I pre-ordered the rewind, and noticed that I'll be upgraded for free! But my question is for the subscription, will there be any discounts for the pro plan?
Also, I do notice that the free version has 10 free hours a month of AI features.
How easy would it be for me to export the recordings, and use it with say Google Gemini Pro for transcribing?
Stock buybacks should be outlawed. They're really a waste for the economy; cash is being used up to buy up imaginary assets to make your previously-owned imaginary assets more valuable.
Why not use that money on more impactful things? Like higher salaries, social programs, or just R&D in general.
The number I've not seen that I most want to see is the amount of share buybacks compared to the number of shares the company gives to its employees as RSUs or stock options.
Given that tech salaries tend to have a sizable pay component made up of stock, my gut feeling is that share buybacks are in large part a roundabout way to pay their employees.
(Now, let's also go fix the laws that make it tax-advantaged to pay people via such an indirect manner.)
Is it tax-advantaged? My impression is that RSU costs count as cash at grant time, which is a good deal (for the company) when the stock is going down but a bad deal when the stock is going up. The RSUs you get are counted as ordinary income when they vest.
Whether this is a good deal for the employee is a bit complicated: you're effectively holding stock for 4 years but taxed at ordinary income rates (as opposed to long term capital gains). On the other hand, if the stock goes up you've locked in being paid substantially above market. During the hot market times this effectively was an option: if they stayed they got stock granted at a low price, but they could leave if a different company was paying more.
Private companies can offer ISOs which do have a nice tax treatment, but this is all predicated on public company buybacks where that doesn't apply.
> Why not use that money on more impactful things? Like higher salaries, social programs, or just R&D in general.
Because the money would not be spent on any of those things. Buybacks are a favorite boogeyman, but they are just tax efficient dividends. They certainly give people something to complain about though.
> Buybacks are a favorite boogeyman, but they are just tax efficient dividends.
"Tax-efficient" is weasel language. If the money was spent as dividends it would be taxed and then would benefit someone besides the executive suite and investors. If they were unwilling to pay that tax, then the money would need to be reinvested in the company in the form of higher salaries or R&D. So yes, if buybacks were illegal the money WOULD go to one of these things.
It's not really weasel language, the potential taxable events are limited to the people who are selling their shares back to the company instead of every shareholder.
The potentially taxable dollars are the same (non-withstanding the buyback excise tax), it's just shaped differently.
I would argue in a global sense its more tax-efficient that tax-advantaged (which is admittedly pedantic).
The main idea people need to remember is that if a company buys back its stock, someone else is selling it.
For equality sake, assume that it's been held for a year (so both the cap gains and equivalent dividend would be taxed at the same rates).
For an X amount of dollars, dividends and buybacks are going to generate the roughly a similar kind of 'tax footprint' for lack of a better term. The potential taxable events are just filtered to 'the entities that wanted to sell their shares' vs 'every equity holder'.
In the average case it's a fair assumption the dividend is going to be qualified, and the owner is going to meet the 60/120 holding period, which effective means it will be taxed at cap gains rates. If not that's kinda their own deal.
I think people fixate too much on pricing dynamics. Kind of at a Gaussian surface level, the simple way to explain a price is eps * earnings multiple, where your inflated demand dynamics get lumped in with the multiple.
The issue is an earnings multiple encompasses so much information as to be of little use, it's not trivial to quantify anything from it.
Let me be clear, buybacks can be a bad use of capital. The stock can go down to any number of factors, general market downturn etc. A buyback is an investment of the company in itself, and investments can be bad.
But if you have a number of earnings and a number of shares, if you reduce the number of shares, you have more earnings per share. At a constant multiple, an increase in eps should dictate an increase in price. That's as real as you and me.
Seems like they're "passive" energy chips are only gonna be targeted $$$ towards big organizations, which make use of the Josephon effect. But if they're targeting transistor technology for the masses, how will they have an advantage against the incumbents
It feels to me that AirBNB hosts are an entitled group of people. They want all the benefits of renting out their place (in most cases, it goes against the original intent of renting a spare room, or family home), but want to make the experience less than ideal for customers. There's a multitude of rules, chores, invasions of privacy (Cameras, decibel monitors, et al).
These are supposed to be vacations, not a walking-on-eggshells experience because the host is constantly spying on you. If there's damage, submit a claim against the person.
In a lot of countries many of the hosts are violating zoning laws and evading tax to.
A lot of people are getting very tired of being subjected to weekend after weekend of stags and hen parties because the neighboring apartment was turned into a hotel room.
Not to mention the extra pressure it's put on property and rents.
I agree. AirBNB was a mistake. It used to be that an apartment could be rented out for a decent amount above your mortgage, and expenses. But now there's no incentive to opt for long-term rentals, when a short-term one is more profitable.
Then the rich get richer and consolidate more properties under their companies, leaving the rest to fend for themselves. Think of people who had been making sacrifices so they could save up to purchase something, just to be outbid by collective groups of people just purchasing property to rent them out. There's no competing.
The worse part is how the “success stories” or airbnb hosts have brainwashed lots of people: my middle class friends strongly oppose regulating airbnb because they dream of someday buying a place to rent on airbnb and get passive income, when they don't realize the reason their rents and housing prices are so high is because of this kind of behavior and that they'll never make it in the first place because of the high prices. The ones who owned before airbnb came where the ones who made real money.
> They want all the benefits of renting out their place (in most cases, it goes against the original intent of renting a spare room, or family home), but want to make the experience less than ideal for customers.
In the first part of that sentence you characterize the transaction as akin to renting out a spare room, but in the second part you characterize the guests as "customers." Historically, if you rented a room from someone, you were subject to all sorts of rules, invasions of privacy, etc. In many circumstances, that's still the case (e.g. with live-in nannies).
What's actually happening is that guests treat AirBnBs like hotel rooms, and hosts are doing the same thing. It's just a commercial, arm's-length transaction.
Exactly, in the former situation you obviously don't have a full expectation of privacy. But when you're paying a premium for an entire property, onerous rules and spying are uncalled for.
"Hotels" does not solve "I'd like to stay in an isolated cabin in the countryside", or various other things that are readily available on vacation rental sites.
(AirBnB has lots of other problems, but "hotels" alone are not a complete replacement for what it provides.)
Fair enough, hotels don't fully cover the entire AirBnB usecase, but cabin rentals and bed-and-breakfasts in the country have been around forever, too.
My point is, commercial rentals exist because of the problems AirBnB are having. They're trying to "disrupt" the industry by not providing the protections and safeguards to save money, and basically running into all of the problems that led to the commercial rental industry in the first place.
Their innovation is collecting a fee while pushing the dirty work off to unsophisticated 3rd party property owners.
I forgive, but I don't forget. One thing is to not let your emotions affect your health, but if someone has crossed a boundary that has made you weary of them... there's no reason to open yourself up to them again.
those are also resetting. Profits are in decline, resetting. Need a new batch of workers, reset the old ones right away. Resetting benefits. Reset workers back to the office. Reset PTO policy.
If you want to work for a company where your salary is 100% tied to yearly profit, by my guest. But even a 2 second critical thinking exercise will demonstrate why that is a bad idea.
One of my friend literally work in a worker co-op for consultants. He has a base salary a bit lower than mine, but double it each year (2024 might be different though)
