937 karma · joined September 23, 2012
Certainly it’s not for everyone or even every engineer but I guess my point was that if you’ve already done most of these things yourself it’s not a huge leap to DIY your own HVAC install compared to the financial incentive, especially if your house has more than one system.
You can't legally break into the business, but DIY on your own house is entirely possible: the equipment is available for 1/4 to 1/3 of the "installed" price and some of the more climate-friendly refrigerants do not require an EPA license to purchase.
Yes, the work involves electrical, light plumbing and welding, a specialized tool or two, attention to detail, and definitely physical labor, but for a lot of engineers that's just fun stuff to do on a weekend - really fun stuff when you save over $10K per installed system (at the 3-5 ton unit capacity level.)
Not just in this particular discussion, but overall a shift away from talking about individual, inspired and sometimes entrepreneurial creativity toward how to pass a FAANG-style interview or have better standups and corporate culture.
I think ideally escrow would nicely encapsulate risk for a seller and ramp it down over time. When applied to cash it could create tax issues if a payment is recognized as income in one tax year and only becomes available in a subsequent year. For shares received by exchange for existing shares structured as a merger, this is likely solvable. If a selling party holds only stock options though and is issued shares on closing, again, my initial guess would be that would be deemed a "taxable event." Another aspect of escrow is that it eventually requires sign-off from the buyer to release it to you, effectively giving them control of your proceeds that they might attempt to exercise outside of the original intent of the escrow.
So, as for handling your windfall during the indemnification period, yes, purely the simplest approach would be to hold the proceeds in the most risk-free way until your indemnification period ends.
This is however, again complicated at least by tax implications if you need some of the money to pay taxes due on cash received in the closing.
Furthermore, there is a strong argument for using some cash to hedge against a decline in the value of shares received (if any), simplistically illustrated by purchasing put options on the acquiring company's stock, since you're forced to hold it throughout some inevitable lockup period. Put options on a reasonably closely-correlated financial instrument might also be viable if the acquiring company isn't so large as to have an active options market, since public stock prices seem to move broadly, barring any company-specific failures.
To put some entirely fictional numbers to the hedging argument, imagine you're obligated to sit on $10M worth of public stock for two years and you could spend $250K cash today to gain a significant level of protection against a drop in the share price. After your two-year wait, you either have $10M or more in stock if the price held or rose ($250K is gone but you spent it on insurance of a sort) or perhaps the stock dropped 80% and you now have $2M in stock but another $4M made back from the put options you bought, so while $6M pre-tax isn't $10M, it's a lot more than $2M.
You're selling something, so in an acquisition you will have to represent and warranty what you actually own and you're selling. This sounds simple on its face, but technology isn't nearly so well-defined and legally sorted as, for example real estate.
In software, even if you are 100% certain you can transfer all of the code and there are no potential content copyright issues or latent prior agreements by yourself or other sellers, current/former employees who think they own something, etc, you still have at a minimum, a hard-to-quantify "Sword of Damocles" in the form of thousands of potential patent claims hanging over you, trolls or not, it doesn't matter in a sale. As in business itself, the bigger the money involved, the more visible you become to potential claims.
A publicly-traded buyer is likely to be less flexible on terms, but in any case you as a seller have also to consider that in a sale, you're most likely going to be forced to shift liability from your corporation to yourself personally. If you're prudent, as this seller was, you realize this creates a time period increased personal risk, despite your increased assets. Keeping this period as short as possible and limiting its scope and magnitude is your objective.
A few limitations I can vouch for making it past public company scrutinity are 1. any dispute costing less than $X are not your responsibility. 2. a maximum liability limitation equal to the purchase price in cash / shares (in case share prices drops) 3. a time limit of two years or less. 4. escrow of a portion of the purchase consideration (shares and/or cash) as a warranty cap for the duration of the warranty, perhaps with release/reduction over time. The tax treatment of this arrangement would have to be considered carefully.
Finally, it's worth noting that insurance for an acquisition deal may be available from big name insurers, likely for some low single-digit percentage of the deal value. However, their legal department will undoubtedly be more sophisticated in this area than your counsel, so at its worst insurance gives you little more than a contract with an insurance company over which to sue, likely at great cost.
Overall, as lawyers always say, "it depends." Unless the deal and/or your resources are immense, likely it is a problem with no risk-free solution. If you're young and have nothing to lose, risk is an easier choice. For everyone else, all you can do is optimize based on present knowledge.
Ironically, my only complaint might be that Taleb seems to get a little more self-congratulating by anecdotally revealing the lifestyle he is able to enjoy as you progress through his series of books. Perhaps this is more of a style device to broaden the books' appeal.
Whatever the case, the perspective you can gain from his writing is worth the time.
As for a $10K repair bill, it's certainly possible, especially if you recently bought the car and/or get hit with some internal engine/trans problems.
These air-cooled 911's seem to be worth keeping on the road at least. There are many examples of other still high-end cars that just depreciate relentlessly until the last owner gets hit with a repair bill that's more than the car is worth and it goes to the junkyard.
Yes, many completely ordinary cars today can match or out-accelerate a lot of the older cars mentioned in the article but that is only a single measure. If you're a "car person," you owe it to yourself to spend some time driving a 911 so that you can truly map that image to a physical experience.
That said for the 911, each of the cars that enthusiasts tend to love has its own character. You can give them all very similar performance specs on paper and driving something American, Italian, or German will still be a completely different experience; overall, the fastest car will not necessarily even feel the fastest; the slowest car that you can consistently drive the hardest might prove to be the most fun to drive.
Yeah phased arrays have probably been the rule for decades at that price-no-object level.
Even at the consumer level, there have been phased-array marine -sonars- (e.g. Interphase brand product line) for at least ten years for "only" 4-digit prices. Spatial resolution is of course tied to the number of elements but they do present more information that your typical 1-d "fish finder."
Can anyone describe the solution to this?
Example idea: Once selected for "lock," the antenna scans in small circles and migrates its central point toward the point on the scanned circle that provides the strongest return, allowing for variation due to noise sources.
1. Easy (to acquire) debt drives demand
2. Education is still "Made in America" thus it cannot hide from the real devaluation of the dollar
Everything about it is against your nature: fixed schedule, dictated product and process, micro management and arbitrary accountability compared to the creative freedom of your life when delivering academic performance on a timescale of weeks or months was your only responsibility. Worse still, it's not an "X year work program," it's designed to be endless.
Not that an entrepreneurial career is for everyone, but if you can be dumb enough to try and smart enough to make it work at a sustainable scale, it sure beats a guaranteed slow corporate death.
"Max... You will find that thing everywhere... As soon as you discard scientific rigor, you're no longer a mathematician, you're a numerologist."
So yes, coverage for anything below a small crisis is non-existent under these new plans, but it's about the same under the old plans. I'd rather bank the 50% monthly savings and know that my family can stay insured no matter what comes along.
As for the artist couple, they've got to be better off than having no insurance at all under the previous situation.
It may not be much different for single people or those under 30, but if you have a family, keeping them in an acceptable PPO was running $1200-$1500/month (total corporate or individual) - and for individual, that's if you don't get rejected for something as ridiculous as someone having been treated for allergies.
Plugging in some numbers on healthcare.gov, I'm seeing comparable PPO's for $700/month and if you play with the numbers you can see that the tax credit drops the plan cost as income drops below 4x the poverty level, so for example a family making $50K/yr would only pay $200/mo for the same plan.
This seems like a step in the right direction in so many ways.
I think most negative publicity is coming from polarized sources who would reject anything, and their paid media outlets.
There is probably no line between self and business for a guy like PK. At that time you could build a significant program or even a game singlehandedly. Most likely he obsessively made his better ARC program for its own reward (you could use it for free) and he was surprised both by the commercial success and the subsequent legal attack. Very personal indeed, and if he wasn't already a completely tortured soul, that would be more than enough to take away any shred of sense he had made of the world. Give enough cash and free time to someone who has been cracked like that and he quite easily can end up dead from an existential crisis with no practical boundaries.
Considering this was some 25 years ago now, if he thought about intellectual property issues at all, the mindset at that time was very reasonable in that your source code and executable was considered copyrightable like a book - it didn't matter if it provided the same functionality as someone else's program as long as you wrote the code. Just consider the fate of the original spreadsheet for confirmation of this.
To summarize, before you take any stand against the tragedy that is the life of PK, consider that there is probably a huge concentration of people very much like the early Phil Katz right here on HN. The man simply needed help, and he didn't get it.