dev_jim

You don't understand how corporate accounting works.

The problem with this whole profit "debate" about Amazon is that most people don't understand that public corporations are not like households or small businesses. Generating a profit is not the same as a person's savings. If a company can reinvest their excess income in new ventures that will drive growth that will increase revenues and thus the stock price. That is a much better use of capital then generating a profit, which is then taxed at 35%, and having either having that cash sit in the bank, buying back stock, or paying it out as a dividend (which then taxes the person receiving the dividend). I'd much prefer a company that has recognized opportunities to invest in then one that inefficiently uses my capital.

As with most libertarians when you point out fundamental flaws in their reasoning, they deflect the conversation and try to talk about an ideal as opposed to anything based in reality.

This is a good example of why very few libertarians exist in NYC. Fantasy solutions like a thousand different HOA's to plow the streets just don't make much sense when you think about 8 million people spread across hundreds of square miles.

> MMM being rich just seemed obvious to me,

Do you actually believe he is rich or are you just saying this to be contradictory?

You make a big deal of owning his home outright, but it's actually not that much money when you think about it. A $320k mortgage for a $400k home is $1,200 in interest a month at 4.5%. That's an extra $15k a year and that's not nothing, but even adding that to his $27k puts him below the U.S. median family income. And that's why things like ice cream freak them out. $27k/year, even with a paid for home, is not a lot of money.

Another way to think about this is seniors. Social security isn't too far off his income level. A lot seniors own their home outright. If that's your only source of income then sure you can live a simple life in Florida, but no one would call this "rich".

All of these passive income stories fall into three buckets:

1) The passive income these people generate is from selling suckers who want to believe in free money a book for $9.95.

2) Their definition of a good passive income is at or near the poverty line in the U.S (That mustache guy?). That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not the life most people want to live.

3) The person got massively lucky with a startup (lots of hours invested there) or real estate and think that idea is easily translatable into a few blog posts. These stories are all survivorship bias and don't account the 1,000 people who failed.

Everyone wants to believe that there's a free lunch out there. That's why scams like stock trading apps, time shares, ponzi home marketing schemes, etc. are so prevalent.

1) Raj is Sri Lankan, not Indian. 2) Kerviel is French, grew up and was educated in France, and worked for a French bank. He isn't a racial minority. 3) Jett was a minority sure and Milken, Boesky, etc. were not minorities. Not exactly a pattern there.

As a New Yorker I'm always amazed as to how inconvenient of a city San Fran is. The BART has one track in the city, the Muni takes forever, walking is an absolute pain with all the hills, and there's so little mixed use development that you can really feel confined in many neighborhoods. Everywhere can't be New York, but cities like Boston and Chicago and D.C. have done a much better job of urban planning.

> The only difference that matters between friendly exchanges (cooking and room/board) and AirBnB or underground restaurants is that one set of actions threaten the existing power brokers who have the ear of City Hall.

I think it's a shame that most people are too cynical to understand why laws and regulations around food, housing, transportation, etc. exist. Odd in particular that you think preventing underground restaurants has anything to do with protecting the power brokers when there's a big public health case to be made for ensuring that food is prepared in a sanitary environment. I'm guessing you're in favor of a solution that let's people get sick/die and then let the free market enact it's revenge on the restaurant. Good thing we decided to leave that model out with the 20th century.

> When you forced to pay $300/night in Manhattan at the W hotel, Atlas Shrugged.

No one is "forcing" you to spend $300/night in Manhattan for a hotel. You should read that book again because you are also not using "Atlas Shrugged" in a meaningful context.

> Not a AR fan btw, just saying both sides of the fence have their pros and cons. I'd place higher value on an apartment complex that explicitly did not allow short-term renting within their contract.

Laws and regulations around housing are put in place to protect all residents, the landlord, the community, regardless of what Joe the landlord remembered or didn't remember to put into his stock lease.

> The other problem is... what's the difference between me using AirBNB and me knowing a friend who let me stayed at his place for 6 days and I just happened to give him some money as a thank you gift?

And what's the difference between cooking for friends who give you money for groceries and opening a restaurant in your apartment? You can always make an argument that appeals to the extreme in making your case, but thankfully that doesn't make it a legally relevant argument.

> If it's your own property, go right ahead.

Yep, this is the problem with services like AirBnB and Uber. It's embraces a purely selfish attitude in individuals with blatant disregard for the rest of the community.

Agree. AirBnB is the ultimate John Galt system in NYC. Apartment renters get cash for their apartment (that they usually don't even own) and then everyone else in the building gets to deals with the fallout of a revolving set of neighbors who share the lobby, amenities, hallways, and walls. Good riddance.

Lighten up.

25 years ago I started gaming because I was 4 and was given an NES and it was fun and stuff. I now have a great job and girlfriend, none of which I attribute to all the video games I continue to play.

Give it up people, trolling the Internet = fast-forwarding your life.

Not really. After his stop he went up the FDR or West Side Highway to head to Conn. The highway traffic usually moves just fine.

Peter Schiff has been screaming about hyperinflation for years and has been completely and utterly discredited.

"Works in cents" can be generalized for an integer with implied decimals. 4 or 5 decimal places gives you plenty of room to work with if you are just using a double to exactly represent an integer value.

In general, you should take the time to learn the rules and regulations before writing things like these up:

- If the off duty light is not on and your trip is in the five boroughs then the cabbie cannot refuse to take you. In my couple years in New York taking hundreds of cabs I have never had a cabbie in this situation lock his doors or ask me where I was going before I got in the car.

- if the off duty light is on then the cabbie has the option because he is going in for a shift change. This happens around 4PM. They are not allowed to put off duty light on otherwise. They often can't go to JFK because there is another driver waiting for the car in the next hour.

You can (and often should) use a black car service when traveling during rush hour to the airports. Uber is 2-3x the rate of a cab. A service like Dial-7 is about 25% more and cheaper if going out of Newark.

Maybe IBM is just a shitty company, but finance doesn't work this way. All the H1-B holders I know make a lot of money and have freely switched jobs multiple times.

Who do you think it was who brought the stock market out of the stone age? That would be the electronic market makers constantly pushing for innovation.

The old guard was perfectly content with eighths and fought as hard as possible to prevent decimalization because they were ripping investors off for billions a year.

You don't understand how secondary markets work.

Higher liquidity and lower spreads give an investor more confidence in their investment. They always have the option of getting out of the investment and at a lower cost. More confidence in an investment means the investor will pay a premium over the same investment that is less liquid and has higher transaction costs.

This premium means companies shares are valued more in the secondary market. This also means that companies can fetch a higher valuation and thus raise more capital in the primary market. Both of these are a win for investors and the companies themselves.

Before HFT spreads were measured in 1/8ths of a dollar. Spreads of a penny (or pennies) matter a lot to your retirement. To the tune of billions a year saved for investors.

Urgh, Hacker News gets worse and worse every day. When did crazy Libertarian rants become part of the popular discourse here?

There's nothing stopping the company from letting you take a vacation that is not a working vacation. The $7,500 is irrelevant to the conversation.

I wonder if you are exaggerating to make a point or you actually believe Americans take little to no vacation because the laws don't mandate it.

In finance you get 8 market holidays a year. The federal government has 10. On top of that, most white collar employees get 2 weeks of vacation their first year. After a year or two it's pretty standard to take 3-4.

<Braces for the piling on by Europeans about how inferior our vacations are>

It's a nice thought, but I'd rather my employer (and my girlfriend's employer) just pay top dollar and let us figure out our own vacation plans.

I live in Manhattan (formerly in the Village and now in TriBeCa) and I think you are exaggerating/cherry picking the lack of costs in NYC. Sure, you can find a few $2,000 1BRs here and there in Manhattan, but they are rare, tiny, and not all that nice. The average 1BR in the neighborhoods surrounding your office is more than 3k. New construction is more than $4k. In the nice areas of Brooklyn you are paying almost as much as in Manhattan.

> It's not about exchange rates and never ever will be. It's about purchasing power. It's just normal market segmentation, like how textbooks are cheaper in India/China than in the U.S.

A blanket statement like this is not correct. iPhones aren't cheaper in China. Louis Vuitton purses aren't cheaper in China.

Prices are what the market will bear in that country. $60 is what video games cost in America. More than that and Blizzard would see a dent in their sales that likely would not make up for any increase in price. Similarly, Blizzard probably isn't charging more (or much more) for Diablo in Australia because all other video games are that price.

Really harsh on the eyes. There's a reason image backgrounds went out with MySpace.

I'm always fascinated as to why people on this board fervently defend scammy self-help books. Tim Ferris' completely phony 4-hour series provoked a similar reaction.