styrophone

8 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Is there a relative tax advantage to waiting to sell ESPP shares? AFAIK, an ESPP discount counts as earned income in the same year, and LTCG tax advantages would only apply to growth, which would be the case for holding any other stock over that period.

styrophone

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

It seems your comment is characterizing the OP as a complaint mostly in search of sympathy. That doesn’t strike me to be the purpose of the post at all.

The OP is using him or herself as an example of a real behavior in response to real economic incentives, no matter how unsympathetic you find their circumstance. The fact that this situation discourages moves that most other markets encourage is a worthwhile point to bring up. Among other things, it reduces supply which has a profound effect on new buyers.

Incentives influence actions much more than personal criticism does. The OP’s relatively fortunate outcome does not mean that they don’t have something relevant to share. In contrast, targeting them with pejorative shaming is totally unhelpful.

styrophone

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

>it will always be cheaper to buy than rent.

That's decidedly untrue. In many markets you can make the case that conservative assumptions result in a cheaper buy option. However, the Bay Area in particular throws that calculus in reverse for many neighborhoods and property types.

Your argument seems to rely on the premise that buying is monteraily cheaper in the long run as long as you're willing to put in nominal sweat equity and risk. And that labor buys you some sort of citizenship that money, for the same amount of tenure, does not. The Bay Area market does not reward that puritanical ethic.

styrophone

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I did the same thing to help me get my head around it. For anyone else finding it difficult to imagine the probabilities in Monty Hall intuitively, consider replacing the 3 doors with 100 doors. After you choose the first door, the host opens 98 of the remaining 99 doors. That generalization, at least for me, helps to show that the problem can be reduced to the choice of 1 door vs all unchosen doors.

styrophone

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Yeah, the choice of a non-inertial reference frame for this example is a little confusing to me too. I also haven't been able to find an independent mention of the spinning astronaut experiment.

styrophone

9 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I think this thought experiment assumes the astronaut is spinning around an axis orthogonal to their belly. From the cartwheeling astronaut's perspective, the other one is also cartwheeling in their own plane.

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

This is a really nice explanation. I think it's helpful to go a little deeper and clarify that the virus itself isn't performing any electrical activity. Rather, the virus transfects the neural cells with a channel protein [0] that opens up in response to light. By opening the channel protein, the cell allows an influx of ions, which starts the electrical activity of the neuron in a very similar way to how it is 'naturally' stimulated. Furthermore, viral transfection is one of a few methods to expresses this protein in the animal. A population of mice that express it can be bred and maintained, with no need to transfect each one.

[0] https://web.stanford.edu/group/dlab/media/papers/Zhang%20Nat...

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

http://www.nvidia.com/object/cloud-gaming.html

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

A lot of spam doesn't expect a response and only cares about link impressions.

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

20% of appreciation for 10% of assets [0]. Seems like decent leverage on your risk.

From the point of view of a prospective homebuyer, at first this seems attractive as an avenue toward mortgage reduction. However, as you point out, it's hard to identify where this service adds any value to the asset. I fear that it ultimately results in another large pool of money pumping up the demand side at the expense of new buyers.

[0] https://point.com/calculator

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

>It also pains me to see such luxury spent on the elderly. While you may have a personal attachment to them, the rest of society would do much better with that money spent to educate and help the new generations.

I don't think we have any reason to believe that this is an unearned luxury lavished on a lucky elderly couple. It appears more likely that this is their own money, saved and invested over their lifetime, and their's to spend how they wish. Furthermore, advanced age is no reason to cast someone off to a bland waiting room. It's not healthy for a society to consider somebody's value limited to their future contribution potential. I'm happy to contribute economically to present-day's elderly folks, not only for my own attachment to someone, but for the social contract that I, too, will be old, and I doubt I'll suddenly just want to stand in the corner.

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

> I heard it does strange things to the mind to cut rat heads for an hour straight

I've spent a few years doing that. While I can see how the image might appear to folks who haven't been in that field, it's a bit hyperbolic to to think of it as a soul-bending meat grinder. Conducting an animal study in a reputable institution is regulated by an ethics committee with the purpose of scrutinizing scientific motivation and the care of animals. When you're clear on the purpose, methods, and minimum animal requirements, it isn't butchery. Furthermore, keeping the animals comfortable (through medication and other means) doesn't just serve to make the researcher feel good; it also eases stress on the animals, which otherwise can confound medical data. In short, it's a sophisticated professional endeavor, and the science gets more mindshare than the visceral unpleasantness of performing surgery on an animal. It has also been my experience that most people without experience in animal research can be quite surprised by the degree of similarity between animal care and use committees and human subject research review boards. Animal researchers can have a fairly high bar to clear to justify the use of vertebrate animals.

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

I don't think suicide is inherently a much worse cause of death than many others, but it is often associated with a mental illness, outside of which the sufferer would not choose to die. Althoigh the illness manifests as free will, it is an illness nonetheless that might be treated. I don't mean to say that it is impossible for a person of sound mind to choose not to live any longer. However, given how often treatment results in improved will to live and improved quality of life, I think it would be irresponsible to assume a healthy mind without challenge and go to euthanasia as a first resort standard of care. We certainly wouldn't do that for any other presentation of symptoms.

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Is this much different from Diffractive Optical Elements in use today?

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

According to the OP, it's because the distance cues from focal length and disparity are consistent with each other.

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Rent-to-own in general exists as a concept in many places, but it has a sour reputation due to the predatory practice of vanishing equity. Essentially, a renter is sold on a higher rent price on the premise that it will result in their eventual ownership. However, if they fail to make rent or must leave early for various circumstances, they have no equity to recoup. In some cases, this serves as an incentive to force out a tenant, and in worse cases, that's the design of the scheme from the beginning. Government housing programs tend not to fall under this category, but I have heard of some governments (e.g. Singapore) revoking housing rights without return of any capital as a penalty for certain violations.

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Access to capital gives larger landlords preferential rates, terms, and prices compared to individual buyers.

Unless the rental unit is a standalone single family home (and sometimes even then), economies of scale in maintenance and upkeep result in those costs being cheaper to a landlord.

Downpayments required for loans with good terms have opportunity cost to the buyer. On average over the long term, it has been appropriate to assign that downpayment a discount rate which is a net negative against average market returns.

If realestate markets are stable or reasonably increasing, mortgages are safe. But renting reduces risk of being stuck in an upside down loan, and risk reduction has value.

Despite all of these factors, you're right that rent includes profit, so in many cases it's wiser to purchase. But it's not as globally true as the parent comment suggests. The best choice comes from a balanced assessment of a variety of factors.

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Having worked with some physicians on AF diagnostic instrumentation, I took away that an outsized difficulty in this diagnosis is patient compliance. One doc called it a "one shower" problem; very many patients would wear holters as prescribed until they needed to take it off, and then fail to don it again. Clearly this is an issue when hunting for an infrequent arrhythmia, and it seems that the comfort and ease of use of the device are inherent to the problem.

From what you're gathering, do you imagine an eventuality in which a medical device can take a form factor similar to these popular consumer choices and provide a signal of diagnostic quality? Or do you think PPG-style sensing is limited to a fundamental degree of uncertainty with respect to arrhythmias?

styrophone

10 ปีที่แล้วdiscuss

Recognizing that the spirit of your comment is about the utility of Wikipedian descriptions in general (I agree!), I thought I'd build out some of these concepts in case someone similarly frustrated also happens to be curious about them.

"Plant" is a legacy term referring to the device or system acting on the state you're trying to control. Sticking with thermostats, the plant is the heating element.

A straightforward way to think of hysteresis is that the output depends on the history of the input. A simple example of hysteresis in a temperature controller would be to turn off heat if the temperature rises above threshold A, but only turn on heat if the temperature falls below threshold B.

"These controllers may be realized in terms of any element that provides hysteresis" -- This is indeed awkward phrasing, since it could be read as though the property of hysteresis is fundamental to create a bang-bang controller. In fact, using hysteresis is "just" a best practice. Strictly speaking, you could make a hot water heater that turns heat on and off based on a single hard temperature threshold as measured by a thermometer, and it would work. However, any noise in the system will make the output jittery and cause unnecessary cycles. Having a "heat off" threshold higher than the "heat on" threshold makes for smoother transitions.

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