jstelly

That doesn't agree with my experience. I switched from Turbo Pascal to Turbo C in the late 80s while doing DOS development because it was a better tool for the job. It had nothing to do with microsoft or windows (v3.0 was not yet out and few people developed windows apps before v3.0). Pascal (the language) was definitely not preferred for DOS development at that time - it's just that until 1987 there wasn't really C development environment that could compete with Turbo Pascal.

I did some Amiga development back then also and that was exclusively in C with some 68k assembly. I don't really recall anyone hoping for a pascal environment to replace their C tools, but the Amiga OS was more C-oriented than DOS at the time.

I think I would give this advice to just about anyone who is trying to follow their interests and build a career at the same time:

It just sounds like you enjoy learning. That is great, but it sounds like you also want a career.

If you want to find similar happiness in a career as you do with learning you'll need to decide to enjoy making things that are valuable to others. It may be that you already enjoy this; otherwise you'll have to train yourself to be happy when others find your work valuable. If you can do that you shouldn't have much trouble building a career given the skills you already have. Learning to work with other people will dramatically increase the number of potentially valuable things you can create so you should also pursue that (as you've already surmised).

I agree that everyone is paying for them via the tax incentives. But I think the media portrayal is often incorrect about who benefits. The benefits of tax-exempt bonds are split between the municipality issuing them and the high-income individuals buying them. But most of the gain is captured by the municipality (because the high-income people would be getting a lot more interest in a taxable investment so the municipality would have to pay a lot more interest to raise money if they had to compete with those investments).

There are going to be costs, but maybe this is actually a relatively low-cost option for helping to get prisoners back out into the world (and not back into prison). It is certainly cheaper than keeping them in prison. It says on that page that 10-20 percent of prisoners stay with their employer after being released. That seems low to me, but I haven't studied other solutions to this problem for comparison.

It seems like firms that are large enough to manage multiple offices do exactly that. In the games industry electronic arts is a good example. They have offices in Vancouver, Montreal, and Edmonton (a huge team grown out of the BioWare acquisition) and possibly other places in Canada.

I also have a model S, but I have owned a couple of other high performance gas cars that are much more responsive on the 55-65 or 40-70 acceleration test (passing at highway speeds). That's the only common case where the tesla loses to gas vehicles, and then only high performance gas vehicles (e.g. 300HP+ coupe/sedan models).

But the 0-30 thing is exactly right in my experience. Even more powerful vehicles don't have the instant and smooth acceleration feel of an electric motor.

This is happening. Sergey Brin reportedly invested over $1B in Calico (biotech / life extension).

It's worth mentioning that none of these techniques actually apply to the case where you exercise stock options - other than the one that says basically "take options as compensation if you can because you don't pay taxes until you exercise them" which is true for everyone who gets options (because you don't get any liquidity) not just rich people with expensive accountants.

The only techniques that apply to income taxes are the "borrow against stock technique" (has a big caveat about a rich person who lost in court when he used it) and the deferred compensation example (which is also zero liquidity; presumably you pay all of the income taxes when you actual get the money).

The article makes a better case for ways to avoid death taxes or real estate taxes though.

Are there people who receive millions of dollars in income via stock options who pay a lower rate? If so, how does that work?

I like this idea but it is probably difficult to implement. Can't drug companies make slightly different versions of drugs and work around this kind of arrangement? In that case the US would get the "best" version of the drug since it's paying the most, but that's not the solution you want (e.g. lower prices) because it's fighting the fundamental fact that the US will pay more for the same drug. I'm not a drug expert so maybe there are some drugs where this is impossible or improbable. But this is pretty typical in other industries so I would expect the same thing to happen here if it became necessary.