poof131

Mostly a history lesson. The reality is fighters are missile trucks these days and the F-15 is a great missile truck with a dozen amraam. Drones and missiles are the future of conventional war with much of the battle happening in the electromagnetic spectrum.

I think the drone war is getting off the charts. 300,000 per month!?! [1] This will definitely have impacts in the coming decade both in war and terror/counter-terror applications.

[1] https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2024/01/05/russia-produces-300...

I want missile trucks. That launch from submarines. Can carry AMRAAM, SLAM, JSOW, etc. Can land in the water and be recovered by the submarine and launched for more missile truck missions. I’d war-game this against super duper expensive jets, carriers, etc. Maybe even the subs can be autonomous and run off AI.

I believe that the minimum wage should be commensurate with the cost of living in a particular area. Similar to the military's Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) and Subsistence (BAS) which adapt according to one's location, the minimum wage could be adjusted to reflect the price of local housing and groceries within a 30-minute radius. By doing so, the implications of less desirable local policy decisions would be absorbed by the communities that adopt them.

At present, there is little motivation for change among those profiting from policies that favor commercial or stagnant development over residential expansion. Such policies often compel people to undertake long commutes or inhabit crowded apartments in order to work locally. If businesses had to raise their prices and consumers had to pay more as a result of these policies, communities might be incentivized to establish policies that enable local living.

If the minimum wage was adjusted to reflect local living costs, it could serve as a catalyst for policy change. It would offer a choice: adapt local policies to facilitate affordable living or bear the inconvenience of commuting to other areas for goods and services where wages are in line with living expenses.

Regulatory arbitrage in Web3 seems to be coming to and end. My assumption is

1) If your contract is upgradeable it isn’t decentralized. Might as well be hosting on EC2.

2) If a multi-sig runs your governance contract or treasury it isn’t decentralized. Might as well form an LLC or C corp.

3) From a more NatSec perspective, if a SEAL team or the FBI can reach a few people in your DAO and your project would shut down, you aren’t decentralized.

Which all seems good and as it should be, to stop people LARPing as decentralized to avoid regulations.

So "consumers" are always said to "pay" as companies "pass through" increased costs due to goods, regulations, etc., but that doesn't apply here to all the taxpayers who use banking and are subject to increased FDIC insurance costs? And taking underwater, low-interest debt on the books at face value costs taxpayers overtime through inflation even if we get "paid back with interest". Why don't private buyers want this debt? Because they'd rather have dollars to buy better paying debt which the taxpayers currently provide. The BTFP will rapidly grow over $25B and be used to recapitalize the banks at taxpayers expense.[1]. Someones got to pay for the unrealized losses if depositors won't take a haircut. [2]

So personally, I fundamentally disagree with the statement "no losses borne by the taxpayer," believe this is used to obfuscate the issue, and am sad to see our treasury play this game. But it is standard fare these days, especially when people think they are protecting us from a banking run and the next great depression. But my concern is these measures lead to more economic inequality, populism, and eventual political turmoil.

[1] https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone... [2] https://am.jpmorgan.com/content/dam/jpm-am-aem/global/en/ins...

Most definitely. SVB had $3B+ of Circle’s deposits for USDC. Just covered dollar for dollar by the US Taxpayers. Can sell all those underwater bonds at face value while the taxpayers issue new bonds at 5%. Crypto just unbanked the banked with the help of the US Gov.

Exactly. Circle and USDC are essentially a bank themselves, and those deposits were just guaranteed. Risk free return.

Confidence in property rights? Not sure what you are talking about. They just provided guaranteed non-negative returns on loans. Put your dollars in a safety deposit box if you want property rights. Depositors need to be able to accept a haircut for banking to function, that's why you get interest and don't pay the bank.

The part that annoys me the most is the idea that all the depositors are mom and pop small businesses or early stage startups.

I’ve heard it said that Circle and USDC have an amazing business model: create a coin, call it a dollar, and deposit real dollars in the bank for interest while customers hold the coin. You don’t even have to offer a percent for the deposit like a normal bank. You can then make a couple percent on billions.

With this bailout the US Government just backstopped the business model with no haircut for a total lack of risk management. But sure, punish all banks (and thus customers / taxpayers) since the costs will be spread to others. Protecting us from systemic risks always seems to create more systemic risk. I’m sure were done though, they are putting protections in place this time.

What I find most disingenuous in this whole saga is the conflating of small business payroll depositors with all depositors. Circle & USDC rely on the interest rate earned on the stablecoin deposits for their business and SVB was providing that with poor risk management. With a $3B deposit (or more since they likely moved money out and partially caused the collapse), Circle should have been doing additional risk management beyond SVB, not just collecting interest. Now taxpayers are supposed to cover that failure?

Disagree. Figma should be competing with Adobe on the open market and winning. Seeing them displace CC in the enterprise in ways Sketch never did. $2-3B would be an insane propellent to them. This deal is great for Adobe, Figma, Greylock, and others, but not consumers or the majority of Figma users in my opinion. Glad to see the antitrust resurgence in this country. The rollup play is going away. Adobe's leaders are going to have to get more creative to compete :)

I wonder if it’s TikTok vs ByteDance. From my friend at the former, they are growing rapidly and understaffed vs the teams in China which are bloated and looking for projects. Also seems like they may need to sever the corporate structure and tech architecture which may also reduce the need for headcount in China.

You miss a big piece. These cities all allow new office spaces and thereby new jobs, since that brings in tax revenue. They just don’t allow new housing, so people pay astronomical prices, commute from far away, or live with entire families sharing spaces designed for single people. For an area that claims to care about the environment and the welfare of immigrants, the lack of building is selfish, greedy, and immoral and one of my biggest disappointments about where I grew up. I’m glad to see this being fixed at the state level and state law superseding local law.

So glad to see this. Military IT has been atrocious. I viewed the Navy Marine Corp Internet (NMCI) as damn near treasonous levels of awful when I got out a decade ago and assumed little improvement with the way contracts are done and the entrenched vendors. Happy to see Google win this not just because I prefer the solution now to MS, but that some change is happening. I still can’t believe we spent $7T on the global war on terror and no one is asking questions.

In the F/A-18 we had a selector that you could set to "both" or "rear only" exactly for this type of scenario. Qualified NFO in the backseat, you want both, and I know people who's lives were saved crashing off the carrier. But for a ride along, "rear only" is definitely the correct setting. And I'm pretty sure this has happened before, remember stories from years ago.

If able, perhaps focus on your earning potential. We’ve had a forty-year run of asset price inflation relative to wage inflation. We may have hit the end of this period and will see a realignment with wages increasing at a faster pace than capital assets, similar to what happened in the 1970s. The Asset Economy is a somewhat dry but interesting book that presents a more academic take on the economic patterns of the last forty years.[1] The increase in unionization efforts, anti-trust, and the inability of the FED to manage inflation seem to point in this direction.

Otherwise, monopolies still seem strong for now with pricing power. Areas the government will print money to fund also seem like a decent bet: defense, climate, …? And you can try to maintain purchasing power with gold or crypto or real estate (in non-bubble areas). But we may be entering some challenging times for those with assets.

1. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Asset+Economy-p-978150954345...

My biggest concern with that article is some of the assumptions, such as most the warheads will go after random army bases in unpopulated areas. I feel like that is a very “conventional” war attitude from an armchair tactician. My guess would be a strategy of annihilating all key US & EU population centers. Utterly destroy DC, NY, SF, LA, etc.

After spending a decade in the military, I saw a consistent theme of underestimating opponents and making plans on how we want them to act. War isn’t rational and never plays out how you want it to. The people trying to make nuclear war seem like a reasonable outcome terrify me, especially when they make assumptions about how the opponent would act that best aligns with what they want to happen.

I don’t get the “appeal to authority”? His analysis is some of the best I’ve read and seems to layout the two options the west has: nuclear war or cold war. I hope your outcome is correct, but that choice is really up to Putin. As a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan and former fighter pilot, I’m amazed at the naive warmongering on social media. People who ignored twenty years of war in the middle east are now all in for WW3. A no-fly zone means US jets shooting down Russian jets (and possibly Ukrainian jets or we aren’t neutral). And when US jets are shot down what do we do? People want to use NATO ground forces. When a tactical nuke is used against them, what do we do? People want regime change in Russia, when they counter and assassinate our politicians, what do we do? If we want to stand up for our values and Putin doesn’t change course, the best we can hope for is cold war 2. Cut off economically from Russia and any other country (China) that supports them. This will bring economic hardship across the world but it is better than armageddon. Maybe Putin changes course, I hope to god so, but we only have two options to really escalate if he doesn’t: cold war or hot.

A few months ago I agreed with her entirely. Tether is an unbacked fraud and NFTs are being front-run [1, 2]. The mid-level marketing Ponzi vibe is crazy. The latency of applications on the blockchain is atrocious. But more recently after learning from and interacting with people building in the space my assessment changed. There is an interesting intersection between tech, communities, and economics. There exists a transparency in the open-source code of smart contracts that will disrupt the current gatekeepers like the internet did.

Certainly, there are problems, but some things will live beyond the crash that is coming and change things in ways no one can be sure of. The internet started in the 1960s and was opened up commercially in 1989.[3] It feels like we are somewhere between 1995 and 2000. The energy feels similar with people trying to shove old paradigms into a new world, vaporware companies, and insane investments. I don’t think we’ve seen the top and it will likely make the crash of 2001 look small by comparison. I may be wrong, but if I’m not, it still is early.

[1] https://bitfinexed.medium.com/tether-is-setting-a-new-standa... [2] https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1457749433844568066 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet

The rampant cynicism regarding corporations is increasingly unhelpful. We’ve had forty years of hands off antitrust regulation and enforcement. We’ve had a bifurcating justice system that doesn’t hold white collar criminals accountable. It hasn’t always been this way and doesn’t have to stay this way. For those interested in the challenges we’re facing with monopolies and individuals trying to effect change, I recommend Matt Stoller’s substack [1].

1. https://mattstoller.substack.com/

It amazes me that the consumer welfare standard has become so ingrained in legal antitrust. How is a company town, feudalism, or even slavery not the purest endgame of this logic? Own nothing and forever be indebted. “Wow, everything is free for most consumers, I guess we created a great world!” Can we move on to the total welfare standard, please. [1]

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...

You are on a bad team it seems. I wouldn’t blame your teammates and look at how you got there. They are probably better than you realize but motivation can play a huge role in interactions and performance.

You’ve said in a comment you have been at startups hiring and building teams. Those are growing teams. You are used to growing, building, and acting with accountability. Now you are on a team with turnover, that probably isn’t growing. Why? Is the team going to be shut down because of low value? Is it in a purely a maintenance function that will just be starved of resources? Is there bad leadership that can’t fix problems and has unrealistic expectations?

Likely whatever is wrong is out of your control. Don’t burn out trying to save something you might not even understand. Do a good job and try to learn “big org”. Look for a different team. Focus on extracurriculars. And find a new job at the year mark if it doesn’t get better (or earlier if you have too). Good luck.

Having spent a decade involved with the military, both big (as a Navy fighter pilot) and small (a tour in Baghdad assisting special forces), I’m disgusted by the waste, destructiveness, and ineffectiveness of these wars. Some of the events that stick in my memory:

In 2007, Marine prowler pilots ran it up the chain of command that they were having “zero” effects stopping IEDs in Iraq. They were told to shut up and keep flying the missions even though ground forces would turn off their “effective” vehicle jammers thinking the planes provided support.

My friend, flying an F-18, found insurgents shooting rockets at a base, and instead of using a laser or gps guided bomb to take out the threat, he was told to spot for artillery, which preceded to miss the target on multiple shots until the enemy drove away.

One of the more effective planes that JSOC leveraged was the super tucano, that could fly at $600 per flight hour versus $10k for an F-18, and also do a better job. Big Navy and Air Force joined together to shut down the program trying to expand its usage.

The massive number of contractors in Baghdad, driving around brand new F-350s. Getting paid ungodly sums of money next to their poorly paid military counterparts. Ex-pilots getting paid $20k+ a month for a job I’d happily have done instead of my near meaningless ground-tour job. The SF guys complaining about their “support” contractors getting paid $1k a day and taking none of the risks.

Patraeus having a peace deal with Sadr that said US troops wouldn’t enter Sadr City, but of course, all the attacks started being launched from there. So he wanted SF to go in with their Iraq counterparts, not on official orders, but just from a phone call, and not to file a secret after-action report, all so he could claim plausible deniability. An awesome SF captain said “fuck that” and his leadership agreed, telling the general he could provide the order over a phone call but they wouldn’t stop filing after-action reports.

I remember Tailhook and all the admirals, McCain, and CEOs of leading contractors all schmoozing it up. Proceeding to build planes and weapons the operators didn’t want: one plane to do everything (JSF), a crapy Navy ATFLIR (when the Sniper was better). Topgun instructors were ordered not to talk about deploying Sniper pods on F-18s. I’m sure some of the admirals are probably on the board of directors now.

The level of grift in senior leadership is just amazing. What an embarrassing moment for the talking heads and leaders of our national security apparatus. Afghanistan should never have been more than SF and airpower. And the Iraq war never should have been. We can’t build nations with the military. But once a war starts, everyone wants to play because it’s the money spigot. Not too different from large civilian orgs.

But really this is all our fault. I remember sitting in a palace on a hill in Baghdad, in an SF operations center, watching a wall-full of flatscreen displays, with predator feeds of young SF soldiers risking their lives, next to talking heads screaming about the developing financial crisis. Seeing the massive outcry and response to the stock market crashing, I realized the wars were just a tv show and didn’t really matter. No one cared, especially compared to their pocketbook. And once I got out in 2011, I didn’t pay much attention myself either. But I do vote now for politicians who talk about reducing the US military presence abroad and view with disgust fake hawks who’ve never served but are happy to send others to war for American prestige. And good on Biden for finally pulling the plug even if the execution bordered on incompetence. There probably really wasn’t another option. Listen to the generals who’d say “stay, we can’t give up”…. the endless graft. A sad time for many of the Afghan people. /rant.

“Giving away their vaccine” is the straw man. There is a huge range between free and maximum profits. I’m not arguing that they shouldn’t be incentivized with a profit, the question is how much and what's in the best interest of the American people, not just Pfizer and Moderna.

That’s a straw man argument. They’ve made billions and will make billions more. Nothing is being given away for free. But currently, it is in their financial interests for this pandemic to go on indefinitely with continued mutations and a never-ending need for boosters. And our free market always seems to tilt in favor of monopolies. Shut down small businesses but don’t put any pressure on big pharma. Similar to 2008, let average people suffer but prop up the banks. I believe in free markets, but there is a reason people are turning against capitalism. No markets are truly free and we need consistent values applied to players big and small. Helping the world get vaccinated is the morally right thing to do, not optimizing pharma profits for the next decade under the guise of “incentives.”

What I don’t understand is how we can shut down the economy with a huge impact on small businesses, but not force the drug manufactures to share the capability with the rest of the world. We complain about the unvaccinated in the US and the possibility of mutations, but then don’t do everything we can to help vaccinate the world and prevent mutations. And Russia and China are sharing the less effective vaccines they developed.[1] The whole things seems tragic, hypocritical, and an inevitable blow to America abroad.

1. https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/bidens-failure-on-covid-v...

Salesforce | Distributed Systems / Backend | Multiple Levels | San Francisco, Palo Alto, Remote | $150k+ | Full Time | Visas Come help Sales Cloud find Insights from its activity data. The Activity Insights team is responsible for running machine learning and heuristic models on top of the massive data set that is Salesforce. We not only generate Insights but are own the alerting engine for the new High Velocity Sales product. Work closely with data science, product management, user interface, and infrastructure teams to build the scalable and intelligent future of CRM software. Tech: Kotlin, Scala, Storm, Spark, Cassandra, Postgres, Kafka, GraphQL, TensorFlow Serving, Docker, and more, all running in Amazon Web Services. Contact: s.young@salesforce.com

While I applaud this move, I still feel the FAA is woefully failing at integrating UAS into the airspace. The Beyond Visual Line of Site issue still seems like a blocker to real adoption and with no real path forward yet. It baffles me that the airspace up to 200’ above private property can’t be BVLOS for the owner. This would enable advances in agriculture, construction, security, ranching, utility inspections, and certainly many more areas.

Additionally, the idea that the FEDs can manage all this is insane. Drones are not airlines, where a city 30k’ below a flight path shouldn’t have a say in the flight. If drone flights take off, land, or transits a cities boundaries, that city should be more involved than the FEDs, who should just manage overall safety and compliance. The future of drones and beyond visual line of sight over other people's property will be more akin to cars, the DMV, and public roads, than to aircraft, airlines, and the ATC. It will require a ton of local involvement, which, unfortunately, the major corporate players focused on delivery don’t want.

I joined in 2015 and left after 2 months. I had left a fast growing late-stage startup, AppDynamics, where revenue was doubling every 12 months, from $75M to about $150M when I left. The director of engineering at Optimizely who hired me said their revenue was doubling too, from $40M to $80M. At the next all hands a few weeks later, the CEO said revenue had been declining slightly for 2 straight quarters. At lunch, after the all hands, no one seemed to care. Someone literally complained that their friends at AirBnb got duck for lunch and we didn’t. The director either lied to me or didn’t know. People were nice and smart, but it was clearly going off a cliff. It seems for many B2B startups the march up the value chain to enterprise is challenging, especially with regards to pricing. I remember the president of sales at AppDyanmics would not cut prices to compete against New Relic in the self-serve market. At Optimizely, I recall enterprises were pissed at being charged more just for better SLAs. From other comments it sounds like they finally figured out the enterprise pricing model by jettisoning self-service. Not sure if that was the right call or they could have found better success by avoiding the pricing consultant fiasco. Though I vaguely recall they were losing too much money per customer so that needed fixing. In any event, it’s hard enough to make money in startups as an employee, but declining revenue at a growth stage startup is a death sentence for your equity. I liked the people at Optimizely, the transparent culture was great, and I wished it would have done better, but the writing was on the wall. Sure enough, not long after leaving the first round of layoffs came, private equity invested, and the announcement was revenues doubled over the prior 18 months, minus the detail of the last 6 being flat to down. Sorry to hear about the impact on you. This is a problem with the current state of startups staying private longer and why I likely won’t work for one that doesn’t have an extended exercise window [1].

[1] https://zachholman.com/posts/fuck-your-90-day-exercise-windo...