senior_james's comments

It's a real problem. I have been buying and selling used products from Amazon to other marketplaces for the last 8 years. I used to get counterfeits once a month. Now, I get them 3 or 4 times a week.

Even when I bring it to Amazon's attention, I only get my money back half the time. When I tried to file a claim with my credit card company, my buying account was temporarily banned until I paid back the money (for counterfeit goods that I actually got inspected by the manufacturer and had the paperwork to prove it). The big problem is that Amazon will only give you your money back if you can prove it. It can sometimes take 5 months to get it actually inspected (if you are lucky) and by that time, you are well past the time to return it.

The worst part is that it nearly destroyed my business. I got two cease-and-desists in 8 months because I wasn't able to catch all of the counterfeits in time. Myself and my staff are well versed in catching these counterfeits, but it's still a very difficult task.

I had to hire an attorney, and I sent all of the sellers' info to the attorney of the manufacturer. I was lucky it ended here.

To this day, I still can't sign up with an Amazon seller account because 5 years ago, a single customer complained about an item I sold them. I returned their money promptly and even paid for a return shipping label. Amazon support didn't care. My account was closed, and I was out $500, because the buyer never sent it back to me. They no longer will even talk to me about it (all emails go into a black hole as if I never sent them) and I can't even manage another person/companies account without getting it permanently banned.

This is why it's so dangerous to allow a few companies to control so much of the Internet. They can potentially ban you from even making a living and there is really no appeals process. At the time, they had a few automated prompts that claim it's an 'appeals process', but I could tell it was just a bot.

I still don't understand how so many of these sellers can sell counterfeits, which is illegal in the US, and make multiple accounts, with almost no issues.

It has to be some sort of collusion with employees. It really doesn't make any other sense.

"After months of media hype about what would happen if a xenophobic extremist like Wilders won the election, it’s not surprising that any other outcome was so quickly heralded as a victory"

"Xenophobic" implies that you hate someone or something irrationally. I think all of the violence we see in the name of Islam (and the majority of its leaders not denouncing it, especially in places like Israel) is a pretty rational and logical fear.

It's really not 'no fault of his'. There are ways to stop it from auto-starting. I even have an app that kills my torrent application if it doesn't detect my VPN.

I think the title should be reversed. Apple has always been for consumers with more money. It is only now making segmented phones that everyone can buy.

The only reason many people even have an iphone is because the true cost is hidden through the payment plans you make to your service provider.

I buy my phones out right and use a cheap Tmobile plan and iphones are double the price of the majority of Android phones out there.

Like I said, the downside is that most people are lazy and will just fill out the form and send it in because they don't want to deal with it or think about it. You can't get most people to do simple math.

"The 1040EZ is supposed to take 7 hours"

Huh?

I've had my business for a few years, but I did my 1040EZ by hand many times. It took at most, 3 hours. Most people have one job and you basically just copy all of the info you have from your W2 (which is provided by your employer).

"The government has all the information about me. Why do I have to gather it all up and tell them again?"

So does the government also have all of the info about the gas you write off or anything else specific about your life? If so, the surveillance state is getting pretty bad.

If not, then I will have to fill out the longer forms anyway.

If they don't and you just fill out a form and send it in, you are giving them more money than you should. The end result will be that poor and uneducated people will give more money to the government and the people that actually pay attention will be giving less.

I'm only looking out for the best interest of everyone. You seem to be fighting for the right to be lazy because you don't want to have to think about it, which never leads to anything good.

The government would actually love this. Most people are ignorant of tax laws and would just sign a piece of paper to get all of their taxes done. It would be an instant pay raise because most people would never even know if they could write something off. It would also allow them to easily remove the ability to write anything off, without too many people complaining.

What many people don't like to talk about is that yes, places like Sweden have much simpler tax code. But they also removed most ways to actually reduce your tax burden and grow your business (this applies to personal taxes too). You are also required to have a special black box on any credit card transactions, which sends everything straight to the government. This smacks of authoritarianism.

Simplicity might seem better, but it gives us less control over our own taxes.

It's also not really that difficult now. Everyone I know has been doing their own 1040-EZ form since they started to work. It's usually only one or two forms to fill out. If this is too complicated for our society, we truly have problems.

It's funny. I said this same thing in a different thread about the US having lower happiness levels and was down votes.

Y Combinator is based on merit. If there is a diversity problem, it's because there aren't enough people applying and we need to find out why.

Most of the time, people that have more freedom are less happy. I remember stories I heard about people moving from Soviet Russia to the United States back in the early 80s. They were unhappy and stressed out because in the soviet union, they were assigned a job and the government took care of them. Here in the United States, you had to fend for yourself.

Freedom isn't always pleasant and happy, but it's better for the future of humanity. I've been all over the world and don't know anywhere that has as much freedom as the US.

It's pretty unrealistic to expect a job without a manger. I also hate being managed.

My solution? I started my own company 10 years ago and have been running it ever since.

I've been interested in running my own business since I was 20 (I'm 37 now). When I was in my early 20s, I was the developer in a partnership. My partner was the 'ideas' guy and was going to finance anything we needed to launch the site. I figured because my friend and business partner was already running his own company, it would make for a better co-founder.

I worked on our idea for 3 months and finished it. At the end of the 3 months, he told me that he needed to concentrate on things that made him money and he just wasn't interested in pursuing any new ideas. Since I was poor and still living with my parents, I wasn't able to do anything with my code except use it on interviews when looking for a new job. Another company came out with almost the same idea a few years later and made millions.

The main problem was that he had no skin in the game. I had poured my life into our idea and thought about it every day. He put nothing/very little into it and was easily able to move onto something new because he wasn't losing anything. Everyone needs to take the same amount of risk in a business partnership. This is usually either time or money.

A few years later he continued on with his door-to-door computer repair company and wanted to hire me for $10/hour as a technician. At that point, I was making a salary and had a great position as a junior software developer and pretty much laughed in his face.

Our personal relationship never really recovered. We were good friends before this and at this point, and I haven't talked to him for 10+ years.

I'm a developer and have helped bootstrap a couple of SaaS. The problem is that in most partnerships like this, the other person can usually only offer ideas or something very minimal with regards to the success of the business.

I usually end up just doing everything myself. Unless you offer something besides just the idea (money, contacts, industry experience). The partnership will not work.

I've had to quit a few startups over the years myself because my co-founder ended up only offering some ideas. This starts to become a perceived manager->employee relationship (since as the developer, you are doing the majority of the work) and because the idea is their only contribution, it's a problem when it needs to be changed.

This also smacks of someone that loves the romanticized idea of running a startup, but isn't willing to actually put the work into it.

Now, I will only go into business with other people that have at least a couple of years of business experience.

"Still, it was a reminder that as a woman in tech, she should be prepared to have her authority questioned at any moment, even by some guy trying to get a job at her company."

This anecdote wasn't a good example of sexism. We have no idea why the person wasn't hired or treated this way. The person, who just happens to be a man (which always seems to come up in these discussions..when we are trying to a avoid pre-judgement based on race and gender), might be insecure and treat everyone this way.

Where is the real evidence based on empirical data? Has all science gone out the door?

I'm a male and have been treated this way throughout my career. It most likely has nothing to do with sexism and more to do with corporate politics. Women are finally getting a taste of what it's been like for men..for decades.

"One reason her career had gone so well, she thinks, is that she’d made a point of ignoring slights and oafish comments. Awkward silences, too. Over the years, she’s experienced—many times—the sensation of walking up to a group of male colleagues and noticing that they fell quiet, as though they’d been talking about something they didn’t want her to hear."

You can't pound lawsuits at males for even making the most innocuous and innocent comments and then expect them to behave normally in all social settings.

Women want to be part of the group and included, but if a man says something that might offend them, they want them fired or sued.

The 50s are over. Most corporations are so scared of a lawsuit, women are treated like gold. The behavior described here is of a beaten down and abused person that is so afraid of potentially losing their livelihood, they are go completely silent.

"She’s been asked to take notes in meetings. She’s found herself standing in elevators at tech conferences late at night when a guy would decide to get, as she puts it, handsy."

There are stupid people everywhere. This is not specific to the tech industry and this is at a conference....not at your job.

"When she and a male partner started a company, potential investors almost always directed their questions to him—even when the subject clearly fell in Blount’s area of expertise"

Do we know why? I have found that the person that is more assertive will be asked the questions. Were you actually assertive? Did these investors know you had this expertise?

"She couldn’t believe that women still had to worry about such things"

Unless we are all mindless robots, you will always have to worry about these things. It's sad, but true.

"that she still heard talk about how hiring women or people of color entailed “lowering the bar”; that women still, often, felt silenced or attacked when expressing opinions online."

I've worked for many tech companies all over the country and never heard this. Not even once.

Do you know the age of the people harassing you?

What percentage are actually adult males and not 12 year olds? I find it odd that so many people take the insults of a little kid so seriously.

"They love the problem-solving, the camaraderie, the opportunity for swift advancement and high salaries, the fun of working with the technology itself. "

Wow, must be nice. How about working your ass off for little pay for decades and having people either pay you in red bull, mt dew, or Fooseball table time?

It took me 15 years to get to have 'fun' at my job...and you are expecting this at age 22? You are the privileged one.

"found that nearly all of the 200-plus senior women in tech who responded had experienced sexist interactions"

Men may not experience as much sexism, but they experience equally dehumanizing behavior in the work place. Society just expects you to 'take it'.

"Women not only are hired in lower numbers than men are; they also leave tech at more than twice the rate men do."

They leave tech because the tech industry consumes your entire life and many women choose to have kids and a family and can no longer keep up with with the daily grind expected of most people in the IT industry.

You also can't just look at the straight numbers and immediately determine it's due to sexism. Are they not getting hired for other reasons? Education? Experience? Not as many applicants?

"Studies show that women who work in tech are interrupted in meetings more often than men. "

Since this article is just going to say 'studies' and not back it up with any actual concrete proof. I'm going to also talk about 'studies' that I've read that also say that women are the biggest critics of other women in the workplace.

"Stephanie Lampkin, who was a full-stack developer (meaning she had mastered both front-end and back-end systems) by age 15 and majored in engineering at Stanford, has been told when applying for a job that she’s “not technical enough” "

I was writing back-end systems in C and assembly by the time I was 15. I was still turned-down for jobs at 19 because I didn't have enough experience, on paper.

"But she has also, for instance, been told by a white woman at a conference that her name ought to be Ebony because of the color of her skin."

Why does this even matter to the discussion? One person saying one hand-picked inappropriate comment isn't an entire industry being racist or sexist.

"In 2014, Google released data on the number of women and minorities it employed. "

I find it odd that when the word 'minority' is used, it doesn't include anyone on an H1B Visa. Why is that?

It would probably be better to get a job at this point in your life.

I grew up in Detroit.

I travel to LA frequently for work and the traffic is not really that bad. It's congested, but at least it moves.

Adding more barriers for the poor will not help the situation.

..who do you know that would kill someone for $1000 cash?

I don't respect a site like this. Instead of getting scientists to actually willingly upload their research for free, you are just infringing on the rights of the intellectual property owners.

Open source has already started doing this to some degree. At my last few companies, we used open source projects as a base for many of our software.

Instead of having to hire multiple senior level developers, all they needed to do was hire one project manager (me) and a bunch of junior developers (which are much cheaper). This is because all of the engineering-level software was given out for free and the company only needs to make changes, which takes much less experienced employees.

I find it odd that when it comes to frat guys at a university and sexual assault, we immediately demonize the frat guys even if the evidence doesn't add up (The Duke Lacross team is a good example of this).

However, when it comes to immigrants, they can do no wrong. The commonality between the two stories is the narrative the left likes to portray: Frat boys are rapists and immigrants can never be criminals.