On a somewhat related note, a few years ago I was flying to a mobile phone conference in Barcelona. I thought it would be fun to bring my Port-O-Rotary cell phone along (available from Sparkfun Electronics).
I enjoyed hours of fun and merriment going through security with it. Frankfurt in particular was a real bitch, as they called in the bomb squad to dismantle and inspect the phone. After they finally cleared me, one of the guards asked me "What is the purpose of this?" I responded "Because it's fun".
At least security in Newark had a sense of humor about it. They took photos of it for a book of all the weird shit that's gone through security there (I really hope they publish that someday).
Safety sells. Let's say it's 2025. You can buy a Tesla Model Z, or GM's latest sedan for about 30 grand. In addition to the E-MPG rating, there's also a new sticker for deaths and injuries per mile driven. The Tesla auto-drive enabled car has a death rate one tenth that of the GM car. Which one is your spouse going to insist that you buy?
I personally like to drive, especially on road trips, but I like the idea of a car that has much better reaction time that can correct if I do something stupid, or it sees something I can't (via vehicle to vehicle reporting).
Speaking of which, there will be many many opportunities to reduce impact severity. Example: a vehicle pulls out in front of you unexpectedly. If the car can react instantly where you'd take a fraction of a second, it can shed enough speed to reduce the severity of impact significantly (if not avoid it altogether). Reducing speed by 25%, will reduce the impact energy by almost half, so even small improvements will result in big differences in injuries and fatalities.
What if the GM has a better rating? Will you find some reason that it's wrong, or didn't account for X, Y, and Z, to rationalize your desire to buy the Tesla regardless?
SO driver-assisted cars will be popular. No reason why it has to go all the way to self-driving. And 10 years of driver-assist gradually taking over more functions will help reduce FUD to the point we'll all find ourselves thinking about driving the way we feel about horses and dial telephones.
Two doors from my house is a deluxe 3 unit condo building that has been uninhabited for years. Not once have I seen any evidence of anyone living there. The units went for little under $2 million apiece. It makes me wonder what will happen if/when China has a financial crisis and people start trying to liquidate their offshore piggy banks.
Exactly! If this is indeed a major factor, could we see the SF housing market nose-dive if/when the Chinese market does at the same time? Or if/when better investment vehicles become available to them domestically?
I am currently dealing with this issue, though on a smaller scale.
The moral of the story is to forward exercise options if you can. Basically what this means is you pay to exercise on your start date. If you quit or get pink slipped before the standard one year cliff, the company does a buyback. Otherwise, the shares vest as per your vesting schedule. You can potentially avoid a lot of the AMT nastiness this way, and start the clock on long-term gains treatment on day one.
That said, companies really should scrap the 90 day exercise window. Uber et al want to avoid employees selling shares on side markets. If they just allow them to hold onto their options for years, most will sit on them rather than feel rushed to sell. I know they want to retain talent, but they should be doing that via rewards versus punitive measures.
In any case, its worth it to spend a couple hundred bucks on a tax expert to figure out in advance how to handle options so you don't get burned by taxes on fictional gains.
It's different with Uber in hindsight, but in general, employees at start-ups are already overinvested in the success of the start-up, and that success is unlikely. I don't recommend that most people also sink their cash into their employer.
Be careful, the company may not be required to buyback the shares. The company may have the option to accelerate the vesting schedule on the options. It's best to assume they'll choose to do this only when it's optimal for them, which likely means when it's suboptimal for you.
It's a real dilemma, as the company is doing well enough that the 409a value is not trivial, but its not clear that they will have a liquidity event in the near term. So on one hand I don't want to get screwed on a fictional profit on taxes, but on the other I don't want to forfeit the options as I earned them, and as far as I am concerned, that was part of my compensation for taking below market salary.
It bothers me that the terms are unnecessarily anti-employee. 90 days simply isn't enough time, especially when critical details related to the cap table and liquidation preferences are obfuscated. If they are not prepared to buy shares back at 409a value, they should allow an extended exercise window.
I think where a lot of technical people get fleeced in compensation discussions is they let themselves get into a 1:1 personal discussion where they feel compelled to agree on the spot. Most business deals are worked out at a distance once the in person meetings are out of the way.
Treat this the same way you might go over a lease for office space. Let them make the initial offer (they have much better data about market rate and what they are willing to pay, you don't and may box yourself into a lowball position). Then take some time to figure out if it works, and take the comp discussion offline.
Keep the negotiation about compensation in writing. There are a million ways for an experienced negotiator to manipulate you in a live conversation. Break things down (salary, PTO, equity, 401k match, telework, other hard benefits), and figure out where they'll budge. And remember, it's not about being greedy, you'll be locking in your pay for 1-2 years, and you're doing your job of negotiating a good deal for you and your family. If someone doesn't respect that, that's a big red flag right there.
Pilot here. I agree with other posts about energy density being an important factor here. I don't expect to see all-solar aircraft anytime soon. The best way to get aviation to become carbon neutral will be via biofuels, which several airlines are already experimenting with.
That said, I can see a couple of areas where solar will contribute.
While it will be very difficult to generate all of the power needed for an airliner via solar, there's no reason not to cover the aircraft in high efficiency (triple junction) solar cells. A large airliner will have a usable sky facing surface area of 1,000 square meters or so (rough estimate). Enough to generate a few hundred kilowatts of power. If the aircraft has hybrid gas/electric engines, that power can reduce the fuel burn a bit (even a small reduction is a big deal).
I can also see where a serial hybrid design could be workable (e.g. lots of fuel cells generating electric power that in turn drives electric fans). This would be attractive, especially in smaller planes, due to the potential to reduce the risk of mechanical failure.
Twenty year SF resident here, and property owner. I am consistently amazed at how selfish a lot of people here are. They'll talk about how pro-housing they are, until someone bulldozes a teardown home on their street and _gasp_ builds infill development.
I am one of the last single family homes on my street, and as much as I would like it to remain a quaint little street, it needs denser development, so I've never complained about the condos going up. My property rights end at my property line (simple concept but one that confounds weak minds who can't be bothered to read the fine print when they bought their place).
My property rights end at my property line (simple concept but one that confounds weak minds who can't be bothered to read the fine print when they bought their place).
Zoning is a bit more complex than that. And isn't simply about "property rights."
Long time App Engine user here. If you're sending email as part of your app, I'd recommend using Mailgun (or similar services). You can set up DKIM, inbound routes, etc, and generally have more control over how your mail is processed. I never got the impression App Engine really wanted to be in the email delivery business, so if that's important to you, there are tools that are focused on that (and free up to a monthly quota). My $0.02.
Love Mailgun. You can configure it to just be a very easy mail provider or use the APIs to send mail and turn on all kinds of things like campaign monitoring, tags, click opens, etc.
The best part for me when using it for customers has been the bounce/click through rate tracking. When someone asks me, "how do I know they got it?" It's incredibly nice to point them to
the dashboard and show a less than 1% bounce rate (people putting in bad email is almost always the reason) with a log of every single email sent.
Most my clients get this service for free because their volume us low enough. They have quite a generous free tier.
+1 as well, after the changes to Mandrill recently, was looking for a new provider and can also recommend Mailgun (at least, for ease and configurability in set up and testing so far, not yet in production).
Yes, Mandrill should have kept the free quota after DKIM and SPF verification. Now, I will be trying out the competitors (Sendgrid and Mailgun) and if I find them at par with Mandrill then for paid projects, I might use them rather than Mandrill.
For our clients, the appeal of Mandrill is the Mailchimp Template Editor. I think this is where their focus is going and so if you don't need that, then definitely check out competitors.
Out of around 18 projects, in which we have used Mandrill, only in 1 we have used the template editor. (I think only about half went for paid accounts when the project went live.) Most of our need was simple and quick transactional messages (Registration, Forgot Password, etc.). The main reason we chose Mandrill was ease of set up over Amazon SES. (Even though we had AWS accounts for all projects.)
Anyways, it's up to Mandrill to choose who they want to serve. I really liked the service though. Best of Luck.
Thanks for the suggestion! I was having issues with SendGrid and had never heard of Mailgun. Took literally 2 minutes to get set up on Mailgun, add the credentials to my app, and send my first email! It's a super small app so don't need anything fancy, Mailgun is perfect.
edit: Not to say Mailgun isn't fancy, I have no idea if it is or not, I can say that it works in minutes though.
Notice that the hot zone spans across jurisdictions that deliberately opted out of Medi-Cal, and generally opposed public health measures in general. Sad, because if Zika gets rolling there, the people who will most need access to health care will be the working poor.
I enjoyed hours of fun and merriment going through security with it. Frankfurt in particular was a real bitch, as they called in the bomb squad to dismantle and inspect the phone. After they finally cleared me, one of the guards asked me "What is the purpose of this?" I responded "Because it's fun".
At least security in Newark had a sense of humor about it. They took photos of it for a book of all the weird shit that's gone through security there (I really hope they publish that someday).