code4tee

YouTube has a nice video of Brian May going thorough the master for Bohemian Rhapsody. It gives a good idea of what’s on a master and also interesting insights into how they overcame some of the technical limitations of equipment at the time—like recording multiple times over the same track to make up for limited channels on the tape-based system. Really interesting stuff.

Valuation inflation / delusion only really matters if you’re the last one left holding the bag. So long as there’s someone else willing to buy the game continues for another round.

When the music stops though things get real ugly real quick.

Salesforce appears increasingly worried about being pigeonholed as a CRM product and wants to ride the data wave and be seen as a data product.

I’m not sure this acquisition makes a lot of sense though. The Tableau fad seems to be fading as people realize that while it’s a nice glorified Excel it doesn’t really solve the data issues most companies have. It seems like a very high price for a product that may be past it’s peak.

That said, we’ll done to the Tableau team for having gone public and then selling the company again at a nice bump.

The “hustle porn” is also quite frequently a coverup or distraction from general failure at other parts of life. Those that are super successful in perhaps their career but have no personal life, no partner, no kids, no real existence outside of their company tend to be quite boring people. These types keep promoting themselves and their “hard work” but it seems lost on them that others aren’t really all that impressed.

Those that are super impressive and truly accomplished are the ones that have successful careers but also have actual lives with families and a real life. Doing both well and not stressing out is a true accomplishment worth celebrating and promoting.

I would imagine on most new construction you could find little things like that if you look hard enough. They should be noted and fixed by the contractors but such items don’t constitute the whole complex being “built poorly.” That seems a bit of a stretch with an alternative agenda.

I’ve used similar systems recently in Europe so it would appear GDPR is cool with it...

It seems they are simply asking for identify verification by sending the photo to a remote DHS server for verification. How is this different than showing a ticket agent your passport and having them scan it? That’s the same photo in question. GDPR doesn’t get you out of having to verify your identity in person against a government photo for boarding a flight.

In fact, one could argue the method in question is actually more secure and private because you never actually have to share your passport photo directly with JetBlue.

It’s not quite as bad as it might appear. A lot of the gauges are engine instruments repeated 4 times.

A lot of pilots would love to fly the old “steam gauge” versions of big planes like the 747.

The WeWork model has proven very easy to copy and in competitive markets there are a lot of other popular “WeWorks” other than “WeWork” so I don’t buy the idea that it’s hard to replicate.

Not that different than Uber. It was a great idea but it’s an easy business to copy with little brand loyalty once new entrants appear in a market.

They are literally losing more than a dollar for every dollar in revenue.

At their age and size that’s both beyond insane and far outside what could be reasonably deemed “expansion costs.”

Yes, it usually means “large dataset of mostly junk that someone dumped on us, which we filtered through ended up with a not really that big dataset and then analyzed using fairly standard means.”

Although telling people you have giant big data infrastructure that performed deep learning to power your AI and cognitive automation sounds a lot sexier.

Yes, on Point B the comp IS “crap” and hence why most startups try to convince you to take the options. They can’t pay you what the competition would give you in liquid comp so they try to get you to take the bet. Such startups are typically paying well below market on liquid comp. it’s not like they’re asking you to make a “bet” with a 10% haircut on liquid comp (which would make more sense).

I’m not against options, but if what you will make over the next X years based on liquid comp is not something you are totally OK walking away with as your total comp over that period then one is probably making a bad choice.

Easiest strategy is to just assume the options are worthless and base your comp assessment on that. Doing otherwise sets people up to get burned badly. Furthermore the risk reward for all but the founders is typically significantly lopsided.

If you can accept the risk great, but again assume you’ll never see a penny from options or far far less than you might think (as the calculator highlights nicely).

If things go well you’ll get a nice bonus. Not life changing for the vast majority of people, but a nice financial surprise.

The mistake most people make is accepting far too little cash comp on the grounds that their options may be worth something some day. When they turn out not to be they get burned twice. First on not getting that money period, and second on not having higher cash comp all along which means they also missed out on compound savings or investment with that money.

Net net see options for what they are in most companies—-a way to “pay” people when the company can’t really afford to pay people.

I love how he just opens every letter with that table comparing Berkshire to the market since the 1960s.

Amazon didn’t withdraw from NYC. They still have around 5k employees here. Meanwhile Google is significantly expanding their NYC offices and nobody had to bribe them to do it.

I’ve always admired Wolfram. As he said in the article he could have made his company much bigger but he has a great thing going and gets to do what he loves most every day. Do really cool stuff, mostly stay out of the rat race and make a few bucks.

Your argument is that Silicon Valley is an economical place to do business relative to NYC and that New York, with its centuries long history of immigrants turning up with nothing and “making it,” don’t take risks? Tell me more. :-)

The backlash was mostly about the tax breaks and government subsidies that would have been given. The argument was that New York is New York and doesn’t need to bribe companies to put big offices here.

The NYC tech sector is indeed growing quite strong and is also quite grounded in the realities of business because of the diversity of NYC’s overall economy. Few cities in the world have the economic diversity that New York does. That drives the mindset to be noticeably different, mostly in a good way.

At several meet ups recently the moderator wasn’t shy about warning Silicon Valley companies “I’d advise you to be clear about how you plan to make money and be profitable because if you don’t the audience here is just going to grill you on how you plan to make money and be profitable.”

The dot-com bubble tells us that when company leadership appears more concerned with meat consumption on premises or water bottle choices of employees vs say addressing actual business issues like losing money hand over fist despite being in business for many years then the future may be a wee bit bumpy for said company...

The New York Times has been running a whole series now on McKinsey with a new article about once a month or so highlighting example after example of alleged serious ethical lapses at the firm. Have things really gone downhill or do some journalists just have an ax to grind with McKinsey?

It was built with ‘old’ technology when it was designed. For example aluminum when new designers were using composites.

Airbus bet on a bigger airplane built with traditional techniques while Boeing bet on a smaller airplane made with new techniques.

It’s an interesting aircraft and nice to fly in, but commercially it was the wrong plane with the wrong technology at the wrong time.

Boeing got some flack at the time when they canceled their own superjumbo plans but history now shows they were spot on shifting their focus to the 787 and getting a head start on the efficient midsize long range jet market.

There seems to be a continuing chain of these damning stories about McKinsey and its quesrionable ethics. Seems like the New York Times has one now every few months. Has the firm lost its way or are lights just being put in places McKinsey would rather they weren’t?

Boeing’s answer seems to say if you accidentally pull the thrust reverser lever before the aircraft is on the ground it just force shuts down the engines.

That sounds like an odd safety override. Surely a better solution would be to just not activate reverse thrust. Unlike car engines a jet engine can’t just be quickly restarted if it accidentally shuts down. It typically takes 30-60 seconds to get going.

This and earlier incidents are highlighting the dangers automation can add to mission critical systems. No pilot wants to hear notices about “hey, so in case you didn’t know our programmers added some code that does this strange uncommanded thing when you push buttons a certain way”

Microsoft’s auth infrastructure has been a hot mess over the last 12 month. These outages are getting old.

The autonomous car community is learning the same lesson the aviation community found. Autopilot is a very powerful tool that increases safety, but it doesn’t replace pilots. Similarly car automation will increase safety but it won’t broadly replace drivers.

These review sites come and go and all end up “going” for the same reason—-it becomes a polluted mess of marketing and manipulated data. Then some new site comes out claiming to be the “new” raw review site where none of this happens... until it does. Rinse and repeat.

Glassdoor is now going through it’s jumped the shark moment where everyone catches on that it’s the same BS as all the sites Glassdoor claimed to be replacing. History repeats itself again.

Investors generally balk at founders taking much salary if the company is not profitable. They need a place to live and eat but beyond that investors want their money helping the company, not funneling into a founder’s pocket. High cash comp should be coming from operating revenue/profits not an investor’s pocket.

You are thinking about tax issues not issues of fiduciary duty. The market value issue is to make sure you’re not illegally funneling money between entities without proper taxation.

You generally couldn’t, for example, transfer significant wealth to a friend without high taxes by selling them something for a dollar When it’s market value is $10 million. This issue here is completely different.

This is basically the textbook definition of conflict of interests.

Given that WeWork is also a very unprofitable business it raises serious fiduciary duty questions regarding his role at WeWork (it would be a big issue even if they were profitable but seems crazy bad when they are not).