brianfitz

I have:

1. Lost a pair 2. Lost one bud from a pair 3. Washed them 4. Swam in the ocean with them 5. Had a pair generally degrade

So I know once I buy a pair, I'm good for about a year until I need another. That's also when I tend to notice the new features. :-)

Great work and as a product guy, I find the preview environments feature explained on your website to be a potential game changer. Being able to spin up and seed environments on demand via pull requests keeps things very clean as I could just look at a particular branch in isolation without the need for fixed dev -> stage environments. By seeding the data, it also means I can "replay" the same scenario again if the developers deploy a change while in the review process.

I believe he was using the source article. One example was a leap in public polling around how our government functions (33% jump in being able to identify the three branches of the US federal government).

Also highly recommend the book “The Phoenix Project”. It highlights common pitfalls and solutions through a narrative of a character thrown into their first time leading a team.

So we’ve created one loophole. What if I buy multiple properties below the threshold? Is the limit per household? If so, does this apply to people heavily leveraged with little net worth who own many rental properties? The rent is income, but they often make improvements to the homes and take a cash-out refinance to pay for the cash down payment on a new property. If we do this to homes, and the wealthy move their money to a new place, such as venture capital, do we try and re-price those illiquid assets each year? If one IPO’s and they take a loan against the stock to buy a home, do you give them their previous year’s mark-to-market payment back to them if the stock goes down the following year and they get a margin call? I’m just going through a few scenarios but this would quickly inflate the tax code to an almost unmanageable state without creating just as many more new loopholes. Imagine trying to grow a startup and being worth X on paper with no actual gains or money in the bank. If you don’t include it, it suddenly becomes a tool for someone else to use within the assets you’ve excluded. If you don’t exclude it, you may force an early sale of promising new businesses to their competitors to cover a tax bill on the unrealized gains.

The special treatment is at the time of sale. My comments were in response to taxing the appreciation at the time of a new loan (such as taking a second mortgage).

This would also affect most home owners. They purchase a home, it goes up in value, and they refinance or take a second loan rather than sell the property. The wealthy do this as well with property, art, and securities. Trying to tax unrealized gains (like a home that has appreciated in value) would be a new mess of tax legislation with holes you could drive a semi-truck through.

I remember a friend talking about how he didn't take Youtube options for some consulting work he did for them in their very early days. This was almost exactly 10 years ago and his comment was that he could have wallpapered his entire house in all the worthless equity he had been paid over the years. It was always hard, it was always rare, but only the winners get press attention.

Markets will factor in all known information ahead of a fine such as this — the possibility that it’s coming and some guess at the size and impact. In doing so, this would depress the price of the stock leading up to any news.

Let’s assume that the estimate for the fine was exactly on the money — $5B. In this case, you’d still expect to see a jump in stock price due to the removal of uncertainty. Uncertainty can pull down prices just as much as bad news.

Throwing out any opinions of what Facebook did, the size of the fine, etc. this is the type of simplistic reporting that gives the news media a black eye. It also happens quite a lot with science reporting such as an article last week on tube that could isolate sound based on its shape. The author made many leaps that were ripped apart on HN.

Any particular instance won’t get noticed by the majority, but eventually an article will get published to an area of your expertise and it’s just glaring. When this happens enough times, you begin seeing the news in a much more nuanced and different light.

TL;DR - The money available to any one company is small (hundreds of thousands) which means it could only ever be a supplement. Since they are very difficult to apply for, it could be argued you’re just better off to spend time raising money from entities that can provide more capital down the road. Also, traditional capital can be spent on all aspects of the business. However, these grants are generally very restrictive on what the money can be used for.