the_watcher

As you move up the chain in global companies such as Twitter, it becomes more likely that you'll have a superior or direct report based in a different location than you, and this has been true for years. The "people person" executive theory only holds for companies that do not already have a substantial number of teams that are not all located in the same place.

Dropshippers (assuming the product they are shipping is decent quality) are providing a service to the manufacturer - customer acquisition. Sure, it's possible for a consumer to find the vendor on Ali Express or somewhere like that, but most don't want to. They just want to Google $THING and buy it from a website that they've heard of or looks like it specializes in $THING.

> 2015, the year Facebook Ads Manager was launched but before dropshipping got big.

Is this right? I was definitely using Power Editor prior to 2015, and am almost sure that Ads Manager predated it.

> If herd immunity is the strategy we're pursuing, then we should lift restrictions enough to meet hospital capacity, so we can get to herd immunity as quickly as possible and get the economy back to something approaching normal levels of activity

If it were remotely possible to precisely control the transmission rate such that we stay just under hospital capacity, there would at least be a coherent argument for this. I'd disagree, since a huge part of slowing the spread is to buy time for other mitigation options, such as therapeutics, contact tracing, etc. That said, it has been immensely frustrating that CA and SFBA leadership hasn't provided more clear guidance on what, exactly, we're waiting for.

> there would be some serious schadenfreude if Wickard v. Filburn showed up to defend individuals from state prosecution for once.

Could not agree more about this.

Freedom of assembly (and to a lesser extent, at least by precise Constitutional language, freedom to exercise religion) have Constitutional protections (that may or may not be unlimited, depending on the justice you're asking). There is no Constitutional protection for running a business or being able to patronize a given business. So protests in public and worship may be protected, but your neighborhood bar is not.

> Laws exist with the consent of the governed.

This is goalpost moving. Of course laws exist by the consent of the governed. Your original post claimed that there was no law, and that businesses should consider litigating to the Supreme Court, relying on pro bono lawyers who "remember their Constitution", despite the complete lack of Constitutional support for your argument.

State and local governments have far greater abilities to issue orders like this than the federal government. What, exactly, is unconstitutional about a city issuing an order that revokes the ability of a business to operate due to a health emergency?

> there’s zero evidence for this kind of intervention.

Citation absolutely required. While there is definitely a ton of uncertainty around what causes spread, the one thing that there seems to be broad agreement on is that sustained time in a shared pocket of air with an infected person is the most likely transmission vector.

What evidence is there that the SIP is limited in effectiveness? The existing evidence I am aware of is starkly contra that assertion. Anecdotes of seeing people too close together in the park are not evidence of an ineffective SIP.

If they're charging interest, their fees would be a lot higher than 2%.

It's briefly mentioned in the article, but Google actually shed jobs during the financial crisis. Facebook is the company that ramped up hiring newly available talent.

You can have issues with the economics of supply and demand, but as you outline very well, there's not really a button that just scales supply when you need it.

> If I used to produce 100 units per month because that's how many I could sell, but now I know I can sell 10000 units per month, that is incentive enough to increase production.

This assumes that you can actually scale production to 10,000 units (a plant that can produce 100 items a month is not necessarily one that can produce 1000), that your typical channels can absorb said production (if they need to hold inventory, they likely cannot), that you have enough packaging supplies for your increased inventory (a real problem being encountered at the moment), the list goes on. Supply chains are not linear. You can have valid issues with price gouging despite this fact, but simply saying "increase production, problem solved" is an extremely uninformed position.

> This would explain some of the more puzzling positive / negative / positive test sequences.

It seems far more likely to me that both of these phenomena are explained by higher-than-usual false positive and false negative test rates.

Matches my experience - was very much a "sure, we could do that, but it's not our core competency or the best use of our resources"

Yea, this actually seems to fall pretty specifically into the Microsoft case.

AFAIK, Google does not require third parties working with Google to use GCP

It is beneficial to the owners of $AAPL, their shareholders, whose wealth doubled simply via buybacks. Relatedly, it increases the value of unvested stock held by employees, helping with retention and recruitment.

I had the same response. I'm sympathetic to the idea that there might be wrong with the increase in buybacks in recent years, although that's more of a sense that any massive change in behavior should have extremely well-understood consequences. This article didn't convince me that _all_ buybacks are bad.

Chloroquine is a common anti-malarial and can be purchased OTC in much of Latin America.

It's at least (apparently) easy to produce and abundantly available in other countries. The medical system status quo is a challenge, but not having to stand up an entirely new production line is a big plus here.

While I almost certainly agree with the OP on surveillance overall, it seems like this bill doesn't actually change the status quo in any negative direction? It seems to mostly preserve a status quo that already contains all of this.

Do antibody tests exist at the moment? While not as critical as actual tests, it's not far behind if you could get a negative COVID-19 test and a positive antibody test.

Your first concern is a problem in the current situation, but wouldn't this be immensely helpful in avoiding/preparing for a second wave in the fall (if weather has any impact) or next year (if it becomes pandemic and endemic)?

Student loan interest on government loans is suspended? Am I reading this right?

EDIT: Found some info, although it's unclear what exactly qualifies the loan: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/14/business/student-loans-co...

> He adds that the law "should also specify that the payments would continue in 2021 and beyond if the unemployment rate rises to 5.5% and remains there or higher. Hopefully this will not happen, but if it does, the money will be needed."

If it has this caveat, it's essentially just UBI, not a response to coronavirus. I'm more sympathetic to UBI than I'd have once expected, but my observation is that any response that creates a potential post-virus entitlement is substantially less likely to pass, and at the moment, the priority should be getting some relief out there. This is suboptimal, but reality.

The Airbnb founders both maxed out their credit cards, and famously kept the lights on by selling cereal at the 2008 Republican and Democratic conventions. I believe the actual idea for Airbnb spun out of them realizing it could help them pay their rent.

I'll add that I agree with him that more companies should try the Netflix approach of all cash comp, with stock for purchase (particularly the cash flow monsters). But he's just so convinced that he's right that he also thinks we need force everyone to come to his conclusion.

> I have tried to recruit too many smart people who are wasting their prime years of productivity working in Big Tech because ‘the pay is too good’.

This is the most honest sentence in the entire piece: We should remove the choice of individuals to work at Big Tech Cos because I want them to work on something else for less money. This whole essay is embarrassing for Chamath.

Edit: Almost unbelievably, he closes with this: "Take the advice of others but carefully consider how it applies to you. What works for others may not work for you."

Also can't help but laugh that he compares Social Capital performance to Berkshire. Social Capital outperformed the S&P by 19%, BH by 155%

While that might help individuals, it doesn't help the travel industry. Yes, employees in Europe will generally not lose healthcare, but what about the businesses they'd like to return to? Such as hotels, tour guides, restaurants, etc.