I'm not running a business, just selling things I don't want anymore.
The proposed limits would apply to me anyway. Am I an idiot for being concerned about this?
Now that you mention it, if I kept meticulous records about all my purchases I suppose I could claim a few grand a year of business losses. I buy a computer for $1k, sell it a few years later for $100 and write off the difference. Same thing for movies, cds, and books. Hmm. If I didn't hate paperwork so much it sounds like a decent scam.
At any rate, I would have been caught in their trawling maybe twice in the past 8 years. I "made" a bunch of money the year I unloaded all my vhs tapes and cleaned out my garage.
I'm not a fan of unrestricted and total free trade either. I just have less of a problem with free trade than I do with free movement of labor. Maybe I just haven't thought about them as equivalent.
Let's say we opened all borders to workers with jobs waiting. Wouldn't the entire globe end up with most workers making near US$3.35/hour (which is the current gross global product divided by population)
Free trade is already a mixed blessing at best for many countries. It seems to benefit huge corporations mainly.
OK right, but let's say you buy a car for $20k, depreciate $4k, and sell it for $18k. You pay taxes on $2k right? (I don't depreciate anything on my taxes)
Not consciously, but I do drink too much coffee, stay up too late, drink too much booze, smoke too many cigarettes, hang around fast women and apparently make idiotic comments on slashdot.
I've thought about going into business for myself. I have a few friends that have done so, one has been remarkably successful. It's scary though. I think it'd be easiest for me to scale back to part time work and grow my business with that safety.
My biggest weakness is that I don't like and am not good at "networking" or sales, and those are key. My friend who has a million dollar business now was very good at those things. I'm also not very ruthless, and in my informal outside computer work so far have trouble charging market rates and getting paid.
It's nice to hear from someone else in a similar situation. Your job sounds quite satisfying - I'd love to have a CNC mill here! It's encouraging to me that you also want to start a business.
Another option is a small, maybe 1-person shop. I do everything for a small manufacturing plant and it's fun work. I can code, design apps, admin dbs and systems, program PLCs or do computer-monkey work depending on my mood. Plus, I get to see all of my handiwork in action in a factory. I'll never go back to a cube farm again.
Of course, you'll either have to invent your position or wait for someone to die to get a job like this.
Damn, you're judgemental and narrow minded. What about people like me who sell maybe $2000/year on ebay, all of it bought retail and sold at a loss? Why should I have to keep books on all that and file a tax return showing my "business" operating at a loss every year? Because I'm a liar?
There are a lot of low value items sold. I've sold 2000 items on half.com (now owned by ebay) in the past 5 years, with an average sale price of $3 or $4. I've lost money on every single one of these transactions, since I paid retail for the books and cds. I've also sold items for friends who don't have stellar ebay ratings who have high value items to list. Yeah, I sold a ps3 some idiot friend bought to speculate on. I got $1000, which was very lucky. This money goes to my friends minus fees, leaving me zero profit. It would absolutely suck for me, and countless others, to have this $10,000 "income" to pay tax on.
Can you imagine the hassle and expense of keeping receipts for every single thing you've ever bought and sifting through them to show your "business" isn't making a profit?
Maybe it would work to my advantage in a perverse time-inefficient way. My business would post huge losses every year. Perhaps this could offset my real income?
Fruit doesn't have free will and the ability to move around on its own. People do. If they think that they can do much better somewhere else and there are no immigration restrictions, they will come long past the time it stopped being rational.
Hobos in the US live a life of luxury compared to the majority of the planet. Without immigration controls people would move to western countries simply for the quality of garbage and faint chance of proper work.
I am not xenophobic in the least, but I think some sane immigration policy is needed. Letting the market work it's magic without restraint for labor would be a nightmare.
How can this work? If a billion Indians and Chinese move to the western world it would be catastrophic. There would be severe infrastructure and housing shortages, wages would be in freefall. There would be zero motivation to invest in infrastructure since as soon as another country offered higher wages there would be another migration. You'd see boom-and-bust on a scale never imagined.
I'll keep this real simple. Is slavery OK according to the Christian god or is it not OK?
Is slavery OK sometimes and not OK sometimes?
Did this change?
If so, than god's ideas about right and wrong changed.
You live on shifting sands, created by man, whether you think so or not.
I'm not going to argue about semantics with you, but I'd like to point out that change is necessary. Every time religious doctrine has changed it has taken bloodshed, strife, and fragmentation of sects.
Religion doesn't like to change, but it has and it will have to in the future. Slavery, women's rights, the heliocentric solar system, evolution, maybe someday extraterrestrial life are all huge challenges to religious doctrine. Religion has been unhelpful and downright hostile to scientific progress.
That business about truth and unchanging god is trivially disproven.
Huh? Many of the ten commandments are purely god-related. Star Trek doesn't follow any of those. Kirk has relations with alien babes, and countless redshirts are killed. People deceive each other, and covet things, and take what isn't theirs.
I frankly don't know what you're talking about. Have you even read the ten commandments? They're mostly a bunch of stick-crazy bullshit about god. The couple that make any sense are too simplistic to be useful. What is murder? Isn't war murder? What is stealing? Is taxation or being a ruthless businessman stealing?
The ten commandments are stupid and useless.
Anyway, the difference between any rational framework and religion is that a rational framework has a mechanism for change, while religion based on dogma and made-up texts by definition does not. I think religion would implode if it had to deal with alien beings. There's a great book, Galactic Rapture, about what would happen if our religions survived alien contact. It's scary and funny, with intergalactic mormons and papal killing squads and every planet getting it's own jesus.
I was joking. Steam engines would be about the worst to have in accident-prone vehicles. A flywheel with enough power to drive around for 100 miles would demolish a city block if it exploded, and an accident would place huge stress on it.
A 10-gallon tank of gasoline has as much energy as 625 sticks of dynamite. Any portable energy storage will be quite dangerous should all that energy be released at once.
Propane is only a liquid at room temperature under high pressure, but you're right about the density. I don't know which one is safer. Methane would tend to collect near your ceiling, propane near your floor. If you have the right concentration and a spark - kaboom! I've certainly heard of both causing explosions, but without knowing accident and usage rates I wouldn't hazard a guess. There are definitely lots of stories about natural gas leaks (usually pure methane) causing explosions on the news.
No, adsorption is different - although molecular sieves are quite common, not for natural gas yet. There are several membrane technologies, here is an interesting one Membranes have been in use for a long time and have increased in performance over the years. It's pretty neat that a physical membrane can be made that sorts molecules based on their size. Sort of like the screens archeologists use.
There are cheap(ish) ways to remove carbon dioxide. Membranes have been around since the 80s that allow co2 through and keep methane behind. Maybe that's vice-versa. You just run pre-treated gas through the membrane under pressure and get purified gas.
I've had good luck with OEM power supplies as long as you don't add any extra power use. If you add a video card, 2nd HD, and run a lot of hungry USB devices that 250W dude won't last long.
Odd timing, my HP power supply died yesterday after 3 years of always-on. It had a video card, 2nd HD and a lot of USB devices. I fully intended to upgrade it, but my other computers took priority and I forgot. 3 years is pretty good considering it was used brutally.
At work, our corporate-dictated Dells soldier on with surprising durability. We've got 30 machines up to 7 years old and as long as I replace failing fans and drives have very little trouble. Some of them are tough to get around inside, but the newest ones we've got are much better at that.
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I'm not running a business, just selling things I don't want anymore.
The proposed limits would apply to me anyway. Am I an idiot for being concerned about this?
Now that you mention it, if I kept meticulous records about all my purchases I suppose I could claim a few grand a year of business losses. I buy a computer for $1k, sell it a few years later for $100 and write off the difference. Same thing for movies, cds, and books. Hmm. If I didn't hate paperwork so much it sounds like a decent scam.
At any rate, I would have been caught in their trawling maybe twice in the past 8 years. I "made" a bunch of money the year I unloaded all my vhs tapes and cleaned out my garage.
Huh? Researchers were asked to rename their papers if they used the word evolve. They had to come up with lame wordy titles that weren't as accurate.
This wasn't happening 10 years ago. What are you talking about?
I'm not a fan of unrestricted and total free trade either. I just have less of a problem with free trade than I do with free movement of labor. Maybe I just haven't thought about them as equivalent.
Let's say we opened all borders to workers with jobs waiting. Wouldn't the entire globe end up with most workers making near US$3.35/hour (which is the current gross global product divided by population)
Free trade is already a mixed blessing at best for many countries. It seems to benefit huge corporations mainly.
OK right, but let's say you buy a car for $20k, depreciate $4k, and sell it for $18k. You pay taxes on $2k right? (I don't depreciate anything on my taxes)
I've thought about going into business for myself. I have a few friends that have done so, one has been remarkably successful. It's scary though. I think it'd be easiest for me to scale back to part time work and grow my business with that safety.
My biggest weakness is that I don't like and am not good at "networking" or sales, and those are key. My friend who has a million dollar business now was very good at those things. I'm also not very ruthless, and in my informal outside computer work so far have trouble charging market rates and getting paid.
It's nice to hear from someone else in a similar situation. Your job sounds quite satisfying - I'd love to have a CNC mill here! It's encouraging to me that you also want to start a business.
Another option is a small, maybe 1-person shop. I do everything for a small manufacturing plant and it's fun work. I can code, design apps, admin dbs and systems, program PLCs or do computer-monkey work depending on my mood. Plus, I get to see all of my handiwork in action in a factory. I'll never go back to a cube farm again.
Of course, you'll either have to invent your position or wait for someone to die to get a job like this.
Damn, you're judgemental and narrow minded. What about people like me who sell maybe $2000/year on ebay, all of it bought retail and sold at a loss? Why should I have to keep books on all that and file a tax return showing my "business" operating at a loss every year? Because I'm a liar?
Isn't he right if you've been depreciating your car? You've written off $4000 already.
There are a lot of low value items sold. I've sold 2000 items on half.com (now owned by ebay) in the past 5 years, with an average sale price of $3 or $4. I've lost money on every single one of these transactions, since I paid retail for the books and cds. I've also sold items for friends who don't have stellar ebay ratings who have high value items to list. Yeah, I sold a ps3 some idiot friend bought to speculate on. I got $1000, which was very lucky. This money goes to my friends minus fees, leaving me zero profit. It would absolutely suck for me, and countless others, to have this $10,000 "income" to pay tax on.
Can you imagine the hassle and expense of keeping receipts for every single thing you've ever bought and sifting through them to show your "business" isn't making a profit?
Maybe it would work to my advantage in a perverse time-inefficient way. My business would post huge losses every year. Perhaps this could offset my real income?
Fruit doesn't have free will and the ability to move around on its own. People do. If they think that they can do much better somewhere else and there are no immigration restrictions, they will come long past the time it stopped being rational.
Hobos in the US live a life of luxury compared to the majority of the planet. Without immigration controls people would move to western countries simply for the quality of garbage and faint chance of proper work.
I am not xenophobic in the least, but I think some sane immigration policy is needed. Letting the market work it's magic without restraint for labor would be a nightmare.
How can this work? If a billion Indians and Chinese move to the western world it would be catastrophic. There would be severe infrastructure and housing shortages, wages would be in freefall. There would be zero motivation to invest in infrastructure since as soon as another country offered higher wages there would be another migration. You'd see boom-and-bust on a scale never imagined.
I'll keep this real simple. Is slavery OK according to the Christian god or is it not OK? Is slavery OK sometimes and not OK sometimes? Did this change? If so, than god's ideas about right and wrong changed. You live on shifting sands, created by man, whether you think so or not.
I'm not going to argue about semantics with you, but I'd like to point out that change is necessary. Every time religious doctrine has changed it has taken bloodshed, strife, and fragmentation of sects.
Religion doesn't like to change, but it has and it will have to in the future. Slavery, women's rights, the heliocentric solar system, evolution, maybe someday extraterrestrial life are all huge challenges to religious doctrine. Religion has been unhelpful and downright hostile to scientific progress.
That business about truth and unchanging god is trivially disproven.
Huh? Many of the ten commandments are purely god-related. Star Trek doesn't follow any of those. Kirk has relations with alien babes, and countless redshirts are killed. People deceive each other, and covet things, and take what isn't theirs.
I frankly don't know what you're talking about. Have you even read the ten commandments? They're mostly a bunch of stick-crazy bullshit about god. The couple that make any sense are too simplistic to be useful. What is murder? Isn't war murder? What is stealing? Is taxation or being a ruthless businessman stealing?
The ten commandments are stupid and useless.
Anyway, the difference between any rational framework and religion is that a rational framework has a mechanism for change, while religion based on dogma and made-up texts by definition does not. I think religion would implode if it had to deal with alien beings. There's a great book, Galactic Rapture, about what would happen if our religions survived alien contact. It's scary and funny, with intergalactic mormons and papal killing squads and every planet getting it's own jesus.
What, a guy can't crack a subgenius joke about fnord anymore? That's pretty uptight. I used to think discordians were cool, too.
You wanna buy some spray-on contrast enhancer that'll allow you to read that word? Only $20! Comes with a free daypass on the saucer!
I was joking. Steam engines would be about the worst to have in accident-prone vehicles. A flywheel with enough power to drive around for 100 miles would demolish a city block if it exploded, and an accident would place huge stress on it.
A 10-gallon tank of gasoline has as much energy as 625 sticks of dynamite. Any portable energy storage will be quite dangerous should all that energy be released at once.
You should go with a nice, safe flywheel-powered car. Or maybe a steam engine - nice safe wood or coal, no dangers there!
Propane is only a liquid at room temperature under high pressure, but you're right about the density. I don't know which one is safer. Methane would tend to collect near your ceiling, propane near your floor. If you have the right concentration and a spark - kaboom! I've certainly heard of both causing explosions, but without knowing accident and usage rates I wouldn't hazard a guess. There are definitely lots of stories about natural gas leaks (usually pure methane) causing explosions on the news.
No, adsorption is different - although molecular sieves are quite common, not for natural gas yet. There are several membrane technologies, here is an interesting one Membranes have been in use for a long time and have increased in performance over the years. It's pretty neat that a physical membrane can be made that sorts molecules based on their size. Sort of like the screens archeologists use.
They're both alkanes that are served with added fragrance. Close enough!
There are cheap(ish) ways to remove carbon dioxide. Membranes have been around since the 80s that allow co2 through and keep methane behind. Maybe that's vice-versa. You just run pre-treated gas through the membrane under pressure and get purified gas.
I've had good luck with OEM power supplies as long as you don't add any extra power use. If you add a video card, 2nd HD, and run a lot of hungry USB devices that 250W dude won't last long.
Odd timing, my HP power supply died yesterday after 3 years of always-on. It had a video card, 2nd HD and a lot of USB devices. I fully intended to upgrade it, but my other computers took priority and I forgot. 3 years is pretty good considering it was used brutally.
At work, our corporate-dictated Dells soldier on with surprising durability. We've got 30 machines up to 7 years old and as long as I replace failing fans and drives have very little trouble. Some of them are tough to get around inside, but the newest ones we've got are much better at that.