616 karma · joined March 11, 2021
There seems to be a false idea that only the USA has tax loop holes. I assure you. It’s not the case. And tax heavens are also way easier to use as a EU citizen because there’s no global income declaration required.
I take out only 11k or so per year from the company as personal income. That’s the tax free bracket. The rest I use is just expenses. And I pay myself minimum wage as well. Also tax free, but qualifies me for national insurance :D
I love the tax system!
Sorry, sorry, I’ve just been informed, the boogieman is no longer islamic terrorists. Now, it’s called radical white supremacist qanon Jan 6 anti vax conspiracy incel nationalist. My bad. I apologise.
But the curtailing of freedom will continue and the surveillance will increase. In order to safeguard our freedom and privacy, of course.
I’m a contractor, I work through my company. It’s way more tax efficient than being perm.
But, it could be even more efficient.
So, I did some research. Turn out, where I am, a business can have multiple business codes. Activities the company is registered as performing. Now, I was and still am a software development company. But I also added artistic production as a business code.
Why artistic productions? Well, because it’s the most liberal business code for expenses.
As a software company, I can expense travel for some things, the most useful for me being conferences. But that means I need to buy the conference ticket even if I’m not interested and can only expense accommodations for the duration of the conference. That’s good but a bit restrictive.
Now, as a artistic production company, I’m not limited by that. As long as I can prove I traveled in order to produce, well, just about anything that can be construed as being art, I can expense travel and I can expense accommodations for as long as I need. You can’t rush art, you know how it is.
So, obviously, first thing I did, I whipped up a blog, posted some random pictures every day and called it good. I’m not using company money to travel the world you see, I’m using company money in order to produce art. Haven’t paid a euro of my own money on accommodation or travel for close to a year now. And the best part, I get to deduce this from my profit.
I love the tax system. I really do.
But, doing this, I got curious. I thought, hey, why not make it better. So I thought let’s see what all the rage is with dalle and stable diffusion and all that. So, what I’m doing now is, I’m changing my approach. My art will no longer be just pictures taken quickly with my iphone. No no. I’m getting the picture and I’m sending it to an API I built. The API runs some computer vision, labelling what it sees, some classification, some stuff with the pic metadata, tries to put it all together and turns it into a description of the picture.
The description of the picture I took is used as a prompt for stable diffusion. And that result ends up being the art. I’d like to thank of my art as a modern commentary on the age old “is art imitating life or is life imitating art?” - At least that’s what I told my accountant and he concerned, it would stand up in the case of an audit!
So, yeah, tldr, I’m working on image to text and text to image to expense my nomad lifestyle on the company.
I don’t understand why money is being funnelled into an economic war rather than, aham, attempts at speeding up the dictators transition into a different state of consciousness ( or lack there of).
I genuinely believe that would be the most effective use of money. Get someone to, you know, do the thing, blame it on one of the countless possible usual suspects and cut a deal with whoever emerges victorious from the ensuing power struggle.
People will say “you don’t know if the next one will be worse”. Sure, but, my argument would be Stalin. Stalin was repudiated after his death. People went along just because they were terrified of him. I don’t think the situation would be much different now.
I don’t know. Just my two cents. I don’t like war, economic or otherwise. The sooner it stops the better it will be for everyone.
What seems more likely to me is, a request came from my app to some bank server. The server detected the request coming from Cuba and flagged the account as having suspicious activity, that in turn triggering an automated message.
Maybe there was indeed a guy somewhere in an office who saw one request to my account coming from Cuba and decided to have some fun and said he’ll turn my account off. I don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s creepy it happened.
I am a EU citizen. I only have EU bank accounts. The app I used was of a EU bank. There are no EU sanctions against Cuba at this time or at the time I was there. I also have no relation to the USA, I was never there or have business there.
A few days after opening my bank app ( again, read only, no transaction ) I received a threatening email from my EU bank saying I might be in violation of sanctions and it is prohibited to use the bank in a list of jurisdictions ( basically the ones mentioned in the post minus the last thee ) and the bank reserves the right to terminate my account.
As you can imagine, this was very concerning. Fortunately nothing came of it.
But still, I find it ridiculous the bank threatened to close my account just for being in a country that, at least for the jurisdictions that concern me, is a normal country.
I have no doubt this was an automated message. The only thing that prevented my bank account from being terminated was the suspicious activity flag triggered the email handler and not the delete account handler.
I find this to be utterly dystopian.
The best readme files write in english what the mode does, a sort of heat-map of the code ( often some parts are more used then others ) and pitfalls.
I’m also a big fan of short and succinct comments in appropriate places. I once broke production because I saw a private key being written to kafka. It felt odd so I removed that. Turns out something was reading that private key. There’s now a comment saying “When checkin data, double check this other module”
But the best thing is to have shared knowledge. I don’t think it’s useful or practical for regular engineers to know everything but the tech leads should be able to provide guidance across the larger cod base.
Most people know it as that one time God made a wager with Satan but the interesting part to me is when Job is taken on this whirlwind tour of creation and all complexity of the world is laid before him and he is made to see his smallness and insignificance contrasted to Gods greatness.
If you want to give it a secular spin, you can think of God as the realisation this universe is far larger and far more complicated than any of us can even begin to comprehend. It is the realisation the lifetime of planets, of stars, let alone human life is but the blink of an eye on a cosmic scale. It is the realisation you mean nothing, you life and experience and love and knowledge and everything you hold dear is a meaningless blip, unnoticed and soon forgotten by a universe you simply cannot comprehend. You are, to quote the good book, dust, and unto dust you shall return.
This is what contemplating God is. And living a righteous and good life in spite of this realisation of meaninglessness is what wisdom and godliness is.
If someone changing jobs frequently is considered a red flag, that’s a failure of imagination on the part of the prospective employer. You look and see a “reliable employee” I look and see a no-nonsense individual who knows his worth and interests and is not afraid to pursue that.
In my experience hire fast fire fast works best. Because the really good ones don’t get fired.
The scriptures you told me to go read are irrelevant to my broader point. I am sure you believe them to be true and they very well might be. But that’s not the issue.
The issue is, I believe people should be able to exist in society and take part in it regardless of what scriptures they believe in. You do not appear to share this belief. You believe people who do not share your scriptural preferences should be shunned from society. And your response to me pointing that out was to quote scripture at me.
Yes wpietri, you are a religious fanatic.
I used to work for a large newspaper. Engineering wasn’t the focus of the business, it was only a means to an end, it was just something they needed to have a competitive website. As a result, the churn rate was very high. But more interesting there was also a very high return rate. Engineers would come and go and return and leave again all the time.
As a result, the code base was a path work of various engineers with various skill level, different directions by different heads of engineering, repurposed old projects, legacy code and last minute additions by urgent request from the editors, among others.
The part I was most familiar with was what I can only describe as a sort of next.js but unlike it, it wasn’t planned or designed but rather it sort of grew organically over the years.
The fascinating thing to me was precisely this phenomenon. Some projects have a clear design and purpose and are built so from the start. Sort of like a building or a mechanical clock.
Others just evolve over time, they change, mutate, evolve, incorporate other bits. More like a biological organism or perhaps nature taking back a derelict settlement.
At first as you can imagine it was difficult to wrap my head around it. But in time, I started to see the beauty in it. It had historical bits. There was code written in 2010 that ran in 2020. Others you could tell little habits of the writer. Not everything gets stamped out by the linter. There was this guy who wrote “class ClassName extends React[“Component”]” - I have no idea why but I would run into code written by him and immediately recognise, ah yes, that’s that guy.
It’s certainly not an example of a good code base, but to me was interesting being able to see the code as a living organism with a history and fingerprints of it’s creators rather than a well designed machine.
We agreed as a society business are not allowed to discriminate. If businesses cannot discriminate, then your business should indeed be forced to host whatever content I put there, no matter how repulsive you may find it, as long as it is within the boundaries of the law.
Close the door to this and the door to discrimination will open.
For now, it will be in your favour. At some point, societal values will change again. And you will find yourself on the “wrong side of history”.
That is why we made anti discrimination laws and that is why we should stick to this.
Would you do it? Would you call him outright insane? Would you dismiss him and move on?
Genuine question, I am honestly curious.
Proponents of hate speech laws and their silent enablers would be one answer. Certainly not the only one.
> I think what you mean is that people are calling for internet platforms to kick out certain groups. This is in no way a call against freedom of speech.
You keep telling yourself self that. Especially when social values will change again as they always do and you will find your self shut off from society. You just keep telling yourself that’s not a loss of free speech.
> I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for 'free speech' means that other people have to provide private infrastructure for those people to spread their speech.
I am not sure why people suddenly believe that being for ‘equality between the races' means that other people have to provide private shops for those black people to shop in - Someone with your thinking not that far away in the past
Tell me, should shop owners be allowed to ban the blacks from their shops? Or is it just the backers that have to make cakes for the gays? Or perhaps it’s the age old “one rule for thee and another for me”?
> Free Speech was never about requiring private citizens to provide a platform
Then why are there laws like ADA or title VII of the Civil Rights Act? Give me a break. You can’t have it both ways. Just admit it, drop the pretence, be honest. Just say it out loud. You believe there are undesirable groups in society and those groups should not enjoy the same rights and opportunities as the rest.
And once you admit to your self that is what you actually believe, reflect for just one second and understand in whose philosophical company you find yourself in.
I think the shift away from free speech we are seeing is the result of decades of indoctrination and people being goaded into emotional reactions via social media.
I genuinely don’t see any functional difference between so called “social justice activists” railing people up and fanatical preachers delivering fire and brimstone sermons. It’s the same phenomenon manifested in different forms.
I will also add, most censorship prone people tend to accuse their opponents of lacking “critical thinking”. While at the same time, missing the point that is precisely what opposition does. You look at the other side, you criticise it’s premises, you criticise it’s assumptions, you criticise it’s goals, you look if the stated goals align with the actual results and criticise the discrepancy. You really can’t have critical thinking if you can’t, you know, criticise.
I think we had more free speech, and more critical thinking in the past because criticism was allowed. Nowadays, if you criticise anything that goes against what some would term The Cathedral, you will suffer severe consequences.
It all depends on what you see the purpose of the company to be.
Some people are dedicated to the company as an entity of it’s own and the product they build and the people working there. It is a valid and respectable way of looking at things. From your post, I have a sense you might fall into this category. Assuming you subscribe to this point of view, it makes sense to consider the retreat an abuse.
Other people do not see companies like this. Instead, they see the company as an means to an end. A tool to use for enhancing financial opportunities and abilities and living a full, luxurious, rich and comfortable life. I believe this too is a valid and respectable way of approaching things. This is how I personally view companies and their purpose. With this point of view, a vacation expensed on the company is not an abuse. It’s the intended purpose.
If you would like to see a decent portrait of this different philosophies I would recommend seeing the difference between Dany Crane and Paul Lewiston in Boston Legal.
Of course it might also be the case this was a miss alignment of business strategy and not fundamental values. If he invited the business partners perhaps he saw it as a business opportunity to renew contracts, perhaps upsell more services, etc.
Whatever the case might be, I think a very frank discussion between the two of you is in order. Business strategy should be aligned, yes, but far more importantly, fundamental outlook on what the company is for.
Best advice I can give you is, don’t leave this unaddressed but address it in a professional manner in order to understand where the other co-funder is coming from. Once you understand his position you will be in a position where you can make an informed decision about your future and the future of the company.
One thing is for sure. She did leave a mark. Winston God damn Churchill was her first time minister! When I will be old and have grandchildren, I will tell my grandchildren how I became a British citizen. And when they’ll ask me when, I’ll tell them during the reign of The Queen. And they will know who I mean.
God rest her soul.
I personally don’t like lettuce. I removed it from my burgers. Am I not allowed to remove lettuce from my burger? Am I forced to consume lettuce?
And before you tell me to look for another burger place, let me remind you there’s no other burger place. All burger places have this business model. All burger places give burgers for free sponsored by Big Lettuce.
So let me ask you again. Am I not allowed to remove lettuce from my own God damned burger?
I propose a mandatory integration with Alexa devices. Whenever the DRM module detects the consumer failing to fulfil the contractually required viewing quota, the Alexa device will be notified to emit loudly the message “Resume viewing!”. Furthermore, if available, it will cause the Hue lights to turn red and flash in order to amplify the gravity and importance of the message.
In addition to the mandatory Alexa integration, I believe it is paramount advertisers be allowed to enforce contractual viewing quotas in order to prevent financial losses. To that end, failure to resume viewing within 30 seconds should result in immediate freezing of bank accounts, immediate blocking of the self driving car from working and immediate locking of the house smart lock - To prevent the consumer from escaping the contractually enforced duties.
One more idea I can add is this. It is unfair for the advertisers to incur loss and costs due to non compliant consumers. In order to rectify these losses, interest in the form of viewing time should be applied to time spent not watching adverts. A standard 12.5% time interest should suffice. For example, a consumer failing to resume watching for 10 minutes should have 1 minute and 15 seconds added to the viewing quota.
A hate campaign was launched against a minority group wielding no societal power by a socially dominant group backed by governments and corporations alike. A group of people with institutional power used their power, influence and privilege to harass and silence a powerless minority. Because they think different to them. This is why Kiwifarms is no longer on the internet.
A better comparison with what happened is, at some point in the past before civil rights were implemented, a white man overhears a black man talking. The white man doesn’t like what the black man is saying, so he says “that black man there is a murderer!”. So the black man is arrested and executed. And you, a passerby, take the word of the white man and begin telling everyone “oh that black guy was a vicious murderer”.
In any case, I have no further wish to engage. I have expressed my thoughts on the matter. I’ll leave you with an echo of my original post. When you’ll find yourself outside the cathedral, just tell your self “nobody reasonable thinks the only time there should be consequences for anything is when they're legal consequences”
Do you believe stores should be allowed to ban black people from shopping there? Do you believe pharmacies should be allowed to deny medication to jewish people? Perhaps you believe bakeries should not have to sell cakes to gay people?
Are these groups not “owed a literal service at their own expense because... principles”?
To me it seems you’re the one painting yourself a bizarre rhetorical corner. You can’t have it both ways. If we agreed as a society businesses should not discriminate, then they should not discriminate.
So to answer the question you should asked, yes, I honestly believe that nobody should have consequences for any actions outside of the literal legal system when dealing with a business. Business relationships are not the same as interpersonal relationships.
And to answer this one too:
> What, specifically, is the protected class you think Kiwi Farms is a part of?
People who think differently from you.
To quote Matthew Price: “it would have been appropriate as an infrastructure provider for us to wait for legal process”
In a civilised society, we do not have mob rule, we have the rule of law.
The reason we have this stems from the observation that societal norms change throughout time. If we do not have rule of law people will find themselves at the mercy of mobs and petty tyrants. We do not let the mob or “gods anointed” dictate who gets rights and who doesn’t, we offer the same rights to everyone and have a system in place to punish those who step outside the boundaries of the law. This is how a civilised society functions.
If you believe kiwifarms did something wrong, the correct steps are to engage with the system, go through the courts and show they have stepped outside the law. The correct steps are not to censor on the whims of a mob.
Let me ask you a question as well. If a gay teenager or a pregnant teenager gets kicked out of their house for being gay or falling pregnant, would you be as callous as to tell them “you may be protected against government consequences but you’re not protected against social consequences”?
- A homophobe cca 1954
Whenever I see this line, all I can think is this is the exact same reasoning used by racists and homophobes and religious fanatics in the past. Maybe it’s legal for you to be gay now, but we don’t want to welcome you in our community. Maybe it’s legal for black people to buy houses in our neighbourhoods now that doesn’t mean we have to be welcoming. Maybe we can’t kill you know for being an atheist but we’ll banish you from the community.
The reason modern societies are functionally republics ( I am counting constitutional monarchies here as well ) and not direct democracies is to protect against this very phenomenon of changing societal whims.
If you subscribe to this line of thinking, remember one thing. Societal normal are constantly changing. Just as acceptance of homosexuality waxed and waned across time, just as acceptance of foreigners waxed and waned, so to it will in the future. There will come one day, maybe in our life time, maybe far into the future, when all your values will be turned upside down and it will be people like you who will find themselves persecuted. And when that happens, just tell to yourself “Freedom of speech may protect against government consequences but it doesn't protect against social consequences”
If you say “we don’t want eu clients” and actively try to keep them away, to me it makes sense not to be liable anymore.
I feel like it’s like, let’s say this scenario. I’m pretty sure in Germany it’s illegal to host content promoting nazisim. Let’s say a hacker posts against all measures taken by the company content that is against the law. Should the german website be held accountable for content they unwilling hosted for a time? Shouldn’t the fact this was done against the wishes of the platform matter?
I might be wrong technically with the german example but the point still stands. I don’t think a platform should be liable if it’s in breach of a law against it’s wishes, if it has reasonable prevention and mitigation measures in place.
To answer your question, we need a way to measure the level of intolerance, whatever this is.
Should we measure the laws in effect? Should we measure the number of tolerable behaviours? Should we weigh these behaviours in our metric? How do we deal with behaviours that are nominally considered immoral but in practice are accepted? How do we deal with regional differences?
I don’t know the answer to your question.