marrington

"Otherwise their wealth will dwindle over time and others will have a shot"

Wealth is not a zero sum game, it's the opposite. Wealth creates more wealth for the society around us.

I really like memeorandum.com for this. Like Techmeme, its sister site, it groups news stories by topic. You can read all sides. It gives you an excellent overview of how easy it is to put bias into what appears to be objective coverage.

They can easily dig under a fence. Fences can't (at reasonable expense) keep coyotes or wolves out of any large area.

This discrepancy, and people's unwillingness to intellectually engage with it, is what allows the extremely wealthy to be just fine with society demonizing high income people. Once you have stored wealth, you don't care any more because there is no wealth tax (other than property tax and inflation). Taxing high income people into oblivion is what allows the very rich to keep their club small.

As a U.S. citizen, if I make the choice not to interact with the U.S. economy and move somewhere outside the U.S., I still have to give the government their cut. Only way out is to relinquish U.S. citizenship. No other developed country requires this.

Yeah we do that about once a week and it helps.It's not really pizza but whatever it is is pretty good.

At the beginning of this year I was easily 100 lbs overweight. Decided it was all coming off this year. Started counting every calorie with myfitnesspal, later started looking at macros as well.

Weight started coming off but it really accelerated when I got serious about exercising. Swimming a mile 3x per week. Weight training 3x per week, and I've been on the treadmill a lot in the evenings, probably another 15 miles per week fast walking. Down 60 lbs as of now and consistently losing around 3-4 pounds per week.

It's hard to keep calories at less than 1800 per day with all the exercise, but it's just a hard psychological limit I've set for myself and the myfitnesspal app (and a kitchen scale) make it doable.

It seems to me that the exercise has made me lose about 1-2 pounds per week more than just diet, but who knows.

I miss pizza.

The National Association of Realtors argues that removing the mortgage interest deduction would reduce home values by 15%. There are likely other less biased studies as well but that was the first that I found during a quick search. More at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_mortgage_interest_deducti...

"integrity or other nonsense"

agree

What's most interesting about this to me is the ranking of the startups by user demand for the virtual stock.

Certainly yes, but it usually takes longer than 3 minutes to figure stuff out. What I really need is an hour at least with a startup 1 on 1 to know if I'm really interested. But like I said above, that doesn't scale with so many companies and investors. So you have to trust your instincts, but there's often a herd mentality as investors talk to each other and try to use those signals to help them.

Yes it's really hard as an investor to 1) stay alert through hours and dozens of startups, and 2) actually understand enough of what they do from the presentations to know if you want to know more. Not perfect by any means, but I certainly can't think of a better way for them to do it without taking massive amounts of time from the founders.

I'm a former lawyer and currently a VC. I really can't imagine a situation where I'd ask a company to sign an NDA in connection with a potential investment. If the information isn't confidential I'd just tell them. If it was it probably isn't mine to share (something we know from a portfolio company, for example).

So it's weird. It's also a red flag that the investor either doesn't really know what its doing, or that they're willing to share confidential information that they shouldn't, or that they are litigious and like to corner people via a NDA and apply leverage.

I'd walk away unless they are your only funding option. And if they are your only funding option you probably have issues with the startup or product that need to be addressed anyway.

This looks good to me, as long as it's enforceable (as in the state sees it as a valid, binding contract). It's still debt until it converts as far as I can tell, which is the only way I know of to give the company money today for securities that don't exist yet.

I think companies will be quite willing to open up. I share the concern on the time compression though. My gut said 20 minutes per company would still be interesting with the right companies/people. But this is an experiment, let's see how it goes.