d_e_solomon

It's extremely intensive to onboard a new employee; and extremely disruptive to onboard a new employee and then immediately fire them. It's also very demotivating to the existing team.

I'm a former tech consultant who manages/ed lots of people since then. A few thoughts:

1) When I was a consultant and had to manage my own staff, they tend to come from a similar background, are extremely motivated, and a strong desire to do succeed. And if the staff doesn't do good, there's 10 more where that came from. That's a relatively easy situation to manage in; but it doesn't make you good at managing all the complexities that come from managing different levels, different backgrounds, and different levels of motivation. So I got a lot better at managing once I had to do it in a non consulting basis.

2) While a lot of consultants are good at making a project look shiny for 6-18 mos while not dealing with depth; there are a lot of organizations and staff that stare at their own navel for five years and tell me that they're doing depth; and never get anything over the finish line. Which is also not great. So there is some balance there and more organizations than not get stuck in the mud.

3) I've had some run ins with strategy consultants who come up with bonkers solutions to very difficult problems. And then hand it over to me to implement. And I go WTF - there are these 10 major problems with this approach. The strategy consultant tells me those are my problem. So I do the implementation and solve the 10 problems I saw and make it work. While I grouch about the strategy consultant... she had the fortitude to recommend the thing that got the client to the finish line... that I would never have the courage to recommend. That is great in a one off engagement, but probably pretty rough to work for.

Apple's earnings release are this week, so we'll probably get more insight into what they're thinking. Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple are all different firms with different strategies and I presume that investors think about them differently.

Apple in particular has particularly well entrenched profits and competitive advantage, so investors may view them differently.

So when loaning money, you're trying to keep a low default rate as possible for the interest rate you're charging. Having collateral and data and identity help protect against the risk of default. If you take those away, you'd have to charge a very high interest rate to cover the risk - thus increasing the risk of default - and it spirals poorly from there.

In the old days before the 1980s for sure, bank loans were done based on relationships - the bank manager knew you and had your business. That worked for some, but many loans that could have been weren't issued due to not having a more industrial process. In this modern era, lending officers can see your credit scores and a bunch of data to evaluate the risk of default. Even though I haven't seen the inside of my bank since 2010, I can easily get a loan based on credit data.

I struggle with why would I want to issue loans without either the data or the relationship. Maybe if you have a way to get a person's collateral and credit data on chain via a proxy, you can use that to issue a loan. But that seems like our existing structure with just extra steps...

I have spoken with owners and business leaders who used the covid crisis and other events to do a 'no fault' layoff - they cut their low performers regardless of whether they financially speaking had to. They felt that doing layoffs in this way was less likely to impact overall morale.

The other thing to think about is that firms also have to signal to their investors. If all my competitors are laying off, but I don't, it might signal that I'm not carefully managing my investor's dollars. Investors might then punish the stock.

Me personally, I've been trying to get managers to be more thoughtful about who they want on their teams, being more careful in the hiring process, coaching those who aren't up to snuff, and letting go of people who are underperforming. Doing that on a regular basis instead of playing layoff games seems to make for a stronger culture overall.

Our system is setup so that the government - even elected via a democratic process - can't trample over certain rights.

The other side of the cash flow game is that you can be cash flow positive most of the time... but go out of business if you face occasional, large often complicated fixed costs. A robust accounting and pricing model is needed to plan for those fixed costs. It's like picking up pennies in front of a steamrolller if you only focus on short term cash flow.

The other interesting example of cash flow games is Warren Buffet's focus on insurance. He really likes picking up people's premium payments and collecting interest on them until the claims hit. My limited understanding is that Buffet looks for those situations specifically.

So what? I didn't say he should go to jail or that the verdict should have been vacated... but I wouldn't have a lot of faith in the political process if a major political figure most likely only survived a criminal trial because of a due process issue.

It was vacated on a technicality, not a matter of fact.

Brazil's politics continue to be a mess. Lula, the newly elect president, was formerly convicted for corruption and then had the supreme court set aside his conviction. Bolsonaro has also committed multiple crimes and tried to the Trump election denial-ism tactics.

I feel for the folks who live under these people.

I don't think big businesses have ever avoided politics. Try being openly gay and get hired in the 80s or being a woman trying to be an executive in the 80s. Businesses did openly discriminate. And that is political.

The shift happened because businesses became dependent on more and more talent for continued growth. Suddenly having a large contingent of your workforce threaten to quit because some dude wants to spout off about women not being as naturally smart as men is really bad business; and it's not surprising that businesses respond to the incentives and axe the dude spouting off.

After the crash of FTX, it's going to take a long time for anyone to trust anything that has blockchain in its description. Fair or unfair, the entire ecosystem is tainted.

I'm also suspicious of claims that an algorithm is uncorrupted by human power. Every computer algorithm is made by people who have human motivations.

You seem extremely angry about a Twitter outage. Have you considered going outside and getting some fresh air?

Most of the gains in Bitcoin are highly correlated with gains in the SP500. The times that it tends to decouple is when Bitcoin is crashing due to Bitcoin problems. So definitely not a great inflation hedge and definitely a rather risky asset class.

BioNTech has been approved for foreigners but that's going to be too little, too late. China has a higher vaccination rate than the US but not in the elderly which is most at risk from Covid.

I really enjoyed the interplay of managing complex programmatic state, virtual economics, and community in a much earlier era. I was also entertained by the connections to blockchain in a situation where it would have been (actually) useful!

> Why don't you segregate funds between Wikipedia and the rest of WMF?

Managing restricted donations is a pain from an accounting perspective and incurs a lot of overhead. I don't deal with nonprofits at WMF's size, but most that I've been a part of won't manage restrictions unless the donation is very large. The amount of additional fundraising that comes in for even pre-defined restrictions isn't worth the overhead of it.

Yes, I should be more civil in my comment and thank you for pointing it out.

I find the tone of "engineers, developers smart, everyone else dumb" to be really tiresome; and when it becomes self congratulatory, it becomes really irksome. It's also the casual dismissal of knowledge in other fields and lived experiences of others that just happen again and again here.

I should probably find a different place to hang.

> its only engineers that I’ve heard say “oh yeah..”

Yes - only engineers are capable of independent and rational thought. The orange site continues to sniff its own farts.

Yes, we're about 100 people in total with a leadership team of sevenish. Adding the regular offsites has actually increased accountability and ferreted out who is effective and who is not; and ended tolerance for those who are not.

So there is lots of grouchiness in this thread. Maybe I'll try and give some comments on how these can be productive.

I'm in a remote working firm that provides IT services. We get together as a leadership team once a quarter to review what was and wasn't completed the previous quarter; review operations metrics, discuss changes in the business environment; and build the plan for the next quarter.

On a yearly basis, we do a bigger strategy session to really think about our marketing position, our offerings, our competitors and so on. The fancy strategy so to speak.

It's good for the group to be in person as the conversations can get difficult at times and it's easier to have them without having to mediate through Zoom. We also use it as a chance to do relationship building and to handle some tactical issues that need a hand.

We don't do go anywhere fancy - we usually rent a conference room offsite as our office doesn't have a lot of conference space.

Implementing these sessions has led to much better execution overall against our plans.

I mean, he did commit to buying them $44 billion. If he didn't want to buy them, he shouldn't have signed a contract agreeing to do so. You can't argue that Musk doesn't know what a contract is and can't get decent legal advice.

We keep seeing actions from Kiwifarms that include doxing, swatting,and cyber bullying that lead to the suicide and death of people.

If you're saying that swatting is free speech, then we've pushed the idea of speech beyond all reasonable boundaries and have decided that speech just means that people are free from consequences of their actions.

No, but any reasonable examination of Kiwifarms shows a history of swatting, doxing, and bullying that has led to suicides. If I had a hosting business, I don't see why I should be required to carry their content or provide service to them. It's not a free speech question - it's a shitty behavior question.

Suddenly everyone who attacks Moon supposedly committed sexual assault and is a groomer or some other slanderous attack. Moon should put up or shut up.

Kiwifarms has gone way past free speech and onto active harassment. To fly this one as a free speech issue is disingenuous. To act like censorship is the issue here is pretty ripe.

Free speech is the right for penis pill sellers to post incessantly.

I disagree. Private schools self select their student population. Most private schools do not take students with special needs or students with really difficult home lives - and those students deserve education. Once private schools have to accept every student regardless of need, will their quality remain? I doubt it.

> This is the greatest German catastrophe in 80 years. It is an existential threat to the German (and, thus, European) economy and nation. Any other topic half as serious would occupy far more of these subreddits' front pages. And it is entirely self-inflicted.

Um... Berlin wall?

That's good feedback. I'll have to give another go.