670 karma · joined May 27, 2022
SF/NY's tech scene gained momentum up before the surge in crime and corruption and is currently mostly coasting on inertia, driven mostly by ambition to tap into that abundant capital from previous cycles.
The new frontier is currently in China.
Oh, those in power are actively manipulating you to be upset about things that do not interfere with their profits. Somehow, nobody is protesting against unviability of single-income households, lack of retirement savings, part-time employment/independent contractor bullshit used to skirt regulations, etc. It's always Worker Alice against Worker Bob and never Workers against the Corporation.
So you would need to bring together the board of local manufacturers interested in making imports prohibitively expensive, and a board of importers interested in making local production economically unviable. And you would need to have a process where they would need to come out with a compromise satisfying both parties. Both parties should have respect for each other and be willing to find a middle ground. That's how democracies work, that's why U.S. managed to become the #1 economy.
Except, this mechanism is broken. Whoever owns the media can point the finger at the prospective manufacturer, scream "climate change denier" and the public won't listen. Because the public sentiment is that some opinions, depending on the identity/affiliation of their sources, are just too dangerous to be heard. And this is heavily abused by those who know how to play the system.
The public gets screwed long-term. It's already prohibitively expensive to raise kids in the U.S. (good luck competing against 5-people-per-room countries), it's unviable for most people to have retirement savings, or even own their place of residence. But the public doesn't connect it with the fact that the remaining local jobs have zero economic leverage and are made to easily replace people on a whim. We keep screaming at the next "enemy of the people" and stubbornly refuse to notice how wealth and economic leverage is being siphoned away from us.
Europe has been playing the blind green eye politics for a decade - all pretending to be green and environmentally friendly, while in fact largely replacing locally sourced coal with imported Russian gas. North America has been doing the same with declaring many industries too dirty, and happily moving them out to China along with the jobs, knowledge and capital.
The planet doesn't give a damn which meridian that CO2 comes from. The effect is global and cumulative, and there are many ways to actually lower it without killing local jobs - nuclear, biodiesel, decentralized production requiring less transportation. But the media never considers that - instead the public is weaponized against the remaining local businesses, largely ignoring the big picture.
It's almost like they are owned by the people heavily benefiting from moving production overseas...
You probably don't want to give away the exact financials (runway/funding/expenses/customer numbers), but you can still be specific without that. Like "We hired you because we wanted to deliver X in Y months. We took the risk to be the first on the market, but it didn't work out. With the departure of the XYZ customer, we simply don't have enough cash to keep paying the salaries.". Make sure it reads more as a personal email than a soulless press-release with "given the worrying situation", "on our journey" and other BS phrases.
Bear in mind that people will inevitably question "why I got laid off why John from team B did not". If you want to reduce this stress, find a good formal explanation (like we are forced to close feature X because we lost customer Y, and hence are laying off the folks that worked on it).
Otherwise, good references, decent severance. Canceling some externally observable verifiable bonus for yourself could somewhat reduce the tension. You could forfeit that annual board meeting in Hawaii, but buy a hell lot of goodwill from people that worked with you (and that will still be in your network) by being public about that. It could pay off nicely some years from now.
Making it centrally-funded won't magically warp new doctors from hyperspace. It will simply shift the pressure from prices to waiting times.
The working solution would be to reduce the bureaucracy and make it easier to open new practices, ban anticompetitive behavior by hospitals and address the residency spot bottleneck. But nope, nobody is suggesting that. We keep fighting about the most fair way to split 3 beds between 10 people.
1) Startup founder gets an idea and develops a legitimate product.
2) The company gains some customers, but the growth is tough, since competing products often sell below cost.
3) The founder gives up and goes to VCs.
4) VCs take away the controlling stake in exchange for an endless stream of cheap money, so the company can start selling dollars for 90 cents just like the competition.
5) The founder's vision is no longer a critical asset, the cheap VC capital is. The founder gets pushed out and replaced by the VCs' protégé.
6) If the stars align, the (still unprofitable) company exits. Numerous retail investors buy shares in something they've heard about but don't fully understand. VCs get 100x returns. The founder gets a letter of appreciation.
The whole cycle is all about getting a bigger share of the endless stream of cheap money from the fed. VCs throw in a lump sum to buy visibility. Enough visibility guarantees that more people with extra freshly minted cash on hand will choose your shares over other speculative investment.
Except all that recently printed cash is now competing for wheat and baby formula (hence inflation), so the fed has no choice but to backtrack and raise interest rates. And if this holds for sufficient time, the whole VC game may suddenly stop paying off.
This is how empires fall. As people with different political views no longer depend on each other economically, they drift more and more into opposite directions, until they do not want to share the same government anymore.
Therefore, we feel confident in delivering a best-in-class service to customers who meet any of the following criteria:
* Received an equity investment of any amount (accelerator, angel, VC or web3 token);
* More than $1 million a year in revenue;
* More than 50 employees;
* More than $500k in cash;
Make tiers: unsupported fully automated service => service with human support per email => service with phone support and customizations.
Price it so that the the first tier is somewhere near the breakeven point, and the next ones give you increased margins, since bigger customers tend to have larger budgets. Offer discounts based on the number of users/transaction volume.
This way you won't need to be unprofessional and pick which customers deserve the honor of using your services, as your pricing figures it out for you with no drama!
The only reason for this kind of announcement I see is that the company acquired lots of low-revenue customers at a loss hoping to fudge the growth numbers. Well, shame on them and shame on the investors that didn't see through the BS.
But if you keep getting them in 1-year increments as long as you expect the rates to rise, you just keep cashing out at maturity and reinvesting at the yield rate of the day.
That might be a dead strategy in 2022. After the 2008 crisis the fed discovered a miraculous economic cure: slowly print money and throw it into the economy, so people keep transacting with each other, and the GDP (and stocks) keep growing.
Turns out, most of this growth was on paper - fads, speculative investments, overvalued stocks. Now that the geopolitical shock has disrupted the endless stream of cheap stuff made elsewhere, turns out there's an abundance of dollars and shortage of everything else. There might be a rather non-trivial correction ahead of us.
Not really. Mild and reasonable concerns have been raised on the right-wing websites for at least a year. The media swept it under the rug. Then the attention-seekers from the right side picked it up and started exaggerating the issue to get visibility to their personas. The media labeled them "far right extremists" and completely dismissed the point of their complaints. Now it's reaching the state where every meme-maker with an MS paint feels compelled to photoshop something about groomers, and that's where you can't ignore the problem anymore. Congratulations, you have suppressed the voices of reason and you will now have to deal with an angry mob.
>Nobody else is making the distinctions you’re trying to make here.
Some people are. Most people aren't. That's exactly why your country will splinter. In some states you will get a ticket for showing up in public with a same-sex partner. In others teaches will be financially incentivized to reach the quota of trans students, as it will be seen as helping people find their true identity. Both extremes are idiotic, but that's how tribalism works and that's how empires fall. You can safely ignore it for a single-digit number of years, but you will see it in your lifetime.
Women get graduated thinking that investing your time in your own family and kids is slavery, but living paycheck-to-paycheck in a rented condo, ready to be laid off on a whim is true freedom.
In a country of 300M+ people there will be always plenty of examples of both. And a civilized society would attempt to discern the 2 different behaviors and find a reasonable way to distinguish them formally. The media is not doing that - it artificially divides people into 2 polar opposite camps and forces you to take side based on identity, rather than discussing specific behaviors.
>However, in context it sounds like you are saying that my example of criticism isn’t legitimate because LGBTQ people are “groomers.”
No, I am saying that some people are groomers. And some people are LGBTQ. And the groomers (some percentage of them being LGBTQ) would yell "homophobia" and claim that their critics are trying to steal civil liberties (while some of the critics would actually be trying to do that and trying to use anti-groomer guise for cover up). So it's important to make a distinction between behaviors (e.g. allowing gay people to marry) and affiliation (like identity-based quotas and virtue signalling), because the former is rather hard to abuse, and the latter is an abuser magnet.
>Everything you say after this point is interesting, but utterly unrelated to what I said.
Oh, I would argue it is. Attention is a legitimate intangible asset. Pride month is taking a small "attention tax" from everyone, and redistributing it based on identity. Stop doing that and the tensions in the society will decrease. If you want activism, divert it towards actions (like bullying is bad, regardless of the victim's identity) and you will get people to actually agree rather than splinter.
That's a very specific thing. Children of certain ages would go great lengths to feel different from the previous generation, "cool", "hip". Decades of various subcultures from Punks to Emos is pretty solid evidence. Grooming is trying to use the need to feel different in order to convince them to do sex-related things before they have a solid intrinsic feeling for it. The motivation for groomers could be finding these children sexually attractive, trolling (deliberately convincing someone to do irreversible changes that will cause them long-term suffering), or compensating for the groomer's own childhood trauma by forcing others to relive it (the worst bullies are former bully victims). I think, this is a legitimate problem and it's important to distinguish it from initiatives that actually help children (e.g. preventing bullying based on looks).
>They seem free enough to criticize to me?
No mainstream media outlet ever covers this angle - it's a complete taboo. But there are plenty of examples where rather mild criticism is immediately branded homophobic/transphobic and actions are taken to prevent other people from considering this point of view.
>The world broadcasts heterosexuality on every corner.
I would be interested to hear some examples.
>You can’t say that one group is being given “different rights” and then in the next breath say that it’s actually “non-monetary tokenism.” Rhetorically, that’s nonsensical.
Respectfully disagree. People do have an intrinsic need for some amount of other's attention, and can feel it very well. Many social rituals are built around it: networking (periodically paying attention to each other), arts (having others pay attention to what you create), the concept of celebrities. The HR departments have figured out long ago that some amount of coworkers' attention can substitute a raise (in terms of lowering the % of resignations). Like the whole "employee of the month" posters. I call it non-monetary because it doesn't cost the employer nearly as much as a sizable pay raise. But it's something people subconsciously feel and track very well. You take a small amount of everyone's attention and you direct it towards a specific group or individual. People belonging to that group feel slightly rewarded, people outside it feel slightly demotivated. Like if your boss congratulated your coworker with their birthday, but didn't congratulate you.
I personally only see the downsides of the current approach:
1. It attracts people that enjoying making others uncomfortable, and all kids of trolls/attention seekers.
2. The former group keeps pushing the limits, demanding more and more unrealistic things, slowly pushing the public opinion against the minority in question.
3. This is used as an excuse for more restrictions of freedom (like the hate speech laws), that are further abused, igniting more and more tensions between people of opposing views.
[0] https://www.atlassian.com/blog/productivity/how-to-write-sma...
There are many things that "just exist", but one subset of them receives massive media attention, mandatory acknowledgments, and is shielded from a lot of criticism, while another subset is constantly being ridiculed, mocked and villified.
Pride month would be fair if we also had, let's say, Fathers' month, emphasizing the importance of teaching your boys self-reliance, emotional control, delayed gratification. Or housewives' month, praising women that sacrifice careers and spend countless time teaching their kids important skills that will help them achieve independence and success in life.
But no, the media has decided that all these things are not important, but one's sexual orientation, a very private thing that makes many people uncomfortable and has zero relation with actual business, needs to be broadcasted on every corner.
So the whole idea of a politics-free workspace is that we keep these things to our private lives. We don't argue which subcategory deserves a month of acknowledgement, and who can get by with half-a-Friday, we instead focus on actual work. Like have a month of refactoring, or a month of unit tests. Because, you know, having common goals brings people together. And giving one subset of people different rights from another one (even if it's non-monetary tokenism) makes a workplace toxic and increases tension.
Edit: s/Monday/Tuesday/ [0]
[0] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/2022-stock-market-hol...
Low interest rates have killed this cause. If corporations can get cash from the banks at near zero rates, the only remaining use case for investments is heavy speculation. In a sense, the post-2008 monetary policy was about making things look good on paper, while hollowing out the economy with bullshit jobs, bullshit stocks and bullshit business models.
As bad as the spiraling inflation could be, I hope the shock coming from it will bring the economy back to the common sense.
Why do they refuse to opt you out of being an unpaid drone generating $0.02 worth of data for them after you paid them $250? Because they can, since we don't have any laws forbidding it.
Making modular wood+drywall+trim sections in a factory could make it cheaper, but that's just another way to transfer wealth from the local workers to another factory in China, conveniently excluding transportation from your CO2 calculations.