How does your car insurance treat the vehicle in terms of replacement cost? Does the low FMV predominate, or the high sticker price and high cost of repairs?
We've looked at doing this as well. Our commutes are so short that a vehicle with only 50 miles of range would work for 90% of our trips. Such a vehicle is nigh-useless to many people, but for us it's a great complement to an ICE or PHEV. It helps that we live in temperate climate, so we never really have to deal with the freezing temperatures that would knock off 20 or 30% of the range.
> Leasing my Mach-E was the right thing, and more are doing it. Leasing made up over 35% of new EV financing in the first quarter of 2024, up significantly from 12% in 2023, according to global data company Experian. It makes sense for such fast-moving tech. When my lease expires in two years, I expect better batteries, chips and more.
Part of the reason leasing is popular is that the current batch of incentives offers some rebates only if you lease. Some vehicles qualify either way, but a decent chunk of them it's only if you lease. I would have liked to have seen numbers here that show it's actually better to lease. If you only have a vehicle for two years, the bit about low-maintenance is mooted, since most vehicles have little maintenance in the first couple years anyway.
This can't come soon enough. Apple has made Siri dumber over the years. I used to be able to say "Hey Siri, play Overcast" and it would play my podcasts. Now it says "I don't see any music by Overcast in Apple Music". When I say "Hey Siri, tell the Overcast app to play" it replies "the Overcast app doesn't have any unplayed content" — even when I'm in the middle of an episode, and I have many unplayed episodes. It is dumb as rocks.
> According to Brian Spear, whose company handled the chemical filtration of the pools used for U.S. Olympic Swim Trials, the potent smell associated with swimming pools is the byproduct of odorless chlorine reacting with organic compounds in the water, like hair or dead skin. Or urine.
Interesting...so if a pool "smells like chlorine," that means it's very dirty?
Interesting. I have noticed that my most-upvoted comments relate to legal questions, which I have relatively more expertise than most HNers (I used to be a lawyer). Although I'm not among the top commenters for law/legal/lawyer according to this tool, I definitely recognize some of the top names and can recall seeing their comments in legal threads. Pretty cool tool!
Yes, earnouts can help bridge a valuation gap — and if the buyer is reasonable/kind, then they can create a win-win scenario. The question is whether a seller can accurately identify whether their counterparty is reasonable/kind. This is the sort of thing that lawyers should be able to help with, since they're involved in many deals. But as mentioned above, they may have misaligned interests that cloud their judgment.
I used to be a lawyer in SV, and whenever my lawyer friends talk about earnouts, it's always in the context of what a bad deal they are for founders.
Basically, they take a lot of lawyer time to negotiate, in order to make them as close to airtight as possible. And if anything goes wrong, it takes a lot of lawyer time to resolve them. And lawyer time equals money (as much as $2k/hr, billed in 6 minute-increments). So you could pay six figures negotiating an earnout, and another six figures when things don't go as planned. That doesn't mean they're always a bad idea — just the vast majority of the time.
A candid lawyer will counsel you away from an earnout, and if a lawyer doesn't mention the potential downsides of earnouts, I'd consider that a big red flag.
Put simply: it would require a constitutional amendment, and those are hard to come by. The Constitution only sets a minimum age for offices — no maximum ages.
That would presumably already be against the law in many jurisdictions (cities, suburbs), so there wouldn't need to be an additional law to cover the situation where you're shooting at a drone versus a squirrel.
A 747 is huge, filled with people, and is not spying on you. To take it down, you would need serious artillery. At the far other end of the spectrum, if some drone is zipping around your house and videoing in your windows, are you allowed to do anything to take it down? Could you throw a baseball at it? Whack it with a pool skimmer?
There needs to be some nuance to recognize the massive differences between a SAM fired at a passenger jet and a pellet gun fired at a small unmanned drone snooping around your house.
> The Federal Aviation Administration punishes any shots fired at drones with the same weight as if you’d opened fire on a Boeing full of passengers. Shooting at any aircraft is charged as a felony with up to 20 years in prison as the recommended penalty.
Whoa, crazy. I wonder when/how this will be updated?
There may well be tiers like on NFLX, where some are ad-sponsored and some are not. But seeing as how rapidly the free/open models catch up to prior-generation proprietary models, I doubt there will be much margin or room for ads on anything but the latest/greatest.
Presumably this wouldn't work in areas that flood, but Fresno isn't one of them. I also wondered about earthquakes, which are a risk in some parts of CA.
We've looked at doing this as well. Our commutes are so short that a vehicle with only 50 miles of range would work for 90% of our trips. Such a vehicle is nigh-useless to many people, but for us it's a great complement to an ICE or PHEV. It helps that we live in temperate climate, so we never really have to deal with the freezing temperatures that would knock off 20 or 30% of the range.