timedoctor

I don't see how any of these solutions help. At the US border agents routinely ask you to log into your email account and search your emails. If you refuse to comply it is much more likely they will not let you into the country.

So they don't just search your laptop they try and search online accounts also.

There is no guarantee the stock market will return money in the future. The past does not equal the future and in fact some experts predict that the stock market will return around 3% on average going forward. Also even if the average return was 7% most people have achieved much less than that.

Obviously it's less effort to invest in the stock market so if you're talking about the amount of effort then yes investing is easier

Are you talking from your own experience? I am. I made a million dollars and it wasn't easy but it was actually a lot more difficult to invest $1 million and make more money with it. I personally found it a lot more difficult.

I think most people greatly underestimate the difficulty in investing money successfully.

If you are talking about the amount of time invested ... yes of course there is a lot less time spent investing. However if you are talking about the probability of success I would argue It's not as high as you would think to take $1 million and turn it into $2 million.

I did not agree at all. In my experience it's much easier to make 1 million then it is to invest 1 million and make another million.

Also there are many startups that require zero investment capital and if you do not have a family and you minimise your expenses you can leave on very very little. If you do have a family it's more difficult but still possible.

I have over 15 houses that I rent to low income people. It's very difficult. Not at all a method of getting rich as claimed in the article. Constant problems with collections, problems with repairs and maintenance (given that the properties are old and were not well maintained).

I bought these 15 houses after the crash in 2008 as I thought it was the best investment possible with fantastic returns. IN fact I would have been WAY better off buying ONE house in the bay area and renting it to one well off person. I would have made a whole lot more in net rent and in capital gain.

So I think the premise of this article is completely wrong in the majority of cases. Renting to poor people is extremely difficult and a very easy way to lose money. Many states in the US are very favorable to tenants and not favorable to landlords. You also have to pay taxes, insurance.

Seriously if it was that easy everyone would do it. I thought it was an easy way to make money and I was wrong. Not horribly wrong as I did buy the properties very cheap, but still, not an easy way to make money.

We have that problem for our desktop apps. Supporting the Windows and Mac versions is much easier than supporting Linux AND Linux has less users.

Less than 100 years ago it was considered NORMAL to segregate black people and prevent access to certain locations in the US. Now it's illegal and considered totally unacceptable.

Is it possible that in the future it will be considered as unacceptable and illegal to discriminate based on your country of origin?

I mean why should a black person from the US have access to different locations than a black person from Nigeria? Or why should a white person from France have access to different locations than a white person from Ukraine?

This is a ridiculous idea. Might work for people who have a very simple tax return but the IRS could not possibly calculate my tax return it's incredibly complicated and is not based only on information that they have access to.

I think this is simple advice and often incorrect.

For example: JIRA, it's very complicated software. Many of the complicated features I think are essential for it to get into the Enterprise market. Revenues $242 million.

Basecamp: Their mantra is simplicity (although they do not actually do just one thing, they have several features as part of their software). Revenues estimated at over $100 million.

I do no think there is one simple answer to how to build a successful startup. Focusing on being great at one thing might be a good idea for some businesses but it's not only way to do things and it's far from proven as "the" way to build a startup.

http://www.afr.com/p/technology/atlassian_sales_leap_as_reve... https://medium.com/@hungrycharles/basecamp-the-small-bootstr...

For women who also want to have children at the same time as co-founding a startup, I think it's important not to underestimate how difficult this is.

When my wife was first breastfeeding I timed how long she spent breastfeeding and changing nappies and bathing the young baby. It was LITERALLY over 9 hours per day (timed to the minute). To think that it's possible to ALSO run a startup at the same time is in my opinion crazy. With older children it's a lot easier but still difficult.

I have several female friends who are also successful entrepreneurs. Some seem to make it work with their family life, but my experience is with most that they have a very hard time and that it often devastates their family life and relationships.

So yes there examples of women who run a company and also have young children, but I think they are the exception rather than the rule.

For women who do not want to have children, or who are not going to have children for many years in the future, no issue.

I would probably still use them even if this information is true because we never had any important data go through their service (just testing accounts) and because I am not aware of any good alternatives.

... would look for an alternative first! But for now assuming that this is not real, anyone checked if it is real?

I checked out the http://www.tarsnap.com/ website and it looks like very interesting technology but extremely unfriendly to the "ordinary" user. Perhaps not designed for ordinary users, but seems like there is a lot of potential for improvement to the marketing (which is exactly the type of content that you can teach in a startup school). They prefaced the entire content by saying that mostly you can't learn startups from a lecture, because the most important information you need to know is what the customer wants and it's specific to each market. You can learn something more general about marketing and user acquisition.

Personally I've been watching the videos online. I think the information is incredibly valuable because it's from people who have some of the most experience in the world at advising and working with startups. Even more useful if you have no experience and no prior education on what it is like to start a new venture.

The attitude of renting or getting a loan for any consumer item is financial suicide.

Why they don't buy second hand I don't know? You can go to an auction site, get the same $1500 sofa for $500.

Double taxation of corporate taxes exists in the US but it's not the case in every country. For example in Australia you get a personal tax credit for any corporate taxes that you pay.

This is the reason why a lot of people choose an LLC in the US.

That did not work it says you have to subscribe or log in

I bet these blog spammers are making a LOT of money as that was really hard to detect.

The quality of the jobs on these platforms is proportionate to the level of employment in the economy and the general strength of labour in the economy. In Australia the situation seems to very different to the US. There is a competitor to Task Rabbit - Airtasker - and my experience is that it's really expensive to hire people on this platform. In most cases I decided to do the work myself because the rates that people charge are so high in Sydney at least (for many tasks $30/hour to $50/hour as a minimum) that I would prefer to save the money and do it myself.

This is a function of the strength of the Australian economy and labour market.

This is very theoretical and I would say there are a lot of mistakes in the analysis

I would look more simply at all the people I know that are entrepreneurs versus those that work in a job.

At least 50 percent of the entrepreneurs have over $1 million In assets and in a few cases over $10 million

Zero employees that I know have over $1 million in assets

I think it is far more likely to be wealthy as an entrepreneur, it's possibly a bit safer as an employee.

The idea of getting a loan to buy something that you can get for free (top universities put a lot of their course content online for free) is ridiculous.

It only makes some sense for degrees where the university education is a 100% prerequisite to a high paying occupation (for example medicine).

In general US consumers go into debt far too easily. For example it's common place to get a car loan, even though you can't afford a car. In my opinion this is dangerous to your financial health, much better to buy a lower cost car for example and avoid a loan. It only makes sense when the car is necessary for your job and in this case if you can't afford to pay cash for the car you should buy the lowest cost (relatively reliable) car possible.

I also use a service like this on all my bank accounts (4 different bank accounts in the US), companies etc. I do not hide the fact that it is a post box with the bank, I just tell them this fact, so I don't see any issue with this. All the mail is scanned and then forwarded to another location or trashed, whatever I prefer.

I think receiving physical mail is insane.

I do all of this for my US businesses, and it's essential to do it this way as I don't live in the US so I would never be there to collect the mail in any case!

In any case there are lots of alternatives to outbox!

This is a better tool with more information provided (in an excel spreadsheet)

http://visualwebsiteoptimizer.com/split-testing-blog/ab-test...

We find it moderately difficult, but definitely possible to find great people. The secret is NOT looking in Silicon valley and the bay area where thousands of extremely well funded companies are looking for talented developers.

Totally agree with the last sentiments that if you're in the bay area why should you ONLY considering hiring in the same area? It shocks me that technology companies can be so parochial.

You can hire across the entire US, Canada is just nearby and then there is ... the rest of the planet!

HOw is having two versions of Basecamp (old and new) simplification?

Also I think Asana is beating Basecamp in terms of having both simplicity and power, although I would say that the Basecamp UI is more simple than Asana, Asana is a lot faster and a lot more powerful and Asana is free for up to 15 users. I think Asana will take a lot of business away from Basecamp over the long term.

Having said that, in our business we use Jira, Asana and Basecamp (part of the reason for using all 3 is that we integrate our product with them). We keep Baecamp as a central repository of information and for that purpose Asana is not really as well suited.

For task management, Asana is way better than Basecamp.

Facebook is used by different people for many different purposes.

In Ukraine right now it is the default news channel for the opposition with the mass protests going on now, and has served a similar function in other countries.

For some people it's a way to stay in touch with close friends.

For others it's a way to occasionally keep in touch with more distant friends.

Others use it as a contact/ address book.

Others use it for games.

I don't think it's going to die out, instead it's going to evolve.

I also do think it's possible it might die out, but way too early to know what will happen.

Great for publicity value. Not that useful for their business in any other respect (at the moment). This is a great time for ecommerce sites to start accepting Bitcoin to leverage it for publicity.

None of the alternatives meet our needs (google talk etc). The needs are: ability to set up rooms or group chats that you can favorite, ability to make calls and video chat, desktop based and always on at all times. If anyone knows of an alternative that can do all of this let me know.

I think the ultimate outcome of this type of patent war is either: a) Re-examining the whole patent system to prevent this sort of attack b) Companies will have to re-locate to China or another country where US patents do not apply

It's totally ridiculous to be sued for offering free software.

There is no issue with reinvesting for growth. Businesses that require a lot of capital to grow need to do that and might need to continue operating with lower or minimal profits as they grow.

However at some point it's important to be able to say that they have played out the majority of their growth ambitions and are ready to start optimizing the business for greater profit.

The trouble is that human nature for many CEOs with big egos and the structure of corporations is to want to continue to grow forever. This is a dangerous attitude. For example perhaps Microsoft shareholders would have been much better off if the company was run without ANY ambitions to compete with Google, Apple OR to dominate mobile or tablets or search or any of these areas. Instead if Microsoft was to just focus on Windows and Office and extract as much profits from the business as possible, then return these profits to shareholders, then the shareholders would be free to invest in Apple and Google stock.

The trouble with this is that for an ambitious CEO this might feel like giving up. I don't believe it's giving up. it's called focus. Focusing on what you are really good at (in this case Windows and Office), rather than pretending that you are great at everything.

I've used a very similar method for myself in hiring remote workers, although my ratios are more extreme. In some cases we tested over 200 people and selected one person for the job.

Have not used math questions at this stage as it seems a bit too obtuse and not to-the-point. Better to ask an actual coding question if you are hiring a coder. However I have had success in hiring people that have been involved in maths olympiads or also in coding competitions.

I have a completely contrarian view: They should stop trying to be a competitor to Google and Apple. Continue with Windows and Office, and continue to improve them.

Get out of EVERYTHING else including all internet services and everything that is just a money-losing proposition.

Then buy back as many shares as possible, keep buying back shares and if the shares get too expensive start paying billions and billions in dividends.

Not every company is meant to be the next wave of the future, why not be content with how successful they are and be really good at it, continue to be great at it, and get out of everything else, banking as much money as they can in the process.