It also doesn't include that a $1.8MM mortgage usually implies a $2.25MM house that you just put down $450k on.
The median price of American homes is $400k. In California it's $860k. In the Bay Area it's $1.5MM. You can get a house in the Bay Area for under $1.8MM, but you need a $360k down payment, and you will likely face a tradeoff between good schools, safe neighborhoods, being within walking distance of anything, and having a nice sized house. Outside of NYC, these numbers are the upper echelon. If you disagree, you have very expensive taste masquerading as requirements.
On that point about home sizes, Americans are frequently surprised how much less space Europeans are fine living in.
You are confusing 6k and 12k mortgages: the former is to buy a modest house today in most decent areas in the US. The latter is to buy a modest house in Bay Area, where a large fraction of hacker news users reside.
A “modest” house to me is a median house: around 2k sqft, run-of-the-mill construction, cheap materials, 8 feet ceilings, <10k sqft lot.
Do you have proof that they changed the recipe/process. My wife and I have long suspected this, but I believe officially they denied any change.
The rebrand was an absolute disaster of marketing. You have a 125 year old brewery with an old-fashioned looking logo, and you throw that all out for a more modern design that looks like every other beer on the shelf that got their designer off of fiver.
"Preponderance of evidence" here refers to a legal standard (i.e. was it more likely than not) rather than the criminal standard of "beyond a reasonable doubt" and not "most of the evidence."
The prosecutors didn't charge him with hiring hitmen because they were uncertain that they could prove it beyond a resonable doubt, but the evidence they were able to present suggests he probably did it.
If only one side is presenting evidence, isn't it likely that the preponderance of evidence will support their claim? I only browsed the linked judgment, but I didn't see the defense address the hitman claims.
"'small “nudges', often the sorts of things that we might not think would affect us at all, can have big effects on behavior. Thus the claims that elections are decided by college football games and shark attacks..."
In Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein's book "Nudge," where I believe the term was coined or at least popularized, nudges are almost exclusively presented as the results of "choice architecture," that is the way decisions are presented to people. Of note is that this makes the nudge directly related to the decision itself, and bears resemblance to the butterfly effect only in that both make claims about cause and effect.
To say that behavioral economics is obsessed with trying to hunt down unexpected correlations and publish papers is at best misleading or just plain wrong. I'm sure there are obscure researchers invloved in such pursuits, but it's crazy to characterize the entire discipline this way. He has the caveat "at least how it is presented in the news media." What is that? He should have talked to someone or read something (like Nudge, the book) before ranting. Did he see John Stossel do a segment or something and now he's an expert?
Also of note is that the author is a statistician and political scientist, but his "piranha argument" is a crude attempt at colloquializing analysis that economists (including behavioral economists!) do all the time. Close behind in ubiquity of the economic mantra that "there is no such thing as a free lunch" is that "people respond to incentives." The law of unintended consequences was a term that was popularized by a sociologist, but its roots can be found in the writings of Joseph Schumpeter.
The author indicates at the beginning that the word "nudge" is any contextual influence, irrespective of the choice made. In fact, the "choice architecture" itself could be a "nudge" in this sense.
> To say that behavioral economics is obsessed with ...
That's not what he's saying. It's more like: in defense of some theory, researchers publish findings with an effect that could (according to the literature) be attributed to a gazillion other causes, but they never bother to address that. The interpretation of the data is thus (extremely) limited, or dishonest, and that's disregarding other aspects (such as generalization). They just present the result as support for their own theory. Hence there's a myriad of theories, all of which are almost completely false.
> now he's an expert?
To me, the author pretty much seems to be an expert. "Andrew Gelman is a professor of statistics and political science at Columbia University." Perhaps not an expert in behavioral economics per se, but an grave methodological error in one discipline is also one in any other discipline.
In the US, any stock held past December 31 of the year in which it was obtained by exerciing an ISO (the most common kind of startup option) generates "income" according to the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT).
AMT is essentially a completely different taxation system that runs in parallel to regular income tax in America. If the shares you exercise are worth a good amount, you will probably wind up paying AMT, especially if you live in a place with high state and local taxes.
After calculating your tax liability for both systems, you have to pay whichever is larger of regular income tax or AMT. Usually this payment, or part of it, comes due April 15th of the next year. Your company is not involved in your reporting and paying these taxes, but it's a federal crime to either misrepresent your income (which omitting the exercise from your filing would be) or not to pay the appropriate taxes.
If you haven't realized yet, a lot of this is complicated, so do your own due dilligence and/or work with a tax professional.
The AMT tax rate is 26% or 28%. The "income" considered by AMT for exercising and holding is equal to the difference between your strike price and the fair market value (FMV) of the stock on the day you exercised. FMV is based on a 409a valuation for companies that are still private. For public companies it's the market price for the stock on that day.
I'm not sure what you mean by your having "a low strike price (<$100 for all shares). For 100k shares, a strike price of $0.001 would cost $100 to exercise 100k shares.
To make the math easy, I'll give a hyptothetical...
You have 100k vested shares with a strike price of $0.10. The company has done well for the past 3 years and now has a FMV of $3.10 per share. To exercise 100k shares, you would need to pay $10k. However, if you're still holding these shares on 1/1/2021, you will have an AMT tax liability due 4/15/2021 of ~28% * ($3.10 - $0.10) * 100k = $84k.
Now it's weird how AMT works, so the above number isn't exactly what you wind up paying, but it's close. In general, the case stated above implies you would owe a sizeable amount in taxes if you exercised and held the stock.
People do this if they're leaving a company and their options will otherwise expire, or if they strongly believe the company will IPO or be acquired soon. Exercising starts a clock on the stock you're holding. If you hold the stock for a year after you exercise, your earnings will then only be taxed at the long term capital gains rate (probably 20%) rather than the ordinary income tax rate (usually higher than 20%). Earnings are the sale price minus the strike price (what you paid to acquire the stock or your "cost basis").
The downside of exercising now is 1) you have to pay cash to exercise, 2) you will generate a tax liability without necessarily having a way to sell your stock, and 3) if the price of the stock falls, the AMT you paid winds up being an even greater percent of the value. There is a way to receive credit on future tax bills for previously paid AMT tax that wound up like this, but it's complicated and best to be avoided.
The upside is mostly to obtain the a lower tax rate on the eventual sale. Most employees still with the company who didn't exercise their stock early don't exercise it until they plan to sell it.
The headline seems to imply that Washington is inflating its COVID death statistics, but the article seems more interested in proving that point than examining the data in good faith, which isn't surprising given that this is a conservative think tank founded by someone who publicly warned during the Obama administration that Americans are on the verge of losing their liberties to the government.
They are bringing up the most obvious cases of misclassification to prove a point. There are surely also less obvious ones, meaning the total is more than 0.5%.
You don't blame the kid who picked up the hammer for the destruction caused by the first kid who forged the hammer in Mount Doom, painstakingly carried it into the china store from Mordor, and waited for an excuse to start smashing china.
I really don't see Prop 30 as the entrepreneurship killer its critics make it out to be.
Why does nobody point out that in the event of an exit, an entrepreneur has control over the timing of their income? Sure, I suppose some subset of people who sold an inordinate amount of stock in 2012 now have to pay more, but how much more? Doing the math, it seems this tax likely increases ones tax bill by roughly 5%.
If you believe a 5% decrease in take-home proceeds from successful outcomes will stop entrepreneurship, I've got some swampland in Florida to sell you.
The median price of American homes is $400k. In California it's $860k. In the Bay Area it's $1.5MM. You can get a house in the Bay Area for under $1.8MM, but you need a $360k down payment, and you will likely face a tradeoff between good schools, safe neighborhoods, being within walking distance of anything, and having a nice sized house. Outside of NYC, these numbers are the upper echelon. If you disagree, you have very expensive taste masquerading as requirements.
On that point about home sizes, Americans are frequently surprised how much less space Europeans are fine living in.