Perhaps I am misunderstanding your comment, but one of the largest hospitals in the Bay Area is quite literally called Zuckerberg Hospital: https://www.zuckerbergsanfranciscogeneral.org/
Gates has given many billions to public health initiatives as well
Have you actually priced out a custom home in the last 18 months? Tract homes in subdivisions are maybe 150-200 a foot but a 4/4 4000 sq. foot custom build is not being built for anywhere near $150 a foot. Plus there was likely a large amount of site work to be done as well.
I’m speaking as a (non commercial) builder, not a buyer. I don’t doubt that contractors are charging more than 150 a foot. But I know what materials cost and I know how many man hours it takes to build.
Some areas are having real struggles with finding construction workers though. We can thank the devaluation of trades training in schools and the ridiculous notion that college is for everyone for that mess.
Being a skilled tradesperson is a great career option for a lot of people, often the same people that end up stuck in retail or some other hellish profession after going to college and maybe even graduating. Their lives would be probably much better in trades, they would earn 4x as much, probably be in better shape, and have a much higher level of personal autonomy. Unfortunately, someone somewhere along the road convinced them that blue collar work was below them.
It’s one of the principles I used when I was raising children: a trade is something you can do anywhere that everyone needs. You own your own tools, you can show up anywhere and provide an essential service irrespective of the economic conditions autonomously and on your own terms.
Professions tend to be much more dependent on complex societal structures and institutions, tend to be more geographically restricted, and tend to be more restrictive to personal choices.
Some vocations can straddle both categories.
With my children, I made sure each of them had the fundamentals of at least one trade that they found interesting by the time they were 16. It has served them well even though they have all ended up pursuing more entrepreneurial and technology or media related fields.
My understanding is that for an LLC to provide protection the house would have to be used for purely business purposes and that there can be no co-mingling of personal finances. the concept is called "piercing the corporate veil". IANAL but I looked into this pretty extensively when choosing how to protect myself with investment properties.
Flexie circuit boards (commonly known as fpcs) have indeed been around for a long time. They are mostly used for interposer connctors and small components like LEDs, microphones, proximity sensors,small discretes etc. etc.
Based on the term "motherboard" used here I'm interpreting this to mean a bent/curved rigid circuit board which to my knowledge, is in fact novel. Obviously,the sections of the board containing the SoC and other chips will need to be flat, so I'm interested to see the utility here.
> ... bent/curved rigid circuit board which to my knowledge, is in fact novel.
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what they're actually doing.
Curved (in 3d space) circuit boards are certainly not novel in wearables though.
It's a very common design requirement to shape things to the human body area the device is being placed upon.
Thus people creating their own circuit boards using CNC on non-planar surfaces and similar. Saying that from having done it myself several years ago. There are also Youtube videos about this stuff as well.
I've never seen a curved rigid board and I'm having a hard time understanding how SMT would work. If you have examples I'd love to see them.
I've spent the last 15 years as a hardware design engineer in consumer electronics, 4 of those years were working on wrist worn wearables for one of the biggest players. Wearables utilize FPCs for curved sections. Sometimes sections the FPC will be stiffened with pieces of FR4 to support larger components, but the SoC, DDR, etc is always SMTd to flat rigid PCB. I've heard reports of rigid boards being bent if the stack up is only a few layers, but have never seen in a production product. Generally the traces and solder ball joints for the chips can't handle the strain.
Can you share some? I've spent a lot of time looking into this, reading and posting on boggleheads, talking with accountants, advice only financial advisors, etc. and the general consensus is that there isn't much you can do as a high W2 earner besides pay your taxes and be grateful to be in such a position.
If you define "average person" as W2 income only, then yeah, there aren't many. If you're married and your spouse can put enough time in to be a "qualified participant", you can you offset W2 income with rental losses (including depreciation).
But for the "average person", you're looking more at investment opportunities - real estate using a 1031 exchange, investing in Opportunity Zones, etc.
You may not be able to avoid taxes on W2 income, but you might be able to shift around when that income is recognized and reduce your overall tax rate.
Poking around online it looks like over 90% of the country is filing only W2 income so that feels like a fair classification for "average person".
I've gone pretty deep on the real estate research front. We have short term rentals but (fortunately) they do well enough that we can't show paper losses even with depreciation. We're both well employed so real estate professional status is off the table (which is why we started with short term rentals - schedule C vs. E)
1031s and opportunity zones don't do anything to change when your W2 income is recognized or reduce your overall tax rate, the only tax benefits are around the capital gains with the property. Both require upfront investments with post tax money.
It just feels a little disingenuous to say there are "plenty of tax optimization schemes for the average person" because showing paper losses on real estate with one spouse getting real estate professional status, is the only strategy I've seen consistently mentioned.
Thanks for posting the raw data, it's super interesting and I wasn't able to find it on my own.
I think we are mostly in alignment, I have just been focused on "how to lower taxes on W2 income" where your point is that anyone can diversify their income streams and find opportunities with lower tax rates.
As a guest, though, if a host is actively weeding out people because they speak out about being scammed by shitty not-as-described slumlord empty-ikea-box listings, then I probably don't want to give that host money anyway.
I totally agree. To clarify I'm a very active guest as well, so I'm well aware of mis-represented listings. I simply use this as another data point when evaluating a guest.
I don't need to know, because I automatically benefit from not having my trip ruined by staying there.
A lot of people don't seem to get that you can be honest about a booking without sounding like a complete asshole (despite how much I like to complain on HN, I promise that I don't write reviews the same way ^^).
You can say a lot of honest things like "if you expect to cook, be aware that you'll need to provide your own X/Y/Z" or "The wifi didn't work for me" or "I found the bed to be uncomfortably soft" or "It's obvious that nobody has ever lived here because so many basic things are lacking". And if any host would choose to deny you based on those, then I wouldn't want to give them money.
Possible reasons for a host to deny a booking:
1) The apartment is actually unavailable. It happens sometimes. I'm not going to cry about it.
2) The host is scared that I'm going to call them out for lying in their listing. If the listing is a lie, then I don't want to stay there. If the listing isn't a lie, then a good host won't be scared by honest reviews about misleading listings.
3) The host doesn't like my face. It's unlikely but possible. Again, I don't want to give money to a person who makes judgements like that.
I've never had any difficulty finding places while staying honest. Honesty doesn't reduce the number of good hosts available. Dishonesty does increase the number of bad hosts available. I do sometimes suffer because other people were dishonest in their reviews, and it upsets me.
Gates has given many billions to public health initiatives as well