NoBSWebDesign

Very respectfully, you strike me as the kind of person who is easily discouraged.

Let me tell you a story about discouragement (or the absence of). When I was in high school my parents told me the didn't have anything saved for me and I'd have to pay for college. I spent my entire junior and senior years applying for scholarships. There was one really big $20k scholarship in particular though that I thought I was a shoe-in for.

Well, the notification date passed and I hadn't heard anything. So I called and called, trying to find out what was going on. The obvious answer was someone else had won all of the 5 scholarships they awarded. But I wouldn't stop until I knew for sure. Finally, I found out that they had all been given out, but that 3 students had declined (they were school-specific). These 3 were going to go back into the budget for next year. I pleaded my case with one of the administrators, and within 24 hours, one of those awards was mine. $20k just like that. And there were 2 more just sitting there if anyone else would have done as I had.

When a magazine ignores your article, it's up to you to make it impossible to ignore.

Anyway, back to your question... ask your partners to hand over the company. If that doesn't work, buy them out. How much? Well, how long would it take you to start over, and how much is your time worth? (i.e. (time to recreate) * (value of your time) * (their ownership of the company) = buyout at this point, because you don't have any realistic valuation criteria beyond that)

It might be a good idea to start something new. And don't let things happen to you, make them happen.

I always assume that people set their resolutions such that they can read normal-sized (12-14pt) text. If that's too small for their eyes, they would have set their screens to a lower resolution. As someone who likes to see a lot at once, this would probably irritate me.

I can appreciate your enthusiasm for community and the web, but I think your passion may be better served elsewhere.

edit Then again, maybe I'm just not your target user/owner.

So, I started doing something else. I now own two companies and in the 6 months since quitting my engineering job, I've doubled my income. No regrets, just decisions and action.

I wouldn't be here had I not went to school and gotten my degrees. Sure, I could probably be somewhere else equally exciting, but this is what I've done, and I enjoyed all of it greatly. When I realized I wasn't enjoying my path at any point, I figured out why and turned.

My one piece of advice is this: don't turn until you've figured out exactly why you're not happy.

I have two suggestions for it:

1. Make it an embeddable javascript widget instead of an iframe. I think it would be more universally acceptable, and anyone could then simply use CSS to stylize the poll however they please.

2. I don't know if you do this already or not, but maybe track IP addresses of those who vote and geocode them onto a map or something. Comments usually have names to go along with them, it would be nice to have some sort of vague automatic identification to go along with the votes.

Anyway, I would suggest staying in high school and enjoying it. I ended up only going to school for half the day my senior year along with a buddy who was in a similar situation. Then a few days a week, we'd attend a college class in town. The other days, we'd go to the beach, or really anywhere and just relax. Those are days we'll never get back, but it's ok, because I think we spent them properly the first time around :-)

College will still be there in a year.

A better analogy would be like saying that a king has a right to abolish his monarchy.

Also, it is only self-defeating if the original goal was only to amass the wealth.

To continue the analogy to this point, a king abolishing his monarchy would only be self-defeating if his only goal was to be a king. However, if his goal as king was to make life better for his country, then abolishing his monarchy in favor of a democracy would be a very good move and not self-defeating at all.

Likewise, if the person's original goal was to produce and then dispose of the rewards as he wished, then doing so is not self-defeating. It's only self-defeating if his original goal was to simply have wealth.

<edit> The other part of Rand's argument is that the individual has the right to dispose of their wealth however they please, because they produced it and they own it. A democracy would only have a right to dispose of itself provided it was the democracy that created itself in the first place. </edit>

If you put all of this together, you end up with the person of achievement not caring where others started (or what they inherited) in relation to themselves. Fairness only holds value when the person getting shafted cares enough to give it value.

Besides, Rand's argument is that over the long run, it really doesn't matter, as the person who is capable of producing great wealth will do so, with or without an inheritance. The person who is not will quickly squander it all and end up right back where they started. Her point is simply that an inheritance does not change one's ability to produce.

Also, I'm an entrepreneur in Ann Arbor, MI, which could be an option for a closer stop if you want to do a trial one close to home first. We have an extra couch you could crash on.

As she argues, money is a means of trading human production and value. To be equal to your money is to provide production and value to society equal to the value of your money. According to Rand, if one who is barely capable of ever making more than $30k per year were to inherit $5m, it would not end well. And actually lottery statistics support this pretty consistently.