figjamjam's comments

I don't have any anti-semitic feelings towards the jews. The jews here make up ~10K of the 20K upper class and I live in Punta Pacifica which is a jewish area. I consider their influence to be instrumental for preventing many of the policies that have severely tarnished other Latin American countries.

Upvoted; I'd like to defend ethics here from the other respondents. Despite what may seem counterintuitive to making money; there is a positive correlation between company success and ethics. An ethical company is more likely to have ethical staff and ethical staff are less likely to cheat the company. This rot from within is often a companies biggest risk.

How do you design a fast car? You avoid designing a slow one.

Make room for good habits by stopping bad ones.

I wouldn't take outliers as examples unless you are also such an outlier. At which point any advice based on averages is moot.

I'm off the market for the foreseeable future and plan on staying that way. So no.

I'm sure it'll be a different culture but that's part of the fun. My only advice would be to take promises of future buckets of money with a grain of salt.

Yup, it was an average of 20 years older to wealthy VCs who look like my dad. I don't get the appeal, feels like jumping right to the end of life. They did get good jobs out of it so there is that.

The Battery, MaiTai, and other private clubs facilitate such encounters.

Having been to cougar nights at The Rosewood I have a bit of an idea on how it ends and it's not pretty :(

Thanks. A problem occurs when the market gets too thin. I've had all my long term gfs leave me for much older richer men. As a guy I'm confident that I will both get older and richer so I'll be fine. My greater concern is for the opposite effect on women and the gender dynamics in general.

Given your response, I put it to you that perhaps you are assuming too much about me and the tech industry. FYI I understand risk and culture to an obsessive degree.

Edit: I used to build risk analysis products for finance

I was excommunicated from my family at 15 because I refused to join Amway. It's a family destroying dangerous cult. It's not like my family was super awesome before Amway but it did drive us from lower middle class to poor while promising them riches. It made me very wary of any get rich scheme - including tech start ups. Instead I'm getting rich slowly. Which is fine for me but really bad for dating. The whole living frugally and saving is a very hard sell, especially in SF.

The government makes it's money via property and consumption taxes. And there is no military to fund. The economy is also helped by foreign tax avoidance. Interestingly; you'll find that the US is now by far the biggest enabler of foreign tax avoidance in the world. So I'm not sure what moral conclusion you're trying to allude to. At least here the same tax avoidance schemes are available to everyone.

Agreed, I now live in a tax haven. It's every bit as awesome as I imagined it to be :)

I wouldn't mind paying some tax but there is a point where you're paying for your own propaganda / chains.

For those who are unaware; the UK TV tax of roughly $15 a month. I never signed up. I'd get a threatening call from the BBC every 6 months trying to shake me down with threats of fines and jail time. I told them that I didn't have TV or the internet at home. Their response was internet on the phone or at work was sufficient to be liable. I told them to b*gger off and they did. For 6 months.

In general; I'm not a fan of states forcing people to pay for things they don't want.

They're all rounghly the same. Some more expensive than others. I'm carribian based, I can't afford to be Switzerland based.

How about abolishing income tax in general and just have a consumption and land taxes.

I live and run my company in a tax haven. I had to move here in order to be competitive internationally with other low tax jurisdictions. My only other option was to go out of business.

In addition to not having to pay any income taxes I also don't have to report anything to the government or worry about the government, bank, isp, phone company etc spying on me. No need to worry about going to jail over a misinterpretation of the tax code. I don't have to worry about immigration issues. Healthcare is completely private and very affordable.

Politics is a lot more boring when the parties are not fighting over who's in control over massive amounts of spending. Helps keep corruption down.

Leaving SF and moving to a tax haven was the best decision I've ever made in my life.

I'm culturally American, but I'm not a citizen. If the US were to adopt similar policies I'd love to move back. I'd bring money and jobs with me. But unless Texas succeeds I'm unlikely to see a western (anglosphere) country doing this in my lifetime.