I asked a friend who is an econ professor "Why does this Peters guy explain this so poorly" and his response was more or less, yes, all of economics has been wondering that too since he first published his Nature Physics paper on this a decade ago.

heads: double your money tails: lose all your money

in which case the expected value is always $1, as you have a 1/2^n chance of having $2^n dollars after n rounds, and 0 otherwise.

The point of discussing ergodicity here, however, is whether you can describe the behavior of the iterated distribution deterministically if you exclude a portion of that distribution which has measure zero.

And the answer is yes - with probability approaching 1 as n increases (ie excluding a portion of the distribution whose measure decreases to 0), the random process matches a deterministic process which is described by "you lose 5% each round".

The point is that you as an individual playing a repeated game don't get to meaningfully sample the expected value of the distribution. You only get to sample once, and you will almost surely (i.e. with probability approaching 1 as n goes to infinity) sample a point in the distribution where you lose nearly all of your money.

I agree with you that if these were his personal notes from which he then composed his evaluation of the candidate it wouldn't matter - but I bet you that's not what this was, and I would further bet you that he was informed of the candidates pronouns and did know them.

It is so easy to just always write "the candidate" in your interview notes, and never need to write any third person pronouns. Certainly he was making a stand, rather than just non-confrontationally abiding by his beliefs. Obviously one wouldn't use any gendered pronouns in the interview since we only have "you" in English - though I imagine "refrained from using any pronouns" is a misreporting.

If you give new RSU grants, what time period do they vest over? What happens to current employees who leave before then, if they are required to re-earn-out their comp? What can you do at all about former employees? Will the IRS still accept that this deferred compensation is subject to "substantial risk of forfeiture" and thus the taxes on it can be deferred (see U.S. Code 409A)?

Stripe is trying to do option b), buy back stock at current valuation. To do so, they need to raise a couple billion dollars. That money will go to the employees (in exchange for some stock) so that the employees can settle up their taxes, though the IRS will "cut out the middleman" so to speak, and requires Stripe to simple withhold the proceeds and remit to the IRS on the employees' behalf.

The $3.5B tax bill is not "corporate tax" owed by Stripe, but employee income tax that will be owed by employees if there is a liquidity event, and which Stripe will be, in practice, required to withhold on their behalf if Stripe arrange that liquidity for them.

Options are for small companies, and 83b elections when the exercise price can be paid by the employee upfront. RSU are for unicorns. Once the company is public and there is liquidity you can do whatever. Except backdating stock options...

Stripe was already worth $9B in 2016. If you joined then, it could have been prohibitively expensive to do an 83b election. The whole point of RSUs is that you don't owe anything until there is a liquidity event, unlike options which you may be required to exercise or lose while the company is still private.

However, RSUs only get this favorable treated (i.e. you've been given something of value, but can defer paying taxes on it) because they technically expire worthless if the company does not have a liquidity event in time. Thus far no successful tech company (that I know of) has screwed over its employees by casually choosing not to have a liquidity event and letting years worth of RSUs grants all expire worthless.

Stripe is trying to arrange liquidity for its employees who were granted RSUs in e.g. 2016, and that expire in 2023. Those employees have not had to pay taxes as the RSUs vested, but will have a large tax bill if those RSUs do anything other than expire worthless...

What, to you, is the property being taken here? One can disagree ethically with the constitution's "The Congress shall have Power To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries", or one might disagree either legally or ethically with the consistency of Congress's implementation of that power, or one might disagree ethically with whether a particular violation of that right that one believes exists is a deprivation.