fractionalhare

The analogy is a little fraught. If a baker bakes at home it's ostensibly not for public consumption. If you work at IBM you could literally code at home too.

This is more like a baker baking things at home, and giving them away for free under their own shingle. That still lacks the nuance of software scalability and licensing but it's a little closer.

This is tricky. There is one sense of "spare time" which concerns output - you aren't always expected to be working. But salaried knowledge workers are commonly considered to have no "spare time" in an intellectual sense, especially when it comes to overlap with the company's core competencies.

This is obviously controversial for individual contributors, but it's well established in IP precedent. It's why you can't work at Google and develop a competing product in your off hours, even if it's "on your own time" and on your own equipment.

See also: one-time bonuses for developing patents and assigning them to your company.

The legal perspective/doctrine here is that people who produce IP as a core part of their work are "always on." They're not paid for hourly labor, they're paid for an intellectual product which only loosely relates to hours worked.

Note that I'm not necessarily endorsing that view, but stating what it is.

To be fair that third one is usually about your biggest worry in general. It doesn't need to literally keep you up at night - though it's a positive signal if you never lose sleep over your company.

That's what I never understand about these proposals...we can't manage to stop climate change on Earth, but we're going to somehow terraform a planet? Or failing that, establish "colonies" the same way we have people live in Antarctica? I don't envy the colonists.

I think the urge to just hit reset and start from scratch is attractive because it removes all the messy unquantifiable problems like politics. But the reality is you'd just get more of that on top of virtually insurmountable technological problems.

Amusingly yes, this is probably the best bet. The temperature and atmosphere around 34-35 miles from the surface are comparable to Earth. And you get comparable gravity and radiation shielding as a bonus.

Good luck storing water and other supplies though. I foresee water piracy in the floating cities.

I sincerely doubt there are many elites seriously considering colonies on Mars. I'm sure they're happy to push their personal brand using the space nostalgic idealism, though.

Triton is a nitrogen saturated, frozen wasteland colder than Pluto. Perhaps you're thinking of Titan? Titan is also an icy hellscape at nearly -200 C, but you can look forward to an ocean of ammonia once you manage to break through the surface.

Europa has liquid water, but the average surface temperature is still colder than the worst ever recorded on Earth. The speculative oceans you seek would be encased under miles of solid ice, just like Titan's. Europa is likewise catastrophically radioactive.

These places are all extremely small, extremely far away and extremely deadly. They make Mars seem pleasant.

Holy shit that demo is amazing. Are there more demos like that? I was wearing AirPods Pro and nearly jumped out of my seat, I thought someone walked into my room. That’s better than anything I’ve ever heard using so-called “spatial audio”, and it’s just surround sound.

I am an angel investor, but I am not a VC and I don't work for one.

Yeah. A well-performing fund will never open its books for a seven figure check. They could likely find a senior employee (not even a partner) willing to invest that.

Another investor is another person you have to have a relationship with.

Basically any established HFT, though they're market making instead of market taking. TGS. Baupost. Soros had an excellent run for like 30 years. Simons' family office, Euclidean, does well. A lot of under the radar family offices which don't have stringent reporting requirements. Various groups in Citadel, Point72 and Millenium. Appaloosa. A bunch of prop trading groups in the Chicago area. And outside of quant, the top long/short equity funds regularly do well. Like Coatue.

I don't really care if you're a former fraudster or not. I am still outright rejecting the claim that the venture capital industry is engaged in, or equivalent to, a systematic Ponzi scheme. If you want to critique it, fine, but don't commit an abuse of terminology.

At this point I've worked for, worked with or invested in over 50 different VC-backed startups. I have been brought in to see their code and the internals of their products. Yeah sure some opportunistic sociopaths like to raise stupid seed rounds on a fugazzi pitch deck. And the industry is frothy with fundraising. But you can't categorically classify the industry as fraudulent.

There exist many varieties of high risk investments with a long time horizon which are not fraudulent. Everyone knows what they're getting into. Cases like Theranos are not the norm, which is why they received outsized attention when they're uncovered.

This probably comes as a shock to people outside the quant finance industry, but RenTech isn't the only game in town when it comes to regularly beating the market by one or two standard deviations, year after year. They're just the most famous and have a certain je nais se quois.

The red flag to look out for is extraordinarily low variance of returns, not extraordinarily high mean of returns. Madoff never promised more than about 12%, but he promised to be within 1% of that all the time. If you look at RenTech's Medallion returns since 1988, they're consistently between 30% and 120%. They're not slamming down the same percentile every year.

It's one thing to beat the market - it's still an incredibly difficult feat to do it consistently, but there's an element of chance involved. You won't beat by the same margin every year, even if you do beat every year. If you're hitting similar returns year after year, that implies your work is completely decoupled from the inherent randomness of market dynamics.

That's not a Ponzi scheme, and you diminish the fraud of real Ponzi schemes by equating them with a frothy venture capital market. Very few startups deliberately commit fraud by paying out old investors with new investors. Just because seed and Series A round investors can liquidate earlier doesn't mean it's a fraudulent operation.

Presumably he thought he'd get away with it, yeah. Or just enjoyed his money while he had it and lived with the dissonance.

No they can’t, refer to the documentation on cookie flags and attributes like httpOnly: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Cookies

I am talking about a much more general class of security than just XSS. You’re making perfect the enemy of good here - yes, of course XSS is not completely mitigated by httpOnly. That was not my point.

My actual point stands, the Web Storage API doesn’t offer the same protections as cookies. Don’t store sensitive data in localStorage, that is emphatically not it’s intended use.

Which is why you use domain scoping, httpOnly and Secure cookie flags so they can only be read by matching hosts (with greater granularity than same-origin policy) over HTTPS and can’t be read by JavaScript. The Web Storage API does not offer these protections.

I don't think the author is drawing any connection between great company culture and great company ethics. The culture refers more to group dynamics, which values are embraced and which are ignored, the kind of leadership, etc.

In this context, great has more to do with efficacy and consistency. The author would probably say a company can have a great culture and still be very polarizing or controversial.

But to be fair, Bill Gates is probably the only prominent example of a billionaire who quit the industry completely and dedicated his whole life towards charity.

James Simons has more or less done this for the past 15 years.

Be it Billy Gates, Bezos, or one of the many Midwestern Financial Gurus—-their use of 901c3‘s are basically tax dodges.

Do you mean 501c3? How are these a tax dodge? How does someone end up financially better off than just keeping and investing their wealth if they choose to donate it or deploy it in a donor advised fund?

Gates foundation gives back less than 1% of the wife’s fund to the nation that birthed him, and provided a comfy launching pad for that privileged life. (I get you need to help developing nations, but America is dying. I have never seen so many homeless.)

If you think America is dying, boy do I have news for you about the state of most of the world. I also deploy most of my personal donations outside America, through GiveWell and Watsi (and more targeted donations independently).

America has a lot of problems. I live in NYC and can empathize with the dissonance of seeing the homeless sleeping in the cold on Madison Ave. I don't want to diminutize that, and this is something I also care about.

But the blunt fact of the matter is that America is far better off than the countries Gates focuses on. It's not even a fair comparison in terms of poverty and healthcare. Gates deploys his wealth primarily in regions that have never or only rarely "birthed" billionaires like Gates, in your words.

It is uniquely selfish to criticize billionaires for hoarding their wealth while also insisting they focus their charity on one of the richest countries in the world by median.

And that is why heads of risk lost their jobs this week!

They can wag their finger, but they don't legally have recourse for finding out this information ahead of time if Hwang and his existing lenders don't volunteer it. That's just the current state of play with margin lending.

I don't personally have any skin in the game, but of course I blame him for losing his money. It's his fault, who else would I blame? Pretty cut and dry case of terrible risk management here. What seems controversial?

Nobody held a gun to his head and told him to load up crazy leverage on a highly concentrated basket of equities... And the banks that lent him money didn't have transparency as to his leverage elsewhere.

No, he wasn't exclusively concentrated in tech or growth.

From what I gather, Archegos had $10B of equity in total? Typically (sensibly) you don't put all your eggs in one basket as a fund, even a quite concentrated fund.

It was $20B. Hwang's whole schtick from the outset of his family office was to hyper lever up on high growth companies. By doing this he went from $1B to $20B of actual capital in about 2 years. Then he blew up spectacularly because he was levered up about 5x in a ridiculous concentration.

There's no royal road to excess returns, etc. He probably could have kept this going longer, but sooner or later one of his superholdings was going to have a market event sparking a loss (like VIAC) and even his volume wasn't going to be able to prop up the price anymore. Chain reaction from there.

This is a good cautionary tale: going around to a bunch of banks and getting crazy leverage Big Short style doesn't always end in a lionizing outcome. In fact it usually doesn't. What sucks is the leverage is going to be demonized here, when the actual problem is Hwang's lack of transparency (albeit legal) to his brokers and his frankly stupid risk management.

Plenty of funds safely chug along for years running at 3-4x leverage, they just have the good sense to keep beta < 1 and stay roughly market neutral in their long/short holdings...

I would agree with you, but the article itself is examining percentiles of income, not net worth.

But evasion peaks among the richest 5 percent, who have an income of at least $200,000 and who, as a cohort, capture more than one-third of total national earnings. Taxpayers in this group hide more than 20 percent of their income from tax collectors.

But such reviews turn up very little evidence of evasion among the extremely wealthy, in part because the rich use sophisticated accounting techniques that are difficult to trace, such as offshore tax shelters, pass-through businesses and complex conservation easements.

This is a weird set of examples.

To start with - the top 1% is a relatively accessible level of "rich." That's an L5/L6 software engineer at Google, or a mid career doctor. Are offshore tax shelters actually available and economically feasible to these people?

As for pass-through businesses: I had a pass-through LLC when I ran a consultancy. Was I engaged in tax evasion? I'm pretty sure I wasn't - as I understood, this was exactly what I was supposed to be doing. I think you're essentially required to do this if you run businesses where you're the only partner (but I could be wrong).

But even if you're not - that's not a 1% thing. That's basically the best practice pursued by anyone running a single member LLC...which describes a huge number of small businesses. A struggling bakery would realistically have pass-through income.

I don't know what "complex conservation easements" are so I can't speak to that.