Alexx

The nuance about DCA that is commonly missed is that lump sum gives a better return on average. The key word is average; averages hide much!

When people struggle to understand that I say DCA can be thought of as a sort of insurance. You pay a price to insure your home to protect against the unlikely event that your house burns down. But on average buying insurance will loose you money. But the cost is comparatively low, and for each individual likely worth it to protect from total loss, even if in aggregate it's clearly a loosing proposition.

DCA is similar, most people will end up with marginally lower returns, however a small percentage of individuals caught close to a rare negative market event will be less impacted by sudden large drops and experience overall much greater returns in the long run than if they had invested as a lump sum due to the nature of volatility decay.

A few thoughts having gone through a similar journey from 0 to several million in revenue.

- The main thing when you are small to focus on is accurate high quality bookkeeping, rather than broader accounting. Almost all of the points you listed above are generally considered bookkeeping concerns (which ledgers to use, debits, credits, etc). So in terms of material to read and learn, bookkeeping is your starting point.

- Most small business accounting software will take care of more than half of the points above automatically - Xero, Quickbooks etc, just pick one and use it - but it is always useful to somewhat understand the underlying principles.

- The only accounting principles you really need to know are having a decent understanding of the balance sheet, P&L and cash flow statement - which are all interlinked. It is wise to be be able to understand each line item on them and to know how changing a figure in one would change figures in the other two and be able to do that even with just pen and paper. This is just useful as a business owner, and is quite a large topic which requires some study and practice.

- Actual statutory accounting I would entirely leave to a 3rd party as it's mostly just for tax and GAAP filing purposes. From day one I just hired a small external accountant and at year end gave them access to our books and let them prepare our filed accounts, I also paid them to file the quarterly tax returns even though our accounting software prepared the statements. That was a good choice as after we'd grown eventually I ended up having the accounts audited by PWC and it meant I could just point them at our accountant and leave them to it. It also means you won't make any silly filing mistakes.

- Set calendar reminders and do your bookkeeping, payroll etc every single month like clockwork, for years I just did it on the 28th of every month, and only later once we were large enough to hire an actual bookkeeper did we start doing it weekly.

- Lastly, once you're under way the things to keep your eye on as a small business is: your cash flow, your working capital requirement (keep it as low as you reasonably can) and your debtor and creditor days (which is part of your working capital requirement). Those are the things most likely to cause you issues.

Also, don't worry too much about it, it's a learning curve - as long as you improve your skills and tools in line with revenue it will be fine.

Yup, WH-1000XM3

The most striking thing about visiting the southern industrial cities for me was how (especially towards the outskirts) they tend to build the exact same residential skyscraper several times next to each other. You just don't really see that in Western cities so much.

Well how things would go if they went to court I have no idea. That's anyones guess really. But that's a different tangent.

All the questions you're asking are, essentially, what would be argued on.

But my point was that none of the involved parties can just indemnify themselves against any consequences. With sums of money like that, any of those parties could well be sued, and end up in court. You can't EULA yourself out of that.

I agree with your analysis there.

But my point was the patent trolling exists because the law is unfavourable. Not because there is a system of mediation in place. If the patent system should be abolished or not doesn't really relate to how inconsistencies in contracts are handled, as far as I can see?

I was just using an example to refute the claim that it's possible to indemnify software creators and users against 'any consequences' via a EULA. A EULA can not indemnify you against tort.

I think your example is convoluted. Free open source software has no contract. For a contract to be legally binding it must have consideration (exchange of goods / services / promises). This is not met.

EULAs and 'Software licences' (like MIT) are't the same thing. A EULA is a legal contract between the copyright holder and the end user, containing consideration, to which the user must agree. An open source licence such as MIT is just a declaration of permissions of use, and has no consideration.

So above it seems to me you are comparing having 'no contract' to 'a contract'.

But the DAO definitively has a contract, not a licence agreement.

Now, the DAO contract basically says 'no one can be held responsible for anything' - which in my opinion is a legal fantasy, contracts can not supersede the law. Regardless of the technological hoops in between, there are real people, with a binding contract - thus there can be tort.

I do accept when ever something new comes along and case law hasn't yet settled any technical loop holes there will always be debate, but I do think this looks pretty clean cut.

A software licence is a legal contract.

There are many things you can not indemnify yourself against - so indemnification against 'any consequences' is not possible.

Apple can not update their EULA for Apple pay, and avoid being held negligent if they messed up and all their customers money was stolen from their accounts. Otherwise every single EULA would make all software companies legally untouchable - which they aren't.

A bug is the difference between the intent and the produced document.

I don't think that is the same - There is no claim that rules of written law always gives the most favourable outcome. But rather that the written law (or contract, in this case) allows for the reality of human error or omission by leaving space for human interpretation, enforcing the underlying intent, rather than strictly enforcing 'bugs' in the contract.

After all, there are almost always small mistakes in complex systems. The system of case law is, essentially, a structured way of turning differing interpretations into a stricter framework over time.

In the UK at least, under case law (Hyde v Wrench, 1840), if you give a counter offer it legally voids the original offer. So if you offer to buy something for £1m and the seller responds that they will sell it to you for £2m, the original £1m offer is legally terminated - so in the UK, legally speaking, this would count as a refusal.

Unfortunately I'm not familiar with how this translates over to US law, but I'd be interested to find out.

I think an analogy more in line with the parent comment would be - if you tried to sell 30% of Apple stock in a single day would the dollar collapse, wiping out all remaining shareholder value.