581–590 of 645 posts
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> Most of my time here I feel vaguely gross about how nice everything is. Tell me more about this.
It just feels like none of this is sustainable. There's too much fat. I feel big tech in general is looting its brands for profit, that while it's not 100% obvious yet, we're in the decline phase.
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'Western Europe' or 'EU + UK' or 'G6' basically, with the additional information that the speaker's North American.
No love for Switzerland?
UN geoscheme lists it as such if you want something concrete. (Though it also puts the UK in Northern Europe, and leaves out Italy & Spain & Portugal (Southern), which I didn't mean either.)
It's a funny term. In UK use it means something like 'mainland Europe but not Russia or some former Soviet states'. It's about the bits you think of and travel to, I suppose. Although that makes it sound obvious, which it isn't, because nobody means India when they say Asia, but it's at least as much in the public psyche as anywhere else in continental Asia.
The second passport thing is definitely true. When I'm abroad--even, recently, Buenos Aires--I have access to office space, free food, a gym, and even a music room where I can practice guitar and piano.
Another great thing is you can usually find someone who is up to have fun, even if you have no social connections in a place you're travelling to. I was visiting Barcelona a few years ago and emailed the misc- alias seeing if anyone wanted to visit Montserrat with me, and 5 of us went up there and had a great day together. Best part is, it is usually cool people who say "yes" - the abject nerds aren't going to respon…
I will also call you out on this. The word is very strongly negative, so I think it's inappropriate to use in this context.
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// Buying something, rewriting it, and abandoning it, is just squandering money. I don't see it that way at all. Everything we do with business carries risk. It's really all experimental. Nothing is a sure thing. When you acquire something, you obviously incur the risk of that thing not scaling as well as you think, or over-estimate the fit into your org. You obviously want to make good decisions when you can, but th…
> but you have to respect the machine that this is a part of. I don't respect the machine. I think it reduces innovation across our industry. The story of google acquisitions so often go this way. They start with a lot of promises - "Your product dreams will be so much bigger at Google! All the resources you need! We believe in you!". When they start at google, everyone eventually realises they need to rebuild their…
Adobe hasn't finalized its purchase of Figma yet.
The "red badge" thing was very real. It was really weird having TVCs on your team. You'd all work hard together to launch a thing, and then everybody except the red badge would get a celebratory team tchotchke or a team lunch or something. If you asked about it, the manager would say "we can't give Jim things directly because that might be like compensation and they'd be like an employee." There'd be all-hands meetin…
thank you for mentioning this. i was a red badge. it was fucking demeaning. i have a lot of stories, but my favorite was when everyone on my floor got an earthquake safety kit except me. literally google didn't care if i lived or died. the expectation was that if i sucked up enough ("demonstrated my value") they MIGHT make me a real boy, like some bizarre Velveteen Rabbit fetish game. i loved watching how Google woul…
There absolutely is a caste system in Silicon Valley based on how you can jump through credential and interview hoops. Which doesn’t necessarily correspond to job performance, which is frustrating for everyone. But nobody can figure out a better way to predict on the job performance. There are some emerging signals like open source contributions but not everyone uses that either because it can also be gamed.
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you said > make it so hardworking people born into poor families can outcompete wealthy failsons I said you can't and you do not agree. Please tell me how do you see this happening and what is the barrier to this now?
you replied to that by saying > You cannot have the same outcome I explitly talked about outcome being dramatically different. Children of wealthy people who have no motivation to contribute anything to the world, learn no skills, and are lazy, should not end up on the same level as hardworking skilled children of poor parents. They should end much lower. Barriers to this include enormous inheritances, the housing ma…
My gripe is with the above. Why would they try when they don't have to? Would you? And what does it matter to you that someone just spends money they inherited? It's like winning the lottery.
And what has someone's else wealth has to do with university costs?
“all the smart people who could argue against anything but not for something“ -- Spot on