dimva

For models, getting free drinks / drugs is table stakes.

As is often the case, the problem is millions of millionaires instead of a handful of billionaires.

There are 18.6 million millionaires in the US. If each of them bought 10 n95 masks just in case, or for themselves + family + friends, that's 186 million masks. They could easily pay $20 / mask (that's only $200 per millionaire), which would significantly push up the cost to hospitals of acquiring masks.

Hospitals might not even be able to afford the masks they need. They are having budget shortfalls due to the ban on elective surgery. Cuomo was complaining about paying $7/mask, and NY state is going to have budget shortfalls as well due to the recession.

Maybe instead of continuing to build housing in uninhabitable places and having the taxpayers foot the bill when disaster strikes, we could build more housing in places which are habitable, like the west coast, the New York metro area, etc.

I guess that would require actual leadership from politicians, but it's the only solution that will work in the long term. I'm waiting...

Force them out... by giving them really good offers for their homes that they willingly accept?

You have a strange definition of "force".

What do you use instead? I'd love to be able to ditch amazon for most purchases.

I don't know about anyone else, but Amazon.com's recommendations for me are laughably bad. "You bought a 48-pack of AA batteries? Your recommendations for the next few weeks will only be batteries, since you are clearly a battery collector!"

I don't remember ever looking at their recommendations and finding them useful. Why would anyone want to use the same algorithms?

Would you be ok living in an apartment (condo)? If so, you are not entitled, and your desires are very reasonable.

But if you feel like you should be able to afford a detached single-family house in your city, you are not only entitled, your desires are impossible to fulfill - there's just not enough land for everyone who feels entitled to a single-family home to have one.

If people moving to your area and investing lots of their own money in the local economy is a bad thing, your local policies, politicians, and probably politics are very useless.

People investing money into the local economy should always be a good thing, and if the locals aren't capturing enough of that to mitigate the increase in costs, that's on them for voting in incompetent or evil politicians. Blaming the people coming in with money isn't going to solve anything.

We will still have ALL of the nation's leading engineers in one city / area, but no one else will be able to afford to live there. Even non-leading engineers will be forced to move out, and will no longer be able to learn from the leading engineers, lowering national productivity.

I don't know why you assume the leading engineers will move. As a "leading engineer", I don't see why I would take a $200-300k/year paycut and a less interesting job just to leave San Francisco, even though it pains me to see what the local politicians here are doing to their people.

I would gladly buy a new phone if they stopped taking away features. I currently use an iPhone SE, and I treat my phone as an extension of my brain - I use it 5 hours / day. For me, the pros/cons of an upgrade to an iPhone XS are:

Pros: better camera, faster processor, water resistant

Cons: no headphone jack, too large for my hands

It's not obvious that upgrading would make my life better - it's more likely to make things worse, actually. I'm not paying $1000 for that.

There's a 10% nominal return, but a 7% real return. Harvard beats this by 3% annually, which is huge!

Then I guess you can stay in an airbnb or a hotel. Not every product has to be for everyone.

If your landlord gets a property tax cut, would they pass on the savings to you? No.

They are leasing you your place at market rate. The market rate is affected by supply / demand of rental units, not landlord costs. The only way they could pass the extra tax onto you is if you are not market rate and there is a law that allows them to do this, or if increasing property taxes on apartment buildings decreases the supply of rental units - an unlikely scenario.

Any of the big tech companies, for starters. But, I don't work for any of those companies. You can PM me for details, we're hiring.

Keep in mind this is in SF, and I don't know any senior software engineers here making less than $300k/year, more than everyone in the government except the President!

Everyone is motivated by remuneration to some degree - the only question is who is remunerating our government officials: the public, or some other party with its own interests?

In the US, we've chosen the private sector to remunerate our officials after they've left public service, and our lovely government is the result.

Keep in mind that, as a public official earning top wages (~$150k/year) in DC, you can just afford to buy the median home in the area. But if you want a nice house (single-family) in a good neighborhood? Forget it! Whereas if you took your skills to the private sector, finding a place to raise your family would not be a major concern.

This is a problem across all of government. As a mediocre senior software engineer with no reports, I was paid more last year than the goddamn President of the United States (and no, it's not because I got lucky with stock). This is completely stupid and unacceptable.

Of course our choices are going to be Hillary vs Trump if we pay the top leader in the country less than a mediocre software engineer. Of course Hillary will give secret speeches to Wall St firms - how else is she going to pay her bills? Of course the government is going to be incompetent and corrupt - we can't hire good people at the salaries we're paying unless they use their influence to obtain side gigs in the private sector (often after their service, but that means they won't do anything to annoy their future bosses).

Why does Sundar Pichai make 500x more than the President? Do we, as a society, value running Google well 500x more than running our government well?

Government salaries need to be raised significantly (2-500x) across the board, or the government will continue being the mess it is now.

And what if you are hospitalized by another hospital? Seems like that's what happened to this guy. If he didn't have that tattoo they wouldn't have even bothered to figure out if he had a valid DNR document before resuscitating him.

As an engineer living in SF, I agree that it doesn't really make sense for the average software developer to live here.

But, if you are top 10-20% (not necessarily a superstar), it's definitely the place to be. Whether you want to work at startup or a big company, the pay vastly exceeds the extra cost of living.

At a startup, you actually have the chance to make lots of money in an acquisition or IPO. In other places, you really don't. I used to live in NYC. There's tumblr, mongodb, and zocdoc, all in the $1 billion range, which only makes the founders and a few early employees rich. Foursquare was really hot for awhile, but ended up disappointing. Rapgenius imploded. Betaworks companies either stagnated or outright failed. I know tons of great people who got jobs at the hottest companies in NYC at the time and ended up with nothing. In SF/bay area, there's uber, facebook, google, palantir, airbnb, twitter, linkedin, pinterest, lyft, stripe, square, etc, etc, etc. All of these recently started companies are worth billions, and have created or will create lots of millionaires. More importantly, I don't remember any big disappointments in bay area companies, besides maybe dropbox. Almost every hot company from 5 years ago is now worth a lot more money. It's fairly easy to select which startup to work for if you want to optimize for equity payout. Today, I would probably pick flexport.

At a big company, you get to work on the most interesting projects. The top executives for all the biggest tech companies are here, so all the best projects are going to be here as well. And the pay is very good - I don't know any senior engineers making less than $300,000 a year, including people who are just a few years out of grad school.

In both cases, you get to work on the most interesting technology. For example, there are no self-driving car companies in other areas (besides Pittsburgh). The most successful blockchain businesses (coinbase, ripple) are here. The companies that have to deal with the biggest scale are here (google, facebook).

Personally, I more than doubled my already-high pay in NYC by moving to SF. Not moving here earlier was a big career mistake - I would have worked on far more interesting projects with much more competent coworkers and I would have been able to retire by now.

Everyone I know who moved from NYC to SF before me is now a multi-millionaire, because they got a job at stripe, palantir, pinterest, or some small companies that managed to get acquired for a large amount of money.

You are right, it does say TB everywhere, and does not mention GB anywhere. But, if this is correct and all prices are per TB, that would be a ~1000x price cut compared to your current pricing, which is per GB.

In finance, companies will pay you your salary to not work if they decide to enforce a non-compete. It's written into the contract. I have friends who get to take year-long paid vacations when they switch jobs just because they work in HFT.

I'm surprised that this isn't law. I guess financial companies care about their employees more and/or their employees are more astute about contracts.

Companies shouldn't be allowed to prevent their ex-employees from earning a living. If it's that important for them to prevent the transfer of their proprietary information, they should be happy to pay for it.

This would be the case in an efficient market, where the risk-adjusted economic profit of renting out homes is close to 0. This is not the case because San Francisco artificially restricts supply of housing. This causes rents to be determined solely by (small) supply and (large) demand. Increasing taxes would not decrease supply of housing or increase demand for it, so it would just serve to decrease the excess economic profits landlords are making.

Another shameless plug: I made a service like this for myself and a few friends: https://zenve.st

It actually trades on your behalf, but only to keep your portfolio balanced and to allocate any cash you deposit into the account. It works on top of Vanguard, and you can customize it to invest in any Vanguard ETFs with whatever allocation you want.

Currently, you can only sign up for the waitlist, as I don't know if people would be interested in something like this.

Every company has no loyalty to its employees, they just pretend they do and thus expect loyalty from their employees. At least Netflix is honest about the lack of loyalty being a two-way street.

I think it is more enjoyable to work with people who are competent and performing well, so keeping poor performers around hurts the morale of other employees. Plus, the caliber of people Netflix hires can easily find another job where they'll be a better fit, so showing them "loyalty" by keeping them around probably hurts them as well.

I'm not so sure. Nowadays they can focus their energies on profitable activities like ransomware or adware. If you're going to break the law to cause grief anyway, why not make some money while you're at it?

It means you don't have to worry about any competition from South Korean companies in the field of cybersecurity.

Hmmmm.... looks like there was some insider trading.

https://www.google.com/finance?chdnp=0&chdd=1&chds=1&chdv=1&...

They are trying to take over the entire publishing industry with Instant Articles.

They are trying to create a mobile UI for every small business with Messenger Bots.

They have added ways to send money via Facebook messenger. This is important in places like Israel, where people use Facebook as Craigslist. It's also useful as a payment method for the messenger bots.

They are releasing innovative ads products such as automatic audience targeting (based on the conversion rate of various audiences, which is calculated by just including a facebook tracking pixel on your site, they will automatically target your ads towards the highest-ROI audiences).

The maximum yearly gain is $3000 * your marginal income tax rate. So, if your marginal tax rate is 33%, it would be $1000/year. This is because you can write off a maximum of $3000 of losses on your taxes every year.

The information you may find about tax-loss harvesting gains on the internet is usually incorrect if it comes from people trying to sell you something. For example, Betterment / Wealthfront claim that it adds an extra 1% of returns (only if you have a $100,000 portfolio and your marginal tax rate is 33%, which are the assumptions they use to get that number). On the other hand, human investment advisors are generating FUD about tax-loss harvesting[1][2], because they want to discourage people from requesting that service.

[1] http://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/24/weighing-the-pros-and-cons-of...

[2] https://www.kitces.com/blog/is-capital-loss-harvesting-overv...

Yes, I agree. The pairs Zenvest uses for tax-loss harvesting all track different indexes (another reason why VTI is paired with VOO instead of SCHB - even though the indexes VTI and SCHB track are nominally different, they consist of the same stocks):

VTI (Total US Stock market) / VOO (S&P 500)

VEA (FTSE Developed All Cap ex US, 3735 stocks) / SCHF (FTSE Developed ex-US, 1471 stocks)

VWO (FTSE Emerging Markets All Cap China) / SCHE (FTSE Emerging Index)

Thanks for the kind words!

It basically follows the Bogleheads approach: https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Getting_started

You get roughly your age as the percentage invested in bonds, with some adjustments up or down for risk tolerance. For taxable accounts, the bonds will be VTEB (tax-free munis). For nontaxable accounts, the bonds will be VCIT/VWOB (corporate bonds / emerging market bonds). The stock ETFs are VTI (US), VEA (foreign developed), and VWO (emerging markets). Nontaxable accounts also get VNQ (real estate), based on how much real estate you already own.

For example, my taxable account is: 60% VTI, 18% VEA, 12% VWO, 10% VTEB

Tax-loss harvesting is a bit tricky. In order to tax-loss harvest, you have to sell one ETF and buy another correlated ETF. This is usually done by purchasing another company's ETFs (ex: Schwab). Unfortunately, while Vanguard charges no fees for its own ETFs, it does charge fees for others' ETFs.

The algorithm takes this into account though, so it only initiates a harvest if the tax refund you'd get is significantly larger than the cost of buying the non-vanguard ETF. In order to make this cheaper, VTI is paired with VOO - even though the index tracked is different, they are highly correlated with each other (>99%).