Would love to bicycle to work. Here in the USA, very few people do so because (A) there's almost no room on the road and (B) motorists are almost always in a big hurry and not paying attention to anything except lights, police, and other cars.
I lived near a university once where there were some bike paths and it was really great.
When you compress air, it heats up and expands -- thus making the pressure go up faster than one might expect. So, when storing it you lose a lot of energy as heat.
When you let it uncompress, it cools -- losing a lot of energy again.
Point is, you lose quite a bit of energy going both ways.
A good solution might be to combine wind and pumped hydro: have the wind turbine pump water to a higher elevation when extra wind is available.
That is definitely an interesting point, although I assume it was taken into account when companies and the government did their comparison with hydroelectric storage. Larger caverns should reduce the amount of energy lost due to heat.
> It is actually quite hard to fire someone in Germany, who wants to stay.
Wow. In the USA, companies can basically fire anyone for any reason at any time (in my experience). And getting fired usually happens very quickly -- as in, that instant: "Please pick up your things and come with me. No, don't touch the computer, someone else will log you out."
The minimum one month notice does not mean you see your desk again, it just means you will be paid at least for one more month (plus what is reached in the settlement).
But an employee that really wants to stay can be on payroll for quite some time. But he cannot work for another company during that time. He has to be available.
But most people, I think, take the severance pay and move on. I did.
No, not anybody can. What if you have a family and are barely making ends meet as it is? It's very difficult to convince a wife that you'd like for the family to spend a little less so you can have a few months off next year between jobs.
Assuming you have a job in IT, how does one get to the point where he's only making ends meet, even with a family in the mix?
Assuming a low-end IT salary, you're still bringing in 5k+/month. Minus $2000 for tax, zero for your 10 year old cheap car, $1000 for rent, and another $500 for food, that leaves $1500 for conspicuous consumption or savings.
If you've chosen to use up that excess by upgrading apartments, leasing a car, buying a flatscreen on the Visa card, etc., that's what is eating up your ability to save money.
There's no reason to be living month to month on $60k+ a year. Unless that's what you've chosen to do.
You're missing a lot of stuff like gas, parking, car insurance, phone bills, internet connection, electricity, heat, water, diapers, kid insurance, kid clothes, kid medicine, kid entertainment (toys, books, etc), babysitter, day care, etc, etc. Your food budget is assuming the family is living on beans and rice.
Day care? The wife either works or she doesn't. In the latter case, day care is unnecessary. In the former case, you've got enough extra money for day care.
As for food, I eat far better than beans and rice, and I probably only spend about $150/month (ignoring restaurants). I'm a 100kg man who eats a lot. $500/month is easily plausible for a family which does not have large teenage children. (This of course assumes a non-working wife to prepare food from scratch, but again, if the wife works, more money to play with.)
Indeed. Budget it out however you like, but if you can exactly make ends meet each month, chances are you can make ends meet and have one dollar left over to save. Look a bit harder and you might find $50 left.
Start thinking that way, and keep at it for a while and suddenly you'll find you're not living month-to-month anymore.
Here's a recipe for living on one 'median' income:
* Pay your cars off.
* Get down to < $300 / month on food.
* Stop eating out except on special occasions.
* Turn the thermostat up / down in summer / winter.
* Cap mortgage or rent at $1000 / month.
* Live close to work
* Stop buying lots of crap you don't need.
* Build some savings
The key thing is, if you can manage on one income, a LOT of expenditure just melts away. Day care, gas for commuting to two jobs, much easier to eat at home, etc. etc.
Those things would be easy if it's just you. However, imposing those policies on the wife is another matter. It just devolves into fighting over money all the time.
One data point you are missing: if you fire the incompetent wife, in the USA by default she gets the kids too. Guess what kind of life they will have with just her raising them.
How does a founder get fired? So, the CEO says "you're fired". Well, I'm guessing that if you're a founder then that means you're a co-owner. So, don't you just tell the CEO, "um... no"?
Sure, if you hold 51% of the equity, and even then it would get messy.
The power to hire and fire is (usually) the CEOs, devolved from the board. The board is (usually) appointed by the equity holders.
For some set ups reversing a CEOs decision might require 50%+ of the shareholders deposing 50%+ of the board and replacing them with tame board members who fire the CEO and appoint someone else.
That's going to look pretty bad to the staff, any investors who don't agree, anyone you might try and hire as the new CEO, customers and any potential future investors. And after all of those people have run away as fast as they can how much of a company is really left?
In many venture-backed companies, the Series A (and B, C, ...) shareholders are guaranteed a certain number of board seats--solely by virtue of holding preferred stock. The founders (who hold common stock) have no control over how the preferred shareholders use their board seats.
If the preferred shareholders have an outright majority on the board, it's black and white that they can effectively fire the founders.
Almost all founder agreements - especially one signed by Cringley who has a lot of experience - is going to have ways for the board to get rid of a founder. Either outright firing, or a buy-out or something.
Just because a founder, for example, doesn't mean you don't have to come into work because you're busy at home eating cheetos and playing xbox (which is definitely not what Cringley did, but an extreme example of why you'd want such a clause).
e-junkie is OK, but the UI is horrible, it's all in flash. I went w/ e-junkie at 1st because of the coupon code that gave me 120 days for free & because they handle all the digital delivery logic like link expiry.
I'm now w/ ClickBank as it seems to be more popular w/ affiliate marketers, only costs an upfront $50 & can accept multiple methods of payment.
What you allude to in your first statement is incorrect for most cases, IMO. Staying together doesn't necessarily mean letting it decrease your happiness. It might just mean you have to get your happiness from a different place.
Often in life you're not presented with win-lose situations. Instead, you're presented with lose-lose situations, and it's your job to choose the least worst solution for everyone involved.
I used to feel this way, but as I've gotten older, I've come to realize that there are a large number of things in life that are completely outside of my control. Accepting that doesn't mean "settling", it means that I've realized that I can't control those situations, but I can control my reaction and how it affects me. Marriage may or may not fall into that category for some people, but generally the behavior of others, health issues, macroeconomic events, etc. are things we can't control and must learn to live with.
Also, the idea that we have to be happy all the time is a particularly American conceit. It can be very rewarding to a point, but there's a thin line between that and narcissism that can make it impossible to form deep relationships. In an ideal marriage, for instance, each supports the others' ambitions, but there obviously has to be some give and take.
I completely agree, but getting divorced is something in your control. The weather is something you can control. Your health is something you can control, to an extent.
I don't know why this was downvoted. I don't agree with the post completely but I don't find it snarky or anything.
To the post itself: It's a bit more complex than that. If the kids mean a lot to you then splitting up means seeing them less, making the "trade" times stressful for everyone, etc. It's a trade off like many things in life.
But I do agree that there are times that staying can be more damaging than leaving.
You'd be issued stock options giving you the ability to buy the company's stock at a very low price. These typically vest over time so that you can't just take the equity and quit. The paperwork is a bunch of legal forms. Have a startup lawyer look things over to keep yourself covered.
It depends on what country you live in... you'll have to research the incorporation laws of the country you specifically live in.
In the UK, you can just decide how many shares the company has, and sell them for whatever amount per share you decide - that way you split the company between several founders. Of course, if you want more complicated stuff, like vesting, you'll probably want to speak to a solicitor.
Lots of people do their own EV conversions from ICE (internal combustion engine) cars. Trouble is, up until now they've all used lead acid batteries (and as such, were heavy and didn't have great range).
The next step -- and what I'm really interested to start seeing -- is homebrew EV's using Lithium Ion batteries. I think this is going to be the next step.
Lithium ion still has a pretty steep early adopter tax, and they're not as forgiving as lead-acid (Overcharging lead-acid batteries ruins your $2k pack. Overcharging lithium ion batteries will ruin your $20k pack and can easily burn up your car and your house).
But they're very much coming down in price. In RC-plane sized packs, lithium polymer packs (with a 5C discharge rating) are down to about $500/kWh retail. A minimum viable pack for a very light car might be five kilowatt-hours (and might only weigh 70 pounds, a little over a tenth the weight of lead-acid).
AC motors are really great if you're building a drivetrain from scratch. You get a cheaper gearbox (single speed, no reverse) and a cheaper motor (theoretically) by paying for roughly six times the electronics (although you can divide the current capability of everything by the square root of three). And it drives just like an automatic transmission, only better.
But with a conversion vehicle the gearbox comes for free with the donor car, and it's typically more work to integrate a single-speed drive than to just adapt the motor housing and shaft to the transmission bellhousing and flywheel. And you're not paying the early adopter tax that's still present on AC drivetrains.
DC motors are very efficient, so, I'd have to see some numbers to buy that.
Also, a big plus for DC motors is that the controllers are simpler. AC motors require a high-power adjustable-frequency inverter.
The only downside of common standard DC motors that I know of is that you have to change the brushes every n years, which I'll gladly take over oil changes. :)
I lived near a university once where there were some bike paths and it was really great.