wegs2

For business continuity:

open source > proprietary > proprietary with activation servers > SaaS

All of those have bins within them too. For example, Google SaaS, or bootstrap startup, will be lower continuity than vendors known for LTS.

Business continuity also changes the buy-build dynamic in ways not always factored in.

I can spend $30 casually, and I wouldn't spend $50-$70 casually, which means Pine64 is exactly at my price point.

I think a lot of that can be managed with messaging and expectation-setting.

My experience hasn't been that volume is manufacturing-limited. A frobitz costs $50 to make, ship, support, etc:

- I know I'll sell 200

- I think I might sell 800

- Best-case, I'll sell 1600

Without preorders, if I order 200 and sell for $60, I'll come out $2000 ahead guaranteed. If I order 800, I might come out $8000 ahead, or I might come out $28k behind. If I order 1600, I'll be almost guaranteed to come out behind.

Ergo, it makes more sense for me to order as many as I *know* I'll sell, and to have shortages than it does to order extra. Unsold units cost a lot, and can drive me bankrupt. Shortages are a bit of lost profit. That's especially true for low-volume, as is the case here.

A comment to all companies:

With current shortages, PLEASE include "pre-order" rather than just "out-of-stock." There are a lot of items where I don't mind waiting, but I WILL forget. Here, the sealed watch is available, but the dev kit comes in September.

Why do I need to set a calendar reminder for September and then (perhaps) place an order? Can't I just pay now, and you'll deliver when it's ready (or refund if it's never ready)?

That's double true for things like graphics cards and other extreme shortages.

Aside from making it easier on me, YOU can plan demand. YOU can place appropriate manufacturing orders. If you have 1000 preorders, you can order 1200 devices. Otherwise, you'll be ordering 200, and find yourself out-of-stock again (or with a glut).

Perhaps. I think the key question is how quickly the cost of alternatives goes down relative to oil.

But if Greenland is the last reserve of oil left on the planet, the value of that oil will be astronomical. Holding off on drilling during cheap oil is a good investment.

I think, in this case, the rich encroach on my privacy enough that it seems proportionate.

It's not okay to shoot your neighbor. It is okay to shoot your neighbor if they're shooting at you.

When the rich stop trading my data, I'll fight for their privacy too.

In the US, marriage is bound by laws created by an active divorce lobby. Divorce is a huge industry.

In my state, divorce, for a men, generally means paying roughly 1/3 of your income in child support, and splitting child-rearing expenses after that. To most people, that's financially devastating.

Before:

Mom earns $100k, $66k after taxes

Dad earns $100k, $66k after taxes

After, Mom gets $88k after taxes, dad gets $44k after taxes.

Uneven income, and Mom gets alimony too.

Mom signs kids up for a $24k/kid child care with 2 kids. Dad pays $24k and is left with $20k for his own living expenses. Mom is left with $62k. Many Moms do things like this punitively, because they hate Dad. Dad is living in poverty, and it's life-ending. Mom is using child support to buy fancy clothes for herself.

Most of this is nonsense, but I'll point out a few things:

"Infringement and damages are unrelated concepts"

No. They're the same concept. Infringement is okay if there are no damages. That's how a lawyer reads a contract. You're merely confusing types of damages. There are many ways to calculate damages. You're describing statutory damages. You usually run the calculation all ways, and take the greatest number which applies (but not always). That's how you might get into hundreds of thousands of dollars of damages for an MP3 collection.

"unless you're sitting down with a lawyer (which let's face most open source projects are not)"

No, this isn't right. Most major free software projects do have access to lawyers. I've worked on several, and what I did was always reviewed by in-house counsel (and not just one organization). Even if there isn't a corporate sponsor, that's what a lot of the free software / open source not-for-profits do. I've had conversations with volunteer counsels too. Most minor projects generally won't need a sit-down session with a lawyer, but if they want access for whatever reason, it's not rocket science either:

1) Look into your social network. I have 3 or 4 lawyers who went to the same college I did. When I have a legal question, I do call them up. For something as simply as the nonsense you're spouting, any lawyer can set you straight.

2) If you are doing work at a company above a hundred people, it will have an in-house counsel. Shoot them a quick email. Most are friendly; that's what they're there for.

3) If you're not (1) or (2), you probably have someone like me in your network.

4) And if all else fails, you can go to the right meetup.

My experience is that for a volunteer project, open source, or similar, most lawyers are glad to chat.

"Just read the damn license"

This is just about the worst advice on HN. Your options:

1) Read the license with a lawyer

2) Read the license as well as articles from actual lawyers about the license

3) Learn enough about law to read the license correctly.

You're misreading the licenses, and that's what's dangerous. It's kind of like referring people to WebMD over a doctor.

You're reading it wrong.

If we were to read this like a piece of computer code, the incompatibility would be mutual. GPL code does not permit further restrictions. "You cannot remove Apache 2.0" would be a further restriction. Ergo, you couldn't incorporate.

It's just that this isn't how you read or interpret legal text.

The linked page is correct. You can incorporate/sublicense Apache code into GPL code. You can't do the reverse.

There is a whole slew of problems.

1) There is still an expectation women will marry up, and men will marry down, in terms of income potential. If the woman is a little bit ahead, it's okay, but e.g. a doctor marrying a nurse is perceived as acceptable in one direction, but taboo in the other. This means there is a growing shortage of mates for men at the bottom of the socioeconomic heap, and increasingly, women at the top (unless college-age and pretty).

2) Overlapping and poorly-defined roles make for a lot more conflict in marriages.

3) Divorce laws vary by states, but in the most liberal states, tend to be punitive towards men; the de facto standard is women get the kids, and men pay (massive, debilitating) child support. At the same time, the legal industry works hard to increase divorce rates. With half of marriages ending in divorce, this leads to all sorts of misaligned incentives and imbalances which are taboo to talk about, but interplay in complex ways. Marrying down is now a huge liability.

4) And, as you pointed out, social classes are much more likely to calcify.

We kind of got to where we are randomly, without thought or planning. We had a bad system (women were oppressed), and we pushed hard against it. It snapped. We landed somewhere pretty random and still pretty dysfunctional; just dysfunctional in other ways.

IANAL, but you're obviously not one either. A lot of what you said is false. You don't read legal text like a piece of code. Contracts and licenses don't work like that. It took me a long time to wrap my head around this.

Contracts and licenses are built on:

1) Things need to be substantially the same. If I offer to build a house for you with Brand X super-plywood flooring, and it's sold out, I can build it upgraded to Brand Y corkwood flooring since Brand X plywood was sold out, and it's substantially equivalent for the purpose, and that's okay. On the other hand, if Brand X introduces a new low-cost plywood flooring that technically qualifies but obviously isn't what we meant, you've got a case.

I can't imagine any court will care about 4b being on a per-file versus per-repo basis.

2) Damages. There isn't a magic genie which throws contract-breakers or license-breakers in jail. The extent to which these matter is damages. If I break an agreement with you, you need to care enough to sue me. Beyond that, a court will award damages, and you'll need to show you were harmed somehow, or entitled to statutory damages.

I'm not sure how you'd show you were somehow damaged by a change like whether license text is per-file or per-repo.

Contracts are written by lawyers who keep all this in mind. That's why I hire lawyers to help interpret contracts; a plain language read is often misleading. My advice is read the licenses with a lawyer, or at least someone with a basic background in contracts and licenses. Goodness knows there are bad lawyers out there, but even those will give better advice than a stranger on the internet.

Disclaimer: This is specific to common law systems, and perhaps not all of them. But that's how the US works.

I drove a revisiting like this in more than one organization.

Fitting decisions like this around the status quo makes no sense. It's exactly actions like this which change the status quo. I'm happy to say there are dozens of organizations without AGPL bans thanks to one useful piece of code I wrote. Most are small, but one is in the tens of billions of dollars in valuation.

I don't think AGPL is a perfect license, but I do think it's the best.

The flaws it has are things like the poorly-written patent clause, verbosity, ambiguity on concepts like linking, and general lack of elegance. It runs into a lot of corner cases around where code looks like data or data looks like code; there isn't a clean separation.

GPLv2 was a brilliantly-drafted license.

For all those failings, AGPL seems like the right choice for people who want their code feeding into an open ecosystem, rather than coopted by corporate giants.

I'll have dinner with virtually anyone, and I'll try to understand them. I also have a lot of historical books, including one written by a genocidal dictator who killed a lot of my countrymen. I try to understand him too.

If you're expecting to convince people, it sounds like you're putting in the wrong effort. The goal of a conversation is understanding, not agreement.

"Here, let us rationally discuss the issues, but regardless of what you say I'm going to go back and vote for [their candidate]" is exactly how a conversation ought to go. If your expectation is different, it's not them. It's you.

If I fly to Japan, my goal is to understand Japanese culture. My goal isn't to Americanize it. And vice-versa. It's no different here. You're not going to successfully impose your values on other people.

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the results of a hundred battles" - Sun Tzu

What's been a bit amusing is seeing a string of startups go through the same lesson about Google Cloud.

I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that the mistake Google made was failing to recognize and focus on its core competencies. In ads and search, everything is scalable, statistical, and returns are decoupled from investment. You hire a few really smart people, and have them blow everyone else away.

It worked.

They should have looked for more businesses like that. Maps, gmail, etc. all did pretty well too. Even Youtube, despite playing whack-a-mole with demonetizing or removing channels with millions of subscribers, does well enough. There were plenty more businesses like that to diversify to.

Then Google brought that same mindset to things which required customer service (which doesn't scale), reliability (which isn't statistical in the same way as ads and search), and other domains, hired a ton of mediocre people to do it, and it seems like a bit of a dumpster fire right now.

Making an EV is easy. I can buy a Power Wheels EV for $400.

Making a good EV is hard. The set of technologies required is still unknown -- bear with me for a little bit.

In the early days of the PC; anyone competent could make a perfectly competitive computer in their own garage in a few months, buying chips, etching PCBs, and coding up a basic operating system. Wozniak did that, as did a few others. It seemed like it'd be simple forever, but it wasn't. Today, the tech tree to make something like a MacBook is long, wide, and extensive. There's a massive engineering team for the mechanical design alone, let alone the OS or the CPU. I can still make a computer, but it won't be competitive.

Same thing happened with airplanes; shortly after the Wright Brothers, all sorts of amateurs made basic planes on their farms. It's still possible to do that, but you won't be competitive with an Airbus jetliner.

Early radios were a few vacuum tubes. Compare that to making a modern cell phone.

Part of the reason ICE vehicles are complex are the same process. The first mass-produced ICE vehicle, the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, was pretty simple. It cost under $5000 in today's dollars ($150 at the time), and looked like a glorified tricycle with an engine.

If you throw engineers at tech, it goes up in sophistication. People figure out how to do things better. Anyone can make an EV. I'm confident, though, that we'll see the same progression as we did in every other fields. If Tesla has enough of a head start making things cheaper and better -- and they seem to -- it's unlikely the established players will be able to compete.

The question isn't about current margin; the question is about long-term margin.

Running at a loss to build out market share, technology, branding and economies-of-scale is a standard startup strategy. Tesla is still in that stage.

The key question is whether things like the Gigafactory provide Tesla with unique economics and competitive advantage. If they do, Tesla will be able to have lower costs or more expensive products than GM. If not, it's overvalued.

My hypothesis is different.

Margins.

GM, Ford, Honda, Toyota, etc. are competing with a commodity product in a commodity market. There's no big difference between a Toyota Yaris, a Honda Fit, a Kia Rio, a Ford Fiesta, and similar cars from every other brand.

They're all within a few hundred bucks of $15k. They all cost do the same thing, cost the same to produce, and I imagine the margins are razor-thin. If any of the brand could lower prices by $500, they'd own the market.

Tesla sells a unique product, with unique technologies.

If Tesla has 5% of the market, but 10x the margins of its competitors, which doesn't seem an unlikely outcome:

1) Its profits will be roughly 1/3 of the total profits of the whole market

2) It will be much more stable. Razor-thin margins mean companies go bankrupt with even minor instability. If Ford's costs rise by 5%, it's dead. If Tesla's costs go up 5%, it's a almost a rounding error.

I think the key question is whether Tesla can execute, but right now, things look promising, although far from certain.

Profit = number of users x number of sales

(Minus costs, which are low for a web service)

There's a point that maximizes profit, and my point was that $4,500 might be a bit beyond that for a personal CRM.

I'd totally pay for something like this, but not $90/year. I'd pay $90 per year for an all-in-one-service to replace Google, but with open source and privacy.

It seems like a tough business model, to try to sell a one-off utility like this. Over a 50 year lifetime, that's $4,500.

It feels like in the eighties, I'd pay $20 (which is $40 in today's dollars) for a shareware tool, and it'd do this for the rest of my life (or until my 80286 running DOS became obsolete, whichever came first).

(1) In an efficient market, all the companies are one segment are no more and no less likely to be either rubbish or overvalued than any other segment. The risk is random.

(2) You manage that with diversification. I'd never allocate more than 25% of my portfolio to my own active management. My expected returns are slightly higher than index.

(2a) Buying stocks for my employer or their competitors would be difficult for insider trading. I'm much more likely to buy adjacent segments: suppliers, customers, etc. If I'm picking a supplier, I'm uniquely qualified to have alpha on their stock. On the other hand, my own job isn't very exposed to market changes in those segments.

I've found two successful strategies:

1) Index funds.

2) Buy/sell where you have unique expertise. If you work in the toilet hardware industry, buy/sell stocks related to that industry.

I do #1, since consulting generates higher returns than any micromanagement of my portfolio. Perhaps that will change in a few years, as I have more savings.

I'm not sure why anything public ought to generate alpha for me over people who do this full-time. The only place where I have a unique advantage are my areas of professional expertise. I can evaluate the quality and market impact of a development in my industries more accurately than people who do finance full-time, so there's some alpha there. It's not huge, since most companies do things outside of my area of expertise too. But it's better than zero.

It's worth noting that diversity is important. One can actively trade a small chunk of one's portfolio in one's own industry. I wouldn't allocate more than perhaps 25% of my holdings into areas where I am an expert.

And of course, standard disclaimers on insider trading apply. A safe approach is to trade in companies in one's own industry, but not in ones where one is employed or has any contracts / NDAs / relationships / internal information.

People gave Facebook my stuff for free.

RMS explains this much more eloquently than I do. He doesn't have a Facebook account, but he's all over Facebook, without any control, desire, or influence.

Many people set up Facebook accounts to have some control over this. Without an account, I can have nasty things about me on Facebook. To have controls over that, I need to agree to a contract with Facebook which gives away other stuff.

Author claims a frame up. Now that is something I've seen at MIT. The Institute has unique means to crash and burn people's reputations so most people fold.

Or they think it's an acceptable risk... $50 liability limit.

That's not how FOIA works. It's a good thing too. Government employees almost always fight FOIA requests. There aren't many subjective tools (e.g. overbroad) and you're certainly not required to say why you're making the request.

Data privacy laws in the US are unfortunately minimal. The bigger problem comes from imbalance -- if the government and corporations have lists of names, people need them to in order to be able to work together and organize.

If you don't think this information should go out in FOIA requests, the tool to accomplish that is data destruction. Government could wipe old emails once no longer relevant.

Nice! MIT and a lot of the other elites would cover up.

I'll be interested to see if the professor keeps their job. I suspect so. A little fraud is rarely met with more than a wrist slap at the elite schools.

Power is somewhat diffuse. Ultimately, there are channels for real power. It's a corporation with a small number of officers with signing authority. Ultimately they, in a very real sense, own and control the Institute.

The Institute owns the computers your data lives on. The Institute owns and has keys to the rooms where those servers live. The Institute believes it owns the data too.

What force do you think is needed?

Power at that level is rarely exerted at levels visible to a student or employee -- but it happens. I can't comment on your medical data, but most places, there are discreet channels for what the Institute considered to be more serious issues.

The incidents I know about haven't been publicly exposed. If I spoke about them in specifics, the Institute would retaliate. One I can bring up -- since I don't think it exposes me -- is email.

In essence, if you use an institutional email account (or keep personal data on Athena or otherwise) you can presume administration will read it without permission. If you get into conflict with the Institute, personal emails can come up and be used against you.

MIT has a lot of good people, but "unaffiliated" is a difficult word to use here. The problems come from the very top of the administration. Just because a particular mental health organization is good and built up trust doesn't mean they have the power to not get overruled by the Central Administration later. Until and unless the Institute institutes some real checks and balances, students absolutely should go outside for mental health.