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.
Since I paid for the car without borrowing money, there was no need to insure it for damage; I only carry liability insurance.
No "collision" (another car hits mine) or "comprehensive" (a coyote drops a safe on it) insurance.
I lose if my car gets damaged. But insurance premiums are negligible, a dollar per day.
For the other used EV I purchased, my wife asked me to get an auto loan. The car value is $18,000 and the lender requires a certain amount of insurance on the car. The insurance alone is more than $100/month.
> 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.
If I tell it to intercom and “mistakenly” (stupid me) use a persons name at the beginning of the message, it will fail and tell me that it can’t yet intercom to contacts.
> 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!
That would be weird. I rant a lot about spirituality and religion and it doesn't show up. But that one time I talk about pregnant man emoji and now I'm the reference for that.
On iPhone I only see Signifcant Locations; on my phone I only see a list of 3 places (despite 400 records). Compared to Google Timeline it’s much more curtailed function.
Yeah, it's a feature enabled by default outside of the EU (in the EU it asks you if you want to enable it). Makes for some fun stats/recaps, and is useful for tracing back steps (wait, where was that awesome store/restaurant/park/whatever we went to while on a trip to XYZ?) at the expense of Google knowing a lot about you.
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.
I work for a company that does a lot of acquisitions. Basically all of our acquisitions involve earnouts, and they're never a bad deal for the sellers. In many cases, without the earnout the deal doesn't happen because the price the seller wants is higher than we'd be willing to pay unless the continued performance of the business post-acquisition justified the higher price tag.
But whether earnouts are good or bad for sellers is industry specific. I don't work for a tech company, and we don't deal with VC or PE firms at all. Our acquisitions are all companies with real revenue streams, established histories of revenue, and non-tech business models that don't require exponential growth or "scale", so earnouts are extremely straightforward.
All of the horror stories I've heard from others about earnouts involved "companies with real revenue streams, established histories of revenue, and non-tech business models that don't require exponential growth or 'scale'". There's so many ways that even the most "straightforward" of earnout terms becomes non-straightforward.
There's so many ways that even the most "straightforward" of earnout terms becomes non-straightforward.
There really isn't, if both parties are active businesses. If you look closely, you'll quickly realize that almost all of the horror stories involve private equity, because they ruin everything.
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.
Earnouts worked great for us, but services businesses aren't product businesses; I wouldn't be surprised to learn that effectively every services acquisition is back-loaded with earnouts.
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.
> 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?
I'm not sure what the right sentence is for shooting into the air at something which is going to crash to the ground, but it should be harshly punished. Either hitting or missing could easily kill someone.
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.
I agree that conflating airplanes and drones here is not ideal/correct, but as I said, both the bullet, and the drone, can easily kill someone if some reprobate decides to pop off at the drone.
I'd say a consecutive sentence for negligent discharge and reckless endangerment is about right, and bumped up to attempted manslaughter in places where it's crowded enough that this kind of behavior is straightforwardly as dangerous as, say, tossing a toaster oven off a tall building.
But sure, the penalty for shooting a Daisy Red Rider at one of the sub-250gm units should be indexed closer to property destruction/vandalism. If it's close enough to the ground to take a bead on it, it's not going to hit someone, and if it does, a laceration on the head is the worst outcome in the reasonable realm of possibility. Just don't be surprised if any legislation on this issue writes that particular scenario out of the picture.
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.
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.