Rakkar’s Blog

If Homeopathic remedies are more powerful the more dilute they are, then why does tap water not cure every known disease?

1. People that insist on using old technology because of a lack of comfort with new technology (phone/mail instead of email, fed-ex rather than scan).

Real example: Phone call with a sales woman, who wanted detailed info over the phone I had already presented in email. I said I’d present it again over email, and she stopped communicating.

2. People that do not respond to an important business related email or phone message. To me, this is just as offensive as being asked a question in person and walking past, purposefully ignoring that person. This happens to me pretty frequently among all industries, although it is again more common among people who are not comfortable with computers.

Real example: Sent an email to a salesman for a moving company, after the order was placed, asking to confirm that the workers were insured. No response.

3. People that do not respond within a reasonable amount of time to new information presented in a conversation.

Real example: Loan broker, who was told twice over email and once on the phone the house was not a short sale. An hour later, wrote an email i got CCed on asking if the house was a short sale.

4. Dishonesty in sales. For example, quoting one price, only to add on mandatory handling fees. Or requiring someone to enter all their information online, only to present terms that would kill the sale after the user has already spent a lot of time in the process. This is also true of hidden charges, where the price is X, but if you do Y, which every reasonable person would do, the price is X + Z.

Real example: Price aggregation website listing lowest priced vendors. However, once you place the order, in fine print you see an additional 3% handling fee on all orders. 3% fee does not show up on aggregation website.

5. People that try to establish customer relationships at too early a stage, esp. when they get offended when you do not reciprocate. “Look, I just wanted a freaking price. Stop calling me. If your price is the best after I’m doing getting quotes, I’ll call you.”

Real example: Movers again. One salesman in particular called me about 6 times after I only reached out to him once. The 6th call was a message (I stopped answering his number) where he was really aggravated I wasn’t talking to him. Ironically, his price was the highest among all bids I got.

California taxes have driven us out of the state.

I run a software company. It earns in the top 1% of income earners in the US. It’s all myself; no employees, only a home office. Despite using only minimal state services, I’m expected to pay over $3,000 a month in California income taxes. I now plan to flee to Washington, with a tax rate of .015% instead of 10.3%.

My wife runs a successful and popular acupuncture clinic in Orange County. She considers it her baby, and has a great time helping people while making a higher than average income. In order to leave with me, she is going to close the business, even though it means having to buy out her lease.

Even at today’s income, it is financially better for us to leave. We spend about $7,000 a month that we would not spend if we moved to a cheaper state with no income tax. $3,000 of that is tax, $1,000 is due to a high cost of living, and $3,000 of that is rent. Why rent? In most other areas we can buy a house in cash, dropping our monthly payment to only property tax and maintenance. We can’t afford anything near my wife’s office in Orange County, and what would have otherwise bought a house elsewhere would only pay the down payment here. As $7,000 a month is higher than my wife’s income, so we’re actually better off elsewhere.

The future holds even more reasons to leave. My business is growing fast and it’s not unreasonable to think I could sell it sometime in the future. My target price is $10 million, and were I to be in CA at that time the tax would be $1,300,000.

Even were my income to stay the same, and we simply lost my wife’s income, we’re still better off leaving. This is because the Federal tax is progressive, yet does not also account for progressively higher costs of living. Take two equivalent single family houses, one for a million dollars in Newport Beach, and one for 100K in Michigan. A family that spent all their income buying either house would have the same standard of living as it derives from house quality. But the family that bought in Newport Beach would be paying 32.77% tax, while the family in Michigan would be paying 21.72% tax – 33.72% less. While this is an artificial example, and our own tax reduction won’t be quite so drastic, it does illustrate the point that you are better off living in a cheaper area and earning less if you can get the same standard of living.

I spent 3 hours at the DMV yesterday waiting in line to renew my office. Although the line of 100 people went around the building, 1/4 of the booths were closed. At the same time, California raised taxes this year, and changed the estimated tax payments to 30%, 30%, 20%, 20%. Leaving is the only sensible thing to do.

From the command prompt:
NET USER loginname /DELETE

I’m not why Microsoft made the boneheaded decision to not show all accounts under the user accounts page, with no other way to access it other than the command line. Wasted 15 minutes of my time to find that command.

Two of these scenarios are tax cuts. One is income redistribution. See if you can tell which is which.

1. The government reduces tax rates on a prior tax year. Based on these new rates, the government calculates how much less tax each taxpayer would have paid. The government send a rebate check for that amount.
2. The government reduces tax rates for the current or a future tax year. With all taxes taken into account, taxpayers overall now pay less tax.
3. The government hands out checks to most taxpayers. You don’t get a check if you paid too much taxes, and you don’t get it if you are a business. The check amounts are only loosely based on the tax you paid, and in some cases you get more than you paid in taxes.

The first scenario retroactively reduces taxes. It may not be cost-effective to calculate, but that is how you reduce taxes for a prior year, should you want to. The second reduces taxes for an upcoming year. The third taxes money from one group (taxpayers, which includes the rich and business) and distributes it unequally to another group (poor and middle class citizens). Taking money from one group and giving it to another group, even with some overlap, is by definition income redistribution.

In the future when I hear “Bush tax cuts” I will correct the speaker and point out this wasn’t a tax cut, it was income redistribution.

Torpedo targeting in Silent Hunter 4: Wolves of the Pacific is very hard. The manual doesn’t correctly explain it and the online videos I saw are incorrect and incomplete.

1. Bring up your periscope and look at the target
2. Press L to lock the target. This way the periscope keeps looking at the target.
3. Press N to bring up the target recognition manual.
4. (In hard you can do this, but not realistic) Press Less than and Greater than to look at your target with the free camera. This makes identifying it easier.
5. Find the target in the target recognition manual, and press the checkmark in the upper right.
6. In the mid-left and upper right will be slider tabs. Press both of them to expand new windows.
7. In the upper right slider tab, press the button for target distance estimation. This is as described in the manual.
8. Drag down the mirrored target until the waterline of the mirrored version reaches the top of the mast of the real version.
9. Wait 5 seconds or more. The longer the better. The manual incorrectly tells you to press the clock button twice. During this time, I adjust the torpedo settings in the left slider window. Always set the torpedo to fast (I’m not sure why this is not the default). If you set the depth according to the target recognition manual you will shoot under the target. I’m not sure why. I’d just go by the manual, 20 feet for battleships, 12 for cruisers and large merchants, 10 for light cruisers and small merchants, and 6 for destroyers.
10. Do step 8 again.
11. Switch to the speed estimation tab (as per the manual)
12. Press the clock button. You will get a speed and bearing estimate. The manual is wrong about this, instead telling you to press the clock button twice. The online videos do not do this. Instead, they just guess at the speed. Anyway, the speed will be set automatically when you press the clock button using this method.
13. Press the red button to enter the speed into the TDC
14. I haven’t found a better way to do this, but you need the angle between the front of their ship and your submarine. As the online videos do, go to the navigation map and use the triangle. Click in front of their ship, online the bearing. Click on their ship. Then click on your submarine.
15. Quickly enter this angle back at the periscope screen. Then press the red position finder button. If it was already on, turn it off then on again. This locks the angle at your periscope, and updates the position according to the speed and angle entered previously. If you turn it on too early, as they do in the youtube videos, the the angle from you to the target will be when you first pressed it, using the default target speed of 0. So it will fire at an angle behind the target. When the position keeper is on, the point to shoot at will move as your sub moves, and will also move using the speed and angle values you entered in step 13 and 14.
16. If you are in hard rather than realistic difficulty, you should go to the attack map and check your work. The white X should be on top of your target. THe line from the X should match the bearing of your target. The most probable error is that the range is wrong.
17. Mathematically, the distance to the target doesn’t matter if they are directly in-line with your sub (0 degrees ahead for forward tubes, 180 for rear). So if you fire closer to these angles, then distance estimation errors hurt you less. But generally, you will need to correct the range to be quite accurate if you want any chance of hitting.
18. Adjust the spread, and fire a torpedo. You can also adjust the spread to compensate for errors – if the range estimate is too long, then your shot will go behind the target. You need to adjust the spread for each torpedo. For whatever reason, the speed and depth is saved per-torpedo but the spread is not.

I bought a Neatworks scanner to make my office paperless. After using it for 9 months, I’m pretty disappointed in it, mostly due to poor software.

1. You can scan multiple pages in order, but they are processed out of order, meaning you have to manually reorder them. After complaining about this to the good customer service, they released a patch that only fixed it if you use quick scan center, and then the pages are still in reverse order. Using the regular scan center it’s still out of order.
2. The stored document quality is very bad, almost unreadable, with white backgrounds turning grey, and the overall quality degraded.
3. The OCR accuracy is bad. I don’t know the exact percentage of the time it fails, but it’s definitely the majority of the time.
4. The UI is bad overall, making the software very tedious to use. For example, if I scan 100 receipts all in the same tax category, I have to manually select the tax category for each one through a huge drop down list. You can’t even type to narrow down the category unless you type exactly the category as it is spelled, with punctuation and multiple spaces.
5. Scans are often off-center because there are no guideposts to ensure your documents scan in straight. This is true of both receipts and regular 8.5 x 11 documents.
6. You can export to pdf only, and then only immediately after scanning a document. Once you archive it you can no longer do so, nor can you modify the document, such as fixing the page order.

I ran into a guy recently who was well qualified for a contract I was offering and even already had code to do it. The only thing preventing me from hiring him was that his code was under the GPL. When asked if he would do a dual license, he flatly refused at any price.

I appreciate what the GPL stands for, which is that source code should be available. But as a practical matter the best code generally comes from people who are paid, and businesses able to pay for code tend to want to maximize profits on what they have done. And one possible tool to maximize profit is to not have the software open-source.

RakNet is open-source because it helps me make money. More users, fewer support costs, contributions from users, and market appeal count among the benefits of being open-source. I’m not worried about theft because the businesses capable of paying license fees have so much to lose were they to violate copyright that it doesn’t make financial sense for them to not pay.

On the other hand, if I were to make a commercial game, open source means I’d be unable to discourage piracy. People would release for free games based on my source which would compete with my own sales. While it’s relatively easy to enforce copyright against major companies, that’s not true against the entire internet.

In the game industry you’re basically forbidden from using any GPL code. From time to time this means I haven’t used code I otherwise would. It’s never been the case, nor do I expect it to be, that because I used a GPL component I was forced to release my source where I wouldn’t have otherwise. It just means I won’t use the GPL code to begin with.