361–370 of 374 posts
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It’s not much different from Paris subway. We should still strive for better - Taipei is a much better model than any European city.
Paris as a city has gone very downhill the past 5-10 years. The subway there is a prime example.
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> It's not that interesting outside of zone 1 Bizarre take. Zone 1 is the absolute worst part of London, full of tourists and unimaginative morons. Paris is ruthlessly segregated by race and class, not what I'd call charming.
The crowd is perhaps due to the concentration of world class museums and historical sights. I know it's hip to play blasé and so much cooler than the mindless drones, but there's a reason people are flocking to zone 1 instead of Peckham Rye. > Paris is ruthlessly segregated by race and class, not what I'd call charming. As opposed to London, where you famously are as likely to see people of all walks of life and inco…
There are even middle class professionals in Barking & Dagenham - it's well covered by the new Elizabeth line.
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right, people will just tell you the best places and things to invest in ... during a game of chess: "hey why'd you make that move?"
"hey why'd you make that bid?" is a valid question that must be answered during a game of bridge..
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>> The Elizabeth Line was unbelievably expensive to build; that's how the UK did it. Fair. But what is also expensive is every single citizen taking $100 Uber rides to the airport, like in NYC. In NJ, the transit service has become so volatile and sporadic and opaque that people have reduced NJTransit use for Newark airport in favor of simply driving.
That cost doesn't show up on government books, so we can pretend it doesn't exist. The joys of decentral planning.
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It's a massive investment in the areas near its stations.
Yes national money once again mostly being spent in London. Coincidentally where these decisions are made.
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Startups like Builder AI use London because a.) they want to raise money from filthy rich Arab investors and b.) those guys are not known for doing much due diligence. They go more by vibes and hype and who's on the existing cap table. Also c.) they are very comfortable with London because it was so much easier back in the day to launder or siphon away funds from their home countries. London is an extremely popular d…
Not all Arab investors are bad - for example, funds associated with the Emirate of Abu Dhabi (eg. ADIA, Mubadala) has been extremely successful in their investments explicitly because Tahnoon studied engineering in San Diego (and rolled at Gracie's gym) back in the day. Additonally, for every failed investment like builder.ai a fund like QIA and MS Ventures has had multiple other successful investments. The perceptio…
I have yet to see one direct startup investment from Mubadala do well. Compare that to a regional fund like BECO or Wamda (both composed of ex founders).
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I feel that these shouldn't be alternatives. Calling something startup is up to the definition that we use; one that I like is the following: A startup is a temporary operating model designed to discover a repeatable, scalable, and profitable business. A friend of mine used: A company that just started that can scale to 100M evaluation in less than 5 years. From these point of views, there are a lot of wonderful SMEs…
Why should it grow to 100M in 5 years? A business can make $500k profit per year, with two employees, forever, and that's a moderate success. Sqlite is doing just that. And they're not captured by exponential growth, they're not going boom or bust filling sqlite with advertisements and AI. They just make a solid product that works. Is that bad?