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smuss77

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Software engineer. Chess/soccer/golf player.

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One of the causes of this is the 1031 tax exchanges (allows a person/company to roll over a gain on real estate into a "like-kind" asset, again: real estate). I have a friend that has rolled over a few houses and duplexes into ever more valuable property (he's done well, but he's levered 3-4x). I've often asked him, "when will you cash out?" His answer, "I can't, I don't want to pay the capital gains tax." "Are you worried about a crash?" "No, because even if rents dip 20% I can make the mortgage payments and repairs and wait for the market to recover." I don't know how much this has driven real estate speculation in my area (Denver, CO), but if there is a semi-serious market turn, enough to cross some sort of pain threshold for speculators, there's got to be some forced selling.

It might seem small, but it's a big step in the right direction. Every block/report on a user/tweets could be rolled up and adjust a spam/abuse score for that user. That would allow twitter users to set a threshold for users that show up in their feed (tweets blocked for that user, akin to google's safe search).

One challenge of this is attempts by groups to harm a user's score by blocking/reporting non-hate/spam. This requires a block or report to be weighted by the blocker/reporter's credibility. It's definitely doable, * Warning Shameless plug* a product I've worked on https://www.inversoft.com/products/profanity-filter handles these situations well. Without some type of credibility tracking it's usually incorrect to blindly trust reports/blocks.

Any chance Linode can shorten the time it takes to update the zone records? We use Linode for spinning up instances, but we're having to look elsewhere for DNS due to the delays (15 min or so)

Buffer Layoffs 10 years ago

I really like the transparency and accountability.

Two questions: Why are the two loans necessary? And, how does a loan get counted as savings?

Leo and I are committing $100k each in the form of a loan at the lowest possible interest rate, with repayment only when Buffer reaches a healthy financial position. Savings: $200,000.

I'm thinking separating user auth (and details required) with something like this from user domain data would drastically reduce the likelihood that one hack could compromise everything all at once.

I'm not upset about that. Personally, I think vaccines are a minuscule risk, and worth taking, but that's me.

The "why not," for me, is if someone truly believes a vaccine is harmful, maybe due to religion or because she's a researcher that believes there is some second order risk (founded or not), it's immoral to force them to do so.

If it was my son and he couldn't be vaccinated for a few months I'd simply hold him out of school until the vaccinations could be administered. I feel for the child and his family, it's a horrible thing that happened to them, but talk about solving a simple problem with an activist response. This is how we end up with a ridiculous number of laws and regulations. If we should legislate that every kid in a public school is vaccinated, why would we stop there? Why not legislate every kid that enters a public library be vaccinated? Why not any public place?

My question is when cars can drive themselves why will the non-impoverished population need public mass-transportation. I envision a grid of cars (belonging to competing private companies) that have no drivers and can take a person from A to B, for a set fee -- much lower than when you need a driver. Light-rail, why? We already have the infrastructure for cars. Give it 20 years.