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No one saw it coming in January. Everyone saw it coming the week that it was starting, which is my point. It’s really easy to tell when the big players start taking risk off.

These people are also tracking senators and congress people’s positional moves, as additional macro indicators.

They’re making money up and down. For example, SPY is likely done climbing for a while. Maybe it will squeeze up to ~4160, but it’s either going to be flat or aggressively down in the coming days. Thursday/Friday was a very clear exit day. If it squeezes north and over extends further, it’s a very clear short. If it sits flat for a week until OPEX, it’ll be a clear buy for another leg up, then you reevaluate again.

This is what I mean when I say treating it like it’s your job. Go back and look at the big downturn last year. To anyone who was paying attention, it looked like a car crash in slow motion.

Only to those of us with other work to do, did it look like a flash crash out of nowhere. The writing is very clearly on the wall for all of this stuff, because the big players needs days to reposition, and will be moving billions of shares, and you can literally watch them do it.

The reason active funds don’t do as well as the market is because they have to hedge. You’re always paying a premium to minimize losses when you’re hedging, and you can’t exit fast when your position is worth billions.

It’s like turning a freighter, versus turning a speed boat.

While you’re right about the majority, there are pockets of young people partaking in sophisticated strategies, and doing quite well. The people in the discord server that I belong to are all using stops to max their downside and get out quick if their instinct proves wrong. After several months on paternity leave, it became clear that greatest barriers to active trading are money and time, like most things. If you’re treating the market like it’s your job, day in and day out, you get a really good feel for the flows, and can move into positions that are turning north pretty easily. The fact that the Nasdaq was about to go on a tear was telegraphed for weeks.

There are hundreds of opportunities to do this every day, so you just jump on the most painfully obvious ones, and avoid anything uncertain.

If you have a real job, and can’t watch the market all day, every day, you don’t stand a chance. Without fail, the biggest losses in our group would come when someone tried to hop into a position while half watching the market, and then get sucked into their real work.

Once you’ve got entry down, the hardest part is training yourself to exit at the right time.

Good luck extricating it from your life. There’s too much utility. I’ve even come back around to Twitter after being off for 5 years. Tremendous value in having a curated list there.

If you haven’t, you should watch some of the first hand videos of the autonomous zone and compare them to the videos of the Capitol.

After a season or 2 — if it’s a hit — I bet it becomes pretty easy to negotiate ownership of items into your contract, since they can’t do the show without you anymore and it’s a relatively small price to pay.

See Sex and the City wardrobe.

There’s an interesting question there about when this form of advertising becomes obsolete.

Uber is in a very different position than many other companies. Anyone who browses the internet with regularity is already aware of their existence and probably just needs the right set of circumstances to come together to make Uber useful to them.

I suspect the results would be different if Uber were earlier in their adoption curve, but maybe that’s not true either. Maybe they’d be ignored for different reasons at that time.

That makes sense, as it’s true of many different varieties of therapy. During certification, the aspiring therapists are also required to undergo their own therapy.

We even had comprehensive sex education, and were forced to care for a robot baby for a week.

Dell is Austin or more accurately now, Round Rock — pretty sure he was a Texas student.

This is the magic of dark European clubs that ban phones and are designed around hiding the identities of their inhabitants, versus bright American clubs designed to see and be seen.

Thrashing about incoherently is just a sign that you’ve lost yourself in the music, and is exactly what you’re going for.

Berghain is a meme at this point, but fuck, I’ve never experienced anything like the communal trance that happens in there.

You clearly believe the dollar is worth less, and is likely to be devalued further, but aren’t willing to tie that to the higher stock market prices?

I think this has more to do with our culture making everything about the individual. You can’t name bands anymore, because explosive popularity is the realm of the individual artist.

Even massive individual artists, disappear into relative obscurity when they move into a band format (John Mayer).

Kanye, Taylor, Nicki, Lizzo, Justin, Drake, Ariana, Billie, Miley...

Even hip-hop, which seems like a distinctly individual genre, used to be ruled by groups. NWA, Wu-Tang, Roots, etc.

Our current culture over-values individuals and loves the myth of the one wo/man show. Teams are boring. Give us someone to follow.

You see this with founders too. Even if the company was created by a team, there must be one figurehead.

I guess this is because so much of marketing is aspirational. Most people try to purchase the identity they want. It’s easier to sell an identity with an actual person.

Until the kids leave the house. Then the parents overtake their no child counterparts like crazy.

I’d also be curious to see this broken out by economic situation. I’d wager parents who don’t feel financially burdened by children score far happier than those that are stressed financially.

They’re about as liberal as places get, yes. I currently live in SF, spent 5 years in Utah, and my entire childhood in Texas. I know several of the places you mentioned quite well.

Mormons are excellent people. I sincerely appreciate how absurdly polite they are. They are cartoonishly polite. It’s just true. My newly married 20 year old next door neighbors moved in and immediately brought me, a plate of fresh baked cookies on day 1.

Fort Worth is a place with plenty of parts of town where I can pretty well guarantee that you’d catch some flack. That said, most big Texas cities are as liberal as they are conservative, if not more, so it’s a bad example of an absurdly conservative place. It’s nowhere near as conservative as SF and Cambridge are liberal. No major city in Texas is. Texas is more diverse than anyone gives it credit for.

I don’t know anything about Pensacola, so I can’t comment on that.

I picked up a Fuji last Christmas, and it’s one of the best purchases I’ve made in the last decade. Their X-line takes incredible pictures, and is so approachable. If anyone has been considering more serious photography, or is having a child and wants to capture more unique shots of them, I can’t recommend them highly enough.

Provo is full of overly polite Mormon families and BYU. They chose cartoonish examples of polite conservative locales to make their point.

There are plenty of conservative places that would be upset to see Harris / Biden attire. Look no further than the classic Top Gear episode with the Gay Pride car and the Clinton car driving through the south.

I actually dislike the rubber tips. The original AirPods fit my ear so well that I can shake my head without them coming loose, and comfortable to the point that I literally forget they’re there.

If they had better battery life, they’d be the perfect easy headphone.

Por que no los dos?

If you own any amount of Salesforce licenses, you can request a Salesforce Innovation Center (SIC) meeting, and ask them to teach you how they do it. They won’t hesitate to pull in a VP who has been doing it for a decade and they’ll open the kimono and tell you everything you could possibly want to know about their approach.

You have to sit through some pitches for this access, and it will include lots of talk about how Salesforce helps, but there is a ton of value in the exercise.

The exercise itself is its own lesson in enterprise selling.

Not enough people realize that these waves are almost completely regionally isolated, with a bit of spillover everywhere.

Wave 1: NY + NJ (some other northeast)

Wave 2: Florida + Texas + Arizona (most of south)

Wave 3: Midwest

You can even see this within California. Wave 1: Bay Area, Wave 2: Some LA, Wave 3: All SoCal

Each wave basically amounts of when that population gave up distancing, and once you’ve undergone your wave, you don’t really get it that bad again. (unless you have a small wave that misses much of the population, like LA)

Texas’ wave 3 is popping in different cities than wave 2 (Texas, like Cali, is just huge).

The difference is in the transparency and purpose of the metrics. Salesforce’s entire purpose is to measure and publicize performance metrics across the business, down to the individual.

In Sales, this means meetings, calls, deals, etc. In Service, this means satisfaction scores, handle times, etc.

All of those are well understood employee productivity scores.

I think this scares people because no one is sure how it’ll be measured and used. At first blush, it just looks like a proxy for identifying luddites and/or people who hate chat — regardless of their actual job performance.

You’d be surprised by how much can be achieved with no code tools on SFDC. The biggest problem Salesforce has is that most customers are barely scratching the surface — or worse, still using the classic version that’s 10 years outdated.

I’ve fixed 2 year headaches of billion dollar enterprises in a few hours.

Why couldn’t they do that themselves?

1. Because Salesforce is so effortless to keep running, that billion dollar companies can get by with a couple of admins, and never put any investment into building on its functionality.

2. The people who know Salesforce well enough to do that are gobbled up and paid boatloads of money by Salesforce and Consultancies.

I finished OMSCS in April. I was surprised to find that I just oscillated between trying to start the 10 different projects that had been waiting for me to finish, and doing absolutely nothing because I finally didn’t have to.

I ended up going through some material and building a trading bot because I never got a chance to take ML4T.

My wife was incredulous that I was doing more coursework after graduating.

This is SaaS 101. Salesforce has been writing the book on all this stuff since before Slack existed.

This should help: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20277115 (What’s Salesforce: by a HackerNews type)

SpaceX seems to have an ability to test without human risk that far exceeds past space missions. (Thanks to reusable rockets and autonomous / remote systems)

If a delivery driver gets a series of 1-star reviews, you can bet they’re getting kicked off the platform.

+ DoorDash actually does refund quite frequently for food issues.

Yeah, this is a popular saying, but couldn’t be further from the truth for the most successful people.

Generally, they begin with an end in mind. It’s a lot easier to get where you’re going if you know where that is.

Or, as the Cheshire Cat says to Alice, “Which way should I go?” “Where do you want to go?” “I don’t much care.” “Then it doesn’t really matter.” (Abridged)

Facebook engineer guides San Antonio Trump team to victory, realizes the gravity of what he has done, goes soul searching in Peru and undoubtedly does Ayahuasca, then leaves Facebook and resolves to defeat his old partners.

Someone needs to contact this guy for the movie rights. It’s the perfect modern redemption arc, and peak Silicon Valley.