Again, a minute to look at their financials. There is a thing called the "cashflow statement". They are not "burning through cash". Operating cashflow is positive. Some quarters their capex is larger than operating cashflow, sometimes it's less.
So to suggest they are "drowning in debt" only shows no understanding of simple financial matters, and little regard for securities legislation. Not all opinions are valid.
No, I can't. You can go look at the SEC like everyone else who can be bothered to actually have a clue before making comments. This is public information, there is no need to be so lazy as to not even bother looking.
Issuing debt does not mean a company is "drowning in debt". The term "junk" debt does not mean a company is "drowning in debt". If a company has more cash on balance sheet than debt, it's net debt is negative. When they issued this debt they had negative net debt. Now they have negative net debt. They were not, are not and have never been "drowning in debt". Promoting false information about a public company is potentially illegal.
This is an incredibly stupid analogy. Twitter doesn't give it's users money. Twitter doesn't give it's advertisers money. They run a high gross margin business. Your analogy would be a NEGATIVE gross margin business. Their cost base is too high right now given the revenue, but there is no reason to think they need to grow at the same rate. Many profitable companies at one stage ran at a loss.
You are likely right, it probably isn't clear cut. But if there is a response to his discussion of physics, it should be around physics, not the fact that he is a "doubter". The world would be in an awful place without any "doubters".
This article by Suster is awful. The take down discussed physics, Suster discusses "doubters". The take down did not suggest it wasn't possible to transmit energy through sound waves, simply that it seemed very impractical to be able to charge a phone without pretty drastic side effects.
"Modern Portfolio Theory, Efficient Market Theory, and Capital Asset Pricing Model espoused by the world's leading financial economists" is also a fantastic lie. Who are these world leading financial economists? The worlds best investors believe such theories are pure nonsense. The best minds in finance do not believe in MPT, EMT or CAPM. Pure garbage written by people with physics envy.
Seriously. Virtually all people complaining about hiring are way off base on compensation. If they were to increase (sometimes they literally need to double) comp, they'd see things get a lot easier.
They do some kinda misleading accounting for AWS. They don't count the capital leases as expenses in "operating income" for AWS, it get's counted at the entire company level. So, because they don't have to expense any depreciation/(expense for capital expenditure in some form) at the AWS level, the "operating profit" at AWS is artificially high and would be negative if it was properly showing the economics of that business.
This isn't to suggest amazon as a whole is doing anything wrong, they are following accounting standards, but that is one place where the standards for capital leases are misleading if you don't read the fine print.
"Is this straightforward" can't be figured in 10 minutes for the vast majority of projects. And if you are outsourcing to devs, "has the team done stuff like this" is going to take some time too. 10 minutes simply isn't enough time. Would you have the same thought about 1 minute? 5 minutes? At what point do you say "no, that isn't enough time?". I'll take a few hours as enough time for some reasonably small but not trivial number of projects as a %.
No disrespect meant, but no one with any real software development experience would suggest that a quick formula can be used to estimate the cost/time to develop a given project. Very experienced people spend lots of time up front trying to estimate cost/time and are usually not very close.
I'm pretty sure he was being sarcastic... It is pretty absurd to think you are going to get your head around the requirements for a project and come up with a good estimate in 10 minutes. It suggests naivety or dishonesty. You choose.
No, it just gets them started. There is no mention in the piece about this being the way to invest for the long-term, so no one is getting "set" on anything. It doesn't suggest you can "beat the market" or appeal to anyone's vanity.
I believe you are underestimating the perceived complexity in investing by people who don't understand it at all. I also believe you are underestimating the amount of diversification that a dozen stocks chosen from different industries can provide. It's better to start sub-optimally than not start at all.
I'm really struggling to believe "elite" people from MIT or google are going to be working at a rate where they can make 10-20k per month. It just doesn't really make sense given their other options.
I don't know. Classical mechanics is useful but has proven to be wrong in various places, I don't know how useful string theory is but, at least to my knowledge, it has never been proven wrong. Whether a set of facts adds up to "murder" is debatable and what is and is not legal under Dodd-Frank is also debatable.
This is, categorically, not "terrible advice". There might be better things to do, sure. The author is clearly suggesting that it's just a starting point. He/she is clearly not stating that this is a plan for life, or a plan for a large amount of money, or anything of the sort.
For many people, just getting started is a huge barrier. Index fund? What is that? Mutual fund? What is that? Buying a dozen stocks in some companies you've heard of can at least get you interested. You've got skin in the game. Now you are motivated to learn. The idea that you have to learn a whole load about it first just doesn't make sense. People are busy, it's tough to get the motivation to learn. Skin in the game is a great way to start.
Poker is in fact legal in a lot of the US in some form. Whether it be indian casinos or regular casinos or legal poker only rooms, the majority of the population has access (say, within a 1 hr drive) to a public game of poker which is legal.
No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying that right now, this very second, there are many things which may or may not be legal, it's uncertain. There are circumstances where (usually) companies will get legal advice from a top-tier firm, and that advice will be "we are not certain if this is legal or not", because there are no cases where this has been tested. This is more common than you might realize. It comes up often where new legislation is passed. Dodd-Frank introduced legislation and none of it had been tested in court and many banks didn't know if X was legal or not, because the legislation didn't explicitly say anything about X, but X might be covered under Y which is explicitly said to be legal or not. There are companies doing things right now and they aren't certain if what they are doing is legal.
I'm not even talking about deciding questions of fact. If you take a set of facts as a given, it's still often not clear if something is legal or not. Legislation is often written in broad strokes and it is up to the courts to fill in the details. There are always new cases coming up that don't fit the same fact pattern as existing cases and hence no one is quite sure what the law says on such matter.
Given a set of facts, it isn't always clear if something is legal or not. Hence, case law, and appeals and so on. Was obamacare illegal? It wasn't clear. A judgement has been made at this point, but to suggest it was an "objective" decision wouldn't be accurate. The supreme court judges could have just "decided" it was illegal if that was their opinion. Several did. The very existence of the supreme courts highlights the fact that the law is a subjective thing, there isn't some nice big leather bound book which you can just consult for every single situation and go "yep, ok, that's legal".
Come on, it was mobile, and on demand services. So hot right now. I'm just surprised they didn't get a late stage round at a $1 billion+ valuation by the sophisticated investing folks at Fidelity etc.
I believe you are confused about the law. Laws are not objective. There are many, many cases brought before the courts where the facts are not in dispute.
It can't be a great idea to aim for the "ideal" situation if it's impossible to do. So much wasted time. Surely it's a better idea to aim for something that one can control, and is obtainable, even if not easy.