samclearman

Not sure what you mean by "should" here, but the IRS definitely considers it to be a gain that you have to pay taxes on, regardless of whether you can sell the shares.

RSU's are taxed on vesting, so it would be worse than options if anything.

Best are options with early exercise, but they're still not perfect (you have a possibly significant upfront cost to exercise them).

Really they should just change the AMT rules.

Yes, it's common. They'll say that it's because they don't want unapproved investors on their cap table, which I guess is reasonable, but obviously the main reason is "because they can".

Because the system is crazy, but it only affects early employees of successful startups so there's no political will to fix it.

In this case, the way it works is:

1. You exercise your options, for a paper gain of millions of dollars

2. However, you can't actually sell the shares (there are likely contractual restrictions on selling them, and even if not, there's not a liquid market)

3. So you have to pay millions of dollars of taxes even though your cash flow is zero.

And before you say "but they're ISOs", there's no such thing as ISO's under AMT so it doesn't help at all.

The article is about the 18th and 19th centuries.

Most Americans have spare bedrooms for when guests visit. You could have your guests stay at a hotel but typically that will be really far from your home which sucks for everybody. Having Sonder or Airbnb style short term rentals distributed throughout cities could allow people to live in smaller apartments, eliminating bedrooms that sit unused most nights creating more space for everybody.

To be clear I'm not talking about the model of renting out your spare bedroom on Airbnb because nobody actually wants to do that. I'm talking about full time airbnb studios / 1BR's obviating the need for guest bedrooms.

Pricing is per household, so a family of four spends the same as an single individual.

Maybe you never used to spend more than $10/month on video, but most Americans have been spending an order of magnitude more than that.

A la carte TV pricing was always a stupid idea. What people really wanted was cheaper pricing, which is of course not going to happen.