digz

Adjust those for cost of living and the US would be even more competitive.

Also possible that this could be related to his sale of Ars Technica. Massachusetts imposes its own capital gains tax, and he may have been liable for a significant portion of that, especially given that it sounds like it was MA domiciled. Or maybe not, but there's lots of ways that he could be legitimately liable for MA taxes while living in a different state.

Sounds to me like his beef could be with the Chicago CPA. CPAs are not created equal, and even the big 4 accounting firms make serious mistakes when things get complicated - has happened to me. Usually, when that happens, the CPA is responsible for fixing the problem (paying late fees, filings, etc.), but you're still liable for the underlying tax burden that they may have missed.

In any case, would be nice to know what the resolution was!

Now google will index searches of its own searches.

For what it's worth, I have a pilot's license and also fly a quadcopter.

A big part of the issue is the separation of powers and who exactly has the right to regulate model aircraft. Congress explicitly and deliberately precluded the FAA from regulating model aircraft. A separate question is whether or not, given their proliferation, the new breed of model aircraft should be regulated. Given existing laws, that's a job for congress to decide.

As an aside: People wanting to do dumb things, will do dumb things. You don't need to create new sweeping regulation to punish people from doing dumb things either. Most cities and states have laws preventing people from deliberately invading others' privacy, or acting recklessly. Many of the concerns levied against drones are either already addressed or are impossible to regulate against. I'm often reminded of a news reporter on 9/11 that was asking the aviation expert on air with her how the planes were able to get into restricted airspace.

Your points are all very valid of course. While utility theory has largely been superseded by prospect theory, like Newtonian physics, it can still be useful for back-of-the-envelop thought.

Furthermore I'll be a devil's advocate however and just make the point that one could rationally defend tobacco use as utility deriving. Just because a (in my view) sane person would see all the horrible effects of tobacco as trumping any positive attributes, someone else may disagree. Depending on one's own discount rate, tobacco use at any point in time in fact be net positive in enriching their life. Even if you argue that some of the positives are created by advertising cigarettes as cool (Joe Camel, etc.), so what? Someone spending $50,000 on a fancy watch is also making the same sort of determination. If the user derives the benefit, regardless of whether it's endogenous or exogenous to the product itself, that isn't obviously inherently bad.

Now, of course, smoking has it's own set of problems because it negatively affects others... but again, it's not so clear that one can't attribute rational decision making to even a smoker.

All that to say, your point is well taken.

Reaching consumers is hard, even if you have the superior product. Facilitating such a transaction should make one proud.

The 'psychological exploits' are a marginal component, but again, why is it inherently bad for someone to feel good about using product x over product y, even if they're exactly the same?

Saying that free markets are best is not the same as saying free markets are perfect.

Why is helping people find products and services that will enrich their lives an inherently bad thing?

Of course. However in the marketplace of ideas, it's important that as a society we don't embrace the trappings of a command&control economy. I am merely reacting to the OPs (albeit extremely benign in this case) view that an individual or group of individuals can decide what is OK for others.

Having studied with the originators of the efficient market hypothesis (Fama), I regret to inform you that what you describe is not a feature of EMH but is rather frequently attributed to it in an attempt to discredit it. There is nothing that rationally follows EMH that leads to Pareto-optimal outcomes in society.

EMH means that well informed markets make sound decisions on the pricing of assets. This means that based on the current information available, markets are excellent at understanding the probability-weighted value of an asset. It doesn't mean that the outcome ends up being right, it means that it's fairly priced based on the information at hand. Nothing guaranteeing Pareto-optimal outcomes from that.

Furthermore, an investor giving 1.2M to a company is not an efficient market under any circumstance.

While I have some sympathy for your point of view (after all the guy is free to say what he wants) I still think the argument is facile. A few thoughts:

- As others have pointed out, talent is not fungible. Just because you can program Yo, doesn't mean to can solve other issues. - If everyone is so convinced that Yo is such a dumb idea, do you really want the founder who's "capable" of doing something so stupid working on serious issues?

- What is worthwhile? If you view Yo as art (in the modern sense) it's pretty effective! Seems to have made the entire tech community collectively think. That's a hard thing to do. We don't mock the choices made by Banksy (who on the surface is a vandal)... Perhaps Yo will be a godsend to folks with severe disabilities, allowing them to simply communicate with others nearby easily and effectively. Or perhaps it's just fun. Why is that bad?

- Or maybe the whole thing fails and that's OK. Far more 'worthwhile' companies have failed.

Also, I'd venture a guess that if you sum up the total cost that has gone into Facebook's Poke feature (development, maintenance, deciding whether or not to turn it off), it would dramatically eclipse the 1.2M that everyone is so up in arms about. No one is losing their marbles over that stuff.

Look, I agree it's a ridiculous app.. but if people use it and derive value from it, good! Utility created!

>> And, by the way, who appointed Christoph McCann arbiter of what it good and valuable in this world?

This is such an important point, and why free markets work best. If people derive value out of Yo, then terrific. If they don't, it goes away. Don't need a moral crusader to decide what is worthy.

I went to a conference* in 1994 in which Kip Thorne gave a talk on time travel. He made an offhand comment about evidence that backwards time-travel does not occur that was along similar lines. 2 points: 1) Not inconsistent for 'real' physicists to think about these issues. 2) I don't think this work is as novel in concept as the author thinks.

* Was for Carl Sagan's 60th birthday... was intended for serious audience of big time scientists but was intended to entertain.

This is an important point. Further to that, Uber should be a company with very clearly understood ROI. They put X number of dollars into a new city and get Y number of users and make Z number of dollars over a few years. Because they've done this in dozens of cities, they've got these numbers down. From Uber's perspective, any money they raise should look as much like debt as possible. Why? Debt means existing shareholders won't be diluted. If a growth company can safely issue debt, it always will. Probably not realistic for Uber to issue 1.2B in straight debt today (interest on that would amount to roughly 20-40% of their current revenue), so they would seek as much of the economics of the raise to resemble debt as possible. The more it resembles debt, the less we learn from the headline numbers about implied valuation.

I haven't read the paper, just the article. It's possible some of these are directly addressed, but I would want to know more before any credibility is given to the conclusions.

Some alternative explanations:

- The 'lowest paid CEOs', per their definition, are typically the ones who have the most skin in the game. When you have many CEOs out there with only $1 compensation, and just stock (and not stock grants as the author mention), they will inevitably be on the bottom. Think Zuckerberg, Google, Apple w/ Jobs, etc. One would expect this highly underpaid group to outperform.

- The highest paid CEOs are often times the ones dealing with the most troubled companies. If you were a shareholder of Kodak in 2000 and saw that digital cameras were coming, would you want to pay for the best CEO possible to ensure you could harvest the most out of the company? Kodak would still underperform the market, but maybe they would have underperformed the market more with inferior management.

- This is a little technical, but with an experienced manager pulling in big dollars, it's more likely that this is a well established company and manager that are well understood by the market. This means that the risk premium demanded by investors would be smaller resulting in a higher stock price. This means that the stock has less to move. And on the other hand, more unproven companies with cheaper managers will have higher risk premia demanded by investors, resulting in lower stock price and therefore have more room to go up over time as some of the unknowns are answered.

Ideally we'd need include other variables such as market size and expected growth (P/E Ratio), CEO share ownership, ex-ante company distress, etc. into the analysis. Based on the described methodology, it doesn't sound like that was done.. but again, didn't read the paper itself.

Not totally liquid. That's a lot of bitcoints being sold. The buyer could not go ahead and sell all of those coins immediately after getting them without severely impacting the price. The buyer would probably need a couple of weeks to unload those BTC without moving prices much. That creates risk as there's a lot of volatility in BTC. As a result, the range of possibilities on what you would eventually sell those BTC for is wide. If you could (and maybe you can... I'm not super aware of all the BTC instruments these days) buy/sell BTC derivatives (options/futures) you would be able to transfer that risk to someone else, but it would be at a cost. This cost would roughly translate to how much you would be willing to pay to be able to sell a bitcoin at a future date at today's market price.

As a result, a buyer would be willing to pay market price - transaction costs - risk transfer cost.

Pricing the risk is of course tough as future volatility is especially tough to predict for BTC. But this is the fundamental rubric for how one would view the transaction.

Actually is does mean that it's worth what it sells for. The nature of seized goods increases the risk premium demanded from a buyer resulting in a lower price. Sources of risk: 1) Goods aren't as they seem. Drug dealers may not have treated the goods as well as average owner. 2) Risk of violence. I wouldn't want to buy some drug dealer's prized yacht... wouldn't sleep well. 3) Illiquid good. If it's hard to resale the good, it's going to introduce risk. For this auction that's the problem... selling tens of millions of dollars of bit coins will have a market impact.

Aside from this, there's also a transaction cost component.. it takes time and some money to transact (think opportunity cost of the 200k deposit, lawyer fees, etc.) and this would be reflected. The sale price would reflect both of these.

Now, if the good was completely fungible, risk-free and totally liquid (think cash), there would be no expected discount because of risk.. just transaction cost.

While average education levels are of course important, they aren't as important as density of high achievers and the flexibility of the top group to remain challenged. It's top achievers that are able to become the best in their fields that create new industries and revolutionize old ones... not a population of passing achievers.

Not to say that we shouldn't care about average competency, but these kinds of studies that explicitly or implicitly portend imminent doom for the US miss the mark.

Or you can just not subscribe to AT&T. Austin's a great example of a place where customers have choice. Cable provider(s?)/AT&T/DSL/Google Fiber/LTE/LTE/LTE/LTE.

I dunno... Looking through the table of contents there's pretty good coverage of a lot of very specific research that goes well beyond basic capm/ff/var/bs/garch.

The goal of this book is clearly not going to be to teach you finance but rather to provide you with enough of the basics and beyond so you basically have all the tools needed to move forward.

Was very pleasantly surprised to see some of the stuff in the table of contents (ie. Pastor and Stambaugh's liquidity measure).

Will order this as I think it'll be a great reference.

The 'tens of billions' is also without context of how much money HFT save investors by basically keeping spreads at zero, and nearly always guaranteeing liquidity. Providing liquidity to the market isn't a public service... participants need to be compensated.

I'm shocked that it didn't fall because of the Oculus deal, but look at twitter vs. fb in the last 48 hours... heavily covariant.

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=1&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

Of course. The signal here is that investors want to cash out. Even if investors aren't selling shares as part of the offering (haven't read the details yet, so not sure one way or another) and Box is simply issuing new shares and locking up investors for some period of time, this is a path to liquidity for investors.

Generally, selling shares is a signal that insiders view the company as overvalued.. otherwise they would hold. If they needed cash, they would issue debt instruments.

The market is hot on tech, so get out while the getting is good.

Agreed. Though I've only played the 3D version twice, my win rate is 50% and i only see it increasing. The 2D version is a little more challenging.. I think I win roughly 25% of the time as luck plays a bigger role (at least with my strategy).

I've had a Phantom for a while, and more recently the Phantom 2. Have never had any issues whatsoever. I don't discount that these happen, but as with most things, there's a pretty big sample bias in complaints.

Also of note, winds aloft are often not the same as winds on the ground. Given top speed on these guys is around ~20mph, any wind above that and you've got a fly-away. Again, definitely doesn't account for all fly-aways, but I would venture that it does explain some.

I get muuuuuch more than 6-8 minutes with my phantom 2 and gimbal. I don't like to push it, so my longest flights are usually ~15 minutes, but I always have at least ~30% battery remaining. In addition to providing power to the gimbal, the phantom 2 is also giving some juice to the gopro, and to a fpv transmitter.

I haven't used ICQ since 2000 or so, but as soon as I read your comment, I immediately remembered my old number!

For context, I rarely remember my anniversary.

EDIT: I just logged in. Out of the hundreds of contacts I had, there's one sad guy still online.

Totally agree. All you need to say is I'm not being paid market.

You're cherry picking a period which actually helps to make sliverstorm's point: The last few years have been categorized by significant increases in taxes, and regulatory burden, which cause uncertainty in the business environment and more pain for the middle class.

Unfortunately, historically, all the evidence supports the 'rising tide lifts all boats' argument. While growth 'at the bottom' has slowed compared to the top, it's still growing. There are plenty of theories for why this is the case, but the data is is there.