Given a piece of contemporary art, will you be able to tell whether it was created by a human or an AI process? What if your in a gallery looking at collection, but the artist is pseudo-anonymous and no one really knows what tools they use behind the scenes to create their work? Would you allow their work to move you?
I find commuting from the 24th and Mission to downtown via the BART very pleasant these days. Before COVID I would fight my way and barely squeeze in. Now I get a seat just about every time. I get off at Montgomery, so I am able to skip over the sketchier stops on Market (Civic center and Powell to some extent). There are still plenty of great cafes, coffeeshops, and bars open within walking distance of my office. Overall no complaints; I enjoy going into the office much more than before COVID.
The BART website clearly states that they are able to provide current operations due to COVID funding which runs out in 2025. They plan to stop offering weekend routes, stop running after 9PM, reduce train frequency to every 60 minutes, etc.
BART's budget is not funded by San Francisco. I think there are many sources of funding such as bridge and highway tolls which should be explored to shore up BART operating budgets. In addition, BART should abandon boondoggle capital projects like the monstrous tunnel VTA is proposing in the San Jose extension to invest in ways that improve service on existing lines. Finally, it is more than reasonable to redirect highway spending to transit.
That sounds reasonable enough, thanks. It looks like tolls generate ~750M currently and BART shortfall is ~330M. So, it's doable if we're able to push through an increase of 50% on tolls.
I wasn't able to easily look up our highway spending budget.
That's not what BART's report says, at all. That is a worst case analysis. The Metropolitan Transportation Commission required all agencies to undertake an unusual analysis using scenarios provided by MTC. The report concludes that BART cannot cut its way to solvency in the given scenarios. The report does not reflect BART's actual projections or plans.
Okay, sorry if I am fearmongering. It's not my intent. What do you feel will happen?
From my perspective, there's a website that has the word crisis in the URL, a chart that shows a ~40% loss in revenue due, and the two-year SF budget shortfall is trending up - recently revised from $720M to $780M. I find it challenging to take away an alternative perspective when none is offered up on the website beyond "be a transit champion."
This is a bit too optimistic. BART in its current two year budget is projecting consecutive years of $300m operating deficits. That is very far from sustainable and not an unusual worst case.
Many subway systems are profitable, like the Tokyo JR East. If there is a will there is a way. Americans simply prefer sprawl and cars when it comes down to it.
The vast majority are not, the systems in a bunch of Asian cities (mostly in Japan, HK, Taiwan, Singapore) are the exception due to a few reasons, most notably because they use distance-based fares and land around stations often belongs to the operator bringing in massive commercial revenues.
It's impossible to know if Americans genuinely prefer sprawl because the alternative of building more compact communities is banned by regulation all over.
>Transportation infrastructure isn’t meant to be financially viable.
Not profitable != not financially viable. At some point, anything that loses too much money becomes not become viable. Transportation isn't exempt from this.
>* Users of the highway passenger transportation system paid significantly greater amounts of money to the federal government than their allocated costs in 1994-2000. <https://web.archive.org/web/20170628114204/http://www.rita.d...> This was a result of the increase in the deficit reduction motor fuel tax rates between October 1993 and September 1997, and the increase in Highway Trust Fund fuel tax rates starting in October 1997.
>* School and transit buses received positive net federal subsidies over the 1990-2002 period, but autos, motorcycles, pickups and vans, and intercity buses paid more than their allocated cost to the federal government.
>* On average, highway users paid $1.91 per thousand passenger-miles to the federal government over their highway allocated cost during 1990-2002.) track
You are citing a common accounting sleight of hand where you look at federal gas excise revenue and compare it to only federal spending on highways. Some issues:
* This includes an important subsidy from urban road users - who are federal funding ineligible - to highway users.
* Federal funding is only 25% of highway spending, the rest being state and local funds.
* Most road expansion capital projects deliver worse increased passenger throughput per dollar than highway projects.
Regarding costs, a good rule of thumb is the best performing road networks pay for half their expenses with user fees (Texan highways). Some poorly performing ones like Maryland are at 20% (http://www.actfortransit.org/archives/testimonies/2009Apr29T...). Owen D. Gutfreund’s
Twentieth-Century Sprawl is a good reference.
The final logical mistake in this line of analysis is looking at per rider subsidies between roads and transit, since American transit systems are uniquely inefficient precisely because of the burdens on transport laden by the road system. You can’t build densely because everyone thinks their cars won’t fit in the new urban geometry, but density is a precursor to successful transit. So we are stuck in an equilibrium where we prop up despots around the world for gasoline while everyone hates their commute.
I'd wager at this point in the history of the West, the full "return to the office" back to pre-pandemic levels will never happen. We will look back at 2019 as the point at which we hit "peak toil", before the WFH movements and AI automation changed the structure of productivity forever.
When a company is nationalized what typically happens to the shareholders? Are they wiped, do they get paid out, or does some of their ownership carry over to the new entity (rights to a special dividend or something)?
Note that long term shareholders have already been pretty much wiped out. CS was worth almost $300B before the GFC, and down 70x to around $8B Friday. Apparently UBS was uncomfortable offering more than $1B for it today, so already down a further 8x since then.
The article talks about "full or partial" nationalization. I have no idea how a full nationalization would look like, but typically, a company is only partially nationalized. The state takes a large equity stake, diluting the ownership of previous shareholders.
Agree, this does not matter to Mark Cuban and certainly not us. Mark is gonna be fine even in the absolute worst case where the money is locked up for years, and he takes a 20% haircut on his modest deposit. This crisis is for businesses that need access to their money now to pay wages and bills.
"Unpaid wages pierce the corporate veil, so boards are incredibly sensitive to employing workers they may not be able to pay."
This is the key point in my opinion, and one I was not aware existed. Personal liability changes everything. You can't tell employees to sit tight while funds eventually get unlocked if you're going to find yourself getting sued.
it’s not as simple as is being suggested. The corporate veil can be pierced in cases of wage theft where the corporation has been used for nefarious means. There’s no evidence that being unable to make payroll because of a bank collapse comes close to qualifying as bad behaviour on behalf of those behind the corporate veil.
You could argue that an overly cautious founder might cut all their employees off immediately out of an abundance of caution, but that would be self-immolation.
As a non-lawyer with zero credibility, I’d be shocked if any founders of companies that can’t make payroll because of this are at risk of the corporate veil being pierced. SVB was based in California, subject itself to California law, it would require some extreme mental gymnastics from a judge to believe that a company that can’t make payroll because they used SVB behaved inappropriately in this situation.
Again, I have zero credibility, but I’d expect when the dust settles, the only companies we see get in any trouble will be the companies that do some insane illegal things in a panic because they get caught up in the tidal wave of fear. Founders withdrawing millions into their personal accounts and then losing it by buying crypto or going to vegas to do a fedex with their remaining cash or something equally insane feels much more likely an outcome.
California labor laws are extremely powerful. "Not receiving agreed upon wages" is wage theft, full stop. They don't care if your bank collapsed or your great aunt ran off with contents of the cash register.
All you have to do is file a wage theft claim with the Labor Commissioner, who evaluates your claim and issue an ODA (Order Decision or Award). Once the ODA is filed it is considered a legal judgement against the employer. You can then use any legal means to collect.
Edit to add: the whole process so streamlined and employee friendly it happens entirely outside the court system. Once a claim is filed the employer has to pay you or appeal within 10 days.
> California labor laws are extremely powerful. "Not receiving agreed upon wages" is wage theft, full stop. They don't care if your bank collapsed or your great aunt ran off with contents of the cash register.
You forget that thinking, rational, humans are ultimately charged with enforcing the law.
Also, you seem way too certain of something that has no precedent. Show me where a major bank has gone under, caused companies to miss payroll, and the corporate officers were held liable.
The laws exist to protect employees, not to discourage employers from employing. Setting the precedent that a shareholder in a company is at risk of losing everything because a bank that their company uses fails would have a very negative impact on California as a place to employ people, which doesn’t help employees.
> "Not receiving agreed upon wages" is wage theft, full stop. They don't care if your bank collapsed or your great aunt ran off with contents of the cash register
The wage theft section of the California Penal Code (section 487m) says it is the intentional deprivation of wages. The California Labor Code talks about it in section 216, which applies when the employer has the ability to pay and willfully refuses.
It is hard to see how failure to pay because your bank collapsed and you can't get the money would be either intentional or a willful refusal.
Anyone who's been on the internet more than five minutes knows how much an uncited claim about the law is worth.
I find it very hard to believe they don't have some clause about employers acting in good faith but who can't make payroll because the payment processor had a truck number of 1, the bank was robbed that day and there was a police line or any of the other legitimate reasons processes have hiccups. And if they don't have that clause the labor commissioner almost certainly just ignores those claims until it's clear whether they're gonna shake themselves out or not.
The labor commissioner's office is almost certainly going to be slower at getting people the money than the company is (the latter is already set up to do so) in cases where the company is acting in good faith so in those cases the labor compssioner's office will best serve employees and also have the least work to do by just sitting back.
Collection can mean arrive with the sheriff and start taking things to sell at auction. Since it pierces the corporate veil, this can eventually include the executives' personal property and bank accounts.
Cut to a scene of fifty angry unpaid devs banding together to file their claim and then standing in the Atherton driveway of their VC and figuring out who gets his art collection, who gets the wine and how much, who gets his watches...
To me, as an employee, that seems like a slightly weird take.
If my employer knows they can't pay me, and they ask me to do work anyway that is causing me serious losses. The moment they know they can't pay me, they have to stop asking me to do work. I would expect someone to be accountable for those sort of serious lies.
A sane enoloyer would furlough pending stabilization. Layoffs would destroy the company. Who would work for a company that both can't manage its finances and also can't manage its staffing?
I am presuming the employers operate in good faith, that is, they are open with the employees about the situation — it would be hard to keep this a secret given it’s major news.
If your employer said to you, “we are caught up in this, we are working to resolve the situation“ it would be pretty fair and reasonable of them. You can choose to quit if you want, you’re under no obligation to work.
I am all in favour of getting rid of minimum wage laws. However, they are currently in play and I suspect that being open and direct about engaging in an illegal act to deal with a bankrupt bank is exactly the sort of situation that is likely to result in criminal prosecutions for executives if the company goes under.
Okay, I am not versed in US law, but wouldn't boards' liability be very limited given that the wages are unpaid due to failure of another entity holding their cash? Was there anything they could do about it? They had to hold their cash somewhere... Liability is for sins of commission or omission. Here they did neither.
I think the implication is that the board wouldn't want to continue not paying and would lay people off. As in, how long can the board continue to employ people who they can't pay?
(I have no idea what I'm talking about legally, I'm just trying to interpret what I'm reading).
So you are suggesting that they might get away with one payment (because the money went missing) but not with more?
What if they relied on cash for multiple payments (think startup that got funding)?
It is also unlikely that people wouldn't notice they are not getting paid so it is hard to argue they won't know about further non-payments.
I would say if they don't have money to pay people they have nothing else to do than fire them or shut down/go bankrupt if it means the company cannot continue.
What if they have a chance to get funded/bailed out or if they expect money to come soon (from expected cash flow)?
I think the danger for the board should be if they promise people get paid and then they can't do good on that promise. Or if they actually have money but use it for something else instead of paying people.
I don't this is an area of corporate law that has been super thoroughly tested? But I think the theory is -
Look, we had $X in our account on Wednesday and did a payroll run that was more than covered, but then our bank went under and the payments never got there. That's not our fault, nothing we can do about it!
But as time goes on and you're still employing people while having no bank account, you become more culpable for their unpaid wages after you find out you have no money.
The tricky thing here, I think, is that it still isn't very clear what is going to happen and it'd be silly to immediately fire a bunch of people because of it. There is a good chance some other bank acquires SVBs accounts and things are back to normal pretty quickly. If that doesn't happen, there is still a lot of money to go around, so you aren't losing 100% of what is in there.
I think there is a good argument that it is prudent and legally defensible to wait a day or two to figure out what is going on before you go nuts and shut the business down.
Looks like the Fair Labor Standards Act at the federal level and there are also state-by-state statutes which add variety.
With the disclaimer that I am not the expert we all hoped would show up to explain, I think the intent is to provide statutes to back up the social contract around wages. Any inkling of the possibility that an employer can wiggle out of paying wages it promised to pay is going to have an outsized effect on an employee’s trust. And businesses do not want (and in the case of a small business or startup cannot) to pay wages up front. Incentivizing a business to lay people off rather than promising them wages that may or may actually appear actually seems like an okay outcome in the degenerate case since the employee has various rights and protections that are triggered by a layoff while unpaid wages could pile up endlessly until the employee initiates action themselves.
Atempa v. Pedrazzani is what you want to Google for.
"Rejecting Pedrazzani’s argument, the Court of Appeal relied on language of the applicable California statutes: Cal. Labor Code § 558 (West 2018) and Cal. Labor Code § 1197.1 (West 2018). Section 558(a) subjects “[a]ny employer or other person acting on behalf of an employer” to civil penalties for overtime violations. Similarly, section 1197.1(a) subjects “[a]ny employer or other person acting either individually or as an officer, agent, or employee of another person” to civil penalties for minimum wage violations. The Court of Appeal held that Pedrazzani was responsible as an “other person” who caused the overtime pay and minimum wage violations."
ianal but this is pretty well known in my experience. If you are the management of an employer and you mess around with wages owed (payroll for work done in the past) and taxes (including payroll tax withheld) then you are personally in deep shit. Here's an article on the subject in the context of California: https://www.melmedlaw.com/guide-on-unpaid-wages-in-californi...
Also curious hearing from an expert on this one way or the other. Took the Tweet at face value without actually being able to confirm under what circumstances that would be true.
Like someone pointed out on here, SVB also provided personal banking to high net worth individuals in Silicon Valley. Such as...startup founders and VCs.
So in either case - payroll resumes normally or is paid from personal assets of company directors - some employees might have to wait for things to be sorted out at SVB.
Hopefully the FTC understands linear separability. Because I often get the impression that people who want ML models to be explicable don’t, and are expecting the mathematically impossible.
I rather think that they (the regulators) are saying that you can’t expect to use mathematical impossibility as a legal argument to avoid liability if your AI does material harm.
Not if you "keep your claims in check" and have proper oversight of the output your AI generates. Then you will be ready at all times to step in, should something go south. Yes, maybe it does not scale up unlimited with proper oversight in place, but this is exactly what Google and co are missing these days and the reason they extract cash to no end. Proper oversight is completely missing.
If the system your building is "mathematically impossible" to explain in a way that would be expected of every other system. Maybe you shouldn't be building that system.
Mathematical explanation is not required in many areas.
Perhaps you can’t perfectly explain it but you can at least understand it statistically.
For example is not currently possible to mathematically explain people’s behaviour, but there is statistical evidence and also accountability on an individual. Eg a doctor making a decision about a scan result.
I don't think mentioning non-linearality means you can bypass the singularities you may cause typically CUSP, buckling etc and omit the analysis intentionally or negeliccantly.
From the FTC's perspective, stuff like that is just a technical detail. It is on the business to make sure that the final result can be explained.
If you can't explain the ML part due to whatever math detail, you better make sure you write a good wrapper around it to catch bad output which you can explain.
Lots of businesses deal with high complexity and open ended problems that lead to "inexplicable" risks. They address this by showing diligence in monitoring and mitigating risks, evolving their approach as new concerns are understood. AI companies should employ similar motions (and some do).
It’s cobbling together an explanation from texts that explain how to solve a problem. It’s like a student who copies an answer, then copies the explanation as well.
Chain-of-thought is not the same with direct prompting. Step by step is better.
> Experiments on three large language models show that chain of thought prompting improves performance on a range of arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic reasoning tasks. The empirical gains can be striking.
Thanks for sharing this video. It's hard to reconcile how these kids live and speak about their lives vs my own thinking. It seems to be a very nihilistic philosophy.
It is a very nihilistic philosophy. Unfortunately that philosophy is spreading, but it's also had an undercurrent there all along. There are a lot of people in the US that culturally do not have the same morals or system of ethics as the rest of the society, and they act out in ways which would appall the average person. This has been able to be mostly kept under wraps in the US because these subcultures, while shared across cities, on each local level are restricted to a small geographical area. With the rise of social media and the Internet, it has made the world a smaller place, allowing rapid communication between people with shared ideals and interests, and this is true for both positive interests and negative interests for society.
Car theft isn't even the half of it. Wait until you find out about the growth of card skimming in the inner city driven by social media. There are /many/ /many/ anti-social behaviors that are culturally rewarded within certain subcultures in the US. To even get to the point you have such a nihilistic world view, you have to have grown up in an environment without any serious positive role models, minimal to no hope for the future, and no realistic pathway in life to leave behind the circumstances you find yourself in. There are generations of people who have been bathed in this nihilism, and it's created a negative outcome for society on generational scale that's spreading.
Sad but true. This philosophy isn't exclusive to one race or demographic, either. Poor white kids fall into criminal subcultures just like anyone else when there seems to be no hope and no way out. Juggalo gangs are one example of this. It's no coincidence that they have a big following in economic wastelands like Detroit:
Or perhaps credit card popularity is increasing; spending that was previously done via cash and debit cards is shifting to credit cards. That would leave earnings constant.
Noob question that I am sure is answered many times. What are the catalysts for a private company switching from options to RSUs (double trigger). In my previous role I got RSUs (double trigger), but now at a much smaller startup I have an option package. As an employee RSUs are a bit easier to make sense of, but both are equity instruments at the end of the day. When, and why does that transition happen?
> What are the catalysts for a private company switching from options to RSUs (double trigger).
For employees at very early companies that are going the venture route, ISOs are a no-brainer. The company is small enough that the strike price isn't too onerous, the company is too small to hit up against the IRS limits, and they provide pretty good tax treatment under the assumption that the company will grow massively in value - like, 100,000x - which is the the optimistic case that everyone wants to optimize for.
For employees at late stage companies (e.g. last funding round before IPO), ISOs are a rough deal. The strike price is large, so the only people who can afford to exercise them before a liquidity event are people who are already independently wealthy. The tax benefits are also still present, but smaller, because the expectation is that the company might grow 10x in valuation, but not 100x or 100,000x (most $100M companies are not going to grow to $10 trillion in valuation).
RSUs avoid that problem, by requiring zero cash up-front, in exchange for less favorable tax treatment in the "company grows 100x-100,000x" case - which is fine, because that's less relevant.
Of course, the billion dollar question is where the inflection point happens - when do RSUs become a better deal than ISOs? There's no universal answer to that, and some of that depends on specifics of the company, and some of that also depends on who you ask (certain people will benefit more than others from the switch at different points, so it depends on how much the company is weighing each of those [metaphorical] stakeholders).
ISOs also have one other advantage for companies: because they have to be exercised within 90 days of departure, a large portion of ISOs that are granted will never actually be exercised (the employee will choose to leave them unexercised, either because they don't have the money to pay for the exercise price + taxes or because they don't want to). So every option granted is <1 share actually given up (in expectation), allowing the company to grant bigger compensation packages (because some portion of those will not actually be used, and can therefore be reallocated to someone else).
With RSUs, every RSU granted is 1 share actually given up (except in the case where the RSUs expire, which makes the company look bad).
There's also usually a switch from ISO to NSO somewhere down the line, often fairly early. NSOs aren't capped at a 90 day post-termination exercise window. Some companies have extended the window to as much as 7 years - Pinterest comes to mind. There is a cap, but it's closer to the RSU cap than the ISO cap.
The progression is usually:
- Founders get shares with a re-purchase option for vesting. The company exercises the option if you leave before vesting ends to take back your un-vested shares.
- Next ~100 people get ISOs.
- Next ~2000 get NSOs.
- Then, double-trigger RSUs until the company goes public.
- Then, single-trigger RSUs.
I agree with your general assessment. The difference between options and RSUs usually comes down to upside potential. An option is worthless at grant time (by law, it usually has to be issued at the 409(a)) and it's just the right to buy company shares. If you're buying the shares at the current price, there's no value in that. Options only gain intrinsic value of future appreciation in the underlying equity past your grant date.
On the other hand RSUs are shares of the company, so they are worth at grant whatever a share of the company is worth.
An option with a $10 strike price to buy shares of a company whose 409(a) is $11 has an intrinsic value of $1. An RSU of a company whose 409(a) is $11 has an intrinsic value of $11.
Companies generally, in my experience, give you about 3X as many options as they would shares for the same role. Give or take. Companies usually switch from options to RSUs when they think that growth in the stock price is going to slow down - [edit] (and when they're hiring people with a higher aversion to risk!)
> except in the case where the RSUs expire, which makes the company look bad
The benefit of double-trigger RSUs over single-trigger RSUs is that they're not taxed until after a liquidity event (IPO, acquisition, etc). That's nice for the employee as they don't have to come up with extra cash to pay taxes on the RSUs as they vest but before they can sell them.
However, double-trigger RSUs have to expire within 7 years -- otherwise there's not a "substantial risk of forfeiture" and they'll be taxed immediately upon satisfying the time condition, just like single-trigger RSUs [1]. It makes sense -- there's no practical difference between a double-trigger RSU that never expires and an illiquid single-trigger RSU, so it would be a tax loophole to treat them differently.
