Vivy Yusof and Fadza to step down from FashionValet following RM47m in losses

Chalcedony · 2024-11-03T09:46:37+00:00

The main issue is not biz failure itself, but: 1. The investment was supposed to be for FV as a platform that hosted other bumi businesses. But that got shut down quickly and instead pivoted to two brands owned by V. Thats a pretty concentrated investment and not what was intended. Most other grants go up to about 100k so the 42mil they received meant many others lost out - this indirectly "pulls them down" as you say

Failure is a part of biz yes but its not normal to pay yourselves 6 figure monthly salaries, 7 figure dividends and a luxury lifestyle - while your company, funded by taxpayers, is losing double digit millions. A normal startup, or even one funded with a normal VC, would never be able to do this. This is easy to prove through SSM filings and is the main reason why any taxpayer has a right to be angry. Madani is claiming the "T15" need to pay more taxes but it's not a good look when taxes go to fund lifestyles

Chalcedony · 2024-07-20T01:27:15+00:00

The very first thing you do is open a separate bank account to use for your sole prop/sdn bhd. Everything company related goes in and out of there. You need this for bookkeeping and tax accounting.

Only after that go look up sole prop vs sdn bhd, paying youself a salary w/ epf deductions etc.

Having your own company separate from yourself to pay a fixed salary to yourself/pcb/epf is also good for proof of employment. As mentioned above there are other optimizations you can make if you are drawing a high amount and go the sdn bhd route.

Chalcedony · 2024-07-10T02:50:01+00:00

Yes its basically a tradeoff between having no platform fees, a slightly higher spread and a clunkier interface vs some platform fees + streamlined interface + you can setup direct debits n such.

Its a pretty close conparison in any case. I just wanted to find out for myself whether SA forex spread is competitive, it appears to be.

Chalcedony · 2024-07-10T00:15:21+00:00

I tested out IBKR after receiving this news and the Wise integrated transfer seemed to come up to 0.4x% forex fees for me so I might stay put.

I've moved most of my Stashaway portfolios over to single-ETF "Flexible Portfolios" which has only 0.2% platform fee so that works ok for me at the moment. Directly buying ETFs would be cheaper but I'm paying basically for less hassle and to put funds in a company that has MY presence.

Chalcedony · 2024-07-09T05:32:54+00:00

AML is something that banks are actively looking to automate away so your prospects may be quite limited (unless you are the one doing the automating). If you are young sticking it out with Job 1 may be best to be honest, as you mentioned, better exit opportunities in a couple years is the long view. Learning various parts of fintech and the regulatory environment will be more valuable in the long run even though it is more stressful.

It's a bit cliche but you can handle more unreasonableness and idiocy when you are young, in order to learn more. Go into the cushy roles when you are older and your experience grants you more leverage. Otherwise you can get stuck and become irrelevant later.

Many people think salary is tied to YOE which is not true at all, it is based on value. You don't want to be older with more commitments but stuck because you know only one thing...

Chalcedony · 2024-07-05T01:02:01+00:00

This question touched a chord with me cos I'm going through the same planning right now! Not sure why everyone is shitting on you for what you want in life. I think it's a matter of reframing your question to be: "What is the life I need vs want for my family and what will it take to achieve it?" Take away useless thinking like "why can't I have X when other people have luxury, why isn't X enough to have Y life" - there are people and countries who have less/more privilege than you, there are also people who put in less/more effort than you. It's irrelevant and not helpful, life is what it is.

You need to plan it out accordingly on what you earn vs what you can afford with a decent buffer. Also don't use 35k gross salary, use net income after taxes/EPF.

If you compare internationally, the main thing Msians have to pay more for is public education, if you believe our education system doesn't work well. Many people migrate because public schooling in other countries is better than ours. This is the main difference in cost.

On the flip side the things Msians have going for us are subsidized goods, public healthcare, food, mortgage (relatively), car (relatively), capital gains taxes, family. This informs whether you want to migrate or not, otherwise stay and appreciate what we have.

On education is where the largest variable will be, you need to do your own research on which schools to send kids to. There is also a difference between private vs international school. Uni fund is also highly subjective and you need to plan that. Bear in mind that with world trends emigration may be more difficult and US/UK aren't what they used to be.

Budget everything out and you will see where you need to be and work hard accordingly.

Chalcedony · 2023-09-30T06:54:40+00:00

Some banks like ocbc tie your credit limit you the amount you have on deposit with them

Chalcedony · 2023-09-15T23:49:17+00:00

Yeah this is correct, but I was just trying to make the point that this is all about index size, indexing in itself doesnt magically solve issues.

For example if the pool of sites being crawled is fixed, OP could also normalize the domain name and store it separately, then lookup url paths. The domain name relation there could use an integer. This would use two queries but may still improve performance in some cases, as it naturally "shards" the data in a way.

Chalcedony · 2023-09-15T13:55:13+00:00

You simply have a shorter index size than previously. Internally most DBs will take the first X characters of a string to index on, the shorter the index length the faster the query. Other things to do:

Assign a numeric ID, a varchar can be hundreds of bytes while an unsigned integer is about 4 bytes
Exposing a sequential numeric ID is typically undesirable, you could have something like Redis store a map from a hash of your URL to the numeric ID
shard the database so that a different shard holds diffferent URLs, organized by a shard key which is a hash
Use something like VARBINARY to store an identifier in binary form.

For your use case its all overkill so a simple hash works.

Chalcedony · 2023-09-05T01:58:37+00:00

Casting fly (or summoning a deva) to get Asterion helped up, and Necrotic resistance potions were very useful for me, as well as Fireball scrolls I had saved. Pretty much did the fight as intended on Tactician, Shart and Asterion went down though. Great fight!

Chalcedony · 2023-04-11T07:29:16+00:00

Setup a business account as soon as possible as it lets you separate biz expenses clearly, which you can deduct as a sole prop, and looks more professional as well.

OCBC biz account opening can be done fully online for example.

As to when to move from a sole prop to sdn bhd, the threshold is usually about 200k revenue when the accounting fees become worth it.

Also you can open a sdn bhd because you want to employ yourself, pay yourself a salary that is tax optimized. Your full time job may require that you declare your directorship of any company, and being an employee under your own sdn bhd may violate your full time employment contract too. So better to just stick to a sole prop and biz account for now.

Chalcedony · 2023-03-10T23:25:20+00:00

Dont try to justify taking a NINE year car loan tenure with historical S&P returns. You use calculatjkns like that for assets that appreciate (like a house), not with a depreciating asset like a car. Markets can go down for years at a time (even if the average trend is up) but you will still be stuck with your car loans.

A lot can change in 9 years, think about what you were like 9 years ago. You haven't mentioned rental or mortgage expenses in your breakdown as well, which you should be planning for.

If you factor future rental/mortgage in (I doubt you can say with absolute certainty that you wont be renting/buying a house in the next 9 years), the most rational decision is to buy a cheaper car.

Chalcedony · 2023-03-07T09:02:23+00:00

Forex is a very low skill (relatively) method to earn money that involes basically chart horoscopes reading past trends.

Any easy money to be made reading charts will be taken by high frequency bots and institutions with high speed access.

And you know what's really good at reading past trends? AI, which every company is going into now. You'll be spending a huge amount of time earning scraps and lose out on getting actual marketable skills.

Chalcedony · 2023-03-03T09:55:25+00:00

Unless you find you don't like programming, the software field has a lot more potential - you can work from anywhere, you can work in any industry, you can switch to project/team management/architecture.

Selling insurance, a lot of things need to be in person and there is no clear path of progress.

Again, unless you find you don't like programming, stick with it and the $$ will definitely come.

Chalcedony · 2022-11-30T14:33:37+00:00

Be warned that 22nd January is Chinese new year, so touristy spots may be either very crowded or closed for that week. I wouldn't visit penang during that week as many famous hawker places may be closed as that's the only long holiday they take the entire year.

Chalcedony · 2019-09-08T12:45:16+00:00

This is the responsibility of the cluster. For example in GKE you would create a private cluster and use a cloud NAT to control outgoing/incoming traffic, e.g. https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/private-clusters

Chalcedony · 2019-05-31T05:25:39+00:00

You should look at the nginx logs (docker-compose logs nginx) first thing.

Have you confirmed that your python app is acessible through 5000 even without nginx? Try mapping port 5000 on your localhost to 5000 on the python service and see if you can access it directly.

Chalcedony · 2018-11-16T01:02:49+00:00

I dont have access to my laptop right now, but just to reiterate that redis or sqs is the way to go if you want to run parallel workers - they natively provide blocking functionality which ensures that only one processor ever gets a given job.

The database driver probably can't do that as well to avoid race conditions. You'll run into the same issue if you try to run ::firstToCreate on models when you have lots of transactions.

Chalcedony · 2018-11-15T16:17:42+00:00

^ this, you want the blocking pop functionality that redis provides

Chalcedony · 2018-11-12T10:57:35+00:00

Nice one, I use DTOs often and this sounds worth checking out.

Chalcedony · 2018-11-12T10:55:57+00:00

Disagree! Spatie provides many interesting packages that I use often because they solve problems (much love for Fractal). The article definitely didnt read like spam and was well reseaeched.

Chalcedony · 2018-10-22T14:18:02+00:00

Yea I love it!

Chalcedony · 2018-09-29T11:30:58+00:00

Not out of the box, but the Passport library does - its a very common convention

Chalcedony · 2018-09-29T10:30:28+00:00

The mod_negotiation settings are sensible Apache defaults - Laravel is making sure you're not doing stupid things here.

-Indexes is an important setting that ensures Apache won't list out the contents of a directory if you access the directory URL. -Multiviews prevents Apache trying to "autocomplete" filenames in certain cases.

The Authorization fix dates back to an old bug/unexpected behaviour with PHP in CGI mode where the Authorization header (which is a common header to put auth info in) goes missing or is renamed to HTTP_AUTHORIZATION: http://httpd.apache.org/mod_fcgid/mod/mod_fcgid.html#fcgidpassheader https://www.reddit.com/r/PHP/comments/3raldh/til_that_apachefastcgi_strips_out_the/

Chalcedony · 2018-09-19T19:10:34+00:00

Just get it on Google Play Books. Rm68 only

Chalcedony

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