dollar

A stranger risked his life to save me from drowning in Costa Rica.

That’s not accurate at all.

Kubernetes is so complicated, the author got started describing it, then gave up and wandered off topic.

I sincerely appreciate the offer. This problem is too “cold” to resurrect today, and far too late for our business. I would be glad to know that Google is taking steps to ensure this cannot happen in the future.

Specifically:

* When an Ads account is suspended it can be devastating to the business or the Google partner. We should have the opportunity to speak with human beings, to bring forth evidence to the contrary, and to escalate within Google instead of with attorneys.

* The vast majority of businesses and agencies simply want to follow Google policies to the letter. Unfortunately the letter of policy is often ambiguous or unclear. When a policy violation is alleged, particularly against long standing and high dollar Ads accounts, there should be a presumption of innocence. Google should explain clearly and directly what is needed to remedy policy violations instead of playing security through obscurity and “guess what I want” games.

* At the end of our time as a Google partner, the automation had become unbearable. We spent 90% of our time resubmitting Ads and campaigns that were suspended or halted for no apparent or clear reason, analogous to advertisement “whack a mole”. Imagine literally any other outlet treating advertisers this way. For example, imagine Viacom suspending a nationwide ad campaign without a word of explanation. Imagine The New York Times pulling an ad without so much as a call or email. It’s patently absurd.

The biggest indicator of a monopoly is when they can treat customers like garbage and keep doing business anyway.

Google suspended the Ads account of our largest agency client ($20,000 per day) with no explanation other than a vague “policy violation”. They steadfastly refused to explain how the policy was violated or what we could do to come into compliance.

We contacted attorneys, wrote letters to Google executives, begged, pleaded. In the end our client fired us and they went back to their old agency.

Later we learned their old agency paid off a Google insider to flag our client’s account resulting in suspension.

Of course, we could never speak to a human being at Google and explain this. One day, the truth about Google Ads (and Facebook) will come out, which is that it is all 85% fraud anyway. Save your money.

Today, we no longer do business with Google Ads or Facebook. Given these companies make up 95% of digital ad spending, it’s fair to say we are no longer a digital ad agency. We’ve adapted to market around big tech, whether they like it or not.

With “partners” like Google and Facebook, who needs enemies?

Rental properties can be great, but beware they are high risk, not low risk. Properties come with many inherent risks you can sometimes assess before purchase, but they also come with hidden risks, not the least of which is the tenants. I used to own many rental properties. In one, a neighbors contractor sawed into the water main of the high rise, flooding over 200 units below. In another, a gas furnace cracked in the winter, and poisoned the tenants with carbon monoxide. In another, a layer cake of black mold grew 6 inches thick and had to be remediated for tens of thousands. In another, a contractor moved a pile of dirt and triggered 5 years of litigation and 100s of thousands in legal fees.

Better to rent properties for monetizing, insure your risks, and let others bear the big risks. I have a friend who owns timeshares and rents them on Airbnb, thereby avoiding most of these risks. Always look at what is possible in terms of risks. The worst will happen, it’s only a matter of time.

I’ve built 14 startup companies over my career, currently on the 15th. Out of those 9 were acquired, and 3 were IPO.

Yet I’m not what you’d describe as rich because of the asymmetry of risk vs rewards, and because of the drag of taxation. Outsized rewards are possibly only if you take outsized risks. When you have a big return, a large percentage of it is taken by the government. This is an additional hurdle over the risk you took. The result is that you take all the risk, and the government shares in the reward.

To break out to a level where you can support yourself and your family purely through requires a true outlier 10x-20x the average return. You can wait a long time, your entire life in fact, to have this kind of outlier.

I’ve sacrificed the best years of my life taking outsized risks and chasing the carrot so to speak. I’ve done well enough to maybe stop working in the next couple of years by age 45. My body kept the score of all the stress and my health paid a heavy price.

The time you have as a healthy person can never be replaced. The trick is to stop spending your time chasing dollars. Let other people take the big risks and get the big rewards, while you sit back and collect a tax of sorts.

The best way to do this is to own a business, which minimizes your tax liabilities, and also minimizes your time investment. This means you have to choose the business very carefully. It should be something that is very low risk, something which allows you to hire labor from the middle and bottom of the bell curve. It should have minimal regulation and licensure required to operate. Likely, it will be completely outside your high tech expertise. That’s good, that’s what you want. You’ll have to learn to operate this kind of business successfully.

By reducing your lifestyle, by not going into debt for anything, by not buying that big house, new car, new computer, etc, and by saving your income, you will be able to afford to buy an existing business like this in cash.

After you’ve mastered the operations and cash flow of one business, you can proceed to buy another.

The richest people I know, both in terms of net worth, but more importantly their time, operate in this fashion. My neighbor owns 38 McDonald’s franchises. He started with a laundromat.

The high tech gambit is a sucker’s game. I know, because I’m the sucker. The answer you are looking for is not “work harder”, or “go into management”. The answer is… stop working! Gradually your dependency on your working income until it’s gone.

You’re thinking about this the wrong way. Start thinking about how to do with less. A bigger house won’t make you happier, it’ll just take more money to maintain, and therefore more of your time. The more you work, the less time you have with your family. You feel like a loser because, somewhere inside you know you’re the sucker. Stop consuming so much. Stop wanting more. Think of ways to maximize what you have by minimizing the time you spend working. Maybe downsize that house. Maybe move somewhere else with a lower cost of living and work remote.

Exactly right.

You labor under the delusion that we have capitalism. We don't. We have socialism, and have for over 70 years.

The United States is a prison, the world's largest prison. You don't realize how quickly you can be accused of a crime you didn't commit, standing in front of a judge that doesn't care about truth or justice.

Written like a total noob who built their business in a boom and never had to survive an economic downturn. When the next recession, you’ll be begging to be added to your clients slack, IRC, forum, whatever. Hell, you’ll take change orders by fax machine if that’s what it takes to get the PO. GTFO of here with this attitude. If you’re this much of a pain in the ass with something so small, I’d hate to work with you when the fit hits the shan. We ask ALL of our vendors to join our Slack. Don’t like it? Neeexxxxt.

The easiest way to identify a monopoly is to look at how badly a company can treat its customers and still get away with it. My company has a half dozen stories like this about Google in the last year alone.

Know what Google is doing to its AdSense partners on a massive scale? They wait until your site has just under the earnings when they have to write you a check, then they terminate your AdSense account for “policy violations”.

I’m taking about AdSense sites that have been running for years with very little traffic, accumulating a few pennies a day.

They suspended a client of ours who was spending $40k a month on Google Ads with a two word explanation of “policy violations”, and steadfastly refused to explain any reason why. Our client was perfectly reputable, ran multi million dollar ad campaigns on television and radio, and was FDA approved.

When what Google has been getting away with finally comes to light... well, let’s hope it does come to light and they pay the consequences.

I love that Google’s commitment to privacy is mucking with the LED on a camera instead of anything, you know, meaningful.

Like, maybe not tracking your every movement, search, interest, thought, fear, and desire to turn you into clicks for money?

Or hey, maybe give you total control of the information they collect on you?

Nah, let’s turn the LED on and tout our commitment to privacy!

Reason #91836218 not to have nexus in California.

So very tired of this victim narrative. Simply refuse to pay the bill and sign up for another cell service.

Meanwhile, they randomly disapprove our ads all the time and refuse to tell us why.

Amazon has never cared about net profit, they care about compounded growth through reinvestment of profits. It took Wall Street about 15 years to figure out they should leave Bezos alone.

This is pretty easy. Take the Google job and stay there 3-4 years and sock away $200k a year in savings. Then leave and go do a startup, there will still be plenty to choose from.

http://fortune.com/2017/01/20/public-companies-ipo-financial...

Former hedge fund manager here. This never gets mentioned, but there are fewer publicly traded companies than there were in the late 1980s. There’s more money and fewer opportunities for a hedge fund to differentiate, so it’s harder to get outsized returns without excessive risk. Meanwhile, the finance industry has convinced people it’s “impossible” to beat the index in the long run.

I'm simply advocating apportionment as the founders intended with Amendment the First.

We made structural changes to our government in the 1920s-1930s and this is one of the long term effects.

1. Congress on its own decided that 435 representatives was "enough" and ceased apportionment. Since then representation has diluted from approximately 100000:1 to 1000000:1.

2. We changed the way the Senate was elected, from a majority of each state's legislature, to a popular vote.

The result is that we have effectively created 2 Senates. Winning a majority vote of so many people requires massive funding. Hence, the profound corruption we live in today.

http://www.thirty-thousand.org/

This is either a really funny joke or the dumbest thing I’ve ever seen. I really can’t tell which, but I’m hoping for joke.

This is why you shouldn’t put your business in California. There’s a legion of highly-paid bureaucrats who have nothing, I mean nothing, better to do than screw with you.

I wouldn’t say Vegas failed to attract high tech talent. After 20 years in San Francisco and San Jose, we moved our tech businesses (and ourselves) to Las Vegas. Best decision ever.

The Downtown Project was highly ambitious - area is just now starting to take off.

https://www.nvsilverflume.gov/home

Nevada has SilverFlume for many years. Also, no income taxes. Also, no Employment Development Department. Also, real estate at $1/sqft. Also...

Everyone is too busy believing they are different to hear what you are trying to tell them. Maybe after 20 years in the Silicon Valley meatgrinder they’ll hear you.

It sure would be fun if Google, Facebook, Twitter collectively shut off EU users on the day this tax went into effect.

Capitalism rewards value. "Doing stuff" is not inherently valuable.

There is no such thing as "unearned income". Assets are risky.