tasssko

I have done some marketing outsourcing and after my experience i would not recommend it. Incentives are definitely not aligned. They charged fixed fees for services that i felt didn’t add any value but increased costs, they used up significant quantities of our time. One time while looking into why we weren’t seeing conversions i noticed there was some incorrect configs on some adgroups. A whole months budget blown in a few hours. No apologies, it was an accident. I still had a invoice from them at the end of that month. If I hadn’t dug in I don’t think they would have been forthcoming with it. Our CAC was impossibly high and in the end I struggled to see the value, i also had no control and was loosing trust. There is also the problem that marketers tend to be good talkers and they always had something to say about the results (agree they had to do this with the pandemic going on). Our budget was mid-level five figures which should have yielded some value but we have ditched all the services they setup for us (it was not done very well) and we’ve chosen new tools. For example they put us on Hubspot we have just shifted to a few replacement tools. If you do go ahead remember marketing effort is difficult to price you are paying todays income for future revenue. The results from your marketing outsourcing agency will only be known after 3-12 months. Marketing like DevOps should be a core capability of any business. You might be able to do it but it will be better via a consultant not an agency. You have more control then.

Bill Gates has a team of people in a ‘family office’ managing his money the reality he probably had a windfall last year and needed to do something with it. Usually when you have a windfall you buy treasuries because they can be liquidated easily when new opportunities are available. Buying treasuries is a bad idea at the moment, they have negative yields when you factor in inflation. He probably had no good stock opportunities and there may have been more opportunities in farm land. Would he have used a loan… maybe I don’t know the details but also maybe not his investment funds don’t need the loans. My point is he has a good team managing his wealth and it will most certainly grow as a result and this team will also find good opportunities for him to grow his wealth. This should not be surprising.

Yes, we have a smaller growing window. My father has found it hard to figure growing conditions out, but his yields have improved year on year he has a nice backyard garden with all kinds of vegetables and fruit trees.

I wish I could put you in touch with my father. He grew up in the DRC he loves gardening and he lives here in the UK now. I grew up with very large vegetable gardens my whole life in Zimbabwe. He has loads of experience gardening in the tropics and I grew up with a healthy respect for this hobby he cultivated. I can offer a tiny bit of advice. Plants will grow in the most difficult of conditions, you probably won’t get it the first time just keep going. My father had chickens (100x better compost) in Zimbabwe we sometimes struggled for water, something that won’t be hard for you however good soil composition can help retain moisture and eek out time when you are water rationing and waiting for rain.

Okra is very good if done right. https://youtu.be/GMnsdI0nO7s

No chance with that comparison. Per unit economics are different, marginal utility is different. Total cost of ownership is different. Pandemic has wreaked havoc for automakers and... for WFH Tesla owners made the 1k monthly car payment look unnecessary while most iPhone users upgraded phones.

I find it unbelievable that he would use a public company for this kind of speculation. It is grossly irresponsible.

I agree with you, as a parent i witness how my child uses his technology. I did think to mention that we might have biases, as technologists our world view is dominated by technology. My child has a ipad and i have a few computers and game consoles in house. By observing me my child sees how i use technology.

I am hopeful we will see a creative renaissance in technology in our children. You can do more than consume with your phone today. Our children have ipads which are hybrid computers at a young age and are learning to access information more readily. They are general knowledge whizzes and learning to do more than just consuming. The software is better and with cloud services the average child will probably never see a data center or build a PC however they most definitely will use airtable and probably build an app in the cloud. The world for them will have opportunities at higher levels of abstraction. At least i hope that is the case.

Thanks for the correction.

Too high for me too. I’d consider the marginal utility of their self driving more at a price like that. The motor industry is in a interesting place with more of them considering subscriptions for feature unlocks. I think it’s a good thing if it means they can invest more to create better software. I don’t agree with it however and if i buy a car i want to know i own the car and won’t need a subscription to operate features. For example My Mercedes Me subscription lapsed a year or two ago i can’t be bothered to renew it… the features are just not that useful. Considering that many of the Mercedes Me features are free on a Tesla.

I don’t envy Elon having to forge a new business like SpaceX on public markets and dealing with the the court of public opinion in a new field with new business models, high capex, high risk. Bezos doesn’t have that and he has the capital to avoid it a bit longer.

The pandemic has definitely accelerated progress in the EV space, many places had clean air for once. Unfortunately there are very few good EVs (dedicated platform and not based on a ICE) but that is changing. Like the Porsche Taycan and Jaguar iPace both good. So this new charger infrastructure is exciting. I don’t understand why you want to diagnose me. All businesses do marketing, i am not caught up on anything. This page is a conversation based on an article about Elon Musk. I do appreciate your responses and i accept diverse views but i think people will be studying what Elon, Tesla and SpaceX have done many years from now and also what Mercedes and Volkswagen did too. I do think we will see more innovation in EV charging and I don’t think the existing business models will last. Thanks for the links. Yes what BP is doing looks good.

Yes it was a bit late (past midnight). Personal security doesn’t get enough conversation.

Sorry it was late past midnight and i did not find anything that could help with a opensource tool like nginx plus modsecurity. However I shared documentation that can help logically identify potential exploits and with nginx plus lua it’s possible this can easily be updated. The OWASP filters are similar. Yes we have done some automation like this many years ago but today we mainly use public cloud WAFs.

Using AWS WAF; https://aws.amazon.com/solutions/implementations/aws-waf-sec...

Some bespoke WAF automation setups. You can mix in ML in this to add anomaly detection.

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/security/automatically-updating...

I wish we had better finance education in school. Not job seeking and career guidance but more around saving and investing. Running a business and being financially free. Today there is so much fakery out there. On the topic of cashflow consider the cost of capital and discount future cashflow to be on the safe side. A bird in hand is worth two in the bush. Wise words.

I don’t think you should pretend you live in a socialist society, progress is made with business and competition. Charging at home is your innovation to replace dependence on fuelling stations. The global super charger network is Teslas competitive advantage against incumbents, its just a simple business strategy and has proved to be a valuable asset. Have you considered the negative externalities of your ICE vehicle? Perhaps the children in the playground breathing in the exhaust fumes are too disconnected from you to care? Imagine if a shell or total decided to convert part of their fuel station franchise to EV Charger networks? High voltage charging could provide enough power to get you home and you can top ip there. Your frustration is probably because the only company that gets it is tesla. Owning any other EV is painful because the consortium based charging networks they created lack standards and maintenance to be relied on.

Thanks for your reply, you see competition is working.

The charging infrastructure is a competitive advantage. Tesla is a business we are talking about capitalism. You can charge your EV at home, you won’t need a fuelling station. That is progress.

It is not as complicated as fitting defeat devices to diesel vehicles and lying about emissions repeatedly. I hardly see the value of your comment. Is it Elon’s and Teslas responsibility to work with old-guard car manufacturers to ensure compatibility? Anyway I think you mistake the purpose of a vision.

Most of these tips are covered by ISO27001 and other similar certifications and i consider it MVP security. You will need to do more today to stay ahead especially if you manage or protect valuable assets. Some tips that come to mind are; manage ingress traffic to your web property with a web application firewall. Setup machine learning to automate blacklist detection and dynamically update blacklists. Use principle of least privilege and role based access to manage users. Protect root accounts with webauthn avoid using them. Setup conditional access control policies to ensure certain roles have more stringent constraints. Mind your dependencies many future exploits will come from dependencies. Partition your pipelines so environments are isolated. Monitor egress traffic if possible. Use VPNs to connect environments but don’t use VPNs if you don’t know how to monitor them (its a complex abstraction and ipsec can be tricky). Once all these technical considerations are in progress consider the developer onboarding process and application connectivity try to implement context segmentation to avoid creating root service and make sire all activities are logged to a monitored aggregator. Look for suspicious activity that can originate in the source. The list goes on and on and on.

Elon is a personality, what the author gets right is he sets out by identifying the vision for the organisation, this helps to align the employees and customers in a way no corporate does (i.e especially not his competitors). Most corporate visions are poorly put together and sound similar “we want to do well to make our shareholders richer”. Elon’s vision involves humanity in its success, this is a unique differentiator. Elon has worked on building a controversial personal brand and as a result also put his companies in the lime light for free. Tesla and Spacex own a significant percent of the news today in their respective categories. He has disrupted corporate communications from the old faceless corporate PR to a champion of and relatable corporate personality.

This is a complex problem and I think the best we can hope for is to close any loopholes and manage with taxes and laws for the effects of negative externalities from high net worth individuals.

Ebay helped facilitate a fraud against me and are still on my black list. The whole process was horrible and costly. Up until it happened i used them regularly to buy and sell. I know its tangential but my thoughts are based on your white list. Essentially eBay and to a degree Amazon are perpetrating fraud indirectly on a massive scale.

Regardless of the perpetrator at Netflix to be named as one of the companies implicated in this is also very damning. I have looked at all the suppliers and added them to my black list. Fortunately I have never worked with any of them so I don't have to cancel anything.

Yes indeed. I get Evernote but not 1Password. The issue with Evernote for me was it kept getting slower and they lost me when they changed pricing, I felt they had lost their way and it was really easy to change note apps. I prefer simpler note apps today, even Google docs or Word. 1Password is good, the windows app could be better and browser integration is a pain but it’s solid.

I agree with you, technical tricks could instead evolve into the person worrying constantly about not looking at their phone. Mindfulness and preparation make this easier, however it is not easy. Personally I deal with this by putting the phone down, using DND mode and have most notifications off. That doesn't stop me thinking about 'whats happening on HN' or in the news or on social media. It's a constant process that needs work. I'm not an expert so I won't pretend to know any more than this but I have also recently started telling myself that there isn't anything important that can't wait.

Source please?

Here is one source[1] this science is not new. The no dig farming movement takes this further because they don’t till the land the soil retains more co2. [1]https://www.soilassociation.org/media/4954/policy_soil_carbo...

The issue here is there is no balance in the discussion. we push people to be vegan and they become radical environmentalists but the vegan lifestyle for the average person is filled with processed foods with no discussion of the environmental impact of food processing. Busy people have no time for some of the food preparation required to be vegan. There is no balance of conversation at all.

Regarding the comment about me paying higher prices, I can't agree. I spend an aggregate of about £1.50 / head on meat per day which is much less than if I decided to buy any processed soy or processed plant protein.