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Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

david.newgas.net

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Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#371

Post by fakedang »

consensus1 wrote: post #347
nekusar wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Properly planning the economy, ala the Chinese tier system, is a good thing. They have 3 tiers. Its called 新基建 - *Xīn Jījiàn Top tier is for essentials like food, electricity, internet/comms, water, sewer. Heavily controlled, usually state owned companies. Middle tier is stuff that's integrated into essential tier. Lower tier is forefront of tech, and not at all critical for life. And a reminder that even fucks like…

This is not that dissimilar to the US. The government either controls directly or is very heavily involved in all those things you listed in the top tier.

The fact that PG&E exists is a clear contradiction to your statement.

In most countries, water, electricity, waste management and public transport are government controlled through and through, even if the government might sell shares to the public markets or induce competitive bidding. Except in dysfunctional countries of course.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#373

Post by bit-anarchist »

b40d-48b2-979e wrote: post #314
bit-anarchist wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What facade of reponsability? Their responsibility was not being complicit in the crime and they accomplished just that. It's not their responsibility to prosecute their employer, specially if it comes with significant risks to their life.

He was complicit when he knowingly made the choice that would have no accountability.

That presumes that it's their responsibility to hold them accountable or, at least, that the other option is free. Given that you haven't shown either of those, and the statements point to the contrary, it's fair to say they are not complicit.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#374

Post by ransom1538 »

RandyRanderson wrote: post #272

In Canada this is a huge scam. The government advertizes that it's funding incubators. Great, right? The money doesn't go to the start ups - it all goes to large tech companies like IBM, etc, because, obviously, IBM knows about innovation. The cover is that the government doesn't know tech so it will give money to trusted partners and they will choose who to give the money to because they've been doing such a great j…

Canada has the same GDP as Texas (well worse). It is a 2nd world economy. You are better off getting a job in El Paso.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#375

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

jasonkester wrote: post #353
zingar wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happened that made you switch away from contracting?

The problem was that every time I stopped contracting for somebody, they stopped sending me money. Building software products fixed that: https://expatsoftware.com/articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-a-l...

I remember your blogabond posts from way back when on HN. I think you were the first to really popularize the "coding while traveling" idea.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#376

Post by advisedwang »

xivzgrev wrote: post #199

This arrangement is bizarre. The VC business model is predicated on extreme growth. The last thing you would want to do is siphon dividends out vs reinvesting into growth. They must have preyed on newbie founders, dangling large valuations. Oh the fees? Well you will make it big and it will be a drop in the bucket!

I suspect initially the fund was earnestly trying to make some huge exits, and the incubator was really a support for that. But as time went on it looked less and less like a big exit was in the cards. A stream of money to fund a lavish life was right there for the taking, and perhaps it's human nature to shift the priority to keeping the good times going.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#377

Post by rcxdude »

consensus1 wrote: post #349
pjc50 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related to this, the massive advantage of AWS is that it allows staff to buy infrastructure without having to raise purchase orders. If you ask permission for spending, it's a very onerous and frustrating process. If you just deploy stuff and get billed for it, it's much easier! Even if that's more expensive than having your own cloud. Worse, if you have on-prem, you have to have staff . They might even be permanent.…

There are only a handful of companies in the world that AWS would be more expensive than having your own cloud. Just the baseline costs of having 24/7 availability requires minimum 5 full time engineers (3 shifts + cover for sick / vacation). So that's $1 million a year right there, and we're already well over the cloud spend of the vast majority of companies. If you want multi region that's now $2 million. And we're…

This is apples and oranges, though. AWS does not manage your whole product. Are you going to have 24/7 on call for the parts that you manage? If not, why do you need it for the parts AWS manages? The reality is that most smaller companies do not need this level (and frankly I think most people significantly overestimate the overhead of running your own box. A heck of a lot of cloud deployments could be two servers in a co-location with one of them being a warm spare, and have equivalent service levels for their product in practice).

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#378

Post by jasonkester »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #375
jasonkester wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem was that every time I stopped contracting for somebody, they stopped sending me money. Building software products fixed that: https://expatsoftware.com/articles/guy-on-the-beach-with-a-l...

I remember your blogabond posts from way back when on HN. I think you were the first to really popularize the "coding while traveling" idea.

I didn’t get to use any of the cool terms for what I was doing though. FIRE and Digital Nomadding hadn’t been invented yet.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#379

Post by tsimionescu »

bluGill wrote: post #337
tsimionescu wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The revolving door is a completely different phenomenon, and it is a problem for a completely different reason. It's about politicians in positions of power over an industry later becoming business leaders or highly paid consultants in said industry. This is a huge problem because it works as a long-term bribe: instead of paying for the politician today and inviting inquiries and problems, you make an implicit promis…

Not to take away from your point, but the revolving door is also good because the experts should be the ones who make the rules. There are too many details about every niche that smart non-experts will get wrong and so we need experts. Good luck reconciling these two conflicting points.

I don't think that's hard to reconcile - that only involves people in industry moving to government, which is far less problematic.

Re: Did my old job only exist because of fraud?

#380

Post by treis »

consensus1 wrote: post #349
pjc50 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related to this, the massive advantage of AWS is that it allows staff to buy infrastructure without having to raise purchase orders. If you ask permission for spending, it's a very onerous and frustrating process. If you just deploy stuff and get billed for it, it's much easier! Even if that's more expensive than having your own cloud. Worse, if you have on-prem, you have to have staff . They might even be permanent.…

There are only a handful of companies in the world that AWS would be more expensive than having your own cloud. Just the baseline costs of having 24/7 availability requires minimum 5 full time engineers (3 shifts + cover for sick / vacation). So that's $1 million a year right there, and we're already well over the cloud spend of the vast majority of companies. If you want multi region that's now $2 million. And we're…

Eh this is true but in practice "my RAM stick went bad" is 0% of our downtime. It's almost always that we screwed up something in the app layer. And my company of ~100 does have 5 engineers on call 24/7. It's baked into our salary to do that.
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