cjlars

Why is a retracting mast preferable to a freestanding rig with, e.g. a roller furling main or a nonsuch style wishbone boom? Is there a physics reason or is this a pragmatic trade-off to fit under bridges and stay out of the way during loading?

I've been on the other side as a buyer. Although I work with 'main street' companies, not high tech, I think there's a lot of generalizable lessons. One thing to keep in mind is that some buyers have substantially all of their eggs in your basket and others will constantly have multiple deals in the pipeline. When you enter into the LOI phase with someone, you want them to be very motivated to close in order to make the time / disclosure / trade secrets risk worth it, so I would encourage sellers to attempt to enter LOI only with motivated buyers that have a high likelihood of closing the deal. A few hallmarks of motivated buyers per my experience:

- The buyer will also be the CEO: the more the buyer looks like he/she will package your business up and pass it along, the lower the likelihood that they close (and the worse your earn out is likely to perform)

- Good buyer / company fit: similar to point one, do not let people tell you they can run this company. Grill them just like you would if you were hiring a CEO to replace yourself. Buyer / company fit is huge and when they say 'the owner is too important to the company' what they often mean is 'I don't think I can run this well'. Someone who knows and is building a portfolio in your space will often be a better buyer than someone looking for 'diversification'.

- Avoid tire kickers: Background in your space is good, but being a competitor to you is bad. If they could potentially gain valuable insider information as part of diligence, be wary of moving forward.

- Small team size: smaller firms have less in the pipeline and more motivation to close on the deal in front of them. Remember that they have the same KPI (IRR primarily) and runway problems that startups have. For them, no company = no ROI.

- Ensure they're well funded: The caveat to the above is that small teams or solo buyers may not have the funds lined up, so be very sure that they actually have the investors / NW to buy the business before moving forward.

Big difference between manually initiating the transaction and amount vs accidentally signing away everything because of one obscured line of code.

Plenty of electric scooters have no mechanical brakes and only electric braking on one hub. But since an extra couple feet of stopping power can be a life or death feature, you definitely want breaking on both tires. Even assuming no reliability issues with the electric breaks (hello sudden rain storm), mechanical is a cheap and weight efficient way of adding braking to the second hub.

Virtually everything besides Rolex, Patek, AP and Vacheron is in stock. For anyone on the wait-list or considering going grey market for a high demand model, I'd strongly recommend looking at comparable models from the wide variety of competing manufacturers. Not only will you get a lot more watch for your time and/or money, you'll support the breadth of artistry that makes the industry so vibrant.

The headline writer kinda went off the clickbait deep end. The article doesn't event mention Reddit or social media.

One issue with solar is where we put it all. If it turns out that a meaningful portion of farmland has an excess of solar energy, that takes a big bite out of the problem. Powering the US entirely on solar might take a land mass equivalent to 2% of the country... Only a small portion of the 40% of US land area used as farmland.

I'm in SF. The tricky thing here is that outdoor humidity is often so high that a humidistat would only result in an 'always on' system. I think CO2 is an objectively better measure anyway. You can remove humidity and particulate with energy efficient machines. You can't (realistically) do that with CO2 / VOCs.