415 karma · joined August 18, 2021
They are trying to solve a problem nobody is worried about and nobody has ever been worried about in the history of the human specie.
People who dedicate more than 5 minutes a day to the thought of living to 120 are the usual suspects: Bezos, Ellison, Thiel and so forth.
A reputable industry cannot emerge if you can count the potential clients on one hand.
Each and every event going their way.
It was not a given, but these people are serial coin-toss winners and lazy observers claim they found a way to have an edge in the 50:50 coin toss odds.
In reality if you take a sample of 8 billion people somebody is bound to record 10,000 consecutive coin toss wins , and not because they consciously found a way to crack the coin toss process, but purely because of luck and law of large numbers
The initial hand over of money from rich parents is just the very start of wins in the long series of coin toss wins.
Every voter is a single issue voter.
And the single issue is : "My net worth"
He doesn't have to deal with alienating all the crypto boys and girls.
And there are millions of them! Given that every election is won and lost by a couple of % points give or take...
What will happen is an implosion first and foremost, only once that happens the public will be calling for congressional hearings.
Get ready to see Saylor, Musk, Armstrong, Dorsey going to DC, but only after the bust. Not before.
Why are rich people who can pay a premium to "get there fast and in privacy" forbidden to land on buildings?
Musk has a deep passion for those fields, he wants to be a techno-utopian cult figure so of course he chooses the areas which are most suited for it.
Nobody becomes hysterical for some SaaS cloud billing company.
Everybody becomes hysterical and cries for a rocket landing on its butt, but people don't ask themselves who pays for it and what tangible utility it brings to their lives.
Entertainment companies go under all the times.
Same thing happened with SolarCity.
Musk wants every corporate vehicle to be traded on the stock market in order to allow for pumps&dumps whenever he is having a bad mental health day.
And also for cash loans backed by the aforementioned pumped equity
If you don't want it don't get it.
If the problems of the world are BioNtech, Pfizer and Moderna...then we are living in heaven.
The most relevant thought leaders in the crypto world are people who have no intention of "owning it", meaning being at the helm of an organization.
They are the so called hodlers and traders, like Microstrategy CEO.
People like Vitalik Buterin would deserve to be in charge because they seem genuinely interested in providing soltions, but he seems very ineffective because he's in search of a problem.
For sure! Pumping and dumping overvalued equity to bigger fools together with his cousin.
You'd think a guy who accomplished the things he accomplished would find it harder and harder to become enthusiastic about stuff, because of the effect of the hedonistic treadmill.
Somehow I think his biggest accomplishment was his ability to slow down the hedonistic tradmill.
What I'll say is that JPGs and paintings have been around before NFTs . And both JPGs and paintings have been around together with the internet, so it might be useful to analyze what happened before the NFT craze, but still in the era of the internet. AKA before the "slap the blockchain on top of it moment"
One of the most famous pictures , if not the most famous picture of the 20th century is the "Afghan girl" taken by National Geographic's Steve McCurry in 1984 [0]
The "original" recently sold in an auction in Poland for 63,000EUR [1]
The most expensive painting on the other hand is the Salvador Mundi sold for 450M , while the painting which is worth the most is of course the Mona Lisa, everything from 5 to 10 billions.
63,000EUR vs 10B. All because you can "right click" the former, whereas you can never "right click" a painting.
There is something about an artist painting or sculpting something in the real world which creates uniqueness and can never be replicated. You can never "right click" the Mona Lisa, not now and not 10,000 years from now.
Same goes for a Banksy or any other famous contemporary painter. Paintings are scarce and can never be right-clicked, because they are crafted in the analog real world, whereas JPGs are not scarce and can always be right-clicked, because they have their genesis in the digital world.
So you end up with a scenario where the most famous photo of the 20th century goes on sale for less than a Range Rover, while a painting like the Salvador Mundi which was only recently discovered and could be fake...goes on sale for the equivalent of 800 square miles of land in Texas
[0]https://dynaimage.cdn.cnn.com/cnn/q_auto,w_1100,c_fill,g_aut...
[1]https://tvpworld.com/50367201/iconic-afghan-girl-photo-sold-...
Hyperbole. De-risk companies is the right word, MBAs unlike wide eyed founders understand that odds are against companies and survival is the priority.
They understand that a company like Yahoo! which in 20 years produced lots of value for shareholders, customers, users and employed so many people...that's a happy story.
People on HN see Yahoo! and think "failure", that's the same as saying Derrick Rose is a failure for not being Lebron, well if that's the case where's your 100M net worth for playing basketball?
Most importantly that multiplier discounts that lockdowns had huge effects on the performance of routine health procedures.
How many cancers were missed? How much did the rate of failure for medical procedures go up? Also how much slower were the ambulance services due to all the COVID protocols?
I suspect that if we had done nothing that graph would have been more skewed to the right
These guys reversed the stereotypical process. It was them being absolutes nobodies trying to chase girls and women who were somebody due to inheritance or stardom at the movies or in music.
I still think a man is better served by becoming somebody first and foremost and then having the optionality to either pursue partners who are also on the same step of the social ladder, or go below and having fun being the prize.
With all due respect for Brigitte Bardot, or Marylin Monroe or Lady Gaga or Angelina Jolie...their fame and stardom is not material and doesn't enhance their desirability. If anything it's a huge minus as it comes with all sorts of problems, lack of privacy, mental and physical tolls etc.
Rare stuff monopolizes internet content, it follows Power's law. But that stuff being rare means that although everybody can see it and be aware of its existence, not everybody can have it, because wealth and luck also follows power's law.
This causes anxiety, frustration, FOMO, depression...eventually every guy will become convinced that they deserve a pornstar in their bed and a private jet and so they'd try to get those things or die trying.
The internet completely wiped away the process of discovery which starts in each person locality and then grows more and more the further they can travel.
Now you can immediately see the hottest girls or the fastest cars or the largest yachts.
For sure, but that doesn't mean you can actually have those things.
From a practical standpoint it's much better not to know.
It's about a very selfish 1st world problem:
Seeking thrill and also not to be discounted the willingness to feel special. Everyday we see and interact with so many people, we have also internalized the concept of being one unit in a 8B sample and that hurts our ego as we want to feel unique and irreplacable.
People hope to find that in a small Mars community, feeling irreplaceable both on a conceptual level as well as a practical level (meaning for the operation of the colony).
BMW pioneered it in 2006
South Africa is the only affordable English speaking country one can go vacation during the Northern Hemisphere Winter.
You get 400h of sun there in December and January.
Many UK citizens were looking forward to going there.