bannerts | 5 years ago | on: (Very) Basic Intro to Elliptic Curve Cryptography
bannerts | 5 years ago | on: (Very) Basic Intro to Elliptic Curve Cryptography
For example with bitcoin
bannerts | 14 years ago | on: Check Out This Berkeley Freshman’s ‘Ridiculously Automated’ Dorm Room
Original message: >I think that the dorm room is impressive, however I wish that the article didn't try to sensationalize it by saying he was/is a Freshman. According to his website, he is 27 years old and has a degrees in Animation and Interactive Media. Not to be cynical, but this room is really impressive for an 18 year old (original impression I got) to have put together, but less impressive for a much older person.
bannerts | 14 years ago | on: Getting Beaten By A Voting Bot In 50 Minutes
bannerts | 14 years ago | on: From idea to replacing full-time salary in 4 months
About how long does it take for two maids to clean a house (or in other words, how many houses can two maids clean in one 8-10 hour day?)? Also, about how many maids do you have working for you?
In trying to come up with a ball-park figure: My guess would be that each pair of maids could bring in about $600-800 a day in revenue (cleaning 4-5 homes). Of this it would seem that about $400-500 goes to paying the maids (say , $200-250 per maid), with about $75 dollars going to daily expenses (gasoline, cleaning materials, etc), leaving whatever remains going to other major business expenses and profit. If his workers are busy 20 days a month, it would seem that a bunch of the so-called monthly costs of being an employer (say around $750 per month per employee) only comes out to be around $75 dollars a day (per pair of maids). I have no clue as to what this value actually is (or how much of it would be part of their hourly wage), I'm just guessing.
All in all though, I would guess that for each maid he has, on average it is costing him around $275-325 per day while bringing in around $300-400 per day. If their is any truth to the numbers above (which one number being off could dramatically mess everything up), it would appear that he is bringing in about $50-75 per maid. If he prices his service to keep that profit in mind (to make at lease $50 per maid per day), then having a staff of 10 maids could end up making around $100-150k a year. And I suppose the scaling would seem to work pretty linearly; if he doubles the number of mades or how much he brings in per maid, then his profit would double as such. Of course there are things like insurance and training (perhaps those costs total 10% of each maids daily wage and is included in that value)...
Based on these numbers though, having 10 maids would require having 25 homes to clean each day (or about 500 per month). I see that he has given out 2254 lunches so far (if I really wanted to make an accurate estimate of the business he is doing).
Anyhow, is there anything major that I'm missing in these numbers? I'm just trying to make an estimation..
bannerts | 14 years ago | on: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 2 Notes
bannerts | 14 years ago | on: How to leave academia (for science PhDs)
bannerts | 14 years ago | on: Confessions of a car salesman
The dealership would offer a rebate only if you financed it through their service. Anyhow, the rates they gave were horrible but like any loan you have the ability to pay it off in the near future. Sometimes this can be used to get a better price on the vehicle by making the dealership think they are going to make a lot of money on the loan in the long run when in fact you are actually just going to pay it off or refinance it in a few months (some deals state that you can't refinance for like 2 months or something from my understanding).
This process doesn't always work though because it involves more more people dealing with your loan, of which each of them usually cost some small amount of money.
