chrismaeda

anno scorsodiscuss

Seiko SSC819 is a good Speedmaster homage. And it's solar powered so you never need to open the case.

anno scorsodiscuss

The interstate highway system is actually made up of Interstate and Defense Highways. So all the "interstates" in Hawaii are actually Defense Highways that connect Pearl Harbor with other military bases on Oahu.

- The H-1 goes from Barbers Point to Pearl Harbor to Diamond Head.

- The H-2 connects Pearl Harbor with Schofield Barracks.

- The H-3 connects Pearl Harbor with MCBH (Marine Corps Base Hawaii) at Kaneohe.

chrismaeda

2 anni fadiscuss

Good question. Quickbooks, Xero, and Wave are all owned by publicly traded companies.

(H&R Block owns Wave.)

chrismaeda

2 anni fadiscuss

It seems to me that this is the key takeaway for founders:

Your accounting stack is

  1. accounting software
  2. bookkeeping  (ie operating the accounting software)
  3. cpa / cfo    (ie for tax and financial planning)

The benefit and problem with "nextgen" solutions like bench, kick, etc is that they provide a proprietary solution for the entire stack. This could be better/faster/cheaper but also comes with risk, as we are seeing in real time.

In contrast, the minimal risk approach is to source your accounting stack from different vendors:

  1. accounting software (eg quickbooks, xero, wave)
  2. bookkeeping   (hire a person or use a service)
  3. cpa / cfo     (hire a person or use a service)

If you use "standard" accounting software, you can change the other layers of your accounting stack at will. The total cost of layers 1 and 2 might be $6k-$8k per year for a company with revenue, which looks more expensive than the nextgen solutions. But the reduced risk and increased flexibility may be worth it.

chrismaeda

2 anni fadiscuss

One of the issues that led to this decision is regulatory overreach. Standard example is the clean air act which regulated air pollution. Years later the EPA decided that green house gases were air pollutants that could be regulated under the act. Then they tried to say that CO2 was a pollutant, and businesses started to fight back hard.

chrismaeda

3 anni fadiscuss

Weapons mounts will be dealer installed options.

chrismaeda

3 anni fadiscuss

Le Select...

chrismaeda

3 anni fadiscuss

This is what we had to read in grad school. I remember the sections on how they designed RISC architectures as especially good fun.

https://www.elsevier.com/books/computer-architecture/henness...

chrismaeda

4 anni fadiscuss

Prolog is cool but has exponential complexity which makes it impractical for real world use.

The rete algorithm was supposed to be a solution but has anyone applied rete to a prolog implementation yet?

chrismaeda

4 anni fadiscuss

Execution is harder than you think.

1. Ideas alone can get funded, but only when pitched by entrepreneurs who have done it before. e.g. the last idea-stage company I invested in was a new crm company pitched by an entrepreneur who had already built a huge successful crm company once before.

2. For the rest of us, you have to show you can execute by building a team, some technology, and demonstrating customer traction.

For any given idea, you have to assume that 10 other people have thought of it, so why are you special?

chrismaeda

4 anni fadiscuss

Consider having children.

chrismaeda

4 anni fadiscuss

The fall of Rome podcast is also very good. It covers approx. 300-600 AD. https://wondery.com/shows/the-fall-of-rome-podcast/

chrismaeda

4 anni fadiscuss

Ontario has a bunch of make-your-own wine companies that work like wine bricks.

1. you buy 5 gallons of grape juice for ~$20 per gallon.

2. yeast is dropped into your grape juice

3. you come to the store to decant your grape juice into wine bottles and cork them up.

Since no alcohol is bought or sold, you avoid the (very high) taxes on liquor. You end up with ~28 bottles of wine for ~$4 per bottle.

It's not the greatest wine, but it's ok for sangria and cooking, and it's a good story if you hang out with people who like to talk about tax loopholes...

chrismaeda

5 anni fadiscuss

This is your brain crying out for adderral. You could probably show this paragraph to your doctor and get an ADHD diagnosis... ;-)

chrismaeda

5 anni fadiscuss

model

chrismaeda

5 anni fadiscuss

Guderian's Achtung-Panzer! is required reading here.

chrismaeda

5 anni fadiscuss

I was a grad student at CMU CS in the early 90s. The assholishness on the opinion bb was mostly performative. Imagine a bunch of kids in their 20s field testing opinions that they were not necessarily committed to.

The RPP was great for a graduate computer science department. I only learned years later that not everyone is reasonable...

chrismaeda

5 anni fadiscuss

One answer is accounting rules. In a typical IT shop that supports a business...

Spending for "business as usual" (BAU or "opex") activities must be fully expensed in the year that it happens.

Spending for capital projects (new IT systems and upgrades aka "capex") can be amortized over the lifetime of the project. So if you spend $1M on a new IT system, you might expense it over a 5-7 year period.

So IT organizations will only have permanent staff for BAU and will hire temporary contractors for capital projects.

chrismaeda

5 anni fadiscuss

Conbini are great.

I'm addicted to the relatively new coffee machines. You get a made-to-order coffee for the price of a vending machine coffee. And now that Suntory owns Jim Beam, you can buy bourbon in every conbini to fortify your coffee.

Family Mart has the best fried chicken ("famichiki").

We once used google translate to tell us the different flavors of rice balls and were shocked when one came up as "spicy child". Japanese friends explained that this was actually mentaiko or spicy fish eggs.

Finally, I resisted the oden by the cash register for years but finally ate it when we were stuck at a bus stop with a long line. Delicious.

chrismaeda

5 anni fadiscuss

Property tax laws cause the empty store fronts.

In Ontario (as with most places in North America), commercial property is assessed on its highest and best use (ie potential use), not its current use. So if a parcel has a low-rise building with some bookstores and cafes, it will be assessed at the same value as the high-rise condo tower next door.

This "highest and best" assessment rule means that in a rising market, the landlord must raise rents to cover rising property taxes. In addition, a landlord may apply for a property tax rebate if a commercial or industrial property is vacant.

So there is zero incentive for landlords to accept below-market rents for small businesses: if the property is vacant, they don't pay property taxes. If the property is rented at below-market rates, they lose money because they still have to pay property taxes at full-market rates.

Even if the small business owner also owns the building, the rising property taxes may make the small business uneconomic and force them to move.

chrismaeda

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How to bulk load 1.6B records into AWS RDS Postgres

China's Huawei, 70 affiliates placed on U.S. trade blacklist

The Case for the [Galactic] Empire

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