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Using PE ratio to compare a high growth company to a low growth company is almost never a good idea.

You're penalizing Netflix for investing in its business. When people refer to short term Wall Street silliness, this is the kind of thing they mean.

I think many that we know about have orbits in the thousands of years or less, with some known in the millions. But would it be possible for a huge grouping or sequence of them to maintain such an orbit together?

I've often wondered: is it possible for a grouping of asteroids to have a highly elliptical orbit and pass Earth's distance to the sun very infrequently, say every X million years?

Is it possible that there is some very regular chance that the Earth would get pummelled, but only on extremely long time spans? How would we know or not know?

> Use that expertise to build a tilt-rotor commercial plane.

They have, it's called the AW609. And like its predecessor V-22, it has crashed and killed the occupants early on and is nowhere near commercial readiness.

Uber's estimates of commercial VTOL flight on an untested airframe by 2023 is total garbage, and they have to know it. The US military has sunk $50 Billion dollars into this problem over the last 30 years and still aren't there.

My guess is that Uber simply wants to maintain some hope of future growth, particularly with their autonomous car program in shambles.

PS I sincerely hope I'm wrong.

I agree with the sentiment but not the tense.

It should read "Judge the value of what you'll have by what you'll have to give up to get it." This is actually in line with the example the author gives.

If it's past tense, then you get yourself into sunk cost fallacies.

The problem was discussed several times across different courses for us. Essentially this is all based on Friedman's book Capitalism and Freedom, which says:

> There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits

That is the basis for the argument your professor made. However, the passage in its entirety is:

> There is one and only one social responsibility of business – to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.

Which is a pretty major caveat.

I had several instances of the opposite while across the Bay: put ethics above profit always. It sounds like you just had a bad professor (which you already know).

I like that you're building something in this vein, but the benefit is not immediately clear to me.

Has it been your experience that talking with others during a lecture is helpful?

In addition to shedding light on the author's experiences, this is also an excellent piece of writing. It's not what normally shows in HN, but I'm glad it did.

If you're ever in the Bay Area, go across the bridge to Sausalito and look back at the city at sunset. The Salesforce Tower looks like a chrome cylinder jammed into some mashed potatoes. It's incredible how much newer and shinier it looks; totally out of place.

It'll probably dim with age, but right now it really doesn't fit with the rest of the buildings due to sheer newness.

> How about putting pressure on your reps to draw up some regulations?

I think the idea is to convince the company directly rather than relying on politicians.

> Because it obviously doesn’t work with these corporations.

There are some pretty glaring examples where it has worked. Nike sweatshops probably being the most visible. Boycotts and lawsuits hit the bottom line, which is what they ultimately care about.

The only problem with the "something tells me" line of reasoning is that it's always being espoused by someone. Literally at any point you can find people who feel the way you do. Good news is that if you keep it up you'll eventually be right for a little while.

That's a great starting point, and one this article makes zero effort to address. Unfortunately nuance doesn't get clicks.

Per the article, the reason is that they're lobbying to keep the existing tax code rather than simplify it.

I generally agree, but I think terms like "evil" and "parasite" get thrown around a bit too easily.

We're all for simpler taxes, unless it removes the deductions that we ourselves enjoy. That is probably a much larger hindrance than any lobbying, but any such nuance is ignored in these types of shock value articles.

No, truly I am.

In sum: static sites will keep the scary hackers away. Here's how you build a self-hosted static site with Contentful, starting at just $250/month for the privilege of using our editor. What a great deal!

The project is not being actively maintained

https://github.com/NYTimes/ice/issues/126

It's not about forecasting the weather: good gas peakers can respond in under 10 minutes. I meant predictable in the sense of day/night/season.

This is essentially incorrect. Renewables have predictable generation when deployed on a large scale, and gas peaker plants can respond to changes as needed. With the simplistic model of the article (nuclear + wind), it is easy to reach the wrong conclusion.

My family vacations there every year and my grandparents lived there for 30 years. I can assure you the crazy is real and not imagined.

It's funny that Florida has such a pristine reputation internationally. I'm from the Southern US, and my view of Florida is that it's where 80% of the crazies in the US live.

Anytime I see a batsh*t crazy headline? Florida. Check the articles you see from now on and you'll notice a pattern.

So to all the internationals: if you like the US but not its extremes, definitely don't move to Florida.

About 1/4 of Norway's GDP is oil and gas (US is about 7%). Ireland is a particularly ironic choice given their recent GDP growth and subsequent dip were mostly from being a tax haven for wealthy US companies.

I wouldn't personally attribute either of these to better educational or societal systems.

I always find it odd that people are surprised when modern manufacturing can yield better results on a given metric (e.g. sound quality).

Are there any real counter examples, where old techniques haven't been met or surpassed?

To have a massive positive impact on the world.

I've been in VC for ~10 years, and we see a lot of founder squabbles.

A lot of what makes for great companies is simple: a smart team in a great market, just plowing through things for 3-5 years.

That 3-5 years part is the one that trips up (a) startup newcomers and (b) people who were very successful in school. You get way beyond the "theory" of what you're building very quickly, and there is a LOT of dull blocking & tackling work.

To my ear it sounds like you are frustrated with the slow pace of the work and want to do things that are more intellectually interesting. This is more or less an anti-pattern at the ~1 year mark, and you might consider that your CEO knows more than you think, just not about the technical side.

I can't see a scenario where pointing to an online equity calculator is going to help, so don't go there. If you're convinced that the CEO is damaging the company, you should want them gone, not still around with a little bit less incentive to succeed. Mostly though, you should consider very seriously whether, for all your VR chops and accolades, you are even correct in assuming the CEO is not able, vs whether you are experiencing Dunning-Kruger or simply don't like them.

I'm thinking the other way around. Telecoms will have incentive to not invest at all in states with stricter laws. Then in a few years they can say "See, it stifles innovation!"

Thanks for the recommendation. Was it the one by Mike Duncan?

I had a similar reaction. I was hoping the article would touch on less obvious things, and I even read it as 829 bytes the first time (then was confused for a second). Hard to take it seriously after that.

I've always thought of ambivalent as meaning no strong feelings either way, but I see that it can also mean mixed feelings (even strong ones). Is there a word that doesn't also include the first part, where it means solely having strong mixed feelings?

My original comment doesn't assume anything for or against -- I think your analysis of "it doesn't usually pan out" with associated data would be perfectly reasonable to include in an article like this.

I'm fine with arguments for or against HQ2; I was commenting more on the sheer amount of hand waving in these articles.