brwnll

I have issues with Seattle, especially the city counsil, and prefer the smaller towns that surround it, but a few of your items are outright falsehoods.

>> - Tokyo offers people nice 1BR apartments for roughly $900-1000 a month, because they are pro-development. that same apartment costs me $2k a month in Seattle

Seattle is doing it's best to accommodate growth. Estimates now peg 1,000 people moving to Seattle each week[1], which is not easy to absorb for a city of 700,000. Seattle has had the most construction cranes in America, each month since July 2016[2] to try to cope with growth.

>> - spending by the city of Seattle has doubled over the last few years, but the population did not double. this means that taxes will eventually be raised to fill the gap. I'm not my brother's keeper, so I'm moving to another low-tax state.

Agreed, Seattle city high earners tax is stupid, but it's being taken to the state Supreme Court where it's widely expected to be tossed out as the Washington State constitution prevents any income tax.

>> - the city has done next to nothing to remove restrictions on the heights of new buildings downtown. it also has made it nearly impossible to do mixed-use arrangements inside towers.

Which area of Seattle are you referring to? There are several skyscrapers being built currently downtown.

>> - taxes on ridesharing? why?! if you want to get rid of cars, as I do, hurting ridesharing won't get you there.

I wasn't able to find any reference to this. Do you have one? Seattle is attempting to push cars out by increasing car tab fees and the cost of parking, which appears to be working with y/y ridership up 12% [3]

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My point is only, Seattle city council has a lot of problems, like most do across America, so there is no reason to manufacture ones that don't exist. As someone who has grown up in the area, I'm glad they are taking some action (unlike somewhere like SF) to accommodate the sudden growth of high wage earners, even if they aren't perfect.

[1] https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/03/27/25043201/more-th...

[2] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/real-estate/fewer-cran...

[3] https://patch.com/washington/seattle/sound-transit-ridership...

Yes, since stock compensation is only granted if the market value of the company hits a threshold.

The interesting part is how this contradicts what Elon's original stated goal of the company was.

I am a Musk believer, and when he started Tesla he stated his goal wasn't to be a major car manufacturer but to be a proof of concept to push the major players into the space. He demonstrated this by the open sourcing of EV patents.

Tying compensation to cap value of Tesla means that he no longer believes the major players will adapt (although there is strong evidence that his original plan has worked and the other manufacturers are making much larger investments in EV), or that the auto's segment will grow as a whole so significantly, that Telsa, as a minority player, will still be able to reach a 10x size over the next decade.

There was a good Odd Lots podcast covering this:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-27/odd-lots-...

With so many companies offering employees public transportation passes for commuting, I'd love to see Lyft/Uber create the ability for employers to offer free/reduced fare office commutes (within a determined range). AFAIK the only option they have is to give blanket monthly credits.

"Almost immediately, they found that they could debunk the time-worn idea that anonymity leads to abuse. Although anonymous comments are "six times more likely to be an attack,"

Hmm, that actually DOES seem to support the idea the anonymity fosters abuse...

Is there any sense of how corporate benefits effect the real cost of living?

Meaning, companies which offer free food, transportation, even limited housing, the net effect of cost of living increases could be somewhat offset?

- Out with flat org structure based purely on meritocracy, in with supervisors and middle managers. This has ticked off many people in the old guard.

- Its once famous remote-employee culture has been rolled back. Senior managers are no longer allowed to live afar and must report to the office. This was one reason why some senior execs departed or were asked to leave, one person close to the company told us.

- GitHub has hit "hypergrowth," growing from about 300 to nearly 500 employees in less than a year, with over 70 people joining last quarter alone.

http://www.businessinsider.com/github-the-full-inside-story-...

I don't know what employers you interact with that believe a prospective employee should take a sub-market pay in exchange for the privilege to work at their company, but it's terrible.

There have been many good articles on HN about salary negotiation, setting freelance rate, and seeing through the "one day you'll be a billionaire because of these options if you work for almost-free" and the kind of nonsense your touting does nothing but set the conversation back.

Not sure where you're seeing that. Many prominent Republicans have endorsed Trump, but then denounce comment after comment Trump makes, without ever removing their endorsement of the candidate out of loyalty to the party.

This was my initial thought. But after consideration this would likely to just lead to companies creating holding/shell companies for groups of patents.

Effectively, Big Corp would spin up "Obvious Shopping Cart Patents, LLC", wholly owned by Big Corp, and register their patents for a given category through it. Then they could sell the entire company to another entity without the patents themselves transferring ownership.

The best fix for patents I can think of is simply lowering their lifetime to somewhere in the 2 - 5 year range.

Yes, the stock price represents the last transaction.

If you are looking at a stock trading platform, you will usually also see "Current Ask" and "Current Bid" representing standing sell and buy prices (respectfully) for the stock.

The specifics of charter school success isn't really the main concept of the article. I believe the grandparent is pointing out the writer attacks the "billionaire philanthropists" donations as an assault on democracy, without acknowledging that the main donors on the other side were all vested interest groups (Teachers Unions, etc)

Love when people call something undemocratic just because they are against the goals of a group.

Wealthy individuals and groups have power to publish advertisements and arguments for their ideas/proposals to try to change the mind of the voters. Attempting to convince the voters your right is not undemocratic, it's the core of democracy.

Additionally, anyone who believes that the plutocracy has more power in America now than ever before is entirely ignorant of even general American history. It wasn't that long ago where there was so little regulation on business, political and police bribes so common, that the wealthy could ignore any law they wanted without any fear of reprisal.

This is likely true, but for a less nefarious reasons. It's very unlikely they received your order and were sitting around twirling their thumbs until the last possible moment.

Instead Amazon has algos that know exactly when they need to get an item in the mail to make it before the deadline. Every time an order comes in, the pickers list is updated.

Meaning that every time a customers order comes in with a tighter deadline, their order will be picked prior to yours, until you deadline is sufficiently close (or there is a lack of more pressing orders) for your items to make it to the top of the list.

Don't most ad blockers also block third party trackers? I know uBlock Origin blocks Google Analytics for example.

I don't know Alexa's fallback/tracking methods, but couldn't these be an indicator of adoption rate of ad blockers, as these charts are not precisely an indicator of traffic, but specifically a measure of trackable traffic.

This is nonsense. A company "swooping in" to buy a company assumes the liabilities of that company.

If Alphabet were to buy a struggling company, they don't get to go to it's creditors and say "We will pay you $1, which you should consider a blessing, since if the this company went out business you would have got nothing".

Similarly, if the company made sales of a product on the notion of "lifetime support and updates", a purchasing company is absolutely responsible to uphold those guarantees (this is the type of thing companies do due diligence for before acquiring a business).

Society is nothing more than a collection of people who agree/desire to abide by a common set of rules. Typically enumerated and enforced by some type of governing body.

If the American people in general want to live in society with only a subset of gambling is allowed (which it appears they do), that's exactly the point of the government.

While humorous, this is nonsense, and a complete mischaracterization of what a stock market actually is.

A stock market is a place where a group of businesses are able to offer ownership stakes in their company in exchange for cash.

The fact that people have built a speculation market around it is very different than a gambling wager. If you buy stock and it decreases in value, you still own the stock.

Edit: As CPLX points out below, in reference to a derivative market, the point is much more valid.

Source?

This is nonsense. Without writing an essay here, you are apparently focusing on the criminals in jail.

There are plenty of very successful and intelligent criminals that have long, prosperous careers in theft.

Bernie Madoff ran a very successful, very illegal Ponzi scheme until he was nearly 80.

And that's not even to touch on the internet ability to let you violate the laws of counties you aren't physically in against citizens your gov doesn't care about (eg Russia to US), and therefore greatly reduce the risk for punishment.

This may be an over assumption, looking at the timing of the block. Article states that because of the timing the site owners were able to seize his funded account, getting a few hundred dollars for free.

May have flagged him prior, but like the opportunity to take government money.

"The Image Slide Show they Don't Want You to See, the Insiders secret to why Ghost Ships End up in Japan!"

Is there any indication what the sponsorship money of Let's Encrypt goes toward?

Corporate sponsorship looks to be somewhere around $2m/year.

Is the money needed for scaling? Hiring engineers? Broadening product line?

As a Seattle resident, I had no idea that our beloved Killer Whales were the most toxic animal on the planet.

Doing a little research, I did find an article[1] from 2009 that states this is because of contaminated salmon, who appear to pick up toxins from the Pacific Ocean (as opposed to rivers) off the coast of the US (Canadian fish fair better).

It also notes that " The state of Washington has issued some local fish advisories, including a recommendation that people limit eating Chinook from Puget Sound to one meal per week."

Information for life.

[1] http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/contaminated...

Instead of a more efficient business model, I'd offer that it's actually the difference between being a hardware and software company.

Being a year or two late in software can often mean you product never has a chance to disrupt the first to market (assuming roughly equal quality product). Contrarily, Apple has shown time and again they can be several generations behind in specific technology (until they can "get it right") and still maintain demand for their products.

Your missing something.

Reading beyond the infographic, the article is really about how Apple is able to offset the need for R&D dollars (which as expanded from $4b in 2013 to $8.5b in 2015) by being an overwhelming large consumer of components ($29b committed next year).

This causes the suppliers to invest heavily in R&D to be able to "wow" Apple and lock up big contracts with their innovations, instead of Apple needing to do it directly.

The most interesting part to me is if this speaks to a counterpoint of the slow direction Apple appears to be taking moving more and more in house. This appears to indicate there is significant value by keeping key partners separate and in the free market, even with the lessened control of being a 3rd party.

I assume you are referring to follow up rounds when you refer to a chill? Or do you expect angel/seed funding to be reduced because they are going to lower guesstimated valuations?

Will be Interesting to see if this pattern has an effect of pushing tech companies to IPO sooner.

Is this behavior being replicated cross sector? It seems commonplace for a tech company to write down a valuation of a purchased company (eg every company MS has ever bought), I don't hear about it in health, finance, retail, etc sectors.

That lawsuit isn't about lowering the transaction rate, it's about collusion between credit companies to keep their rates in line with each other.

First hand, I've seen a small ecommerce shop have rates lowered a 1/4 percent doing less than $1m/y.

Second hand, Costco, who in the US and Canada just switch from AmEx to Visa as their accepted card, went through long negotiations that resulted in booting Amex for not matching the discounted rates Visa was willing to offer.