In most cases, you are granted a notional dollar amount that is immediately turned into a concrete and fixed number of shares that then vest over the next 4 years.
Then, any share price appreciation on the shares is captured by you at vesting, rather than being paid in cash (the value of which has been inflated away) and then purchasing shares/index that has risen in the last 1-4 years.
If you are paid in cash, you will be buying fewer shares per dollar (and per year) rather than getting the same number.
Right, but cash compensation could be structured the same way, minus whatever would be settled on for the retention value to the employer of the vesting schedule.
I get your point. The value of stock isn’t that it’s stock per se, but rather that it’s inflation-resistant even when illiquid.
It's optionality that only has an upside financially, while the downside is just having to do more interviews.
Let's say you're worth 300k on the open market as a senior software engineer. If you get a job that pays 200k a year + 400k in stock over four years, you're making ~300k.
Except if after the first year, the stock goes up 30%, you're making 330k the second year + whatever cash raise you get. Then if it goes up another 10%, and so on... etc.
If, however the stock falls after the first year, presumably you can go out and find another 300k a year job at a different company.
I've known a few people who lost everything when the company went bankrupt. (most died of old age when I was a kid - before pension reform companies often did put your retirement in the company stocks)
We are bottlenecked at energy supply, not running hot via demand. Raising rates is likely to stifle already weak sections of the economy. Additionally, we are getting into territory where raising rates threatens our own ability to pay our debt.
Just to be clear, I am not coming at this from some anti-interventionist or anti-monetary tool standpoint. It's just that demand side tools seem like the wrong lever for the job. We are backing slowly into the corner of persistent inflation or structural failure of some kind.
CPI works by asking how much people pay for rent. If home prices raise 20% in one year (not at all unreasonable in various times in the last ten years), it takes a long time for that to be reflected as many people have their rents fixed, some people have rent control, some landlords will only raise rents on new tenants, etc.
for existing, well established renters, sure. For new renters, or people who move, or people who face housing insecurity, or people who want to buy homes, it's much higher and not accurately reflected in CPI.
I wouldn't exactly call TV dinners "healthy". In many ways it was much more heavily processed fatty carbs than what passes for microwave food today. It was loaded with salt and sugar.
The main difference is that TV dinners were designed to be heated in an oven rather than a microwave, back when microwaves were less common.
My impression (as someone who was alive back then) is that the early TV dinners often weren't that different from something you'd cook yourself, but the industry has spend half a century optimising them into cheap chemical slop engineered for palatability.
Also, not all ready meals are crap. You can buy premium frozen meals from restaurant suppliers but they aren't cheap.
One study (sorry, can't recall the source off the top of my head) claimed 20% of calories in the average U.S. diet was replaced by processed foods over that period. I'm over 50 years old, and it agrees with my own observations. Those "big gulp" beverages became popular in the 80s, and "low fat" foods just replaced fat with added sugar.
One example: long ago I used to buy Bush's baked beans in a can. They had a vegetarian version which I assumed was healthier, and it even tasted better than the original. But one day I compared the labels and found the vegetarian version had more added sugar and more calories per serving.
We were fed a massive amount of misinformation about healthy foods in the 1980s. Hopefully things will improve from now on.
>My hypothesis is that as societies industrialize, they afford their population more and more activities that are simply more fun and rewarding than having children.
But this is by and large not true. I've traveled, eaten at expensive restaurants, enjoyed a child free existence into my mid thirties and having kids is a blast[*]
My wife was adamantly against having kids when we got together in our twenties, and she changed her mind in her late thirties; she now says that was the best thing that has happened to her.
Finally, there are many studies showing that people lead happier lives when they focus on someone else, have a higher purpose beyond just hedonism or living selfishly.
[*] - I have a supportive partner who collaborates with me so we both get time away and time off from the occasional drudgery or exhaustion of parenting. I still get time to work out, see friends, have time with my wife, all of that. If I couldn't afford the occasional babysitter and had a partner who was absent most of the time, it would be a lot harder!
true, but you didn't know until you had them, and society keeps telling us otherwise. we need to change the message and educate youth about becoming parents. but also create a culture where having children is welcome.
in the west we complain about kids running around, making noise, being not under control. and most importantly we blame the parents. in china every child is treated like a treasure. sometimes even to a fault. but at least parents are not being blamed for having children, or for bringing them along when they have noone else to care for them. for example children hanging out at their parents workplace after school is normal. in the west that's ground for getting fired.
That's an easy answer, but it doesn't explain why nearby/culturally related countries like South Korea and Taiwan have similar or even lower fertility rates, despite never having a one child policy.
And of course China's fertility rate now is even lower than it was at any point when the one child policy was in effect.
How people feel about having kids doesn't seem to be a uniform thing. The majority of parents certainly seem to love their children, but I do see a lot of mixed opinions about whether they love being parents.
In my peer group, it's been about 50/50 between people who seem to really enjoy parenthood and others who are struggling. There are many reasons for struggling, like how they or their spouse handle the stress and how much help they have or pay for. But the biggest one is that kids largely take up a lot of time and energy.
It's hard for someone to expect that they'll enjoy parenthood when they look around and see many parents who are unhappy.
In my childless group of friends the ratio of happy to unhappy seems similar. What if it is not about the children but about the people? Each has its preferences, and damn I have seen a lot that have no clue what they like and continue doing things that makes them unhappy.
Maybe we should have like with "open university day", "open raise a child day". Some might like it more than imagine, some might hate it more than imagine.
I've used for dropbox for the last 13+ years, was an early customer, and absolutely love the core product.
However, in the last handful of years, I've been incredibly disappointed in the stagnation of their products.
Dropbox was the first 'virtual desktop' I created that allowed me to hop into new companies and get going in a seamless way. Beyond just dotfiles, I was able to keep applications too, it was so easy to sync and get everything setup at a new company.
When repl.it came out, I wondered why Dropbox hadn't done that first. There's all sorts of room for innovation here - being able to install the right binaries, perfectly configuring a cloud command line setup, syncing configs, etc.
Photos - I have the majority of phots from my adult life stored on dropbox. But the searching is crap compared to google. It's not easy to share or make albums.
Dropbox could have been a mini-social media site, a way to share photos, collages, albums easily with friends - but it has half the features of google photos!
Collaborative Editing - They probably could have done something here too, but I never saw a compelling attempt.
Dropbox is still a great product for file syncing, but I fear that they will slowly lose relevance if they don't get another hit product.
reply