tomkarlo

The protests over gentrification that turned into brick-throwing were in Oakland. I can't imagine they'd prefer more people living there because of a short commute.

You're right. My bad.

Really? Citation needed here; at least in the US, that's the norm for white-collar jobs.

If you're going to go into "debt", vacation debt is the right kind. It doesn't accrue interest, it doesn't impact your credit rating, and they can't subtract it from your paycheck in most states (like CA) if you leave the job - they have to chase you to pay it back, and many companies don't bother.

It's just a part of the comp negotiation, the same as a starting bonus. It's not a rollover from the old job and it's irrelevant if you got paid out for it there.

Lots of companies have mechanisms to let employees go into "vacation debt" of 1-2 weeks when needed. Asking to take vacation may cost them exactly zero, since they're going to pay you those days eventually anyway.

Giving employees less vacation is just the same as underpaying them, except it's even worse for morale and turnover. If a business can't afford to pay it's employees a reasonable market rate, it either needs to hire more junior folks or start charging more.

An additional week off is maybe 3% higher pay. If you're a little guy, it seems like you should look at offering 3-4 weeks of vacation in your base package, given the dual benefits of attracting candidates and having happier, healthier employees.

Few large companies are offering more than 2-3 weeks vacation to new hires any more. I don't think any are offering 4-6, much less "6-12".

For longer tenured employees, getting an extra week off after 3 or 5 years is equivalent to a 1-2% raise each year. If a business can't support that, something's wrong.

Swapping the OS on a desktop computer has never been particularly accessible to most people, either. What percentage of desktops ever get a different OS from what they came with? I'd guess less than 3% if you don't include upgrades from one version of Windows to another.

The real cost of a physical keyboard (at least a built-in one) isn't the cost of the hardware. It's also the cost of having to have a different hardware unit for each country you want to sell in (and often not just the labels, but the physical layout as well.) That's a massive increase in the inventory risk you're taking, because your inventory has suddenly become less flexible.

It's hard enough to make a profit on popular phones, as evidenced by the woes of HTC, Blackberry and others... making a phone for a niche group, especially if you can't charge materially more (and I mean $1,000 or more, unlocked) just doesn't make any sense. Particularly when you consider that carrier and OEM marketing (large national campaigns, in-store placement, etc) doesn't scale down to small volume products.

Making niche products doesn't work well for consumer electronics in general, unless you can sell that product at a much higher margin. Having a keyboard on a phone just doesn't seem to result in being able to sell it for twice as much.

Another issue with keyboards is they don't internationalize well. So rather than having 1 hardware design worldwide, you now either need a TON of SKUs - one for each country (and you can't move inventory from one market to another) or you need to further limit your target market to just a few regions.

Maybe... but nobody really thinks of it that way, any more than they bother to worry about what fair market value of the assets (the other part of the purchase price) is for an early-stage tech company. They just care about the overall price, and they leave splitting that into FMV and goodwill as an exercise for the accountants after the deal is done.

Are you referring to "Modern Meaning"? Maybe I'm not understanding what you're saying. It seems like you're implying that "goodwill" is a material part of the calculation of a purchase price prior to the deal being signed.

> Goodwill is something you add to the value of a company to sweeten the pot during acquisitions but it should never be the primary value proposition.

What? Goodwill is an accounting name for the excess paid to acquire a company beyond the fair market value of its assets. It's a "stub", basically used so that the books balance in terms of debits and credits (i.e. you paid X cash for the company, and that value splits between FMV of its assets and the rest is "goodwill".) Nobody ever says "I'm going to add some goodwill to sweeten the pot" when buying a company, nor would anyone attempt to use it for determining purchase price.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodwill_(accounting)

Also, the parent post refers to "flipping" but that generally means quickly reselling something, not killing it after three years.

More likely he just was hard to schedule for a photo shoot, so they used a file photo and this was better than a headshot of him speaking at some conference. Unless there were new robots to show from Google, it wouldn't add much to take a new photo.

I'd rather have an replacement faceplate that has a micro-USB connector that you can swing out to charge things. (They already have ones with a USB socket, which is great too.)

http://www.lowes.com/pd_369050-63374-WP2UWR_4294689722__?pro...

Yeah, but it's not very long at all in Retail Time.

It's taken us 20 years from Amazon coming online to Internet sales eclipsing retail holiday sales (which I believe is projected for this year.)

Floors and their traction level are in fact already regulated as part of ADA for many buildings. And there's tons of building codes regarding your residential bathroom for similar safety issues - minimum clearances, height of fixtures, anti-scalding valves, types of glass.

As others have pointed out, the entire building code is basically a balance between cost and safety. Anything having to do with egress tends to get extra attention, as well. If there was a zero-cost way to prevent slips and falls, it might well end up in the building code, yes.

With an aging population, there's going to be a lot more people who have trouble with doorknobs (due to common arthritis and other impairments) than those who have kids young enough to be stumped by doorknobs but not levers (say 3-5 years old) or dogs who turn lever handles. (So maybe 10% of homes.) It's not a "few" people who have trouble with doorknobs - it's probably close to 20-30% of your overall population and maybe 30-40% of households.

E.g. it's about 1 in 5 Americans who are impacted by arthritis (of some form), plus you have people with repetitive strain injury and other non-arthritic conditions who will also benefit from lever handles. Compare that to the relatively small fraction of people in wheelchairs and this seems like a no-brainer compared to ramps.

That two situations are superficially similar doesn't mean they don't have different real-world implications, and shouldn't be regulated in a different manner. Driving a go-kart is broadly similar to driving a semi-truck, but you only need a license for one.

Google's (and other Internet services providers) terms of service restricting your usage aren't anti-competitive in nature. The restrictions they're placing on your usage of the content don't prevent you from getting that same content from another provider (especially when we're talking about public domain or fair use text.)

Carriers are regulated much more heavily than other businesses, because the nature of their business creates a disproportionate number of opportunities for anti-competitive practices and other shenanigans. Also, many of them have a monopoly or duopoly position in their marketplace, and as such are scrutinized more closely for anti-competitive practices.

Example: As a monopoly cable provider I can be the dominant internet provider in your city. So to extract more money from users, I create a new subsidiary owned by the same (unregulated) parent company as the cable division that charges for online video. The parent company then tells the cable company to throttle the bandwidth for all competitors so that everyone is forced to move to that new company's video service, regardless of whether it's actually a better product. This is anti-competitive and harmful to the public - rather than offering a better service, I'm using my ownership of one business to unfairly hamper free competition in another market.

Apples and oranges: you're conflating copyright/fair use with terms of service.

Google's not claiming you don't have a right to reuse the text. They're placing restrictions on how you use their service to access that information. It's no more a copyright claim than your local library telling you that you have to come during their operating hours.

I'm American and I never understood the back-pocket thing until I moved to the West Coast and started carrying my (bulky, remote) car key in addition to just house keys. Once you have those and a phone in your front pockets, something has to go in your back pocket.

>I don't know whether this is common in other industries, but at top American law firms, salary raises and bonuses are lockstep. That means everyone gets paid based strictly on seniority. At many firms, this even carries through the partnership ranks.

This is really only true for the associates any more, and it's a source of a lot of frustration. Mostly, I hear complaints about how either senior associates or junior partners are "carrying" the senior partners in some cases because their billing rate and total hours billed is grossly disproportionate to their income. Also, while salary might be locked based on which year an associate is in, there are all kinds of games played with which year associates get slotted into, especially if they move laterally between firms.

I don't agree that lock-step systems increase cooperation; if anything, they turn competition into a winner-takes-all game because they're generally associated with a strong "up-or-out" culture where you either get promoted or culled over time. That's not likely to encourage cooperation between peers.

Don't hold your breath on that one. Does any major manufacturer have a flagship slider keyboard any more?

Mass media usually trails, rather than leads, on these kinds of things. There were tons of gay parents before you saw any on tv shows as recurring characters, and they still insist on the stereotype of the nerdy male engineer. Unless you think those are good things, it seems like they should work to stay at least current.

That's like saying TV should always make software engineers men, because most of us are. Simply perpetuating the existing bias limits our worldviews.

I don't think it's a matter of "seeing" it as a game. It is a game, in that definition. (As opposed to the "things done for entertainment" definition.)

It's a good thing to look at relationships and coupling as a "game" because too often we treat finding our partner as a "fairy tale" story where it's just a matter of "meeting the right person". That myth does a disservice to everyone: both the couples who find someone but then need to work on the relationship, and the people who have unrealistic expectations and end up alone.

Also, even if it doesn't inform individual choices, it's useful for looking at things in terms of broad demographic trends. If the article is right, it means there's a potential demographic shift coming of fewer children, fewer people with supporting family structure, etc. Understanding the dynamics behind that can be important for planning a society's future.

It seems like this is something that will self-correct over time; it's just a lag associated with the fact that our expectations are set during childhood but play out 20 years later as adults.

One thing that would help is if TV and other mass media stopped enforcing this stereotype so much - they always have the high-powered woman married to the high-powered man, and the high-powered man may be married to either a career woman or non-career woman, but you don't see the reverse. A few shows (Parenthood comes to mind) have gone against this trend.

There's two important issues at work here: 1. "Pairing" is basically a barter market where every good is unique, information on them is noisy or downright deceptive, and you only get to trade once (hopefully). That's a recipe for having problems getting clearing trades and feeling good about a trade you've made.

2. Behavioral psychology says we all tend to "high water mark". We want our eventual partner to be better looking than, smarter, more successful etc than the partners we had previously. Especially if you're getting older and your appeal is perhaps declining, that's going to make it very difficult to find someone who meets your standards, because your standards have risen over the course of your dating life.

An individual man may earn more than an individual woman, but in broad strokes, with more women graduating college than men, you're going to see more of them in "professional" jobs, especially in younger cohorts.

Credentials are an imperfect, but reasonable, proxy for career trajectory; if you have two big groups of people, and one has a lot more degrees than the other, you'd expect that group to be more successful over the course of their careers.