kdsudac

The exit of the brands are directly due to the sanctions.

I'm sure the PR hit they'd take from continuing to do business is a factor, but I don't think this many large int'l companies would have reacted this quickly to just PR hits.

All international companies really, really, really, really like to get paid for the goods and services they provide. After sanctions that becomes difficult to impossible to do in Russia.

I think their thought process is:

Best case scenario they get paid in rubles which have gone down in value and are likely to go down further or at the very least be very volatile.

Worst case scenario they get $0 USD for their goods and services as they can't get the money out... and they are slapped with further sanctions.

Interesting read and makes some good points.

The reasoning about the "incredible run of ursurpurs" is a very flawed though. It's not like Bezos, Zuck, Jobs, Gates, Musk, Ellison, Page, Brin, et al. made their fortunes collecting their paychecks and funding their 401k's to the max and paying the top-level income tax bracket.

Their fabulous rise in wealth was because of the equity of the companies they founded becoming publicly traded at very high valuations.

Remember Jobs was only taking $1 in annual salary.

I'm not blaming the wealthy founders, they did remarkable things and deserve to be fabulously well compensated (not that fair or deserved have anything to do with it).

If anything I think the author should distinguish between capital gains taxes and regular income.

Really cool tool with a lot of potential.

My feedback/nit: It's a little hard at first glance to understand what it's useful for. Users need to engage with the demos down below that are probably too far down the page.

The headline has changed to indicate Uber set price at $45 per share or $82 Billion.

Educate yourself: http://video.valleypbs.org/video/3000761059/

"Without agriculture there is no California drought." This type of rhetoric really undermines your credibility. It'd be laughable if it wasn't so ugly.

So really 3 is your solution: compensate rights holders and then have the government sell water rights on the open market. I'm open to this idea. Would everyone be buying water on open market? or would you support subsidies for cities, industry, environmental causes, etc?

I really feel like you can make the argument for 3 without demonizing farmers.

P.S. 5th amendment = right to not incriminate yourself. 14th amendment is equal protection and due process. Not sure how they are related.

Might be good to replace "they" with "we" i.e. "we are pumping fossil water". (unless you don't live in California)

It doesn't seem like pointing the finger at the farmers who are bearing the brunt of the drought is very fair or productive. Just makes farmers feel like their livelihood and way of life is being threatened. What would you do if you were in their shoes?

I'm not using prior appropriation as an excuse, just pointing out that the more egregious wasting of water in agriculture is the exception not the rule. It'd be the equivalent of farmers citing the Bel Air resident as representative of all city dwellers.

If prior appropriation is the problem, what would you do policy wise to move forward? It's a very hard problem to solve and I'm sincerely curious to hear proposed solutions.

You realize that most farmers in California have received zero surface water for the last two years, right?

Some farmers in the Imperial Valley (east of Los Angeles) have an abundance of water because it comes from the Rockies and they have strong water rights. Another group near Sacramento have strong water rights as well. All of the farmers in the central valley are getting 0% of their water allocation for the last two years which kinda puts 25-40% voluntary reductions in perspective.

Video of original talk from startup school: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOubCHLXT6A

Can't wait to hear all the bitcoin fanboys explain how this is in fact a good thing for bitcoin. :)

Every time I read an article about the death of the PC and the ascension of mobile, I wonder how much carrier subsidies distort the relative demand for PCs vs mobile devices.

I'm inclined to believe that mobile sales are "artificially" inflated by these subsidies to a large degree.

Of course, if this business model is sustainable over the long term I guess it doesn't matter for mobile h/w manufacturers.

But for s/w developers the fact that people upgrade h/w every 2 years because of subsidies doesn't mean that those h/w sales are translating into a greater user base.

The most frustrating thing about these kinds of systems is how they never seem to apply at the top. Was Balmer a top CEO? The market doesn't seem to think so.

Haha, well if Musk says so it must be true!

As other posters pointed out, there are obviously competitors in the space (as I'm sure you were already aware).

In my experience, buying SSL certs can be a little confusing since there are so many providers and different types of certs. I did the research to figure out what product I needed, but I can imagine a sizable niche of customers who just want someone to tell them what they need.