Viewing profile — jlangenauer

I'm similar to this - I like drinking, but I've cut it down quite a lot in the last few years. My main rule is that I only drink (with occasional exceptions) on Fridays, Saturdays …

A seriously incredible achievement, and I'm sure everyone at SpaceX is very happy with what they've done right now. I was absolutely certain it wasn't going to make it when I saw c…

It's a fair point, but the only way at all to land on a body that has no atmosphere is to use rocket engines that point down. The Apollo Lunar Module landed on its "tail", though i…

And have significant externalities which democratic societies must bear, but allow for the tech monopoly shareholders to reap more profits.

This is not exactly the fault of VW/Renault etc. China has quite explicitly encouraged technology transfer as an important strategic imperative for their local firms, so if these c…

Or alternatively, "*technology will be used to extract profit, or preferably rent, from you and constrain your agency even further than it already is."

Oh that sucks. I recently rented a Model 3 from Sixt in Australia, and they said bring it back with any level of charge you want, which was great - I only had it for 3 days, and th…

Both those brands are exactly that - brands - where a lot of the cost of the product is recycled right back into advertising to convince you that the brands are actually worth the …

I was born in Australia and live in Germany, and I think I see something of the same: in both countries, there is no sense of purpose, no raison d'etre. There is no national projec…

I have a Canon printer which I use with Windows, and I get exactly the same thing. I think your diagnosis is correct.

I see we're going from "UI changes, the cause or reason of which we don't know" to "geopolitics" without considering any of the obvious alternative explanations. If China decides (…

One of the other nice features of Swiss rental law is "imputed rent", which is rent the government assumes you have collected even if the property is empty, and upon which you are …

It's not even a "crime problem". It's much more often people expecting their class prejudices to be embodied in the built environment, so that working class/poor/immigrant folks - …

To be fair, this is how most "advanced" economies operate. It's identical in Australia (although there the consulting companies run the sweatshops directly so they can skim more cr…

Because you need to pay VAT on imports into the country above a certain value (which is much less than the cost of a Macbook).

I see it less as an aristocracy (most of which are sidelined and/or laughed at), but instead a highly-evolved technocracy which runs Europe according to their ideal of what the cit…

What the hell? This isn't a slight negative, it's a compelling reason to avoid them completely. A low-risk SaaS business has their account terminated for no reason at all? Good lor…

It should be noted that no-one was forced to put their money in a VC fund, so when the author is whining about VC's playing with "other people's money", he's ignoring that those "o…

I detect a certain decline in almost all activism: You can spend years fighting any issue, but the other side will have too much money, too much patience, and even if, by some mira…

I think it's something analogous to Jevons' Paradox. Jevon's Paradox, originally written about the use of coal, noted that as it become more efficient to use a resource, the end re…

Another vote for Caro's magisterial biography of LBJ. I read all 4 volumes this year, and cannot praise them highly enough - not just a masterful biography, but an exposition of th…

Why do "indiehackers" want attention from and create products for other "indiehackers"? As a group they seem the people with the least amount of money to spend on products, and are…

You tax capital gains, interest income, dividends, royalties etc etc etc exactly the same as income from labor is taxed.

Why is it astounding? Leadership is there to serve the interests of shareholders, not employees. For obvious reasons, this truth is usually elided behind talk of "company families"…