gbronner

This is an unfortunate outcome:

under the argument offered by the company, they can lower your salary, and you can choose whether or not to take it. If you keep working, you have a new job at a new salary.

Under the employee's theory, they have the option to keep working, and then sue the company for constructive termination. From the employer's perspective, this is a disaster, as legal fees overwhelm any reduction in salary.

So given that salary reduction is off the table, the employer now has to fire all employees that are drastically overpaid, or make everyone sign a release. This is not good for the large number of employees who would prefer to keep working at a lower salary rather than be unemployed -- it produces a worse outcome.

Can SBF's parents house be sold on the open market? I was under the impression that you could only sell on-campus Stanford houses to other Stanford affiliated people?

At least when I went to one, I generally had no idea who had generational wealth (there were a few with famous names), and there weren't obvious ways to show it off; the University had so much money itself that everything was free or nearly so for the students. If you were a billionaire on campus, you still got the same crappy dorm room and wore the same uniform of jeans and t shirts etc. Bragging about how rich your parents are to a bunch of ivy league students isn't going to make you friends.

I did get a sense of who was extremely motivated and smart, and, by and large, those people have been the most successful, not the ones who came from money. The ones who came from money were more likely to take 'interesting' vs lucrative jobs, but most of the advantages of networking are knowing other highly motivated people who are at the top of other fields, but knowing rich people.

Apart from that, classes at top schools go faster and teach you more, and if you want to, you can take more of them for free. So many students get 5-7 years of mid-tier college content in 4 years, which tends to produce a better trajectory for lifetime earnings.

Perfect price discrimination raises the maximum amount of revenue, but tends to rub perlite the wrong way

I had not worked with cobol until recently.

If you have a solid background in C, it is not very hard to learn. It seems to show up at older companies, and is fairly good at moving and reformatting records where you want to address each field on a character by character basis.

Unlike more modern languages, there's no encapsulation, polymorphism, local variables, etc., so you can write tangled code quite easily, though the code I've seen has been very well written. Everything is in capital letters, and the character set is often ebcdic. Most numbers are fixed decimals, which leads to some unusual math results.

As a result, it can be maddeningly verbose -- I've seen 100+ lines of code that would just be a single printf statement in most other languages.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hagvGTyEMUA

An axe and a broadaxe and a chalk line (though people originally just used charcoal).

Making beams is not that hard, especially if you have lots of wood and not a lot to do in the winter.

If you happen to have a bunch of high-quality logs on-site, you can get a portable sawmill to come to you. My estimate was that about $1500 worth of rental and labor yielded $5000 worth of rough-sawn custom timber, and the economics got slightly better if you had the mill there for multiple days.

This allows you to produce post and beam beams for personal use quite cost effectively -- they don't take that much time to saw, and the transportation cost is basically nil because you are going to use them on-site, and you don't pay the monster weight penalty to put them on a truck. You can't kiln dry everything, but you can air dry it, and it tends to be extremely good for construction. The waste can be burned in a wood boiler.

Balloon framing requires: chop tree -> haul log to sawmill -> cut logs extensively -> haul dimensional timber to warehouse -> haul to customer. That's great if you have a train and good roads, but if you are in the middle of the forest,

chop tree -> hew it on-site -> haul to building area is very cost effective.

If you have infinite wood (remember, clearing land requires removing the trees anyway, and people would often burn them just for the potash), it is both cheaper and better to use post and beam.

The author fails to connect the dots:

1) Nails were expensive. Timber framing does not require any nails -- it uses dowels which can be made cheaply with a drawknife.

2) Unlike @simonsarris' wood, most wood available to post and beam constructors was not particularly straight. Post and beam is very tolerant of faults in lumber.

3) With post and beam, you don't need to square all four sides of a beam. You can get away with squaring off one(the external one) plus the spots where any corner braces go. If you are hewing with a broad axe and an adze, this is a huge time saver.

4) In rural post and beam construction, the beams do not all need to be the same size. You can use whatever tree you have lying around, as long as it is big enough. This is an advantage, as you can use a local tree and save the extremely laborious trip to the sawmill

So to summarize, you can have a bunch of low-skill farmers harvesting and preparing trees for beams. Then you need a high-skill carpenter to put the mortises in and assemble the whole thing.

I don't think they the games are rigged. Fifa did a lot better than pro wrestling, and there's a reason for that.

Likewise, 7/8 group winners defeated the #2s in the round of 16.

But the lower ranked teams have excelled in getting nationals from higher ranked associations, and as they play together with less turnover, they might be better teams, if the players themselves aren't as good individually. E.g a large chunk of Morocco could have played for Spain.

Isn't it absolutely amazing that VCs are willing to pay you 4 months worth of income to do absolutely nothing?

I've written skills for them. The issue is that as a skill writer, you have to pay for all the CPU usage, even when almost all the benefits accrue to amazon.

Not nice.

Originally, the tokens were just a mechanism for low friction money transfers. As such, they have utility and thus value, but the value is somewhat arbitrary.

The issue, which is similar to how alcohol is mis regulated, is that the legislatures machines returns either to the states general funds (ny) or to the companies and their lobbyists and politicians (ks)

They should have maximized happiness of the users by limiting the pace at which money could be lost, and the odds/ spreads at which it was lost

I had the same issue with Beepi. Had a friend who worked there -- I got the sense that complying with a bunch of interstate car sales was rather tricky and they often had issues getting through the state DMVs.

The concept is great. But the volatility in the used car market has been historically unprecedented, and there's no easy way for them to hedge this.

As an FYI, I sold a car this spring for 8% over what I paid for it 6 years prior, i.e. it was worth about 85% of orig price adjusted for inflation. Today, edmunds appraises it for 45% of orig price adjusted for inflation.

That is an insane move on a durable asset.

Still rediscovering 19th century finance.

There's an occupied one on my block. They have to move fairly often, but it is cheaper than rent!

Go Sonja! It would be nice if cities could have rent controls or zoning but not both-it would eliminate a lot of conflicts over building new housing

If you have an apartment that hasn't turned over for 20+ years, you can either rerent it at a low text and get sued by your tenant for lead or habitability violations, or you can borrow money and invest it at less than 2% in a renovation. Both ways you lose a fortune.

Or you leave it vacant and still lose money, but you don't have to work as hard doing it

loans are underwritten based on both the intrinsic value of the house and your ability to repay. You can't predict that second one years in advance.

You can get a floating rate loan, however, it if you want your payments to follow the market.

The idea that you can transfer excess wealth intertemporally and safely is something of a lie.

If the design is good, this should be cost effective unless the canal requires maintenance.

The footings are there, there are no pesky weeds to grow and block the canal, the workers probably don't have to worry as much about rattlesnakes etc

The issue is that he's going to be trying to maximize his chance for a win, and not his expected points. So the model likely underestimates his chance of success

Exactly. The costs of discovery are high and assymetric. A decent lawyer can legally cause a defendant to run up a monster bill long before this gets anywhere near a trial. It is legal extortion.

From personal experience, the new automatics are better than manuals.

I found going from a 5 speed to a 6 speed annoying -- it added a lot more shifts. After 26 years of driving a manual, my car got totaled and I pretty much had to get one with an automatic.

The new car has hill descent mode, which is pretty similar to what a manual does, and it has some more sophisticated limited slip traction control modes, which eliminates the only other real advantage of a manual.

The only remaining advantage of a manual now is cost, which matters far more in developing countries than in the USA.

Lots of highly opinionated clickwarriors in this comments section. Free time brought to you, almost certainly, by having relatively few kids.

It would be nice if rad power could get their fees paid for this obviously frivolous law suit, but they will probably settle because the steinsapirs can run up the costs way beyond any reasonable jury verdict

Cars, especially in the first few years, are extremely reliable. So a less reliable new car is still amazing when compared to a 15 year old beater.

We've inadvertently created substantial cost advantages for REITS:

* Assuming that they never sell, they never pay capital gains taxes. Meanwhile, if I move and sell, I get hit now. * Ability to cross-collateralize a bunch of houses lets you tap into institutional capital. No pesky appraisal fees, no payoff for a mortgage broker, etc. Result is that their cost of capital is way below an individual's. * Better management -- ability to hire a bunch of actual skilled handymen to work across multiple properties means that they have specialization/ gains from scale. Typical homeowner is a jack of all trades who has to hire specialized talent which is vastly more expensive. * lots of pricing data with which to price as optimistically as possible. * ability to write off expenses

So basically, tax regime changes have created the rise of the REIT.