You still have 20% after another round of financing after you left? You cut a pretty awesome deal! Sounds like your "real money" comes from your clone company though!
I assume he was PAID for his time to this point in time -- why would his company give him more as "a sign of goodwill" with no assurance of his continued employment? Really, the offered 10% is that "sign of goodwill" contingent on his staying for five years.
That said, the whole thing sounds fishy if the company has more than five or so contributing technical employees -- which I assume it does if growth has been "impressive" over the past few years.
Yes -- but make sure the lawyer's payoff percentage is only on settlement/judgment over $100K and that percentage is low for the first $X (X probably >= $300K in a case like this). If the lawyer gets you $100K, well, you already had that. Also, the lawyer shouldn't get anything significant from "settling" for %140K just because you had the gumption to call a lawyer. On the flip side, offer a HUGE contingency on amounts over $X *maybe 40+%) in order to align the interests of all parties. Of course, some of this may depend on which state the case is in, and hence which mob^H^H^H bar association rules the roost.
Possibly the 10% had been diluted into oblivion and the original paperwork was a little ambiguous and the founder decided to buy a sure bet rather than "queer the deal" with litigation. Hard to say without more detail.
I don't agree that Lincoln was the worst president that we ever had - indeed, I think he was among the better. This thinking is, however, based on an "ends justifies the means" analysis rather than a belief he should have done what he did the way he did it.
But, I am always amazed and saddened by the whitewashed version of history about Lincoln that is taught in schools. I suspect faced with a multiple choice test question of "Who said the following and subsequently affirmed it?":
"I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people ; and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."
that the vast majority of High School graduates in the U.S. would cross Lincoln's name off the list almost immediately while trying to determine the answer by the process of elimination. Of course, they would be very wrong to do so as Lincoln said just this (and affirmed it later) in the fourth Lincoln-Douglas debate on September 18, 1858.
Although, such a statement must be taken in historical context, to pretend that Lincoln vigorously championed equality between races (as many seem to think) is a fantasy.
The problem is that multiple computers in my place are accessing the tubes, sometimes with big up/downloads and any single computer may be rebooted (or just shutdown) at anytime. There's no reason to incur the space/cost/power/heating/cooling/maintenance/setup overhead of adding another general purpose computer just to play the minimal role of a router to manage traffic to the tubes. And the alternative of sharing this duty with an existing computer is not a good one (the wifey would get quite upset if I decided to reboot the "router PC" when she was the dev engineer involved in some really hot multi-day problem at a customer who spends $50M a year with her company -- and our couch just isn't all that comfortable to sleep on!). Hence, the thinking that maybe tomato on a cheap router might be able (or evolve) to do this if ISPs started offering the service you proposed.
Perhaps I misunderstood your post that I responded to, but it seemed to suggest that this could all be managed from software on the accessing PC -- which is true for the "one-PC, one-cable modem" case, but that's probably not the majority of/. readers.
Overall, I like (complicated) solutions like yours though:)
(And, you insensitive clod, I can get slightly over 20Mb down from my ISP - so there!)
C- Because we have a wasteful government that will spend billions on wars. (if we spent as much on education as on warfare, we would be number 1 in the world, but we dont, so we're somewhere around number 40 in quality of education)...
Umm... we (I assume you mean the "United States") do spend more on education than on warfare. Even if you consider the entire DOD budget -- much of which is not spent on "warfare" but on being ready for warfare -- the DOD outlays are about the same as those for public primary and secondary education (I'm too lazy to track down exact figures for the same year for both categories though - try using google).
You may be making the mistake of looking at only the Federal budget -- most education spending is from state/local governments (and some is from private individuals/organizations) in the United States while all of the defense spending comes from the Federal budget (this is not a surprise - the US Constitution doesn't authorize the Federal government to involve itself in Education, but requires it to provide national defense -- although the Constitution is often overlooked which gives us the Department of Education and NCLB).
Some references... Page X shows a total 2005-2006 public Primary/Secondary expenditure on education (so excludes expenditures on universities, junior colleges, and all private schools etc) at $527B. The entire DOD budget for 2009 is under $550B
Why do people cling to economic theories like they were religions?
Not surprising actually... Neither are very reliable at predicting the future accurately, both are based on faith, and neither are (in practice at least) falsifiable.
What is the fucking rationale for Facebook to be up against this natural human act? Have they all been bottlefed?
So, should Facebook allow explicit images of the "natural human act" of copulation? Or, at least, unless everyone at Facebook is the product of immaculate conception?
Can't say that I agree (or disagree, or even much care) about their limitations on breastfeeding pictures -- but this argument for allowing them is weak.
But when that download finishes, you're going to be disappointed with the results -- we have this newfangled thing called color TV now that wasn't available when you started the download.
I'm fairly certain that if I had the resources to field a transition team, I could find someone that, IMHO, was as well qualified yet less volatile, more reasoned, and grokked the intent of the U.S. Constitution more strongly than Holder.
But, my point was not that Holder was a bad choice, just that he should be held accountable for his mistakes and these should be counted "against" him in the selection process. Perhaps Holder is the best qualified person Obama can find who's willing to be a part of his administration - I've not been involved in the selection process so who knows who was uninterested in the position.
It seems that what you're saying is that Holder made the wrong call when faced with a new situation (the internet) which wasn't in his playbook. But, we shouldn't worry about that lapse of judgment because the internet is now understood and perhaps he's changed his views on it anyway.
But, gosh, what if during his tenure as Attorney General something else comes up that isn't yet in the playbook? While I know that's fairly unlikely in most cases, certainly in a time of "change" it might actually come up sometime.
Given that many others evaluated the risk of the internet and were urging little or no regulation when given the same information that Holder had, I think I'd have to give Holder some demerits for this failing and be concerned that it may reflect on his ability to analyze novel situations.
So, if the property tax went from $1K/year to $21K/year on a property which rents for $20K/year, the landlord would end up losing money just by paying the tax bill (let alone paying the mortgage, maintenance, insurance, marketing, etc...) and would continue to do that year after year? Of course not.
It's not obvious and immediate in some cases, but of course the taxes are just passed on.
Without rent control, landlords try to raise the rents as high as they can (independent of taxation level). Generally vacancy rates are moderate (maybe 5% or so depending on the market but it varies).
The "average" landlord requires a minimum ROI to stay in the business (obviously this long term ROI must be better, for example, than that of Treasury Bills). If the market rents allow an ROI higher than this minimum required ROI, more rental units appear on the market (through conversion from owner-occupied units or via new construction/conversion) - driving rents down by increasing supply. If the market rents don't allow an ROI of at least the minimum, landlords take their properties out of the market (such as by selling rental homes/condos to individuals for owner-occupied housing or by conversion to other uses such as retail or industrial) - driving rents up by decreasing supply.
Obviously ROI is decreased by increased operating expenses -- including higher taxes. So, yes, increasing taxes does increase rents. In the short term, it may not have much effect but it will over the time frame that supply can be added/removed efficiently (maybe five years). Similarly, decreasing taxes will not have an immediate effect, but supply will eventually increase. There is no free lunch.
In a market artificially starved for rental units (such as a city that won't issue permits to increase density of existing complexes or add more residential housing), it's probably true that moderate tax increases and decreases won't make much difference for quite a while. However, such markets are the exception rather than the rule.
(Some commercial leases - which are often longer than residential leases, do include provisions allowing the landlord to directly pass tax increases on to the lessee.)
Much as I dislike the bailouts, they may actually return direct investment returns in excess of their cost (to say nothing of possibly beneficial side effects on the economy). No, I don't really believe this, but "they" keep telling me this. NASA, on the other hand, has never put more directly into the Treasury than it cost.
Not saying this means NASA shouldn't be well funded, but comparing it to the bailouts seems like comparing apples to kumquats.
If it wasn't for the military implications of space leadership, NASA probably wouldn't ever have existed. Even today, NASA's continued existence and relatively strong public support is, I think, largely predicated on the vague notion that long term military leadership requires a space presence. If the public decides to reduce the priority of the US military, they are likely to slash NASA at the same time.
It seems to me that most people "like" the idea of "pure space exploration" but those that believe in big government spending are much more likely to allocate limited funds to "human needs" (welfare, medicaid, food stamps, make work projects) than to NASA.
Once we figure it out with the robots, we just send a few packages of human eggs and sperm cells (and a bit of nutrient glop) on several transport vehicles to the robots and tell them to create humans.
I think it would be acceptable even to the nutcase "right-to-life" extremists to subject unfertilized eggs and sperm to risks we wouldn't accept for living humans.
She graciously has offered to send you her pager. Just post your address in response to this post. We will even, as a public service, pay for shipping.
I can attest to the fact the unit is plenty loud. As a bonus, you will get plenty of pages for problems that an engineer should never be called for and should have been handled by customer support.
Of course, in the future we will live in virtual worlds, where space is unlimited.
But, imagine how quickly virtual people can spawn new virtual people - Moore's law would be very scary here as the rate of spawning would double every 18 months or so. Where will we put all the bits needed to uniquely define each virtual human - there are only a finite number of atoms conveniently close to us!
The cost in Earth based resources to ship the excess population to Mars will likely exceed the resources required to simply keep those people on Earth for the rest of their lives.
Shipping people off won't impact the ability of the remaining people to spawn - and if any net resources are freed up by shipping people to Mars, those remaining on Earth will simply increase their spawning rate until, again, Earth suffers from overpopulation. If this wasn't the case, the Earth's population would have frozen before it was necessary to send the first million immigrants to Mars due to Earth being overpopulated
Seems there may be good reasons to build a human civilization on Mars (such as protecting the human species from extinction due to an event local to the Earth - such as an asteroid impact), but dealing with overpopulation doesn't seem to be one of them.
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You still have 20% after another round of financing after you left? You cut a pretty awesome deal! Sounds like your "real money" comes from your clone company though!
And things rarely get better after Series B and C :)
I assume he was PAID for his time to this point in time -- why would his company give him more as "a sign of goodwill" with no assurance of his continued employment? Really, the offered 10% is that "sign of goodwill" contingent on his staying for five years.
That said, the whole thing sounds fishy if the company has more than five or so contributing technical employees -- which I assume it does if growth has been "impressive" over the past few years.
Yes -- but make sure the lawyer's payoff percentage is only on settlement/judgment over $100K and that percentage is low for the first $X (X probably >= $300K in a case like this). If the lawyer gets you $100K, well, you already had that. Also, the lawyer shouldn't get anything significant from "settling" for %140K just because you had the gumption to call a lawyer. On the flip side, offer a HUGE contingency on amounts over $X *maybe 40+%) in order to align the interests of all parties. Of course, some of this may depend on which state the case is in, and hence which mob^H^H^H bar association rules the roost.
Possibly the 10% had been diluted into oblivion and the original paperwork was a little ambiguous and the founder decided to buy a sure bet rather than "queer the deal" with litigation. Hard to say without more detail.
I don't agree that Lincoln was the worst president that we ever had - indeed, I think he was among the better. This thinking is, however, based on an "ends justifies the means" analysis rather than a belief he should have done what he did the way he did it.
But, I am always amazed and saddened by the whitewashed version of history about Lincoln that is taught in schools. I suspect faced with a multiple choice test question of "Who said the following and subsequently affirmed it?":
"I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people ; and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race."
that the vast majority of High School graduates in the U.S. would cross Lincoln's name off the list almost immediately while trying to determine the answer by the process of elimination. Of course, they would be very wrong to do so as Lincoln said just this (and affirmed it later) in the fourth Lincoln-Douglas debate on September 18, 1858.
Although, such a statement must be taken in historical context, to pretend that Lincoln vigorously championed equality between races (as many seem to think) is a fantasy.
Just a bit of historical reality to consider...
And there are plenty of news sources that are not the interweb:
- your friends and cow-orkers
Indeed -- that's how I found out that the WTC towers were actually imploded by the US government on 9/11/2001.
Unfortunately, all I saw on TV were harebrained claims about it being caused by terrorists or some other such bunk.
A small price that the police are willing to pay to make sure you don't take pictures of them shooting or beating someone w/o cause.
The problem is that multiple computers in my place are accessing the tubes, sometimes with big up/downloads and any single computer may be rebooted (or just shutdown) at anytime. There's no reason to incur the space/cost/power/heating/cooling/maintenance/setup overhead of adding another general purpose computer just to play the minimal role of a router to manage traffic to the tubes. And the alternative of sharing this duty with an existing computer is not a good one (the wifey would get quite upset if I decided to reboot the "router PC" when she was the dev engineer involved in some really hot multi-day problem at a customer who spends $50M a year with her company -- and our couch just isn't all that comfortable to sleep on!). Hence, the thinking that maybe tomato on a cheap router might be able (or evolve) to do this if ISPs started offering the service you proposed.
/. readers.
:)
Perhaps I misunderstood your post that I responded to, but it seemed to suggest that this could all be managed from software on the accessing PC -- which is true for the "one-PC, one-cable modem" case, but that's probably not the majority of
Overall, I like (complicated) solutions like yours though
(And, you insensitive clod, I can get slightly over 20Mb down from my ISP - so there!)
You insensitive clod. We have at least six computers used by two people several different OSs running through a router to the cable modem.
Sorry, PC level SW isn't going to cut it - maybe time to check out tomato.
Umm... we (I assume you mean the "United States") do spend more on education than on warfare. Even if you consider the entire DOD budget -- much of which is not spent on "warfare" but on being ready for warfare -- the DOD outlays are about the same as those for public primary and secondary education (I'm too lazy to track down exact figures for the same year for both categories though - try using google).
You may be making the mistake of looking at only the Federal budget -- most education spending is from state/local governments (and some is from private individuals/organizations) in the United States while all of the defense spending comes from the Federal budget (this is not a surprise - the US Constitution doesn't authorize the Federal government to involve itself in Education, but requires it to provide national defense -- although the Constitution is often overlooked which gives us the Department of Education and NCLB).
Some references... Page X shows a total 2005-2006 public Primary/Secondary expenditure on education (so excludes expenditures on universities, junior colleges, and all private schools etc) at $527B. The entire DOD budget for 2009 is under $550B
Not surprising actually... Neither are very reliable at predicting the future accurately, both are based on faith, and neither are (in practice at least) falsifiable.
So, should Facebook allow explicit images of the "natural human act" of copulation? Or, at least, unless everyone at Facebook is the product of immaculate conception?
Can't say that I agree (or disagree, or even much care) about their limitations on breastfeeding pictures -- but this argument for allowing them is weak.
But when that download finishes, you're going to be disappointed with the results -- we have this newfangled thing called color TV now that wasn't available when you started the download.
I'm fairly certain that if I had the resources to field a transition team, I could find someone that, IMHO, was as well qualified yet less volatile, more reasoned, and grokked the intent of the U.S. Constitution more strongly than Holder.
But, my point was not that Holder was a bad choice, just that he should be held accountable for his mistakes and these should be counted "against" him in the selection process. Perhaps Holder is the best qualified person Obama can find who's willing to be a part of his administration - I've not been involved in the selection process so who knows who was uninterested in the position.
This is not comforting.
It seems that what you're saying is that Holder made the wrong call when faced with a new situation (the internet) which wasn't in his playbook. But, we shouldn't worry about that lapse of judgment because the internet is now understood and perhaps he's changed his views on it anyway.
But, gosh, what if during his tenure as Attorney General something else comes up that isn't yet in the playbook? While I know that's fairly unlikely in most cases, certainly in a time of "change" it might actually come up sometime.
Given that many others evaluated the risk of the internet and were urging little or no regulation when given the same information that Holder had, I think I'd have to give Holder some demerits for this failing and be concerned that it may reflect on his ability to analyze novel situations.
So, if the property tax went from $1K/year to $21K/year on a property which rents for $20K/year, the landlord would end up losing money just by paying the tax bill (let alone paying the mortgage, maintenance, insurance, marketing, etc...) and would continue to do that year after year? Of course not.
It's not obvious and immediate in some cases, but of course the taxes are just passed on.
Without rent control, landlords try to raise the rents as high as they can (independent of taxation level). Generally vacancy rates are moderate (maybe 5% or so depending on the market but it varies).
The "average" landlord requires a minimum ROI to stay in the business (obviously this long term ROI must be better, for example, than that of Treasury Bills). If the market rents allow an ROI higher than this minimum required ROI, more rental units appear on the market (through conversion from owner-occupied units or via new construction/conversion) - driving rents down by increasing supply. If the market rents don't allow an ROI of at least the minimum, landlords take their properties out of the market (such as by selling rental homes/condos to individuals for owner-occupied housing or by conversion to other uses such as retail or industrial) - driving rents up by decreasing supply.
Obviously ROI is decreased by increased operating expenses -- including higher taxes. So, yes, increasing taxes does increase rents. In the short term, it may not have much effect but it will over the time frame that supply can be added/removed efficiently (maybe five years). Similarly, decreasing taxes will not have an immediate effect, but supply will eventually increase. There is no free lunch.
In a market artificially starved for rental units (such as a city that won't issue permits to increase density of existing complexes or add more residential housing), it's probably true that moderate tax increases and decreases won't make much difference for quite a while. However, such markets are the exception rather than the rule.
(Some commercial leases - which are often longer than residential leases, do include provisions allowing the landlord to directly pass tax increases on to the lessee.)
Renters do pay taxes, it's just that landlords rather then the government collects them via something often called "Rent".
Don't worry - a love child will pop up somewhere to bridge the gap.
Much as I dislike the bailouts, they may actually return direct investment returns in excess of their cost (to say nothing of possibly beneficial side effects on the economy). No, I don't really believe this, but "they" keep telling me this. NASA, on the other hand, has never put more directly into the Treasury than it cost.
Not saying this means NASA shouldn't be well funded, but comparing it to the bailouts seems like comparing apples to kumquats.
If it wasn't for the military implications of space leadership, NASA probably wouldn't ever have existed. Even today, NASA's continued existence and relatively strong public support is, I think, largely predicated on the vague notion that long term military leadership requires a space presence. If the public decides to reduce the priority of the US military, they are likely to slash NASA at the same time.
It seems to me that most people "like" the idea of "pure space exploration" but those that believe in big government spending are much more likely to allocate limited funds to "human needs" (welfare, medicaid, food stamps, make work projects) than to NASA.
Once we figure it out with the robots, we just send a few packages of human eggs and sperm cells (and a bit of nutrient glop) on several transport vehicles to the robots and tell them to create humans.
I think it would be acceptable even to the nutcase "right-to-life" extremists to subject unfertilized eggs and sperm to risks we wouldn't accept for living humans.
I mentioned your problem to my wife.
She graciously has offered to send you her pager. Just post your address in response to this post. We will even, as a public service, pay for shipping.
I can attest to the fact the unit is plenty loud. As a bonus, you will get plenty of pages for problems that an engineer should never be called for and should have been handled by customer support.
But, imagine how quickly virtual people can spawn new virtual people - Moore's law would be very scary here as the rate of spawning would double every 18 months or so. Where will we put all the bits needed to uniquely define each virtual human - there are only a finite number of atoms conveniently close to us!
The cost in Earth based resources to ship the excess population to Mars will likely exceed the resources required to simply keep those people on Earth for the rest of their lives.
Shipping people off won't impact the ability of the remaining people to spawn - and if any net resources are freed up by shipping people to Mars, those remaining on Earth will simply increase their spawning rate until, again, Earth suffers from overpopulation. If this wasn't the case, the Earth's population would have frozen before it was necessary to send the first million immigrants to Mars due to Earth being overpopulated
Seems there may be good reasons to build a human civilization on Mars (such as protecting the human species from extinction due to an event local to the Earth - such as an asteroid impact), but dealing with overpopulation doesn't seem to be one of them.