YeBanKo

Does not include an actual report or very little info about methodology.

> "don't commingle customer funds"

This seems to be with accounting, not securities.

> there's actually a pretty clear answer as to what would need to be done to be fully above-the-board and legal

What needs to be done to be fully legal?

Initially I thought it iwas about money. Now it seems to be about intellectual position: Sama wants to move fast and break things, Ilya does not. I don’t want my bank to replace customer support with LLM agent, that has access to internal APIs or LLM driving a medical decision just yet.

As an example, couple years ago Crisis Text Line decided to sell data to a for profit spin off. Their justification was that data was anonymized, which was bs for it’s unstructured text data, and that it’s not against terms of service, which users had agreed to. Mind you, these users were people in crisis maybe even on a brink of a suicide. This was highly unethical and caused a backlash. Then one of the bod members wrote a half assed “reflection” post [1]. If some core employees of CTL did a “coup” to stop this decision, because they believed it’s unethical and dangerous, wouldn’t it be justifies?

[1] http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2022/01/31/crisis-...

Or they would get more money from other donors to build open source models.

It does not matter. They have fiduciary duty in the interest of the company's mission. Maybe Altman wanted to monetize the company in a way that board deemed not aligned with their mission.

It’s not about altruism. He might have wanted a different thing. If he is well set financially for himself, he may want to build AGI or advance AI further. Others may want to have some sort of an exit for the company or invest more into building SaaS AI platform.

I like your idea. But I think it is much simpler: money. Someone called him and offered insane amount of money to sell the company. He told them to fuck off and did not inform the board about the offer. Or maybe he refused a very lucrative contract without consulting the board.

I am no obtuse, you are ignoring reality. Shou Zi Chew testified before Congress and lied through his teeth that they will invest in restructuring to store US users data in the US and insulate it from CCP government, which is impossible without significant US presence. TikTok's current head of operations, Adam Presser is a US national, as well as his predecessor. If Californian cared about kids mental health, they would absolutely go after TikTok.

Do you also think that California should not go after drug trade, because cartels that run it are outside of the US and Californian jurisdiction?

There are plenty of evidence of harm from sugar.

They absolutely can subpoena Bytedance. Congress did. They have offices in the US: https://maps.app.goo.gl/XqJdQyvTCQ1ZUEa96

Other states sued TikTok. TikTok distribution channels are Google and Apple. They also use aws and azure, so Amazon and Microsoft. Hence well within California reach. Probably non negligible part of ad revenue comes from California as well.

Candies are the least sever offender. Everyone know, that you have to limit kids candy intake, because they have too much sugar. But why all of a sudden products like yogurt or pedialyte have loads of sugar?

Should they also sue all the garbage TV shows for kids and food companies putting sugar everywhere? Did they also sue TikTok? To my knowledge California and New York did not sue TikTok, but is way more dangerous that Instagram. Did they not want to upset Xi during his visit?

This can be a premium feature. Run your own server and for a little bit of money you can configure your client to use an alternative server. Client code is what make it private and secure, so you want to use their verified client even with your own server.

As soon as there is “extra privacy” for a premium, I would ditch Signal immediately. It’s either provate and secure or it’s not. Certain things cannot be half measured.

Nothing seems out of the ordinary in terms of costs. But there some features that would be pertinent to their core mission of providing a secure messenger, and stories and payments aren’t some of those. Stories button takes up half of the bottom navigation bar, I have not seen anyone using that feature. Their non-product approach is what prevents men from becoming a recurring donors. They are finally testing a build with usernames, but it has been long over due.

> give them somewhere to use their drugs that isn’t in public

Why can’t they use them at home?

Not just as good, but better. There are no morons around you who are constantly live streaming.

High property tax pushes owners to rent/sell/use land rathe than let it sit unoccupied in high demand area.

I know multiple people who inherited houses and has been sitting on it to avoid paying market-rate property tax. In my experience they also tend to be the shittiest landlords.

California has one of the lowest property tax rate, yet one of the highest income tax. We need the opposite to incentivize the right behaviors .

Also, I think Poland is a good country with growing economy and looks like they were able to elect centrist liberal party.

Hard to look it up on the phone, but I almost am sure that temperature extremes are harsher or same in Chicago than in Stockholm. I think being washed by seas from all sides makes it softer. The bigger challenge imo is very short light day in winter months. As for the weather, they are very good at handling it at infrastructural level. Roads in Iceland in the middle of the night during a winter storm are better than in California in the afternoon after a medium to heavy rain. Also their attitude to clothing and cold weather is very practical and resilient. This is why it impressed me so much, that good infrastructure made bad weather livable. Otherwise, I don’t like winters and don’t miss snow a single bit.

Are you implying that someone from Softbank was getting kickbacks from him?

Is moving to a different state with higher wages an option for you?

> Where is it better? Imo, better is in Scandinavia, Finland, Netherlands, though I have not been to Finland. Every country in Scandinavia seem very comfortable for living.

When we were traveling around Scandinavia, on couple of occasions we stayed next to business centers on weekdays, once in Stockholm and once in Reykjavik. In the morning when I realized that there was a bunch of IT companies, while my wife was trying to arrange us some tourist stuff I was walking around and thinking if I should just go door to door and see if anyone has a job opening.

Typically countries and other states don't impress me that much when I travel as a tourist and I don't fall for "the food is so nice and people are so friendly" argument, but Iceland and Sweden, specifically Stockholm, really made an impression on me.

So yeah, Scandinavia, Northern Europe and maybe Canada? I have met a lot of Easter Europeans, Asians and some Americans there in seemingly all professions, not only specialized skills, so there must be some immigration pathways.

Man, you hate Americans, why do you live here? Honest question.

Holmes got federal prison time. Neumann did not. Arguably, Holmes did worse. Holmes was about to start selling snake oil, or rather snake oil blood test, which is essentially a medical fraud, although this is not the type of fraud that brought her to she to the prison cell.

Neumann took stupid VC money for a ride. Unethical? Yes. But they giving it to him very willingly. His actions arguably could do more damage, because maybe WeWork bankruptcy can finish off SF commercial real estate market – I don't know how much of their 13 billion lease obligations are in the city. But it's hardly his fault that the system is so brittle.

> Commercial real estate needs to pull its head out of its ass soon and start heavily discounting spaces or shit’s going to get real real.

Looking at SF, I think it is not only a discount thing. The way it was rented before: "open space" office with bare wall, rows of desks and insanely high price per sqft or a mall is probably not gonna work anymore. They need to repurpose it: convert to apartments, smaller open space offices, regular offices, etc. Trying to do any kind of construction in SF is ridiculously complicated. When money was flowing it created many layers of bureaucracy and complexity, but it was affordable. Since then money flow dried up but complexity and bureaucracy is still there.

Adam Neumann promised to get rich, he got rich. He also mentioned, that his grandkids gonna be on the board and carry his legacy, it is probably true, as he has built generational wealth for them in real estate. He took everyone else for ride. Matt Levine wrote multiple times on Adam Neumann and WeWork. One of my favorite quotes "He lit $10 billion of SoftBank’s money on fire and then went back to them and demanded a 10% commission" [1]. And they kept paying them.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-10-23/how-do...