najdorf

Google Beats for Q4

I'm going to go ahead and say that if you reprice employee options when the share price goes down, you have no business giving options to employees at all. The entire point of options is that employees participate in the upside that results from their good work or the downside that results from errors. If the stock goes down, they should suffer. If you start getting into "well, employees aren't to blame for a decline in the share price", then you really ought to argue "employees don't deserve credit for a rise in the share price".

If options are nothing more than a way to throw money at employees regardless of whether the company's owners (shareholders) make any money, then let's just throw money at the employees and stop playing games. I would vote against the BoD of any company that recommended repricing of employee options in a time when shareholders and profits are hurting. It's wrong. Salary and employee ownership are two entirely different concepts.

Why Is the YouTube User Experience So Poor?

I think Youtube is wildly variable depending on time of day/internet traffic/your system/your connection. Some days I can't get videos to load at all, some days it's instant, and it's sometimes correlated with a generally slow internet connection for me and sometimes not. I find the quality pretty decent for a free service.