I'm doing what now? The point is there's a high correlation between being a prisoner and being a psychopath, so you do not necessarily get to have super high honesty and compassion or whatever in the list of traits of a person who will reform prison. What you do get to do, is look at the set of actual people who have experienced prison (and therefore are most motivated and qualified to fix it), and sort by entrepreneurial skill. Hers is not zero.
the thing is, to spearhead prison reform, you need someone who was once a prisoner, and the intersection of that with "compassionate, honest, empathetic" characteristics would not appear to be very large
> She described federal prison as “hell and torture” and said she was “not the same person I was back then”. “The people I love the most have to walk away as I stand here, a prisoner, and my reality sinks in”
would love to see Holmes as a face of prison reform when she gets out, she has the right skills and connections to really make a difference
Why Clojure = for Datomic, Rama, Electric and Missionary. No need for long blog post - this stack screams if your app fits within its intended operational margins - e.g. enterprise cloud information systems and rich interactive web products.
... i actually considered becoming a "civil servant" after this experience to try to help (on either the govt side or private side), but I could not see a viable way to actually make a difference, even a small one. Everything is so jammed up and deadlocked with outrageous anti-competitive regulation —go learn what is "IDIQ" "SPARC" "8(a) STARS II" "GSA IT Schedule 70"—that it's not actually possible for a startup to bid these contracts without partnering with the 800 lb gorillas and therefore becoming a part of the thing that you are trying to destroy. "Disruption does not come from within"
sell your stock then if you are a shareholder, it's up 225% on 5yr chart, 1525% since IPO, and has risen to a $1.7T mkt cap since the $13M Series A at $100M Post in 2005. That's a 100,000x ROI on the A if I did the math right, forgive me there are a lot of zeros to keep track of
i honestly could not find any root cause analysis in that article that i agree with. it is not a problem of “too few bureaucrats”, it is that the contract procurement process is not competitive, nor is literally any other process on the government side, including meta processes like the bureaucrat hiring and selection process. the entire govt side system top to bottom has evolved in a world where money does not matter and the contractors have simply evolved to the constraints of that interface to get at the money the way a plant grows towards the sun.
absolutely startups can be inefficient but government projects are at a wholly different order of magnitude. Some startups will crush $20M and then die, and yet the best ones, such as facebook, return 100,000x ROI on that same $20 mil. Govt projects will crush $200M, deliver nothing and then go to recompete so another vendor can have a turn.
did 2 years at a medicaid federal system integrator, same, their primary program was a $40M/yr capital bonfire and it was not subtle, not a single engineer in the trenches believed it would succeed. Is a competitive startup 100x more efficient? Hard to say yes because i couldn’t deliver that contract for $400k/yr, but they lost it in the end—they couldn’t deliver for 40M—so there’s a divide-by-zero in the comparison. So when I see USAID or whatever with some bleeding heart mission statement, all i can think of is how many vendors are siphoning off that money while paying lip service to the culture war theme of the year, like a drug lord making sure to be seen at church every every Sunday. It’s not a question of, like, is it one third fraud or half fraud. There is absolutely no accountability and there is not a single competitive aspect about these projects. At no point whatsoever is there a credible attempt to deliver on promises made. The Purpose Of A System Is What It Does and what that program I saw does is let about 150 people bill about $100 per hour to the government. All you have to do, to collect your $800 per day, is report that your jira ticket is taking more story points than expected due to technical debt, and make sure your MS Teams stays green from 8 to 6 (buy a mouse wiggler)!
potential visa workaround - incorporate abroad (i.e. self employed) and work remotely for US startup as a contractor (that is willing to work with timezone and culture differences to save costs). Even still there is a rate ceiling, startup jobs are gonna top out at 80k for overseas remote unless you have a distinguishing value prop, and non-startups don’t really have a good reason to hire overseas as the management/accountability issues really prevent this from scaling beyond early stage startup situations. my 2c as a US startup with overseas eng.
US social security pays about $3k/mo, so $1k/mo post-tax pre-expenses is not just enough to retire but also typical. These are real numbers from a real person (unmarried) in my life. They own their house, have about $200k in retirement assets (generating that $12k/yr in income) and otherwise have a fine life which is spent mostly gardening and helping parent grandkids. People are not rich!
The main issue with this narrative is that social security is on track to be insolvent in less than a decade. If that happens, then the long-tail of regular non-rich people are going to be in a world of hurt.
the purpose of the expensive property in the high COL city is to be near the best jobs. 10k MRR is recurring, it is not a job, it continues if you stop working, it is an asset that can be sold, it means you never need to be employed by someone else ever again. Recurring revenue also grows, 10k MRR today is 20k MRR in 2 years if you work it, which you have time to do because you are not wage slaving your life away at your job making other people rich, clocking your hours and vacation time for those 4% raises while the business doubles revenue. 10k MRR means you are now free to do literally anything with your life that you want, such as grow your business if your number is 50k MRR or whatever, which is $600k annualized and at 8x saas revenue multiple can be sold for 5 million which makes you top 99.9%† net worth in the world.
Pre-IPO investors always get their money back first, this is a straightforward defense against founder fraud - effectively meaning that the valuation of the company has to go up before a sale, not down. If it goes down, the founders have lost their gamble and the round should not have happened. The legal machinery for this is - each Series of stock is a custom negotiated contract and can have any number of custom terms; shareholders and/or the existing board have to consent of course. If existing board doesn’t like the terms, then don’t do the deal. The exec comp here was for retention and can include their retention salary - i.e., the $1M can simply be $250k 4 year comp and nobody is allowed to leave.
can't what? civilization is organized hierarchically, alliance union country state county city township neighborhood street family individual. Layers get added on top as civilization progresses in order to make trade more efficient. A concrete issue today is getting startup stock options to cross international lines in a remote-first world. There is sufficient demand for a solution that solutions will emerge on a timescale of, idk decades for sure. There were not global alliances 400 years ago and 400 years from now there will probably be interstellar. Fudge N to match your best guess as to rate of progress.
what is "it doesn't work" ? The exception is part of the type, so it doesn't typecheck unless all callbacks are of type "... throws Exception"? What's the problem with that? It's not generic enough, i.e. the problem is Java generics are too weak to write something like "throws <T extends Exception>"? (Forgive me, it's been 13 years since I wrote java and only briefly, the questions are earnest)
edit, so like `@throws[T <: Exception] def effect[T](): Unit` or something, how is it supposed to work?
the book is quite interesting, one idea was - how many hours do we spend online per day? i spend, like, 15 hours plugged in - PC, iphone, TV/games. i’m plugged in when i’m driving, when i’m out jogging, i’m plugged in right now as i wake up drinking coffee in bed, I have more internet friends than IRL and they are more important, my business/financial relationships are entirely digital, as is most of my relationship with the state. So, why are governments organized by geography? How long until we free ourselves entirely from this constraint?