bps4484

It's not "almost 100% pork funneling" and I know this because....they're there! they are at the moon! I don't like pork either, but let's not blow this out of proportion.

How much do we think that it should have cost, if everything was perfectly optimized, to get to the moon? 50b instead of 100b? so ok, 50% was pork, and that's bad, but let's not overstate it and instead allow a little joy in our lives.

also the original apollo program was about 300b in today's dollars, so seems like things have always been a little porky.

it's not that density per se drives down existing costs, but density almost always brings more housing stock to the market (unless they are simultanously tearing down housing elsewhere) and housing stock drives down the cost of housing, which is the point of the original article.

So if we take it as an assumption that density increases housing stock, there is lots of evidence that density drives down prices of existing land/home values.

I wonder if overall rainfall doesn't tell the whole story. From my experience in SF (and admittedly CA is big and people will have very different experiences) there has been an enormous amount of rainfall early in the season and then another enormous amount over the holidays, but the rest has been dry. The total may not be that much but the acute heavy storms have been pretty intense.

"Reductio Ad Roy Feldium" is the internet addage[1] that as in a hacker news discussion about a rest api grows, the probabilty someone cites roy felding's dissertation approaches 1. I'm glad this post cut right to the chase!

[1] ok it's not an internet adage. I invented it and joke with friends about it

I should first note that I'm a big fan of waymo and want autonomous to succeed generally.

I take both waymo's and lyft/uber all the time in sf and waymo's are way slower. I'd estimate it at 10-15% slower. Once the novelty of a waymo wears off you realize that they drive like a high anxiety teenager and going 15 mph on a 15 mph road, coming to gentle full stop at every stop sign, and being very tentative on turns and passing people all add up to a very slow ride.

You're right though it definitely feels safer.

They stay with you if you choose. What's kind of sentimental and nice is that the area code stays with you as marker of where you're originally from no matter where you go. It says "this is where I was from as a teenager when I was first allowed a cell phone."

I don't know if this coincided with trend of getting an area code tattoo to signify where you're from, but that also is something that is done by some.

6 figures would pay for a week for what he needs. Maybe less than a week

I'm sorry this isn't true. Your name wasn't on the line when you took the investment, and the OP pointed out with his "5 startups in 10 years" line, it's very easy for early employees to walk away. That isn't as available to founders. There is much more burden (reputational, financial, emotional) on the founders.

I've been a founder, and I've been a key early employee. It is very different.

Is this true?

That's a legitimate question I haven't done the research on this. It would seem though that usually it's a municipal employee, probably a union job, so probably paid pretty well (relative to say an uber driver). Also that cost for the driver would be double if you half the size of the bus and run them twice as much which would be a better experience for passengers. It would seem like the cost of drivers could be a real impact but this is me being handwavy I haven't crunched any numbers.

I don't think they were saying they are mediators or settle feuds. I'm sure a bunch of people at the companies are pissed at the conclusions they come to. It's moreso though that precisely because they aren't tied to any feudal relationships within the organization they're able to be more impartial with their research and cut through bureaucracy.

Certainly though if all they're doing is parroting back conclusions backed by "research" that the exec who hired them wants to hear then they aren't providing much value, other than perhaps providing air cover when some decision, any decision, is better than no decision and gridlock.

"Consultants are hired mercenaries in coporate warfare, they don't care about you, they don't care about your company or the rivalries or the squabbaling."

"They are not brought in to solve problems"

I've known people that worked for consultancies and the biggest value add they think they have brought is when the problem is the rivalries, politics, and squabbaling has led to inaction and they've needed outside support to come in who don't care about these things.

Perhaps we should hope for companies to have leadership teams where they are able to cut through this intransigence, but unfortunately all too often with old companies stuck in their ways this isn't the case.

oh it's certainly not free money (queue the seinfeld episode of kramer telling jerry to "write it off") but the discussion is about taxes or lacktherof. In no other investment that I know of are you allowed this double write-off: you can write off both the investment as it depreciates and the costs to make sure it doesn't depreciate.

"An no one will now rent, since your building has an effective value of $0 since it has become crap."

This isn't true. You will have put money into the property to keep its value up, also writing off all of those expenses, so that you can still rent it out.

"Few rental properties will have under a 3.7% ROI"

This is a leveraged investment (meaning you have a mortage). What that means is for your 20% down payment (the actual money you invest), that 3.7% writeoff on income can be an 18.5% cash on cash yield (ROI) in which you pay no taxes, ever. Few properties on the market can get you a better yield than that. If your ultimate yield is less than that you can roll those losses over year over year, so that then later if/when you get more yield you still* don't have to pay any taxes. It's a really big tax loophole and is the reason Donald Trump pays almost nothing in taxes (and he admitted as much in the presidential debate).

*I own 3 properties in buffalo, one of the best rent to value markets in the US, and it's hard to find better yield than that even in that market. https://simplepassivecashflow.com/rv/

Do you know why the rule was made?

My guess would be that parents are constantly taking photos and getting in the way of kids playing, or their performance, and it's to encourage parents to just enjoy their kids. This sounds like a pretty good rule to me. I'd have to guess that during their childhood your children will have multiple orders of magnitude more photos taken of them. I'd only worry memories will be lost by an overwhelming amount of media being saved about them.

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic.

I don't mean about looking someone in the eye, but I do mean cutting through a multiple months long dance to get someone money when they are in a full sprint growing their business, or sitting on their board and meddling when you don't have experience operating a company. I think VCs can learn something from that.

Weirdest quote the TC article was "In the meantime, Tiger Global, which prides itself on its due diligence"

They are notorious for outsourcing their due diligence and often not even paying attention to it. They pride themselves on moving fast, not diligence.

I liked the investment thesis of "get founders money and get out of their way" and hopefully other VCs learned something from it, but they certainly lacked a lot of control in how they operated.

"Managers mandated themselves into making x times the amount of their top paid report, control decision making, and have hiring and firing powers all in one position."

I'm curious where you work (not specifically, I'm talking about generally the industry), because it's not been my experience either as a manager nor my understanding of anyone else in silicon valley or large or mid sized software companies. I've managed engineers who get paid more than me, never have had unilateral hiring or firing powers, and don't control much decision making power other than my ability to hopefully influence engineers or upper management.

I could imagine your case being true in other places (finance, for example) where managers usually aren't engineers and there is much more of a fiefdom organizational structure, but it hasn't been my experience in software.

I completely disagree. They were 450 people with 150 engineers. If I had to guess I would bet the engineers clamored for leveling and it came from bottoms up requests and a need to be fair with compensation when hiring.

Now to be clear they shouldn't have been that big (clearly), but leveling people was not the problem.

they were a company of nearly 500 people. they had 150 engineers. At that stage people who don't have levels will feel like they have no direction.

"but a smaller Craigslist might have been able to pivot and innovate ahead of them."

I feel like they had a small team that didn't innovate for 20 years. Whether they were 10 employees or 10,000 they were due to have someone figure out a better way.

My response to "Oh, I can implement this in 5 minutes" is always "but will you support it?"

I think this is the hardest thing about moving from a startup to a more mature company (either through growth and age or acquisition); you have to move your mindset from building to supporting. Building is fun and creative, supporting can be tedious and soul sucking (but needed!). It's a huge, and legitimate, reason why large companies slow down (either to support, or to consider support in the build process).

I was going to come here to say this.

The only nit I have (and I think this is actually what you meant) is we must build more housing. I say this because often people think it's good to tear down an old house and build a new one. That isn't helping things (and I'd argue actively hurts things).

"I just want to know what he needs done / and let's go make the thing."

I think this is the problem. It's really really hard to do that at scale. Different people require different types of messages in order to get it. You need to repeat your vision of what needs to get done again and again and again. That can be hard for an introvert. It doesn't mean you can't be shy, but I think that's why it can be a challenge.

I'm not the original poster, but I agree with the sentiment and can explain how it's not easier:

Take any number of "fundamentals" of management: having regular 1-1s, regular reviews, having planning meetings with the team, long term goal setting, operations reviews, etc, etc (yes, management is a lot of meetings).

If an office setting, you can feel like you're doing these on an ad hoc basis, and maybe you or others can do successfully this in an ad hoc way (although if this is the general way of doing things, and your org is large enough, I would guarantee there is a manager that isn't doing this well). But this way of managing completely falls on its face when people start going remote. If you aren't regularly scheduling this stuff then it's just not happening, or people are getting left out.

So I would say that remote management isn't easier, but it makes it very apparent who is doing the management basics, and who is not.

I have a theory that how good someone is at something (soccer, the piano, programming) is directly tied to what they can put into their subconscious brain. The more that you can do subconsciously the better you are.

I realized this after thinking about skills like dribbling in basketball where first you get plain dribbling into your subconscious, then more complex dribbling, then entire moves.

Athletes always talk about when “the game started slowing down” and I always wondered if this was pushing a lot of faculties into their subconscious so they could operate at that speed.

To me this all depends on how it's implemented but you're right to be suspicious.

If all they do is give you 1/4 of the equity they were going to give you previously, then yes it drastically reduces employee upside to the benefit of others (execs, investors).

But they probably can't do that because it would be harder for them to attract talent against a 4 year vest company. Instead they'll probably have to bump up that initial grant so that when employees do the math there is still the big upside if the company improves.

A a great podcast that has started a personal hobby/interest in linguistics and etymology.

I love that history is able break your notion of what is or isn't possible and this podcast is great at that; it repeatedly shows how no language is set in stone, it is a human construct, and how languages are interrelated.

"I've always wondered what their ultimate collective bargaining power is if the single thing that grants them their leverage (to strike) is off the table from day 1."

While they can't strike, they can do the absolute bare minimum, which is what happens in a lot of professions (police, fire) where they can't legally strike. I'm not saying it's as effective as an actual strike, obviously, but with how much extra time teacher give beyond normal working hours, cutting it down to just working during business hours makes a school noticeably worse.

I was thinking the exact same thing. Does everyone else remember The Great Coffee Shortage of 2016? Because I don't. This smells like a PR story funded by commodities traders that are long on coffee. Better stock up now!!!!!!!!!