floppydisk

Does the delta between lowering the cost of labor (assuming people will work for the lower wage) cover the tax increase?

Labor, in the service industry, is already handled like a variable cost. If you expect a rush, you increase the number of people on the shift and if you don't, you schedule the bar minimum. If there's mismatch between staffing and projected work - and say schedule too many people for what turns out to be a dead shift - they get sent home. Changing the minimum wage from $9/hr to $15/hr reduces the number of people you can run per shift and keep your costs the same (assuming all other inputs continue to cost the same). I.E. It costs me $30/hr to keep two waiters when I could run 3 for $27/hr so I cut back one waiter per shift.

Where the business gets in trouble, in terms of survival, is the price of fixed inputs. They need to buy goods and services that will fluctuate in price and if the cost of doing business goes up due to higher fixed costs in the form of taxes, those costs will reverberate through the chain. The food supplier will raise prices, the restaurant will need to raise its prices to afford the food, which will impact their ability to attract customers which impacts their ability to derive revenue to pay the food supplier, their tax bill, and so forth.

Similarly, if businesses are having to charge higher prices and wages are depressed due to UBI + <other wage>, will people have the money to afford goods and services at the higher rate?

Playing devil's advocate, what happens to businesses in the presence of an even higher regulatory and tax environment and what will the impact of increased taxes be on employment and business viability as well as the cost of living?

For the sake of argument, think about businesses with razor thin margins like restaurants. In the presence of increased taxes, their margins significantly diminish, if not vanish, and it becomes increasingly unviable for the business to stay in business. Once they shutter their doors, the tax base and employment decreases. Extending the argument, consider other organizations that have a healthier margin and are growing and hiring. The presence of substantially increased taxation raises the costs of growth (re: hiring) and raises the costs of employing Americans and earning money in America which reduces their ability to compensate employees / develop new products etc. Yes, they might have the margin to pay the increased tax rate, but the tradeoff is they lose money that goes into R&D, increasing salaries, hiring more people, and other business activities we think are good and useful.

As a consumer, I'm also curious to know what this does to my cost of living. Prices will not stay static and if businesses are incurring higher costs to produce goods and services, those get reflected in price. Given wages aren't keeping pace with inflation, what will a sudden price shock do to the cost of living in the face of businesses adjusting prices to address the new taxes? This could take people who are getting by now and turn them into a new wave of impoverished as necessary goods and services increase in price or it could prevent UBI from achieving its goal because prices keep rising to offset the tax rate which puts goods and services outside what people can afford on UBI.

I managed >1TB Postgres installs using not-fancy tools and we did just fine. The How:

Installing databases was pretty easy. We wrote DDLs for our databases and created shell scripts that would leverage pgsql via the command line to create the databases with all our desired extensions, plugins, functions, and schemas. Repeatable every time by even the least trained IT guy on the staff. Data loading was a little more finicky, but that was easily doable by using pgdump if we were coming from an existing database and it was executable by shell script.

Stats wise, we wrote stored functions in the database that would leverage the built in, and excellent, stats API. Our management system would execute a shell script that leveraged PGSQL to execute the stored procedure(s) and pass the resulting values to our graphing and system monitoring software. Standard setup on each DB box. Worked like a champ.

For managing configuration files, we preferred to be hands on and edit pgconf directly as each database box ended up being a little different in terms of needs and we would annotate the configuration file with notes to selves about why settings were the way they were.

How do other services do this via console? They interface with the database API directly (like you can do) and make an interface to trigger the commands they're executing.

This is my biggest gripe with the modern technology industry. We've gone from "you have the background and skills to do the work - here's how we do what we do" to "You don't check these thirty boxes specific to our company?! No job for you!" It's getting rather absurd, especially when you're job hunting and the recruiters give you the "you have an impressive background and could do this work, BUT you don't have <exact ten things> ergo we'll pass." Very few people take the route of finding talent then training them up. Companies willing to take the time to train their people and focus on finding raw talent they can mold will make a killing. Not only will the people be trained exactly how you want them, but I'd argue they'd be cheaper and you could tie compensation increases to hitting defined mile marks in the training program or demonstrating competencies.

From the flip side, I see the company concern - kind of. If I bring in raw talent and train it, I've sunk $X into the talent and if they leave shortly thereafter, I'm out $X with no benefit. The counterpoint to that argument, I think are signing bonuses and defined time contracts. In exchange for us training you to do this job and completing the program, you get a signing bonus of $X at the start, $Y at the end, and sign a 2 year agreement to work here. If you leave beforehand you agree to payback the $X+Y signing bonus (unless laid off by the company).

There are ways to address the "skills shortage". The problem is, no one wants to take the time and the cost to do it.

Playing devil's advocate, could this also be a means by which Amazon increases their influence in the book selling world by decreasing the value of the title of "best selling" author? In the traditional sense, we think of best selling authors as achieving certain sales numbers in a given time period (NYT Best Seller's List for instance) where access to the club is limited by the amount of space on the list. In terms of a writing career, it used to be an illustrious achievement to make one of the major newspapers' best seller lists and became an advertising perk for later writing and speaking endeavors.

Now, with the advent of Amazon, anyone can be a best seller based on very fine grained categories (as shown here) but claim the same accolades based on the title of Best Selling Author. A lot of people accept the title at face value. Over time, this shifts the power from the traditional lists to Amazon since Amazon has most of the power in determining who gets a "best seller" label and at what granularity.

I think this is what the author is really concerned about. In the article he mentions his job consists of working with authors to promote their books and their metric of success is aiming for the NYT best seller's list. If that list loses its value and the cache of being a NYT Best Selling Author decreases, then the author's value add to an individual author is diminished thereby threatening his underlying business model as it stands now.

Speaking from personal experience, I think a lot of them end up in the boat of having just enough paying customers that the idea looks viable but not getting enough long term traction to go from niche product surviving on raised capital to self-sustaining. Riding the initial public interest wave a bunch of people signup and the revenue projections look really good which lets the company go raise more capital to keep going, but over time, the company taps out their customer base and their revenue growth flatlines and ultimately they can't jump from niche product running on capital to self sustaining.

A lot of these postmortems, I think end up with CEOs looking at metrics, especially the early growth metrics, -- and they want to be successful, most of the time it's their baby -- and seeing enough interest to make them think they're close. Ergo, the "only if we had more time/money" postmortems.

I'm going to respectfully disagree with you here and argue that understanding some facets of psychology (perhaps wrapped in a broader definition of people skills) are essential to long term success managing teams and projects.

Specifically, understanding Goal-Setting Theory, Motivation Theory, and Self-Regulation Theory can provide substantial insights into why people think the way they do and give managers a framework to understand their employees and how their actions will impact their motivation and goals. The book PeopleWare touches on this a little bit when they discuss the role of autonomy in improving worker performance. Knowing that people like to feel ownership of their work and projects helps me, as a manager, guide the team and work on framing things in terms of my direct reports exercising autonomy rather than me dictating. They'll be happier and feel more involved in the work and as a result, the quality of work will be higher.

This isn't to say you need to be a life coach, therapist, and parental figure wrapped up in one. That's not your job -- though team member's lives will impact their work at some point and you'll need to empathetic. Your job to is to guide your team to meeting their objectives and understanding part of the human psyche and what motivates people will make you better at this job. Hands down.

Yes! Best way to keep up with blogs and websites I like, especially ones that don't update very often, and avoid a lot of the cruft that can make the websites themselves hard to use.

Moved over to Feedly after Google Reader shut down and it's been fantastic.

A couple of questions I've found helpful when talking to startups are as follows:

1) What is the funding situation like - specifically, how much capital is available, is any of it tied to contingencies (i.e. hitting a sales number), what are your plans for getting more if it runs out/is there investor interest in giving you more? 2) When do you expect to be cash-flow positive? (incoming cash >= expenses) 3) What's your burn rate? More specifically, given the current rate of cash burn, when is drop dead? 4) When do you anticipate being able to make a decision on whether to bring me on full time if I join you as a contract-to-hire worker? 5) What's the duration of the contract and what are the renewal options if we don't go full time hire?

Right now it's being used to build out the Air Defense Identification Zone they claimed over the south china sea a couple years ago and back up their claim with the threat of shoot down. By projecting force over the South China Sea, they, in essence, use the islands to turn it into their own private lake and effectively take over what are considered international waters render moot the ongoing arguments at the UN regarding islands and mineral rights. If the geological estimates concerning the amount of oil in the SCS are correct, it's a major coup and has the possibility of turning China into a net oil producer.

As with all other Forward Operating Bases (FOB), it will face the same challenges as any island during conflict. If you can exhaust the island's supplies and constrict replenishment, the utility of the island diminishes. In the case of Diego Garcia, assuming a conflict with China, they lack the force projection capabilities to effectively shut down the flow of supplies to DG. (Assuming the US submarine force > chinese submarine force in capability). Their best bet would be to render it inert using cruise missile and non-nuclear ICBM strikes to disable the runways, mine the anchorages, and destroy the fuel supplies. Bonus points if they can sink ships in the lagoon.

It's the same strategy the Japanese tried using in WWII to turn islands into stationary aircraft carriers. So long as you can keep them resupplied, it works to a certain degree. The moment the supply line gets into trouble, the island starts losing its ability to project power. Replacement parts, supplies for the ground crews, etc. all start disappearing. As a deterrent, they make a great show piece, as a practical matter, it's possible to either exhaust their supplies and bypass or take them out via other means.

Realistically, in the event of hostilities, we wouldn't send in the air force to take the islands out. We'd launch a bunch of sea skimming cruise missiles from a submarine or a special forces raid onto the island to punch a hole in the air defense grid then let the planes through. We did something similar in Gulf War I & Gulf War II. Planes only went in after other forces ensured the air defense grid wouldn't be defending much.

It's unfortunately common that once you're salaried, your compensation is capped at $X/yr for 40hr/week of work but it's reasonable for managers to demand extra hours above the 40 without increasing compensation accordingly. Rereading my last employment contract, the stipulation was I was paid assuming 40hrs/week, but the office expectation was 40 was a floor. 50-60 was more the norm. The whole salary exempt from overtime thing gets to be annoying quick.

Part of me thinks I should start invoicing employers for time spent at work over the 40hrs, charging an overtime rate, or something to increase compensation in exchange for the lost time, or modifying the contract accordingly if there's not an alternate compensation mechanism like comp time offered. The one employer I've worked at who was good about this let you disappear from the office if you hit your 80hrs for a 2wk pay period.

They're growing rent until they hit the breaking point that no one will pay. Many of the families in my metro area are 2-parent working families and many of the big corp positions here tend towards mid to senior level or executive positions with the requisite salary and landlords keep pushing the rent up so long as people are willing to continue paying it. For single people, it's common to be cramming 4+ into a single family home (which pushes rent down to <$1k/person depending, not including utilities). For married folks, I hope you're both working and bringing in bank. Apartments tend to be more reasonable than single family homes, depending on location, but they're still quite high (1br apartments are between 1.6k-3k+/mo depending on the building. Closer you are to a metro or major roadway, substantially higher price).

In essence, we're a victim of our own success. Back in the day, life revolved around the city center and much of what is the 'burbs now was farm land. Overtime, as more people moved to the area, the cheap real estate was always al little bit further out from the city so people would saddle up and buy a house (with a 20-30 commute as the penalty) for a reasonable price. Over time, companies started building offices in the 'burbs, more people kept moving to the area, and the creep has pushed "affordable" out almost 20-30miles from the city center (commute time >1hr). Factor in the road networks are terrible, and mass transit stations are rare enough that real estate near them commands a premium and you find people willing to fork over a chunk of change in rent to not have a terrible commute either to city center or their 'burb job. Houses for sale, in the neighborhoods closer to the city, with good schools, not terrible commute etc, are generally priced for 2-income families. (>$500k).

Yes, the tradeoff between renting and buying is you assume the risk and costs of maintenance in buying. Most of the rentals i know of (single family homes or townhouse) push the cost of utilities onto the renter so really, all we aren't paying for is standard house maintenance and taxes. I'd rather assume the costs and risks of maintenance and taxes (and budget for them accordingly) and live with a fixed housing cost rather than continue fighting variable costs and potentially cranky landlords. Nothing makes a good housing situation sour faster than a bad land lord.

As always, it depends. Speaking anecdotally, most of the millennials I know speak rather forcefully about their desire to not settle down, marry, or begin a family prior to 30. I can count the number (amongst my friends) on one hand who discuss factors like underemployment and debt as being significant in their decision to delay settling down. Most seem to enjoy the party/city lifestyle and spend their time focusing on their career/traveling instead.

Yes, it's possible all of those things are factors but I'm going to argue for most it's subconscious rather than explicit factors in a settle/not settle equation. I think a lot of millennials are buying into the "extended adolescence"/party phase/single life/no responsibility/free spirit/high mobility (pick your moniker) lifestyle choices and acting accordingly - based on my anecdotal experience.

Perhaps, I haven't fully explored that option and it would make sense since the investor's money will be tied up longer. However, paying down principal quickly reduces total cost of the asset since there's less $$ for the interest to grow/compound against.

The basic premise behind that idea is rents are (historically were) cheaper than a mortgage so you could take the mortgage-rent delta, invest that, and generate a return greater than the interest rate on the mortgage and end up ahead. A lot of the mortgage calculators have a 3-5yr inflection point where renting, traditionally, was always cheaper if you planned on staying somewhere for 3-5yrs and moving.

The problem is, the equation has flipped. Mortgage payments are now, in many cases, cheaper than rent and there's such a high demand for rental units in some metro areas that landlords have no problems keeping tenants increasing rent 3-10% year over year. Ideally, you could do the same arbitrage buying a house (ideally an asset that nets 0 when you sell it worst case and you get your money back) and invest the rent-mortgage delta into other assets. The problem is "unlocking" the house option. If you don't have exemplary credit, and a certain pile of cash available, banks are leery to touch you and make financing available. Ergo, you get forced into the rental market and there's a huge incentive to turn properties into rentals.

Tack on the millennial generation's hesitancy to settle down in one location and you get a set of economic conditions that encourage renting and regular rent increases.

30 year mortgages make the monthly payment smaller, which reduces the monthly cost of housing, BUT you end up paying more interest since you aren't paying principal off as fast which means the total long term cost of the asset is more due to compound interest. A 15yr mortgage takes more out per month, but it's cheaper overall since you're paying off principal faster and interesting isn't accruing or compounding as quickly.

I think it's possible to "game" the system by getting a 30yr mortgage but set it up so any extra payments above and beyond the minimum amount get applied against principal - in effect reducing the amount of money they can leverage interest against. Then you make as many extra payments as possible over the life of the mortgage and pay it off ASAP.

That's the way my recent home buying friends look at it. They know they'll be in this metro area for X years and given most landlords raise rents by 3-5%+ in this area depending on demand, getting a 30 year fixed mortgage lets them lock in housing, in a location they want, for a fixed rate per month that never goes up. In fact, if they do it right, they can refinance and get the rate lower. Net result, housing becomes a fixed, rather than variable, cost they control with the bonus of being able to do with the space as they want. No questions asked.

The American VC market has been saturated and everyone with a spare dollar has been throwing cash into the market trying to find the next Google/Facebook/Twitter. A lot of institutional money started looking at the VC market as a way to maintain a 7-10% rate of return when traditional investment vehicles started going sideways.

You could get funding for a portable neighborhood pony washing service if you built an iPhone app backed by an AWS service and called it Uber for Pony Washers (or some such)if you looked hard enough.

As the article points out, this is changing. The boom part of the boom-bust equation is starting to flatline with IPOs happening less frequently and for less money and the institutional investors who get in later in the game to buy out the initial VCs being more gun shy about investing.

Net result for the market? Startups need to focus on being a functioning business generating positive cash flow rather than a money pit that occasionally generates a lottery ticket. Not everyone will succeed, but the changing economic climate will push a lot of the fair weather pony washing app founders out and leave the more seriously business minded people which should result in a new wave of solid companies capable of handling more strenuous economic conditions.

Frankly, I don't even look at them at all. Snacks are a nice-to-have and shouldn't be a selling perk and a 1x week team lunch can be a good way to build morale and camaraderie in the company, but again, not mandatory. What matters is work expectations, compensation, team, culture fit, other compensation, salary, etc. Not the freebies that might get pushed to distract you from other things you need to consider.

I get worried when people really push the free perks like breakfast/lunch/dinner every day. That, to me, says the corporate culture will expect you to work longer hours (for probably less take home pay) in exchange for feeding you. The food may not even be that good or healthy for you. Frankly, while I like my coworkers, I value having a life outside the office with friends and family and would be extremely leery about any job that asked me to spend the significant majority of my waking time working outside the usual 40hrs/week.

Value wise, ask them for their per-diem rate or what they budget for lunches/dinners to evaluate.

Lunch, depending on your organization/per-diem rates in the area, usually fluctuates between $10-20 and dinners between $20-50 depending on organization, expectations, restaurants in the area, etc.

Then figure out what the difference in salary is, knowing you could make lunches and dinners on your own for between $5-10 ea that are guaranteed to be fresh and nutritious. Odds are, you're going to be losing more money getting the "free" lunches/dinners than you get back in their dollar value.

Yes, you can argue there's a time tradeoff for buying and cooking, but if you do it smart, you can get this down to once a week in a batch trip at a prescheduled time.

Lets look at it from an evolution of technology angle.

10-15 years ago we had pain points with web apps and making them more fully featured/responsive and dealing with things breaking at scale. They were kind of clunky to build so, we did what all good engineers do and figured out how to make things easier to use for everyone. Now a days, the "kids" are learning how to build web apps that don't require a deep level of knowledge about the stack - we've done a fantastic job building out the tooling that abstracts a lot of these concerns away from the "average" developer. They know if I install framework X and use Library Y the two will communicate correctly. I might understand how they communicate, but don't need to know the intricacies at this time.

Technology is always evolving and what you need to know at a deep level is changing. 60s/70s/80s - The size of the program, how it was laid out on disk, disk sectors, memory layout. All that mattered to get the best performance. You needed to understand how the hardware worked intimately.

90s/ early 00s- Managed languages (Java etc.) become more of a thing and you need to understand less about all the gotchas the prior generations faced. The framework and language abstracted a lot of the prior generation's challenges away and increases in hardware capacity reduced the need to layout programs just so on the disk or in RAM.

Early 00s-Present - Hardware kept growing exponentially in terms of capacity and performance, and we started placing more emphasis on building out scalable, fully functioning web applications (thin clients) rather than thick clients running on a desktop. People figured out a lot of these applications were simply wrappers about DATABASE activities and wrote frameworks that made writing the backend for such apps KISS simple. RoR I'm looking at you! This freed up people to focus on the bells and whistles the user interacted with and reduced the need for anyone developer to know the intimate details of how their framework worked.

It's a changing world and the next generation of programmers is always going to be starting at our current level of abstraction, much like we started at our prior generation's and built our way up. Challenges we faced, overcame, and turned into libraries, become the starting assumption for the new kids that they'll build up from.

On the flip side, I gotta ask, what are you looking for? There are so many "full stack" combinations (language, server, SQL/NoSQL database, front end scripting library) now that the odds of finding a person with deep experience using everything you are using, unless you've reduced to the lowest possible common denominator, is low. Are you looking for someone you can train into the position and has enough knowledge not to blow their foot off, or do you want someone who you can plugin ready to go? Your expectations will influence how you're viewing the candidates, your expectations, and your relative measure of disappointment in them.

First off, relax. You want to be there, they want you to be there. You're already "in". Working relationships will begin to develop naturally in the first couple of months as you get comfortable with them and they get comfortable with you. You accelerate this process by asking questions when you don't know or understand something and get comfortable giving your opinion on things.

Friendships, depending on what you're going for, will naturally evolve with time. Go out to after work social activities (or organize a happy hour every so often), some of the same meet ups, and start building shared experiences with your coworkers. Over time, this will morph into deeper relationships.

Congrats on the new gig! Relax, have fun, and learn a ton!

Apple Maps, in many ways, is more usable than Google Maps when it comes to directions / heads up on turns and such. Unfortunately, it's still missing a glaring feature for me where I can't get it to ignore toll roads or highways when calculating directions. Even if I manually jigger it to avoid the road I want to avoid, it still "corrects" and tries to send me on that road.

They need to get some more of the driving GPS features figured out and I'll switch over entirely.

That is the one hiccup I foresee happening. The best current workaround I could think of would be to setup your datastore as a micro service the other parts of the app could interact with. That does lock your datastore into a single provider, but gives you flexibility with the rest of the app.

It's possible Intel keeps a stranglehold on the DC due to DC providers wanting X86-64 compatible chipsets and they do have a sizable advantage in their manufacturing process at this point.

I think the greater danger isn't other X86-64 chip manufacturers though. The only real competition is AMD/ATi + GlobalFoundry and their chipset process is a generation or two behind. The greater danger is the market moving to an entirely new architecture. Think about ARM in the datacenter. Less power consumption, smaller boxes, less cooling requirements. DCs could make a strong argument it's cost efficient for them to jump and if a major one jumps, developers will probably follow. Most of what we build today uses a software stack built on top of a managed language (Java/Python/Ruby) and doesn't rely on being native compiled. It reduces the opportunity cost of switching.

One of the other commenters already pointed out services like Docker are letting us abstract away from the specifics and just run the software wherever there's an OS that'll take it. That reduces the hold any one provider can have and forces them to compete on price / features rather than technology lock-in. If one of them implements a requirement you must use their standard APIs for XYZ, then you're probably going to get a mass exodus.

Longer term, I think Amazon's cloud will continue to eat market share, especially as an entirely new generation of techies comes online whose only experience has been working with AWS and other cloud providers. Kind of like the transition from desktop software in the 80s/90s to server-based web apps in the 90s-early 00s. If you're building a company / app today, the first move is to go to the cloud and get on AWS. That's the "safe" business move now rather than spending capital to buy hardware, getting a sysadmin, etc. etc. etc.

For the market, I'm hoping we see someone develop a set of common APIs that abstract away common specifics across AWS/Google Cloud/Azure and let you run a generic web stack and dynamically move parts of your app around based on pricing. If Google drops below AWS and your demand is spiking, you setup new instances on Google, rather than spinning up AWS instances, and use a micro service API to interact with the database. Behind the scenes, the API layer tracks the different clouds you configured for and dynamically moves most pieces of your application except data storage as your target conditions change. I envision spot cost, demand, latency, and host availability / provisioning time all playing a role in this cost algorithm. Eventually you end up with agnostic applications that don't ever live anywhere. They migrate and dynamically adjust across different clouds turning each individual cloud in part of a larger, more agnostic cloud for some services.

It makes a difference if they're dealing with a disproportionate amount of revenue concentrated in the hands of only a couple major customers. If the customers end up having disproportionate control over revenue, they can use that bully pulpit to force Intel to make changes the rest of the market may not want, hit certain price points that Intel wouldn't otherwise, etc. using the threat of do it or we go to AMD/ARM/IBM Power/build our own chip.

Edit: Fixed wording.

I usually go funds as well. However, if there are individual stocks that are getting hammered not because they're doing poorly but because the overall market sentiment is pushing people to sell, I'll grab those too. I.E. The Apple Bounce from a couple years ago where people would see off right before a major product announcement from Apple and artificially suppress the price. Buy it on the push down and when everyone buys back in because they think $NEW_PRODUCT_IS_AWESOME, you get the delta gain.

I tend to look for things that are strong on fundamentals and get murdered because of market sentiment and not because of business performance.

I was following the article for a while until it shifted and started blaming the politicians' religion as the driving force in the changes to the law. It sounds like the authors have an axe to grind.

For instance, they use this quote as an example of the Police Commissioner being a teetotaler against drinking and justifying it according to religion:

“In another foray into the state’s social and moral landscape, Mr Scipione says the rise in binge drinking among girls and young women is making them vulnerable to sexual assault, liaisons they may regret, psychological trauma, sexually transmitted infections and even a threat to their fertility.”

The Sun-Morning Herald article they link to [1] reports the police commissioner pointing the journalists to a 2011 study coming out discussing the impacts of binge drinking on young females and the PC is reiterating the conclusions of the study and asking people to be aware of the risks of their behavior and take commonsense measures to ward off potential negative outcomes. I'm missing the part where he's a frothing totalitarian religious zealot out to impose a strict religious interpretation on the population.

It's one thing to write a policy critique, which, I think the article mostly gets right and points out the impacts the laws are having on local entertainment and the impacts that has on other industries notorious for attracting and keeping you people, like technology. It's another thing to divest into an axe grinding tangent that ascribes malicious intent to politicians for religious reasons while providing spurious reasoning and support in the article. It's disingenuous to mix in personal opinion and interpretation of actions as verifiable fact without having links that show because A therefore B.

[1] http://www.smh.com.au/national/health/girls-drink-pact-20111...