"An no one will now rent, since your building has an effective value of $0 since it has become crap."
This isn't true. You will have put money into the property to keep its value up, also writing off all of those expenses, so that you can still rent it out.
>You will have put money into the property to keep its value up
You're ignoring what was written: if the building has value 0, then it is not maintained to keep the value up. Of you kept the value up, then it would not have an effective price of 0.
Of course most people put money into properties exactly to keep value up.
>also writing off all of those expenses
Writing off expenses does not make them free - you are still paying for them - out of otherwise profit. It just means you get taxed on net profit instead of taxed on property gross income. But you are still losing money.
Writing off expenses is not some free money giveaway.
The point was to illustrate that OP ignored costs involved for landlords in the thought experiment.
oh it's certainly not free money (queue the seinfeld episode of kramer telling jerry to "write it off") but the discussion is about taxes or lacktherof. In no other investment that I know of are you allowed this double write-off: you can write off both the investment as it depreciates and the costs to make sure it doesn't depreciate.
"Few rental properties will have under a 3.7% ROI"
This is a leveraged investment (meaning you have a mortage). What that means is for your 20% down payment (the actual money you invest), that 3.7% writeoff on income can be an 18.5% cash on cash yield (ROI) in which you pay no taxes, ever. Few properties on the market can get you a better yield than that. If your ultimate yield is less than that you can roll those losses over year over year, so that then later if/when you get more yield you still* don't have to pay any taxes. It's a really big tax loophole and is the reason Donald Trump pays almost nothing in taxes (and he admitted as much in the presidential debate).
*I own 3 properties in buffalo, one of the best rent to value markets in the US, and it's hard to find better yield than that even in that market. https://simplepassivecashflow.com/rv/
My guess would be that parents are constantly taking photos and getting in the way of kids playing, or their performance, and it's to encourage parents to just enjoy their kids. This sounds like a pretty good rule to me. I'd have to guess that during their childhood your children will have multiple orders of magnitude more photos taken of them. I'd only worry memories will be lost by an overwhelming amount of media being saved about them.
I think that a general law against posting pictures of kids on the internet could just work. It's not just perverts, kids cannot consent to having their images stored in photographic databases forever and being IDed off facial recognition.
Weirdest quote the TC article was "In the meantime, Tiger Global, which prides itself on its due diligence"
They are notorious for outsourcing their due diligence and often not even paying attention to it. They pride themselves on moving fast, not diligence.
I liked the investment thesis of "get founders money and get out of their way" and hopefully other VCs learned something from it, but they certainly lacked a lot of control in how they operated.
> I liked the investment thesis of "get founders money and get out of their way"
It's a great theory. I read somewhere Masayoshi Son looks in founder's eyes to decide if they are trustworthy, same with George W Bush who would look into other leader's eyes to decide if they are someone he can do business with.
I don't mean about looking someone in the eye, but I do mean cutting through a multiple months long dance to get someone money when they are in a full sprint growing their business, or sitting on their board and meddling when you don't have experience operating a company. I think VCs can learn something from that.
For those who don't get the reference, in 2001 President George W. Bush had this to say about Vladimir Putin:
"I looked the man in the eye. I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy. We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul; a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country."
Of course it is, if other side knows this they will train and react in a way to appease. And a KGB apparatchik should know a trick or two about psychology, manipulation etc. Especially quirks of US president, the counterparty in global political games.
He may be internally with himself still working the same 'patriotic' game, but currently in some very f**ed up psychotic way.
But to be honest, I don't believe it - he stole half of Russia, continued and improved system of state-managed corruption and theft, russian population is a poor miserable one more than ever. He clearly doesn't care for murdering fellow close slavs, and other russians neither. But billion dollar worth pallaces and superyachts are fine for 'great leader' I presume.
Actions speak for themselves more than some shallow talks or staged trained looks.
Or maybe its just the good old 'power corrupts' theme. He certainly is just a mere shadow of his former self, at least the part public can see.
I am skeptical any one person , even a typical president can take that kind of decision on their own, however objective or well rounded the metric it could be .
There are teams of career diplomats and intelligence professionals and variety of external stakeholders including business lobbyists, other foreign diplomats and those equations go into a diplomatic decision to publicly endorse someone.
Bush was very much establishment and not an unpredictable wrecking ball like Trump, that was unimaginable 20 years back.
More likely the decision was taken at the point to publicly support Putin and bush articulated it in this rather poor fashion.
The intelligencer community at the time may have had hope that the other power in Russia like the oligarchs to keep Putin in line. Remember this was before Georgia , Chechen and Crimea ; Putin hadn’t yet developed the reputation and consolidation of power he has today.
Considering that Putin never really lied about his goals, despite being extremely under handed and secret with his methods, W's judgement wasn't too far off I'd say.
There seems to be a lot of disagreement and bad judgement around "best interests of his (Putin's) country".
"Managers mandated themselves into making x times the amount of their top paid report, control decision making, and have hiring and firing powers all in one position."
I'm curious where you work (not specifically, I'm talking about generally the industry), because it's not been my experience either as a manager nor my understanding of anyone else in silicon valley or large or mid sized software companies. I've managed engineers who get paid more than me, never have had unilateral hiring or firing powers, and don't control much decision making power other than my ability to hopefully influence engineers or upper management.
I could imagine your case being true in other places (finance, for example) where managers usually aren't engineers and there is much more of a fiefdom organizational structure, but it hasn't been my experience in software.
I work in Fintech. On average, managers make more than their reports and heavily influence how much their reports make. Just based on levels.fyi managers earn a base of $40k over their engineering equivalent, with a higher bonus and stock margin as well (at my company). My company also doesn't position technical leaders at the same level as their manager, so technical leaders are already in an odd position when trying to represent the team. Generally I've figured out that many managers don't know what "influencing" is, so it starts to feel like "pressuring" from someone who doesn't understand the product from a technical perspective. I don't think any of this is uncommon to the larger software landscape, but certain companies may hire better managers than others.
I completely disagree. They were 450 people with 150 engineers. If I had to guess I would bet the engineers clamored for leveling and it came from bottoms up requests and a need to be fair with compensation when hiring.
Now to be clear they shouldn't have been that big (clearly), but leveling people was not the problem.
Engineering is expanding, to meet the needs of the expanding engineering. Continuously built self-scaling heuristic AI-based microservices that have full resiliency across four datacenters and twelve chaos monkeys.
Do not underestimate mans ability to overcomplicate things, when his continuing employment depends on him finding more things to engineer.
Yes, you need like Engineer and Senior Engineer and then when you have some rock stars who actually move the business forward they are your principles and/or future directors.
To try to build this all up ahead of time, show me where it's ever worked? When Google was that size they were playing with having no managers at all.
If you're only interested in sniping FAANG talent, arbitrary levels provide a familiar comfort, and an opportunity to offer a level up immediately upon joining. "You're level L4 at Google, but we'll bring you in at L14".
>> * Fast hired engineers, engineering managers, product managers, and executives directly from Big Tech. Many of the software engineers joined from Meta, Google, Uber, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and other well-known companies. Many joining had competing offers both from Big Tech and other high-growth startups.
"but a smaller Craigslist might have been able to pivot and innovate ahead of them."
I feel like they had a small team that didn't innovate for 20 years. Whether they were 10 employees or 10,000 they were due to have someone figure out a better way.
Sure, one of them would have figured it out. But then they would spend the next year trying to get managers to listen and would eventually quit out of frustration.
My response to "Oh, I can implement this in 5 minutes" is always "but will you support it?"
I think this is the hardest thing about moving from a startup to a more mature company (either through growth and age or acquisition); you have to move your mindset from building to supporting. Building is fun and creative, supporting can be tedious and soul sucking (but needed!). It's a huge, and legitimate, reason why large companies slow down (either to support, or to consider support in the build process).
And it's not just large companies that slow down, either. I work for a very small organization (three developers) that's been around for 10 years. We'd love to spend more time building new stuff, but we've got 10 years' worth of old code to support. We don't have bureaucracy getting in the way, but we still can't move as fast as new startups.
I've only ever worked at small companies, but have a few friends that work at larger ones.
And I always bust up laughing reading their stories about trying to avoid adding even more code under their support umbrella. One person wrote a useful tool for fun, it got passed around and all of a sudden an unrelated team from halfway around the world started asking him for features.
The only nit I have (and I think this is actually what you meant) is we must build more housing. I say this because often people think it's good to tear down an old house and build a new one. That isn't helping things (and I'd argue actively hurts things).
This isn't true. You will have put money into the property to keep its value up, also writing off all of those expenses, so that you can still rent it out.