redshirtrob

Ummm, are you saying that C is the grandparent of C, or do you have a typo in your example? Sure, the initial comment is not necessarily the grandparent, but in your ABCDE example, A is the grandparent of C, and C is the grandparent of E.

Maybe I'm just misreading your comment, but it has me confused enough to reset my password, login, and make this child comment.

You're correct that the rail needs to continually have its stress managed. This could be cutting the rail and adding a new piece, or removing a bit. This is a fairly labor intensive and costly process so the railroads were very interested in coming up with a way to determine when a buckle or break was most likely.

Buckles and breaks were most common just after a train had left a section of track. The normal approach was to issue slow orders when the temperature got too high (buckle) or too low (break). So there was a lot of interest in finding more accurate ways to determine when slow orders were necessary and to optimize when to add/remove rail.

AFAIK this problem is still outstanding. The product I worked on years ago never quite succeeded. Railroads are a harsh environment.

This is a fine article. It covers a lot of the decisions one must consider when considering stock options. I just think it's a little abstract for folks who haven't lived the experience.

I actually tried to enumerate the scenarios. When I hit five variables I realized the advice would be mostly worthless. That's 32 separate outcomes, some of which are pretty subjective, e.g. do I think this is a viable company?

Nevertheless, I've been down this road a few times. I have some wins and losses. I think this article misses an important point: Exercising is not an all or nothing proposition.

For example: If I join a startup and leave after a year, the difference between my strike price and the 409a price might be non-zero. I can still exercise a percentage of my options to avoid AMT. Maybe I can't exercise all of them without triggering AMT, but chances are I can exercise a fair amount.

If I'm offered an early exercise, I don't have to do 100%. I can do a number that fits my budget. I just have to make sure I file my 83b election form.

If I'd bought Bitcoin at $1 and it went to $5, I would have sold. If I'd bought at $10 and it went to $20, I would have sold. If I'd bought at $100 and it went to $150, I would have sold. The amount of discipline it would have taken to hold through all the rises and make an obscene amount of money is well beyond my risk profile.

But I get what you're saying.

Read the first "Alex Cross" book.

It's...not very good, but it's a pretty good example of Patterson's work. I read the first 3-4 books in the Alex Cross series, but gave up after finding no growth or improvement on the character or the author.

I think you'll find his popularity similar to what makes lots of other things popular. His books are rather bland, but not quite boring. He doesn't pack a lot of exposition between the action so the plot moves forward. Unfortunately this often makes the characters seem quite stupid as they rush to action rather than ponder the situation. I find this unrealistic and annoying, especially given Alex Cross's profession.

Obviously, I'm not a fan.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about Windows or RDP.

I was just on a developer group call the other day where another developer from another organization was having weird scaling issues RDPing into the vendor's sandbox. The solution was to adjust some buried registry setting on the remote machine, not fiddle with the local machine. Unfortunately I paid little attention to the details as I rarely RDP and when I do I can tolerate display issues.

I realize this is super vague, but it was so fresh in my brain I had to respond. Maybe someone who actually knows something can provide actual details.

Hello there. That's eerily familiar. For me it was sports (although I was quite good at baseball and soccer) and Turbo Pascal. My parents, especially my Mom, put up a huge resistance to me programming. I had to promise to try out for the HS basketball team (easily my worst sport) to get a computer. I'd been cut the previous two years so of course I barely made the team that time.

My Mom was convinced I was sitting in the computer room playing games. When I told her: "No, I was programming", she asked what I was programming. Of course I told her I was writing a game, as all kids learning to program were. She responded: "See! Games!" as though she'd somehow proven her point.

But, like you, I've made my career from programming and it's treated me quite well for the most part.

> Parenting is a tricky balancing act!

Indeed it is. Our rule of thumb is that you have to finish what you start, and generally give it two chances. This worked well for me as a child. I wanted to quit everything after the first go, but there were many activities that I loved after the second go, and a few I was happy to be done with (looking at you trombone).

1. Finishing what you start means honoring the promise you made--be it to the teacher/coach, the team, or someone else. Oftentimes other people are depending on you.

2. Giving the activity a second try accounts for the possibility that the problem wasn't with the activity so much as the environment.

To be clear, I only apply these rules for the kids wanting to quit, not the parents. If, as a parent, I observe unacceptable behavior by the coach/teacher, dangerous conditions, etc I will pull the plug. Thankfully that hasn't happened yet.

I had this happen with a fraudulent charge once. To be clear, I don't know that it was a recurring payment with Stripe, but the behavior was similar. It took me about three years and a half dozen new cards to finally kill it.

At one point I asked the customer rep if there was any way to rid myself of this nuisance other than completely closing my account. She responded with the normal "that's your decision, blah, blah, blah...", but I was legitimately asking, not threatening.

I think I said something like: "No, let me be clear: I don't want to close the account. I just don't want to deal with this every six months either. I'm seriously asking if this is the only other recourse because it seems we've tried everything else."

It did get resolved eventually. It was also for a trivial amount so nothing like what you're looking at. It was still very annoying though.

I don't know if there's comparable data, but I can tell you the mining companies in north west Australia would routinely run 300+ car trains without incident. But these were very much a straight line from the mine to the port without much civilization in between.

I worked in this industry for many years. The railroads were always hyper-focused on increasing throughput. I left the industry about ten years ago, but back then derailments were considered the most significant risk to average network speed. At the time, average network speed was roughly correlated with profit. The rule of thumb was a 1 mph increase in average network speed was worth about $100MM in profit. That was 15 years ago.

There were a lot of systems in place to monitor rolling stock:

- Wheel Impact Detectors

- Hotbox detectors

- Acoustic bearing detectors

- Truck performance detectors

To name just a few. There were also efforts to monitor the railway infrastructure. The things I remember:

- Rail stress management (rails need to be under the right amount of stress, which of course varies with temperature)

- Top of rail friction management

- Rail profile management (the name eludes me, but the idea is you want the interface between the rail and wheel to meet certain parameters)

I worked on the rolling stock side measuring wheel impacts, overloads, imbalances, and a handful of more esoteric metrics. One of the outputs of these measurements was a train consist. For each of our locations we were able to build up the consist of the entire train (which was a fun CS problem in itself).

I stared at a lot of consists over the years. In North America I never saw anything longer than about 100 cars and 2-4 locos. However, in Northwest Australia they routinely ran 300 car trains meeting the description in this article. But, the reason they could get away with that is they were running a straight shot from the heart of the Pilbara to one of the port towns on the north west shoulder (Karratha and Port Hedland).

I need to check in with my old colleagues and see if things have changed. It wouldn't surprise me if train lengths have gotten longer, but I would be surprised if this correlated with a large increase in derailments, as that would have a tremendous impact on average network speed and thus profit.

As someone mentioned elsewhere on this thread, there are a lot of single track corridors. It's bad enough when one train has to sidetrack. It's really bad when a train takes out the whole corridor. These aren't packet switched networks. It's not easy to reroute. And it's really expensive and difficult to lay new rail.

Exactly. I've had a bunch of different mortgages over the years. Plenty of them have been passed around, but I've never had to sweat the details. I just set up autopay and forget.

Yeah, I could not care less about what they do with the loan. I'm not looking for a relationship, just the best deal I can get. Full stop. Do people still think otherwise on loans?

All that said, our local CU does in fact keep their own mortgage portfolio. This may be rare, I don't know. They're a large CU associated with a government contractor.

When I bought my house they had the best deal (rate + closing costs) hands down. When I refinanced they were no longer offering 30yr loans on their portfolio (and I wasn't interested in 10/15), but still were originating them to sell. Unfortunately the 30yr rates were not as quite good as I could get elsewhere and closing costs were close to a wash so I went another direction.

Has anyone actually used Rocket? Every time I (or a friend) have looked at them they have higher closing costs and wanted multiple points to close the mortgage.

I was able to do way, way better by going with a local bank, as did my friends.

The only thing I can figure is they are better for folks with "good" (not "excellent") credit and can maybe close the loan faster.