fraserharris

This article is somewhat out-of-date. The L & 7 trains were modernized to communications-based train control (CBTC) & automatic train operation (ATO) since 2006 & 2018 respectively. This allows for moving-block signaling, where a trains are separated by a distance, instead of fixed blocks of track. The legacy fixed-block signaling system is still retained as a fallback.

The entry level rate for >$10M AUM is ~0.5%

"Phase 1 clinical trials of a 15-PGDH inhibitor for muscle weakness have shown that it is safe and active in healthy volunteers. Our hope is that a similar trial will be launched soon to test its effect in cartilage regeneration" - Helen Blau, Baxter Laboratory for Stem Cell Biology & the Donald E. and Delia B. Baxter Foundation Professorship

I recently had to select a 401(k) plan for our small startup. For a startup, the _employee_ fees was significantly better on Guideline (0.15 - 0.3%) than Fidelity (0.5% + $100 bookkeeping fee). The _employer_ fees were slightly more expensive with Guideline ($1,778 on Enterprise plan for Guideline vs $1,200 for Fidelity) but offered more features.

Important for founders in the US to know: you can put up to $70k annually into your 401k using profit sharing, which only some 401k plans offer. Your startup does not need to be making a profit to do 401k profit sharing. Employees may also be able to negotiate this!

It was a surprise learning how applicable your statement is when I was selling technology products into consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. Consumer preference is very hard to change once it is established, and leading CPG companies spend an enormous amount establishing that preference.

Whatever fills the void for people. ie: instead of bowling leagues, people watch TV or play video games. It's arguably a worse product because it doesn't fulfill the socialization or exercise needs of people, but it does fill the same block of time.

Small organizations exist largely because volunteers will them to exist by donating their time. From our elementary school, it's clear the people who have time to volunteer are the stay-at-home parents. The dominance of two-income households eroded the small organizations, which created a market (distributing the costs over many more people) for large organizations to fill the void with a worse but market-serving product.

I majored in Engineering Physics with an EE focus. Our classes were scheduled so we took the dependent math courses a semester before the relevant EE topics (ie: learned Laplace & Fourier transformations before circuit analysis). The EE majors all took the related math & EE courses simultaneously and visibly struggled, with every class we took together having a bimodal grade distribution.

Paraphrasing from an Oakland police officer reflecting on the spike in crime 3 years ago to today: "Flock has been a game changer. The officers who use it are getting results. Criminals will steal a car, drive through a neighborhood and rob someone. Pretty quickly we can look up 'black BMWs driving around this location'. Maybe 10 come back, you figure out which is the likely one, and then can see where it shows up in the next few hours. Then you have officers on patrol in that area look out for it. The criminals get a police car tailing them & they ditch the vehicle. Instead of doing 5 or 6 robberies with a stolen car, they can do 1 or 2. That makes it much less worth it to do the crimes."

Fresno / Central Valley is not the circuitous route, which is quite close to the I-5 near Bakersfield. The true circuitous detour is between Bakersfield and LA, where the route is planned to go East through the Antelope Valley with a station at Palmdale.

Business continuity planning & investment is an important part of running an enterprise.

The reliability speaks to the technology immaturity. I agree with the inevitability of the EV drivetrain + charging off the existing distribution network being more reliable than competing technologies.

AC Transit (eg: East San Francisco Bay) performed a detailed 2 year study (July 2020 - June 2022) comparing newer Hydrogen Fuel Cell & Battery -powered buses to existing Diesel, Fuel Cell, & Hybrid -powered buses, 5 of each type. The key results are the Hydrogen Fuel Cells have significantly more expensive infrastructure, fuel, and maintenance costs than Battery. However, both technologies are still less reliable than Diesel.

The results are broken down into 4 volumes, each covering 6 months. You can read them here: https://www.actransit.org/zebta

This is exactly correct. This is Salesforce's 3rd or 4th rebranding of Customer Data Platform, which has never taken off. This latest positioning is targeting Snowflake.

Lithium deposits are common -- Nevada has significant ones too. The question is if the lithium is concentrated enough to make extracting it financially viable.

David J Griffiths' Introduction to Electrodynamics was a fantastic undergraduate-level E&M textbook https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_Electrodynamic...

Support & maintenance have radically lower margins than software licenses. Without discounting rules, sales can craft deals that lose the company money.

Is that attrition rate inclusive of seasonal employees?

More likely you got options, and they are taxed as income at a liquidity event (acquisition, IPO)... unless you were confident enough in the startup to execute those options & immediately pay the resulting taxes out of pocket. And you have to have that confidence before the valuation is too high & the taxes are unaffordable to absorb.

In California the seller discloses as much as possible to the buyer - i) house inspection and pest inspection, ii) disclosures from the county, state, utilities district, iii) advisories of risk of wildfire, lead paint, natural hazards, earthquake; and much more. This is so that the buyer has as little possible recourse to sue in the future for losses on the property. This behavior also enables faster real estate deals b/c the buyer is more willing to offer without contingencies.

The 3rd hand story I heard ~2011 from a former RIM executive who was there at the time of Steve Job's demo of the iPhone was that Mike Lazaridis' (co-founder of RIM) reaction to seeing the demo: "It's impossible! The whole thing would have to be a battery!"

Research in Motion thought the Blackberry keyboard was their killer feature for business professionals. They were wrong. The iPhone killed Blackberry, not Android.

This is great advice for any SaaS company. We scaled to ~80 engineers and >1,000 customers on an almost entirely monolithic app running JARs on EC2 instances with a single Postgres database. Keep it simple & focus on delivering product features that create customer value.

Cadillac Fairview said the images taken by camera were briefly analyzed then deleted — but investigators found that the sensitive biometric information generated from the images was being stored in a centralized database by a third party.

The images are not being persisted, just the metadata about the individual. Who is being harmed by this? If a person with a clipboard collecting this information without telling anyone, is there any outrage?

That state of affairs is because of the Post-WWII order the US constructed via alliances & multilateral organizations, in response to being repeatedly dragged into European wars.

https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2013/08/Europe-only-Armed...

Kaiser Permanente is a conglomerate that is a consortium of for-profit and not-for-profit entities. The health plans (insurance) and hospitals are not-for-profit. The physicians are organized into for-profit partnerships.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente#Operations

We, Fivetran, have an SFTP connector. You can be sync'ing data with 10 minutes of effort. Our value is in (nearly) zero configuration, automatic schema migration, and automatic failure recovery. We take the pain out of Extract-Load, and push Transformation into the warehouse. https://fivetran.com/docs/files/sftp

Two approaches that can fix the root cause of mis-alignment between sales & product:

1) Teach your sales team how to pitch your product roadmap, so that customers are buying into the bigger vision. When customers are bought in, they will accept that they don't get their small feature because they will gain something larger faster. Sales LOVES when this is successful because then their deal can close faster.

2) Challenge the sales team to find at least 2 other customers that need the same feature before you agree to re-prioritize your product roadmap. This creates alignment between them & your need to prioritize the most impactful features.

A lesser known limitation of S3 is that it does not have Read-After-Write consistency for overwriting PUTS & DELETE operations. Netflix has reported observing consistency taking hours for outliers. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/Introduction...

On Vancouver Island the harvesting cycle is 40 - 50 years. Trees grow fast with reasonable temperatures with lots of rain.