it's a good bet there is collusion on the part of the managers and owners of the plant to hire illegals. Why would the plant prefer hiring illegals to legals? What's the difference to the plant?
Before you say "payroll taxes" or something like that, remember that the illegals used fake SSNs, so the plant was paying taxes on 'em all.
I did some quick googling, and I saw that some jurisdictions in the US actually define what is and is not safe for a child to do alone. Here is a link to one such set of guidelines.
If you think about it, it's pretty absurd. In that county, no child age 7 or under may be left alone ever. When I was 6, I rode my bike to the store, rode my bike to school each day, etc. And I did not live in a rural area or even the suburbs. I lived in the city.
It gets more absurd from there. According to the guidelines, a child aged 17 can be left alone for up to two consecutive nights, but only "in some cases". That's a pretty big jump from age 17 years, 11 months to 18 years when we consider that person to be a full adult, capable of living on their own, making adult decisions, and being held responsible for their actions as a full adult.
Personally, I think those guidelines are absurd, but that is the type of legal environment we live in nowadays. If I lived in that county, what choice would I have? The cops would come take my kids away.
I'm sorry, but you are both pedantic and wrong. I am well aware of the difference between Outlook and Exchange, and Sunbird cannot replace Outlook.
Unless something has changed, Sunbird cannot perform the killer use case of Outlook+Exchange. Not even with CalDAV. And without that use case, Sunbird is useless as a groupware client.
The use case is: User creates a new event, User selects invitees, Invitees' availability is displayed to the user, User clicks "AutoPick Next", System selects the next available timeslot where all invitees are available, User saves meeting, Invitees are emailed an invitation, Invitees select "Accept", "Decline", or "Propose new time", System tracks invitees' responses.
The steps in italics I do not believe to be supported in Sunbird. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but to my knowledge, Sunbird Just Can't Do That. Until it can, it is only a calendar for single users.
I'm sorry if this message came off as a little irritable, but frankly I'm irritated that when I post a response to a question that asks about Exchange vs. Sunbird, I get a half dozen responses about how Exchange is a server app and Sunbird is a client. That may be true, but please explain to me how that should change my answer.
As far as I can tell, all it should change is 's/Exchange/Outlook/g', because Sunbird (or Thunderbird+Lightning) doesn't replace Outlook any more than it replaces Exchange. In my mind, the client vs. server detail doesn't warrant a smarty-pants response. I'm pretty sure all of you knew what I was talking about.
Migrating your corporate address book to LDAP is a great start, but I still don't think that Lightning is going to do what you need it to do.
Again, try it out. Hopefully it will meet your needs. But as far a I know, there is no way to automatically schedule meetings based on others' calendars. Most organizations use that ability of Exchange quite heavily.
I said dictionaries on my shelf. dictionary.reference.com is not on my shelf. They still make actual books, you know.
And nowhere can I find that metathesis gives us a valid pronunciation, only that it happens. What is the difference? It's just a word. How can a pronunciation be valid or invalid, if not through usage? Please don't tell me you say, "i-ron".
For fun, I used your dictionary.reference.com to look up both nuclear and tomato. The pronunciation guides list noo-klee-er/noo-kyuh-ler the same way as tuh-mey-toh/tuh-mah-toh.
Looks to me like you say noo-klee-er, I say noo-kyuh-ler is on equal footing with you say tuh-mey-toh, I say tuh-mah-toh.
I hate to break it to you, but the "noo-kyuh-ler" pronunciation appears in every dictionary on my shelf.
While you've got your dictionary out to verify, why not look up the word "metathesis" as well? Unless you walk around all day pronouncing "iron" as "i-ron", it's time to drop the whole "nuclear" issue.
Maybe Bush learned to say "noo-kyuh-ler" form former President Jimmy Carter?
Nina is not dead. Either she's hiding, or she's lost somewhere, or possibly has lost her memory. I presume she loves her kids to much to put them through this ordeal, so I consider this hypothesis unlikely.
Well, Nina is a Russian mail-order bride. According to the article, Nina and Hans conceived a child their first night together. Really roped Hans in pretty quick, no?
The kids are currently known to be in Russia, and the Russian mom is conveniently nowhere to be found.
According to the article, Reiser thought the Russian mafia or spy agency was tracking him. It was actually the local police, but because they used many unmarked cars and airplanes, he thought the tracking was beyond the scope of a local police force.
If you thought that the Russian mafia or spy agency was after you, would you be driving around in your personal vehicle that they know is yours? Or would you drive someone else's car? I don't think that I would have the courage to drive my own car if I believed some "serious people" were after me.
Also, I'm told that removing the passenger seat is common in the "ricer" community.
I'm not sure I agree with this. The reason being, those 11 years the doctor spent in school, learning, the janitor was scrubbing toilets. If I had to choose between eleven years of education, or eleven years of scrubbing toilets, I'd gladly pick the education.
Totally irrelevant. I'd rather be traveling the world right now, but that's not going to earn me any money. It's not investing in myself.
The aspiring doctor is spending 11 years learning to do something that takes 11 years to learn how to do. That the janitor might rather be attending med school is nice, but totally irrelevant. He is NOT attending med school, so he doesn't get the benefit of having attended med school.
The other issue with this one is the cost of eleven years of education. My opinion here is that the more educated people we have in the country, the better. The current system of grants and loans -- and this is coming from someone working a full time job to afford going to school full time -- is rather inadequate. The cost of tuition is skyrocketing, and the only solution is more loans. I think in a world with a fairer distribution of wealth, a good college education would be available to anyone, much in the same way a high school education is available to everyone.
Well, believe me, I'm not looking forward to paying for my kids' college, so I won't argue with you here. However, again, it is beside the point.
The doctor still went through 11 years of highly specialized training, and the janitor did not. In order to hire a doctor, you need someone who went to med school. Not everyone goes to med school, so that creates scarcity of supply. And bingo, higher prices.
Making med school free doesn't help, either. Time, the ultimate scarce resource, will always limit you. Sure, you can go 11 years to free med school, but can you go to med school and law school and vet school and get a PhD in chemistry and.... See what I mean? People are always going to have different backgrounds and different skills, and yes, different values on those skills.
My granny always used to say, "Want in one hand, shit in the other -- see which one fills up first." Wanting something badly doesn't mean you'll get it. There are only so many resources.
Well, I'm sure your grandmother was a great person, but what kind of an attitude is that? That saying doesn't even make any sense to me. Why are my only choices wanting or defecating?
I agree that the world and the economy are both finite, so you cannot have everything that you want. No one can. But if you pick something realistic, you can achieve it. You may not be able to achieve it faster than you can fill your hand with fecal matter, but you can achieve it.
Regardless of any other factors involved, I can't see how one human being deserves more than another. That could be in this country, or worldwide. Sure, it's idealistic, and some might say unrealistic, but I think it's not too crazy to think every human being should get an equal share of the world's resources, both natural and otherwise.
Obviously no human life could have more value than any other human life. However, some people do produce more value than others. If you want them to continue producing more value to society, then you need to compensate them for it. The free market does this.
The ideal that I ascribe to is that every person should have his or her basic needs met. A society that allows people to starve on the streets is not a just society. However, once each member of society's basic needs are met, then I say let the market decide who gets what.
There's no such thing as truly "good" debt, IMHO. Debt is fundamentally bad by its very nature, and anyone who says otherwise is probably a loan officer.
Well, I won't try to convince you otherwise because I know that I cannot, but as someone who is not a loan officer and believes that there is such a thing as truly good debt, I'd like to ask, where did your beliefs come from? Why are you so adamant that debt can never be good?
A normal consumer would be facing a question more along the lines of a $5k ring and a $400 monthly payment, in which case, they would feel somewhat pinched at $800, but they could do it. Thus, they might reasonably consider $5k to be an acceptable amount of money to spend on e.g. a wedding ring.
Well, add or subtract zeros as you feel appropriate; but my point (perhaps poorly made before) still remains. You even say that someone "might reasonably consider $5k to be an acceptable amount of money to spend on e.g. a wedding ring", and being a reasonable person, might consider that $5k debt to be good debt (I know, I know, there is no "truly good" debt, but in your framework, there seems to be a concept of "acceptable" debt... not "good" per se, but go for it nonetheless):)
Again, I am not making a value judgment about purchasing a $5k or even $50k ring. That is none of my business, and anyway, I cannot judge how much happiness that piece of fine jewelry would bring to someone other than me. My issue is with the financing of the purchase, not the purchase itself.
My point, is that while you have said it is "reasonable" for a person to take on a $5k debt, assuming he could muster up $800 per month if he really, really had to, I would argue that this $5k engagement ring financing is a monumentally stupid move. I mean, literally deserving of a monument to be constructed right there in the jewelry store, for all to see and remember the gross idiocy this guy showed. That $5k loan is the epitome of bad debt. My apologies in advance to you if you were that "reasonable" guy in the jewelry store.
The reason that the ring purchase is bad debt is that you expect a large negative return on investment (diamonds decline sharply in value post retail sale). You might counter that the investment is more than just a diamond, it is also a wife. Unfortunately, experience (not personal experience, of course) shows that a wife who insists that potential grooms spend 3 months' salary on a worthless rock (again, "financial worthlessness", not "personal happiness worthlessness"--if you've ever tried to sell a diamond, you will know why I use the term "worthless"), will without fail be an even larger negative return on investment.
My personal experience is that, while I did purchase a diamond engagement ring for my wife, the ring cost approximately $500 in today's dollars. She still wears it proudly, despite the fact that we could easily replace it with something more expensive. To the extent that a human being can be given a "value", there is no ring or other token that can be had at any cost, that would be an accurate expression of how much I "value" my wife.
Again, my rules were not intended to say whether something was a good deal, only whether you could really afford it.
Well, I disagree that your rules even say whether or not a purchase is affordable.
Your rules state that, because I can't make $16,000 payments each months, I cannot afford to purchase the building. I am a landlord, and you are wrong. I can afford it, and I would have zero difficulty getting it financed. This is based on experience. By the way, if you are aware of any properties that meet this description, please contact me.;)
You would also "very likely" counsel me not to purchase the building. I can understand why you would give that advice--you do not have any experience owning rental property, so you greatly overstate the risks involved.
I guess I should have said the six figure bit applied only here in the U.S.A.
That would have only made me clarify that I do, indeed, live in the USA. I'm about a 10 hour drive from you. But you are right, the cost of living where I am is much higher than in Nashville.
I did some thinking about the median household incomes around here last night, and the more I think of it, the more I can see how it's true that they are really that high. It's pretty standard around here for a non-entry-level job to pay more than $50k. Even many entry level jobs pay that much here (my first job out of college paid $52,000 per year and I progressed quickly from there). There are hardly any single-income households around here, so viola. You're at 100k.
Single income households don't drag us down too much, either. With a few years' experience, it's very doable around here to make $75k-$100k. Also, there are many many attorneys who live here and they tend to make over $100k. Before you ask, neither my wife nor I are attorneys.;)
What is the virtue by which one person deserves a much higher standard of living than someone else?
Well, that's easy. Some people's work is more valuable than others'. There are many reasons for this. Some jobs require more education and training than others. A doctor needs to go through 11 years of expensive training and zero income post high school. A janitor can learn his trade in 11 minutes. We must pay the doctor more than the janitor, otherwise there would be no doctors. You'd have to be an idiot to waste 11 years of your life studying to become a doctor when you could earn the same amount to feed your family in 11 minutes' training.
Some jobs require more risk, and therefore there should be greater rewards. Do you think I would have started 3 small businesses if I didn't think there would be a reward for that? Heck no! I would have stayed at that first job out of high school. Why should I take huge risks for no reward? There are a lot of reasons why some people earn more money than others. These reasons are usually valid.
I say usually, because I'm sure you'll point out that some people get their jobs not because of talent, but because of family connections. Indeed, I have an uncle who owns a company, and his adult son can't seem to hold down a job. Rather than continuing to just give his son money for nothing, he gave him a 'job'.
You'd probably argue that it's unfair for his son to be given a job that he did not earn himself, and I'd tend to agree with you. However, these cases, while highly visible and controversial, are actually quite rare. Or at least in my observation they are rare.
But my point still remains. Take away the incentive to invest in oneself and you'll find that people won't invest. If I can make the same money as a master electrician as I can doing unskilled carpentry (there is a difference between skilled and unskilled carpentry, to say the least), why would I become a master electrician?
Remove the reward for taking risks, and then why should I start 3 companies? And what about my employees, what would they do? Why should I give up the comforts that I was used to like heat in the winter while getting things off the ground? Well, I wouldn't have. I would have gone to work in nice clothes, punched my timeclock, driven home in a nice car, watched cable TV (yup, that got canceled, too), enjoyed my climate-controlled home, gone out for dinner (HA! that was the first habit out the window when I quit), and just basically lived the yuppie lifestyle.
Instead, I took that risk, my wife and I gave up the comforts that we were accustomed to, I worked more than I had to or wanted to. I did it because I believed that there would be rewards on the other end. So I find it laughable when someone says that I shouldn't make what I earn, if he didn't go through what I went through. Where were you all those cold nigh
My point is that most people do not understand good debt vs. bad, and you are no exception. It is a shame that our educational system does not prepare people to make important financial decisions.
Here are the criteria you put forth for taking on debt:
Use of funds must be a huge amount of money proportional to your salary
Saving up the funds is impractical or purchaser lacks the discipline to save
Can afford 2x the "minimum payment"
So answer me this, should I buy a $50,000 diamond ring for my wife on a jewelry-store consumer loan? After all, $50,000 is a huge amount of money proportional to my salary, the minimum payment on a consumer loan is typically 4% of principal, which would be $2000. I could afford double. And, yes, I think it's impractical to save up $50,000 for a hunk of carbon. So I should head to the jewelry store then, no?
On the other hand, let's say I can buy a 25 unit apartment building for $1,000,000.00. Definitely a huge amount of money compared with my salary. Saving the funds is no doubt impractical, if not impossible. Can I afford 2x the minimum payment? Well, the minimum payment would be about $8000, so no, I could not afford double that.
On the flip side, if the units rent for $600 apiece, I have inflows of $15,000 per month, minus expenses. Net net, we're probably looking at a positive cash flow on the building of approximately $3000/mo.
You would have advised me never to purchase this building because I couldn't make 2x the minimum payment. In my opinion, your test is defective, because the building is a good purchase.
Now we see that what you do with the money is way more important than the amount of money involved.
Why does taking on debt to buy a home make sense? Because you have a housing payment anyway, and you might as well be building up equity and deducting the mortgage interest.
Why does buying a car on credit make sense? Why would you want to have that much money tied up in a rapidly depreciating asset? Anyhow, you should buy a used car. New cars are a ripoff.
Why does remodeling your home on a home equity loan make sense? Because you are investing in your property and increasing its value.
Good Debt is for investment, when you expect a return on that investment that is much higher than the cost of funds. The only exception that I can think of to that rule is your primary residence, and that is for the reason that I gave above: you're making a housing payment anyway. Why not pay yourself?
I generally consider "rich" anyone who makes six digits a year. While that might seem a low number to a lot of people, it's my opinion that anyone should be able to live very comfortably on less than $100,000 a year.
It might surprise you to know that the median household income for the county that I live in is (you might want to sit down before you read this) ~$90,000/yr. One county over, the median household income is (you'd best stay seated) ~$100,000 per year. Pretty nutty, huh?
It's pretty easy around here to make $100,000 per year and not feel too rich.;) You'd feel right about average, and well, you'd be right.
I feel that, generally speaking, most people who make more than that are taking more than their share out of the nation's prosperity.
Rails is great, but only if your project doesn't butt up against Rails's limitations.
Rails decided not to be all things to all people, the way J2EE is. Rails is for new applications with one web front end communicating with one and only one database back end (I know, I know, SOAP, but that is often a bad answer for internal applications) and the database schema is brand new (and doesn't use any stored procedures).
If that is your architecture, Rails should be one of the frameworks up for consideration. If you've got a good source of Ruby developers, I say go for it. Rails will help you out immensely.
If, on the other hand, your architecture is anything other than what I just described, you will be in for a world of hurt if you try to use Rails. Rails will be getting in your way at every step of the game, and some things are simply impossible to do in Rails at all.
If it takes more ingenuity to get it to work/scale, just how are you getting any substantial productivity boost?
This is silly. Getting any application to scale past a certain point is going to require a lot of ingenuity. I guess it depends on where that "certain point" lies.
Scalability, I think, is one place where Rails' simple architecture helps it. Many (but not all) performance issues can be resolved either through a lot of ingenuity or by throwing more hardware at the problem (or temporarily dedicating more hardware to the problem while simultaneously exercising some ingenuity).
After all, you can always just deploy another copy of your app on another box, point it at your database (or database cluster, depending on your needs), and you're good to go.
I'm a firm believer that if you cannot pay cash, you probably can't afford it anyways.
This is kind of silly, no? Most people could not pay cash for their homes, but I would argue that it is false to state that they therefore cannot afford to live in their homes.
Loans have been around for thousands of years. They are a financial tool like any other, and there is nothing inherently wrong with them. What has happened is that the lack of education and ease of obtaining loans has caused folks such as yourself to recoil at the mere thought of being in debt.
There is good and bad debt, just like another tool (financial or otherwise) can be used for good or bad. Most people, unfortunately, do not know the difference, and that is how we got where we are today. Where you can't walk into an electronics store, a jewelry store, a furniture store, a department store, etc., without being offered a quick, easy, but extremely costly loan. It is sad that most consumers lack the education to even understand the offer, let alone evaluate it.
But good debt is good. Most new businesses would never get off the ground without a loan. Most people could never buy property without a loan. Schools would not be built, parks would not be built, very little corporate or government investment would be possible without debt.
Proper service is, as a practical matter, whatever the judge says it is. In-person delivery is of course the gold standard of proper service, but in many cases, in-person delivery is not possible.
Perhaps the identity or location of the entity to be served is unknown. For instance, let's say a residential renter abandons his rental unit owing me money (I am a landlord). When I sue him, I generally won't know his location (he abandoned, after all), so I merely have to send notice via certified mail to his last known address (his abandoned unit), and he is served. Of course, in that case, he will never receive his notice, and when the trial proceeds, he will lose the case by default since he won't be there to enter a defense.
Should he choose, he can at a later date petition for a new trial on the grounds of never receiving service. He would probably get a new trial, assuming I can't demonstrate that the defendant was actively trying to avoid service. This wouldn't get him out of the woods, it would merely give him a chance to enter a defense.
In other situations, say when not only is the identity of an interested party to a legal action unknown, but it is also unknown whether or not such an interested party even exists. In cases like that (you'll see it all the time in probate and real estate title cases), notice is delivered by, I kid you not, placing an ad in the local legal newspaper. You do read your local legal newspaper, don't you?;)
Anyhow, that brings us back to service by posting a message on an Internet forum. If the judge approves, you're good to go. Realizing that, of course, your defendants might eventually challenge your service by claiming to have not seen the posting. Hopefully the law students who own those handles had the good sense not to reply to the posted notice!
That ever happening, of course, is extremely unlikely, assuming that the true identities of the defendants are never discovered. What will probably happen in this case is that a default judgment will be entered against the forum handles, the real identities of the posters will never be discovered, and this whole thing will be an exercise in time wasting.
China is a preferred trade partner for crying out loud!
This is grossly misleading, and basically incorrect.
What you are thinking of is a trade status called "Most Favored Nation" which no longer exists in the US. MFN doesn't mean that a nation is somehow a preferred trade partner. Really, it was just another way of saying "Normal Trade Relations" (indeed, nearly every country in the world had MFN status at the time). In the late 90s, because of windbags such as yourself decrying the fact that nations with poor human rights records were our "Most Favored" trading partners, MFN was renamed to Normal Trade Relations (NTR) in order to more accurately describe the situation.
At the present time, only two nations, North Korea, and yes, Cuba, are the only nations on the planet who do not enjoy Normal Trade Relations (what used to be called MFN) with the US.
What you describe is extremely counterproductive for landlords. Where to begin?
As a landlord, you don't pay much tax on your buildings. Because you're only paying tax on your profits, and expenses are astronomical in the rental industry, and you are allowed to depreciate your property for tax purposes, often landlords will show a tax LOSS (or a modest profit), even while turning plenty of profit. Even if you underreport your income, you won't decrease your tax liability by much or anything at all.
Example. Many landlords like a unit to cash flow $100/mo after expenses (mortgage, taxes, insurance, repairs, maintenance, advertising, vacancy, collections, credit loss, etc.) That $100/mo can easily be swallowed up by depreciating the building. Of course, depreciating the building will lower your cost basis and increase your capital gain when you sell the property, but google "1031" for more information on how to fix that little snag.
When you are applying for a loan or attempting to sell a building, you want to show that building to be operating as profitably as possible. Non-residential real estate is priced based on a multiple of the building's earnings (as opposed to comps), so if you are only declaring 50% or 75% of your rental receipts, you have just decreased the value of your building! Also, you will make it much harder to get a loan because banks want to see earnings. And yes, they absolutely do look at your tax returns.
When deciding where to be, erm.., creative on your taxes, always remember the following maxim: If you're caught overdeducting, you pay a fine. If you underreport income, you go to jail.
You open yourself up to fair housing problems. Picture this: a tenant doesn't pay his rent, so you evict. Nothing fancy there. But let's say that this nonpaying tenant is black, and wants to mess with you because he's mad that you evicted him (or he really feels discriminated against. Doesn't matter.).
He calls some infomercial contingency-fee lawyer, sues you for fair housing violations, and during discovery, finds out that ALL of your tenants are underpaying. By 25-50%! But a quick glance at the court records reveals that you did not evict all of them. Why did you single out this one tenant, hmm? Oh, you are in for a costly court battle, settlement, and/or judgment now. Unless you are prepared to testify under oath that you belong in jail for underreporting your income. (And prepared to pay your attorney $10,000.00 for the privilege)
Bottom line, this is really the wrong industry to underreport your income in. This is why, even with all of the shady landlords out there, you never see landlords being busted for underreporting.
Slashdot Mirror
Before you say "payroll taxes" or something like that, remember that the illegals used fake SSNs, so the plant was paying taxes on 'em all.
Go to your high school reunion. See what became of the bullies. I think you'll find that most of them fared much worse than you.
I did some quick googling, and I saw that some jurisdictions in the US actually define what is and is not safe for a child to do alone. Here is a link to one such set of guidelines.
If you think about it, it's pretty absurd. In that county, no child age 7 or under may be left alone ever. When I was 6, I rode my bike to the store, rode my bike to school each day, etc. And I did not live in a rural area or even the suburbs. I lived in the city.
It gets more absurd from there. According to the guidelines, a child aged 17 can be left alone for up to two consecutive nights, but only "in some cases". That's a pretty big jump from age 17 years, 11 months to 18 years when we consider that person to be a full adult, capable of living on their own, making adult decisions, and being held responsible for their actions as a full adult.
Personally, I think those guidelines are absurd, but that is the type of legal environment we live in nowadays. If I lived in that county, what choice would I have? The cops would come take my kids away.
I'm sorry, but you are both pedantic and wrong. I am well aware of the difference between Outlook and Exchange, and Sunbird cannot replace Outlook.
Unless something has changed, Sunbird cannot perform the killer use case of Outlook+Exchange. Not even with CalDAV. And without that use case, Sunbird is useless as a groupware client.
The use case is: User creates a new event, User selects invitees, Invitees' availability is displayed to the user, User clicks "AutoPick Next", System selects the next available timeslot where all invitees are available, User saves meeting, Invitees are emailed an invitation, Invitees select "Accept", "Decline", or "Propose new time", System tracks invitees' responses.
The steps in italics I do not believe to be supported in Sunbird. I would be happy to be proven wrong, but to my knowledge, Sunbird Just Can't Do That. Until it can, it is only a calendar for single users.
I'm sorry if this message came off as a little irritable, but frankly I'm irritated that when I post a response to a question that asks about Exchange vs. Sunbird, I get a half dozen responses about how Exchange is a server app and Sunbird is a client. That may be true, but please explain to me how that should change my answer.
As far as I can tell, all it should change is 's/Exchange/Outlook/g', because Sunbird (or Thunderbird+Lightning) doesn't replace Outlook any more than it replaces Exchange. In my mind, the client vs. server detail doesn't warrant a smarty-pants response. I'm pretty sure all of you knew what I was talking about.
Migrating your corporate address book to LDAP is a great start, but I still don't think that Lightning is going to do what you need it to do.
Again, try it out. Hopefully it will meet your needs. But as far a I know, there is no way to automatically schedule meetings based on others' calendars. Most organizations use that ability of Exchange quite heavily.
I'm sorry to report that Thunderbird/Sunbird is nowhere near ready to replace Exchange. Depending on your needs, it might be a good fit though.
I'd say download it and try it out. If it's too basic for your needs, and it probably is, then look at some of the open source groupware packages.
There's some neat open source groupware out there.
Lightning, which is the Sunbird plugin for the Thunderbird email client, was also released.
Update as usual: Tools > Add-ons > Find Updates
Great work, guys!
You're fighting a losing battle here.
vegetable: vej-tuh-buhl OR vej-i-tuh-buhl
There's your multiple pronunciation through metathesis example. I only used "tomato" before because of the song.
For fun, I used your dictionary.reference.com to look up both nuclear and tomato. The pronunciation guides list noo-klee-er/noo-kyuh-ler the same way as tuh-mey-toh/tuh-mah-toh.
Looks to me like you say noo-klee-er, I say noo-kyuh-ler is on equal footing with you say tuh-mey-toh, I say tuh-mah-toh.
Cheers!
I hate to break it to you, but the "noo-kyuh-ler" pronunciation appears in every dictionary on my shelf.
While you've got your dictionary out to verify, why not look up the word "metathesis" as well? Unless you walk around all day pronouncing "iron" as "i-ron", it's time to drop the whole "nuclear" issue.
Maybe Bush learned to say "noo-kyuh-ler" form former President Jimmy Carter?
The kids are currently known to be in Russia, and the Russian mom is conveniently nowhere to be found.
I'm
According to the article, Reiser thought the Russian mafia or spy agency was tracking him. It was actually the local police, but because they used many unmarked cars and airplanes, he thought the tracking was beyond the scope of a local police force.
If you thought that the Russian mafia or spy agency was after you, would you be driving around in your personal vehicle that they know is yours? Or would you drive someone else's car? I don't think that I would have the courage to drive my own car if I believed some "serious people" were after me.
Also, I'm told that removing the passenger seat is common in the "ricer" community.
The aspiring doctor is spending 11 years learning to do something that takes 11 years to learn how to do. That the janitor might rather be attending med school is nice, but totally irrelevant. He is NOT attending med school, so he doesn't get the benefit of having attended med school.Well, believe me, I'm not looking forward to paying for my kids' college, so I won't argue with you here. However, again, it is beside the point.
The doctor still went through 11 years of highly specialized training, and the janitor did not. In order to hire a doctor, you need someone who went to med school. Not everyone goes to med school, so that creates scarcity of supply. And bingo, higher prices.
Making med school free doesn't help, either. Time, the ultimate scarce resource, will always limit you. Sure, you can go 11 years to free med school, but can you go to med school and law school and vet school and get a PhD in chemistry and
I agree that the world and the economy are both finite, so you cannot have everything that you want. No one can. But if you pick something realistic, you can achieve it. You may not be able to achieve it faster than you can fill your hand with fecal matter, but you can achieve it.Obviously no human life could have more value than any other human life. However, some people do produce more value than others. If you want them to continue producing more value to society, then you need to compensate them for it. The free market does this.
The ideal that I ascribe to is that every person should have his or her basic needs met. A society that allows people to starve on the streets is not a just society. However, once each member of society's basic needs are met, then I say let the market decide who gets what.
Well, I won't try to convince you otherwise because I know that I cannot, but as someone who is not a loan officer and believes that there is such a thing as truly good debt, I'd like to ask, where did your beliefs come from? Why are you so adamant that debt can never be good?
Well, add or subtract zeros as you feel appropriate; but my point (perhaps poorly made before) still remains. You even say that someone "might reasonably consider $5k to be an acceptable amount of money to spend on e.g. a wedding ring", and being a reasonable person, might consider that $5k debt to be good debt (I know, I know, there is no "truly good" debt, but in your framework, there seems to be a concept of "acceptable" debt... not "good" per se, but go for it nonetheless) :)
Again, I am not making a value judgment about purchasing a $5k or even $50k ring. That is none of my business, and anyway, I cannot judge how much happiness that piece of fine jewelry would bring to someone other than me. My issue is with the financing of the purchase, not the purchase itself.
My point, is that while you have said it is "reasonable" for a person to take on a $5k debt, assuming he could muster up $800 per month if he really, really had to, I would argue that this $5k engagement ring financing is a monumentally stupid move. I mean, literally deserving of a monument to be constructed right there in the jewelry store, for all to see and remember the gross idiocy this guy showed. That $5k loan is the epitome of bad debt. My apologies in advance to you if you were that "reasonable" guy in the jewelry store.
The reason that the ring purchase is bad debt is that you expect a large negative return on investment (diamonds decline sharply in value post retail sale). You might counter that the investment is more than just a diamond, it is also a wife. Unfortunately, experience (not personal experience, of course) shows that a wife who insists that potential grooms spend 3 months' salary on a worthless rock (again, "financial worthlessness", not "personal happiness worthlessness"--if you've ever tried to sell a diamond, you will know why I use the term "worthless"), will without fail be an even larger negative return on investment.
My personal experience is that, while I did purchase a diamond engagement ring for my wife, the ring cost approximately $500 in today's dollars. She still wears it proudly, despite the fact that we could easily replace it with something more expensive. To the extent that a human being can be given a "value", there is no ring or other token that can be had at any cost, that would be an accurate expression of how much I "value" my wife.
Well, I disagree that your rules even say whether or not a purchase is affordable.
;)
Your rules state that, because I can't make $16,000 payments each months, I cannot afford to purchase the building. I am a landlord, and you are wrong. I can afford it, and I would have zero difficulty getting it financed. This is based on experience. By the way, if you are aware of any properties that meet this description, please contact me.
You would also "very likely" counsel me not to purchase the building. I can understand why you would give that advice--you do not have any experience owning rental property, so you greatly overstate the risks involved.
That would have only made me clarify that I do, indeed, live in the USA. I'm about a 10 hour drive from you. But you are right, the cost of living where I am is much higher than in Nashville.
;)
I did some thinking about the median household incomes around here last night, and the more I think of it, the more I can see how it's true that they are really that high. It's pretty standard around here for a non-entry-level job to pay more than $50k. Even many entry level jobs pay that much here (my first job out of college paid $52,000 per year and I progressed quickly from there). There are hardly any single-income households around here, so viola. You're at 100k.
Single income households don't drag us down too much, either. With a few years' experience, it's very doable around here to make $75k-$100k. Also, there are many many attorneys who live here and they tend to make over $100k. Before you ask, neither my wife nor I are attorneys.
Well, that's easy. Some people's work is more valuable than others'. There are many reasons for this. Some jobs require more education and training than others. A doctor needs to go through 11 years of expensive training and zero income post high school. A janitor can learn his trade in 11 minutes. We must pay the doctor more than the janitor, otherwise there would be no doctors. You'd have to be an idiot to waste 11 years of your life studying to become a doctor when you could earn the same amount to feed your family in 11 minutes' training.
Some jobs require more risk, and therefore there should be greater rewards. Do you think I would have started 3 small businesses if I didn't think there would be a reward for that? Heck no! I would have stayed at that first job out of high school. Why should I take huge risks for no reward? There are a lot of reasons why some people earn more money than others. These reasons are usually valid.
I say usually, because I'm sure you'll point out that some people get their jobs not because of talent, but because of family connections. Indeed, I have an uncle who owns a company, and his adult son can't seem to hold down a job. Rather than continuing to just give his son money for nothing, he gave him a 'job'.
You'd probably argue that it's unfair for his son to be given a job that he did not earn himself, and I'd tend to agree with you. However, these cases, while highly visible and controversial, are actually quite rare. Or at least in my observation they are rare.
But my point still remains. Take away the incentive to invest in oneself and you'll find that people won't invest. If I can make the same money as a master electrician as I can doing unskilled carpentry (there is a difference between skilled and unskilled carpentry, to say the least), why would I become a master electrician?
Remove the reward for taking risks, and then why should I start 3 companies? And what about my employees, what would they do? Why should I give up the comforts that I was used to like heat in the winter while getting things off the ground? Well, I wouldn't have. I would have gone to work in nice clothes, punched my timeclock, driven home in a nice car, watched cable TV (yup, that got canceled, too), enjoyed my climate-controlled home, gone out for dinner (HA! that was the first habit out the window when I quit), and just basically lived the yuppie lifestyle.
Instead, I took that risk, my wife and I gave up the comforts that we were accustomed to, I worked more than I had to or wanted to. I did it because I believed that there would be rewards on the other end. So I find it laughable when someone says that I shouldn't make what I earn, if he didn't go through what I went through. Where were you all those cold nigh
Here are the criteria you put forth for taking on debt:
- Use of funds must be a huge amount of money proportional to your salary
- Saving up the funds is impractical or purchaser lacks the discipline to save
- Can afford 2x the "minimum payment"
So answer me this, should I buy a $50,000 diamond ring for my wife on a jewelry-store consumer loan? After all, $50,000 is a huge amount of money proportional to my salary, the minimum payment on a consumer loan is typically 4% of principal, which would be $2000. I could afford double. And, yes, I think it's impractical to save up $50,000 for a hunk of carbon. So I should head to the jewelry store then, no?On the other hand, let's say I can buy a 25 unit apartment building for $1,000,000.00. Definitely a huge amount of money compared with my salary. Saving the funds is no doubt impractical, if not impossible. Can I afford 2x the minimum payment? Well, the minimum payment would be about $8000, so no, I could not afford double that.
On the flip side, if the units rent for $600 apiece, I have inflows of $15,000 per month, minus expenses. Net net, we're probably looking at a positive cash flow on the building of approximately $3000/mo.
You would have advised me never to purchase this building because I couldn't make 2x the minimum payment. In my opinion, your test is defective, because the building is a good purchase.
Now we see that what you do with the money is way more important than the amount of money involved.
Why does taking on debt to buy a home make sense? Because you have a housing payment anyway, and you might as well be building up equity and deducting the mortgage interest.
Why does buying a car on credit make sense? Why would you want to have that much money tied up in a rapidly depreciating asset? Anyhow, you should buy a used car. New cars are a ripoff.
Why does remodeling your home on a home equity loan make sense? Because you are investing in your property and increasing its value.
Good Debt is for investment, when you expect a return on that investment that is much higher than the cost of funds. The only exception that I can think of to that rule is your primary residence, and that is for the reason that I gave above: you're making a housing payment anyway. Why not pay yourself?
It's pretty easy around here to make $100,000 per year and not feel too rich.
Rails is great, but only if your project doesn't butt up against Rails's limitations.
Rails decided not to be all things to all people, the way J2EE is. Rails is for new applications with one web front end communicating with one and only one database back end (I know, I know, SOAP, but that is often a bad answer for internal applications) and the database schema is brand new (and doesn't use any stored procedures).
If that is your architecture, Rails should be one of the frameworks up for consideration. If you've got a good source of Ruby developers, I say go for it. Rails will help you out immensely.
If, on the other hand, your architecture is anything other than what I just described, you will be in for a world of hurt if you try to use Rails. Rails will be getting in your way at every step of the game, and some things are simply impossible to do in Rails at all.
Scalability, I think, is one place where Rails' simple architecture helps it. Many (but not all) performance issues can be resolved either through a lot of ingenuity or by throwing more hardware at the problem (or temporarily dedicating more hardware to the problem while simultaneously exercising some ingenuity).
After all, you can always just deploy another copy of your app on another box, point it at your database (or database cluster, depending on your needs), and you're good to go.
Out of curiosity, what would make a person "rich" in your mind?
Loans have been around for thousands of years. They are a financial tool like any other, and there is nothing inherently wrong with them. What has happened is that the lack of education and ease of obtaining loans has caused folks such as yourself to recoil at the mere thought of being in debt.
There is good and bad debt, just like another tool (financial or otherwise) can be used for good or bad. Most people, unfortunately, do not know the difference, and that is how we got where we are today. Where you can't walk into an electronics store, a jewelry store, a furniture store, a department store, etc., without being offered a quick, easy, but extremely costly loan. It is sad that most consumers lack the education to even understand the offer, let alone evaluate it.
But good debt is good. Most new businesses would never get off the ground without a loan. Most people could never buy property without a loan. Schools would not be built, parks would not be built, very little corporate or government investment would be possible without debt.
Perhaps they feel that enough damage has been done already.
Proper service is, as a practical matter, whatever the judge says it is. In-person delivery is of course the gold standard of proper service, but in many cases, in-person delivery is not possible.
;)
Perhaps the identity or location of the entity to be served is unknown. For instance, let's say a residential renter abandons his rental unit owing me money (I am a landlord). When I sue him, I generally won't know his location (he abandoned, after all), so I merely have to send notice via certified mail to his last known address (his abandoned unit), and he is served. Of course, in that case, he will never receive his notice, and when the trial proceeds, he will lose the case by default since he won't be there to enter a defense.
Should he choose, he can at a later date petition for a new trial on the grounds of never receiving service. He would probably get a new trial, assuming I can't demonstrate that the defendant was actively trying to avoid service. This wouldn't get him out of the woods, it would merely give him a chance to enter a defense.
In other situations, say when not only is the identity of an interested party to a legal action unknown, but it is also unknown whether or not such an interested party even exists. In cases like that (you'll see it all the time in probate and real estate title cases), notice is delivered by, I kid you not, placing an ad in the local legal newspaper. You do read your local legal newspaper, don't you?
Anyhow, that brings us back to service by posting a message on an Internet forum. If the judge approves, you're good to go. Realizing that, of course, your defendants might eventually challenge your service by claiming to have not seen the posting. Hopefully the law students who own those handles had the good sense not to reply to the posted notice!
That ever happening, of course, is extremely unlikely, assuming that the true identities of the defendants are never discovered. What will probably happen in this case is that a default judgment will be entered against the forum handles, the real identities of the posters will never be discovered, and this whole thing will be an exercise in time wasting.
What you are thinking of is a trade status called "Most Favored Nation" which no longer exists in the US. MFN doesn't mean that a nation is somehow a preferred trade partner. Really, it was just another way of saying "Normal Trade Relations" (indeed, nearly every country in the world had MFN status at the time). In the late 90s, because of windbags such as yourself decrying the fact that nations with poor human rights records were our "Most Favored" trading partners, MFN was renamed to Normal Trade Relations (NTR) in order to more accurately describe the situation.
At the present time, only two nations, North Korea, and yes, Cuba, are the only nations on the planet who do not enjoy Normal Trade Relations (what used to be called MFN) with the US.
Most Favored, indeed.
What you describe is extremely counterproductive for landlords. Where to begin?
- As a landlord, you don't pay much tax on your buildings. Because you're only paying tax on your profits, and expenses are astronomical in the rental industry, and you are allowed to depreciate your property for tax purposes, often landlords will show a tax LOSS (or a modest profit), even while turning plenty of profit. Even if you underreport your income, you won't decrease your tax liability by much or anything at all.
- When you are applying for a loan or attempting to sell a building, you want to show that building to be operating as profitably as possible. Non-residential real estate is priced based on a multiple of the building's earnings (as opposed to comps), so if you are only declaring 50% or 75% of your rental receipts, you have just decreased the value of your building! Also, you will make it much harder to get a loan because banks want to see earnings. And yes, they absolutely do look at your tax returns.
- When deciding where to be, erm.., creative on your taxes, always remember the following maxim: If you're caught overdeducting, you pay a fine. If you underreport income, you go to jail.
- You open yourself up to fair housing problems. Picture this: a tenant doesn't pay his rent, so you evict. Nothing fancy there. But let's say that this nonpaying tenant is black, and wants to mess with you because he's mad that you evicted him (or he really feels discriminated against. Doesn't matter.).
Bottom line, this is really the wrong industry to underreport your income in. This is why, even with all of the shady landlords out there, you never see landlords being busted for underreporting.Example. Many landlords like a unit to cash flow $100/mo after expenses (mortgage, taxes, insurance, repairs, maintenance, advertising, vacancy, collections, credit loss, etc.) That $100/mo can easily be swallowed up by depreciating the building. Of course, depreciating the building will lower your cost basis and increase your capital gain when you sell the property, but google "1031" for more information on how to fix that little snag.
He calls some infomercial contingency-fee lawyer, sues you for fair housing violations, and during discovery, finds out that ALL of your tenants are underpaying. By 25-50%! But a quick glance at the court records reveals that you did not evict all of them. Why did you single out this one tenant, hmm? Oh, you are in for a costly court battle, settlement, and/or judgment now. Unless you are prepared to testify under oath that you belong in jail for underreporting your income. (And prepared to pay your attorney $10,000.00 for the privilege)