vladd

Unrealized gains are temporary in nature. Next year the pandemic could stop and the value of the company could drop back to previous values. Should the tax remain in effect in that case?

You'd end up with a system where volatile companies have their investors taxed more than non-volatile ones (as fluctuations create unrealized gains during snapshot periods such as end of year, despite reverting back to the mean afterwards).

Is there a reason why investors should be taxed more for increased volatility? Should one lose their wealth to taxation more aggressively based on the degree of the stock fluctuations?

P.S.: We shouldn't mix in general wealth vs income taxation. Paul Graham wrote an insightful article explaining the fundamental difference of outcomes between them - http://www.paulgraham.com/wtax.html .

The errors I've seen with some startups is that they rely on the unsubscribe mechanism of the mail sending platform, but then they use their customer-base emails across multiple mail sending platforms (and obviously people unsubscribe from one but they remain subscribed on the others).

Hopefully it's not the case here with Stripe (fingers-crossed)

Deans, just like CEOs, are at the top of the leadership chain to protect the interests of the institution, and especially to maintain a long-term vision against short-term gains and speculation.

Most people cave in when it's time to make such decisions. A lot of folks would chose a cookie in the short term, while desiring to have a six-pack on the medium outlook.

In business or education, you fail as a leader every time you don't make that trade-off: every time when you take a quarterly one-time gain against the long-term interest or profits of the corporation, or when you fail to protect freedom of speech and the right of innovators to take risks just because the "safe path" is easier for now.

I think Paul Graham touches on this very well in his latest essay:

>> Why do the independent-minded need to be protected, though? Because they have all the new ideas. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be right. You have to be right when everyone else is wrong. Conventional-minded people can't do that. For similar reasons, all successful startup CEOs are not merely independent-minded, but aggressively so. So it's no coincidence that societies prosper only to the extent that they have customs for keeping the conventional-minded at bay. <<

>> For the last couple centuries at least, when the aggressively conventional-minded were on the rampage for whatever reason, universities were the safest places to be. That may not work this time though, due to the unfortunate fact that the latest wave of intolerance began in universities. perhaps the decline in the spirit of free inquiry within universities is as much the symptom of the departure of the independent-minded as the cause. People who would have become professors 50 years ago have other options now. Now they can become quants or start startups. You have to be independent-minded to succeed at either of those. If these people had been professors, they'd have put up a stiffer resistance on behalf of academic freedom. So perhaps the picture of the independent-minded fleeing declining universities is too gloomy. Perhaps the universities are declining because so many have already left <<

http://paulgraham.com/conformism.html

At the end of the day, students vote with their wallet.

The decision of the dean chooses to protect an environment of low-risk social-compliant low-EQ classroom, which will act as a deterrent on the university's prestige moving forward (e.g. you don't see those traits associated with MIT or Harvard).

At the end of the day the dean might get fired for his actions. To use an analogy, "nobody gets fired for choosing IBM, but if for years you're left beyond Amazon"... one might need to eventually take a hard look at the university leadership and make the needed changes.

In finance, you would compare 2020-q2 with 2019-q2. You would still get a similar 8% - 9% drop.

That figure (32.9%) is based on future projections. Stating the predicted future as something that took place already would get someone fired in finance.

>> This is more like the general populace not understanding how finance works

It looks to me more closely as someone applying mathematical formulas either without understanding what you are doing de-facto behind them, or being ill intended in the first place to manipulate the market. Either way, it's bad.

Unless you're explicitly writing "in Q2, the GDP dropped at an annualized rate of -33%", you're committing the capital offense when it comes to writing good journalism: not knowing your average audience, not adapting your content to the audience and probably most significantly, not understanding as a journalist what you're writing about.

If spot instance price is the only communication channel between you and the cloud provider to achieve this, it's hard to do a good job at it. For example, if the spot price was $0.60 one hour ago, and $0.55 right now, and you still have 13 hours of latency left for your job's execution, should you start triggering it or not? (how do you figure out your bid level?) You could have statistical data to have an intuition what's the lowest price that's been hit historically on similar days of the week in the past etc, but it's inexact and overly complicated.

If the cloud provider becomes aware of the remaining latency you have at your disposal for the job's execution, they can do a much better job. They would be able to look across the entire job execution queue in that datacenter, each job having a specific remaining duration for its execution, they would know the predicted pattern of carbon/solar/wind split for the next hours, and the implementation of the system would sit just on the cloud provider side (making the life of the customers easier and simple).

Of course, in the end, the benefit is towards our planet, but this is much more likely to succeed if the proper cloud API exists and the implementation initiatives are properly aligned to avoid redundant implementations on the customer side.

> One way to do it would be assign various jobs a value. Or you could use real money.

It's not the value of the outcome for that job that you're interested, but rather its sensitivity to a delayed latency in executing it.

For example, preemptively converting Youtube videos to a lower resolution with optimum compression to avoid having to do it in real-time (when video is played) at a crappy compression (to be fast), is valuable for sure. It's just that it can be postponed for 24 hours without real impact. Executing a search for a single user is less valuable in terms of overall impact but much more latency-sensitive.

(you can think of value and latency-sensitive in terms of two dimensions that are independent between them.)

This idea helps save the planet for sure, but it requires cloud-providers to build APIs that enable devs to switch from the "here's the SSH to the server, do what you want with it" to a model where it's the devs that say instead "here's a lambda function and its desired latency execution, please schedule to run it for me and let me know when the result is ready" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inversion_of_control )

Google was able to do that because it owns a large part of the jobs executed in their datacenters. Hence they could build this adaptive scheduling for their own jobs quickly without necessarily passing through a cloud-based API that inverts the control of job scheduling.

There are significant second order effects (and 3rd, 4th degree effects and so on) that are difficult to foresee and accurately simulate. For example, just to continue on your train of thoughts, the number of average children in existing young families is going to go up, which is going to increase food consumption and, potentially decades later, construction activities in real estate.

The economy is going to change, for sure. But different verticals are going to react differently to this state of intermittent lock-downs. Travel-related industries (hotels, restaurants, airlines, oil) are going downwards. Food delivery and gym@home equipment is going to sky-rocket. At the end of the day, it's a gamble to state where overall GDP or stock-market is ending, but over time increased air-born disease risks are going to facilitate new industries to come to life, and old ones to offset. Just like it always happened.

Like Warren Buffett says, "From a standing start 240 years ago, Americans have combined human ingenuity with a market system to deliver abundance beyond any dreams of our forefathers...". There is nothing to suggest this is suddenly going to stop moving forward, even as we adapt to these new realities.

By reading the postmortem I got the feeling that it focuses primarily on providing a timeline of historical events without being future-looking.

I did not find any questions that would trigger a path of improvement for similar future events:

- Why did the recovery take so long (up until Thursday morning)?

- If the surge lasted for 20 seconds, why weren't the systems operational again 1 minute after the event?

- Why is an on-site technician needed in order to re-activate the equipment?

- Could we build a system that enables the reactivation remotely?

There might be very well-rooted answers to the questions above (based on how real world electrical supplies work), but if the questions aren't asked, we won't end up exploring better solutions for the answers.

Are you talking about "The Cloud is Just Someone Else's Computer"?

If so, it's available at https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-cloud-is-just-someone-else...

Uber and Lyft businesses are a marketplace that benefits from the effects of scale: when lots of drivers and customers are present, supply and demand are near each other and balance out nicely. It also suffers from the chicken and the egg problem in new cities being launched: there's no driver close-enough in order to ensure low latency for new orders.

To mitigate that, Uber and Lyft heavily subsidize launches in new cities by pre-signing up drivers well ahead of initial demand, to ensure low minute order fulfillment. This is done by giving drivers activity bonuses in the initial new-city market formation stage, no matter the actual orders. This ensures order low latency fulfillment for early adopters in new locales, which leads to customer satisfaction, word-of-mouth advertisement and soon enough full marketplace formation (and lock-in).

If you were trying to compete with Uber in New York City, the main problem you would have is that you'd need a lot of capital to have hundreds/thousands of drivers to ensure order fulfillment on average under 5 minutes by having a driver as close as possible to any new order being placed.

Convincing people (using money) to stay idle despite lack of initial order demand (until the marketplace is formed) takes more than $5 per driver.

You can check-out http://www.curlie.org/ , which is the successor of DMoz, the volunteer-powered now-defunct Directory of Mozilla project.

> anybody reading these plots? This is really the worst news

A significant amount of work and investment goes into making some of these plots trend that way:

https://datareport.goalkeepers.org/

You might be down-voted because you take that improvement for granted.

In some situations, disagreement early in the decision making process could be beneficial to all participants. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disagree_and_commit for context (a principle used at Intel and Amazon).

> If sharing won't generate enough revenue to pay for the cost, why would you?

Any one-time cost can be amortized in time by recurring revenues, after which you're left with pure profit.

Technical work (manage your reader's cookie and policy preferences etc) is a one-time cost. Revenue from EU readers is an ongoing benefit. Hence, as long as EU income is greater than its traffic serving costs, you're bound to come ahead after some amortization time.

I don't think EU will be special in the grand scheme of things. US legislation is already pending under draft form ( https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet-privacy/pris... ).

To rephrase: if you produce an asset that can be shared with an additional significant audience at a fraction of its production cost, and all you need to do is a one-time compliance cost that probably will soon become mandatory for your primary area of distribution, then how can it be a good practice to continue banning your customer-base based on what continent are they in the world?

Subscriptions is the end-result. To get there you need many things: brand, reputation, good crawling, incoming links from authoritative sites. All of these are predicated on the idea of a global Internet.

If webmasters in Europe stop linking to you, Americans traveling in EU lose your trust, and EU-hosted search engine crawlers figure you don't exist, then you start to have some problems.

A good businessman is able to change its assumptions when the world around him changes. In 1980, it might have made sense to limit your newspaper audience in the area where you lived. In 2010+, due to the Internet, the main cost of a newspaper consists in the work performed by the writer to produce the actual content. When the world around you gives you basically free infrastructure to send those bytes to another continent against a one-time investment of assessing and fixing your site for compliance, you just don't say no.

> It's unlikely that the benefits for the business would outweigh the costs.

On the Internet, nobody cares where you are located. The fact that one cannot be bothered to serve their bytes, at basically marginal networking costs (and some fixed one-time investment) to hundreds of millions of potential additional readers shows bad business judgement and poor leadership.

You can keep the timetable no matter what -- use sails just to save fuel consumption when weather is favorable.

New features introduced in TLS 1.3 include:

  * smaller latency (0-RTT: zero round-trips support).
  * removes insecure encryption primitives (SHA1, MD5, RC4).
  * elliptic curve support.
  * downgrade protection.

Some interesting reads: https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-0-rtt/ and https://www.cloudflare.com/learning-resources/tls-1-3/ .

The article presents a graph where two metrics are overlapped on the same scale (union membership and percentage-based middle-class income), with a graph title suggesting that one causes the other. This isn't necessarily true.

Irrespective whether you agree or not with the article's arguments, in general correlation doesn't imply causality.

The drop in the percentage of middle class income could be caused by a bunch of factors, including (but not limited to) increased automation capabilities and increased reliance in off-shore low-wage workers.

Warren included several gems in this year's annual letter. Below, a small preview:

- discussion about December's tax change (>> The $65 billion gain is nonetheless real – rest assured of that. But only $36 billion came from Berkshire’s operations. The remaining $29 billion was delivered to us in December when Congress rewrote the U.S. Tax Code <<)

- the new GAAP accounting standard that will produce huge quarterly swings in Berkshire reporting in the quarters to come.

- 2017's frenzy in high purchase prices for American enterprises, and the side-effects of using debt to finance them. (>> If Wall Street analysts or board members urge that brand of CEO to consider possible acquisitions, it’s a bit like telling your ripening teenager to be sure to have a normal sex life. <<)

- payments made by Berkshire for hurricane insurance.

- strong discouragement to borrow in order to buy stocks (>> the strongest argument I can muster against ever using borrowed money to own stocks. There is simply no telling how far stocks can fall in a short period. Even if your borrowings are small and your positions aren’t immediately threatened by the plunging market, your mind may well become rattled by scary headlines and breathless commentary. And an unsettled mind will not make good decisions. <<)

- details about Warren's bet against hedge funds when compared to S&P indexing.

- risks in owning bonds versus stocks.

Overall, I found the letter to be a useful reading for those passionate about investing or financial self-sustainability.

A "legitimate" signature (or, for a better word, a good-performing signature) is one that performs well on both precision and recall ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precision_and_recall ).

Precision is the ratio between correctly-identified cheaters and the total number of people matched by the signature.

Recall is the ratio between correctly-identified cheaters and the total number of cheaters in the system.

In this case, the signature had good recall but poor precision, as those threads describe cases that make it plausible to have a "catbot*" username without cheating.

(I said "had" because the recall rate is going to drop when the string gets changed by the cheat authors. So long-term, the signature is poor on both recall and precision.)

The most problematic issue I see for Valve is not the lack of measurement of precision and recall for their VAC ban signatures, but rather the inability to obsess over their customer experience and react properly when relevant issues in their products are reported.

I'd recommend to be careful when mentioning nationalities together with diminishing words ("dirt cheap") - even if it's not discrimination, it can impact your judgement and its validity.

For example, if you would have said "the market is flooded with dirt cheap programmers", the next question would have been: are the competent, therefore really valuable from a value per dollar perspective, or not? Once you mention their nationality, the reasoning goes elsewhere and you don't make your point (you do not follow-up on why they're dirt cheap, how this connects to their quality of work and why it causes the 60k cap).

49 / 7 = 7 years (a gap of 3 years until they can commit for a decade)

>> Closing A380 isn't going to happen for years considering the backlog they have

The article mentions: "96 unfilled orders -- But based on airlines’ intentions or finances, 47 of those are unlikely to be delivered, which halves the number of jets in play."

So the actual backlog stands at 96 - 47 = 49 planes.

This page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Airbus_A380_orders_and... - shows that they've been delivering between 20 and 30 airplanes per year in the last years, which would allow a backlog depletion within 2 years. Even if they slow down, it still doesn't cover the decade gap requested by Emirates.

Uber is showing huge growth by expanding in a lot of new markets (in Europe and Asia). Market formation is expensive; they initially support a critical mass of drivers with minimum guaranteed earnings before mass adoption in that region happens. As long as they can prove profitability in established regions such as New York City, I don't see a problem with them temporarily losing money on expansion.

At the end of the day, Uber is still a private company. There's very few data flying around, and key metrics are shared just with the original investor group. It's hard to judge if they made a correct capital allocation decision or not. And, ultimately, it's their money and their decision to make. Who are we to judge?

>> he would have to liquidate some stock [...] which would have the effect of depressing the FB stock price

Depressing the stock is not the main problem of that. Insider trading is (he cannot liquidate FB stock on short notice as he has material undisclosed information pertaining to it).

He might elect to use a 10b5-1 plan (which basically empowers the broker to make the sell decision autonomously in the future based on a target price), but if you want that cash tomorrow, borrowing against the stock is more appropriate (see for example http://www.businessinsider.com/larry-ellison-has-a-10b-credi... ).