adaisadais

The Grand Canyon is so magnificent. I thought it was all marketing until I saw it.

Glacier is my favorite. I thought The Grand Tetons were incredible. Yosemite is incredible but def touristy. Yellowstone is probably appropriately rated and a good place for the family.

I thought Joshua Tree was a waste of time but I am more pro mountain and less desert.

I’ve been listening to “The Smartest Guys In The Room” (the definitive book on Enron and their scandal) and one of the ways Enron continued to grow and grow is by setting up a really complicated system of moving debt onto equities off of their balance sheet.

While it was sorta legal (at the time) it was not ethical and led to a massive collapse of the #1 company at the time.

Makes you wonder if AI is in such a bubble. (It is).

Stuck in the middle with you

Can someone give me a TL;DR?

Fantastic.

I’ve sold SaaS for three different companies.

B2B accounting, Procurement SaaS, and Senior living SaaS (niche, I know).

My only rule:

1. Have a good product.

How long do you have?!

A friend of mine pitched me this idea of “onlyfans but for NIL” and I’ve been running with that idea.

It’s been an insanely tangled web but there’s some crazy stuff happening and I think it can be a big business.

:( one of the most iconic NBA players. Mutumbo will be remembered.

Building in the college NIL space.

I appreciate your insights.

I think that’s the desired outcome but not the most common path.

I love music but I mainly Spotify - concerts are a once a quarter thing, right?

I totally agree. This is a terrible place to research - but I also seek to get the “nerd” perspective bc I’m curious if they’ve hacked it to be better.

I did some research at a football game recently. If you’re bored / interested you can find it on YouTube under “charleswilliamss” or instagram under “gethalftime”

It’s less of a mystery - I agree. Less fan fare.

I think that’s also with the news in general right now.

Here’s my current flow:

1. ESPN app - mostly for the headlines across sports

2. Tigernet - clemson specific / mostly football. Like the message boards.

3. Instagram - great place to get lots of good news

4. Maybe a google search - “when is x game?”

5. YouTube for game recap / highlights / long form.

6. Occasionally 247.

7. FotMob for soccer

It’s a race to the bottom until someone has a durable competitive advantage: it’s usually a market based advantage or a technical advantage. The best companies achieve and maintain both.

Haha your name is great.

The danger I find in information is a) there’s too much and b) it’s already out of date.

Wisdom transcends time but is much harder to come by.

“I’m not a pessimist, I’m an optometrist” -Ricky

I too have the same problem.

I’ve always wondered “what if I simply just read them and took a note / maybe linked them to a word or Google doc or something?”

I had a friend who did a similar activity with books. Read a book, took notes on the ‘highest learnings’ and saved each book he finished.

He went back and found an old book with all of his ‘wisdom’ and realized he had totally change since he wrote those things. He didn’t really care about them like he thought his future self might.

Knowledge / link hoarding is vanity.

The “religious leader not existing” argument is slightly comical lol.

Does anyone know of any companies where this strategy has worked?

Obvs lesser of the evils but the fear is that, at some point, the family or the fund, gets too far removed from the mission / founder (as is common with many companies) and ultimately chooses profits > environment.

Is there infinite?

Tough for finite things to try and understand much less comprehend such a simple and complex quandary.

What happens if there really is infinite no beginning and no end. Or what if there is an Alpha and Omega - such a beautiful thing to not understand.

Slack being down is so detrimental… it’s crazy.

I’ve almost forgotten how to send my coworkers email. It blows my mind how much we are so reliant on a few tools to carry out so much work.

This is most excellent - lots of stuff I’ve not heard about nor read. Looking forward to checking these out this year.

My personal recommendations are to read “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by the late Clayton Christensen and “Ecclesiastes” (ESV for Native English speakers) by Koholet.

“The Innovator’s Dilemma” has had a major impact on me. Keep moving the ball forward and keep finding the biggest market despite what your current market thinks.

“Ecclesiastes” is a great reminder that we will all die and it is good to be apart in the present. To innovate. To make things better regardless if we will live to see the positive impact or not.

Both are honestly great books about life in general too.

As religious faith has declined, comment intensity on HN has risen.

All joking aside this is a pretty well-known phenomenon that folks like Hegel and Nietzsche have discussed. The Enlightenment has had its tentacles on formalized religion for over 300 years in the Western World.

Nietzsche’s mad man who runs about the town telling people that “God is Dead” is not meant to be taken as a positive or light statement. Nietzsche posited that many of the key elements of modern society would cease to have meaning. Why then, if man is not created in the image of God, should man treat fellow man in any which way? What justification does one have for not harming fellow man if his fellow man is but ape?

Books I loved with perspectives on this are “Enlightenment Now” by Steven Pinker and “The Rise of the Modern Self” by Carl Trueman.

“You gotta serve somebody.” -Bob Dylan

You’re looking at this wrong.

This is a massive opportunity for someone to do what iTunes did to music and what Spotify did after. It just might end up being Amazon...

_April Fools_

I recall hearing about this when it was first published. It fascinates me to no end that the more we learn about our own planet the less it seems we truly understand about the complexity and beauty that we are amongst.

“That’s a pair of them docks” - Bon Iver #paradox

Regardless of what they advocate for is the data they state true / accurate?

Homelessness does not beget homelessness. It is most important to note that. Our society is so focused at solving the primary symptoms without ever diving deeper into the root cause of things like this (looking at you Sf).

To experience homelessness one must have first experienced a reason to now be homeless. In modern western society we have many failsafes that prevent people from becoming totally dislodged from a place of shelter. But more and more people are losing such shelter and are ending up on our streets. Why?

The answer is often rooted in the human condition. Solving that is almost impossible... but it’s worth trying.

Herein lies the issue: the quasi-war. The US must make actions in the future to more accurately describe what a war is. In my mind virtually every “quasi-war” that the United States has waged since WWII has been waged unconstitutionally.

We’ve gone about for too long meddling in the affairs of others. Putting boots on their grounds and haven’t the slightest bit of gall to make it official and firmly support it. These acts of ill will (however good intentioned they may have been- and most have not *see War in Vietnam) have been nothing but racketeering and have violated our own Constitution.

I agree. We must clarify and make it more explicit. We must also create a nuclear armistice. We can’t continue to go on kicking the little countries and idealogies of the world and not expect the Big Ones to at some point decide to kick back.

“ Don't you understand, what I'm trying to say? Can't you see the fears that I'm feeling today? If the button is pushed, there's no running away There'll be no one to save with the world in a grave”

From Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction”

I’m a millennial and I love using Airbnb. That being said I struggle to understand what the competitive advantage / moat is for Airbnb.

Outside of brand / name recognition I don’t know any reasons why someone would pick Airbnb over VRBO or another service.

Is there some sort of data play that they are making? Why would I invest in Airbnb when I could buy into a REIT or some other real estate asset? Would love some ellucidation.

When San Francisco has it’s businesses open (pre-Covid) it is a fun city.

When the businesses closed it became the opposite of a fun city. Restaurants and bars have been shut down and only a few have started to reopen. Many Parks outside of The city have had their parking lots closed. The city itself started doing massive road renovations which seem to be in every neighborhood. Helping the homeless seem to become less of a priority. All of the real problems that people covered up by going to shows and having a good time at restaurants and parks and bars became quite apparent.

I don’t think San Francisco will recover for a long time.