bjacokes

This falls prey to the same fallacious thinking as gambling with the house's money. Assuming we can extort billions of dollars from Mexico, that's money we could be spending on anything – why is a wall the best use for it? And if a wall is the best use for it, the government should be prepared to build it with our own tax dollars, regardless of whether we extort money from Mexico.

Cool, I'll have to give this a try sometime. I've only tasted one wine that retails for over $100/bottle, so I'd be hard pressed to guess that any wine I'm trying costs that much!

I'm curious how the other varietals did. Cabs have so many flavors going on that it might be easier for cheaper wines to "hide behind" oak and alcohol. (Relatedly, the general wisdom for homebrewers is that Budweiser-style beers are much harder to emulate at home than IPAs, because any bad flavors in a light beer will stick out much more than a flavorful ale.) I've heard some wine people talk about how hard it is to find "good" Pinot Noirs for under $30, presumably because that grape has a bit more nuance and it's hard for (at least the snobby) people to find cheaper bottles that don't have sharp edges.

I'd certainly encourage people to try natural wines if they do a tasting. They're on the cheaper end of the good wine spectrum, don't need aging, and almost universally taste better than the median wine at 2x the price. Something like Raisins Gaulois is a good starting point.

I'm not sure blind tastings with relative newbies gives the best signal here. If you give someone cocktails for the first time they'll probably like screwdrivers the most; if you let kids choose between doritos and oysters they'll pick the doritos.

After having had a lot of moderately expensive wine over the past few years, I'm sometimes surprised when I go back to a $5 bottle that I like. Usually if I think about it harder, I find that I'm enjoying a combination of sweetness and oak that are pleasant, but not really that fun to dwell on. It's similar to that balance of salt, sugar, and fat that snack foods use to be broadly liked but not have much depth.

Not to say that such wines are bad, but I think you're missing the point to say that expensive wines are supposed to be appreciated by the masses.

The tax rate on capital gains is the same as the tax on qualified dividends. It's the timing of the taxation that differs. With dividends you pay tax now, with capital gains you pay when you sell the stock.

Distributing cash via dividend or buyback usually happens when a company has more cash than they can productively use. There are a few advantages of distributing money via dividend instead of buyback:

* With a share buyback, the company is actually making a bad investment if the stock ends up being overpriced. There are plenty of instances of companies buying back shares and then having the share price drop, because companies can't reliably time the market any better than the rest of us.

* Investors receive a tangible reward when a dividend is paid. In theory, you can mimic dividends by periodically selling small portions of a non-dividend stock holding. However, this means that you're subject to fluctuations of the stock market, so your "dividend" sale might be 20% more or less depending on the month. Dividend-paying companies, on the other hand, typically aim to have predictably-increasing dividends.

The predictability of dividends, however, is a negative if you're a company that doesn't want to set aside cash for investors on an ongoing basis, which is the case for many tech companies.

Seems more like: "next time, how can I not have to throw the first one away?"

Maybe you never get to that point, but you could at least have to throw away less, or be closer to a final version the first time around.

I get that this is dry subject matter and some humor helps to lighten it up, but I found the writing style distracting. Some paragraphs are dense with algorithm details, others just have a picture of a tech office, a story about running into someone on BART, or descriptions of data structures as "lame" or "losers". Made it really tough to retrace my steps and get context from the preceding section.

It's hard to have a reasoned discussion about cities because there's so much ego tied up in your decision of where to live. People don't want to feel like they've made the wrong decision, so they'll say bad things about other cities to rationalize their choice.

I moved to SF from Chicago about five years ago, and on the whole it's been an improvement for me. The comp increase more than made up for the cost of living difference, I have a stronger network of classmates from college, and there are more job opportunities. Certainly if you want to quickly grow a tech company to 100+ people, it will be much easier here than in Chicago. Outside of work, there are many outdoors activities (cycling, hiking, surfing) that aren't easy to access in Chicago. There's no snow and no suffocating summer. There's plenty to be cynical about, but that's true in any big city.

What I miss about Chicago is knowing people with a more diverse set of professions, being closer to family on the east coast, and having a more moderately-priced restaurant and bar scene. Things generally feel more relaxed in Chicago because the cost of living is lower. A downside is that Chicago tends to draw mostly Midwesterners, so as an east-coaster I actually know far more people in Seattle and SF than I did in Chicago (if you're from Iowa, Wisconsin, etc, then you'll probably find the opposite to be true).

I have a tendency to get enamored with cities I visit, or miss cities that I used to live in, so my trick is to try and spend time doing things that are specific to where I live. After moving to SF I started hiking and visiting wineries and eating Mexican food. If I moved back to Chicago I might start jogging on the lakefront again, or going to more improv shows and brewpubs. At any rate, it's a bit more enjoyable of a way to feel like you've made the right choice on where to live than bad-mouthing other cities.

That's mostly true with growth stocks. If you buy Amazon trading at 300x earnings with the expectation that earnings will grow 50% per year over the next five years, then it's tough to say whether the price will be higher or lower if they meet your expectations.

Value trades rely a bit less on others' expectations. If you were to buy a company trading at 12x earnings with the expectation that earnings would grow 15% per year over the next five years, then it's pretty likely that if your expectations come to fruition then you'll make money on the trade.

You're misunderstanding how taxes are calculated. If they could deduct the writeoff, they'd make back their marginal tax rate times the purchase price, so they'd still lose around $2B. (Similarly, when people deduct their mortgage interest, they don't get the mortgage "for free".)

I'm by no means a chess expert, but from commentary I've read on games between grandmasters, e4 is considered aggressive and d4 is considered conservative. Or rather, e4 leads to more tactical and exciting games (e.g. Sicilian) and d4 leads to slower, more strategic games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Game

That's not true, the ISO option spread at exercise is taxed via AMT [1]. In general you shouldn't give out tax advice, and if you do at least make sure you have your facts straight. Plenty of early employees have been bitten by this rule and it doesn't that people perpetuate incorrect information.

[1] https://www.nceo.org/articles/stock-options-alternative-mini...

Right: startups give out options, and those options are likely to be worthless. Your previous comment, however, was also suggesting causation: startups give out options because they are likely to be worthless. That's certainly not the entire reason. Like I said, a startup doesn't want to pay market salary because it would effectively ~halve their cash runway versus shifting compensation towards equity.

The main reason that options are handed out is to compensate for below-market salaries, and the main reason salaries are below market is that the company wants to increase its runway. Some specific valuations or offers warrant cynicism, but remember that any startup with negative cash flow (even successful ones with near-market salaries) should be giving out equity to keep their salaries costs down.

Secondary offerings don't significantly affect the stock price and research notes don't make the bank much money, so the outrage is a bit misplaced. If a bank wanted to make money by breaking the rules, they'd have M&A talk with their prop trading desk.

That's not a productive attitude. (1) There will be another boom, (2) with more affordable housing, you could stabilize the population during pullbacks instead of people moving out.

Fidelity's phone system lets you authenticate by typing your password on the phone keypad. On the plus side, this is probably the only time I've understood the technical reason behind a limited password alphabet.

This is also the subject of a Kurt Vonnegut short story, "The Euphio Question", from Welcome to the Monkey House.

As mentioned in the article, there's always potential downside to preferred stock. A more accurate comparison is if you could buy Twitter stock for $100, would only start losing money if it went below $30, and would only start making money if it went above $100. If that is starting to sound like a crummy deal, then clearly the preferred stock price has some loose relation to that of the common stock.

That's Andrew Mason's shtick. There is similar stuff in pretty much any other statement/article he writes.

It's worth watching the Advanced Go Concurrency talk from I/O before judging whether Go is designed for below-average developers. They throw up a plausible code sample near the beginning that has multiple tricky bugs. It's not a very forgiving language if you aren't meticulous about how you use it, which I've also found to be true of Ruby (perhaps this is true of expressive languages in general).

https://developers.google.com/events/io/sessions/332768653

You're absolutely right that it's an opinionated language, but having used both for production code, I don't at all see the parallel to Java.

I compiled a jargon list when I did a summer internship in finance. They're less frequently used in startups (thank god) but I still hear them used by business types:

- Human capital: "People", often referring to your employees.

- Reach out: call or email.

- Leverage: Basically equivalent to "use". "We will leverage our human capital to generate exciting new products in this space." You should leverage this word as frequently as possible when talking to finance people.

Our web hosting service at Parse (launched last week) is built entirely in Go. It happens to live in a sweet spot for the language: we need to query Memcache and/or Mongo to figure out exactly how to route a request but don't want to block the thread, which is dead simple in Go. I've personally had a great time using the language, and I am hoping to write up a blog post on our experience within the next week.

I would expect the direct financial impact of this launch to be quite small for us. The goal here isn't upselling customers, it's making it easier for our developers to have a strong web presence. This is only the first step, and we have some follow-on projects in this area that should be interesting even to "non-beholders".

It's worth looking at "active isolated stretching" for an approach that is well-regarded in distance running circles and is an alternative to the "static stretching" that this article is referencing: http://www.runnersworld.com/injury-treatment/active-isolated... . It's easy to learn and is a sort of middle ground between stretching and the active warmup suggested by the article.

Stretching is absolutely important in certain situations -- context matters. E.g. if you sit all day and have back pain, in general you should be doing psoas (hip flexor) stretches, and should not be doing back stretches. The article is mostly right that you should stick with light stretching and exercises on a daily basis, but for tightness and imbalances that need to be actively corrected, stretching is the way to go.

I don't quite understand the reasoning here -- it seems like you're advocating a long-term buy and hold approach with bitcoins, based solely on the fact that they've recovered from every crash thus far? While bitcoins certainly have a lot going for them as a currency, I think it's the "bitcoins will keep going up, buy the dips" mentally of the true believers that makes this sound like a bit of a tulip craze.

In defense of Chicago, its grid is amazing for being able to efficiently travel around the city. The street numbering makes it trivial for any local to find their way to an address like "X00 W Belmont" without a map, and obviously the lack of hills makes for easier biking and public transit. It skews more towards beautiful architecture than beautiful landscapes, and has its share of decrepit neighborhoods (as does SF), but I don't think many people would describe it as a "soul-sucking" place. Different strokes.

True -- although in that hypothetical situation, there'd be a lot of pressure to raise the dividend. Investors don't want to have money in such a cash-heavy company, because it's like investing in a mutual fund that takes half your money and sticks it under a mattress. Even if they do good things with the other half of your money (like Apple does) you're halving your potential return right off the bat. Cash in the bank is useful when you need liquidity (unprofitable, danger of recession, potential acquisitions, etc) but $500B is still too high for any of those needs.

A price/earnings ratio of 10 is fairly common for blue chip stocks. It certainly isn't priced for growth, so presumably investors think that Apple's earnings have a risk of plateauing. Given how high Apple's earnings are, there's certainly an argument to be made that they can't go much higher without another big hit.

Keep in mind that earnings != cash. If you look at their full SEC filing, their net increase in cash was $5.4 billion. Some of that money will be directed towards future R+D, some toward a dividend, and some will stay in the bank or used for acquisitions.

Companies with a healthy balance sheet and a lot of cash, like Apple, will either pay a dividend or buyback shares long before the book value of the company (cash + other assets - debt) is greater than their market cap. The market cap is more likely to be close to the book value for a struggling company, in which case the company is at risk for a private buyout + liquidation.

Like with any other language, I've found that frequent interaction with financial terms improves your literacy and helps you make better connections between ideas. For instance, a few years ago when Southwest Airlines seemed to have much lower prices than everyone else, I read that they had bought futures contracts back when oil prices were low. Right there you have a company that's 'naturally short' oil, who 'hedged' against rising prices by buying 'futures', etc. A couple of good sources for financial news are the APM Marketplace podcast and Felix Salmon's blog on Reuters, and you can look up terms on Wikipedia when needed.

Keep in mind that a bunch of the commonly recommended finance books are either a bit pop-finance (Liar's Poker) or somewhat outdated (Intelligent Investor), which is OK if your goal is to be entertained or well-versed, respectively. Most authors have a thesis, and if you were to only devote time to one book and it happened to be something like Fooled by Randomness, you'd find yourself with a very skewed view of things. That's why I'd suggest current news if you're only interested in financial terms as they relate to your job.

And finally, like with any other jargon, realize that while it's useful to know and can help formulate ideas, a lot of people overuse it. Not saying this article does it, but I've seen finance people go "short" undesirable menu items at a restaurant. Don't let the gratuitousness make you think these terms are more important than they are :)