roymurdock

Mid 2012 MBP with swapped out internals...8 years later and still the best computer I've ever owned

Agree with all you've written, just wanted to call out how Pollan painted the tension between Hubbard and Leary specifically. I'll check out the book Acid Dreams and I just ordered Electric Kool Aid Test to get a better understanding of the merry prankster scene.

I believe some of the 60's and 70's youth found sustainable ways to live outside the mainstream, but many of the communes/alternative living situations were volatile and corrupt. Take for example the Rajneesh community out in Oregon [1]...so much energy and potential channeled into a corrupt and ultimately destructive/pointless enterprise. The corporate way is the safe way in America, and I think many people were looking for safety in a confusing time when many alternatives looked bleak.

That said, this is just conjecture, I was born in the 90s so I have no first hand experience.

[1] great documentary on the Rajneesh: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_Wild_Country

Hubbard was a true pioneer, known as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. He would go around just giving it away to people, trying to get them to open their minds and improve their lives. He was also a trickster in his youth and a true man of adventure - he sold the IP for a new type of battery he built as a teenager (which was never used), and was involved in gun/liquor running during the prohibition.

Leary was clearly on some kind of power trip and was much more selfish/egotistical with his research into acid and its potential.

Hubbard disliked Leary because Hubbard viewed acid as a way to dissolve the ego, a selfless endeavor of healing that he wanted to spread to his friends and influential individuals in the US.

Leary jeopardized this amazing potential medicine with his attention-seeking, selfish, and flamboyant behavior, which was definitely a major factor in it getting outlawed

This is what I gleaned from "How to Change Your Mind" by Pollan, at least.

It will be interesting how Boeing/Airbus/traditional carriers react when China fully enters the market with Comac-built/branded planes. Commercial flights of its first plane, the C919 are slated for 2021. The whole 737 MAX fiasco really came at a bad time for the US aerospace industry, and if the other comments about Airbus being just as bad culture-wise are true (profits/jobs over serious engineering), then China could really be set up to take a lot of commercial aircraft market share over the coming decades.

This is the ultimate problem with how we've structured public corporations/LLCs in the US. When markets are working correctly in an environment of low innovation, companies themselves becomes the product, and the company's product itself just become a cashflow on a balance sheet. Grow the company (and its userbase) to a point where it can be harvested (go public) and then processed while you get paid out.

Nothing else in the environment matters if it's not on the balance sheet (most notably pollution, social disruption, and general human suffering). Yvon Chouinard has a great perspective on this in his book "Let My People Go Surfing" where he meditates on the paradox of running a private business that fights itself by automatically giving away portions of its revenue to charity rather than paying out shareholders/reinvesting in growth. What do you do when you see every sale your company makes as a failure in the fight against consumption/towards sustainability?

Bait and switch. Author starts with one sentence on safety critical systems then transitions entirely to discussing challenges with insecure, non safety-critical software such as mobile phone OSs, email services, and web browsers for important people (e.g. politicians and policy makers). Yes safety and security are intertwined, no they're not the same and it's just confusing the matter to talk about functional safety-criticality in the context of secure communications. People who need secure communication channels often do their research or have teams to recommend or build systems for them, I don't think it's necessary for Google Chrome to tell the general public what tradeoffs they are making between usability and security (nice to have somewhere in the documentation? sure. but not necessary).

The FAA/NASA have guidelines for getting space craft "human rated":

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/what-are-the-safety-regulatio...

The software design aspects of these rules have probably evolved in conjunction with DO-178, the industry standard for designing safe computing systems for avionics.

We are so, so far away from being able to leave earth and terraform/colonize other planets. A better argument is that we might find new technology or make new observations that help raise the standard of living on earth through designing to the requirements of space survival and exploration. But it's hard to translate potential ROI into spending when there are much more pressing problems here on earth.

We needed to beat the russians to the moon, it was part of the cold war effort, as much as I agree with these ideals they need to be tempered in reality and politics. We have no comparable political need for space exploration today.

Wetware/biohacking

Other comments here incorrectly pointing out that Boeing and Airbus don't manufacture in China - they do. And why wouldn't they, it's obviously much cheaper to manufacture there given material and labor costs. Obviously they don't manufacture highly sensitive military aircraft in China, but commercial aircraft, sure why not.

What they don't do is the design, testing, and certification in China. This is the real IP - not the materials or the assembly techniques, but how to navigate the regulatory landscape of the FAA and the EASA in extremely complex hardware/software integrated systems. The article mentions certification documents/evidence as a primary target.

The funny thing in all this is that passengers inherently trust the FAA and EASA operated system and inherently do not trust a Chinese-owned, manufactured, and regulated system for commercial aircraft. When really this breach was all about the money - Chinese companies want to get in on Boeing and Airbus' market.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but I will say that Boeing isn't doing itself any favors with it's cost cutting efforts on the 737 MAX, and that if it wants to keep consumers trust in its planes over the perception of "inferior" foreign competition, it needs to work much more closely with the FAA to ensure safety is the primary motivating factor on new designs and does not get overriden by fuel efficiency.

It's a cornerstone of their brand relative to other office space leasing companies, and tech investors are how/where they got a lot of their funding. Check out their S-1, they mention "technology" 110 times:

"Technology is at the foundation of our global platform. Our purpose-built technology and operational expertise has allowed us to scale our core WeWork space-as-a-service offering quickly, while improving the quality of our solutions and decreasing the cost to find, build, fill and run our spaces. We have approximately 1,000 engineers, product designers and machine learning scientists that are dedicated to building, integrating and automating the complex systems we use to operate our business. As a result, we are able to deliver a premium experience to our members at a lower price relative to traditional alternatives."

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1533523/000119312519...

Levine is skeptical/amused by the nonsensical valuations but takes a more neutral stance, probably because he was never truly invested in/familiar with/cared that much about new technology and what people promise it can do. Galloway is more idealistic and Levine is more practical taking things at face value and breaking them down. They're both very knowledgeable and worth reading.

More interested in the public money manager opinion on why not to buy this deal instead of all the other "tech" companies that IPO. What caused enough of them to push back on this valuation and are they acting in a coordinated manner or is it just a few large public funds that usually buy in saying no?

Tell your WeWork employed office manager (there is one in every office right?) to look at the line every morning when they're getting their coffee for two weeks. If the line is too long buy another 2 or 3 espresso machines, or supplement them with a few keurigs.

I just saved you $20M per year in sensors, IoT platform subscription, and data scientist salaries for an investment of $5k. Pretty insane how much money is wasted on dumb BS just because there's so much money to waste and it's a trendy way to waste money

Or more likely they wanted an innocuous reason to track all their office users at all times for other reasons

How have we gotten to the point where a company that is considering a $10-46B IPO is in a position where 1/3 of its staff is redundant and can be laid off, where investors can look at that company and think it's a good and growing investment to sustain their public pension or hedge fund returns, where bankers and consultants can come in and say yes deprive these 5000 people of their income and livelihoods because we need to give the founders and early investors an exit, where "tech" has come to be defined as a more flexible office space leasing model that scales quickly, where the brightest new students want to replicate another SV "tech" success by following the same playbook.

There is something extremely wrong with the rate of innovation, productivity growth, the division of labor and capital, and the distribution of profits between labor and capital in developed countries today, and it's unsustainable.

This should be the top comments, thanks for taking the time to write it out

investors don't really care what "tech" truly means in the classical sense (using/selling computers or apps as a central part of the business). investors care about what kind of return they can expect from a certain class of company. "Tech" has come to mean a company with high revenue/user growth, low marginal cost of production, big moats, not necessarily profitable, but on track to IPO and with large institutional/public demand for investment.

WeWork is obviously not a tech company like Microsoft or Apple are tech companies and nobody is arguing or should really even care about that, investors surely don't. But it also fails to check some of the boxes of new class of "tech" companies and that is being reflected in the current valuation battle. or maybe the underwrites just really overshot the mark after SoftBank pressured them with its own high valuation estimate.

Matt Levine as usual called how this would play out. He said we work would start dropping the weird voting/control privileges ("corporate governance concessions") that founders have enjoyed on recent "tech" IPOs. He also said investors wouldn't care much and this latest news confirms that.

His conclusion: "But now WeWork seems to be facing the traditional tradeoff: Stay private, keep control, but lose access to billions of dollars of funding, or go public, raise unlimited money, and have to act normal. If it does either of those things, that will mark a sort of end of an era. At the height of the unicorn boom, big tech companies could stay private without giving up the benefits of being public, or they could go public without taking on the burdens of being public. Now they might have to make hard choices again."

I went backpacking up arroyo seco with 2 friends on the same weekend. On our way into the campgrounds the rangers told us this story, we almost didn't believe them the story was so ridiculous on its face. Crazy to see this article in the news now.

Beautiful place to hike and camp, and if that's not your thing then check out the Tassajara zen center.

I wrote a trip recap here: https://roymurdock.com/blogs/2019/0722ventana.php

I'd give microdosing LSD a shot:

In the 1950s, before the term “Silicon Valley” existed, a handful of engineers at the tech pioneer Ampex were approached by Al Hubbard, the “Johnny Appleseed of LSD.” And with his help, they found that dropping acid could make their jobs easier.

“[Hubbard] wanted to turn on the best and brightest and have the wisdom trickle down to the populace,” Pollan said. “Engineers who were working on chips found LSD very helpful in imagining a structure as complex as a computer chip. Before there were computers, designing a computer chip was much harder! It was a three-dimensional structure, layered, and you had to hold an incredible amount of information in your head.”

The Ampex engineers started a nonprofit called the International Foundation for Advanced Study, giving LSD to people like inventor Doug Engelbart. His first under-the-influence invention was a toy for toilet-training boys, but Pollan pointed out that it was only after this experience that Engelbart did the work he’s most famous for: Inventing the computer mouse, the graphical user interface and key components of the internet.

“Engineers, unlike scientists, deal with irreducible complexity,” Pollan said. “There’s so many variables that, instead of reducing a problem to simplicity like scientists, they have to find patterns in a very complex space. That’s what LSD does — it helps you find patterns.”

https://www.vox.com/2018/5/16/17358484/michael-pollan-how-to...

Lots of revived interest in psychedelics that is finally coming front and center in no small part due to Michael Pollan's recent book "How to Change Your Mind". Rolland Griffiths plays a pivotal role in the book (and in the real life advocacy and study of psychedelics) and Pollan probably seeded the ideas of psilocybin's potential into the right ears around Berkeley and on his book tour [1]. Think there's a ton of potential here and looking forward to what research comes out of this new group.

[1] The center's operational expenses for the first five years will be covered by private funding from the Steven & Alexandra Cohen Foundation and four philanthropists: Tim Ferriss, author and technology investor; Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress; Blake Mycoskie, founder of the shoe and accessory brand TOMS; and investor Craig Nerenberg.

Get yours while the getting is good. What would you do differently in Neumann's position?

This company/its IPO is a shining example of what emerged from the way "we" decided to structure the US economy post 2008 recession.

Seconding this recommendation. Pollan talks about this exact article in the book, and how Eva Mendez came to sorely regret ever letting Wasson and Richardson partake in the ceremony and publish accounts of the experience.

Most incredible to me is that Pollan, late 50s with a dim view of drugs and especially psychedelics, experiments with various different drugs in order to explore and describe their effects for the audience. Great author who does his research and great book.

Large and continued slowdown in global productivity combined with huge amounts of liquidity/easing from the world's largest central banks.

Pretty good time to have a lot of money (it's always a good time to have a lot of money), to own a business in a developing economy, to start a "tech" company to be acquired in a developed economy, to be in private equity, or to fraud/bluff your way into a lot of money in a developed economy (true productivity-increasing products/technologies are currently few and far between but globalization of technology and outsourcing is still going strong).

Not a great time to be poor, a saver, a licensed professional, or worker of any sort in a developed economy (aside from working at a "tech" company).

You're splitting hairs and I'm not sure what your point is.

He's sane/rational. He has motives for most of his actions from what I've observerd. I'm asking what the motive is behind his initiation and escalation of the trade war with China.

I'm not arguing that it's an intelligent thing to do, or that Trump is intelligent. I'm asking what his motive is. If he was irrational I would concede that perhaps there is no motive because he's disconnected from reality.

These are good points. Not sure why Trump would care about the first one, but could see how enough businesspeople were leaning on him to get the second point done. This seems like the most likely explanation to me as well (opening China to further foreign investment by accelerating the country's slowdown in growth).

We don't live in medieval times. Trump is not a good human being, I don't like him one bit, but he's sane (I would go as far as to call him cunning) and democratically elected.

Comparing him to insane kings from the 18th century just gets people to chuckle and move on, sweeping deeper critical thought under the rug.

To call him stupid or mad ends any line of further inquiry into why he does the things he does, and that to my mind is very, very dangerous.

Come on this guy is the president of the US people need to stop calling him ignorant and dumb just because they don't like aspects of his persona (racist/greedy/cunning/divisive). He is surrounded by aides and business people giving him information and trying to forward their own agendas. He's not just sitting there thinking "wouldn't it be fun to start a trade war to look tough".

I respect Krugman as an economist but not as a political pundit, he needs to dig harder than resorting to the age old "don't ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity". There is already some simple logic (trade war = tough = re elected) behind the decision, I just believe there is more to the story that we don't see.

I've heard that argument but it's wrecking parts of the ag sector, hurting manufacturing (big parts of his base), and will probably push all consumer prices up. I guess if his base can't put 2 and 2 together that prices are rising due to his tariffs it almost makes sense.

But I don't think it's that simple, he's clearly a coin operated guy so which coin is operating him to escalate this trade war?