Sure, you seem intent on making a point that has nothing to do with OP's assertion or my observation, so go for it. (That's a strawman fallacy, right?)
I was not highlighting the author's background to appeal to authority. I was pointing out that what OP dismissed as "coder philosophy drivel" (likely from skimming the title and nothing else) was written by someone who has nothing to do with that field.
In fact, by doing that, OP made an anti-appeal-to-authority. You seem to be interested in logical fallacies.. could you help me out and tell me if that one has a specific name?
I wasn't making a value judgement on the piece (or the author's credentials). My point was that someone took the time to share something with the world and you dismissed it after making (incorrect) assumptions about their background. You'll miss out on a lot of good stuff if you've already cast judgement before you finish reading the title.
In any case, it's a <3min read and it does offer a few non-BS pieces of advice that may be useful to some.
It looks like it is using the "Tufte" style, named after Edward Tufte, who is very famous for his writing on data visualization.
More examples: https://rstudio.github.io/tufte/
Gotcha; never been subject to gardening leave myself, but I always assumed it exists for the same purpose as a noncompete, i.e. to provide a 'cooling off' period to lessen the competitive impact that the exiting employee can have by switching to another firm. I assumed that since it's been around a while in finance that the "paid noncompete" idea became a negotiated part of the comp.
Depends on how you look at it I guess. The history of the Chinese empire had periods of relative stability, separated by periods of rebellion, civil war, and strife, sometimes hundreds of years long. There were even periods where the empire was ruled by outsiders.
At the end of any given dynasty, it would be hard to say whether the empire is truly crumbling, or merely transitioning to a new dynasty. Who knows, maybe 1,000 years from now communism and the period of strife in the 20th century will just be seen as an unstable period preceding a dynastic transition.
Since the IRS has custody of other people's sensitive data, they should be held to a different standard than the carefree homeowner in your example.
If I pay my bank for a safe deposit box, good security is part of what I am paying for. If it can be shown that they were lax/careless/negligent in the event of a theft, then I certainly would lay blame with both the bank and the thief for loss of my assets.
This is even more the case for a government with vast resources.
I think if an ignorant person wishes to trade stocks, the lack of a platform like this won't stop them. Retail brokers like Etrade and Scottrade got the pennystock crowds long ago.
Mentioned in another reply, I would hope ETFs are available on a platform like this, since they trade like stocks. Hopefully that would allow more people to put small amounts of savings into index funds. That being said, Robinhood wouldn't be very innovative on that front, since many brokers offer the more popular index-based ETFs without fees anyway.
We are probably in the same camp; I just wasn't sure if GP was comparing casinos with 'stock trading' or the equity asset class in general, which, if one subscribes to the 'boring' methods of index fund investing, are hard to beat over a 5+ year time window.
I would hope ETFs are available on this platform, since they trade like stocks.
Wow, this is a long read but definitely worth it. I have never read anything by Pettis, but I am thinking about picking up The Great Rebalancing if it explores similar stuff more deeply. It doesn't always come naturally to look at country economies as a bunch of open systems all operating in a closed system, but this read will certainly encourage that kind of thinking.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
P/E approaches infinity as you near "break even", so for a company like AMZN with both massive revenues and expenses, P/E is not useful when the two are almost equal. You must dig further and look at things like cash flow, revenue (not earnings) growth, operating margin (not profit margin), etc. These things give a much clearer picture than an odd-looking P/E. If a company with high P/E had operating margins that ware closer to profit margins (not triple, like AMZN) I would be a bit more concerned.
If capital expenditures are reduced just a bit, or if margins are improved slightly, the E part of the fraction will jump and P/E will fall massively.
All of that being said, there are still plenty of things that could go wrong for AMZN.