code4tee

Excellent progress and a great credit to LetsEncrypt and others that brought free cents to the masses. There’s almost no excuse to not encrypt anymore. The “not secure” shaming of non https sites by major browsers also applied some needed peer pressure.

Most drones already do need to be registered and commercial operators need to be licensed. Pieces of paper don’t stop stupid though unfortunately.

Looks mostly like the Firefox logo

Except it was more like we sell iPhones at half the cost we bought them for but claim we have a business because mindfulness. PS no meat.

This is impressive. Use case is for an incapacitated pilot. It won’t work well or at all if the aircraft itself is having issues or in other emergency scenarios. As such it doesn’t replace the need for qualified pilots at the controls.

Setting aside the dumpster fire that was WeWork’s business model, the product was just fundamentally not that good. In cities where competitors popped up WeWorks were often the bottom of the market in terms of places one actually wanted to work.

Sure the places looked hipper and more modern than previous iterations of coworking, but it was just generally an unpleasant place to work. It was very difficult to get any actual work done.

Options holders are not shareholders. Options holders are not owners of the company. Options holders are not investors in the company.

Too many forget these things and are shocked when then find out some event doesn’t treat them like one of the above.

Have visited Amish stores where they have pneumatic belts for the cash registers. The registers were about the only electric thing in sight and were powered by batteries and solar or generators. Lighting was all gas powered from propane tanks. They had some off the shelf lamps and things that had been re-rigged to run off LEDs and batteries (literally a car battery on the floor next to the lamp powering it). It was all very cool. Ceiling fans were also pneumatic. Building also had tons of skylights so during the day everything inside was lit with sunlight.

Some people think the Amish are against technology which isn’t really accurate. It’s more that they’re intent on being self-sufficient and against unnecessary uses of technology.

So SoftBank is loading up We with huge amounts of debt to give it cash (vs a normal capital investment)? This smells like a leveraged buyout PE move.

The whole side deal on bailing out Adam on his mega personal loans with the banks is interesting. Reporting suggests he effectively defaulted on those loans based on previous developments with We but banks gave him some time to sort things out before calling in the loans.

This whole thing is going to make for an interesting book when the dust settles.

There’s another often unwritten element here around companies basing their valuation on false markets. For example, if I sell $2 for $1 that’s a false market. Of course I can grow like crazy and gobble up lots of customers. I could even “disrupt” existing players like those stodgy old companies (banks) that sell $2 for $2.15 (a loan).

The VC subsidies for some of these companies are so high that they are basically selling $2 for $1 in some cases (WeWork was basically losing nearly $1 for every $1 of revenue!)

Ride share companies grew fast when they sold VC subsidized rides but have struggled to maintain that market share dominance without subsidies (lots of other players quickly move in). MoviePass sold lots of subsidized movie tickets until the money ran out.

Thus the fallacy of the whole “it’s ok that we’re unprofitable because look at how fast we’re growing” is that in many cases these companies were only growing BECAUSE they were grossly unprofitable in the form of their investors massively subsidizing purchases.

All that’s happening is that the market is calling BS on companies that lack sound business fundamentals. The days of valuing companies sky high that are deeply unprofitable but “it’s OK because we’re a tech company so it doesn’t matter” are over.

This is ultimately a good thing for companies with real businesses that were for much of recent history valued far less than those that had no clear prospects of making a profit. See all the writings about IWG vs WeWork on some of the previous insanity there.

It would appear there is a lot more to the story than the headlines imply.

For example evidence disputes their account of how they ended up in the US and the fact that they previously tried to enter the US and were denied for reasons not fully clear. I’m ignoring the sensationalist headlines for now until the full story comes out.

ICE may have some challenges but they’re not just rounding up nice wholesome British families and throwing them in the slammer for no reason.

WeWork could have been successful if they focused on the core business and operated lean and mean. While they didn’t invent the co-working space model there was certainly room to improve it.

However the company was just simply not run very well, was very unfocused on all sorts of random side businesses/acquisitions, and was massively bloated in terms of its team.

Ultimately it was a good idea poorly executed from a business standpoint. The market has clearly turned (for the better most would say) in that people want to see real businesses with real sustainable business models. Fruit water on tap and glossy marketing materials don’t replace the core fundamentals of a good business. It’s refreshing to see the market finally calling BS and expecting more.

Very cool. I love this physical photo effects stuff.

It will be bad, although with the complete inability of UK leaders to get anything done or make decisions much damage has already been done.

This does exist, but isn’t common. Some newer jets do have something like this. When the A350 has its first flight out of JFK the computer automatically aborted the takeoff because it thought there wasn’t enough runway. Turned out to be a false abort.

“Aviation experts say airliners need to lift off the ground with enough runway left to abort a takeoff“

That’s not accurate. While the aircraft shouldn’t be nearly hitting the end of the runway on takeoff it’s normal for larger jets to hit a point before takeoff where they couldn’t stop before the end of the runway.

Pilots call that point V1 during the takeoff roll, which means whatever happens you need to take off. If one of the engines blows up, you still take off. When V1 is called on takeoff standard procedure is to take your hands off the throttle controls since a ground abort is no longer available as an option.

The pre-takeoff briefing usually includes something like the captain saying if there are any problems after V1 we’ll take the problem into the air with us and troubleshoot from there.

Depends entirely on contractual details likely not broadly known. Those details have not been broadly reported or discussed. In general in a generic sense it’s quite common for investors (those writing actual cheques into the business) to be made whole again and then some before options holders or others get to come to the table. First dibs on the rewards goes to those that took the most risk.

Reports out now are saying the likely market cap of the company is less than the cash raised by the company. Speaking generally that’s typically a beyond ugly situation for non-investors hoping their stake/options is going to make them some $. Think about it... it wouldn’t be right for some employee equity/options holder to get money while investors lose money.

Haven’t seen much written about the details specific to We/WeWork, but given all the crazy governance issues identified to date with its corporate structure it wouldn’t be surprising if such clauses are very complex.

People have been calling for a recession/big market correction since around 2012. At some point an analyst will be right and then they’ll hold the throne of “this analyst predicted the last recession... hear what they think now” until the cycle repeats itself again.

Those that have been around a while know this whole story plays out on a loop over and over and over :-)

This IPO story is struggling. There have been several recent examples of public confidence in the business model collapsing post IPO, but the WSJ and others are reporting on this so heavily as it looks like we’re now seeing public confidence starting to fall apart before the IPO of an ultra-unicorn. Get your popcorn ready.

Someone might buy these bonds at their deflated prices because WeWork still needs to pay interest on that loan and if its still around will eventually pay back the original loan, but for now this is more evidence of market skepticism of the future health of WeWork financially. People are willing to just take a hit now and get out.

The ultimate issue here for Lyft, Uber and such is not contractors vs employees but the amount of subsidy these companies need to give to get people to buy their product. Making people employees is only a big issue for these companies because it further increases the subsidy required to get people to buy.

There’s an old saying that’s its easy to grow fast if you’re selling $2 bills for $1 and the Uber, Lyft, (and WeWorks) and such of the world are simply following that model. The market is finally smelling the BS on this strategy for long established “startups.”

If such companies don’t have a viable path to profitability then the whole 1099 vs W-2 argument is moot.

The user empathy factor is a big one. Lots of team pushing AI nonsense when people just want a simple solution that works.

That may provide them some short term legal protection, but the second one of these sub-entities plays that card it’s basically game over for the whole enterprise.

Why does WeWork increasingly look like one of those deals on Shark Tank that starts off looking great then goes way south when the sharks start probing?

I can see it now:

“Wait, so we’d be investing in your business which is leasing buildings from another business that you own... but we’re not getting a piece of that action?”

“Hold on, so we’d have to license the name of this company back from you and then you continue to get a royalty from that?”

“So what’s your revenue and how much did you take home last year? Sorry say that again?!?”

Agree everyone will end up getting a cheque for like $4 or something, but doesn’t hurt to make the claim.

Actually looks like everyone should claim 20 hours of your time wasted at $25 an hour and get $500 (Option 2 listed).

I certainly had a lot of time wasted trying to figure out what to do and then taking more actions to protect from possible consequences of their screw up.

The spirit of this is in the right direction but the details are in the implementation. I’ve seen this sort of thing backfire big time as it basically encourages cliques of people that “like” each other and then shun others.

If not done properly the whole company starts to feel like high school politics all over again as it loses track of what it’s actually accomplishing or not accomplishing and focuses too much on poorly implemented soft metrics. I’ve seen excellent managers that drive high performing teams get dinged by under-performers on those teams who say said manager is hard to work with. Sure they’d be much happier with a manager that let them slack off but that’s not going to help the company.

The Zoom security team has a lot to answer for on this one. They subverted built in security to only then fall victim to the very thing that would have been stopped by what they subverted.

Good on Zoom to do a rapid course reversal here although naturally trust is now damaged given they only came to their senses under strong public pressure. Also a good case study of how putting “user experience” over security can come back to burn you.

The article sort of disses traditional landing guidance systems but misses the point of these. Specifically that such instrument approaches are used because one can’t see the runway at all. Thus a system that relies on cameras to land is academically interesting but not all that practical. Also with the advent of GPS-WAAS based LPV approaches one doesn’t need equipment on the field and a high precision 3D approach path can be created anywhere.

As for replacing pilots for “autonomous” aircraft a pilot friend of mine said to ask actual pilots if they’d get on board a fully self flying aircraft and you’d be hard pressed to find one. As he put it, the automation on planes is amazing and a big help but it does mess up and when it does the automation can crap out big time. For the foreseeable future there’s still no replacement for a qualified pilot at the controls ready to take over.

Finally there’s a lot of debate in the aviation community that too much automation actually decreases safety because pilots not flying enough manually lose skills. See the SFO accident with the Asiana airliner that crashed for no other reason than the ILS was down so they couldn’t fly with the autopilot. They crashed short of the runway on a simply manual landing in perfect weather because they couldn’t fly the plane properly!

The landing in the article was a really cool experiment though.

He’s not being charged with publishing classified data. That is broadly protected by the First Amendment and has been tested many times.

He’s being charged with stealing the information and actively supporting others in doing so. That activity is a crime.

Every US journalist knows if someone secretly gives you some secret document it’s fair game. If you go and steal said document then different story.