to raise a family, maybe send their kids to private school. It'll kick them in the teeth."
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB...
Historical study for "millionaire tax" in Maryland:
"The Change Maryland study found that the tax cost Maryland $1.7 billion in lost tax revenues."
http://www.cnbc.com/id/4812044...
Actual numbers (scroll down past
Now you're down to trusting the rational decision-making of a low-level grunt who's been stuck below-ground in a silo, watching every day for the launch order to come down. You think they train those guys to be skeptical of the orders they're given?
Yes, they train "those guys" in that.
The specific class at the United States Air Force Academy in which the train them in this is Law 220, and the unit within this course is called "Military Dissent and Junior Officers", and they are taught how to properly respond to illegal orders. Without a declaration of war, which requires the approval of congress, and without it being a retaliatory strike for an exiting strike in progress, the order would be illegal.
In case you were wondering, Law 220 is a Core Course, and passing it is a requirement for graduation from the USAF academy, which is itself a requirement for becoming a commissioned officer qualified to act as a "missile jockey".
But I think if the president were to issue such an order without a clear and present threat, it's more likely that it would not come down to the missile jockey; instead, he'd be wrestled to the floor by his senior cabinet, followed by anything ranging from a "The president is gravely ill" to a "The president tripped and fell on his letter opener" announcement, to explain why he was no longer presidenting.
I'm pretty sure the same would apply in Russia, China, and North Korea.
Biometrics for all the "things"!
Sadly, there's not an ASCII art for the Trollface with the torch graphic...
The venture capitalists and others trying to prop up the current tech bubble.
Only Mark Cuban from "Shark Tank" is doing the "The sky is falling! The sky is falling!" Chicken Little dance, and he's basically a media company guy, and really has dick to do with tech, so his opinion isn't worth a hell of a lot when it comes to tech.
To make it clear: just because a small number of companies have very large valuations, and all the tech blogs are screaming about unicorns farting rainbows, doesn't mean we are in a tech bubble.
For example, why was WhatsApp worth $18B?
If you base it on revenue, it wasn't. Period. But if you base it on the value of SMS and MMS services income in (mostly foreign) markets that it destroyed in the last fiscal year, it destroyed about $9B in revenue for telephone companies. so $18B is worth 2X revenue destroyed, then its valuation makes a lot of sense: it's worth ~$9B/year in *leverage* over these telephone companies. Facebook needs this, if it wants to achieve additional marketshare by growing its available customer base.
Question: how the hell do you think he was able shove internet.org down the throat of reliance communications in India?
These valuations are based on more than "grab as many customers as you can before someone else does, then figure out some way to monetize them", which was the Netscape model, and the model everyone at the time was using before the dot-com collapse. They are based on the value of leverage. This is why so many of these companies are being acquired for vastly more than they could possibly IPO at: they are being acquired for their value as leverage, not on their revenue.
If you've got a $1.25T/year industry by the balls, and all it cost you is $18B, you got a deal.
They are not commercial drivers. They are contractors.
They are not a taxis service. They are sharing a ride in their personal vehicle.
This is, in fact, one of the reasons I think Uber will never go "driverless cars": it will sink their rideshare-not-taxi business model, if Uber owns the vehicles.
And contractors need to take special precautions as well. Uber basically needs to work out a fixed term contract, then kick the driver off Uber for some time - it must be clearly obvious they are contractors and not employees, and are completely free to pursue other jobs in the meantime.
It's on a per-driver basis, yes, so Uber needs to make sure drivers know they cannot work for Uber for more than X months without taking time off, or finding alternate work (e.g., for Lyft) because they need to show independence from Uber.
Excellent point on the term of the contract.
I'm not sure about their contract terms, or if this is part of their general contract, or if the contract has a "right to change terms" clause on behalf of Uber.
California desperately likes to convert contractors to employees on technicalities wherever it can, and the usual target is high income contractors, since it nets them tax revenue, payment to the workers comp fund, and so on. The higher the income the contractor, the higher the take on the part of California.
They also have to be looking at the sunset provisions on the federal subsidy of the ACA, and are realizing that they are going to have to come up with that money themselves from somewhere, and given prop 13, and the commercial property tax dodge (thanks, Kaiser Family Foundation!) that makes almost all commercial property immune from having the property tax rebased, that money is not going to come from property taxes.
Retroactive for the current year for personal income over $250K for a single filer ($500K joint). Prop 30 was on the Nov 2012 ballot and would be retroactive from Jan 2012. If your AGI is over $250K, you are not poor or middle class, even in Silicon Valley. Your sob story doesn't make sense.
Name a Subway sandwich shop that does not have > $250K AGI.
Name a Laundromat that doesn't have > $250K AGI.
Name a Quickie Mart that doesn't have > $250K AGI.
You can't? That's right, because small businesses have AGI's above that, but you, as the owner, are lucky if you take home $60K. When you buy or start a small business, you have not bought yourself a small business, you have bought yourself a job; one that pays about half what a recent college graduate would get as a starting salary at Google ($100K-$120K).
Further, these are *cash flow* businesses; what this means is that what you don't take out to pay your income taxes + food + transportation + mortgage + kids braces, gets immediately plowed back into the business. You can have a *huge* AGI, and have nearly no net profit to show for it.
And guess what? You pay your taxes quarterly out of net profit, and *then* any leftovers which haven been eaten up in day to day operations, *you put back into the business, under the reasonable expectation that the state of California is not going to come back to you with a gun in their hand and say "this is a stickup!".
I have a bunch of friends who run small businesses. Three of them -- roughly 20% of them -- had to close their businesses and sell off the capital assets of the business in order to pay this surprise retroactive tax; they are now working for other people, and the savings they had put into getting their business up and running in the first place: just gone. Two more decided to try and stick it out by getting second mortgages on their homes; if California comes back to the well... they will lose their houses over it.
I have other friends who had paid taxes on exercise-and hold stock options, and RSUs; guess what? they had to pay gain. Guess what else? They had to convert some of that stock -- which is basically their only retirement plan, because it's not like tech companies offer pensions these days -- and pay *short term capital gains tax on that conversion, instead of being able to hold it until it was long term and the tax rate was lower, which meant they had to convert even a larger chunk to cover the difference, and to cover the tax on the conversion. So basically, they got taxed 3 times on an asset that they technically have not even realized yet.
Do you know the difference between theoretical value and "Mall Money"? Apparently, you don't, so let me spell it out to you: Mall Money is money you can take down to the mall and spend on something. Theoretical money is an unrealized gain, and it's imaginary until you convert it from a financial instrument into cash (at which point you pay tax on it).
You think prop 30 taxed only CEOs and "wealthy mother fuckers who deserved it", as one person is quoted as saying in the run up to the vote; that's not the case. The wealthy people had already moved their cash into tax free municipal bonds and other non-taxable instruments by the time it was an idea. Or they moved out of state before it passed, so it didn't apply to them. Hello, Austin! Hello, Tahoe!
A lot of people lost their small businesses over prop 30. Other people lost their homes. The cut off was too low, and the people behind prop 30 *knew this* and went ahead with it anyway, so that they could buy these assets at fire sale prices.
Guess what the state realized in tax revenue?
About what the California parks and recreation department had squirreled away and was hiding from the people of California.
It was a totally unconstitutional ex pos facto tax, and it wasn't needed, if the people currently in government weren't cheating the people of California and fudging their numbers. It was nothing more than a property grab by the actually wealthy from the seemingly wealthy. Disgusting.
I don't understand this analogy.
Car analogy anyone?
I'd post one, but... most small shop car mechanics are independent contractors. They own their own tools (like Uber drivers own their own cars), they carry their own insurance (like Uber drivers carry their own insurance), they set their own hours (like Uber drivers set their own hours), they can decline a specific job (like Uber drivers can decline a specific job), they can work for other shops (like Uber drivers can work for other car services or elsewhere), and they have a written contract (like Uber drivers have a written contract).
So really, there is no car analogy that supports the GP's proposition.
Or they might actually care a smidgeon about the labor in their state rather than simply deepthroating corporate cock like you do?
Apparently you were not in California when prop 30 went through, and the state came after everyone for retroactive income tax, which applied to the labor in the state as well as small businesses operating on a cash flow basis, to be paid with money they no longer had in hand.
This is just another money grab. Someone has to pay to gold plate the public buildings, you know, instead of spending the money on the people of California.
You mean NEOs like Russia? You can't get any nearer to Earth than that.
Probably "yes".
If the vast majority of the new generation manage to piss off future employers, what are these businesses going to do, not hire anyone at all? Because they certainly aren't going to start hiring 50 year olds.
This strategy seems to be working for military and police agencies not hiring white hats who were formerly grey hats or black hats.
Oh wait. The government keeps getting their computers successfully attacked... guess it's not a great strategy after all. Never mind.
"Hi, Facebook! Belgium here... we'd like to have ubiquity in surveilling our own citizens, like you have, but we're too stupid to build it ourselves, so we'd like a copy of your blueprints, KPLZTHX!"
That's a laugh, especially since their claim essentially reduces to Assange has been denied speedy justice without taking notice of the fact that Assange is a fugitive from justice. The man is a study in pathology.
The guy definitely has the "winning" personality of another Hans Reiser, which is to say, classic narcissistic personality disorder; he's about as likable as anal ulcers, but it's also pretty clear that Sweden is acting as a cat's paw for the U.S. because of information disclosed on Wikileaks.
Suppose I was a high IQ person in a tech firm with access to people who are actually doing machine learning in a practical setting? Since the comparison is university learning versus on-the-job learning, not university learning versus autodidactism.
Then the employer has a choice of having his machine learning people who are already trained either *doing machine learning*, or wasting their time teaching you *instead of doing machine learning*. Unless you are proposing that you would just shut up and observe and not ask questions? In practice, there is no such thing as zero loading for apprenticeship programs.
In other words, you are asking that they sacrifice the location in the timeline of their time to market window in order to train you, in the hopes that you will contribute long term to the company. Predominantly, such training would be sufficiently long-term that this would represent a substantial investment by the company, with no guarantee of your indenture to the company for a sufficient length of time to pay back that investment.
Additionally, it would require that the time to market window be large enough that it would only pay them back during the term of a single delayed project, were projects to be measured in terms of decades, rather than a couple of years, since the cost in the time window could only be made up within the lifetime of the delayed project, were it a long term project that would then benefit from the presence of the trained apprentice, prior to the end of the window.
This is elementary queueing theory.
The fact of the matter is that highly technical fields are not the same as plumbing, electrician work, carpentry, or similar blue collar labor, and are not amenable to apprenticeship programs.
What if the Russians let the Syrians know about this spy they've outed, and some Syrian who then knows gets captured by ISIS and tortured for information?
I have it on good authority from the people that have criticized the U.S. government for using water-boarding, and from president Obama himself, in the executive order he signed outlawing the practice, that no useful information comes from torture. So that won't be an issue.
Unless you don't want me to believe president Obama?!?
Expect an updated U.S. travel advisory.
The U.S. Department of State normally handles travel advisory updates to U.S. citizens traveling to North Korea via email over the 3G network to mobile devices owned by the citizens, routed through the embassy in China. All other consular services are generally handled through the Swedish embassy in North Korea, including an agreement requiring their notification within four days of an arrest or other detainment of a U.S. citizen.
I suspect that the U.S. will potentially be prohibiting travel.