Family homes rarely exceed $13M but farms and ranches can get up there. Seems like it should be easy to exclude agricultural land, but there's second-order consequences.
If farms and ranches are the best place to hide family wealth, then family wealth will pour into agricultural land. That inflates values and pushes out the actual ranchers and farmers. If farming is just a byproduct of your tax-avoidance strategy then you are unlikely to try too hard at it. We actually need farms, and nobody wants them to become tax-avoidance shells.
it thinks it knows how and then produce good looking code at a glance but with wrong logic.
This is so accurate. I still like copilot and I might even pay for it, but I will never trust the logic. It always wrong in a way that _almost_ looks right.
This has always been Amazon's strategy. Amazon is not a server company, an ecommerce company, a grocer, or any of the other seemingly random things they do.
The common thread running though all of their lines of business is to create businesses with complex problems, solve those problems incredibly well, then sell those solutions to other companies. Amazon uses themselves as their first-and-best customer [1]. AWS, Prime and all of their best solutions work in this way. The whole company is organized to support this strategy.
The fact that Amazon is expanding their warehouse capabilities beyond their needs and building deeper into the stack by getting into real estate development is a natural continuation of this strategy.
I’d love to see Ben partner with a smart tax/finance guy.
His analysis is interesting, but very slanted with the tech business viewpoint. The cringy canonization of Uber back in the day is a great example. IMO, these machinations by Amazon are probably more about financial engineering than anything else.
Amazon has a good distribution network, but Shopify, Walmart and Target seem to have found and are competing successfully at Amazon’s weak points. Many people I know pivoted to Target for consumer staples vs Amazon. You can have anything they carry in about 30m. Shopify seems to be the place for sellers who want to protect their brand and avoid being ripped off within days.
Not sure why Ben cares about an Amazon truck vs UPS delivering stuff he’s probably alone in that.
If you have all the cash you need and a bare lot in Vancouver with services set up, you're still two years away from getting shovels in the ground. The permitting is straight out of a Joseph Heller novel.
A while back there was an article here from someone who moderated their social media use by throttling the connection speed for facebook - with the site getting slower the more time you spent browsing.
At the time I read that article, my achilles heel was Instagram. The Instagram mobile site has most of the content I care about but a pretty poor experience on a mobile browser. I can still get messages and see the things I care about. I can't use it for more than a few minutes without getting frustrated. Stories barely work, you can only watch 4 or 5 before the video player hangs up. Honestly it's perfect, and the discussion here on HN helped me realize that a degraded experience was a better experience for social media. Using the mobile site helped me turn a bad habit into a healthy one.
I use the same strategy for Twitter but their mobile browser experience is better. Twitter can still be habit-forming without the app.
I don't know anything about this industry but I listen to a lot of audiobooks. I have always wondered how the narration actually works, what the job is like. Sometimes I can hear the changes and it opened up a whole world of me wondering what that process looks like. This was an excellent description, thank you!
Pemberton had historically high snowfall last month, followed by a massive rain event. If the roof didn't have issues in January it's probably not going to have issues for a very long time. Pemberton is in a rain shadow. Owl creek gets some snow, more than town, but not much. Much less than Whistler.
Fully agree on the fires. I live in the woods on a steep slope and it's not ideal. Pemberton has insane fire risk. The pool might help with that, you can get agricultural water cannons and use the pool water to soak the roof and surrounding land.
About 3 years ago I realized I turn into a hermit. Being home alone all day is bad for me. The problem is that I live in a small mountain town now and my company is fully remote as well.
I rented an office that I share with a really close friend who does the same kind of work. We set up a sweet little kitchen with our ridiculous coffee stuff. It's less than 5 mins from my house. I get to see my friend every day, and we can go for walks and talk about work stuff. Our dogs hang out while we work. It's in a commercial space but I honestly think renting a residential apartment would have worked just as well.
I think this going to become common.
There's real value in being around people who care about the same things, but it doesn't actually matter if you all work for the same company. There's value in separating home from work, but I still want to share my work life with friends and former coworkers that I really enjoy being around.
The one thing I would add is that once you pick your base color, the lighter shades are probably going to be low saturation and the darker shades are going to be high saturation.
If farms and ranches are the best place to hide family wealth, then family wealth will pour into agricultural land. That inflates values and pushes out the actual ranchers and farmers. If farming is just a byproduct of your tax-avoidance strategy then you are unlikely to try too hard at it. We actually need farms, and nobody wants them to become tax-avoidance shells.