quartesixte

Discords and Group Chats are slowly making their way back into being the default social media for friend groups and acquaintances. New apps like Partiful have been trying to move the last bastion of Facebook (events invites) out and in my own social circles it has been a resounding success and has completely killed off FB as a social media.

The kids use it much more asynchronously too. Especially Discord, because leaving notifications on will overwhelm your phone.

Yeah the Revolution gets hyped a lot but if you take a step back it was “anddd they taxed us too much time to take up arms.” Which to the colonies was tantamount to tyranny but the world hadn’t yet seen tyranny the way it would see it post Industrial Revolution.

Unfortunately, humans are tribal creatures and having certain tribe markers still makes your life a helluva lot easier.

I went to a T20 school in the USA with name brand recognition. I often hang out with close friends who did not. Let me tell you: school discrimination is real. People (including those who gatekeep the first 5 years of your career) treat me differently than my friends once they find out where I'm from. All of a sudden I'm much more interesting. I get told I'm smarter.

Hell, job interviewers softball my questions. My first big-boy job interview's final round went something like this.

Hiring Manager: "So, [T20 School] huh? You had a good time there?"

Me: "Yup, I say it was a great experience."

HM: "That's awesome. I love the campus so beautiful. My kid plays in their afterschool soccer program. You like soccer?"

Me: "Oh yeah I like following Premier League"

HM: "Awesome. How 'bout them Aresnal's right? Anyways, look you seem like a smart kid. You'll probably get the job -- we'll call you next week with details."

And I got the job.

(My second job's phone screen literally started off with "Oh my husband went to [T20 School]. He was two years ahead of you ever run into him? No? That's fine it's a big school. Anyways!)

And I pale in comparison to the kids who went to the Ivies.

Unfortunate. But there's a reason why many dedicate tens of thousands of hours of their youth to beat the competition and break-in.

Yeah that last bit is important. Businesses are operated by a certain class of people. How you speak, act, make connections, socialize -- if you want to work white-collar, professional jobs (or Grey-Collar ones managing blue-collar ones), you need to have all the appropriate markers and cues. College + the road to college is how those get instilled in you. That piece of paper indicates you have a high probability of correctly displaying all the right traits. Further resume items solidify that.

And yes, for certain technical fields, you will need 4 years of rigorous education in the basics of that field to be basically competent.

For other fields, networks + connections + opportunities is what you will glean (on top of the socialization). And the location matters! I'm sorry, but if you're doing marketing/communication at a state school in Nebraska, you will have a much harder time than the kid going to USC/UCLA/LMU or NYU/Columbia on the same degree. Because those kids will be quickly snapped up for jobs at marketing firms that make enough money to pay them enough money to make the degree worth it.

This. This guy operations and processes. This was beautiful and the corporate bureaucrat in me salutes you.

>See the previous point. No one would use Etsy if they had to make a whole video and go through an automated process for an item that might sell once per year.

I am not entirely sure of this claim. My own experience with artisnal craftspersons is that they will tolerate higher levels of inefficiencies precisely because they are not operating at scale, and being artisnal makes their cost of revenue really really wonky.

>Because that costs money and most Etsy sellers sell very few things. We're not talking thousands or hundreds or even dozens per months. We're talking single digits per month. Per store. Not per item. With 7 million stores.

I agree with this though, and to direct this at the parent post, that is a LOT of operational overhead. Like, a mindboggling amount you will require Amazon's levels of profit and scale just to properly pull this off. Do not underestimate the sheer amount of labor it takes just to run even fairly simple operations that deal in the lot counts in the low hundreds. Doing this for tens of thousands of potential transactions a day across millions of sellers is asking for trouble. This is why Etsy has sellers outsource this to UPS, FedEX, and the Postal Systems.

True, but I think when creating marketplaces, you want a little bit more friction on the sell side. Sellers undertake risk + labor to bring products to market. In exchange, they are rewarded via profit. Buyers take no risk + labor in exchange for paying that profit. The market exists to match sellers and buyers and provide a forum for price discovery.

Make it too easy to sell but not have equal reduction in price penalty is how you get Etsy's current problem. Removing the dropshipped items will (hopefully) remove race-to-bottom conditions that in turn allow for small time creators to charge higher prices + profits and buyers to regain confidence that they are getting more perceived value despite the non-commodity prices. But so long as the dropshippers exist, that balance gets destroyed.

Sometimes they have nice designs or pretty pictures.

Circling an important date takes very little effort.

No opportunity for distractions.

That whole "flip through the months to think through future schedules" is actually a pretty good UX.

>Additionally on the education front, admissions to the state's flagship schools is guaranteed for students in the top 10% of their high school.

This is also technically true for the University of California. Top 9% of your local school = get into the UC.

The rub (and a pretty big one) is that the UC considers all of it's campuses as one, giant, single University. Thus you are guaranteed a position at a UC, but not a position at your CHOICE of UC. Practically, this means that you will be assigned to UC Merced. Top tier UCs (Berkeley, LA, San Diego) are pretty much out of reach because the competition and prestige means there will be no open space. And, frankly speaking, UC Merced isn't looked upon too favorably by the most desirable employers...

How does Texas get around this? Are all their campuses equally strong in reputation and rigor? Did they instead actually open up spaces for 10% of top in-state high school students at even the flagship campuses?

Despite the great number of views that the enormously long tail of YouTube can garner, the general public still gravitates towards more general content.

THR is reporting on the general phenomena most of the general public will see. While also catering to their target demographic: the movers and shakers of the celebrity industry in Hollywood. It is a trade publication afterall, technically speaking.

MrBeast is a fascinating case because he has almost become too big. There is a podcast of him where he says a lot of brand deals do not come close to his minimum requirements now, even AAA blue-chip deals.

YouTube could maybe be losing money on him? I don’t follow the stats too closely to make a more informed conjecture though. My realm of YouTube is far more niche.

Yeah people pine for the old EU canon (Legends, as it's now called?) but the content that placed itself way after RoTJ got really bizarre. Not happy with the Sequel Trilogy's handling of the universe either, but I don't know if movie-goers would have been able to stomach something like the whole Mara Jade plot or Yuzahn Vong War.

>how close it ended up getting to the larger plot of the last couple Frank Herbert Dune books.

My understanding is that Sci-Fi writing for established franchises during the 80s - 90s was kind of a small circle of people. The influence would have been unavoidable. And they also often wrote for multiple franchises too.

3750 for committing serious crimes seems so low, one can only imagine the desperation or lack of value understanding involved with participants.

Or coercion.

My initial reaction was the opposite — “wow they are kind of late to the hydraulic press channel hype. That’s odd.”

For a company that has always prided itself on having strong marketing chops, this felt out of character. And perhaps a sign of the general change in culture and standards at Apple.

Yeah an unpopular and maybe socially inconvenient thing to say at parties, but the more I manage operational teams, the more I find this true. Bureaucracy stoops down to the lowest common denominator of the group. Smart people capable of self-motivating and self-organizing don’t need a lot of bureaucratic structure if given enough incentive and freedom.

Being promised millions is a lot of incentive.

You are assuming these kids have parents (or other trustworthy, responsible adults) to go home to. Which, in large areas of the USA, they do not.

I had a senior engineer chastise me once for NOT using the lookup tables.

"How do you know your memory was infallible at that moment? Would you stake other people's lives on that memory?"

So what you did on that phone interview was probably the biggest green-flag they'd seen all day.

I am going to go out on a wild limb here, and conjecture that one of the US's biggest weakness is how they handle teachers.

1. Above average talent in any subject field do not join the talent pool for teachers in the USA. Industry pays better and has better working conditions (both real and perceived). This is going to be a major cultural hurdle but the USA needs to break away from the idea that teaching is lesser work. This will create more political will to boost teacher funding.

2. Free Market Economics. You heard me. Teachers in the USA have the unique "opportunity" of having to find and interview for positions. Two problems: First, you end up with talent pooling unevenly. Next, you have teachers stagnating at one school for decades. Solution: central deployment. Teachers are hired by districts, and then the district rotates teachers through all schools in the district over the course of their career. Seniority grants some preference ranking, and longer rotation periods.

This also counters a third problem: Teachers finding themselves out of a job, or facing job prospects so dire that they just leave the field altogether. There is a level of security, and those who wish to proceed to administration are given opportunities towards the ends of their careers.

3. Administration as a separate career track. Administrative bloat is becoming a real problem, and both the higher pay associated + the opportunity to laterally move into the track via "further education" is a root cause. This makes them a separate class with competing interests, and incentives will only lead to more bloat as well as siphon away talented teachers who get burned out by teaching (mostly due to the abysmal pay). My time in Japan gave me perspective on a perhaps better way:

   a) School based administration (principals and vice principals) is a role only obtainable at the end of your career, on a fixed timeline. If you decided to put yourself on that track, you will most likely be in the last 6 years of your career, and your last 3 years as principal will end in retirement. This both prevents admin bloat and class distinction, while allowing skilled, senior teachers to provide guidance and pass along wisdom.\
 
   b) School District administration -- that is all the bureaucratic management of schools -- is a completely separate career track of professional, general bureaucrats who are assigned to school administration as part of a career rotation inside their career at government. 

Teachers teach, and become experts at teaching. In the end, they are rewarded by becoming Principal Teachers. Bureaucrats manage, and in the end are rewarded by becoming ... senior bureaucrats somewhere inside the halls of Government, by being a good administrator during your rotation.

And thus begins a virtuous, positive feedback loop of good teachers rotating around a school district reinforcing good teaching, and then ultimately being rewarded by becoming the ultimate teacher. At the same time, administrative entrenchment is avoided because administration is an assigned, rotating task.

The lifetime requirements for a lot of components even with crewed capsules and human-rated launch vehicles is an order of magnitude lower than aircraft.

“An airliner has to survive 13 hours in the air. A rocket only has to survive 13 minutes.”

I will say, some of the techniques that live in the brains of machinists/welders/technicians is borderline alchemy, and sometimes highly specific to the worker themselves.

Can’t really scale that. And good luck doing corporate espionage outside of physically kidnapping them.

SpaceX’s key insight was that the hardest part about building rockets was components manufacturing and attacked that problem aggressively, bringing in as much in-house as possible vs. outsourcing to a nationwide supply chain.

And there is no real secret to a lot of their manufacturing methods either. They just attacked hard problems aggressively with really smart people and clear leadership.

The refurbishment did present a problem for SpaceX, iirc.

It’s just that Elon seems to have a knack for managing Manufacturing Engineers and got Merlin production and refurb down to not just science, but magic.

The contents of these particular emails is actually not very sensitive, and the courts do allow for redactions of more sensitive things (e.g. the actual numbers involved).

Things that should not be discussed in writing happen in person. Meeting rooms, offices, hallways, golf courses.

The emails are written knowing it might be public. And at the C suite, emails are to be very intentional.

To add to this: that "tell/sell/give to a foreigner" portion applies universally anywhere, and (the way I was taught), it can happen by proxy/passively.

Example: You put up on a whiteboard in a conference room an engineering drawing of a Air-to-Air missile's internals. When you leave the room, you forget the drawing on the board.

Later that day, somehow, a foreign visitor is walking around the office and peeks inside, and sees the whiteboard.

Congratulations, you just committed an ITAR violation.(Why? The apparent logic behind this rule is that spy agencies regularly employ people with photographic memories)

Another example: You take your phone that has your work email/chat on vacation to a foreign country. On arrival, your phone gets confiscated for "inspection" and then is handed back hours later. Bam. ITAR violation.

A nice side effect of this, by the way, is that you just leave all work stuff behind when you go on vacation. No pesky work-calls while chilling on the beaches of Portugal. Don't want to go breaking the law now, would we?

Yup ITAR/EAR follows the specific item/technology. You can get in major trouble even if you never interacted with a US counterpart at any point in the supply chain in this way.

It might seem draconic, but it's to plug a very easy loophole that can be exploited, and people actually do try to exploit when they don't understand exactly to what the regulations apply to.

We need landlords to be people, period. Local people, who gained the property through other business means and have decided to make a little bit of extra profit while providing a necessary service to the community. Ideally, they would live in one of the units with the tenants.

My landlord lives in the “best” unit of the apartment. It makes the experience so much better, and a kind of mini-community develops.

Faceless corps becoming landlords and using professional management companies is part of the problem.

Oh and as an additional comment: Propulsion Engineers are a niche, specialized branch of mechanical engineers. They are the ones who usually design engines.

The writer probably was referring to the fact that he was just a regular mechanical engineer and not a Propulsion Engineer.

I can also have:

Just the right amount of cats Just the right amount of internet points Just the right amount of chutzpah

Seems like from the blogpost that the writer and the founder were part of the same cohort at SpaceX. I would hazard a guess that they became friends, and had planned to do this together, and he joined ("hired") as soon as feasible for him (or the founder gained enough traction to pull him away from SpaceX).

The rocket equation would like to have a word with you. The wall thicknesses required to create rockets with enough thrust to get to orbit on pressure-fed would render the rocket physically impossible.

There is also a lot of control that goes into flying a rocket, and pressure-fed rockets are kind of hard to control.