xyzzy21

YMMV

My professional relationships formed AFTER college are far stronger. I honestly don't hang or communicate with anyone I knew in college. I've tried but we simply don't have enough in common - I felt like I was doing all the work and so eventually I just dropped it.

I'd also say that the strategic problem space is seldom located where the tactical problems space is that "solves" the strategic problem. And we can not know where or how far away the latter is. You see this a lot when you study the history of technology. What often happens is "Survivorship Bias" - you don't hear about all the other attempts that didn't work - so the historic narrative tries to form a story where "They knew all along" and that's seldom substantiated by actual history or facts.

It would also be nice to remove the "magically thinking" around machine learning. It's mathematically related to all prior signal processing techniques (mostly a proper superset) but it also have fundamental limits that no one talks about seriously. ML et al. are NOT MAGIC but they are treated as if they were.

And that is in itself a dangerous moral and ethical lapse.

The Green Revolution of the 1960s proved that we could - that Malthusian claims were BS. What we have now is those same Malthusians actively sabotaging the roots of the Green Revolution by shutting down energy and means of production. Technically mass murder.

A natural result of women's demand for 6-6-6

Honestly if this is a problem, you haven't designed/structured the product design or marketing well enough. You should be focusing on pitching the economics rather than the technical implementation.

And then you want is to have a product plan that makes you essential to the process of productization. If you can't or haven't done that - you indeed run this risk you probably won't get that far.

You want to pitch the market problem, your market solutions without details, and then how you can provide that solution. You do need to be able to "pull out the technical proof" as required but it should not be the center of the pitch.

The other thing to remember: most money people have (relatively) no technical skills sufficient to implement anything they are funding - they are looking to fund an implementor - that's why you would get money. They definitely DO NOT WANT to know the details until you've passed the economic "close" first. Then they may have an industry expert review your technical plan.

For other "exits/deals" like being bought by a large company in the industry, there is actually a bigger risk of pitch-and-run unless the company doesn't current have a presence in the market/technology area or they are looking for a "quick time to market" by buying you. Again you can make yourself essential in an implementor role.

Again focus on the economic need 90%. The technical is usually just a "turn the crank" thing with the right people (paid the right salaries).

A lot of the problem starts with the fact that most hospitals in the USA were taken over and are now owned by "Private Equity".

If you know ANYTHING about finance, that should send shivers up your back and also make you realize why this happening with nursing.

Private Equity is where you go to get money if:

• Your business is floundering and no one will loan to you

• Your industry is in the ebbing phase and not growing

• You are ignorant or naive about getting money for business

• You haven't done your due diligence

• Your company is in play for a hostile take-over

Having Private Equity getting involved is always a major Red Flag if not Black Flag.

In general, Private Equity knows nothing about your business norms or markets - they don't care. They are a one-size-fits-all investor and that primarily means "Cut Costs on Everything".

It's very akin to having a lawyer become your CEO (e.g. Sears/Kmart) - it's a omen of VERY BAD things being imminent.

A case in point: the COVID bounties from Medicare for testing, admissions, treatment AND DEATH BY COVID are exactly something that Private Equity would love maximally, dream up and probably try to enact with lobbyists.

Absolutely true.

I worked and lived in the SF Bay Area for nearly 30 years and I grew up in Marin. I left in 2016 and now own land in a rural area back East. I'm building my dream/retirement/Jeff Tracey Thunderbirds house and will never return to California. I still have most of my family in the SF Bay Area but they are going to end up "holding the bag" and lose out if they wait too long. My brother who has a house in Noe Valley worries me the most but I can't save him from himself.

I realized about a decade ago I could never retire in California due to the costs regardless of retirement investment. I also realized that what made Silicon Valley work politically, economically and intellectually is now 100% gone thanks to Woke.

I actually like urban cities. But I've lived in cities that ACTUALLY WORK - Taipei, Singapore, Tokyo, etc. And NO CITY in the USA will ever attain even 1/10th of what these cities achieve in terms of livability and cost - we don't have the cultural or national stamina to do what it would take (and NO green energy is not the answer). I've had hope in the past but clearly it's never going to happen.

And that won't change in my remaining lifetime (based on my grandparents' lifespans, I've got as much as 30 more years). If you've ever lived in "real cities" like these in Asia or Europe, you know exactly what I'm talking about. If you haven't, you need to travel and experience it. Honestly it's a lot like meeting woman overseas - you discover what you thought was normal absolutely is NOT nor remotely necessary.

The lower cost of where I live now has enabled me to make all the capital investments for my next companies (I've cofounded 4 since 2000 - all SW & HW based). Having the R&D "done/validated" before we talk to money means we keep far more ownership and are closer to release to market with time-to-market advantages.

This is completely impossible in California or NYC now. Doing this is pretty marginal in AZ or TX or OR or WA but sometimes doable in certain niches fields. It's a slam dunk if you have far lower operating and living costs.

Everything is changing - all the places you could MINDLESSLY assume would be good never will be again. A very useful historical analogy: between 1920 and 1960, the "electronics industry" (including the 1920s Radio Boom which was analogous in growth to all the booms in Silicon Valley over the last 50 years) were all centered in the NYC tristate area.

And then it was all gone - when it all moved to Silicon Valley and other western states. Nothing is permanent. And this type of migration is currently in progress right now. Again. But California is the "overpriced, antibusiness" location everyone is fleeing from. Just as in the 1950s-1960s, it wasn't necessarily clear where the new "hotspot(s)" would be. A lot of people were also sure that NYC would remain the center of electronics just as many people think California will always be the place for "Tech". They were wrong. The weather is not enough to keep people!

Except if you consider the "entropy" of doing that, you have an enormous amount of energy inputs required.

It's far safer than keeping it on dry land or burying it.

Just look up the amount of water in the Pacific and then divide into the amount of waste water being discussed - the ratio is insanely tiny and nearly unmeasurable. The biological effects are far smaller because of this ratio than if you kept it concentrated on land.

As someone who lived through "64K should be plenty" and often used computers with little more than 4K RAM, I absolutely agree. This is one of the major "bloatware" features of modern computers which could extend Moore's Law a decade or more with mere software changes.

For some things it's definitely possible. For "basic editing/writing" it's plenty good enough for Linux applications that aren't super compute hogs. Which is actually most things that everyday people use computers for. It's only a few niches that truly need more.

There are all the normal issues of "desktop linux".

They are useful for a lot of "portable computer" applications that would normally be assigned to laptops. For example as a controller to talk to the physical world like weather stations, 3D printers, etc.

Fun Fact: Germany and Austria have agreed to pay for Russian gas/oil in Rubles.

And apparently, at least Poland, is now buying gas and oil from Germany (obviously now at a premium due to two transactions instead of one).

The article premise is the purest of false dichotomy. Profits and Free Speech are not opposite cause and effect - how did American manage 250 years to archieve both together???

This is a legal problem - allowing broadcast advertisements to the general public for pharma products is where the problem started. Before that, pharma had to advertise in targeting media directly addressing the medical profession only, e.g. JAMA, NEJM, various trade magazines, etc.

That's how this should be fixed - return to those limits. In an online environment that would mean limiting ads to doctors et al. on sites that require password and professional identification/validation. Otherwise information on drugs et al. should be presented only neutrally and scientifically to the broader public - marketing should be banned from the process.

Or Covid vaccine.

Could it be that since humans are social primates, online simply can never work as well as face-to-face.

I work in sales and direct face-to-face sales ALWAYS has better close rates, happier customers, etc. than indirect sales through phone or internet.

Human men already do this as well - it's how you get single mothers.

Just as the board and executives has fiduciary obligations to shareholders, employee option holders fall into that population as well. There are legal incentives/threats against not handling it fairly.

The rule of law is a good thing.

When I was young I loved magazines like Popular Electronics.

After getting my EE, I looked back at those magazines in my collection I immediately thought "That's so wrong!" or "That omits so/too much" or "I can't believe I thought this was electronics" or "Baby project! How lame!".

:-)

So it's very much about what can be absorbed and tailoring to the audience. You can't start with the math load that an EE student gets with a broad, general audience.

You see the opposite of this with academic papers - either the level of assumed audience is stratospheric OR it's clearly wording to keep the riff-raff out of the field. Mostly the former but sometimes the latter. You often also see this in STEM textbooks - the audience isn't even freshmen oriented!

Fun fact: OLEDs have radically shorter lifespans "in the field" than LED or LCD.

According to a paper from Samsung at IEEE IRPS three years ago, the best OLED screens only have about 2 years (600 hours) best case continuous use but that is extended by "screen savers" and estimates of only 25%-50% customer use in a 24 hour period to about 5 years (extend by not using)

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8720529

Part of the reason for this: low energy manufacturing materials/processes, by definition (physics), will have low energy failure mechanisms (which always means they will fail more quickly). This is about chemico-physical reaction activation energy. Anything ink-jet created or organic is a low energy process/material.

Actually CRTs and vacuum tubes in general are the "far more complex" manufacturing process compared to semiconductor. It's sounds wrong but just watch the following video about Mullard vacuum tube (valve) manufacturing in the early 1960s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDvF89Bh27Y

The transistor would start to displace tubes during the 1960s (when I got into electronics in the early 1970s, you still would learn or use or have as option the user of vacuum tubes but by the end of the 1970s, that was 100% gone for professionals and hobbyists though in 1980s as a freshman EE student we had the last gasp of vacuum tube education corresponding to having to use FORTRAN and punch cards that one last semester for programming as well). At the same time, discrete transistors were arising as the de facto choice in commercial (the adoption "Chasm" for them occurred in the late 1950s). ICs were still "early adopter" in the 1960 and crossed the chasm in the late 1960s, early 1970s which is why the 1970s were the boom decade for Silicon Valley and IC manufacturing.

As I watch tube manufacturing with 40 years of experience in semiconductor, I just cringe at the non-reproducibility and labor involved - it's insane. By contrast, semiconductor (and by commonality of process, OLED) is far simpler. The reason: the planar photolithographic cycle is repeated over and over again in semiconductors which in contrast to the "different at every single step" of tube manufacturing is radially simpler.

With current supply chains and infrastructure, yes, flat panels in general are easier. OLED are still somewhat specialized so most come from JP or KR companies (with factories in JP, KR or CN).

My current employer (based in Taiwan) makes an "LCD Flat Panel Manufacturing Plant" product.

You literally just need a building shell (the plans for which we can provide to qualified sales prospects). Then you place your order and a few months later dozens of shipping containers arrive and you put the contents into the shell like a child's construction toy or Ikea furniture. All the cables are snapped together and you start feeding it the inputs, and out pops flat panels. It's 100% turn-key.

This product is part of the reason why flat panel TVs are so cheap now - and Chinese customers LOVE how it's so simple for them and requires zero actual knowledge of making flat panels - sort of the ideal manufacturing for them (we also sell a support contract service to run them).

Also one of the very last CRT manufacturers on the planet (which now manufactures flat panel screens as well with CRT production ending in the mid 2000s) was in Taoyuan TW (their logo still has a CRT in it last time I drove by their plant).

Taoyuan and Hsinchu have been glass centers for TW for the last 200-300 years due to natural reserves of highly pure silica and natural gas in the area. Before semiconductors, these places made scientific glass products (chemical/medical glassware, lenses, etc.) which is why this former CRT plant was located there. Note that the supplier of lenses for iPhones is located in this same area. The common supply chain of silica is why Hsinchu is the semiconductor center that it is. Old fashion geography still applies to why the world is the way it is.

If you were to start a CRT manufacturing plant in the US, the only best place would be in NY or PA near Corning NY because Corning Glass is still there and doing leading edge work in glass still. There's no company nor area better for glass or glass dependent products in the USA at this point in history.

I have a TON of old HP LaserJet printouts from the 1980s and 1990s have have done this - if you have them stacked in a box, you find them stuck together and pulling them apart takes the print off with one or the other sheet.

I haven't experimented with work arounds but perhaps separating with wax paper or parchment might be helpful.

And then you add this to the universal surgical risk of abdominal fistulas.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKMBWOBbyws

You seriously want to ponder whether you should get any surgery at all...

Issue: NVM endurance limits.

If those who already own stock in the 49% sell, then someone else can buy up to 49% even if the 51% holder never sells.

The amount of ownership can change for one already owning 51% if the amount of stock issued changes - that changes the denominator

Finally: there is proxy voting. Normally common stock holders have 1 vote per share. However most votes are "proxy voted" where you give your vote to someone else because "reasons" - like you can't attend but an institutional investor seems to represent your position so you proxy to that investor.

Via proxy voting, it's possible to push past 51% as a minority shareholder.

Related to this, you can create an informal alliance with an institutional investor owning a larger share in the same company. This appears to be how Musk "borrowed" the money for his takeover - the money came from a large institutional investor that makes money on both ends: interest paid on the loan plus the promise of higher returns on Twitter stock. That's what's called a "can't lose investment" that no ideology can beat.

Of course, the Twitter board famously owns no significant amount of stock which is problematic but reality - this means they have ZERO skin in the game so are more likely to shirk (or risk to shirk) their legal obligations for fiduciary responsibilities. They apparently got a legal wake up call over the weekend about this however.

The legality of a poison pill is defined by case law of of Unocal vs. Mesa Petroleum.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unocal_Corp._v._Mesa_Petroleum....

Basically a company can ONLY create a poison pill IF and ONLY IF:

* the tactics of the party doing the hostile takeover are "coercive"

* the hostile takeover will likely result in dissolution of the company

Neither applies to Twitter in any serious sense. Musk's methods are anything but coercive under the law per point #1. A change in direction or operations is NOT legally the same as point #2.

Additionaly, board members are required under law to maximize shareholder value under the rubrik of profit maximization (eBay vs. Newmark) and public company board members can be PERSONALLY legally liable for lost profits and punitive damages.

https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/casebrief/p/casebrief-e...

It's VERY LIKELY that the Twitter board was informed of these cases (again, hopefully - these are legal fundamentals of being on a corporate board you'd be stupid not to know ahead of time).

As a result the Twitter board appears to have "straightened up and are flying right" in terms of law and potential legal liability now.

Again: I'm utterly mystified that boards (especially in "Tech") do not seem to know basic stuff like this and let companies run riot in ways that puts both the board and executives at tremendous personal legal and financial risk.

Pfizer no longer have trust. For anything. Just read the documents they were forced to release this year (rather than 75 years in the future) - you figure out pretty quick why they wanted it covered up for 75 years. It's horrific.

Simple.

1. Russian anticipated the sanctions - this isn't the first time - so Russian had some plans in place. They've been dumping US Fed Treasuries and hoarding gold. That's part of removing USD dependence.

2. Russian has plenty of internal resources with plenty of industry to replace enough (not all) of the sanctioned imports.

3. Russians support Putin at nearly 80%. Sanctions have electrified Russian patriotism. A funny set of Tweets are Russian women tearing up the expensive Coco Chanel products. That's thousands of USD worth torn up because patriotism.

4. Russian has the EU by the balls because Green Energy doesn't and won't replace the Russian exports of oil and nat gas; compounding that is Germany shutting down nuclear power plants exactly when they can least afford it. The next play: demanding payment of the same oil and gas in Rubles rather than USD. The assumption that the USD is supreme is wrong and provably so now with the Ruble rebound.

5. Russian has plenty of allies who leak past the sanctions - like 2/3rds of the world's countries by population - it's LITERALLY only the West who is sanctioning. This is akin to how Cuba was/is embargoed ONLY by the US but not Canada or Mexico.

6. By doubling down on sanctions the US has primarily weakened the Petrodollar which is the ONLY REASON the USD is as strong as it is and the only reason we have the lifestyle levels we have today despite having very low economic production - we'd be closer to Portugal in effective economic strength without having USD reserve currency status. It's a subsidy that has made and still makes us super lazy and entitled.

6a. The US is still living in the delusion of being unipolar and "indispensable". That is no longer reality and sanctions accelerated the move to multipolar.