Remove the psychological pressure that's driving you to drink and you'll find you don't want to drink. I changed my job and dumped all my drinking friends. I'm also ok forging my own path without friends so that part was easy for me.
> It's to reward employees who may need to sell stock based compensation to pay bills and other things that require currency.
Don't spend money before you have it.
On the other hand, equity is worthless until it's fungible. Fungibility problems turn into retention problems. Otherwise, the company has to pay large bonuses to key employees who may decide to cut their losses.
Sometimes it can be hard to time your expensive emergencies. Drunk drivers, cancer cells in a loved one's body, natural disasters, and law enforcement officers having a bad day rarely wait for the moment when your assets are at their most liquid.
That’s what the employee equity is in the first place...a way for the startup to spend money it doesn’t have to get the employee. The employee, in theory or at least tech anyway, is sacrificing a better salary at an established (likely public) company to join the startup in exchange for that small chance they make it up with the equity on the backside.
Although everyone loves to pretend the US is a Captialist system...it’s not, it’s debt driven. The entire Country is premised on spending money it doesn’t have in hopes the can turn profit before it all crashes, and that is reflected in every single high-growth tech startup seeking to IPO.
Want the employees to hold on longer for benefit of investors...change the whole system and reverse the tax rates of wages and capital gains. Why should the hard working employee pay 40% of their wage to Uncle Sam while the investor who sits on their ass pays 10% so long as they can hold on for a year?
In theory, an 83b election should be looked at for any restricted stock grants to minimize the ordinary income tax issue you describe. I know it's not always possible.
... follow a public-health driven harm minimization strategy, such as the Netherlands.
To give one example, Amsterdam used to have a huge heroin addiction problem, with associated crime and high death rates amongst addicts.
It is now treated as a health rather than a policing problem. Safe injecting rooms, methadone replacement programs, etc. As a result, the average age of heroin addicts in NL is now over 40, because young people aren't being addicted, and 'established' addicts are able to manage their condition for years, rather than die early from overdoses.
For more info on the Dutch approach to drugs of all kinds, this 21-page PDF has good background plus statistical comparisons both over the last 15 years and with other European countries:
Serious answer: to the countryside, away from the city and its lures, away from the dealers and with a bit of luck also away from the legal dealers of alcohol, even though that would be harder to achieve.
It seems to me it would be cheaper to give the committed substance abuser their drug of choice for free in a safe, separated and controlled setting, rather than maintain this magical thinking that one day they will turn things around on their own in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
Cheaper money-wise, maybe. Probably if and when the supply of those drugs has been taken out of criminal hands - something which is long overdue as the 'war on drugs' does nothing but guarantee high prices for criminals while it does next to nothing at all to limit the amount of drugs on the market. As to whether the 'move to the country' scenario works depends on the reason for the addiction. For some it probably will, others will either keep their addiction or change it for another one.
It will improve the quality of life for the addicts as well as the city climate, as to whether this is worth the extra costs compared to a state-supplied drug stash is up to society to decide.
I was thinking move them to the country AND supply them with their drug of choice, at least until hopefully someone discovers a miracle cure for addictive behaviour, which would be a better solution. Or why not relocate them to a closed environment with no abusable substances whatsoever?
Some people are incapable of looking after themselves, or fall into addiction after horrible experiences, and leaving these people to stew in their own juices rather than intervene is inhumane. We do after all section people that are a risk to themselves or others, so this is not without precedent.
Then try to find a way to live a life which does not solely revolve around getting the next hit. This will work for some, it won't for others. An alcoholic will find it hard to quit drinking while living in a pub so getting her out of that place is one way to give her a hand in breaking the addiction.
I think the parent was referring to: homelessness on the rise, lower-income residents being forced out, the need for many service workers to transport themselves to the city because they can't afford to live here anymore, housing speculation and foreign investment leaving units empty and driving up prices, etc. All of that "changes the character of the city", IMO for the worse. One reason (of many) for these changes is obstructionist behavior toward building housing and increasing density.
At least that's what I'd be referring to if I were to make the parent's argument.
You'd think it wouldn't take so much effort to defend the claim "if you build enough housing, people won't be homeless", but it does. So let's go with a prominent example: Tokyo.
Neighborhoods in Tokyo have no local control over zoning, and houses are widely understood to be a depreciating asset, not an investment. So Tokyo builds enough housing and homeowners can't pull up the ladder behind them.
The homelessness rate in Tokyo is astonishingly low and decreasing: just 1600 people in a metropolis of 13.6 million. Almost everybody can afford to live somewhere, because there is enough housing for everybody to live somewhere.
You may think I'm saying that your neighborhood has to look like the Ginza area, and I'm not saying that at all. Tokyo contains some calm, beautiful, residential-focused cities such as Setagaya. (If this is confusing: a metropolis can contain a city.)
Japan culture is very different than US. There is inherent respect obtained from having a job, any job, and dedicated yourself to it no matter how small. Being without a job or worse, homeless, brings much shame to that person and their family. There is strong social pressure to maintain your career and pour many many hours into it.
There's strong social pressure to maintain your career and pour many hours into it in the US, too.
That doesn't have very much to do with whether there are enough places to live. If the places where the careers are have fewer available places to live than they have people, it doesn't matter how dedicated you are, you can still fall out the bottom of the market.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like you're implying that homeless people in the US are homeless because they aren't ashamed enough of their situation to work harder and find a job, any job. That's... a gross misunderstanding of the problem, if so.
I think Tokyo is a good counter to the nonsense perpetuated in SF that the law of supply and demand doesn’t somehow apply to housing.
Homelessness however is more a multi-headed beast, and Japanese culture likely plays as much into a lack of people on the street as does housing availability.
