You guys weren't joking when you said you were moving fast. Looks great. I'm kicking the tires now and will report back. As I told you in January, great damn idea. Let's grab a beer -Jason
It's about a future where our preoccupation with productivity led us to genetically engineer away our need/ability to sleep. In this future sleep becomes the drug of choice and the domain of the counter culture.
I have a framework I wrote last month and a good friend of mine is a sci-fi editor. She agreed to give me notes, mainly so I would leave her alone.
Not really going to set a word a day goal. With me, I find that sometimes only a few hundred words eek out. While other days 3000-4000 come out freely.
My method for getting a great coder even though you can't evaluate coding skills -
Hire a great coder to HELP YOU INTERVIEW. Find a great coder who's work you respect, who is currently employed and not looking to leave his position. PAY HIM his going rate to help assess your candidates.
Find candidates through local meetups, friends of friends, and this lovely community here. Above poster is correct, Good coders are respected. If you actually start becoming a part of the community you will start to find folks who might work out.
We liked freshbooks more than quickbooks, so I can say that it's a nice product.
But right now, I'm a big fan of what's going on over at Less Accounting. I think he's on the right track to the perfect small business solution. And the support level is unreal.
I should have mentioned, but I am looking for a solution that scales. I've checked out freshbooks before, and I think that it would be easy to outgrow. Plus, I am not just looking to invoice clients...I want to keep track of all of our finances.
This is really a question for your underwriter. As it varies greatly depending on who holds your merchant account. You are right, most credit cards are going to default to the unqualified rate anyway.
But the bigger problem is this.
If you get bare minimum information from your customers, and then for some reason you start getting more than a few charge-backs, they might close your merchant account. Which is a fun exercise in thinking on your feet =)
The best bet is to get a merchant account with an account representative that is familiar with your business model and talk to him about how you plan to proceed. You are much less likely to run into problems if they verbally signed off on your actions.
As to fees. This is really cart before the horse. You have no sales yet. Trust me, when you have a whole gang of sales, people will start tripping over themselves to process your transactions at a happier rate.
The modern assumption of retirement is a bi-product of the industrial revolution. Retirement was a brass ring that was held up for workers to see as a way to keep them productive and loyal for a long period of time. Just think of how many times you've heard the phrase "You don't want to jeopardize your pension do you?" said in a movie.
Unfortunately, greed, escalation, and bloat caught hold at lots of these companies. And the concept of company retirement became much more of a well organized ponzi scheme.
As one example, both of my parents were taught from an early age that they should grow up to work at one company for their entire life. And that's what they did. My mother, went to work for the local school system. And my father went to work for the local chemical production plant. When they started work they both expected a retirement package, payed into and provided solely by their employer.
Neither one got that. My mothers retirement plan converted. Into a 401k with a fractional matching contribution from the school district. So she went from 100% contribution from her employer, to 90% coming out of her paycheck. If she was to retire "on time".
My father had a much worse fate. He had a pension from his company and a company managed 401k. Both of which were gutted when the company was spun off in debt reallocation. He still has the company letters that shows him having over 1 Million dollars on paper as his retirement package. He retired with little more than a gold watch for 40 years on the job. I had to support him in the gap between his "retirement" and when his social security kicked in.
But the silver lining is that we can all learn from the fallacy of our predecessors. We can take responsibility for our own lives, happiness, and "retirement". That's a big reason why I work for myself.
And most of the people I know are into the "mini-retirement" concept that has been more recently popularized by Tim Ferris. Live now. Don't work your whole life to live later.
If you truly love the work that you do...who'd want to retire anyway?
"The modern assumption of retirement is a bi-product of the industrial revolution. Retirement was a brass ring that was held up for workers to see as a way to keep them productive and loyal for a long period of time."
I am not aware of any company that paid pensions during the industrial revolution, but then again I am not an expert on the subject, so maybe there were enlightened employers that did. Mostly, though, this was the time of 16-hour work days and child labor.
Retirement was not a "brass ring" but rather a necessity. How are you going to make a living when you're too old to work? In Europe, labor unions gradually forced companies to take care of this, and eventually it was set into law (in most countries anyway), with the government and employers cooperating to pay for people's retirement. In the US, not so much. Which system is preferable depends on one's outlook, I guess.
Ok, maybe I abbreviated my train of thought there. Let me elaborate.
And I am speaking solely from my knowledge of US History.
"Bi-Product of the industrial revolution." retirement came about SOLELY because of the industrial revolution. Prior to that most people were artisans and self-employed. However, once everyone got onto an assembly line, older people who couldn't keep up started gumming up the works. And they were being laid off in droves. To counteract that, Roosevelt, enacted Social Security as a form of "Old Age Insurance". Soon after, corporations started pension plans of their own. And this ushered in the era of "Companies look after their own" in America.
The point I was trying to make is that it use to be common belief that your employer would take care of you. It's not that way anymore.
So...are the children suppose to live in the school and never leave? Because the second they step out the door they are bound to run into a few rogue hotspots.
Even out in the rural areas of the US, you can usually find a wi-fi signal.
