stretchwithme

Was lucky at a web-based training company that had enough paying corporate customers to keep me on until 2005.

So many things got cheaper in the Valley. Whole companies started just to sell off all the Aeron chairs and other leftovers.

Rent actually went down. Got a place for 40% less than the previous tenant in 2003. I remember our CEO renegotiating every major expense.

Not exactly. Those who wanted out of that fairly free arrangement did not want others to get out of literal bondage. The freedom to oppress is not what I was talking about.

There won't be peace on Earth until people give up on the idea that they have the right to coerce other people into political relationships.

Yeah, it's not like they've been harvesting organs of Falun Gong members.

Pretty important, as methane has 30 times the warming effect that carbon dioxide does.

There will be countermeasures as well. Whether a bird is fake or real, breaking into a house can still be detected.

I imagine we'll also see small robots that scurry into your garage when you open the door and whose one job will be to open the door later for thieves. That is probably already possible. So we'll need intelligent security cameras in garages too.

Drones that crash through a window and set the place on fire - I don't know what we'll do about that one. But anticipating and solving such problems would make an interesting startup.

It's always cheaper to design a feature into a product than to add it later.

Not everybody can use a car either. There's always exceptions to every proposal.

But I don't think bicycles and mass transit will take over ultimately. But self driving electric vehicles a bit larger than a bicycle could do it.

These will only need one seat and minimal storage. They'll go directly from home to work without stopping at every bus stop or train station along the way. And they'll be 1/4 the cost of today's car.

And, yes, they won't work for everybody and every situation, just like everything else.

If he's not careful, REAL communists might overthrow the government.

Just kidding. Only people in countries that have been spared its horrors still believe in communism.

They will get wise to this eventually and start loading their articles using javascript. Business Insider already loads their images with javascript.

Weird. I didn't run into that with Firefox.

I do turn off javascript for specific sites using Chrome. That does defeat some paywalls.

Social media gives a few people out of 7 billion the power to downvote you. And ycombinator gives them anonymity.

It's easier to leave a small country. The distance from any city in it to another country is lower. You can hop in a boat in Singapore or Hong Kong, but that is much harder to in East Turkestan.

Then there is the likelihood of colonization or invasion in general and the ability of ideas to spread. Competition between governments is more intense.

It may be Europe got its technological advantage and property rights evolved more quickly there because of more competition between countries. But in the center of a large continent, change is slower.

Crony capitalist dictatorship.

Yeah, I think if you are forced to do something and not paid a mutually agreed upon wage, and then you die, you are not getting monetary compensation for that sacrifice.

But you may gladly go along with all of it, even the risk of death, because of what you care about. Your family, your town, your country.

Which is why claiming the work of either men or women is done for free is silly. There are so many other values in life.

I suppose once you realize that keeping a sum of money will cost you more than giving it back, you give it back.

And if I say men died for their families in war or in the struggle to make a living and did it for "free", that also would be a vast oversimplification and a distortion of the situation.

I didn't say their labor was worthless.

But free definitely implies they did in exchange for nothing, which is false.

It would be cool if any food about to expire could be given away by your refrigerator. Maybe robots will one day handle that. Maybe even sniff the food to make sure it's still good.

Of course, when robots start cooking and restaurant quality meals on demand for the cost of the fresh ingredients, the need to store food will drop like a rock and this problem goes away.

As long as you consider surviving and having your children supported financially to be worthless, yes, the labor was free.

So, wait. The focus will being on getting work done?

That'll never work.

There never was a need to record and transmit votes electronically. All that we really needed was improvement in how the paper ballots were encoded.

We could have done that with PCs and punch card machines, which have been around forever. No network required.

But companies wanted to make money and elected officials needed campaign contributions. So they decided on over-complicated solutions that we don't need.

Isn't the restaurant business already hard enough without being charged $8 to answer a customer's question.

Well, I guess restaurants can end their relationship with Yelp and customers can stop using Yelp too.

Apps are often more of an obstacle to connection than the aid they promise to be. What we mean to each other cannot be quantified with ones and zeros.

To get more thin, artificial connections that never used to happen, we give up the real ones. Now friends don't have to met up to get the latest news. They know everything already, so no need to met up with a real live person.

My advice is if you have a great friend in real life, do NOT friend them on Facebook!

Of course, as long as we've been wealthy enough to afford separate shacks, we've had people die in isolation without anybody knowing. It's not a new problem. But I think it's going to become more common, not less, unfortunately.

I think if you and I lived on the same street and everybody on our street decided to generate and distribute our own power, we would never create such dysfunctional rules.

And if we did, we would probably change it the day after it failed.

Centralization enables a lot of good thing but also some bad things. Lobbying thrives on centralization because it is easier for decision makers to scam people they don't know, more likely to happen with centralization.

That was more a failure of the artificially constructed electricity market. It didn't allow longterm contracts.

Weirdly enough, cities that had their own power companies could have such contracts and didn't get rolling blackouts. I worked in Santa Clara at the time and lived in Sunnyvale. We never lost power at work but frequently found all the clocks flashing when I got home.

Which sort of suggests that centralization is the problem, not public versus private. We had a private company failing and public power companies unperturbed.

The price of water has to reflect what it will cost to replace it, not just the cost of extracting it.

Definitely something to that. 30 years might seem like too long a period. But if you want your pension to stay healthy, build it to last. That message would be pretty clear.

I think it's more a lack of long term thinking. Leaders that do not have a long term stake in the company but who can profit from a rise in the stock price in the short term.

What if executives could only sell their shares five years after they acquired them? What if they experienced losses when the company does?

Boards and shareholders need to get smarter. I'm hesitant to regulate it but I see no problem the SEC rating companies for their incentive structure. It should be updated whenever leadership changes or the company changes compensation.

Companies lad by founders who still have most of their wealth in company stock should garner the highest rating. Companies that don't require CEOs to invest and who allow CEOs to exercise options stock and sell stock whenever they want might get the lowest.

How executives can sell stock should be part of that rating. If executives can only sell an amount of stock gradually, say in 8% increments every month for the next year and can't change that schedule, that is safer for shareholders than allowing them to sell whenever they want.

Of course not. It's a little teacup.