The trouble with the AdMob-like behavior is that acquirers pretty much know founders would flip and go. No rational acquirer these days can expect founders to stick around very long. It may happen - YouTube guys stuck around - but the odds don't favor it.
Golden handcuffs and such only go so far, because if a person's mind is not fully engaged, what's the point in him or her showing up?
This has the effect of lowering the price acquirers would want to pay. I have seen this dynamic play out. When one of the companies I am involved with acquired a small company (note that most such deals are never publicly announced), they simply told the founders to stick around 3-6 months, hand over the technology and go. There was not even a plan to ask them to stick around. Of course, the price paid reflected that. This is the flip-side of the "talent acquisition" deals we read about - pure tech acquisitions, valued only for the code and the jump-start it gives someone else.
I am noticing a trend lately where private market valuations seem higher than what equivalent public companies get. Of course, it is hard to find a public company equivalent of Facebook or LinkedIn, but I would say Google can be a good proxy for FB or LI.
This is puzzling at first: if private parties thought public markets were undervalued, why won't they directly invest in already public companies?
I believe the answer has to be that private parties believe private companies are relatively undervalued compared to what "they should be" in public markets - in other words, they are not undervalued compared to currently public companies, but they are undervalued compared to some notion of what they ought to be as public companies themselves.
This idea is not surprising - after all every start-up investment, almost by definition, reflects the investor's bet that they found something that is "relatively undervalued compared to its eventual public status."
I made that original comment. Thanks for doing the analysis I was too lazy to do! Your analysis jives with the broader point I was trying to make - in the past 15 years, finance has been the surest path to riches in America. It is not just at the level of the Forbes 400. During the real estate bubble, newly minted mortgage brokers (often coming from other fields such as car sales, they found selling debt far more lucrative) were taking home $0.5 million - and not just a few of them. I have had acquaintances in Goldman, at fairly low level in the org chart, who have been taking home similar sums in bonuses every year. I know Unix systems administrators in Wall Street who take home ~$300K/year - and these guys are generally very low in the Wall Street totem pole.
It has been the age of the financier for a while now. No, this is not capitalism at work; it is Federal Reserve policy. It allowed specially privileged entities to lever up (30x leverage in case of investment banks like Goldman or Morgan Stanley, 10x in case of hedge funds), allow them to speculate with easy money, and have them pay out huge bonuses in case of investment banks or huge carried profit in case of hedgies ... and finally bail them out when their leverage blew up on them, only to have them start speculating all over again.
The thing is, however, that the times are different now. Look at a chart of the US 10 year note from the 60's to the present. It peaked in 1981.
I parse that history as -- the world was coming off of a golden era in productivity, wealth and economic stability. It would make sense for people from B school to make a lot of money if they started getting their chops on Wall Street, etc.
But now it's different. I think that the 10 year note has begun its steady rise again, finally (biggest acceleration since the late 60's and early 80's). But in this economic climate, nimbler business arrangements surely are more viable and better training for future business leaders.
It's just basic math -- in a 4% environment, things like SpaceX and other lighter economic models will be successful. In a 15% environment, financing itself is more useful, and, with synergy and everything, on average produces more massive individual personal wealth.
The constraints that faced those currently on the Fortune 400 list (which is really some sort of integral of the past 30 years -- as these are people at the peak of their careers) are different from those who will be on the Fortune 400 list in 2030.
(N.B. I made all this s* up having looked at an all-time 10 year note chart earlier tonight. But it's an idea.)
ETA: Although it's a bit of a project. I think it would be interesting to compile the 100 wealthiest people in the world over the past 100 years. I have a feeling that certain periods in time would've produced clusters of financiers (JP Morgans, etc.), whereas other times would produce clusters of startup founders. Would be interesting to compare them to different economic indices, etc. Then the thing would be to determine if our own present economic climate resembles others periods -- and what that means to the different types of fields you should, on average, go into to maximize personal wealth (if that's something that you're into). Or at least be aware of it.
The thing is, once you have $15M I'm sure that financial manipulations are enormously popular.
I don't think about getting into fortune 400. I think about going from 5 figures in the bank to 8, for which I feel entrepreneurship is the best choice.
of course I've been an obsessive programmer since I was 13 (16 years now, eek) so it is a more natural path
Quibble, but wasn't it the SEC that allowed the investment banks to leverage up 30x?
Not to mention that all of them are now dead, bought out by bank banks or in the process of becoming so (well, that's just the big names, but as I understand it the smaller fish are very small).
Yur second point is dead on - these companies aren't the "champions of capitalism" some think they are. They are benefactors of government policy, like the fractional reserve system, Federal Reserve policy, etc.
pg, unfortunately for America, in recent years most of the highest paid people (to the tune of hundreds of millions per person) have been financiers. Even fairly successful outcomes in the start-up world, such as Mint.com to take a random example, don't make founders that rich.
I suspect if you look at the new inclusions in Forbes 400 list over the past 10 years, that list (of deltas) would be dominated by Finance. This is not a good thing.
Only one post-Bubble company (Facebook) currently looks like it has a good shot at making its founder a billionaire. Compare to newly minted finance billionaires Steven Cohen, James Simons, Peter Thiel (also the founder of PayPal, but he made his billion in finance, not software), Ray Dalio, John Paulson, Kenneth Griffin and dozens more.
I have some colleagues and good friends in Beijing, most of them coming from various provinces to Beijing for their jobs - they are not high up in the ladder socio-economically. The impression I get is that they love China (to the extent of choosing not to go abroad to live and work), but resent the party's overbearing ways. They are not going to go out and protest, but that doesn't mean they like their government much either. They tell me banned publications are fairly widely available, if you know how to find them, and many of them are fairly knowledgeable about stuff the party doesn't want them to know about.
My suspicion is that Facebook revenues could be much higher than they are letting on. I say that as a non-Facebook user and a fairly neutral outside observer. If they were being coy because revenues were actually too good, it wouldn't be the first company to do so. Google was coy about its revenue in the 2002-3 timeframe, and it surprised a lot of people when it was later revealed just how much they were making.
Here is my theory: Facebook's traffic, measured in terms of users or page views is about even with Yahoo. Facebook has the added advantage that every single page view is a from a logged in user, who has provided Facebook with a fair amount of personal information, far, far more than what Yahoo has. Facebook has considerable information from the users' profiles as well as their various activity streams that Facebook tracks. This should enable Facebook to target its ads more precisely than Yahoo can, and therefore achieve at least as much revenue as Yahoo. From an advertiser perspective, it would seem like Facebook, with its vastly superior knowledge of user behavior, should be a better bet than old-school Yahoo. Of course, Facebook probably hasn't pushed its sales efforts as hard as mature Yahoo; still, I would expect Facebook to be doing a goodly fraction of Yahoo's revenue, which is running north of $6 billion per year.
If you buy my theory, long term, Facebook should overtake Yahoo in revenue; in fact a lot of Facebook revenue will likely come by stealing advertisers from Yahoo. So the company with the most to fear from Facebook is not Google but Yahoo.
Maybe facebook will be one of those powerhouse private technology corps like SAS that make money hand over fist but stays private to do whatever the hell it feels like in terms of personnel benefits and R&D expenditure.
To me the number's Facebook put out seem reasonable. I haven't seen evidence that Facebook's targeting capabilities have been yielding significantly higher CPC's for their ad network (and thus huge revenues). I've done some smaller buys, and yes you can control who views your ad on several grains (age, gender, location, etc.), however even with really great ad copy, CTR's are still surprisingly low given the boost you would expect from their targeting. They'll continue to refine their product but it still has a ways to go and targeting doesn't seem to be a huge competitive advantage at this point. I'd say that the big boost as of late (which was alluded to by other comments) was the loosening of their ad policies last year.
To the point about Yahoo, clearly they'll be less relevant going forward, but I don't think the comparison is completely fair. Keep in mind that they are still pretty much the king of display with an huge US reach (180MM Americans - http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2010/1/c...).
I sense too much negativity and frustration on this thread. I can sympathize. I was exactly the same way at 24, a nerd who couldn't hold a conversation with the opposite sex, had rejection after rejection, and was pretty depressed about it too.
I consciously decided to "improve" myself. Here are things I did:
1. Improved my wardrobe. Believe me, it makes a difference.
2. Consciously taught myself to listen, and ask questions that will lead to more conversation.
3. Consciously taught myself to gauge the level of interest of the other person. Move on if the other person isn't interested - as they say, there is always more fish in the ocean.
4. Push the envelope a little bit ... the man has to push - you have to ask for the phone number! And it is a good way to gauge interest.
5. Don't forget that some level of IQ compatibility is critical. Just as "they" don't want the nerd in you, may be some of the "airhead" types aren't great to be around for you either.
Let me just say that I hit success after consciously doing it. It is like doing a start-up. Know your strengths and know how to compensate for your weaknesses - a superior IQ can help you figure out how to compensate :-)
It seems like one of the least evil taxes to me. $3.5 million or more worth of assets are absolutely irrelevant to a corpse. So the great evil is that the descendants of someone who amassed a great fortune only get $1.5+ million that they did absolutely nothing to earn, after presumably having every conceivable advantage growing up? To me that seems much less evil than taking a fraction of what a living person actually worked to earn and might still need.
Of course, I usually reserve the word "evil" for killing, raping, arson, dragons, Satan and that kind of thing. Taxes seem to have a much less dramatic effect on their victims.
This looks at the tax from the perspective of those who will inherit, and concludes that since spoiled kids don't deserve big inheritances, the estate tax is fair, just and moral. But what about where the money goes? Does the government deserve it? I don't think so. One might be able to make an argument that the money should go to society, because the system is what made the creation of wealth possible. But that's not what the estate tax does, the estate tax takes the money to the government. Arguing that spoiled kids have not earned it is a lot easier than arguing that the government is deserving.
What about looking at the tax from the perspective of the individual who created the wealth? What the tax does is encumber the creator of the wealth from deploying it as he/she sees fit. Why do we want to encumber creators of wealth?
TO CLARIFY: the gift taxes that are part of the estate tax complex encumber creators, not just corpses. If you remove the gift tax, I have no problem with the estate tax because nobody would ever pay it.
How can a corpse deploy wealth? If they wanted to do something with that wealth, which I agree they have the right to do, wouldn't it make sense to do it while they still have the ability to have thoughts?
It makes more sense to me for the government to get it, because that reduces the need for them to take wealth from people who are alive and might be able to use their wealth.
> "Arguing that spoiled kids have not earned it is a lot easier than arguing that the government is deserving."
Isn't "the government is deserving" the crux of the Gates/Buffett argument? That government has provided them, as wealthy people, far greater services than the average person? (In the form of providing safety, protecting property, supplying an educated workforce, enforcing market rules, etc)
The general idea being that you simply can't become fabulously wealthy via anything short of barbarism without government, so the government does deserve something more to further these services that they're providing?
If Gates/Buffett really believe that the government is deserving, why have they arranged their affairs to pay as little tax as possible? Including (but not limited to) essentially zero estate tax?
Forgive me if I'm not convinced by an argument that suggests that others should be compelled to do something the proponents of the argument relentlessly avoid.
To be fair, I think their argument is more accurately phrased: the government is more deserving than the heirs (after a reasonable threshold, natch). Or, more generally, society is more deserving.
I don't see a logical conflict in their preference for private charity over government redistribution.
Honestly, I don't think any proponent of the estate tax would mind if the practical result of a high estate tax was that the rich just gifted their estates to private charity to spite the government. Government is just the only group with a sufficient cudgel to enforce the practice and sufficient reach to ensure that otherwise-undirected estates do give back to society.
Why want to encumber an aristocracy, not creators of wealth. The creators in question are dead. Thomas Paine covers this in his pamhlet _Rights of Man_.
Sure. Until we have a better organization, whose primary concern is the overall health of society, to distribute it.
Government is certainly a flawed organization. But we currently trust them with all our other tax dollars. I don't see any reason to hold estate tax dollars to a different standard than any other government revenue.
Except that deserving isn't a binary attribute. So pointing out the government is undeserving isn't sufficient.
My point is that we as a society have entrusted government specifically with the job of redistributing wealth to better society and that makes them the better of bad choices.
It may be true the government does not redistribute wealth in a way that provides value to the purpose of an estate tax. I would hardly call it evil though. If other aspects of society and government were managed well, an estate tax might be a valuable part of the machinery.
Without regard to the efficiency and quality of government, when you die, "your" estate gets taxed 100%, not 55%. This happens without government intervention. I know many high net-worth people that get upset about estate taxes. I know many that don't care. The key difference between these two types is the later accepts you can't take it with you. The former is still holding on to some feeling that they can control things after they die.
I assume you agree that there's some level of necessary taxation? You then need to make an argument that people who receive money from an inheritance don't deserve to have that income taxed, whereas an entrepreneur who builds a company and sells it to Google does.
The argument is that they already own it. My kids have rooms in my house now. You are saying they should have to give money to other people (i.e., be taxed) for those rooms when I die? They are getting food and education costs based on the profits from my company- I die so they must be taxed on that on top of the income tax? It's not income from an inheritance, it's a continuation of what they are already getting tax free. My death shouldn't have anything to do with it.
They're already benefiting from the money you've earned, but that doesn't mean they own it in any meaningful way. You have complete control over your assets, you can refuse to support your kids and they can't head to Vegas and gamble it away.
As a general rule we tax assets when they change ownership, maybe because the benefit to the recipient cushions the pain of giving away part of it to other people.
Just to be clear, the tax is on a transfer of money, not on the money itself. If you transfer only $10 million to your family, the tax will only apply to that $10 million in transfer. Similarly, if you gift them $10 million while they are alive, that money will be subject to taxes.
In terms of what you can actually do if you set your mind to it, they're not terribly different. In terms of the default/conventional things recommended by their communities, they're fairly divergent.
Speaking as someone who's used both and prefers Mercurial:
* Git's branching philosophy (lots and lots of branches, only one active at a time) can be handy. But Mercurial's philosophy (not quite so many branches, and usually as separate clones so you can work on more than one side-by-side) is, I've found, usually better.
* Git's much more encouraging of editing history up to the point where you share code with someone else. Mercurial will let you do that if you really want to, but it's discouraged; the only "easy" way is limited to undoing the last commit. Git seems to encourage committing much, much more often and not particularly caring about the repository history until you're ready to share with someone else (at which point you just selectively rewrite the history to look sensible). Mercurial seems to encourage committing in logical chunks so the repo history is clear and sensible the whole time (but again, if you really really want to do the Git-style stuff, you can).
* Mercurial seems to me, personally, to be a bit more logical in terms of choosing good defaults and exposing abstractions. Git's choices for default behaviors have been criticized even by its fans, and it tends to throw a lot of its inner workings at you on a regular basis, even if you don't really care much.
But, again, this is only my own personal opinion; undoubtedly others will disagree with it.
> usually as separate clones so you can work on more than one side-by-side
the major downside here is that all IDEs I know are excellent at reloading your project from the fs when you git checkout a different branch, but much clunkier about having to reopen another directory.
If you go the git route, then you only look in one place for the code and it's easy to just point at it no matter what's currently active. But the downside is that (so far as I know) no tool other than git can show you what's in not-currently-active branches.
If you go the hg route it's easy to see lots of things side-by-side, but of course you don't have the "it's all in one directory, and you do have to point at different locations to work on different branches.
If you want branches side by side in git, just clone your repository. Or am I missing something?
The one catch is that the "upstream" repository will be the local one you cloned from, rather than your original upstream. git-clone could easily have a switch for that, though.
Notice that I've never said "git can't do this". I've been talking in terms of the conventions recommended by each tool's community. In the case of git, that's not separate clones for branches...
Not taking a side on branching philosophies (other than that I think it's good to be branching lots), but git does let you do checkouts in multiple directories. It uses hardlinks (in the repo, not in the checkout, obviously) so it's fairly efficient in terms of space and time to perform the checkout.
Here's my experience with each. I'm biased and stubborn here, but in ways that may or may not be relevant to you. Your circumstances will differ, so take any advice about this with a grain of salt.
I've used distributed VC systems for quite a while, at least in the small. I find VC systems, databases, and the like verrrry interesting (due to a past life working in libraries), and an acquaintance of mine was the primary author of Monotone. I had already been keeping my home directory and /etc in svn, but that sounded far more interesting (it was also a full backup!). I tried it, and found using repository-as-a-whole versions more convenient than per-file versions. Later, I tried out hg, and felt it had a nicer interface / was easier to set up for common operations. (mtn assumed you cared to set up strong crypto auth for everything.) I was quite happy with Mercurial - it's a good system.
After using hg for a while (nine months or so?) I tried out git. It was still rough around the edges (the interface and documentation have since gotten better), but it had one major feature that stuck out - its ability to nonchalantly create and shuffle between several local, topical working branches in the same repository. To my knowledge, Mercurial still doesn't have a comparable feature, since their decisions about the core data structures make it awkward -- git saves the repo in terms of data snapshots, while hg saves the diffs (or perhaps vice versa, I forget). There was a major release where the hg team introduced "bookmarks", which were an attempts to emulate the git branching model, but you still had to be careful about copying them from one repo to another, etc. It had different trade-offs. I stopped paying attention around then. (If hg has since gained these, it would be a major point in its favor.)
That sounds overly negative towards hg, though. A major con of git is that the system is heavily skewed towards running on Unix. If you install it on Windows, it uses vim as the default editor for comments, it assumes you're used to man pages, etc. As a whole, the native behavior of the platform is an afterthought. Lots of little Unix-isms. Now, I can't blame them - I use OpenBSD at home, and strongly prefer old-school Unix in general. Also, developing any kind of system with the niceties that Unix provides and then porting it to Windows later is a big pain. Still, Mercurial's releases have consistently seemed to more evenly support Windows. I develop for Windows at work (in a field involving high-performance graphics and associated hardware), and, for my own circumstances, would choose Mercurial over git. Again, I should stress they're both a landslide better than any other systems I've seen.
Also, mercurial seems to place more emphasis on being simple for basic use, yet having a clean foundation for adding extensions. I haven't written any, or looked at it in a while, but it seemed like a good example of the different design styles - git was more powerful but scruffy, while mercurial was clean and more concerned with usability. (Whether this is an emergent property of git being written in C and shell scripts vs mercurial in Python with hotspots in C would be an interesting debate.)
I still use git for my home directory and personal projects, though most systems' flaws aren't a big deal for smaller projects. Feel free to experiment. If you're doing research prior to committing to one or the other for a massive project, switching really isn't a big deal until you have branches with months of churn. Unless you're working on the Linux kernel or an equally massive project (unlikely), it'd be far easier (in isolation - not counting retraining) to just pick one, use it for a couple months, articulate pros and cons, then switch and compare. They have quite a bit in common, and either would be vastly preferable to svn (ack!) or perforce (ACK!!!). You can't make an informed decision without trying either, and they're both quite good.
I looked into Darcs as another system that had interesting features and a pretty nice interface, but given the problems with bootstrapping an even remotely recent version of GHC on BSD (http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1346), there's no way in hell I'd depend on Haskell for something as fundamental as VC.
Also, weird web2.0 juice nonwithstanding, it's a version control system, not a religion. It's a means to an end. You (everyone), you're using it because you're writing something, not because you're trying to be seen scribbling deep thoughts in a damn moleskine notebook.
nonchalantly create and shuffle between several local, topical working branches
That functionality's actually available in hg, it just doesn't seem to get used much (except by people who are being forced to use hg and want to make it just like git). The more common workflow seems to be using different clones for different branches, which has both advantages and disadvantages, as does git's approach; it seems mostly that people choose a VCS depending on which side of the tradeoff they like best.
You're right. I found keeping a different directory for a different branch a bit annoying, but it's not a big deal. (Besides, if you're keeping really, really large binaries under VC, you're probably using the wrong tool.)
Well, again -- you don't have to do the whole separate-clones thing. Mercurial's bookmarks are pretty much git-style branches under a different name, for example. And even though they're provided by an extension they're really not anything fancy: they're just a thin layer of UI on top of normal hg operations (in hg terms, bookmarks just boil down to a way to name -- and thus jump to, merge from, etc. -- heads in the repository).
I use git more than hg, but neither bothers me, and I do use both. There's one major workflow that's significantly easier in hg, which is to generate a local patchfile (amazingly clunky in git sometimes, despite being actually kinda simple too). Hg has some UI fail too, it's just different.
Some of gits front end is (even now) a bit weak, but, it's also quite complete (really) and insanely powerful (for better or worse, you can really shoot yourself in the foot with it, if you poke too much).
There are things that are commonly in use that people shoot themselves with all the time (like stash - which is really an antipattern when you have such cheap branching (hint: branch & commit never causes problems, and rebase / cherry-pick help you squash temp stuff)). You can find anti-patterns in any software though, and I recommend you simply use both for a while, I think anyone unbiased will generally agree they've very very comparable.
If you have a brain cell or two, neither of these systems are going to be a major bottleneck to use, despite what folks might say about their UIs etc.
Git is a little faster at doing some tasks, but this isn't going to really matter to you unless you're managing large repositories. Gits recent popularity growth means there's some neat tools out there too, depending on your platform, and preferences.
As far as windows support goes for git, I have to help less technically minded non-developers use git on windows on a fairly frequent basis, and msysgit works just fine there. You'll want to be aware of details of SSH & key management, and debug with ssh first before debugging with git. That's standard debugging though, and not really anything to do with git, or windows, but the lack of commonality of these tools on the platform. Again, a few brain cells correctly engaged very rapidly get past any such niggles if you're being pragmatic.
Executive summary: Both are very good. Mercurial tends to be playing "catch up" to git in the more elaborate (but very useful) functionality. Git on Windows tends to be rougher but it is catching up, maybe caught up. If you cannot decide, flip a coin and Just Do It[tm], it will be a win either way.
When I last used Mercurial heavily (around a year ago), its branching was weak so the user model tended to be clone to create a new repo as a branch rather than branching within a repo. Logically, this is the same, but practically it is less convenient... it tends to create multiple directory pollution and then you forget what is in which directory (especially when you have CRS disease). I understand Mercurial branching is catching up or caught up with git.
Mercurial is pure Python (sorta), which makes it more portable (sorta) but slower (sorta). Git is written in C, which makes it faster (almost always), but assumes a "reasonable" POSIXish OS environment, making it hard to port to Windows (solved now).
TortoiseHg is great on Windows. I have played a little with TortoiseGit - it appears to be as good as TortoiseHg on Windows, but that is a recent development.
Git has some killer features, starting with its near magical merging. As Linus points out, branching is easy - it is the merging that is difficult. Hg is on par with merging, so that isn't a big discriminator.
A unique feature of git is the "index" staging mechanism. This is very handy to pick out certain changes (with the "interactive" mode, even down to the line-in-a-file level) and check just those changes into your repository without having to either update everything as a lump or jump hoops to separate wanted and unwanted changes.
Another really nice feature is git's "interactive" mode which allows major patch rework/rearrangement - you can split, merge (squash), and reorder patches. This allows you to be anal-retentive on checking in your changes frequently and then rationalizing the forest of changes before pushing it upstream. (From what I've read, while it looks like you are "changing" history, in the bowels of the git metadata, all the state and sequence information is preserved.)
Git's rebase is very nice and very useful if used with discretion. Again, it looks like Hg has a rebase plugin now.
Personally, I prefer git because it is the repository for the open source projects I'm involved in and because my perception is that it is more popular and growing faster. If your development is in the Python world, you probably will prefer Hg for the same reasons. ;-)
The really good news is that you can move from SVN to Hg or git easily and you can move between Hg and git bidirectionally with only the conversion time as a penalty without losing any information. This means that, even if you pick the "wrong" DVCS, you can "recover" easily.
Hg's branching isn't weak anymore. The functionality of git and hg have converged to the point now that it's more a matter of a decision around inteface and community feel instead of features.
Mercurial isn't pure Python - a few hotspots (particularly diffing) are done in C. It seems to be easier to port, though. (Git has a thicker "Unix accent".)
You hit the nail on the head. This is really the effect of the massive credit bubble - natural resource companies and financials. Given the way things are going, we will likely see a lot more of this in the next decade.
I'm not sure how natural resources are a bubble. They might not compete in the same way companies which innovate on their products do, but they're certainly not under-valued. Financials, on the other hand, are a bubble in which major shareholders have complete control of the legislative process in the US. Consider the power of the federal government to bail out those "too big to fail", and that bubble seems pretty unlikely to pop.
Golden handcuffs and such only go so far, because if a person's mind is not fully engaged, what's the point in him or her showing up?
This has the effect of lowering the price acquirers would want to pay. I have seen this dynamic play out. When one of the companies I am involved with acquired a small company (note that most such deals are never publicly announced), they simply told the founders to stick around 3-6 months, hand over the technology and go. There was not even a plan to ask them to stick around. Of course, the price paid reflected that. This is the flip-side of the "talent acquisition" deals we read about - pure tech acquisitions, valued only for the code and the jump-start it gives someone else.