eldavido

I think this is an insightful comment and I'm sorry to see it get downvoted.

I live in a large condo building. It has its pros and cons. It's great, in theory--750-1000 people pooling their expertise and funds to tackle infrastructure issues. Great recent example: we fixed a sewer lateral (the pipe that connects to the sewer under the building). Three of them, total cost 200k. Sounds a lot until you realize we spread it across ~350 units (600/unit), which is roughly 1/10th what a typical suburban homeowner would pay for the same thing.

The other side of the coin is that, in larger political structures, governance REALLY matters. You can end up with a relatively well-run condo like mine, or a large, wasteful organization that squanders obscene sums on pet projects and outright corruption.

Many people don't even know this, but SF has been under federal investigation for high-level corruption in the public works department for over a year [1]. The thrust of your comment is correct. Large cities attract large amounts of money, much of which gets wasted, or ends up lining pockets in hard, or even "soft" corruption, with jobs and contracts steered to friends (qualified or not) via patronage networks.

What I think you miss though, is that there's a middle ground. You don't have to be either extreme drive-everywhere suburbia, or a giant mega-city like Beijing or New York. My home town, Homewood, IL, is a nice, walkable city of about 20,000, with a nice downtown, plenty to do, and relatively honest (if not always saintly) government.

The mid-size towns and suburbs can do a lot more to encourage the kind of urbanism the author calls for. Getting explicit about cultivating nice, walkable downtowns is a start. Many, including Homewood, don't, because "development" and "jobs" are seen as unqualified goods, without thinking about the cost side of the equation (roads, plumbing, etc required to service this stuff).

I've written for Strong Towns. What they get most right is that (1) LAND is the scare resource in a town, and (2) cities should explicitly encourage uses that lead to the highest taxable value of that land. Big box retail isn't this. Denser housing and retail districts (I own one of these buildings), is. The numbers on this are simple and don't lie.

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/Mohammed-Nuru-to-sett...

The claim is correct, but incomplete.

It's true that many commercial real estate developers design buildings to roughly match depreciation lifetimes, reason being, depreciation reduces tax and once your basis hits zero (the item is fully depreciated), you can't use depreciation to shield any more taxable income. The base depreciation lifetime of US commercial real estate is 39 years though, not 15-20.

The other elephant in the room is that building to last is really expensive, at least upfront. So it isn't, and perhaps shouldn't, be something we do for everything.

Every town has "forever buildings": schools, village halls, religious institutions. Places that cater to basic needs that aren't going to change. Imagine a typical "old" American school: a giant brick building, with a steam boiler, well-made doors, and thick walls. This is what "built to last" looks like. There are often ornamental features like murals on the outside walls. Ditto for churches: thick, heavy buildings with materials like marble or other stone. Old, well-made houses are the same way.

This isn't how big box stores are made. They have way more drywall, polished concrete floors (definitely not tile), cheapo sliding doors, thin walls with stucco or other flimsy materials, standardized designs that don't change based on where they are (vs. something designed specifically for the area), and giant parking lots. The entire mentality is different. These are built to last a couple decades, then get taken down, or demolished. It's actually the same with McMansions, giant 4000 square foot houses in deep suburban areas.

One other thing, read patio11's "Mortgages are a manufactured product" [1] -- CRE (buildings) is also a "manufactured" product for a lot of the same reasons, namely, there are buyers in the economy that structurally desire regular income streams (rental payments) from these buildings, and the fact that they're a Walgreens, or a Wal-Mart, or whatever else, barely even registers. The "customer" of a lot of this stuff is the pension fund / endowment that ends up holding the debt on the property, not the people or businesses that actually, you know, occupy the place day-to-day.

Source: husband of an architect, and commercial real estate owner/manager

[1] https://bam.kalzumeus.com/archive/mortgages-are-a-manufactur...

Buttigieg was pushing a vehicle mileage tax (VMT) based on how much you drive.

Eliminate the gas tax, just charge directly based on the amount of road use.

It's interesting you think there necessarily are "losers".

Interest rates are set in a competitive market. At any given point, there's a relatively fixed supply of money being put into what's on offer.

For buyers like pensions, it's simple: get the highest rate they can with acceptable risk and diversification. Keep in mind that not all of a fund's assets should be invested in super-long duration loans. Anyone running a fixed income portfolio understands this is a major source of risk (interest rate risk) as long-dated bonds are one of the most rate-sensitive investments possible. You'd do better with a blend of short, medium, and long-duration debt to ensure you don't end up hosed when rates move the wrong way.

Also keep in mind, many net buyers of this stuff are using it to offset long-term liabilities -- insurance loss payments, pensions, etc. Insurance companies will adjust premiums based on earnings of their investment portfolios.

And finally, keep in mind that interest rates aren't just a video game. There are major "real" drivers of them, economic growth being one--the demand for credit and its supply absolutely shifts over time, and throughout the business cycle. Real economic variables like demographics, home building, population shifts, the number of retired (more savings) vs working (more wage income) people in a population, etc. cause this stuff to move around a lot. If someone gets a higher rate, it's because at the time, there was more demand for credit, it wasn't just someone "losing" or getting "ripped off" that made that trade possible.

Not what you asked, but stories like this are why competition is critical to the economy.

All large human systems, government, academia, business, whatever, converge to this. Everybody's comfortable, nobody's working too hard, sure, we'll get to it in a couple months...maybe. The paychecks will keep on coming, we can all go home at 5, everything's great.

Then, all of a sudden, some small startup "cuts corners", doesn't fill out the paperwork, kind of ignores all this "compliance" a bit, and somehow...out-executes you with 1/10th the staff, at half the price.

The immediate reaction is always disbelief, and rationalization. "They don't have feature X". "They aren't PCI-DSS compliant." Yet somehow, the customers are lining up and can't get enough. Someone figured out precisely what mattered and what didn't (what people were willing to pay for), and delivered it.

Single-payer healthcare, the DMV, and private equity-created monopolies are what happens when there's no competition. There lies the world of consistently higher prices, "waiting rooms", we can't do that because "it's never been done that way before", etc.

I have a nagging feeling the rules are different in fields like sales, trading, sports, or others where performance is more precisely quantified.

The reality, somewhat sad in my view, is that in most places, software shops, architecture firms, academia, pretty much anywhere where individual measurement isn't possible and most work is done in teams, most performance reviews are a thin veneer over a high school popularity contest. You get ahead by being liked, something that's at best loosely correlated to how much work you get done, or at what quality.

Of note, the best manager I worked for (in software) ran a great team by making work about the work, not being liked, or delivering great powerpoints, or other secondary things.

Yeah, this is how I see it, too. Sort of a gradual convergence.

On the static side, Java and especially C# are simply _better_ than they used to be. Type inference is great - I can just write var x = new List<Thing>() rather than having to stupidly repeat the type e.g. List<Thing> x = new List<Thing>(). Add in generics, and lambdas, and about a dozen other things that have now become widespread, and it's really a different game than 10 years ago.

Coming the other way, I never expected to see Intellisense-like autocompletion for languages like Ruby or Python. It honestly feels magical. Refactoring has gotten much better to where I can pull methods up and down inheritance chains using PyCharm or other mainstream IDEs.

I actually think it's mobile that's pushed people back toward static. Swift, ObjC, Java, and Kotlin are all static and there's less emphasis on this "one language" idea that drove a lot of people toward trying to use the same language (JS/TS) for their React front-ends and node backends.

> Main thing I wanted to say is that we all love to shit on how Silicon Valley has basically gotten rich off investing in websites and SaaS products over the past ~15 years

500 years ago, these people would've chased Jewish financiers out of strongly catholic areas, or shit on Dutch merchants getting rich in the spice trade.

When it comes to human nature, things don't really change.

Nailed it. This article is a textbook example of why STEM people shouldn't be so quick to dismiss things like political science.

What we're talking about here is governance -- laws, norms, and fairness. Nobody lives on an island. Even on land that's "yours", you're still reliant on things like roads, water pipes, and other shared public infrastructure. You don't like how someone's running things, vote them out or leave, but don't pretend you're better off doing everything yourself. "Self-sufficiency is the road to poverty" as a famous economist said.

Incidentally I've been watching the walking dead again (season 8) and a lot of this stuff is the subject of the show. It's definitely had some rough patches but at its core, it's a show about how to build communities and large-scale civilizations, and what effects various leadership styles have on each society's long-term prospects. Very relevant.

"Venture Capitalists are just hedge fund managers who can quote the Tibetan Book Of The Dead." — Taylor Mason, Billions, Season 3: Flaw in the Death Star.

I've thought about this. Keep it completely static, no back-end server required, minimal front-end javascript, mostly plain HTML.

The key, as many others have said, is to make it easy to copy/archive (on computers, archive.org, etc). A simple set of linked pages (with graphics in widely-used formats, eg JPEG/PNG) is your best bet.

What the stone tablets crowd here misses is that a lot of cultural production today that's very important--major artworks, political speeches, movies, court records--is electronic. This means that by necessity, unless you think that entire corpus will get discarded, future societies are going to develop archival systems capable of indexing and decoding all this information.

Also - storage capacity has grown a lot, and that's a trend I'm betting will continue. Today, entire libraries' worth of books and magazines can be mass-duplicated and carried around on disk drives or USB sticks. What does this trend look like in 500 years?

I also think using open systems and formats has a better chance of survival than proprietary ones, if only because there are more reference implementations for how to convert bits into something people can understand/experience. There's a lot of important stuff written in .doc (MS Word) but my money's on HTML or ASCII, or even PDF if you want long-term survival.

It's low (100-200ms). Read my post above

C++. 200ms cold start. provided.al2 runtime environment.

Lambda success story:

Started with a .NET Core API about a year ago. Monolith-first. Mix of clients across mobile and React. Async/await is one of the better things about C# (the language used for ASP.NET Core) and as a result, we were able to do things you'd never consider doing in-process on a system like Ruby on Rails (right on the thread serving the HTTP request), like transcoding a 12 megapixel HEIC upload into JPEG. We just did it, left the connection open, and when it was done, returned an HTTP 200 OK.

That worked well for a while and let us serve tons of clients on a single Heroku dyno. The problem: memory. Resizing images takes tens/hundreds of MB when you're doing it into three different formats.

Over the last two weeks, I extracted the HEIC->JPEG transcode/resize out of our monolith into a Lambda. I'm extremely happy with how it turned out. We went with C++ because the whole idea was performance, we're going to be doing point cloud processing and other heavyweight stuff, and wanted fine-grained control of memory. Our process has 28MB of dynamic libraries (.so files), starts in 200ms, and runs comfortably on a 512MB instance. We moved to 1024 to provide a margin of safety just in case we get a really large image. The system has progressed into "I don't even think about it"-level reliably. It just works and I pay something like $1 for 40-50k transcode operations. No EC2 instances to manage, no queues, no task runners, no Ruby OOM, no running RabbitMQ, none of that (former ops engineer at a very high-scale analytics company).

As a general comment, I don't see many cloud services written in C/C++. This is no doubt partly because those skills just aren't widespread. But I think the bigger lesson is that it might be worth adding a little bit of development complexity to save 10x as much ops overhead. When I explained this setup to my friend, his first reaction was, "Why didn't you just put ImageMagick (the binary) into a container?" Once I explained that actually, I need to get images from S3, and write them into several formats, and manipulate their S3 keys in somewhat complex ways, fire off an HTTP request to a server, and pass a JWT around...sure, I could write this in a shell script, with wget, and curl, and everthing else. But at some point you just have to write the right code for the job using the right tools.

I think hybrid approaches like this make the most sense. .NET and Java are great high-productivity tools for running server apps where memory is relatively abundant. I wouldn't try to move a system like that onto Lambda any more than I'd try to do something that more naturally fits with a queue/worker pattern on a webserver. This seems kind of obvious but if I'm being honest, it's probably experience talking a bit.

It's also neat to just get back to the metal a bit. Drop the containers, runtime environments, multi-hundred-MB deployment packages, just ship a xx MB package up to the cloud, deploy it, and have it run as a standalone linux binary with all the speed and simplicity that brings. Modern C++ is a totally different animal than 90s C++, I'd encourage giving it a try if you haven't in a while.

This is what I do. It seems to work ok.

Google Meet perf really is terrible though. Makes me wonder if the entire idea of in-browser video is misbegotten.

Slowly but surely, I've noticed my general exasperation with browser apps growing in the last few years. Between getting into mobile development, better sandboxing, easy app store-based distribution, much better isolation between apps, and learning C++ (from working in robotics) it feels it's time to get back to writing high-performance native code that doesn't involve the ridiculous tradeoffs the modern browser requires (latency, memory use, etc). I think this might be a trend we see more of in the next decade.

The whole issue is the general prudence of taking on debt. It's a question of efficiency. Too little and you miss out on opportunities to produce and grow, too much and you're super-fragile.

Over-indebted companies is a very Anglo (US/UK) and Japanese thing. There are plenty of companies in continental Europe (Germany, Italy, France) who operate with much less debt than their US counterparts. A good example is Aldi. They have no debt on their balance sheet anywhere, not even for inventory. By the standards of American business culture, that is 100% absurd.

I'm really not sure who's right. It's optimization vs survival.

100% agree. Prime video is garbage through and through. I much, much prefer Netflix.

I think Benedict's larger point is correct that I might put up with shitty Prime streaming because I want to watch what's on it. But it's not a delight. No way. And in the long term, that shit matters. The joylessness creeps up on you over time, until eventually you're left with Eclipse, Windows 10, or Android scrolling. Your NPS scores fall off a cliff, you get zero word of mouth, no lines outside of stores, nobody talking about it on social media/news/etc. and then everyone acts like it's some big shock.

It's not fun!!

I think Tesla, Apple, and Netflix all really get this.

I used to read a lot of writing like this and still do (tech strategy newsletters--Stratechery, Benedict Evans, etc)

The hazard of reading stuff like this is that it makes the world seem much more orderly and predictable than it is. Case in point: Zoom. "Videoconferencing is a commodity". "Distribution is all that matters". And all of a sudden, someone does this "commodity" a lot better, without the pre-existing network/distribution/brand of someone like Skype, Google, etc. How do they explain this? How does it make sense that a team can work heads-down without any clear distribution advantage and just grind, and build a large, meaningful company by making a better product?

It's the same deal with Yamaha Motorcycles. Read their story. Bootstrapped from a "nobody" brand in the US, stiff competition against Harley-Davidson and their ilk. They just got better and better, gradually improving year after year, until they're taken seriously by hardcore enthusiasts and are one of the leading motorcycle companies in the US. How do you explain this success in terms of moats, 2x2 matrices, SWOT analysis, competitive positioning, etc? Sometimes a company wins because they just want it more badly and are willing to push their people harder, and outwork/out-deliver the competition.

Calling the tech "still fundamentally a commodity" bothers me not because I'm a technologist, but because it's horribly hand-wavey and imprecise. It sounds precise, but what...exactly...does this mean? As other commenters have pointed out, sure, a commodity that cost oh, 100 billion dollars and a decade to build, isn't easily duplicated, and meaningfully contributes to the user experience? I heard someone describe gold as a "6000-year bubble" last week in the context of the "crypto bubble". Same idea--"a commodity that nobody else has, took a decade to build, and over 100 billion dollars". Some "commodity".

As a CEO, I increasingly find all this strategy stuff noise. All that matters is delighting your customers. You do that and charge a reasonable price, you're going to succeed. It might take a while, and of course you need decent sales/marketing execution, but overall, just focus on keeping customers happy, and you'll get there.

SEEKING FREELANCER | US | Remote-only

We’re Dials: Github for property maintenance. Today, huge skyscrapers and hospitals track maintenance items (furnace repair) using legacy “building management systems”. It’s what you’d expect: desktop software, six-figure contracts and multi-year implementation timelines. For the other 99% of buildings, Dials moves all this to the cloud and organizes it, letting everyone work faster, earn more, and take better care of their buildings. The first piece we’re doing is HOA reserve planning, a high-stakes problem that when done incorrectly, causes disasters like the condo collapse that just happened in Florida.

We’re making product design our first hire because we see ourselves as similar to Square: lots of semi-technical users, served by an inexpensive, self-serve product. Product Design will be a key growth driver for the business and accordingly, this position offers a ton of visibility, and room for growth.

You will have broad discretion to remodel, use, or even discard what we’ve built so far. We wouldn’t mind if you want to contribute code but the priority is someone who can work from (and help shape) product requirements, building flows and assets using Figma, InDesign, Photoshop, and other similar tools.

Our founders have 15+ years combined experience in Silicon Valley, one prior exit, and our CTO led the perception team at the company that was first to legally operate an 18-wheel semi truck with nobody in the cab. We’ve assembled a great team of 30+ investors from Stripe, Square, Coinbase, and Heroku, and are a distributed-by-choice company with the founders in different cities. Obviously, we want to make ourselves and our investors money, but we chose this because it’s technically deep, and has the potential to make millions of owners', managers', accountants', and tradespeoples' work lives more pleasant. Aishanou and I creating the sort of place we’d want to work ourselves: clear expectations and reporting lines, respectful, high-caliber coworkers, 45-50 hours/week of work (no weekend work/”crunch time”), and ample mentorship for junior employees.

Email: david@dials.com

Great illustration of why respect for individual rights is so important.

There will always be some megalomaniac, whether dictator, president, cop, or some authority figure, who "knows best".

Individual rights are the brakes. They're the lines we've agreed not to cross as a society, even when we're really sure we "know best". Example: property rights. No matter how sure you are that there's stolen property in the building, even law enforcement doesn't get to enter without a warrant.

Individual rights limit what others can do.

I think this is a big part of it. I've worked in Silicon Valley ~10yrs and I'm surprised how little actual work people do at these 60-80k jobs.

It really isn't comparable. The way SV people work, the expectations, level of responsibility, selectivity in hiring, and sometimes hours/stress, are of a kind only found in law or medicine elsewhere.

I think this is a great point. You need some way to account for what the stock has done over the period.

My understanding of tax is that escrowed shares (common for longer grants) aren't beneficially owned by the employee until the vesting expires, at which period the income is considered "earned" since it's yours (i.e. you can spend it), and taxed.

This means tech salaries are being somewhat artificially inflated by the huge run-up in general US equities (stock market). If the market is flat/down over the coming years, you're going to see these numbers crater for no reason other than that GOOG didn't double/triple over the past decade.

Interesting to see the US somewhat following China's lead here. Industry/government/defense cooperation has a rich (and somewhat ugly) history in the US, but seems to have fallen out of favor in recent decades, whereas China has leaned in even harder toward five-year plans that attempt to get every part of society -- academia, government, business, media, etc. marching in the same direction.

I've really started to wonder about how, and how much, government should try to influence a lot of this. In the 60s Kennedy said we're going to put a man on the moon (US) and we did it. There's clearly some role for direction-setting at the national level.

But it's not without costs: corruption, cronyism, wasted money. China's been trying to bootstrap a domestic semiconductor industry for decades and the most they have to show for it is SMIC, which is nowhere near TSMC or even Intel's level of capability. Ditto for internal-combustion cars--they (rightfully) trumpet EVs as a pretty large success story but leave out the part about wasting billions trying to make a domestic Detroit. And then there's the fact that government has a hard time writing sub-$1bln checks so there's the potential for a huge amount of waste if things don't pan out.

FYI there is an entire book at deals with this topic called "10% less democracy". Basic idea is that the US has become too democratic.

Places like Singapore have a different attitude toward this that's worth understanding (not saying it's right, just different and worth understanding, like comparing OSX to Windows). There are parts of the US government that operate this way, like the Federal Reserve.

One interesting proposal from the book is having congress pass a tax law that's very simple, something like "the top 10% of income-earners should pay 15% of all revenue" and giving the IRS (career tax experts) much more leeway to write the tax code, in a way that complies with the stated (democratically accountable) objectives, but maximizes simplicity and ease of enforcement. I think there's something to that.

There's a place for technocrats. But in today's extremely "power to the people" moment that gives us Trump and Sanders, it seems like a harder sell.

Nice comment but I think this is a bit wide of the mark. Schools are a state and local issue in the US where party is less significant. Look at the difference between a "republican" in, say, California's central valley vs. the same in Alabama. In most other places, that'd be two different parties.

Though I agree we'd be better off with something more like Germany or the UK, with coalitions.

I see this happen a lot, where we need to make some kind of practical decision in politics (how much to pay teachers, how to set water rates), and it inevitably descends into an ideology-driven discussion of fairness, the meaning of life, and other similarly non-answerable questions.

We have to reframe this for what it is, a person being paid to do a job.

The overall issue here is that when you let values guide decision-making, there's no "right" answer. There is no "right" answer to how much the US should spend on health insurance. Likewise there is no "right" answer to what to pay teachers.

The only way I see to solve this is to peg it to something set by a market. Markets operate under constraints. Maybe set pay (all-in including vacation, pension, benefits, etc) relative to a local private school that sets wages competitively based on what teachers can get vs what the school can afford to pay from fees. Modulate +/- 10% based on overall funding levels if you want to split hairs.

The alternative is much worse: a big slugging match between taxpayers and well-organized special interests (e.g. teacher unions), and news flash, the special interests usually win, because it matters much more for them than for the average taxpayer, and they're better at playing the long game (e.g. organizing member rolls, getting members to show up to meetings/vote, knowing relevant laws, developing relationships with city management/school board members). This is a big part of why secondary education in the US sucks. In any other business, software development, architecture, law, manufacturing, the management has discretion to manage -- set wages and salaries, hire, fire, supervise, and hand out bonuses. School managers (administrators) are absolutely handcuffed by collective bargaining agreements that restrict how they hire, fire, and promote.

You think I'm being hyperbolic? Tell me one other job, apart from a competitive process at a university, that gives people firing-proof "tenure". That's insane.

Speaking for myself, the biggest shift was mindset. You can really approach business in two ways and they're completely different. Decide which is for you.

One: the artisan/boutique way. You can make plenty of money this way, it's how a lot of high-end law firms, marketing agencies, etc. run. Focus on a very high-value problem, do most of the work yourself or with a small team of partners, and be the best at it: medical malpractice cases, patio11-style marketing optimization, that kind of thing. Stay small, make a million (or more) per year, build your brand. Get work through referrals and keep charging more as you get better and more well-known. Most of your gains will come from serving clients with bigger pocketbooks, even through the work will be substantially the same (funny how that works).

Option 2: the true "business owner". Reframe from "I can make X for Y hours" to "I need to sell x million @ y% margin". Think like a drug dealer or a guy selling shoes. Sell a million dollars of product, keep 10%, you make 100k. Two million in sales @ 15% = 300k. The point is, you aren't selling yourself, you're selling a product, whether that's hours of developer labor, some kind of outcome, or even a physical product. You're a merchant. This is what it means to be a true "business owner" -- not that it matters that much, many people that go down the other path do just fine.

The main thing is to get into the mind of a (your) customer. It's no longer about the work itself, but your customer - how they find you, why they're paying you, etc. You need to figure that out.

Good luck.

(used to run an agency and now starting a software company.)

Data point: wages are higher in the US than most other countries, even for equivalent jobs. I routinely see development jobs in Europe offering 40-50k Euros that would pay double that in dollars in the US, and the US also tends to have lower taxes.

How does your country's wages compare? I do think the US works more hours (look at OECD data for this) but I think US companies are managed better in general, and the general non-unionization of the US workforce (only about 15% overall, with the majority working for government) is a big part of why pay is higher.

I tried Rust this past weekend. It feels like a language that delivers on the promise of C++ -- fast, good "static" tooling, no VM, scalable to large projects -- but if C++ was designed today, with 40 years of hindsight and we could eliminate all the crazy legacy.

Something I realized doing c++ professionally for the first time last year, it's nearly three different languages. There's an inner core of procedural C, the mid-90s new/delete/raw pointers OO business that got big during the heyday of COM/ATL/other Microsoft technologies, and then what's come to be known as "modern C++", with smart pointers and a lot more automatic stuff.

What I most enjoyed about C++ is how, as someone put it, it feels like an armory with everything on offer from a pocketknife to a nuclear weapon. It integrates with everything, you can write code any way you want from embedded assembly up to functional, and it runs everywhere, on any platform, and can link with Android, Windows, Linux, .NET, Java, whatever.

I'm starting to think garbage collected languages are headed for obsolescence. Like maybe, with better languages, we could ditch all the bullshit of pip, and gems, and all that, and get back to a time where you could just download something, run it, and not have to worry about some gigantic runtime environment that eats all your memory and requires a ton of configuration. It we could pull that off without making it incredibly hard to write simple code, that'd be cool.

Google the term "liquidity preference". It's generally understood to be a function of real GDP and interest rates. GDP up = more demand for currency to be able to transact. Lower rates = holding cash has less opportunity cost (there are fewer opportunities to invest in other things with higher yield).

Totally. And this is why I think all this "move to the suburbs" business is overblown.

Physical proximity still matters a hell of a lot. Especially on the margins when making something 1% easier is the difference between doing and not doing something.

Ironically pg is the guy who said the real world is really high bandwidth (Cities and Ambition) and that going where you have an audience is important. I share your frustrations about it being difficult to get to people to pitch them. Doubly when you aren't chasing an audience that spends all day in front of a screen.