a16z and certain Sequoia partners specifically supported this during the 2024 election.
If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
My company just spent $10M renovating an office but we’ve been in business for several decades and have been profitable every year for the past decade, I’m not sure about prior to that. It’s not always a bad idea to spend money on office space.
Tenant improvements (office remodels) are $75-$150/square foot these days depending on the level of finishes and FFE (furniture, fixtures, and equipment), and can go higher if you’re building out dozens of offices instead of open office space with perimeter private offices or want high end architectural lighting, aesthetic flourishes, etc. I know you can wire up a basic office with lights and receptacles for about $15/sqft if you use union labor and basic 2x4s/recessed cans for lighting.
My state allows 1 occupant per 150 gross sq ft of floor space (interior partitions, columns, and other items that occupy floor space are counted in gross square footage), so an office tower with a 22,500 sq ft floor plate allows for 150 occupants. At $100/sqft, you’re looking at $2.25M to build out a single floor of an office tower.
Depending on the market, the landlord might offer an allowance for tenant improvements or ‘pay’ for the improvements and they get paid back later over time through rent payments.
And maybe (just maybe) raise your voice in _actionable_ support for dismantling the complexes these money ghouls use to wage war against you and regular society.
We've entered Civil War II and I fear it will have to get much worse before there's any chance of turning things around. Regardless we can never give up.
10 years ago that would sound crazy but today it's very real. I wish very much to be wrong in my prediction.
[1]:https://youtu.be/JEjU-X57Wrc?t=5815
It seems sometimes that they have mapped out how things are going to play out years in advance and are ready. After all what is the American government but just a group of fellow countrymen with all the data and resources?
Generally speaking, we don't deploy our military in peacetime. So unless there's a natural disaster in Chicago or D.C. right now, there aren't but so many conclusions to draw...
Or alternatively, they were in fact correct, and tens of millions on the other side subverted democracy, at least temporarily (and would surely do so again if not prevented).
Either way, it sounds like you've millions of people each convinced that millions of others are about to start a civil war. Which sounds like it makes that war practically unavoidable.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/03/heritage-...
They call it a revolution. They keep using that word, I do not think it means what they think it means.
1. Trump declared a Venezuelan gang as a terrorist organization.
2. Since then, Trump has ordered the military to conduct extrajudicial killings of people suspected of being in that gang who were on boats. He is implicitly asserting that military action is allowed without Congressional approval if the target is a terrorist organization (it probably isn't legal, and he's put out no justification for it).
3. He just declared Antifa a terrorist organization. He has a history of blaming things on Antifa and has mused about declaring other leftist organizations as terrorists.
Now connect 2 and 3.
I've literally gotten language I drafted written into state and, twice now, federal law.
If you pick a hot-button issue, no, you probably won't move your elected. But on issues they didn't even consider to be on their plate? You can get attention. (Better yet if you can convince them you have other motivated voters beside you.)
It does. But every single case where I got to draft legislation occurred before I made money and before I’d given anyone any money. (I never gave either of the federal electeds I worked with money.)
I called about a bill that wasn’t getting attention. The elected thought it was interesting, but their staff were overworked. (They’re always overworked.) I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work. In a minority of cases, they introduced those into the working copy of the bill, and in a minority of those cases the bill actually passed.
Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
I'd argue that time to do free work, and especially the ability to do is legal drafting, is something that the upper classes have a lot more access to than others.
Your leverage is in surfacing primary challengers. Even if they win, it’s a drag on time, energy and capital.
Elected will pay attention to groups that can petition for and support a primary challenge. Even if they’re gerrymandered.
I have better things to do with my time than charge at windmills.
Yes. I’ve lived in these districts. They still don’t want a challenge.
> The party wants it this way and is actively hostile to any primary challenges
Of course. They’re hostile because they don’t like it. Not much of a threat if you’re going to do something they like.
> have better things to do with my time
Then say this. Of course civic engagement takes time and effort.
Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district. Most people aren’t.
And then we have the Supreme Court giving the President unlimited power.
Whether you are a Republican or Democrat in California it doesn’t matter who you as individual votes for for President. If you are in Los Angeles county, it also doesn’t matter who you vote for in the general election as your representative.
The primaries matter though. California sends the same number of Senators to DC as West Virginia and half as many as North and South Dakota combined even though they don’t have nearly the population.
How long and what strike of luck will it be based on timing that you think this country will see a liberal Supreme Court? Especially since justices nominated by Democrats refuse to leave when a Democratic President is in office? But then again, we are in this mess we are in today because the Democrats were too cowardly to pressure Biden not to run sooner.
I’ve knocked on doors for judicial elections in Manhattan where a single tenants’ association’s turnout out swung every election on the ballot. (In another case, the judge who went to Koreatown with us after a meet and greet swung our eight top to turn out, which was more than the margin for an off-cycle mid-week judicial primary.)
There are always elections on the ballot that matter. And civic engagement isn’t limited to voting.
The (Republican) governor of GA has been spending years and millions of dollars to get the Hyundai plant in GA that would bring 8500 direct jobs and no telling how many indirect jobs to GA. That was delayed an almost ruined by ICE.
It was such a bad fuckup that Trump tried to beg the Koreans to stay after being arrested by ICE. They refused.
The GA voters overwhelmingly voted for Kemp over a MAGA endorsed candidate during the primaries and even a Republican governor can’t block the federal government’s jack booted thugs
Never listen to anyone telling you that your voice doesn't matter.
Like... here's a story about me getting a kind of boring corporate law (related to limited liability companies) changed in Italy. Tons of people rolled their eyes at me and said it'd never happen, but I kept poking away at it, and it did happen:
https://blog.therealitaly.com/2015/04/16/fixing-italy-a-litt...
Also, local politics matter a bunch in the US. There is a ton of good you can do in your community with just a handful of people.
Right now, the governor of California is trying to meet Texas gerrymandering with its own. But liberals are clutching their pearls with “two wrongs don’t make a right” and arguing about things like this in their committees
The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/02/dnc-mee...
Support for DOGE before it was implemented is not a bad thing. Ro Khanna (Democrat from Silicon Valley) supported it too. https://khanna.house.gov/media/in-the-news/opinion-democrats...
It is the act of supporting DOGE after the dumb implementation (e.g. 1/28/2025 Fork in the Road letter) that would concern me (which I think a16z has continued to do).
In my opinion, Elon Musk approached DOGE all wrong because he is used to running companies where payroll is the #1 expense, and cutting workers is how he has always cut costs at his previous companies when they were strapped for cash (e.g. SolarCity, Tesla). He did’t realize that the US Government is mostly an insurance company, so cutting office staff is a drop in the bucket. A tragedy of his own juvenile ignorance.
Of course it is. It shows terrible judgment this was easily foreseeable.
A reminder that before it was implemented, it was called DOGE. It was never a serious thing, and supporting it may not have been bad, but it was hopelessly naive.
And with deregulations, "move fast and break things" startups can move even faster.
What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd. They enjoy social freedoms which the current gov. would rather see go away...so, talk about selling their soul to the devil.
SV workers, sure. But "socially liberal" is absolutely not my impression of SV venture capitalists.
Most of what DOGE cut was stuff no one wanted or needed in the first place. Just scroll their twitter feed, cutting this stuff shouldn't be termed as "smaller government".
Generally, the government doesn't do things that private industry could do on their own. There are specific times where this isn't true. For example, there were small commuter buses in San Francisco for a while that the existing MUNI service could not accomplish. But these are quite rare!
For example, private industry is never going to fund basic research that is the foundation of the US's wealth and strength, except through taxation. The idea is ludicrous.
We could have private highways, private roads, perhaps, but we would be handing off public decisions to a private company that is almost certainly a monopoly. There are only rare cases where roads and highways are not inherently monopolistic.
SV venture capital is not one type of person, there are both liberal and libertarians among them. The libertarian variety got suckered in by the Dark Enlightenment propaganda and thought they could be the puppetmasters controlling the world with propaganda. They should have looked to what happens to their ilk in places like Russia before backing someone who wants to turn the US into an autocracy like Russia:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/02/business/russian-oligarchs-de...
Silicon Valley has had a monarchist element for at least a decade now. I've been commenting on it for a while. It masked itself in the language of libertarianism. (Note: not all libertarians are monarchists.) But 2024 outed them (Andreessen, Musk, the All In crowd, et cetera) for the bastards that they are.
Sam Harris is the only intellectual in that space that I know of who was repulsed by their actual views and pulled back but maybe there are others.
The libertarian party itself got taken over by a less sophisticated group of these guys in a Mises Caucus mask from a coup orchestrated by the overstock.com ceo in 2022
I have been railing against these people for over a decade.
My experience with every friend or acquaintance denying their racism pretty much came down to “no one is actually that bad, you’re being ridiculous”
Between that and the people telling me Project 2025 was a caricature of a cartoon villain and would never happen last year, I am losing my mind at all the people confiding in me hat in hand that maybe, these people might actually want to bad things
It was really obvious what these people wanted. They advertised it. They wrote entire books about their plan. But all they had to do is say “no, that’s not true” in a single interview and everyone bought it because the alternative was mentally painful
You can have members of this group straight up admit to lying[1] and yet I have people who I can show the video of them admitting to lying who then still try to claim the lie is truthful.
If you are reading this comment and had seen these actions and events and had waved them off previously, then my opinion is that you were actively ignorant to save yourself the mental anguish
[1] https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/jd-vance...