I think there are some theories that the universe is fundamentally discrete at the lowest level below current capabilities of measurement, but to my knowledge none of those is widely accepted.

They're all in California where the law is very pro-employee. As long as you're not taking actual documents or code with you, there's nothing your former employer can do about what's in your head.

If you want to discourage short-term thinking, make the vesting period longer on executive stock grants. Making companies' performance less transparent just opens up more opportunities for insider trading.

> If you want to discourage short-term thinking, make the vesting period longer on executive stock

Give them no stock, pay them 100k a year and if they fuck up fire them rather than saying they left to "spend more time with their family" - kinda like the rest of the working joes out there.

Pay me 100mil this year and I might as well spend the rest of my time on the job gambling with shareholders money or trying to shag everyone in HR, there are no longer any consequences to my actions.

You get paid for what it costs to keep you in the seat and valuable. They get paid $100M because they're making decisions affecting >$1B.

The exec's bosses are the board, the people who represent the stock holders, so the exec's compensation is a direct reflection of the incentive the board is giving them. Stock options ensure they look out for that ticker. If the board didn't want short term gains they can always change their mind on the structure of exec compensations.

> Give them no stock, pay them 100k a year

That used to be the case, though more like millions a year. Clinton ended it.

Agree and make it two years for long term capital gains.

The problem isn't the executives, it's the boards.

But board members are largely just a proxy for the large shareholders anyway. E.g., short-term investment strategies are not going away.

Working C-levels would almost always much rather take the longer view against the wishes of their boards.

Yeah, it always surprises me when people on HN of all places who should have some modicum of critical thinking assume that, say, Bobby Kotick, Stephen Elop or a string of recent Intel's CEOs are some kind of rogue actors who just scammed their shareholders when in reality they were doing what they were hired to do by the board which represents (big) shareholders.

A pretty large percentage of the population believes in some pretty strange falsehoods about how business works, capital, economics, etc.

Could also price in negative externalities of short term trading with higher taxes for that behavior, nudging the markets to focus on value driving investments rather than speculation

Like short term vs long term capital gains tax rates?

Either that or implement it at the exchange level. Eg. if accredited investors sell a stock in <3 months, you pay X% as a tax at the moment of sale - or maybe different fees for <1 hour, <1 month, <1 year

> If you want to discourage short-term thinking, make the vesting period longer on executive stock

It’s 3 to 4 years on average. This isn’t relevant to quarterly filing requirements.

Harder to attract talent though (not saying you’re wrong)

Then you are free to sue whoever you think is violating your copyright. That's one of Serpapi's defenses: the owner of the copyright needs to sue, not a non-exclusive licensee of the copyright (Reddit).

This is a great legal defense, but if they are trying to make themselves seen as though they are fighting for the rights of the users and aren't doing the literal same thing that Reddit is doing, that is disingenious.

I wonder if any lawyers could weigh in here. Does this admission that they know the data is the user's make a class-action against SerpApi or whatever a slam-dunk? They're practically publishing their own admission of guilt!

They're not dying, but they're not healthy either. They've been around for 24 years and still haven't figured out how to turn a profit.

I don't want to just copy and paste my previous comment, but this isn't how companies at this size think about declaring profits. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47347993

Hence the comment you replied to saying "they print cash". You'll find a lot of big companies work this way: high free cashflow, because they earn a lot more than they spend, but then the spare cash is either reinvested or paid out via share buybacks. Declaring a profit isn't advantageous compared to the other options available.

If I was a NOAA meteorologist I'd be making bank insider trading temperature prediction markets.

Maybe this could be an alternative funding source for weather prediction, haha.

How can prediction markets be priced with continuous instead of discrete predictions?

They usually divide into buckets

But wouldn’t that be a feature of the prediction market, not a bug?

If someone really smart knows what will happen, that will make the market’s predictive ability more accurate.

That's always been a just-so story invented to justify insider trading. If weather predictors always bet on a weather prediction market, why would anyone else? They'd be guaranteed to lose money.

1) Not all expert weather predictors agree. They can bet against each other.

2) retail traders lose money and know far less than institutional investors, but do retail traders participate in the stock market? Of course they do.

The meteorologist making the observation has the ability to sway the outcome. "Those automated observations were wrong, turns out the maximum temperature today was 61F not 60F." This already happens all the time. Whether insiders are doing this to win in prediction markets is up for debate.

Yet somehow Microsoft Copilot doesn't know how to use that tooling.

Promotion-driven development happens at Microsoft just like any other big tech company.

This is totally true, if you ignore the entire history of taxation in the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Taxes are a part of a broader redistributive system.

Mobility is given by ensuring that all have equal opportunity. Opportunity to learn, opportunity to start a business. Etc.