timavr

Longtermism reminds of Soviet version of communism where problems of today were justified in the name of “the bright future”.

- Decent Human Being - Hard Worker - Wicked Smart - Someone I want to spend time with

Still. The biggest hurdle is building what people want.

Sure, but if I can work from home in Malibu, it is a sweet deal too.

But for most people in LA, it is not the case.

Lived in LA for a decade plus.

The biggest problem in LA is the traffic, plus that you need a car to go anywhere.

Try to go on average day from Griffith Park(Observatory in the picture) to Santa Monica(surfing). You will hate your life.

People who live in LA are kinda used to crazy traffic, but if your value your time, LA is not the place to be

Just wondering at what point it stops being business and becomes theft.

50% mark-up $100m painting seems excessive.

For starters there are two types of loans in the system, federal(92%) and private(8%).

Federal is less of a loan, but more a subsidy that you have to repay at later date if you can. There is no market mechanism involved, government sets the terms and rules. Overall if you have your shit together(push paperwork on time), it is nearly impossible to default on that type of a loan. So for all intense and purposes, those loans are just another hidden tax.

The benefits of this system is arguable, but for America where people hate to pay taxes and government needs to put people through college, this is not a bad option.

But... There are two massive problems in the system, private loans and the way colleges charge for education. First a lot of colleges are free to set fees any way they like, as a result in many cases federal loans are not enough and people are forced to take private loans. The problem with private loans, that they are completely market driven(higher, fees, higher costs, depends on your assets etc), but you can't get rid off them via bankruptcy which is absolutely nuts.

Overall the whole system regardless of country is very unfair and regressive in nature(poor people pay more then rich) and represents an example of broken social contract between government and its citizens. As student debt skyrockets, it also impacts the broader economy and forces people to go into debt to pay day to day expenses.

But maybe it is all by design. It is much easier to control people if they are in debt very early on in live vs debt free.

Very on point. We have democracy on a government level and have 1 day in 2 years to select our representatives. For the rest of the time we have to please our boss, that we have not much say about and that has a lot of power about economic circumstances.

Yes, we can always find another boss, but mentally on day to day basis it is not that different to dictatorship.

Lambda School run into the realities of education economics.

As a society, we decided to subsidize high performers so they can actually focus on building/researching things and securitize everyone else.

The fact of the matter is educating high performers is cheaper short term( they teach themselves and process information better) and exponentially more valuable long term (they get good jobs, go into business or lead lucrative fields) If we sort out people based on similar ratings as applied to bonds, Lambda school works with Cs. It doesn't mean that everyone is bad, it just means on average the level of people is bad. All A people are picked by good unis via scholarships. B people can't get a scholarship but have good enough grades to get into B schools and pay via a loan or via relatives.

Lambda School is focusing on everyone else, but hopefully, there is a lot of everyone else. The model should have been on looking at Cs and separating good Cs from bad Cs. A good C is normally a student that didn't have opportunities or environment to become A, but have innate ability to do so, given the opportunity and resources.

If you don't really have the tools to distinguished good Cs from bad Cs, you can enroll as many people as possible and hopefully RNG your way to success. The problem with that strategy is that a lot of bad Cs will be unhappy with job outcomes, struggle with courses, generate bad press impacting recruitment, and more importantly be a massive drain on teaching resources.

I still think Lambda School is onto something but trying to do this via hypergrowth focused VC funding is a challenge.

On another topic, the hack I use in recruiting people who didn't have the opportunity to learn CS is to ask them to do CS50 in their own time. About 90% of people never come back, about 5% start but never finish or take too long to finish, and about 5% knock it out of the park. Those 5% generally were always worth my time advising and if we were lucky working with them. It doesn't mean they will become rockstar programmers, but it means they have learning ability and with enough time and resources will become a net positive to the company in a variety of engineering and engineering adjacent roles.

There are a lot of moving parts. Sculpting, UV Mapping, Rigging, Skinning, Animation, LODs, Baking, Texturing, engine import, lighting, materials.

A lot of things can be done procedurally, but going from 2d concept to actual working 3D Character in video game is a long jump.

On top of that every game will have very different asset and gameplay requirements.

Look I don't mind that defence.

But can we like all get such good defence. Where do I sign up or who to vote for so every American citizen gets a legal representation like this.

Normally if you defraud somebody, you are going to prison for a long, long time very very quickly.

Somebody should do a startup that just confirms money in a bank account.

Love how they fight for drivers rights and working real hard to replace them with self driving fleet.

We don't know what is their risk profile.

The goal should never be to beat the market, but to beat the market relative to risk exposure.

I don’t doubt though that a lot of money is wasted on fees and salaries can be preserved via passive investing.

Just got this e-mail in my inbox. Just replaced my company name.

Subject: What's Beta's post-COVID plan?

Hey Tima,

Looked into Beta today--pretty cool what you're doing.

As a remote accelerator, we've had a spike in applications recently from startups forced to go remote because of the quarantine, and much of our investor network is still investing.

We’re interested in what you’re building, and since many companies are gearing up for the post-pandemic economy I thought Beta would be a good fit for our accelerator.

Just to give you a quick run down:

-We run several cohorts per year for startups in the Pre-Seed, Seed, & Series A stages, investing up to $250k into the top companies. -We've helped companies raise over $150m+ in funding. -We help companies with marketing, fundraising, growth-hacking, and even exit plans in our curriculum and 1-on-1 advising. -Our program includes free resources like Foundersuite, AWS credits, Microsoft Azure, etc. -We've always been a remote accelerator well before recent events--our entire program is designed around connecting founders with mentors and investors remotely.

If you’re interested, you can read more about the program and apply here: https://launch.newchip.com/apply-now

-Ryan

P.S. We’ve been working 24/7 reviewing investments for our cohort companies from our demo day, but feel free to message me if you have any questions (might take me a day or two to respond but I will!)

I didn’t know Uber is live in Syria.

For startes I do run a business, but it is irrelevant. To understand how economy works, algebra is enough.

There is nothing wrong with government providing liquidity by purchasing corporate debt and replacing lost cashflows.

A lot of corporation are so leveraged, that if they can't get the new loans to pay principles on old loans, they are in big trouble. They constantly refinancing every few years.

Market conditions are so uncertain right now, that investors don't want any of that and would like to sit on the sidelines or charge crazy interest rates.

As a result Fed stepped in and said that they are happy to participate in the market to make sure the interest rate stay low and companies have access to capital.

EXAMPLE:

Corp borrows 100 dollars to build a factory at 5% annual interest to be repaid back a year later.

Corp builds a factory and makes 7 dollars that year profit.

In the end of the year they have 2 dollars in their account ( 7 minus 5 interest). So how they supposed to pay back 100 they borrowed?

They just go borrow another 100 , pay it back to early investors and cycle repeats. This business is generating 2% return to shareholders and 5% to bond holders. Sucks to be a shareholder in this, but they are in the green.

Obviously it is way more complicated in real life but it is exactly the same principle. Access and cost to capital is what businesses needs to survive. Here is example of Tesla doing it -> https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/31/investing/tesla-cash-crun....

The moral here is that Fed willingly just creates money out of the thing air, totally realizing that they might never get it back. If those loans blow up, they just write it off and add to the national debt for future generations to pay.

If corporation goes bankrupt, nobody is chasing CEOs to pay back their multimillion salaries funded by taxpayes. It is just cost of doing business and I am fine with it.

Can we just extend same courtesy to the rest of the citizens. As the great American philosopher said: "Corporations are people my friend"

I think the discussion here about online recurring payment services, where customers just churn if you ignore them long enough.

One off projects, yep you better do everything what client says and don't forget to chase after them to pay up even if everything is done to spec.

It is a resources allocation problem.

Support is very linear in nature. More issues you have, more people you need to take in feedback and act on it. For early companies with very MVP products, support can just kill them, because they will spend all day long doing support stuff vs building. By definition their products are going to be bad.

On top of that reporting issue is just 1% of work, because you actually need someone to go and reproduce that issue. If it is a feature request, then it is another massive chunk of work to spec it and even decide to do it or not to do it.

Also when you post it in the forum, it is way easier to get back to and companies will ask to login support tickets with production accout details, so they can actually go back into the logs and match that data.

Bad customers provide value early on, because they basically do free QA.

Also early there is not enough data to know who are the bad customers or who customers who are having real problems, they all look the same.

The best way to deal with them is just to be honest: "This is not on our roadmap, yes we know issues exists. Here is link to issues forum"

Public issues forum helps a lot, because if issue doesn't have upvotes or comments, they can reason that chances for developers getting to it is nearly zero.

Especially for anything below non pure enterprise 100k+ per customer, there is no way team can address even 2% of issues if there is even hint of PMF.

Even for massive companies like Atlassian and Unity there are public feature requests that have thousands of upvotes and they just don't do them because it is not on the roadmap.

The situation with debt for average Americans is criminal.

Why lifes and mental health are being ruined, while Fed is just pumping gazillion of free money into corporations?

Not taking any debt is the best decision the person can make in their lifetime. In some cases it is OK to do it, when buying a house or using debt for business purpose from non institutional lender: friends, family etc.

Companies should just write it off. It is just money.

For any non-violent crimes we should not send people to prison. I don't even know why it became a criminal matter. Civil courts can do that job really well.

If we prosecute everyone who took information from the previous job, then there will no sales people left. I don't know any SaaS sales person who doesn't take their sales funnel with them.

The problem with that approach as in any negotiation that in order to be successful, you need to put your job on the line every time you go to negotiate to have the maximum leverage. It is all fine and dandy if you win every time, but if you go and they don't budge and your stay, your leverage is basically gone.

People early in their careers have flexibility of moving around, but if you have mortgage, kids, family or need to take care of your parents, this strategy carries a lot of external costs.

For games speficaly it is nealry impossible to negotiate meaningfully because every postion is budgeted ahead of time, including salary increases. By that I mean if someone asks for 5% increase, they are basically negotiating against spreadsheet, not human across from them. The best one can do is to hit just under the cut-off line.

On top of that, employee providing different "value" to the company is just a myth, because if someone was literally providing value to multi billion company they would be paid millions. For most people their value is just replacement market value.

If people want a meaninful compensation in games, they have to be an executive or creating new revenue stream for the company.

It depends on the mindset. From my point of view, it is a huge success, because now when you apply for normal game jobs, you will massively stand out for creating something that people used and supported it over time. Basically you will have job for life. Most developers can only dream of that outcome.

From business side, I don't think it has anything to do with you. Quite often it is down to luck, ability to predict where market is going next and execution.

It is tough for Monogame C# framework to compete with Unity. Your tool is basically build on top of their Monogame funnel, so if their funnel is tiny, then you screwed. But at the time it is hard to see how it was going to go, because Unity has so many problems and closed source didn't really help.

Number of problems increased exponentially on the Unity side, but it became industry standard, so today if you making games and not using Unity/Unreal and not AAA studio, it is super risky to get funded.

I assume that the money is just laundered and appears as clean money on accounts.

If drugs distributor has money in cash, they will probably engage in loaning short-term to ligitimate businessses with very predictable massive cashflows that pay in cash: construction, cleaning, farming, gambling etc. They don't even have to pay in cash, as long as they have cash receivables that will work as well.

They probably called something like Farming Loans Inc and deliver cash in the beginning of the month for business to meet their cash requirements. They either use it to pay their workers or will just deposit into their account as revenue. Month later they just send me back the check,that is loan pay back that is 100% clean money.

Obviously they will need to manage Farming Loans Inc balance sheet to explain where the seed money for loans are coming from, but that's where white colar crime comes in, where not so good accountants and lawyers will cook books.

For ransom money, the system will be even more cleaner. Somebody will create offshore consulting security firm, that will engage clients in return for consulting fees. So if somebody has breach, they will call them and like we need some consulting. Consulting firm will talk to ransom guys, get keys and then bill the client. So if you accountant and look at the balance sheet of multimillion dollar company, you will see consulting fee invoice and that is pretty much it. For IRS or FBI to dig any evidence, they will have to get a whistleblower plus somehow get the documents of offshore company, which makes it impossible.

In the end of the day white colar crime is 100x bigger then anything to do with drugs/ ransomware and it starts early, because the system pushes people to behave this way and 100% trust base and a lot of behaviours are 100% legal.

The good example is retail brokerage companies that encourage day trading, options trading, FX pares trading. This is just a scam, but hey why not.

It wouldn't work in this case. It will be similar to drug trade, where everything is hush hush and the price probably will go up. It will just push more innocent people into white colar crime.

You are running the company. You spend all your life getting to CEO position. And then boom breach and your company has massive loss, lawsuits and you are out of the job. Probably 9/10 CEO types will just engage in a crime to avoid that situation.

Current situation is way better. All breaches are public, prices are public, so the correct answer is to invest in security and if you get caught with your pants down, just pay the fee Let justice department handle it from that point on.

The way bank robberies are handled is the best. Just give them everything they ask for. In the end of the day it is either insured and even if it is not, it is stupid to risk anyones life for money created in fractional-reserve banking system.

People who give a great advice can back it up by data, logical explanation, operational experience and are aware of their limitations.

People who give bad advice are people who repeat the people above, but without relevant background.

It is not about the audience, it is about the messenger.

The problem is that the same argument is used in dictatorships to ban people and activist from traditional media(print/TV).

Right now, what prevents Russian government/companies going to twitter and telling them look guys, you just banned your American extremists, can you please do the same for ours. They also practice hate speech, disinformation etc. The only problem is that Russian extremists look like average centrist US democrat.

In terms what is the right and what is not the right is not really for twitter to determine in this case. My point was it should be determine on legislative level what should be on twitter and what shouldn't.

In the end of the day twitter is a massive part of the political process. People exercising their rights, complaining to their representatives, supporting them, spreading their message.

So if you ban entitties from twitter, you ban them from political process. And I do think some entities should be banned, but it shouldn't be up to twitter, it should be up to us citizens to decide that.

If we think that holocost-deniers, nazy sympaphizers or whatever should be banned from social media bring it to the vote, pass the law, hopefully it will stand supreme court challenge and move on.

I don't know what is the right answer.

It is like we are stuck between two evils.

One is censorship, that is used by dominant group to silence everyone else.

Another is bunch of minority groups that might have outlandish aims and use free speech platforms to harrass everyone else.

What I don't like that it is left to private company to sort it out and enact their own policies. This questions should be clearly handled on legislative level. In the end of the day a company provides a service, they shouldn't be the judge of how much free speech is allowed/not allowed.

So I would say it is not failure of twitter here, it is just massive failure of our political process, but we all kind of know that already.

That was my point.