This is my number one argument against HOAs: They are fundamentally un-American. Truly in every sense they are for collectivism over individual rights and it's insane.

I live in a neighborhood where if you want to cut down a tree more than 10" in diameter you have to get all of your neighbors' buy-in. It's my tree! And your trees are your trees!

Where I live the city mandates that I can't cut down trees over a certain diameter no matter how many of my neighbors I ask. Even if I planted the tree!

You can, of course, in actuality, but you'll face a fine for doing so. Though if none of the neighbors report it you might get off scot-free.

Say what you will about whether or not a private company like Paypal should have the ability to do this.

What clearly is true based on this example is that if we ever gave this power to the government they would use it and use it in a dangerous way.

So, these decisions ought to be entrusted to an entity whose responsibilities are to its shareholders rather than elected representatives of the general population?

honestly, amorality seems less scary than self-righteousness to me at this point in history.

If you live in western Europe that is a point in favor of the government. Compared to the self rightousness of private companies the government are amoral buteacrats just following the regulations. Sure, there is some personal selrightousness but nowhere close to the levels at American tech companies.

>If you live in western Europe that is a point in favor of the government.

Maybe if history started in 1947 it would. Righteousness tends to do much better at the ballot box than the stock market. And self-righteous as American tech is for advertising purposes, I'd still say it has an order of magnitude more self-awareness than American politics for advertising purposes.

The representatives of the US are not “elected by the general population”. If that were the case, Montana wouldn’t have the same number of Senators as California, the President of the United States in 2016 would have been the one who received the most popular votes and gerrymandering wouldn’t be a thing.

The last thing I want is to give the government more power. Have you been paying attention to laws in conservative states that want to regulate speech on Facebook and Twitter but go out of their way to make sure that sites like Truth Social aren’t affected, the “Stop Woke” act in Florida, the laws passed in GA and Florida to punish corporations who speak out against the government (Delta and Disney specifically).

Private companies, especially US based, tend to ban everyone based on keeping every pressure group out there happy.

At this point I'm pretty sure a government would ban less.

? Government does have this power, because they have courts, police, and the army.

Who knows, like Twitter, government officials are not sitting in the same Slack channel as Paypal employees?

There are two games that come to mind that are/were like this:

1) Total War series — it's not FPS per se but there is the idea of managing the macro situation (resources, where armies are, developing cities, etc.) and then when you actually attack another army or lay seige, you have more of a tactical view where you direct the action.

2) The original Rainbow Six (and maybe some of its immediate sequels). You would plan out exactly what you want every one of your special ops guys to do (e.g., when I give the signal throw a flashbang into this room) and then you get to play as one of them. Not sure if anyone has replicated this yet!

Keeping your fixed costs meaningfully less than your non-variable compensation (i.e., RSUs) is the root of everything he said here. It's that simple.

Less than the recession value of RSUs. They won't go to zero in a recession, unless your salary does too.

Do you keep your RSU's if you lose your job? I think that's the real fear here.

Unvested RSUs? Of course not.

Then that doesn't seem like a great recession hedge. I think the biggest immediate fear of a recession is losing your job, your investments should be available in that situation.

I think GP was saying you shouldn't take them into account, not that they are a good hedge.

I wonder how many bankruptcies could be avoided if more people just had some basic spreadsheet literacy.

Before I bought a house, I built a stupid simple model to understand what my monthly expenses would look like. What you get an appreciation for is that very quickly you can go from comfortable to precarious with just a few additional fixed expenses (childcare, a new car, a boat).

Without laying it all out and seeing how your numbers change, it's hard to get a visceral appreciation for your finances.

Spreadsheets can be extremely powerful for what-if analyses. They can of course also be abused in that respect, especially in a business context, where complex spreadsheet models can get conflated with reality.

I wrote a CLI tool in Python for this exact use case and am currently using it to write a novel. Basically the CLI tool solves a lot of the tedious issues that come up (e.g., combining all of the text files, reordering them, etc.)

If you like writing out of a text editor (I use Atom) it's super useful.

https://github.com/edelgm6/draft

cool, will check it out. thanks

This calls to mind a quote from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian:

  It makes no difference what men think of war, said the judge. 
  War endures. As well ask men what they think of stone. War 
  was always here. Before man was, war waited for him. The 
  ultimate trade awaiting its ultimate practitioner. That is 
  the way it was and will be. That way and not some other way.

Just swap our war for Excel! "It makes no difference what men think of Excel, said the judge. Excel endures. As well ask men what they think of stone."

Well, the thing is that they cap the size of the fund at $10B so it's not really a CAGR per se as the original capital isn't appreciating at that rate.

It's just they have $10B invested and then they distribute $6.6B per year and that's it (i.e., the fund doesn't become $16.6B next year).

Still take your point that it's an insane figure!

Agreed!

It's easy to say 'you should be investing that capital into projects.'

But I think people don't realize how much money is actually generated by some of these companies.

I know AAPL is the strongest possible case for my argument, but bear with me.

Their operating cash flow net of CAPEX is ~$65B as of their 2018 year ending in September. I.e., after paying for all of the investments they want to make, they still have $65B in straight up cash left over.

I mean -- what are you supposed to do with all of that?

There's no problem with returning capital to shareholders. There is a problem when shareholders just plow it back into index funds. Does Apple have a better use of money than shareholders? Well, there are investments available to Apple that aren't even available to shareholders, so on the face of it, how could they not?

Therefore the issue isn't so much Apple not being able to find better opportunities than shareholders, but that it can't find better opportunities than Apple -- making those actually good investments would look bad for Apple because of how absurdly profitable it is. That's not a good reason to return capital, if you think about it carefully.

I totally believe it.

If you've ever taken a taxi in a market like South Africa, China, or Chile, it's so cheap it's insane. Almost unbelievable.

In many cases the cars are more or less the same, the gas costs more or less the same, so the only variable that's different is the cost of labor which Waymo eliminates.

Most of those cars are much older and have much lower maintenance labor costs as well. I fully expect self driving cars to remain more expensive than taxis in many of the countries I've visited.

Oh well sure I do as well. All they have to do is be less expensive than what Uber can deliver enough to get people over any concerns with technology and they're good.

My point is really that Waymo is eliminating what is unquestionably the highest marginal cost component of a ride.