kdsudac's comments

I'm sure the PR hit they'd take from continuing to do business is a factor, but I don't think this many large int'l companies would have reacted this quickly to just PR hits.

All international companies really, really, really, really like to get paid for the goods and services they provide. After sanctions that becomes difficult to impossible to do in Russia.

I think their thought process is:

Best case scenario they get paid in rubles which have gone down in value and are likely to go down further or at the very least be very volatile.

Worst case scenario they get $0 USD for their goods and services as they can't get the money out... and they are slapped with further sanctions.

The reasoning about the "incredible run of ursurpurs" is a very flawed though. It's not like Bezos, Zuck, Jobs, Gates, Musk, Ellison, Page, Brin, et al. made their fortunes collecting their paychecks and funding their 401k's to the max and paying the top-level income tax bracket.

Their fabulous rise in wealth was because of the equity of the companies they founded becoming publicly traded at very high valuations.

Remember Jobs was only taking $1 in annual salary.

I'm not blaming the wealthy founders, they did remarkable things and deserve to be fabulously well compensated (not that fair or deserved have anything to do with it).

If anything I think the author should distinguish between capital gains taxes and regular income.

My feedback/nit: It's a little hard at first glance to understand what it's useful for. Users need to engage with the demos down below that are probably too far down the page.

So really 3 is your solution: compensate rights holders and then have the government sell water rights on the open market. I'm open to this idea. Would everyone be buying water on open market? or would you support subsidies for cities, industry, environmental causes, etc?

I really feel like you can make the argument for 3 without demonizing farmers.

P.S. 5th amendment = right to not incriminate yourself. 14th amendment is equal protection and due process. Not sure how they are related.

It doesn't seem like pointing the finger at the farmers who are bearing the brunt of the drought is very fair or productive. Just makes farmers feel like their livelihood and way of life is being threatened. What would you do if you were in their shoes?

I'm not using prior appropriation as an excuse, just pointing out that the more egregious wasting of water in agriculture is the exception not the rule. It'd be the equivalent of farmers citing the Bel Air resident as representative of all city dwellers.

If prior appropriation is the problem, what would you do policy wise to move forward? It's a very hard problem to solve and I'm sincerely curious to hear proposed solutions.

Some farmers in the Imperial Valley (east of Los Angeles) have an abundance of water because it comes from the Rockies and they have strong water rights. Another group near Sacramento have strong water rights as well. All of the farmers in the central valley are getting 0% of their water allocation for the last two years which kinda puts 25-40% voluntary reductions in perspective.

I'm inclined to believe that mobile sales are "artificially" inflated by these subsidies to a large degree.

Of course, if this business model is sustainable over the long term I guess it doesn't matter for mobile h/w manufacturers.

But for s/w developers the fact that people upgrade h/w every 2 years because of subsidies doesn't mean that those h/w sales are translating into a greater user base.

In my experience, buying SSL certs can be a little confusing since there are so many providers and different types of certs. I did the research to figure out what product I needed, but I can imagine a sizable niche of customers who just want someone to tell them what they need.

Do you have anything to back that claim up? I have quite a few friends who go on rants about government inefficiency and would be nice to have some hard data.

I always just resort to asking: what's a more laissez faire country that you'd actually want to live in? is their approach scalable and sustainable?

I'd assume it got on the front page because people thought it was good advice and/or interesting. I've been told that's how HN works (snark).

Easter egg or nice place to catch a nap?

At this point I think rapgenius is just using this as a way to get attention/traffic.

What percentage of people are actually willing to share? and what percent is needed for these business to be viable?

Using airbnb as an example, what percent of the population is actually willing to rent a room in their house?

Thousands of newspapers writing about this is exactly what Musk shouldn't want! Thanks for making my argument for me. :)