lesdeuxmagots

The point of the conference is not the official conference itself, but the meetings that happen around the conference. This is not true of all conferences, but for the JPMHC, and many other major conferences, that is the entire point. It's just a way to get people all in one place at one time, so that there is an efficient gathering to do deals.

Funds pay thousands, often $10K+, per room at the nearby hotels, often spending hundreds of thousands to book over a dozen hotel rooms to use as makeshift conference rooms. The hotels often don't even allow people to sleep in the rooms, only to use them strictly as conference rooms.

All the real action happens in those hotel rooms, at private events, private receptions, etc.

Love the idea of the transparent shit umbrella.

Some people advocate keeping the team inside and telling them it's raining. But how far does that go? Are you keeping them in an underground bunker? Or is it a room with a window? A skyscraper with floor to ceiling windows surrounding them?

I'm of the mind that if it's possible, the team needs to be outside in the shit rain while protected by the shit umbrella. But they need to FEEL the weather, not just see it or vaguely know of it, but still protected enough to be able to get to where they need to go.

Of course, what if the shit storm is overwhelming and coming in sideways, or if it's flooding shit, so that even with protection, everyone is stuck in a quagmire? Well, obviously, don't actually let them go outside, but 1) the company has much bigger, likely existential problems it needs to deal with, and 2) the team REALLY needs to know.

Needless to say, this all applies more to decently high functioning organizations, but not to completely dysfunctional ones. When it's a nuclear winter outside, everyone is bought into the idea of staying in the bunker and just keeping calm and carrying on regardless of how bad it is outside. There's nowhere to go, you're there just to survive.

Did you somehow accidentally share a selfie?

But if you visit NASA space center, and have the means, definitely do the VIP tours.

The depth, the quality, the passion of the guides, are an order of magnitude better than the generic tours they offer.

The regular ones are often lead by young inexperienced hires, mostly reading from a script, and you go through extremely curated exhibits.

On the VIP tour, we had a 30 year veteran who was on first name basis with the last few directors. We did things that made you think “I can’t believe we’re allowed to do/touch/see that” over and over again.

It would seem that Sapporo did not do enough diligence when they bought Anchor. Anchor's facilities are far too small, their infrastructure and their team not setup to brew at that sort of scale. Stone is a much better fit for what they seem to be trying to do.

They started selling at scale 1 or 2 days after prohibition ended. This is logistically impossible if they were truly shut down during the entirety of prohibition.

If you plan on being a Walmart lifer, sure. But what about your next job if that isn’t true?

Better to be central to where the majority of companies and candidates are, where your ex-colleagues, parents of your children’s friends, and casual acquaintances (proverbial bowling league) all are part of a broader and accessible network for future job prospects.

It also keeps you culturally (professionally) more similar to your next job’s culture.

Of course MBBs and others have expertise. It's just that most of that expertise is not in the industry domain.

They have expertise in crafting and creating compelling arguments, in selling ideas. They have expertise in maintaining an industry-wide view and synthesizing general trends across the industry (or across industries). They have expertise in parachuting in as third-party and the politics that are associated with that.

These are VALUABLE skills. Imagine if everyone in your organization was an expert in crafting narratives, in putting forth concise arguments, in maintaining the larger context beyond their own area of practice.

The problem with strategy consultants is that they are not hired to be objectively valuable to an organization, an industry, society, etc. They are mercenaries who apply their skills to be valuable to specific people. And because they know how to be more compelling, even if they are not actually correct, it becomes deeply problematic over time, or at scale.

I have aphantasia and 100% visualize on decent sized doses.

For professional office workers, there are short term and long term benefits to all individuals (entry level, middle management, executives / younger, older) and to the company as a whole. There are also short term and long term detriments to all the same parties.

For individuals, the costs and benefits are easier to grasp, though the net benefit is likely higher than for companies. This makes it harder for companies to make a case as to why it's worth it, especially since the longer term costs and benefits for companies is incredibly difficult to prove in the short run, and without concrete evidence, it's very hard to convince people to give up the more tangible benefits they are seeing as individuals.

Then there's overall societal impact as well. Things like the economic impact on neighborhoods surrounding business districts, residential districts as people shift where they spend their time. Things like changes in civil engineering needs as commute and travel patterns change. But even more broadly, the impact of spouses spending more time together, parents spending more time at home with their children, home duties being more evenly taken care of across parents, etc.

In my mind, the level of complexity and decision making issues is akin to something like outsourcing manufacturing from the United States. There were short term and long term impacts on individuals, on companies, on industries, and on society as a whole that were known, that were debated. But how much import we placed on each, how much each factor was weighed in the moment, versus the broader impacts we are finally realizing and grappling with now, decades later, is just an absolute mess.

The train ride is less of an exploration, more a viewport into, a meditation on what is happening outside the window.

I've done the road trip - a slow meandering journey spanning tens of thousands of miles across the United States and Canada across many months. It's wonderful, but it's also fully engaged while being very hard on the body to drive so much. The engagement is obviously the point, but it's a particular way of travel.

I've also done the Zephyr in both directions, lakeshore limited, etc. on sleeper trains. It's very relaxing, but you also don't get to actually interact much with what is going on outside. But that's not such a bad thing at times. Sometimes it's exactly what you're looking for.

in such a niche market, you're better off creating competition among a few bidders, rather than putting off a significant % of the demand and relying on a person really liking the property to bid up the price.

Put another way, 4 people moderately interested in the property will probably yield a higher price than 2 people that are very interested in the property.

This is especially true in luxury real estate, where buyers go in looking to substantially change the property. They expect to bring in their own architects and designers. The staging is just a canvas.

So, to rephrase, watching the sports you’d like to legally is rather easy, the options being very obvious and straightforward.

You just believe the costs, either in money or in privacy concerns, are not worth it. Which is reasonable.

But to describe it as impossible does not seem accurate.

Yahoo still makes billions in revenue every year. And the vast majority is not from finance or sports.

Baffling to some HN readers perhaps, but Yahoo is still one of the biggest online destinations. It has a DAU count an order of magnitude larger than say Reddit, and it monetizes those users far more effectively.

$200 won’t even cover the cost of the electrician’s labor. And beyond just the cost of materials and labor to actually do the thing, consider the cost of the consultation on what is actually possible for a given location, the time and cost of permitting, the time involved in all the paperwork such as the drafting and filing of the plans, etc. This isn’t and informal process like some exterior facing outlet you decide to add to your home as a weekend project after looking up a YouTube video and doing a Home Depot run.

Then there’s all the aggregate costs associated with switching. Maintenance of an EV requires different skills and different tooling. Establishing new or amending existing maintenance contracts, training new mechanics or retraining old ones, rewriting guidelines, purchasing new tools and equipment, etc. Many hundreds of thousands of dollars of costs per region.

And you’re going to do that across far-flung areas of the US, many which have a current EV install base near or at zero?

They have to work to transition this across tens of thousands of locations, while not jeopardizing the delivery of hundreds of millions of pieces of mail a day. And you’re going to suggest that they NOT take a slow phased approach? To transition one of the largest fleets of vehicles in the world?

Please. Consider for a moment you may be wrong. That things are not as simple as you think. That when every single person is trying to explain why, you shouldn’t automatically attempt to find ways to dismiss or invalidate what they have to say.

Sales teams do EXACTLY that. Go into salesforce and you’ll see the estimates.

Potential deal with client Foo will be for $X, to be signed on Y day, with Z% chance of closing.

On an individual level, it may be more precise than it is accurate, but it’s a fairly standard and important part of sales operations. And yes, the estimate dates are often just ways to express orders of magnitude (put next Friday as estimate dates not because it’ll definitely close next Friday, but bc it’ll probably take about 2 weeks). The % chance of closing are typically pre determined by what stage of the deal you’re in.

However, when applied across dozens, hundreds, thousands of potential deals, it allows the organization to understand their sales pipeline and sales velocity fairly accurately.

Of course the numbers are gamed a bit. And some sales people are much worse at estimating than others, or less consistent about keeping the numbers up to date. But the benefit of these practices are massive.

Yea, I do wonder if this will shut the door on any future high growth independent startups in the space to be created locally.

DoorDash started their business doing exactly this in Palo Alto, and likely wouldn’t have been able to raise the funds or grow at the pace they did without this strategy.

On one hand, you could say good, these sorts of businesses are exploitative. But I’m not sure that the industry is a net negative as a whole, and this law could shut the door on a more sustainable model.

In Ear Monitors

Not quite. The relatively similar all cause does not imply that it would be the same people dying. There could instead people different people dying.

For example, there are much less people dying by automobile accidents (a leading cause of death for young people). In 2020, they could be replaced by very different types of death (COVID, Suicide, etc.)

That said, it certainly COULD be relatively similar people. You’d likely see relatively similar individuals dying of pneumonia as dying from COVID.

An institution can both grow revenues and increase efficiency at the same time.

The ideal solution to being more efficient is also usually not by cutting budgets.

Fixing policy issues especially doesn’t come from changing budgets.

Their mandate requires a stable financial system with solvent institutions and sufficient liquidity moving through the system.

By definition, solvency and liquidity at the country level depend on major asset classes maintaining some amount of value.

That baseline changes based on regulations of what can or cannot be used as collateral for different measures, what ratios institutions have to maintain, etc, but there is a floor of some sort at which point the financial system implodes and the economy collapses.

Given their powers and mandate, preventing economic collapse is of the utmost importance.

A flat 10% cut rather than a dynamic COL adjustment?

Some people could definitely make that work. A move to a no income tax state with low COL could come out very ahead. Of course, the career implications could be more negative than it’s worth, but there’s a reason why back office / administrative / operations staff tend to be easier to move to a different state relative to technical talent, which is more densely concentrated in fewer regions.

IC -> manager -> director -> vp

4ish years to promote up, especially the first two level levels. Velocity isn't all that crazy.

Well... The guy knows all about securitizing and trading energy.

That said, do you really want to be buying assets from a guy who's claim to fame is how well he is able to hide the risk in esoteric or complex structured products?

They're staying near the domain area, which seems an incredibly reasonable. Relatively accessible via multiple freeways from population centers and the airport, close to many other tech campuses. Larger tech campuses optimize for those sorts of factors far more than where people want to hang out.

One factor is that they're just following the trends of broader society - influencer mentality has impacted every consumer facing industry, and makes it easier for more people to be involved in building up and monetizing a public persona.

About the privatization of specops - that would seem to follow the general trend of mercenary forces. As private military contracting has picked up on the last few decades, it's natural that special operations gets roped into that.

Jeff Skilling could probably give some real fantastic advice on business and finance, particularly structured products, operating, etc. That's not to say you'd want to FOLLOW the advice, but it would likely increase your knowledge or insight into something.

His failure was in ethics. THAT might be something you'd not want to look towards him for.

It's very useful to separate the two.

In this instance, an expert's read on a situation is interesting and informative. You just might not want to take his policy recommendation.

Hm. Allocating credit for achievements is a tricky thing.

Management is necessary to allocate resources (including labor) efficiently at scale, but it comes with overhead.

As such, at smaller companies, startups, small businesses, the overhead of management can be outsized, the pain felt acutely when compared relatively to the actual output of ICs and such.

At larger companies, the massive cadre of management which is necessary to keep the machine running is also very obvious, as the overhead of a large organization is very large, even if the management itself is excellent and highly efficient.

As such... How does one allocate credit? An analogy would be like financing or investment. Necessary. A filtering mechanism. Sometimes helpful in an advisory mechanism. But are they the ones creating output? No. But do they deserve some credit? If something cannot be done without it, then they must deserve SOME credit, it's just a question of how much.

That positive feedback loop is one of the key things to watch out for.

Work tends to have many mechanisms which directly links what you put in with positive feedback in a relatively short amount of time, which leads people to optimize for that short term maxima. Putting in more effort, more hours, etc for a positive outcome on a project, a promotion, etc is an easy decision to make, can be almost addicting for many high performers.

However, the neglect that one does to long-term feedback cycles, like not spending enough time with your spouse, children, friends, family, personal hobbies, only manifest negatively in the long run. The investments on the positive side also play out mostly in the long run as well, so the direct feedback cycle isn't quite there.

Using work to get those satisfying consistent wins can have its costs if you aren't deliberate about balancing against investments towards the long term maxima.

I wish you and the team the best of luck. Tumblrs first downfall was partly because the autonomy it was given to a team that had no idea how to grow the business. Karp had zero idea how to grow the product or the revenues past the initial vision. D'onofrio is an operator, likely not the best fit for leading a vision of what a new Tumblr with a new mandate should be.