> There are an estimated 10 million Americans living overseas
Curious how you found this number, have a source?
This made me pretty curious, but I couldn't find any official numbers. The closest 'official' numbers that I could find are from the Federal Voting Assistance Program [0] and that lists 4.4 million people, but only 2.8 million of those being adults.
Strange that someone down-voted you, as this is a fair question.
> Curious how you found this number, have a source?
I don't have the source handy but have seen the estimated 10 million figure cited repeatedly. But maybe it is about a million too high, as the US Department of State estimates nine million in this 2020 publication: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/travel/CA-By-the-Number...
Using FVAP stats to me seems problematic, because just like the general population, many US citizens do not bother registering to vote (though they do acknowledge this on the page you linked to and try to control for it).
State likely have a more accurate estimate from knowing how many passport renewals originate from overseas addresses. I am sure some Americans renew or replace their passports while merely travelling overseas, but I cannot imagine this is a routine practice.
I feel like something must have changed, because when we went to cancel ours on a previous car ~3 years ago it was a long-ish process, but only because they kept offering more and more discounts until it was essentially free.
A couple months ago when the trial ran out on a different car it was like you said, over and done with in 5 minutes.
This is an interesting take, that I think might hold some water. With a budget of $59 million (according to wikipedia), they are definitely a small entity in the grand scheme of the US Government. Big enough to run their reports, but not big enough to stop them from being ignored if they are the only (or one of the few) going against the popular consensus.
Also, while I am not anywhere familiar with them enough to know their overall track record, even if they did correctly predict the topics listed in the article 'correct', that is three items in 60 years? I'd be curious to know how their intelligence has compared with the numerous things inbetween. That would be a huge lift though.
Still fun/interesting to learn about these agencies, even as someone who grew up in the US and took higher level classes on US Government, you never really get a complete view everything.
Options aren't equity, they're only the option to buy equity at a specified price. Vesting just means you can actually buy the shares at the set strike pice.
For example, you may join a company and be given options to buy 10,000 shares at $5 each with a 2 year vesting schedule. They may begin vesting immediately, meaning you can buy 1/24th of the total options each month (or 614 shares). Its also common for a delay up front where no options vest until you've been with the company for say 6 or 12 months.
Until an option vests you don't own anything. Once it vests, you still have to buy the shares by exercising the option at the $5 per share price. When you leave, most companies have a deadline on the scale of a few months where you have to either buy all vested shares or forfeit them and lose the stock options.
There can be an advantage to not exercising: it causes a taxable event the IRS will want a cut of the difference between your exercise value and the current valuation, it requires you to commit real money to buy shares that may never be worth anything ....
And there are advantages to exercising: many (most?) companies take back unexercised shares a few weeks/months after you leave, it kicks in a CGT start date, so you can end up paying a lower CGT tax when you eventually sell
You need to understand all this stuff before you make a choice that's right for you
Unless I'm mistaken, the difference is that grants vest into actual shares while options only vest into the opportunity to buy the shares at a set price.
Part of my hiring bonus when joining one of the big tech companies were stock grants. As they vested I owned shares directly and could sell them as soon as they vested if I wanted to.
I also joined a couple startups later in my career and was given options as a hiring incentive. I never exercised the vested options so I never owned them at all, and I lost the optios after 30-90 days after leaving the company. For grants I'd take the shares with me and not have to pay for them, they would have directly been my shares.
Well, they'd actually be shares owned by a clearing house and promised to me but that's a very different rabbit hole.
Looks like I used the wrong term there, sorry. I was referring to Cede & Co, and in the moment assumed they could be considered a clearing house. It is technically called a certificate depository, sorry for the confusion there.
Cede & Co technically owns most of the stock certificates today [1]. If I buy a share of stock I end up actually owning an IOU for a stock certificate.
You can actually confirm this yourself if you own any stock. Call the broker that manages your account and ask who's name is on the stock certificate. It definitely isn't your name. You'll likely get confused or unclear answers, but if you're persistent enough you will indeed find that the certificate is almost certainly in the name of Cede & Co and there is no certificate in your name, likely no share identifier assigned to you either. You just own the promise to a share, which ultimately isn't a problem unless something massive breaks (at which point we have problems anyway).
If I'm not mistaken, at least in the US most brokers also aren't the titled owner. That falls to Cede & Co which acts as a securities depository.
This is where the waters get murky and really risk conspiracy theory. My understanding, though, is that the legal rights fall to the titled owner and financial institutions, with the legal benefactor having very little recourse should anything actually go wrong.
The Great Taking [1] goes into more detail, though importantly I'm only including it here as a related resource if anyone is interested to read more. The ideas are really interesting and, at least in isolation, do make logical sense to me but I haven't had time to do my own digging deep enough to really feel confident enough to stand behind everything The Great Taking argues.
I would bet my left leg that the US gov't would never allow Cede & Co. to fail. Same for Options Clearing Corp. They are too important to a highly functioning financial system.
Banks and trading houses are kind of the exception in that regard. I pay my bank monthly for my mortgage, and thus I live in a house that the bank could repossess if they so choose.
The phrase really should be about force rather than possession. Possession only really makes a difference when there's no power imbalance.
Banks have the legal authority to take the home I possess if I don't meet the terms of our contract. Hell, I may own my property outright but the government can still claim eminent domain and take it from me anyway.
Among equals, possession may matter. When one side can force you to comply, possession really is only a sign that the one with power is currently letting you keep it.
Absolutely not. You are protected my law, regardless of whatever odious mortgage contract that you signed.
What is about HN that makes so many commenters incredibly distrustful of our modern finance system? It is tiring, and they rarely (never?) offer any sound evidence to the matter. Post GFC, it is working very well.
Re-read the post you’re replying to. They said options are not vested equity, which they aren’t. You still need to exercise an option that has vested to purchase the equity shares.
They did not say “options cannot get granted on a tiered vesting schedule”, probably because that isn’t true, as options can be granted with a tiered vesting schedule.
I dunno, most of the time, the offered vouchers have been more than the cost of the flight by a good amount. I haven't had an offer in a while, but the last few times were often starting at around 2x the price I'd paid for the flight for a 2-3 hour delay. I've never seen it be less than $200.
>It could be that US investors are less willing to invest in co-ops. But then, why? Is there something about them that makes them less competitive?
My, admittedly uninformed, guess would be it has to do with 1) there are more worker protections in the EU than in the US and 2) Co-ops tend to pay employees better wages, have better benefits, etc.
Shareholder corps will try to drive down their labor costs as much as possible. Walmart goes so far as providing advice to how it's employees can best apply for food stamps, all the while keeping them under the 32hr/week threshold that would require them to receive benefits. This can provide a price advantage against co-ops who are not running these same practices. It the EU the labor protection laws are better so the potential difference of labor cost is diminished between sharecorp and co-op.
Yeah, I had to do a double take at that... Or maybe we both somehow missed an episode.
I will say it has the americana filling of violence/gore though (if gore is the right word for the boat scenes).
As an aside, the audiobook version of this is really well done. You'll probably get more out of the actual book, but I really enjoyed having this on my long runs.
true, but it wasn't any better during the olympics and i think it was much worse before that. i only got there shortly before the olympics so all i can confirm is that it did not get any worse after.
according to this report air quality in beijing continuously improved for the last few decades:
yes, but the olympics were mainly in beijing, so when it comes to the question of what happened with the air quality after the olympics, beijing matters the most.
Curious how you found this number, have a source?
This made me pretty curious, but I couldn't find any official numbers. The closest 'official' numbers that I could find are from the Federal Voting Assistance Program [0] and that lists 4.4 million people, but only 2.8 million of those being adults.
[0] https://www.fvap.gov/info/interactive-data-center/overseas