In many states in the US, if someone pays you $X, you are required to provide $X of service, and you can't have an expiration on it.
So, you can advertise a coupon where someone pays you $X for $2X of services, and you can put an expiration date on it, but you're still legally required to redeem the $2X coupon for the $X paid for it even after expiration.
Couldn't they just look out the window? Maybe that big thing outside the window that a whole bunch of people recently walked off of just happens to be the plane everyone at the gate is waiting to board?
Maybe, but probably not.
If you land a plane at an airport, and go and park at a gate, what are the odds that the people waiting for a flight at that gate are supposed to be on the same plane that you just parked there?
Even if you get lucky, how is anyone supposed to even know what gate they are supposed to be at?
Of course, anyone can sue anyone for anything, but Apple would have to prove that the marketing was done in a manner to make it appear that Apple endorsed the contest; simply advertising that you are giving away a product by the name of the product is not sufficient.
Asking for equity earlier would not have done him any good, because he wouldn't have gotten any then either.
The reason many startups give out equity at the start is because they can't afford to pay the going rate for the talent they need, so the principles are forced to trade a lot of potential payoffs later for cheaper help now.
If this company is hiring contractors, then they have enough money to just pay the going rate for the work they want done. If they've decided they are going to just pay the going rate, having asked for equity at the outset would have just caused them to hire a different contractor.
Fact of the matter is, the guy was offered a compensation package for doing a job. There's no reason to expect any equity when you're getting paid up-front. Equity is compensation for risk. No risk, no equity.
Programming is easy for people who will be good at programming. It requires being able to take a solution to a problem and arrange it into a set of instructions. If you can't do that by the time you get to college, and especially if you can't do that after 15 weeks of intro, you're not going to learn it in college, because the problem isn't that the student doesn't have CS experience; the problem is the student doesn't know how to solve problems and write down the solution.
That's not something that a HS grad who doesn't know it already is going to learn.
Should we give tax breaks to people who create jobs (especially 6 figure salaries), tax revenue and wealth?
We should. But if we really want to give a tax break to people who create jobs, we would eliminate the Federal Job Tax, the 15.3% tax on jobs, and replace the revenue with an income tax. Then the people who actually *DO* create jobs get a huge tax break, and the people who are replacing American workers with machines or Chinese workers or Indian workers don't get a tax break.
Anytime someone says that they will create more jobs if you lower their income tax, they are LYING. They are trying to trick you. The more you lower their income taxes, the greater incentive you provide for them to ELIMINATE jobs, because instead of keeping 50% of the money they save by shipping a job to China, they now get to keep 70% of the money they save!
So, yes, we should absolutely lower taxes on job creators. And the only way to do that is lowering the JOB tax, not the income tax.
47% of American households do not contribute to the federal budget.
That's just plain false.
40% of the federal budget comes from payroll taxes. That's a 15.3% tax on all wages up to about 90k or so. It's 2.3% after that. It's 0% on rich people income like dividends, capital gains, interest, etc.
The poor may not pay income taxes... but they don't have much income. The rich don't pay payroll taxes, and they have a ton of income.
If you add it all up, the very, very poor come out at about 0 on taxes. Once you get into the lower middle class, federal taxes are pretty much flat-rate from then on - income taxes go up, tax breaks go up (like home mortgage deductions), payroll taxes go down, and more income comes from "favored" means like dividends and capital gains that are taxed at very low rates and interest that doesn't get a payroll tax.
If we spent on the military and in NASA what we spend on welfare and medicare in the US. We could replace every aircraft and ship in inventory with new equipment EVERY YEAR. We could build a new space station in orbit EVERY YEAR. We could build a new moon base EVERY YEAR. We could take a trip to Mars EVERY YEAR, and the sad part is we would have money left over.
True, but a few million senior citizens would be dead, partially because they spent their lives working in jobs where instead of providing a decent pension and retirement health insurance, their employer (or CEO or shareholders) got bigger yachts.
The reality is that the rich don't pay their fare share of taxes. I'm a small business owner, and if I make an extra $100, my federal taxes on that are about 43% between income and payroll. The ueber rich don't pay payroll taxes and get down to about 38% on their salaries. But the really really rich, who make millions when they sell their stock options, pay 15%. Oh, don't forget about fun things l like getting the federal government to pay 35% of your interest on your $1 million mortgage.
Even the bush tax cuts.. the average american saw their tax bill go down less than 1%. But people making millions of dollars a year saw their tax bill go down 6%.
The whole tax system is rigged in favor of the rich, and a bit for the ueber poor. Those of us in the middle are screwed.
As an aside, the worst tax for jobs in the US is the Federal Job Tax, aka Social Security and Medicare. About 40% of the US's revenue is in the job tax, and anyone can avoid paying the job tax by simply refusing to hire Americans in favor of hiring people in other countries. If we really want to fix the tax system in the US, we'd do something like no taxes on the first $30k of income, and a flat 25% income tax on everything beyond that - income, capital gains, dividends, whatever, 25%. No payroll tax, eliminating the huge tax incentive for shipping jobs overseas.
If states can allow and levy taxes on Indian Casinos, why can they not levy taxes on corporations selling to or from their state?
Because federal law specifically allows states to collect taxes on Indian casinos. Congress said the states can do it, so they can do it. Amazon's point is that Congress did NOT say states could collect sales tax on interstate transactions, and so Amazon doesn't have to until Congress says so.
to be simple two 1280x1024 monitors compared to one 2560x2048 display.
The two monitors have HALF the total resolution of the large monitor.
$1,000 for double the screen real estate you get for $400 is not a bad deal at all.
I actually have one 2560x1600 30" monitor with a 1200x1600 20" monitor on either side, rotated to portrait perspective. That essentially gives me one 4960x1600 desktop.
Not only do I save a ton of time not having to switch back and forth between windows, I save a ton of time not even having to scroll up/down.
The fund gets paid out to record labels, not artists. The best you can do is sell your copyright to a record label so they can get your share of the cash.
You can never lose more money than you have at the table.
This should be concern for the company, there should be no limits set by governments on liability (like the few tens of millions of dollars liability cap they had or have in USA for deep water oil drilling).
It's really the company's problem - they have to figure out how to take that and store it or reuse, whatever.
There is only a certain value to the company, so no matter what the law is, the limit on liability is the value of the company. And with some creative corporate structuring, a company can artificially reduce its apparent value.
So what happens when a company is only worth $10 billion, but can cause $1 trillion in damage? It becomes rational for that company to make decisions that have a small risk of a $1 trillion accident even though it may only save them a few million dollars, since the MOST the company can lose is $10 billion.
Whenever a company has the opportunity to cause greater damage than they can pay for, regulations (and enforcement) are required to make sure companies do not take risks with money they don't have.
Twitter's real problem is many of their users are receiving tweets on devices that are not conducive to reading the news, and on devices being held by people who are far less likely to be able / want to read the news anyway.
Think about it - if someone's preferred method of communication is 160 characters or less, how likely are they to want to read an article?
Actually, it's a pretty good analogy. Yes, there are laws that say the doctor can't divulge certain information. There are also laws that create liability if someone inappropriately discloses what's in your email.
But, ultimately, the only thing that prevents the doctor from disclosing your information is his own choice. Additionally, the doctor has staff that work at his office with access to your information. Your insurance company may also have it. Health authorities may have access to it. And the information he has is likely not encrypted, so if someone were to break into his systems or gain physical access to his office, your information would be available to them as well.
If you encrypt your data with sufficient technology, you have a near complete ability to prevent it from being compromised. With email and your doctor, you're relying on a combination of laws, choices by the provider, and frankly the fact that your particular email/medical history just isn't interesting enough to anyone nefarious to bother getting it to protect you.
E-mail itself isn't encrypted and any email you send transmits through and may even reside, unencrypted, on several servers between the sender and the recipient. If someone were to gain physical access to whatever server your email is stored on, they can read all your email. Or gain physical access to any server that transmits email and read a lot of email going through that server.
An email provider is a bit like your doctor - they have several motivations for NOT disclosing your private information, but there is no physical restriction preventing them from doing so.
One, about half of groupons don't get redeemed. So you're really only losing 50%, not 75%.
Two, you're only losing 50% on whatever the coupon gets the customer. The key is, you don't want the customer to only buy what the groupon gets them.
For example, if you are a restaurant and you sell $40 groupons for $20, you want to make sure your customers are spending $60 or more to eat at your restaurant.
If you are, say, an amusement park, selling a $35 admission for $10 is still getting you more money than the admissions you're giving away for free because you really just want people in your place to spend $4 on a soda and $5 on a hot dog.
If you are, say, a ski slope, same theory applies - you're already giving significant cost reductions to season pass holders and other outlets to get people on the hill, so still a good deal.
If you are, say, a paintball field (and paintball field owners LOVE groupon), you might have a $20 admission, $20 rental, and $20 for 500 paintballs. But you probably also have a package price for $35. With Groupon, you offer the package at 50% off the non-package price, so with half the groupons being redeemed, you're still getting $30 instead of your usual $35, and you're probably going to upsell the customer on a better rental or more paintballs or concessions.
Yes, if you have set your business up so that you have no margins on your list/retail prices, groupon isn't going to work for you. But if you have set up your business so that you don't have high margins on your list/retail prices, your real problem is you have not let yourself enough room to promote your business no matter what.
Groupon pays you 50% of all groupons SOLD, whether they are ever redeemed or not. (at least in the US.) And they pay you about half of what you sell the day after they are sold.
The guy who wrote the article doesn't know what he's talking about.
I've talked to a good 40 business owners who have used Groupon. Some things that the author of the article totally ignored:
1) Only about half of the Groupons get redeemed 2) If redeemed after the expiration date, they are only good for the face value paid. I.e., if you buy a £200 Groupon for £29, and you don't redeem it before expiration, then you just get £29 off the price of whatever you buy. 3) Upselling is key. For restaurants, when they sell a $40 Groupon for $20, they're betting you're going to come in with some friends and spend $60 to $100 on dinner. I do a lot of work in the recreational activity sector, and there they often do groupons for 50% off a basic package, then once you are there upsell you to a bigger package at full price. In the case of our photographer, if he does it right he'll be getting people to buy £400 or £600 photography packages - "You already are getting all this for £29, look what I can add to it for only £100 more!"
Now, maybe this groupon won't work out great for this one business, but Groupon can work very well if you set it up right and treat it as what it is supposed to be - an advertising/sales lead channel.
Indeed. And Groupon offers a no-questions-asked refund policy (at least in the US), so if the availability sucks, the buyer can get a full refund.
As far as the deal for the photographer, this is just an example of someone who didn't understand the business consequences of what they were doing when they did it. If the photographer had simply done £100 and required the shoot to be at this studio, he'd have done pretty well for himself. Or, he could have gone with the upsell model - offered a very basic package, then sold the customer on a bigger package one they have them at the shoot.
The article also misses another aspect of Groupon - only about half of the coupons get redeemed prior to their expiration date. At that point they just become worth face value in most jurisdictions, so on average, the business gets the full face value of the Groupon for those who redeem them (half the face value for the people who use them, and half for those who don't.)
So while this may not work out great, with half the groupons not being redeemed, and the opportunity to upsell the customers on more services/prints, this isn't going to be as bad as it seems on the surface.
This also works out a lot better for some business models than others. For example restaurants do a lot of $40 of food for $20. But most people who use the groupons can't buy exactly $40 worth of food, so they end up with $20 off of $50 or $60. And since restaurants are generally high fixed cost and lower marginal cost, getting the extra people in the door (and the extra revenue) is worth it to the restaurant.
I wonder, though, how long it will be before people start scamming Groupon for capital. Groupon pays you about half of the coupon sales up front, then the remainder over time as coupons are redeemed. So...
Launch feature Groupon deal Get check for 25% of total sales (half of your half of the face value) Move to Tahiti!
Slashdot Mirror
WoW is simply adopting the cocaine sales model. Give 'em a little for free so you can enslave them to your product!
Come to think of it, I don't know anyone who has ruined their life because of drugs. I know a few who have ruined their life because of WoW.
I've had an iPhone since the first one came out. .... It's just a phone with some extra features.
You make calls on your iPhone?
Actually, that's a sales guy motivated to make a sale.
You know what they call believing the sales guy?
Stupid.
In many states in the US, if someone pays you $X, you are required to provide $X of service, and you can't have an expiration on it.
So, you can advertise a coupon where someone pays you $X for $2X of services, and you can put an expiration date on it, but you're still legally required to redeem the $2X coupon for the $X paid for it even after expiration.
Couldn't they just look out the window? Maybe that big thing outside the window that a whole bunch of people recently walked off of just happens to be the plane everyone at the gate is waiting to board?
Maybe, but probably not.
If you land a plane at an airport, and go and park at a gate, what are the odds that the people waiting for a flight at that gate are supposed to be on the same plane that you just parked there?
Even if you get lucky, how is anyone supposed to even know what gate they are supposed to be at?
Of course, anyone can sue anyone for anything, but Apple would have to prove that the marketing was done in a manner to make it appear that Apple endorsed the contest; simply advertising that you are giving away a product by the name of the product is not sufficient.
Don't you mean:
iP([ao]d|hone)s
Asking for equity earlier would not have done him any good, because he wouldn't have gotten any then either.
The reason many startups give out equity at the start is because they can't afford to pay the going rate for the talent they need, so the principles are forced to trade a lot of potential payoffs later for cheaper help now.
If this company is hiring contractors, then they have enough money to just pay the going rate for the work they want done. If they've decided they are going to just pay the going rate, having asked for equity at the outset would have just caused them to hire a different contractor.
Fact of the matter is, the guy was offered a compensation package for doing a job. There's no reason to expect any equity when you're getting paid up-front. Equity is compensation for risk. No risk, no equity.
Programming is easy for people who will be good at programming. It requires being able to take a solution to a problem and arrange it into a set of instructions. If you can't do that by the time you get to college, and especially if you can't do that after 15 weeks of intro, you're not going to learn it in college, because the problem isn't that the student doesn't have CS experience; the problem is the student doesn't know how to solve problems and write down the solution.
That's not something that a HS grad who doesn't know it already is going to learn.
Should we give tax breaks to people who create jobs (especially 6 figure salaries), tax revenue and wealth?
We should. But if we really want to give a tax break to people who create jobs, we would eliminate the Federal Job Tax, the 15.3% tax on jobs, and replace the revenue with an income tax. Then the people who actually *DO* create jobs get a huge tax break, and the people who are replacing American workers with machines or Chinese workers or Indian workers don't get a tax break.
Anytime someone says that they will create more jobs if you lower their income tax, they are LYING. They are trying to trick you. The more you lower their income taxes, the greater incentive you provide for them to ELIMINATE jobs, because instead of keeping 50% of the money they save by shipping a job to China, they now get to keep 70% of the money they save!
So, yes, we should absolutely lower taxes on job creators. And the only way to do that is lowering the JOB tax, not the income tax.
47% of American households do not contribute to the federal budget.
That's just plain false.
40% of the federal budget comes from payroll taxes. That's a 15.3% tax on all wages up to about 90k or so. It's 2.3% after that. It's 0% on rich people income like dividends, capital gains, interest, etc.
The poor may not pay income taxes... but they don't have much income. The rich don't pay payroll taxes, and they have a ton of income.
If you add it all up, the very, very poor come out at about 0 on taxes. Once you get into the lower middle class, federal taxes are pretty much flat-rate from then on - income taxes go up, tax breaks go up (like home mortgage deductions), payroll taxes go down, and more income comes from "favored" means like dividends and capital gains that are taxed at very low rates and interest that doesn't get a payroll tax.
If we spent on the military and in NASA what we spend on welfare and medicare in the US. We could replace every aircraft and ship in inventory with new equipment EVERY YEAR. We could build a new space station in orbit EVERY YEAR. We could build a new moon base EVERY YEAR. We could take a trip to Mars EVERY YEAR, and the sad part is we would have money left over.
True, but a few million senior citizens would be dead, partially because they spent their lives working in jobs where instead of providing a decent pension and retirement health insurance, their employer (or CEO or shareholders) got bigger yachts.
The reality is that the rich don't pay their fare share of taxes. I'm a small business owner, and if I make an extra $100, my federal taxes on that are about 43% between income and payroll. The ueber rich don't pay payroll taxes and get down to about 38% on their salaries. But the really really rich, who make millions when they sell their stock options, pay 15%. Oh, don't forget about fun things l like getting the federal government to pay 35% of your interest on your $1 million mortgage.
Even the bush tax cuts.. the average american saw their tax bill go down less than 1%. But people making millions of dollars a year saw their tax bill go down 6%.
The whole tax system is rigged in favor of the rich, and a bit for the ueber poor. Those of us in the middle are screwed.
As an aside, the worst tax for jobs in the US is the Federal Job Tax, aka Social Security and Medicare. About 40% of the US's revenue is in the job tax, and anyone can avoid paying the job tax by simply refusing to hire Americans in favor of hiring people in other countries. If we really want to fix the tax system in the US, we'd do something like no taxes on the first $30k of income, and a flat 25% income tax on everything beyond that - income, capital gains, dividends, whatever, 25%. No payroll tax, eliminating the huge tax incentive for shipping jobs overseas.
If states can allow and levy taxes on Indian Casinos, why can they not levy taxes on corporations selling to or from their state?
Because federal law specifically allows states to collect taxes on Indian casinos. Congress said the states can do it, so they can do it. Amazon's point is that Congress did NOT say states could collect sales tax on interstate transactions, and so Amazon doesn't have to until Congress says so.
to be simple two 1280x1024 monitors compared to one 2560x2048 display.
The two monitors have HALF the total resolution of the large monitor.
$1,000 for double the screen real estate you get for $400 is not a bad deal at all.
I actually have one 2560x1600 30" monitor with a 1200x1600 20" monitor on either side, rotated to portrait perspective. That essentially gives me one 4960x1600 desktop.
Not only do I save a ton of time not having to switch back and forth between windows, I save a ton of time not even having to scroll up/down.
a tricorder required a doctor to make sense of the diagnosis in Star Trek, thus why Dr McCoy was needed
The tricorder made the diagnosis. Dr. McCoy was needed to add snarky comments and general indignation to the diagnosis read from the tricorder.
The fund gets paid out to record labels, not artists. The best you can do is sell your copyright to a record label so they can get your share of the cash.
You can never lose more money than you have at the table.
This should be concern for the company, there should be no limits set by governments on liability (like the few tens of millions of dollars liability cap they had or have in USA for deep water oil drilling).
It's really the company's problem - they have to figure out how to take that and store it or reuse, whatever.
There is only a certain value to the company, so no matter what the law is, the limit on liability is the value of the company. And with some creative corporate structuring, a company can artificially reduce its apparent value.
So what happens when a company is only worth $10 billion, but can cause $1 trillion in damage? It becomes rational for that company to make decisions that have a small risk of a $1 trillion accident even though it may only save them a few million dollars, since the MOST the company can lose is $10 billion.
Whenever a company has the opportunity to cause greater damage than they can pay for, regulations (and enforcement) are required to make sure companies do not take risks with money they don't have.
Twitter's real problem is many of their users are receiving tweets on devices that are not conducive to reading the news, and on devices being held by people who are far less likely to be able / want to read the news anyway.
Think about it - if someone's preferred method of communication is 160 characters or less, how likely are they to want to read an article?
Actually, it's a pretty good analogy. Yes, there are laws that say the doctor can't divulge certain information. There are also laws that create liability if someone inappropriately discloses what's in your email.
But, ultimately, the only thing that prevents the doctor from disclosing your information is his own choice. Additionally, the doctor has staff that work at his office with access to your information. Your insurance company may also have it. Health authorities may have access to it. And the information he has is likely not encrypted, so if someone were to break into his systems or gain physical access to his office, your information would be available to them as well.
If you encrypt your data with sufficient technology, you have a near complete ability to prevent it from being compromised. With email and your doctor, you're relying on a combination of laws, choices by the provider, and frankly the fact that your particular email/medical history just isn't interesting enough to anyone nefarious to bother getting it to protect you.
E-mail itself isn't encrypted and any email you send transmits through and may even reside, unencrypted, on several servers between the sender and the recipient. If someone were to gain physical access to whatever server your email is stored on, they can read all your email. Or gain physical access to any server that transmits email and read a lot of email going through that server.
An email provider is a bit like your doctor - they have several motivations for NOT disclosing your private information, but there is no physical restriction preventing them from doing so.
You're missing a lot of factors here.
One, about half of groupons don't get redeemed. So you're really only losing 50%, not 75%.
Two, you're only losing 50% on whatever the coupon gets the customer. The key is, you don't want the customer to only buy what the groupon gets them.
For example, if you are a restaurant and you sell $40 groupons for $20, you want to make sure your customers are spending $60 or more to eat at your restaurant.
If you are, say, an amusement park, selling a $35 admission for $10 is still getting you more money than the admissions you're giving away for free because you really just want people in your place to spend $4 on a soda and $5 on a hot dog.
If you are, say, a ski slope, same theory applies - you're already giving significant cost reductions to season pass holders and other outlets to get people on the hill, so still a good deal.
If you are, say, a paintball field (and paintball field owners LOVE groupon), you might have a $20 admission, $20 rental, and $20 for 500 paintballs. But you probably also have a package price for $35. With Groupon, you offer the package at 50% off the non-package price, so with half the groupons being redeemed, you're still getting $30 instead of your usual $35, and you're probably going to upsell the customer on a better rental or more paintballs or concessions.
Yes, if you have set your business up so that you have no margins on your list/retail prices, groupon isn't going to work for you. But if you have set up your business so that you don't have high margins on your list/retail prices, your real problem is you have not let yourself enough room to promote your business no matter what.
Groupon pays you 50% of all groupons SOLD, whether they are ever redeemed or not. (at least in the US.) And they pay you about half of what you sell the day after they are sold.
Who says he's going to be run out of business?
The guy who wrote the article doesn't know what he's talking about.
I've talked to a good 40 business owners who have used Groupon. Some things that the author of the article totally ignored:
1) Only about half of the Groupons get redeemed
2) If redeemed after the expiration date, they are only good for the face value paid. I.e., if you buy a £200 Groupon for £29, and you don't redeem it before expiration, then you just get £29 off the price of whatever you buy.
3) Upselling is key. For restaurants, when they sell a $40 Groupon for $20, they're betting you're going to come in with some friends and spend $60 to $100 on dinner. I do a lot of work in the recreational activity sector, and there they often do groupons for 50% off a basic package, then once you are there upsell you to a bigger package at full price. In the case of our photographer, if he does it right he'll be getting people to buy £400 or £600 photography packages - "You already are getting all this for £29, look what I can add to it for only £100 more!"
Now, maybe this groupon won't work out great for this one business, but Groupon can work very well if you set it up right and treat it as what it is supposed to be - an advertising/sales lead channel.
Indeed. And Groupon offers a no-questions-asked refund policy (at least in the US), so if the availability sucks, the buyer can get a full refund.
As far as the deal for the photographer, this is just an example of someone who didn't understand the business consequences of what they were doing when they did it. If the photographer had simply done £100 and required the shoot to be at this studio, he'd have done pretty well for himself. Or, he could have gone with the upsell model - offered a very basic package, then sold the customer on a bigger package one they have them at the shoot.
The article also misses another aspect of Groupon - only about half of the coupons get redeemed prior to their expiration date. At that point they just become worth face value in most jurisdictions, so on average, the business gets the full face value of the Groupon for those who redeem them (half the face value for the people who use them, and half for those who don't.)
So while this may not work out great, with half the groupons not being redeemed, and the opportunity to upsell the customers on more services/prints, this isn't going to be as bad as it seems on the surface.
This also works out a lot better for some business models than others. For example restaurants do a lot of $40 of food for $20. But most people who use the groupons can't buy exactly $40 worth of food, so they end up with $20 off of $50 or $60. And since restaurants are generally high fixed cost and lower marginal cost, getting the extra people in the door (and the extra revenue) is worth it to the restaurant.
I wonder, though, how long it will be before people start scamming Groupon for capital. Groupon pays you about half of the coupon sales up front, then the remainder over time as coupons are redeemed. So...
Launch feature Groupon deal
Get check for 25% of total sales (half of your half of the face value)
Move to Tahiti!
Two stealth helicopters got them in; they had two helicopters in reserve to get them out.