Knocking off 18k for 401k and 5.5k for a Traditional IRA dramatically reduces the tax liability. I recognize 50k-32k = 18k (so the full 23.5k can't be executed in this case), but it makes a significant difference regardless.
And there are methods to pull this money out well before the standard ages without penalty, such as Substantially Equal Periodic Payments (SEPP).
It's not clear. Human moderators are not the magic pill that fixes everything. Google has taken enough flak for injecting far too much liberal bias into their system and human moderators will only outrage more people. You may see it as righteous when opinions you don't like are swept off of websites you use. Everything is neat, tidy, and non-challenging to you. It's a bit Orwellian to me.
Google has an automated API in beta to detect toxic comments. I've been playing around with it and it works pretty well and could solve the human moderation problem.
I don't think human moderators are the clear fix at all.
Both Facebook and Twitter employ a large number of human moderators, and they still regularly make judgment calls that are comically bad - defending stalkers while suspending their victims, suspending users that are the target of coordinated harassment campaigns, etc.
The reality is that when you have an army of people who need to churn through a vast amount of content per day, without the time or authority to look at the full scope and context of user interactions, they will make lots of bad calls. Doubly so if the moderators live half a world a way and have little awareness of the culture and norms of users they're asked to evaluate.
Add this to the fact that the really obvious abusive comments can and are already being moderated by automated systems, it means the human moderators are overwhelmingly exposed to the trickiest, least cut-and-dry situations.
When I read this, I can't help but think of the enormous promises that came with the computerization of medical records versus the reality that we have today.
America, since its founding, has been an experiment in extreme individualism over collectivism. We worship capitalism over all else. Even a whisper of government programs that help the poor are vilified as communist. Selfishness and immorality is a natural consequence of that. Things won't change until our culture completely changes.
In my experience, it's likely that the founders' problematic behavior has existed from the beginning, but employees feared retaliation and thus didn't speak up until now, when they are safe from being fired.
This is one of most unbelievably naive, immature, and truly ignorant comments I've read on HN. I sincerely hope you're trolling.
Put down the Ayn Rand fantasy novels and go meet some people outside of your economic bubble. Not everyone can be a software engineer in Western society. I'd wager you're about as responsible for your lot in life as these people.
Read about the history of the industrial revolution. Tenement life in NYC. Try to empathize. Develop some humanity and real perspective for Pete's sake.
By the way, no one is stopping you from living like that if you're so jealous. But it's clear you wouldn't last a day like that, you're all talk anyway.
LMAO. I didn't even get a chance to read illegal_in_ca's reply before it got flagged. What did they even say to generate this much controversy? (Probably something really stupid).
And even aside from the obvious moral problems of extreme wealth inequality, it's not even economically efficient. You can't have a strong and growing market economy without a middle class. Hong Kong could get away with it for some time because their economy is based on international trade and finance, but that only takes you so far. Eventually you need to develop a domestic consumer base. Their current political crisis is caused by this inequality catching up to them, though the HK business and political elite conveniently pass the blame to Beijing.
There is simply a massive difference between the theory of democracy and its actual implementation. Your personal autonomy is restricted by the government, massively, period, generally for everyone's own good. They decide what and how much medicine you can put in your body. Whether you can gamble, and where, and on what, and how much. What drugs you can take. What speed you can drive. Whether you must go to school or not based on your age. Which food you can buy at the supermarket. What you are allowed to see on television. Where and when you may protest. What behavior is allowed in public and what is not. What speech is considered 'free' and what isn't. What machines you may operate and under what circumstances. Which financial transactions you may or may not participate in and the terms of those transactions. The type of home you build and it's specifications. Which countries you may or may not enter and under which circumstances. Whether you are allowed to work or not. It's just the way things are.
But it looks like things are changing with regards to finance.
Because now, it is going to be much more difficult for the government to regulate your financial activities.
The "way things are" is changing, and changing for the better.
Don't like it? Then the government can send in its men with guns and attempt to stop it.
The technology is getting better and better, though. So it will soon become extremely difficult for those men with guns to do anything at all with your untraceable, untraceable, and unstoppable financial activities.
May the best group win. The government will need all the luck it can get.
>Your personal autonomy is restricted by the government, massively, period, generally for everyone's own good. They decide what and how much medicine you can put in your body. Whether you can gamble, and where, and on what, and how much. What drugs you can take. What speed you can drive. Whether you must go to school or not based on your age. Which food you can buy at the supermarket.
These restrictions violate people's basic rights and are to the material detriment of society at large. The more of a regulatory burden is placed on an industry, the more dysfunctional, bureaucratic and nepotistic it is.
Basic rights are defined by various charters, constitutions, international agreements, and that's about it. If you find that one of those restrictions contradicts the ones applicable to your country and legal system, you have a good shot at changing it. (Point in case: gay marriage, and other Supreme Court rulings.)
As for all other rights, those are determined by the government that is democratically voted in. If most people, via their elected representatives, decide that you shouldn't be allowed to speed, or smoke crack, and it's not constitutionally guaranteed, then it's not a basic right and it's not your right at all. Maybe moral right, but that depends on highly subjective morals and might therefore still get you into legal trouble.
Best course of action is probably to find a country with a legal framework that matches your morals. If there's no such country, perhaps the time for these ideas hasn't come and you want to lobby for them to be recognized as basic rights, since right now they're obviously not.
>Maybe moral right, but that depends on highly subjective morals and might therefore still get you into legal trouble.
We're intelligent human beings. We should be able to arrive at some kind of consensus on what our moral rights our, through rational discourse. That's what I'm trying to do right now. My argument starts with what "the law" means:
> We should be able to arrive at some kind of consensus on what our moral rights our, through rational discourse.
In the commonly used sense of the term, the scope of morals by far exceeds what you'll get even reasonable people to agree upon. "Rational discourse" means that you need enough of an uncontroversial set of base facts that either party is willing to work with. I don't think we have enough of those to derive a single valid system of morals without injecting other, subjective, more controversial opinions in the process.
Say, you have a basic statement such as "All people should be equal", something that most can agree with. By itself, this isn't actionable, and won't determine how to handle a situation unambiguously. You could come up with a libertarian doctrine that all people should be given the same treatment regardless of their background or current situation, or you could come up with a socialist doctrine that disadvantaged people should get extra support to balance out unequal origins and misfortune. Or anything in between. None of these can be rationally discarded, because there's not enough source data to come to any conclusion to begin with. If you attempt to expand the set of source data, you will find many who disagree with you. That's why it's subjective.
That said, trying to distill what basic facts we do have, so that they can be worked with in a constructive fashion, is a commendable goal. Good luck!
You do not have a right to speed on public property because others share ownership in it, and thus have a legitimate right to contribute to the rules that govern its use. If you owned your own private track, you would have such a right.
DD isn't exactly cheap. And neither is partner time, that's probably a more precious resource than money at your average VC.
A failed DD says as much about the VC as it says about the company, it more often than not translates into 'VC didn't do their homework', and it can really eat into the '2' of the 2 and 20, those DD costs will come straight out of the operating capital of a fund. Especially for smaller VCs this can really hurt.
Thanks for the detail. To me, that sounds like the cost of doing business as a VC, more than risk. Forgive me if I have a little less empathy for the other side :)
Well, I see both sides. VC is not the money printing machine that many people make it out to be, lots of VCs work hard, take tremendous risk and in the end end up with relatively little to show for all their effort.
2% of the capital under management is a lot when a fund is large but when a fund is small (say 50M) it translates to 1M of operating capital for a year when all capital is invested. That's only the case at the end of the fund cycle, the time before then there will be on average only half of that available. If a full process DD (legal, commercial, technical, financial) costs $200K then even a single failure will substantially eat into the operating capital for that VC and may in fact harm their ability to do future deals.
Not having empathy for the other side is not very productive, either from the VC's point of view or from the point of view of the start-ups. I've seen more start-ups that try to play tricks than I have seen VC's (but I've seen both).
This is the type of logic that leads to mandatory military parades, the banning of religion as a distraction and "Dear Leader"-style propaganda and mythology. If the military would like to do something in my benefit I request they stop destabilizing the world and causing death for profit instead of glorifying and normalizing it through state-sponsored propaganda.
I expected to read about how OP built a successful e-commerce business after transitioning from full-time software development. Instead this is about how he earned $275 over three days on a one-time shirt idea. Click-bait.
Assuming a $50k income post-tax