I lived in India for awhile and had female friends go though a bit of what is described in the story it brings back situations I was in and I empathize.
I've gotten three of these in the last two days from three family members on different sides of the family who all use Yahoo. I thought the first two were just idiots, but after the third I started to wonder how widespread this was.
I have lived outside of the US for 6 years and can hands down recommend Charles Schwab Bank. All ATM fees in the US and abroad are reimbursed and there are no foreign transaction fees.
That shady private ATM in the bar charges $5 per transaction? You are totally insensitive to it.
When was the last time you walked into a bank with a checking account question? You are here on HN so I assume it is rarely or never
But...it's a debit account, so if you need a credit card this may not fit your use case.
I am from the US and I have not heard anyone paying taxes on the $40k as a US citizen. I can not say if this is the correct way to handle it or not. Since the money is split up between the team it is a bit complicated if you have more than one team member, but the money does get reimbursed to the head team member so if someone was responsible for paying taxes on it, it would be the head team member. All charges that you submit for reimbursement must be made from an account of a human team member on the contract or a Chilean company, and not from a US entity such as an LLC.
You can elect to draw a small salary from the grant money here in Chile (which most do) and you must register with the tax office here, but the salary is not high enough to require you to pay taxes here in Chile either.
"...performance of UIWebViews is less than in mobile Safari. This has a lot to do with the absence of the new Nitro JavaScript engine in UIWebViews, apparently for security reasons. I ran some tests on my iPhone 4 with iOS 5.1.1, the JavaScript benchmark Sunspider running in Mobile Safari was 3 x as fast as running in a native app with a UIWebView. Also, to communicate from the UIWebView to the native app, a JavaScript bridge is needed. This is tricky stuff, slow and not really thread safe."
I think the bigger problem is still iOS's webview from within native apps, not that it has to pull most of the assets from the server. If you go to m.facebook.com in Safari it is much faster than using the native application and most of it is the same HTML5 code that is running within the webview of the native app. The twitter app is also painfully slow when clicking a link and it opens up the resulting page in a webview.
Great point. I initially thought I would float everything on my credit card until I got reimbursed. I found out it doesn't work like that unfortunately. You have to show that the credit card has been paid off for the transactions you are submitting.
Yes, they make it pretty clear that you should have $5k per person to get you on your feet. I took it pretty lightly but it ended up being quite accurate and we ran into some cashflow issues.
As for time on program overhead, minimum probably 2 days a month. Much more if you want to be more involved with the community. You are not forced to do much more than the reimbursement process and finding some ways to give back to the Chile. You could go to meetups and such 3-4 days a week if you wanted, a lot going on.
I am a skinny guy so my problem is not keeping weight off but rather putting weight on. When I am deep into my work I put off eating and end up skipping meals.
My co-founders and I have started going to the gym for an hour or so every night which is a great break from work. Before it got cold and I started going to the gym I would sneak out for a 30min run every other day, a lot of great ideas come to me while running.