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Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying

wsj.com

141–150 of 221 posts

Re: Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying

#141
post #37
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this also in line with recent proclamations by at least two venture capitalists that they do not reflect / introspect / dwell on consequences in any way?

No because you don't understand what Andreessen means by reflection / introspection. He obviously thinks you should learn from your mistakes and that you must be an avid and quick learner. But learning skills is not what introspection / dwelling is. It's spending times on thoughts like "what should I be doing with my life". "I can't believe how much of a victim of the system I am". And he specifically contrasted it a…

Did we not understand when he said introspection was something made up in the past few hundred years? I was aghast when he said it right in front of my copy of Meditations given how much these guys also obsess over the Roman Empire

Re: Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying

#143

I struggle to understand the psychology of how founders who are clearly incompetent charlatans get second+ chances -- they couldn't do fraud successfully but investors have a faith they could do business successfully. But they still get funding (like adam neumann of wework fame) and full on "narrative tongue baths" by the business media community (like this wsj article on trevor milton). Why? I struggle to understand…

some of the 'investors' use such as investments as tax-write offs

Re: Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying

#144
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s a political sub-thread. What is a tech stack? Is that what people used to do back in the day before people started building using English? Interesting!

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Re: Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying

#145
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No because you don't understand what Andreessen means by reflection / introspection. He obviously thinks you should learn from your mistakes and that you must be an avid and quick learner. But learning skills is not what introspection / dwelling is. It's spending times on thoughts like "what should I be doing with my life". "I can't believe how much of a victim of the system I am". And he specifically contrasted it a…

> It's spending times on thoughts like "what should I be doing with my life". How else do you decide what to do?

There are those who would argue doing anything is better than doing nothing while you try to figure out what to do. I'm in a position where I know what my passions are and am sufficiently constrained by resources that I can't afford major mistakes; but if I were sufficiently wealthy and indifferent, throwing darts at a board with a couple of ideas on it and just doing whatever has a certain romance to it.

Re: Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying

#146
post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ok, but it wasn't consensual?

Then he should be in jail. Unless they mean it is statutory even though she gave consent (since she was 15 and underage). Then it would be consensual if she was 16.

I don't understand the purpose of writing multiple comments about the age of consent on a thread that is unambiguously about sexual assault. It wouldn't matter if she was 40 years old!

Re: Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying

#148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...if you disabuse yourself of the notion that Neumann was playing a game of entrepreneurship and good-faith empire building, and instead conclude that the game he was playing was shameless capital extraction, every step and action he took suddenly makes sense. Sort of. I get the capital extraction part, but you also need to be a good steward of capital and make a profitable business out of it. He failed badly at t…

IMO you're being unfair; he talked his way into getting paid half a billion dollars for wework, and he's now a billionaire. That's a massive success at capital extraction.

This is too cynical for even a turbo cynic like me.

Basically, you’re saying he mislead investors and got a bunch of money, so those investors see themselves being ripped off as a valuable skill, so they invest in him again. Wut?

I say again — why would investors trust him if his only track record is losing investor money?

Re: Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying

#149
post #98

I struggle to understand the psychology of how founders who are clearly incompetent charlatans get second+ chances -- they couldn't do fraud successfully but investors have a faith they could do business successfully. But they still get funding (like adam neumann of wework fame) and full on "narrative tongue baths" by the business media community (like this wsj article on trevor milton). Why? I struggle to understand…

It's distribution. Guy's got a brand name now. People and investors recognize his name. It's a lot easier to find an absolute quantity N of investor money for a fraudulent but well-known name than it is for an unknown upstart. The fraud might have a low close rate but the top of the funnel is huge . The unknown upstart can't even get meetings.

His “brand” is “torching investor money.”

Still don’t get it.

Re: Trevor Milton is raising funds for a new jet he claims will transform flying

#150
post #130
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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The average dog has slightly less than 4 legs; the modal dog has 4 legs. If you call a tail a leg, it's still not a leg, so no dogs have 5 legs. What the President believes is not, has not been, and cannot be the basis of law. If it were, the President would be a king.

> What the President believes is not, has not been, and cannot be the basis of law.

Yes, but...

> If it were, the President would be a king.

First, rape is an immoral act that the law does and should punish. It is a factually bad thing, regardless of whether a legal system recognizes it as such.

Second, pace the legal positivists, the law is a determination of the moral law within particular circumstances. It is not arbitrary without becoming false. As the old legal maxim goes, lex iniusta non est lex: an unjust law is not a law. This means justice is presupposed by the positive law; the latter exists in the service of the former.

Third, kings are not God. They are not the basis for the law in the sense that they can simply legislate anything they want. One reason I've already given: a valid law can only be a determination of the natural law; declaring dogs to have five legs is meaningless.

Another reason is that kings were bound by tradition, custom, and various feudal contracts. In Europe, the Church also kept kings in check. In countries like Poland, the king increasingly became more "presidential" in the sense that the sovereign could not enact any laws without the consent of the nobility (per the Nihil Novi Act [0]).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nihil_novi

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