kinkora
Joined 15 years ago
Joined 15 years ago
I am not involved in the wordpress community in any shape or form but am fairly privy to what it is along with the open source world yet.. even I am finding it hard with confusing and/or conflating statements on what falls under the non-profit, foundation, commercial entity, etc.
But even if you ignore random stranger me from the internet, wouldn't it flag something in you that your own legal representative got it wrong on an official company post clarifying the structure? Even if I apply the most charitable interpretation, it seems Neil is also equally confused or at least not on the same page as you since he is unable to respond consistently in the other threads?
I am sure you will at least see why that everyone is just perplexed by how obtused the whole structure between the WordPress.org, WordPress The Foundation and Automattic.
Or.. you could just swap it for an M1. :)
Not sure if Tim reads comments on HN but he really should acknowledge the FIRE bit more and the impact his book has brought to that community. Most critics of the book focus too much on the outsourcing endeavours, the remote work shift, the digital nomadism culture, the income muse pursuits, etc but it is the FIRE component where most readers ultimately end up at and i, will vehemently argue, has the most impact to his readers.
IMHO of course. :)
Besides the obvious wife/kids being in Australia = personal ties, ATO also considers the following to be reasonable points to be constituted as a tax resident:
- Australian Bank accounts, even with $0.01 in it.
- Superannuation
- Properties owned, regardless if it is as an investments or owner-occupied (not rented out)
- Any Australian Account e.g. commsec, vanguard australia, telstra/optus mobile, etc
- Postal address/P.O. box
And so forth. ATO is purposefully applying broad strokes to "ties" to Australia so that they can claim their share of taxes accordingly.
I have a mate whom is a miner, working offshore for BHP, and was audited by the ATO since he lives in Indonesia (wife/family) thus claimed he is a non-tax resident. He is originally from WA so got dinged for a house he owns in WA (which he intended to come back to) + his (Telstra) mobile plan that he never used but paid the smallest plan to keep so that he didn't lose his aussie number + his NAB bank account that had $1000 in it so that he has some cash to spend when he visits family. ATO told him that if he wanted to be considered a non-tax resident, he had to liquidate _and_ close everything he has in Australia to be considered a non-tax resident. Since he didn't do so, they considered he has every intention to return to Australia thus place undue burden on medicare & pension system, if applicable, thus had to pay the difference in tax he paid in Indonesia vs. working in Australia.
Maybe we should laude and celebrate that at least loads of effort was put into getting all the G7 finance ministers in one place and actually have a discussion + agree to a next step?
Feels unnecessary negative and very arm chair criticism to just hand wave the whole endeavour and say "oh nothing was done and all they did was talk".
I sometimes think people in the last decade are to quick to find faults for every little thing that falls short of a 100% effort (and even that gets criticism) without even considering that they are not the men-in-the-arena [1] doing the hard work.
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[1] Whenever I think of criticizing something/someone, I always consider Theodore Roosevelt comment on this sort of behaviour where he once said:
"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
It was only halfway through the episode you realise that Hank Scorpio is the stereotypical james bond villian and everyone working for him (including homer) was helping him in his diabolical schemes! But you wouldn't know it if Homer didn't re-sign from his job while Hank was battling Bond. :)
Disclaimer: note bunny ear quotes and like any 2nd hand information, there might be some stretched out truths attached to it.
He used to get a lot of flack for it and i never understood why since you use whatever gets the job done. Too many people doing the "gatekeeper" thing.
For me, I don't always have an issue being productive when I am in the zone but I have a problem of sometimes being unable to "jump-start" into that mode. Its like the engineers/developers version of a writers block and I get the occasional mental block when I need to create something.
So what do I do to overcome this?
I gave $1,000 to a really trusted friend and told him, if I dont show him the thing I want to create by the end of the week, he can give that money to an organisation that I absolutely against with on principle (think brainwashing) and hate with my guts.
Boy, it was sure a motivator to my brain on day 5 or 6. :)
I love wine and it runs fantastically well on both my personal mac and on my fedora workstation. I run a lot of old school engineering apps (think like MIPS simulators) that doesn't run on any other platform so wine makes it easy for me to both be productive at work since I am much more efficient on a command line and allows me to WFH occasionally so that I can spend time with my family.
Now my rant - since upgrading to Catalina last week, I've been completely unable to run wine at any way shape and form due to Apple's mandate that all 32bit programs be barred from running on Catalina. Guess what runs exclusively on 32 bit?
I tried everything including compiling my own wine64 wrapper but it doesn't work at all since the underlying app is still win32. I know there is a crossover product that works but unfortunately that's not on the cards due to budget issues.
Honest question: why is it so hard to get wine32 working on Catalina and why doesn't Catalina have an option to run 32bit apps? Its been out since October 2019 so one will have thought a solution will have surfaced.
Side note - i am Australian, have traveled the world and I find it funny in many countries (particularly Asia), everyone thinks Milo is from their own country. They are suprised when I tell them it's Australian and hilarity ensues when they looked it up online.
Oh and don't feel bad cause Aussies have loads of brands too that we thought were local but are actually from overseas. For the longest time, i thought Maggi noodles was from Asia but its actually Swiss!
So he proves this out by taking an example of what happens if you hit someone on the head and assuming that person sleeps for a long time, how will he feel out of place in the world. Here are the examples I remembered he used (paraphrasing):
1. If you take someone living in the 1700s, knock them on the head, and have them wake up any time till the mid 1800s, to that person, life feels almost the same even though 100s of years have passed. Sure, maybe there are more buildings, more people, more horses, weapons are more or less the same, etc but essentially life is still familiar.
2. Now take someone living in, lets say 1850, knock them out and have them wake up in 1880. Holy shit, suddenly the world is so much brighter and there are "lights" everywhere. What witchcraft is this?? The world will look so different from what he/she remembers them.
3. Now take that same person living in 1880, hit them on the head again and have him/her wake up 35 years later and it is 1915. HOLY DOUBLE CRAP, what is this new fangle machine on wheels on the streets people are on and where have all the horses gone?? Ok I need to go into the toilet and wash my face...OMG WHAT IS THIS FLUSHING THING AND THIS METAL SPROUT CREATES MY OWN CLEAN RIVER??? Walks to the city and wow, look at all these buildings looking like mountains! And not only that, he/she looks up in the sky and sees gigantic "metal birds"...WTF YOU CAN RIDE THEM AND NOW GET FROM LA TO NY in a couple of hours?? The world will look completely magical to them.
Now here is the interesting thing - if you take someone from 1920s, hit them on our head, and put them in 2020.. that economist surmises that life will look pretty much the same to that person, not unlike scenario (1) where you take someone from 1700s and put them in the 1800s. Vehicles might look a bit more modern, buildings might look a bit more taller or "sleek-er", there are way much more people but essentially, the world hasn't really change much. Oh, there is this new computer & internet thing but that's it.
So yep, it is nothing to do with you. We just happen to live in a time where we have yet to experience a "leap" in invention where life has become completely magical to us. My guess will be, the day space tech becomes a common place and attainable, that will be when the world looks magically different to those of us living today and that generation will feel the same leap as the inhabitants living from 1850~1920.