You could also have bought $1,000 worth of stock at the time and it would be worth one million today (since 1995 with reinvested dividends, source ChatGPT). Up to you whether the 32 years spent in the office makes the money more worthwhile to you.
Exactly how does one purchase $1,000 in stock of a company never listed on a stock exchange? NeXt was never public.
For the love of God, use the right tool. Portfolio back testers are a dime a dozen and easy to use and get 100% accurate answers. LLMs are the wrong tool to get investment expertise from.
Apple was, though. They went public in 1980. The IPO price, adjusted for splits, was a little under $0.10 per share. Ignoring any dividends, etc. your $1000 today is the equivalent of over 10,000 shares of Apple, worth almost $2 million today.
Why do some countries cheat in the Olympics? Because it is no longer a contest of human achievement, it's just about the medals as a symbol of national glory. Of course: once all countries are doping, the medals will become meaningless. College degrees will suffer the same fate if everyone cheats to get them.
Testing doesn’t work for everything, especially for dissertations, publications, research etc. That being said I’m wholeheartedly in favor of using extensive in class testing when applicable.
It works for enough that 99% of cheaters are weeded out. Perfection is the enemy of "good enough".
Also, always keep in mind the most underrated kind of cheater: the clearly smart kid who cheats to go from an A- to an A. That level of student can't be "caught" with tests because by all accounts they already know and have even mastered the material. The pressure at that level of competitiveness simply requires zero room for doubt. Not really what the article is about, but some food for thought.
Diversity in evaluation methodology is a reliable way for many subject. Even short, minimal handwritten exams would help to assess student understanding at a few key checkpoints and should should be reintroduced.
"Most financial experts attribute he sudden increases that started in the 1970s with an influx of federal funding designed to make college more affordable."
Expensive things can be affordable. A house is expensive, but with stable employment and a bank loan you can afford it.
When we're talking about college costs, public schools are really the only institutions that matter. The Ivies (or even Ivy+) are a rounding error compared to the big midwestern land-grant universities and the UC and Cal State systems.
This coincides with federal funding programs, but student loans are famously not dischargeable, which makes them more instruments of social control than conventional financial vehicles.
We had that in the form of MapQuest, and it was agonizingly slow. Click to load the next tile, wait for the page to reload, and repeat. Modern SPAs are a revelation.
They could, but it'd take a lot longer and movers are usually paid by the hour so they could expect to hear a lot of "Stop playing on your phone and get to work" or even "why are you taking photos of my (or my child's) stuff" which could get pretty awkward.
I expect that right now moving companies do sell info like your name and your old/new address. That alone should give them a rough idea of your income level, if you're getting poorer or richer, starting a family or recently divorced, etc. If you're using a moving company like Flat Rate and taking photos of all your stuff so that they can make an estimate they could be selling that data too.
Look, everyone on the planet agrees that calling it FSD was over-promising. You are not adding anything to the conversation by pointing that out, or by confusing technology with "magic". The fact remains that software developed by a competent team can actually improve over time, despite the insanity of corporate leadership, and that's what is happening here.
The fact also remains that fraud (even if it's not prosecuted) is fraud. You promise X and deliver... not X, for years? You're a fraud. Even if you are getting better at delivering Y, for some value of Y which is Far, Far less than X.
The thing is, the dot com hypesters were right about the impact of the Internet. Their timing was wrong, and they didn't pick the right winners mostly, but the one thing they were right about was that the Internet would change the world significantly and drive massive economic transformation.
The majority of comments here seem to argue the ideal equity share for employees is zero, since it probably won't be worth anything. That seems like an even more founder friendly viewpoint, no? Mass inequality of ownership is how we end up normalizing the corrupt billionaire class. I agree with you we need an industry desire for better ownership terms, but instead I see people arguing employees should just take a salary, look the other way, and let owners hoard all the spoils.
That is not what people are arguing. Labor sellers should assume equity in a non publicly traded company is worth far less than the labor buyer wants the labor seller to think it is, so labor sellers should demand more cash such that the compensation is competitive with other potential job offers that offer more cash.
Don't get sucked into blind rage over nothing. Why do most employees nowadays prefer cash over options in startups? because for every successful startup where the secretary got a vineyard there are 99 when the startup limps along for 12 years and then closes without a sale. Generational wisdom turned into "Dont get suckered for low wage and options, get a high wage and invest in the S&P".
Will there be lucky founders that become very rich? absolutely. Founders are generally very risk aggressive and are willing to go boom or bust. But for an average person that just want a good life why risk lower living standards for a low change of riches?
If you are very risk aggressive you can push for more equity, but expect your salary to be much lower than your peers. Most veteran SE will advise against it.
Earning a salary in cash doesn’t stop you from investing the cash. I have never earned equity from an employer but most of my net worth is sitting in publicly traded companies. So obviously I am not lacking company ownership just because the company I worked for didn’t loop me in.
The other reason this isn’t true is that equity becomes a lottery ticket that is written in a founder and investor-preferred manner and is used to fleece mostly young employees who don’t know better and are romanced by the thought of being a part of the next Uber or Airbnb.
The practical reality is that it becomes “this job is worth $150,000 but we’ll pay you $100,000 and you can have some equity that might be worth hundreds of thousands if the casino pays out.”
But then you have investor preference multiples, valuation fuckery, and other ways that even a successful exited company can pay out less than your fair share.
To me cash is king because I can invest it however I want. Equity is fine if it’s for a public company, as that’s effectively just deferred cash as an incentive to stay longer.
https://www.lbl.gov/people/excellence/nobelists/jennifer-dou...
The fact that this treatment "built on decades of federally funded research" is the scary part, given that such funding may disappear.