I do it the opposite way myself. If the stock is increasing there's a nice tax bonus on most ESPP plans by holding it 2 years from the start of the plan. If you have a lookback provision, by holding 2 years you shift more of your gains from ordinary income into long term capital gains (LTCG).
So a common example is a 6 month buying period with a lookback and a 15% purchase discount. Say the stock was $10 at the start of the period and ended at $12. The lookback period takes the lower of those two for purchase. A common misconception is that it is the lowest price anywhere in the 6 month purchase period, but no it's just the start and end values.
So if you sold right away you'd end up buying at min($10,$12)x85% = $8.50. You'd sell at $12 (so that's your cost basis) and have $3.50 in ordinary income tax per share.
Now say you waited 1 year to get the LTCG. In that time it went up to $13 a share. You sell and now you have $4.50 in gains. But you're still before the 2 year period so your cost basis is $12 and the split is $3.50 in ordinary income and $1 in LTCG.
Now say you waited 2 years. This is where the tax advantage happens. Your cost basis is adjusted to the min($10,$12) value. Even if the price is still at $13 when you sell your tax split is $1.50 ordinary income and $3 LTCG, because your new cost basis is $10.
Keep in mind when the stock declines over the purchase period this advantage completely evaporates.
Another thing to note on the timing. The clock starts ticking on LTCG when the stock is purchased into your account. But for the tax benefit is it from the start of the plan, when they start taking money out of your paycheck. Where I work the plan is annual, with purchases every 6 months. So on the first purchase of the period 6 months have already elapsed and I need to wait 18 months to get the tax benefit. On the second purchase 12 months have passed so I only need to wait 12 more months, which aligns with the LTCG period.
Something that commonly happens is that your brokerage sent you the cost basis for those sales at $0 on your 1099 form. There's typically an adjusted cost basis buried on their website which is what actually needs to be entered into your tax software as the cost basis, not $0.
So say you had $50k in stock vest and you sold $10k to cover the income tax. It's likely that when you import your 1099 that the cost basis is set to $0 on the $10k which if treated as a gain is a $2k-$3k tax bill. But if you find the adjusted cost basis and enter it the taxes drop to essentially $0.
So if you've experienced a huge, unexpected tax bill from RSUs vesting, go back and look at your tax return. If you see a $0 cost basis on the form then you overpaid. It may not be too late to amend your return and get it back.
It's not Etrade, it is the IRS instructions for Form 1099-B, Box 1e (cost basis).
"If the securities were acquired through the exercise of a compensatory option, the basis has not been adjusted to include any amount related to the option that was reported to you on a Form W-2."*
While income tax and short term capital gains do work like that (an increasing marginal rate) long term capital gains (LTCG) do not. They are paid fully at the bracket you fall in to. When calculating tax rates (US federal, states may vary) you apply income first and capital gains second to determine your rate.
If you're filing single the LTCG threshold is $518,900 in 2024. So as an example, if you made $400,000 in income and $118,000 in LTCG that would put you just under the threshold to pay 15%. you'd calculate ordinary income tax on the $400,000 and then you'd pay $118,000x15%=$17,700 in LTCG.
But if you made just $2000 more in LTCG you'd pay much more as you'd be bumped into the higher 20% rate. You'd end up paying $120,000x20%=$24,000 in LTCG taxes, an increase of $6300 in taxes on just and additional $2000 in gains.
First, let's state that you are referring to taxable income, not gross income. The former is usually non-trivially smaller than the latter, due to adjustments (including pre-tax paycheck deductions) and itemized/standard deduction.
Using 2023 numbers (since we don't know whether 2024 tax law will change between now and the end of the year), and your dollar amounts:
$400K of ordinary taxable income tops out at 35% marginal rate, the total tax is $111,895.
It is regulated. If it looks like a die in a game of chance then it is a fair die. If it looks like a deck of cards, it is a fair deck of cards. This is written into the gambling laws of each regulated gaming jurisdiction.
And like most regulations, these rules exist precisely because someone tried exactly this scheme at some point. And the regulators saw it and said "Oh hell no" and made a rule. As the saying goes, regulations are written in blood.
Source: Casino game developer and mathematician for 20+ years.
as I understand it, they are allowed to get pretty creative with the odds on "reel" type video slot machines.
the odds of a given outcome have to match the published odds in the payout table, but the animated reels don't have to be an accurate physical simulation of reels -- they are allowed to make it look like there was a "near miss" of a jackpot for instance.
normally it is something like: it looks like poker (single player) but with some bonus side game/bet added to add more edge to casino, where it tries to give you an illusion that you have more chance.
The majority of game mathematicians work on video slot machines. These games have somewhat complex payout structures, seeing that they may have 40 or 50 "lines" (directions in which identical symbols trigger a payout), one or more "scattered symbol" prizes (payouts based on the appearance of a minimum number of special symbols, regardless of lining up), wild symbols, multiple progressive jackpots (individual and shared), one or more bonus games, free spins (often at an increased payout multiple, with the possibility of triggering jackpots), and possibly more gameplay features.
Incorporating all of these features into a single games with an acceptable "hold percentage" (theoretical percentage of wagers that result in casino profit) that is still fun to play that gives players a feel that they have a good chance of winning and generates repeat play, is a difficult task that every slot machine vendor is trying to achieve, and the mathematicians are tasked with balancing frequency of payouts with amount of payouts to keep players playing.
Right now Aristocrat Gaming is the most successful, they have the most titles (and the top spots) on industry-wide slot performance surveys.
It applies to all regulated gambling devices in a jurisdiction that has that rule. Virtual dice/card decks must behave like a fair version of their physical counterpart. And they basically all have that rule because Nevada has it. Every manufacturer wants to sell in Nevada and they only want to make one version of their software, so even if some places doesn't have that rule it's highly likely that the game still behaves that way anyway.
I'd describe it as being a mashup of voting machine development with game design. Gambling is a form of entertainment for most people who do it. When they go to a casino they vote with their dollars on which games they find entertaining. But we can't send our games directly to players, we sell to casinos. And every single one gets tested and approved by and independent regulatory board whose rules create a lot of boundaries/limits on how creative our designs can be.
And the mathematician part is exactly like being a "fun accountant" for the game. We set your fun budget and make sure the player (randomly, on average) never exceeds it.
I did gaming math in Vegas for what I believe to be the biggest gaming math consultancy in Nevada (at least at the time). The games were divided between Table, Slot, and Video Poker. I did table games, because I find slot and video poker math to be boring.
Each assignment to me I was provided the rules of the game and the payout table. It was my job to determine the optimal way to play the game and calculate the house edge if you played with the optimal strategy. When I turned in my assignment I only provided the exact house edge. The owner of the business worked independently to determine the house edge as well, and if our numbers matched then he was confident that it was correct. If we had different numbers then we had to dig in to see who made a mistake.
I found table games fun to work on because of the variety of games people came up with, and it was mostly fun to determine the optimal strategy.
The owner of the company was very ethical. He attempted to convince clients to not spend money on introducing new table games. He would tell them that there was about a 1 in 1,000 chance that they would be able to convince a casino to let them do a 3-month trial run, and another 1 in 1,000 chance that the game would outperform blackjack in terms of dollars earned per square foot per month (not necessarily because it isn't a good game, but just because people love blackjack and are more wary of a game they aren't familiar with (it is intimidating to walk up to a game you don't know how to play, especially if you can't practice online first, and you don't want to feel dumb in front of strangers)).
Slots do fine in terms of making the casino money and plenty of room for variety. They have a high house edge. Video poker has a lower house edge, but a new variant of video poker is just adding the game to the menu of a video poker machine already in the casino. There is also less risk for someone that hasn't played a slot or video poker game because it is just them and the machine and no one to feel embarrassed watching you figure out how to play. So he didn't need to warn people that came to him with those types of games.
For new table games the gaming commission requires a trial period to verify that the drop (the profit the casino made) was statistically consistent with the calculated house edge.
I wouldn't have wanted to do it full time, I did about one game a month on a contract basis. I was going to work on a game a month no matter what to satisfy my curiosity and need to do math (finding a new game in a casino). I found a new game with a mistake that gave the player and edge, shared it with the guy that ran the company and he hired me when he confirmed I was correct.
The exception to his warning about table games was adding side bets to existing table games. That doesn't take up any additional square feet, and the house edge is much higher on all of the side bets, and very easy for the player to understand how to participate in the side bet.
As far as I can recall the only new table game introduced in the last few decades that succeeded was Three Card Poker, and the other poker-variants that spawned from it.
If you want to get into this, you are probably better off working for a company like IGT or Arsitocrat that makes their own games and is constantly trying to come up with new ideas and testing them.
What value are you adding here by shitting on another poster's job? Just because it isn't something that interests you personally, is it necessary to announce that?
This guy wasn't proposing anything as crazy as pay-per-bullet. There's lots of games with limited ammo and you find more in the environment. Even in Doom you might run out of ammo for your favorite gun and need to put it away until you found another ammo pack in the level. This is why Valorant has a knife you can switch to, because if you waste gun ammo you run out on your main weapon. In Fortnite you have to find ammo and weapons in chests, etc. This guy was proposing an option to pay to refill your inventory immediately. But people heard "reload" and assumed something completely different.
The real problem with his proposal is it quickly falls apart if you think about it for even a minute. It's a classic pay-to-win mechanic. And once something is pay-to-win it becomes a slippery slope and a race to the bottom for the game makers. Every game has some amount of edge cases where you're playing only to realize "Damn, I'm out, this sucks. I'd pay a buck right now to refill." But once you add in some options to pay in those scenarios, the game maker has a perverse incentive to no longer make it an edge case. Some PM will realize if they make the rare event 10x more likely they'll make 10x more $$$$ and they're off to the races. They start messing with the ammo drop rates to create "pinch points" and now your super fun game really does require you to be "paying to reload" and it's not fun anymore.
This guy was trying (and failing) to present it as a player benefit but the reality is he know exactly where this road lead. It's the same place EA games with loot boxes landed in the end.
I'm not sure exactly what you're saying here, but I'm assuming you mean they run each source in separate lines. That's the same in the US. The point is that these pipes aren't well insulated so the line has probably cooled even though it is a "hot" line. Running the water a little bit flushes the cooled water out so that only hot water goes into the dishwasher. Because even though it is a "hot" line it gets cold over time if it isn't being cycled. Maybe in the UK you're much closer to the hot water source, but in the US houses are often so big and poorly designed that you need to run the water a bit before you get really hot water from the tap.
At least in Germany, dishwashers are hooked up to the cold water line. No matter what I do with my sink, the dishwasher will never get hot water on its inlet.
I believe what you're calling the "outer wall" is just the edge of the excavation grid, not a wall in the original city. The grid plan used by the archeologists won't necessarily align to the city plan.
As someone leaving Austin after 10 years, one limiting factor to growth here is water. All of the municipal water for the metro area comes from Lake Travis. There's a hard limit to how much growth the city can support even if infrastructure and housing was prioritized.
Not really, most of it comes from the Edwards aquifer and the CO river (which Lake Travis is a damned portion of).
If we stopped selling so much water to rice farmers in east texas at a hilarious discount per acre foot we wouldn't have a shortage. Utilities also haven't lowered water prices since they hiked them during draught conditions even though we've had a surplus of supply for years now. Rice farmers are still paying pennies on the dollar for thousands of gallons.
cardies = video poker