lefstathiou

Anecdotal “proof”: In the heart of Manhattan’s ultra trendy Chelsea neighborhood is the Chelsea market which is now this super trendy food hall. In the basement is a delicious butcher named Dicksons where literally hundreds of New Yorkers and tourists eat and drink craft beers while they literally saw entire pigs and baby calfs in half and dangle their carcasses in clear eye sight of where you sit and eat. I take my family there all the time because of how tasty and fresh the meats are and my children love it.

Showing people where their meat comes isn’t going to reduce the demand in my opinion. I personally believe people should know where their food comes from as it reduces waste and garners introspection about our role in the planet and ecosystem.

I’m Greek American and lamb on the spit is a cultural tradition on Easter. As a kid, it was very weird for my American friends to pick food directly off of a carcass but so many told me over the years it was an unforgettable experience. My uncle once took me to the farm in Georgia where he got the lamb, handed me a large knife and asked me to slit its throat, I was 13 at the time. I couldn’t do it, I cried and watched him do it. I will never forget that. To this day I have a profound love and appreciation of animals, especially lambs. I still eat them. The two ideas for me are not conflicted to me. The only thing I abhor when it comes to meat is wastefulness.

Potential Option 3: your perspective is more influenced by the prevailing tone / narrative that you're reading online than you realize. When Twitter was in positive light and Meta wasnt, you may have been more positive / neutral on Twitter and negative on Meta. Now the prevailing tone is negative on Elon / Twitter / X and you may be going with the flow while being more positive on Meta now that the prevailing narrative has shifted to more neutral or positive.

I've seen this with dozens of our employees and people in tech. Without anything materially new to come out of Zuckerberg, everyone magically started liking him again simultaneously. It's amazing to watch.

Another fun anecdote about those times and MIT specifically. My brother was arguably the top student to come out of the Atlanta Public School System in 1996. This was a kid used to being the best in everything he did. He starts at MIT and takes the Calc 2 placement exam (he got a 5 of course on the AP BC test) and scores an 11 out of 100. He said the teaching assistant sat him down and told him “we are not in Kansas any more, forget everything you think you know, you are not prepared to be in this class and we will not accept your AP test results.”

Unfortunately, I recall in 1996 4 or 5 students committed suicide at MIT due to the academic rigor (which is why the first year was pass fail).

I’m not advocating for this system just sharing stories told to me.

My brother graduated from MIT 20 years ago and I recall one summer when I stayed there one of his fraternity brothers quipping “the fastest way to get a girl in Boston is to tell her you go to Harvard, and the fastest way to lose her is to tell her you go to MIT, they don’t want nerds”. Amazing how things have changed but even then it was basically an accepted truth that Harvard massively inflated grades. At the time I was told perfect GPAs were basically unheard of at MIT (back then least).

Grade inflation is real and I think it leads to significant unintended consequences. I do find myself flip flopping however on whether there should be grades at all. If you’ve read zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance, you’ll recall there is a powerful case made to eliminate grades at the college level. I still lean toward having them currently.

That’s not how the calculus works actually. Today a corporate bully can safely count on you being a rational actor (and not spend $1mm to win $400k) and push the envelop of competition and appropriation of data and trade secrets with limited recourse. Under a prevailing party construct, the risk of doing so is enormous.

Thus, in instances where they are objectively wrong, they lose big. In instances you are objectively wrong, you lose big. In instances where it is not black and white, where there is merit to both sides of the argument, you settle. All this is achieved with little intervention by the courts.

Very simple solution: the US should implement prevailing parties clause (prevailing party wins legal fees by default in a lawsuit) as law of the land by default.

We had a guy in Australia trying to use our trademark, in the US they would call my bluff and I would have to spend tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to sue. In Australia we sent a polite letter, outlined our case that was pretty clear, reminded him he would pay our legal if we escalated and made it clear we would, and the result was immediate.

In short, companies shouldn’t be incentivized to play game theory on whether or not you will sue me if I trample your rights.

If I had a magic wand:

1- One six-year term on the presidency. Enough time to get stuff done and see the results, but then you're out. The current structure gives the American public 1-2 years of productivity, then they go into campaign mode on the tax payers dime.

2- All official party nominees get the exact same budget for campaigning. Creates a level playing field and neutralizes the power of lobbying

3- Congressman, Senators, Governors are limited to a single 6 year term. This will create a lot of churn, require voters to get engaged to understand the candidates better, and eliminate lifetime politicians who will inevitably be corrupted (I'm a cynic).

Need to ponder how to hedge the power of the people behind the scenes who support the office since they are unelected and undoubtedly powerful (I'm thinking about the people writing Biden's scripts, who are they, who elected them, what do they believ, etc.... we know he isn't doing it).

Of course it will. And don’t think the politicians don’t already know this. It’s all part of the plan. Next on the ballot is universal basic income for all who lost their jobs. Voters for life.

Sorry I typed this on my commute so I didnt flush it out. What I believe (and didnt say) is that data ownership and privacy controls are important issues to individuals, but are not meaningful drivers of ongoing performance and market control of big tech. I don't believe their power lies in their access to my data, it lies in their control over the infrastructure I used to earn my living, engage with the world, etc.

Thus, to mitigate their control (assuming you want to), I believe we need to look to solutions that garner competition. MSFT collects rent on the corporate enterprise via Azure, they own corporate documentation via Office, they own the corporate code repository via Github, and they own the corporate identity via LinkedIn.

Random opinion here: I don't think privacy safeguards will have material impact on big tech and on the whole. They own the platforms we engage on and can thus channel engagement with or without privacy guards in place.

I think the only solution to this, and I personally don't care to implement it so just discussing this intellectually, is to disallow M&A. These firms have reached such scale that they can overpay significantly for every next generation platform (that could eventually compete against them) and protect the moat. Otherwise we we will only see shakeups when paradigm shifts occur, only to see the companies leading the shake ups get acquired... OpenAi comes to mind as the only credible threat to Google in recent years, only to see it get swallowed by MSFT.

Its difficult for any company to be at the bleeding edge of innovation forever, so they must be prevented from acquiring all innovation forever.

The link you provided is from April. When I click on the article, then click on the cited Twitter stats “visits to Twitter.com”, then scroll to “Total visits in last 3 months” (for Twitter of course), the report appears to indicate that traffic is up 1% MoM and currently at a high for the trailing 3 month period (which is all they provide). It is just shy of Instagram (which I was surprised to see).

I think decoupling is the right word. These south East Asian countries were unindustrialized nations before the hundreds of billions of foreign direct investment and hundreds of billions of intellectual property that transferred from the West to the East.

America exported its manufacturing know how for decades, and now it is taking it back as the trade is no longer as favorable. Seems rational to me. SE Asia came out a huge winner in the process, and now the time has come to stand up their tech and manufacturing in their own.

Much ado about nothing imho.

I won't opine on how to manage usage of of tech as the comments already handle that well.

One thing I'd like to respectfully point out to our community, which I personally think is going to snowball into a full blown health crisis, is children's posture while using tech. I live in NYC and everywhere I go I'm seeing kids and adults craning their necks and backs at 45-60 degree angles. My mother was a seamstress for 30+ years and the consequences are horrible. Keep an eye on it

As for my strategies to manage this, I nag frequently (and my kids know the consequences are losing access). For the few times I do give them screen time on the go, I force them to watch with the phone on the table and either leaning on sometime or in this little phone holder that forces them to sit upright to see the screen.

Here is a random link that quantifies the impact on weight on neck at different angles: https://healthmatters.nyp.org/how-to-prevent-tech-neck/

My two cents based on how we use Salesforce

1- being able to bcc or better yet have a gmail extension to log emails sent to prospects and clients is a foundational requirement for us. Be sure to have that asap. Outside of being a CRM, our SF is the knowledge base of all customer interaction.

2- Opportunities and funnel management are critical workflows for us. Being able to define rules on qualification and auto activate / expire a prospect is important.

3- documentation is important. I know there are armies of SF consultants I can tap into if needed. In the absence of that, a strong wiki will be important as you start offering customization

4- speed speed speed. My team much preferred SF classic over lightening because it was significantly faster

5- for us, mobile is overrated. Most work is done on the laptop or desktop. Mobile is more about reading details and freshening up on client ahead of the meeting

Lastly, I’ve dabbled with the idea of offering a light-weight CRM to our clients (we serve a niche industry that has onerous onboarding requirements and the vast majority of clients don’t use an off the shelf CRM). Once you polish this off, if you’re open to chatting about a white labeled solution feel free to connect.

Good luck.

Our society (and every parent I know) has established that kids are highly impressionable. That’s why so many laws are written to moderate advertising (eg not show a camel smoking a cigarette), moderate content (tv and movie ratings) etc. I can’t go a day without people telling me how manipulative social media is on the news for both kids and adult minds. We casually acknowledge entire elections have been manipulated by the content shown to people on television.

So what is it about video games that have absolutely zero negative impact on impressionable and unstable minds?

Speaking purely for myself, as a life longer gamer (I’m 37), I personally don’t believe video games have inclined me in any way towards violence. I do believe that the idea of handling assault weapons was normalized by video games (it was a non event for me to shoot them at a range when I eventually sought them out), and that trashing cities and committing vandalism became fun. Doesn’t seem like a stretch to me that boys being boys are going to be more inclined to do it, especially without some overarching moral construct to counter balance or (like church).

That’s what I got wrong. You outgrow a WeWork at about 8-10 people which is where customers are most stable. I assumed they could adapt but the economics aren’t there.

In full transparency I didn’t do much analysis. At $5 it was trading at 1-2x revenue growing at 20% in a horrible market with a great operator. The issue is too maturities and running out of cash.

Thank you for the note on the link, updated it.

Believe me… the thought has crossed my mind!

I’ve ridden this stock down almost all the way (came in at $5 then 2.50 then again at $0.50). I am a pretty bad investor in that my top criteria is to buy stocks that produce a good or service I love and then stick with them a long time.

As an operator WeWork adds so much value to us as we staff up all over the world. I love being able to go into any city and have a fun energetic and aesthetically beautiful environment. When I look at the WFH shift, I struggle to rationalize how companies wouldn’t rather utilize flex space as needed for group huddles than commit to long term leases. Their pricing is variable which is inflation resistant. Top line growing at 20% and they removed $2bn in run rate expenses. The list goes on…

Anyway I was wrong on literally every account. This was a huge (and expensive) lesson for me. Stocks always have room to go down no matter how low you came in at.

Socialize losses + Medicare, Medicaid, ERC, unemployment, education, subsidize food, housing, solar, recycling etc etc.

System is working out nicely actually.

So what do you believe is the solution that prevents hard drugs from running “unchecked” while not fostering a black market? “Education” about how bad drugs are for you?

Many moons ago there used to be an HN for finance that was a clone of HN but with a green theme. I believe it was called Mogul something. All the articles had some connection to finance and I never saw investment advice, just analysis. It abruptly stopped one day. I’d use a version of HN focused on finance (we’ve considered building one at our company).

Update: it was called newmogul.

It’s a losing proposition eventually even for the ones that don’t. They are competing against significantly more people with significantly greater resources and access. It’s like those hackers that held up the energy company a few years ago and woke up one day to find their anonymous crypto wallets empty. Was supposed to be impossible but that doesn’t account for America literally owning the internet back bone. Cause enough trouble and they’ll show up at your door. The only protection is state sponsorship (ie Russian and Chinese hackers on government payroll).

It absolutely is. A few weeks ago I decided to create what are now dozens of rules to manually filter out spam and it has been extremely effective for me (20+ a day we’re hitting my work inbox).

My best filters target the “opt out / unsubscribe” language people put in their footers. I iterate a few times a week as things sneak in. I’ll never get 100% but the results have been very positive.

Manager perspective: I think it should be explicit. When you use “unlimited” you invite fear in some (of overusing their PTO) and abuse in others. Ultimately I prefer employees feel 100% confident and safe about using PTO. We give a number we feel good about and insist employees take it. Not sure if it’s changed but we don’t roll over on grounds that we expect you to use it.

The data makes sense to me but not the interpretation. My 2.5yo son loves watching Lego assembly videos on Youtube during his TV time, which is of course tied to my account, which therefore means I contribute to his middle aged male statistic. Perhaps I am having a tough time empathizing but I find it hard to believe droves of men my age are watching Lego assembly videos in the background.

Michael Kramer, who reads many of his books on audible, is incredible. I enjoyed listening to several more than reading them because of him.

What seems an obviously right course of action to you is not to others and it comes down to value systems. Only time will tell the outcome. My colleagues wife’s company was acquired by a huge media company and she and dozens of her colleagues have spent the last 6 months wondering if they are going to have jobs. The stress is palpable every time I see her. That’s not more humane to me than what Musk did (let everyone know within weeks where they stand). It impacts her, it impacts my team lead which impacts me. It’s horrible.

I remember a few weeks ago Twitter wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on. That’s obviously not the case. Interesting how fast the narratives are moving.

Let’s pretend for a minute Musk wasnt liberal public enemy #1 and the machine wasnt fully activated to take him down (now that we have confirmation of what we already knew, that media companies collude to suppress or amplify coverage)… he is running Twitter without any noticeable impact to the operation of the services with 70% less staff. That’s astounding to me. All else equal, this business would have been significantly more profitable over night.

The fact of the matter is, companies will go where the users are. Once the noise dies down, why wouldn’t you continue spending money on Twitter if your competition is?

1.5 billions hogs are killed a year to feed the human race according to the Google, a huge percentage of which I’m sure ends up as waste (uneaten and unsold). This seems like a noble pursuit by comparison.

Society at large is comfortable with the wholesale slaughter of animals for our benefit.

Biology doesn’t.