Just wanted to drop in this thread and let you know I think you have an awesome product and I have been happily using speedify for almost a year now. I hope you keep up the great work and are able to keep growing!
You ask a great question: If a business isn't able to employ American workers at competitive pay, what purpose does it serve for the country? Why should it be here or exist?
I have sympathy for cash poor startup founders, but offering substantial equity works wonders. Like a real amount, not something that rounds to 0. It's hard to feel bad for someone who wants to keep all the upside and not pay a good salary. Someone making 500k elsewhere should be a key hire, so spend or dilute yourself accordingly.
If most American startups aren't able to hire American workers at competitive pay and start moving little by little to (say) Canada, aren't there a risk that the whole VC/startup ecosystem will slowly move there? If the Apple/Google/Amazon of tomorrow are Canadian, how does that serve USA or American workers?
It's a short term vs long term balance. As an American you should want US to remain dominant in the startup ecosystem. Restricting startup access to skilled workers is counter-productive in the long run, even if it serves your short-term interests.
Businesses do not exist merely to serve their host countries. They serve the needs of many people, including shareholders, customers, employees and the communities (not just countries) they are based in.
> You ask a great question: If a business isn't able to employ American workers at competitive pay, what purpose does it serve for the country? Why should it be here or exist?
One would assume that the business still pays taxes, bills, rent etc.
It's still a net gain to the economy, especially when the alternative is for the work to go overseas.
Instead of fighting over the same people for a decade, they could try hiring some junior people and letting them take on increasing responsibility. The guy who made Stardew Valley lived in Seattle, had a CS degree, and couldn't get a job! It worked out for him in the end, but not for the companies constantly whining that they can't find workers.
>Can you imagine living on $20K, $30K, $40K, a year?
Yes, because I have done it every year for the past decade. Having lived in several large metropolitan areas, I don't consider myself poor or even struggling.
I'm a grad student, so I make about $30,000 a year.
I didn't feel poor until I had a bicycle accident and saw the hospital bill. If the insurance hadn't covered it, it would have taken me years to climb out of that hole of debt.
Well, technically, it wouldn't be possible for a chunk of antimatter to be heavier than you.
But yeah, one theory is that if you hold one that's more massive than you are, its repulsion would overpower your attraction, and bang, zoom, straight to the moon!
Not sure if that conclusion is right. It probably wouldn't result in an explosion and the energy output would probably be in the form of light. Regardless, I'm going with Stephen Hawking on this one: "If you ever meet your anti-self, don't shake hands!"
"It probably wouldn't result in an explosion and the energy output would probably be in the form of light."
That's what nukes do too. Turns out that dumping absurd amounts of light (various parts of the spectrum, but certainly including visible) into the surrounding area absurdly fast tends to fuck stuff up pretty good.
Yeah, a lot of the power output from a nuclear explosion is in gamma rays, and even air is opaque enough to gamma rays that the energy deposition heats it up to way incandescent temperatures. That's what the fireball of a nuclear explosion is: incandescent air.
Funny that I actually managed to get the maths wrong. 4000 TeraJoules is 4 PetaJoules, i.e. 10g of antimatter is actually a 0.25 Megaton nuke. Still packs some serious punch, but I totally fail at arithmetic, it seems.
I think you misunderstand what the term means. For example, the control rods in some nuclear reactor designs are held up out of the core by electromagnets. Thus even in the event of complete power failure, the rods fall naturally, stopping the reaction. Since failure results in a safe state, this is referred to as a "fail-safe" system.
By contrast, if you were holding a lump of antimatter contained by an electromagnetic field, a power failure would result is the antimatter escaping confinement and annihilating with your body, releasing an unimaginably large amount of energy nearly instantly. This is what you might call a "fail-deadly" system, because a failure results in a decidedly unsafe state.
>In the current economic climate, it is pretty much a waste "investing" in anything until you have, say, an 8-figure sum in cash laying around doing nothing.
Why do you say that? It is clear that money can be made investing with less than an 8-figure sum. For instance, the Vanguard S&P500 index fund returned 22% last year and 10.66% since its introduction in 1976. The fund minimum is $3,000.
Those are two very-selective samples. How much did the S&P return from 2000 to 2011? If you look at a chart of an index fund dating back to the 1970s, they certainly look like things that were following an upward trend, which got goosed steeper a couple of times, until everything blew up in 1998 and now there is chaos and unpredictability. 1998-2011 is over 1/3 of the period from 1971 to 2011 so one can't really regard this as a blip!
Yes, money "can" clearly be made investing, if you time the market and are lucky. I am disputing the idea that stocks will always generally go up. I think this used to be true but may have changed. Much like "housing prices always go up", which was shown to be absurd.
Just wanted to drop in this thread and let you know I think you have an awesome product and I have been happily using speedify for almost a year now. I hope you keep up the great work and are able to keep growing!