China owns a ton of US treasuries. It will sell some of those in exchange for dollars. It will then buy it's own currency, the Yuan, with those dollars.
Selling treasuries will make US bond prices go down.
Buying Yuan will increase it's price versus the dollar.
So, this is a move by China to prop up the value of it's currency.
...correct in a normal world. China is not normal. Their currency is pegged to the dollar. They are trying to decouple (see IMF comments delaying their inclusion for another year). They are lowering the peg which is increasing the dollar vs. ren. This in effect is lowering/devaluing the ren. which makes manufacturing cheaper there. Other emerging markets are also decoupling so that they can devalue their currency in order to keep up with the Chinese active devaluation. Currently other major markets Germany, Japan, etc. are not actively devaluing. If they do we will have a currency war. This would be very very bad.
...this article is only describing one aspect of a very complex picture right now. One that you could argue has not been seen previously. That and the weird illiquidity problem that happened Monday with ETFs. It makes for a very odd picture right now.
I heard a similar story from a Sony employee about the Sony hack. Was able to find it mentioned in a Vanity Fair article:
>...this morning, as she began her day, she discovered that a bizarre specter had hijacked her computer. The screen glowed with a blood-red skeleton baring its fangs, and the words “Hacked By #GOP.”
>The third reason for why individual options are probably worth less now than they used to be is that both employer and employee need to account for the fact that the time until IPO or liquidity is longer than it used to be. This is a big issue. To get the true value of offered comp, employees need to add their offered salary to the present value of the options offered. When calculating that, the further out the payout, the less it is worth today
This assumes a constant payout, which defeats the purpose of options. If there were a set date and set payout, the company should just offer cash bonuses or similar.
The value of an option increases the further the expiration date is [0]. He even says:
>You can be pretty sure that a company currently worth $10mm won't be worth $1b in 3 months, so you have a reasonable band of expectation.
Sure, but it might be in 5 years. You're granted an option as a bet that it might grow that big by the time you cash out - not to lock in some set amount of compensation 3 months from now.
Maybe I'm missing his point. Sure, employee compensation might need to be rethought - but not because options are a bad tool. Companies grant options at an early stage because of the long time horizon and high volatility [1]. That's what makes them valuable. If you want your compensation to be liquid and predictable, you should probably just ask for more cash.
The actual water embodied in the exported almond is trivial. A bunch of water is lost in evaporation, but I don't know how that evaporation compares between these various food items, I got the impression that a ton of water is dumped on the almond trees at some critical moments, so I'd presume most goes back into the ground? Some water may be unsuitable for reuse even if it doesn't evaporate.
Much larger in scale, alfalfa is also exported, often to Asia. "The water used to irrigate just alfalfa and hay — 7 trillion gallons per year — exceeds the irrigation needs of all the vegetables, berries, and fruit orchards combined." (Center for Science in the Public Interest; http://www.cspinet.org/EatingGreen/pdf/arguments4.pdf)
Most HFT players are market makers, not market takers. If you take a look at the fees in that link, the fees for liquidity taking are positive, i.e. $0.0027, whereas the fees for liquidity providing are negative, i.e. $(0.00150).
Exchanges offer rebates to market makers to incentivize market activity on their platform.
That felt a little hostile; maybe I wasn't reading it in the proper voice, or reading the letter writer in the proper voice, but in my head the letter writer seemed to know that GRRM didn't owe him anything, and just wanted some more meat put on those bones of an idea.
I think that even with free software authors, it's easy to act entitled to their work. (Undervaluing people's work is one of the world's great issues...)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rope_(data_structure)