That's not quite correct.

Shorting does mean borrowing stock, and that borrowing has an interest rate so there are fees to pay.

But there is no due date. Just an interest rate on the borrowing; i.e. borrowing for more time = more fees.

You may be confusing this with covering the short (i.e. buying to close the short position), and the T+2 settlement time on share transactions. I.e. after closing the position you have 2 days to actually provide the shares. That's the only place where there's a specific time limit. Failure to deliver after that time is a pretty serious offence (SEC enforcement criticisms notwithstanding).

Ofc for retail this is all handled automatically by the broker. Same actually for most hedge funds. The largest I'm sure have slightly more special/custom arrangements.

That's not actually true - for a hard and a soft reason... ...max loss can be capped on a short using options; i.e. if you short at $100, then buy a call option at, say, $120. the call option you own gives you the option (but not the obligation) to buy stock at $120 anytime up to the expiry date of the option. Options, in this context, are typically used to hedge a bet; i.e. hedging the short in this case.

The softer option is that (memes aside), stocks don't tend to crash upwards as viciously as they crash downwards. so whilst theoretically a stock can go to infinite value (with infinite loss for short positions), in practise stocks don't go to infinite value, and they tend to take longer to spike to the same degree. i.e. even within max loss it tends to be more manageable.

Bear in mind its also possible to be long or short a stock not in holding/shorting the actual stock but also by holding options positions. E.g. selling a call option, or buying a put option would be simple profitable positions to take if you expect the underlying stock to decrease in value.

Ditto - but again for a different reason.

It'll always be a bit more expensive, less extra cost than now maybe once it gets more common/commoditized/whatever, but fundamentally....

gamers are older now than they used to be, especially those with cash to spend on high end stuff.

Its probably a bit of an over-generalisation/stereotype, but with increasing age comes increasing likelihood of there being other responsibilities in life. So something as immersive as VR becomes quite difficult to actually participate in.

I.e. in VR I can't...

- hear the doorbell
- see when the dog/cat wants to go out / get fed
- see when the wife/spouse/etc wants attention
- see when the babies/children wake
- have a conversation with anyone else in the room.
- see when you get a message/notification/etc from friends

It's basically *too* immersive to be an accessible form of entertainment for a large percentage of the population.

Plus the need for a decent amount of space, and evenly balanced eyesight, and reasonable aversion to nausea/motion-sickness.

Frankly I used to love sim racing (iRacing, primarily). But that pretty much stopped being a thing when we got a dog. If the damn animal wanted to go out and barked/scratched/etc that was race over... ...so I ended up just not bothering.

Now with small children + dogs + wife. VR... no way.

I bought one yes, a Vive soon after original release. And it is awesome. Do I ever play it? Ever? No. Weirdly only when hosting parties/etc and only then as an entertainment/novelty piece.

So no, I never thought it would be mainstream... ...because mainstream people can't frequently disconnect from RL for any real period of time to engage in VR experiences.

And, despite what I opened this post with, I don't think it will *ever* be mainstream for entertainment/gaming for exactly this reason, no matter how much costs come down.

(one could argue there are multiple reasons for the dumbing down of games; one reason being the common case complaint of a simple society. The other being that there are just too many time/attention pressures on the average gamer that a larger percentage just don't have the time or mental space to fully commit in the way that a zero-responsibility-teenager can).

The regional difference is interesting - here in sunny england i have been using this service for some months. Prices are comparable to local stores, and often cheaper...

With the added advanfage of not having to leave the house, pay petrol, etc... ...amazon delivery ftw!

Actually with young children at home meaning it is hard to leave the house once they have gone to bed this is fantastically useful....

Ofc small children also mean much less headspace for being organised for your own pleasures. And well sometimes randomly lets just have wine!

I evaluated a few, not for very long admittedly, but found all of them to be too slow.

Fundamentally, doing this stuff professionally means your workstation and tooling (ide or editor or whatever) needs to be an extension of you for you to be able to function efficiently and keep a good flow going. Some of this is muscle memory on keyboard layout and shortcuts, most of it (imo) is responsiveness and ui latency. If the ui cant respond faster than you notice it then it just hurts too much to create stuff effectively.

Hence, for me at least, native ide is important. Even if it syncs to a remote host on save for compile/preview/run (so long as it consistently does that quicker than i can alt+tab).

I love that integrated environments are available online, and i love the portability of that. But i just dont think it can be fast enough for serious development.

(Nb, by fast although ive not really done any benchmarking, the bottleneck so far as i can tell is the ide in javascript locally, even on a decent pc, rather than network latency)

Actually it didn't. Emissions are part of advertised specs. In the UK at least, this is an important figure because it determines how much annual road tax you have to pay to drive the thing - i.e. its important to consumers making the decision....and its really important to the UK government who have arguably been defrauded out of a whole bunch of tax revenue.

teehee, you put this so much better than I just did ;)

I'll be frank - but these are my opinions only.

Yes I would employ them with those caveats in place (and yes signoff can be sought from the other depts involved) - but I do see that as the employee saying "I'll work for you, but only until something else comes along" and to be honest that is a negative. If an employee is borderline at the hiring stage, this would not count in their favour for being hired.

We want people to be committed to us and for us to be their career, for as long as they choose to remain with us. The perception this gives is that they can/will leave at any time, and while they are with us they won't put in the effort to make it work anyway because they'll also be focusing on their home projects. Some people can make this work, keep the two separate and still give 100% in the day job. Many can't.

This is the key bit. On hiring them it is very "probably". Taking on someone new is a risk for the employer as much as it is a big step for the employee, especially for small business.

The honesty of being clear that they want to do side projects is appreciated (and important!), but to be frank it is a negative. Sorry.

You may also be right that many employers probably wouldn't...I can only speak from my experience.

They aren't intended to own your soul. I believe (again IANAL) they are intended to start from a position of legal clarity regarding the ownership of software produced by the employee that *may* make its way into company software products.

Obviously the company has to be clear that it does actually own what it thinks it owns (including its software). The clause prevents cases where the employee may write a nifty library at home, and use it at work as well, before subsequently deciding to sell it to someone else and denying the employer any legal right to use it - or even the choice of whether to use the '3rd party' code.

I agree there should be processes and people in place to avoid this happening in the first place (not least of which is a code signoff process) - but the 'default' position, as reflected by the contract, is for legal clarity. A reasonable employer should be able to exclude you from it, on the proviso that there are clear ownership rules around what employees write in their own time (plus no-compete rules).

I would like to reiterate; these clauses are - at least as far as my organisation is concerned - NOT about "we own your soul". Any reasonable employer should be able to come to a mutually agreeable agreement with you if you TALK to them. If they won't....well they probably aren't people you want to work for anyway...

There are legal advice services for employees too. Sometimes they are even available through the employer (provided by a 3rd party so unbiased). We do this through RBS mentor services. (I don't have a link sorry and cba to google for you ;)

hehe, if you feel like that then you will find employers won't care about you...

but fwiw you're wrong. A great many employers care hugely for the welfare, wellbeing, personal development, skills development and happiness of their employess. But you won't find one to work for while you have that attitude.

That may be, but life is a lot simpler for everyone if we can all work by mutual prior agreement.

*all* contracts start in the favour of the people who wrote them. It's a game to make it mutually fair as much as it is to do a decent tax return or haggle for goods at the market. You may not like that it's a game (I don't!), but it is one.

Yes - explain why you don't like this, and what you intend to do in your spare time that you wish to retain ownership of.

These clauses usually come from a desire that employees don't misappropriate company IP and use it to write something competing. Or for a competitor (where the 'who owns what' question becomes murkier).

Any reasonable employer will write you an exclusion, but likely with a no-compete clause, which is fair enough.

IANAL, but I write the above as an employer, running a tech team of 21.

Well actually I do a bit, with everyone on Windows 7 games can start to be dx11 only, which means more pretty.

Mostly I just care about people getting off ie6, and that's happening anyway so who cares what OS people use under the browser.