Do you want your bank vault to be locked with a Masterlock padlock, or a 1-ton safe door with glass inserts and an armed guard? That's the difference between unsalted MD5 and salted SHA.
Supposedly if you are over that limit you are rich enough to pay for a commercial software. Apparently government does not want to take business completely from the likes of Intuit.
1. What deductions? I fill out a ton of them every year and they're never more than my standard deduction. Maybe things change as I get older, but in the meantime it seems like a safe default. "Do you want to try and get your taxes lower than $X by filling in a bunch of info? (Y/N)"
2. What am I going to deprecate, my Civic?
3. Despite being in a healthy tax bracket I don't know what this is.
4. See #3
5. Snoozefest
6. Diverse activity?
7. Yeah I think most of your objections apply to the minority of people who actually hire a CPA to do their taxes.
The bottom line is, for the vast majority of people (even people with interesting W2/1099 incomes like me) you could do your taxes on a napkin if you enjoyed a bit of paperwork/math pain. Again: the IRS already has basically all of this info. What gives?
(3) Cost basis matters whenever you sell an asset, whether it's a house or a stock or whatever. You can get sucked into partnership cost basis calculations simply by buying certain mutual funds that are structured that way.
(6) Diverse activity means income in more than one jurisdiction. People who travel a lot for work can end up filing with dozens of states. A real hoot.
Also, as an entrepreneur you've officially graduated beyond the resume/interview/application process. The only people who fully appreciate those entrepreneurial skills are other business owners and executives; if you come in and ask me for a job coding awesome stuff, I'm mostly going to care about your code skill because someone else is handling the promotion, design, and management.
Of course you could work in a small business where having lots of diverse skills is valued, but you'll probably be vastly underpaid and overworked.
Sounds like you want to be appreciated though. Offer to work for free! If you don't need the money, help someone you identify with. Give back, pay it forward, whatever. You'll have a great time, learn a lot, and make new friends for whatever happens next.
That they let you accrue thousands or even millions in charges and then lock your account unexpectedly with poor customer service is the rub. There's no warning, just a surprise logistical nightmare that they benefit enormously from.
These circumstances include the fact that this business had had an account with PayPal for six years and had run hundreds of thousands of pounds through it.
If you never trust businesses that appear to be legitimate, no matter how long they maintain this appearance, eventually all your legitimate (and highly profitable) business customers will leave. That risk should be weighed against the fraud risk.
Let's do a back-of-an-envelope calculation and say Paypal makes 1% of a transaction (after accounting for CC processing, etc.) - if the company in question had processed say £200,000 through Paypal then Paypal would have made £2,000 from it.
That's a fraction of the £11,000+ that they would have been on the hook for if it turns out the event had been a fake and they'd allowed the account holder to withdraw the money.
You're making the assumption that fraudsters are stupid, they're not. Fraudsters regularly try to build (or perhaps more commonly steal) accounts with reputation before using them for fraud, you can weight account history in your risk evaluation and they may well have done so in this case, but you can't let that overly influence your risk judgement as otherwise fraudsters will exploit that.
(Unless you're arguing that Paypal should be more lenient and just accept the high fraud rate as a cost of business (presumably passing it on their customers in the form of higher commissions) - in which case I agree that's a feasible route they could take, but I assume Paypal have done the analysis and figured the numbers just don't work).
I could believe that a fraudster might spend a few months trying to appear legitimate, but six years?
Your point about PayPal's risk vs. their profit on this account is valid, but look at it from the other side. Let's take a more plausible scenario than one in which the account was opened for fraudulent purposes from the beginning. Let's imagine our business owner has had every intention of running a legitimate business and has been doing so, but as a result of personal misfortune is now in a state of desperation. Would it really make sense to torpedo a running business in order to get a final payout of maybe £50,000, and put oneself very much on the wrong side of the law in the process? For £500,000, I could see this, but I don't think many people, even those desperate or venal enough to ignore the ethical difficulties, would do it for an amount comparable to a year's revenue from a business they've worked for years to build.
Or conversely, if there really are fraudsters with the patience to run a legitimate business for six years in order to run a large scam, surely they would also be shooting for a payout well into six figures if not seven.
I think PayPal has made the considered decision that it's not worth their time to think about individual cases. That's their right, though they certainly are inviting competition.
Absolutely. Have you seen some of the "off the cuff" town hall style meetings he's had? The one before the release of OSX was telling, he repeatedly said that if he were making the decisions, he'd do X, but he's not. It was very eye opening that sometimes it isn't all Steve's fault (of course it isn't.)
Likewise, it's amazing to see that it isn't all Bill's fault. Here he is advocating passionately for a huge change in usability and getting nowhere. Lots of these problems still haven't been solved as of Windows XP (Vista/7 have fixed a lot of update quirks by virtue of being a native app.)
Generally it's pretty easy to get root on a system. Then you're generally 100% owned. The only away this will survive is on the good graces of malicious hackers everywhere.
Why would anyone buy $12000 in bitcoins, at this stage? That's just dumb no matter which way you slice it and asking for handouts via bitcoin after having your bitcoins hacked is the perfect scam.
Yeah man, I'm working on it. That site isn't even mine. Someone on the IRC created it and just posted all that info. I wasn't really asking for handouts.
I had a few coins left and started selling them at a high rate to try and counter my losses.
