mchannon

Had a similar situation a couple decades ago that blew up in my face. Here are the countermeasures I should have insisted upon:

1. No deal is too good to walk away from. As soon as I smelled something, I should've said, "Thanks but no thanks."

2. You run a straight Delaware C corporation, not an LLC. If there's preferred stock the investor gets none of it. Use a boilerplate vesting schedule that lets you cut the investor loose if they turn toxic.

3. You retain access to the corporate checkbook. If investor balks, run away from the deal screaming.

4. If your investor has a change of heart (or health event, or divorce, or drug problem) in the next 9 months, it will be harder to raise money without his full buy-in than without his involvement at all. "Why isn't so-and-so putting in any of his money for this next round?"

There's another approach you should consider. I call it a "Truman Show acquisition".

Get with the good 95% of your company and start a new entity. Don't tell your cofounder about it.

New entity makes a deal with your current one to exclusively license the technology and branding, and take possession of the assets. Make the deal as one-sided as you can without your toxic CTO catching wind (and without breaking the law or giving grounds for a lawsuit in the event they do catch wind).

All new R&D goes on at the new entity. All existing staff gradually curtail the hours they spend at the old entity and "resign" here and there, all while working for the acquihiring new entity. Old entity never hires replacements. CTO continues frittering away, you can't afford to pay him, but ensure that his equity in the old firm is acknowledged and protected. At the end of some period (e.g. 3 years), the license agreement ends, everyone but CTO makes a clean break and officially works for the new firm. The old shell of a company gets folded up due to having no money.

Truman Show acquisition.

Email me and I’ll send a photo.

Never been much of a blogger. This was from a bygone era, before I (or anyone I knew) had a smartphone.

I once bought a far larger supercomputer. It was 1/8 (roughly) of ASCI Blue Mountain. 72 racks. Commissioned in 1998 as #1 or #2 on the TOP500, officially decommissioned in 2004, purchased my 1/8 for $7k in ~2005.

Moving 72 racks was NOT easy. After paying substantial storage fees, I rented a 1500sf warehouse after selling off a few of them and they filled it up. Took a while to get 220V/30A service in there to run just one of them for testing purposes. Installing IRIX was 10x worse than any other OS. Imagine 8 CD's and you had to put them each in 2x during the process. Luckily somebody listed a set on eBay. SGI was either already defunct or just very unfriendly to second hand owners like myself.

The racks ran SGI Origin 2000s with CRAYlink interlinks. Sold 'em off 1-8 at a time, mainly to render farms. Toy Story had been made on similar hardware. The original NFL broadcasts with that magic yellow first down line were synthesized with similar hardware. One customer did the opening credits for a movie with one of my units.

I remember still having half of them around when Bitcoin first came out. It never occurred to me to try to mine with them, though I suspect if I'd been able to provide sufficient electrical service for the remainder, Satoshi and I would've been neck-and-neck for number of bitcoins in our respective wallets.

The whole exercise was probably worthwhile. I learned a lot, even if it does feel like seven lifetimes ago.

Let's suggest you're using pineapple plants. They are nowhere near the best choice if CO2 mitigation is your goal.

One human produces 51.4g CO2 per day (note: this number is from the leading source on Google, which is on the low end of a wide range of reported numbers).

100cm2 of leaf area consumes roughly 1g CO2 per day.

So you'd need roughly 5,000 cm2 of pineapple leaf area, or 0.5 m2, or (roughly) 5 square feet of leaf area. Easily doable.

You'd want to triple that to get the numbers noticeably below ambient. Also doable.

During my travels I've measured large buildings that have lots of indoor plants. They feature the lowest CO2 ppm numbers I've ever recorded, anywhere, around 200ppm.

Go low-tech.

Indoor plants can bring your indoor CO2 levels way lower than ambient (which I submit is way healthier than ambient).

Devote 10% of your interior planview space to indoor plants. This used to be commonplace in the 20th century and for some reason just lost popularity.

You forgot about Donkey Kong (and Junior, and 3, and Mario Bros.)

Punch-Out!!

But most noteworthy is Galaga: Ran on 3, count 'em, 3, Z80's.

If it were me, I'd lock down what relationships and tech I could, and let it fail.

Then reboot with a new entity featuring similar business model, keeping the talent and customers and leaving the chaff (including CEO) from the old firm to fend for themselves.

Even investing your own money in this fatally flawed business is throwing good money after bad. That's a much tougher ask for investors than a reboot.

As you let company A fail, use your spare time to get company B lined up and ready to launch so it's turnkey.

Spincasting plastics, PCB fab, PCBA fab, printing manuals and packaging.

Desperately need that kind of help. Contact info?

Join a local makerspace and learn tech like machining, PCB's, printing (3D, vinyl, etc.) through classes they offer. Learning by doing (and especially making mistakes) has no real substitute.

Alternatively, you could get yourself a "classical" engineering degree in Mechanical, Materials, or Electrical. Wouldn't expect it take you less than 3 years full time even if you're fresh out of school with a B.S. in C.S., but mine's been valuable.

Message me if you want to help me build out my factory. Are you in the US?

a-Si has been at or beyond this level of efficiency since the 90's and also does not require a Cz or FZ process.

It's encouraging to see progress but where perovskite thin films show potential is in an integrated mechanical stack application with silicon, where they can supplement each other's barely-double-digit efficiencies focusing on different parts of the spectrum to combine to reach something on par with traditional crystalline silicon, but thinner and with lower production costs.

Seeing thin film beat crystalline silicon is like seeing nuclear fusion become cost-effective. It's perpetually 10 years away, and has been since the 70's.

My favorite way to make CO out of CO2 is thermal cracking, which is quite straightforward:

2 CO2 -(700°C)-> 2 CO + O2

I’ve theorized in my book _Fat Gas_ that vasopressin levels are tied to elevated indoor CO2 levels.

Would not be at all surprised if these novel social conditions stem from not going outside enough and from poorly ventilated buildings (especially gyms and conference rooms) and transport (planes trains and automobiles each routinely exceed 1000 ppm from everybody’s lungs).

Not all of them, no.

In exchange for giving up a few minor bells and whistles I gain what I’m looking for.

A $9 USB to WiFi dongle addresses my networking needs.

90% of a mammal’s energy output is in the form of climate control, not movement.

The variable not factored in is the average ambient temperature. Americans of yesteryear shivered in winter months and sweltered in summer months.

Today, that work has been outsourced to heat pumps, gas furnaces, and refrigerated air systems.

I discovered regular workouts removed my extreme discomfort with it being cold inside. I may not enjoy it being 55 degrees, but it’s not painful like it used to be. I suspect most Americans would find the same.

When I was a new father, another new father handed me this book: https://amzn.to/49odJYo (disclaimer: it's a paid affiliate link)

I found it very useful. I then gave this book to yet another new father.

It's $10, probably less if you get a used copy. This book is worth 100 of these comments, and hopefully you find it as useful as I did, and can then pass it on to another new father.

No, they don't.

When the doctor's office can't get a hold of you, now you're looking at 6 months longer until you get to see the specialist you've been waiting for.

When probation can't get a hold of you, now you're looking at an unannounced visit, violation, and/or arrest warrant. This happened DAILY when ankle monitors suddenly malfunctioned and communicated that they'd been cut off or that I was violating home confinement by leaving unannounced.

Being forced to interact with city government, state benefits, hospital systems, courts, police, and especially probation officers, all of whom are known to block or obfuscate their number even though missing their call could cause you no end of trouble, would help disabuse you of your smug solipsism.

It's not either/or.

I have numerous issues with both. Would be happy if more Americans had issues with either.

Tried andrew@kemendo.com but it got bounced.

Maybe you could ping me at my email address?

As the former wearer of such an appliance (also married to another former wearer of a different such appliance) I can confirm this is no longer the case.

My public defenders appealed two limited issues, one evidentiary and one to do with the government using a drug forfeiture law where no drugs were involved or alleged. There were at least sixteen better grounds (most involving their own ineffective assistance).

The 10th circuit hearing was one of the first audio recorded and made publicly available on the website and indicate just how moronic the panel was. They denied the appeal in part and remanded the part of about the drug forfeiture back because they couldn't make sense of it. I fired my counsel and got assigned another mercenary attorney to reargue the forfeiture bit two years later. Supreme court flushed the case, as they do most.

In the interim while at large I filed a habeas action (2255) within the scope of the court's own rules and they deliberately disregarded their own rules in order to deny it unless it was limited to 1/10 of its original length. Appealing that matter was fruitless, so rather than being left without options I filed an abridged version.

On the day of self-surrender, I traveled to Vermont to file a habeas action (2241) in custody of the D.Vt. within the second circuit, which had a reputation for being less corrupt (not less enough, unfortunately).

2241 got denied because by the time the judge got reassigned I had been moved into the ambit of the first circuit and thus they tossed the case (I was moved back into the second circuit shortly thereafter).

2255 got denied by the trial judge, of course. Quite a few years later the 10th circuit flushed it by ignoring half of it and deliberately misstating facts and misinterpreting facts and pointing to procedural incantations present within my original briefing but not within the 1/10 length I was illegally limited to.

Oh yes, that mercenary attorney I fired later too, but not before I went to watch her argue. She argued well, but pearls before swine. Later that day, on the Southwest flight home, I sat next to the 10th circuit judge on both cases (random coincidence) and asked him if he'd ever met someone whose life he'd ruined with one of his rulings, and now he had. As soon as we landed this 70-something old man ran off the plane faster than anyone I've ever seen, and went to tattle to the secret service to get me in trouble (though I did not threaten or attack him), but afterward, wouldn't recuse himself from the case, for which his vote was the deciding vote, 2-1 against me. The rest of the circuit gave him a pass for his ex parte conversation with me.

The amount of daylight between circuit court judges and gangsters (and I've come to know both) is far smaller than most Americans could possibly comprehend.

There are always more appeals I could file. Until they get an attitude adjustment from mounting public or political pressure on the judiciary, it's wasted effort for now. Americans are quick to outrage but easy to distract and sedate.

This is not a facetious response.

I honestly don't know. The jury foreman didn't know either, so he asked the judge to clarify, which she didn't. (I have copies of the notes they exchanged).

The jury didn't want to come back the following Monday, so they voted guilty on all counts, even though they didn't know what the counts were.

The judge later declared that I had pled guilty, then revised her order that I was found guilty by jury of X on a series of dates she pulled out of thin air. Then in her next order it was not X but rather Y. I don't think it's a stretch to say she didn't know either. One explanation is that the prosecutor kept changing her mind as to what the charges were, in three separate overlapping indictments, and played a trick where she'd supersede an indictment but argue the charges from the illegal one she superseded.

This case stinks to high heaven. Just the way America likes it.

And check out dirtyprosecutor.org for proof she forged the federal magistrate judge's signatures on the search warrant.

Finding a reporter interested in this matter is 100x harder than finding someone to help you open the cage to buy laundry detergent at Walmart. First they hide, then they literally run away screaming from me rather than do their job.

In the federal system, inmates are offered “GCT”, Good Conduct Time, where they get released from 15% of the sticker price time of their bid.

It’s subject to revocation. That makes for a powerful carrot. Refusal to work is one of the prohibited acts an inmate can do (called a “shot”) to get it taken away.

I’ll dispense with the 18 cents vs. 0.18 cents lecture.

Work stoppages can and have occurred, but the CO’s had sufficient expertise, staffing, and paid overtime to prevent anything newsworthy from happening. Generally unfair treatment or conditions were the cause of stoppages, none of which occurred during my tenure.

Collective punishments for evidence of smuggled contraband (which was ubiquitous) were more common.

Numerous jails I did time in transit (appx. 7 over 100 days) had worse conditions than the FPC I did the majority of my time in.

The problem with Shawshank as applied to the modern day is that the newsman Andy sent the warden’s financials to no longer exists to receive it. There is no independent investigative media in the U.S. anymore and the likely outcome of the movie, set today, would have been the warden continuing to commit his atrocities, unencumbered by public scrutiny.

I think a screenplay and movie will be the vehicle I tell this story with. Print isn’t exactly dead but movies are a more effective vehicle for change in this day and age.

I got “paid” $0.18/hr. in a federal complex in Colorado to make bologna sandwiches and other slop for other inmates on lockdown.

They took out over $1/hr. (the difference expropriated from remittances I received from family) to put toward “restitution”.

Slaves break even. This was closer to being held for ransom.

I feel a deep sense of shame to reside in a country where the majority of the populace is fine with it. Some with a shit-eating grin.

Totally not my experience. At most you get a phone number to call, which is a recording that won't even take a message.

Shopify would be out of business from chargebacks if it catered to consumers instead of businesses. They've become worse about exploiting businesses than Groupon, and that's saying something.

Lots. What kind of project are you looking to fund, what sort of return are you looking for?

Not that these are prevalent in here, but here are a few reasons:

1. A company already has a candidate in mind for the role, and they want "plausible deniability" that they didn't try to fill the role through a competitive process. This is especially true with H1B-focused roles, where they have to justify hiring non-U.S. workers. Your resume serves that purpose.

2. They have an image to present. Shareholders have more valuable stock when the company appears to be doing well (dozens of unfilled positions) vs. not hiring at a given point in time. HN would be way less effective for this purpose than a company's own corporate website, but it's still part of the company image.

3. Workers are flaky as hell, and your rock star dev you snagged at 2x market rate just got an offer for 4x at a FAANG, and now you're left flat-footed.. OR.. you list their position as open, collect resumes, and as soon as they send you their two weeks you have a deep bench of eager recruits to interview. An unfortunate side effect is that you the applicant are highly unlikely to luck into the heir apparent role.