was
1yr ago
Remember when the Democrats had Biden look at the camera, break the fourth wall, and say "do I look like an extreme leftist to you?"
They know that as long as Biden has the looks and mannerisms of an upper-middle-class grandpa with a touch of dementia, most people will map him to "harmless and with good intentions".
In reality, Biden is a lifelong politician who has likely never worked an honest day in his life. All the things you cited reinforce that. The fact that his son Hunter is all sorts of fucked up to me also reinforces that (although only as part of a constellation of data points; it is far from conclusive by itself).
was
10mo ago
It's not super clear to me that a decaying body releasing gases (while in a tight container) actually extends the breathable atmosphere meaningfully for the remaining occupants.
was
1yr ago
Google Maps -- outside of the U.S., restaurant reviews (which derive from that) surpass Yelp.
Google Drive -- at our company of about 100 people we no longer routinely use Microsoft Word, Excel, etc. (granted, most of the executives and salespeople still have Microsoft licenses as they may need to send a Word or Excel document).
Android
Chrome
I don't know if that any of the above are "super successful" relative to Search, but then very few things are. But that's the core of their complacency -- anything they build gets compared to a trillion dollar, 90% margin business. For example GCP is a clear miss on a relative scale (relative to AWS and Azure) but still would be a multi-billion dollar company in its own right.
Granted, there are a lot of total whiffs too.
was
1yr ago
If the FDIC or other banking entity does not cover deposits, any business that depends on SVB and has a > $125K bimonthly payroll will have to do furloughs or layoffs. That's basically any business above ~15-20 people.
Directors of a company are criminally liable if they ask people to work knowing they have no means to pay them. Wednesday is March 15 (payday, for work done March 1 - 15). That means companies unable to make payroll #2 in March need to furlough or have layoffs before start of work Thursday.
There's something on the order of 1,000 series A or higher deals per year (even in 2022, decreased from 2021). The average time between raises is about 2 years. Thus, conservatively there's something like 2,000 venture-companies that have > $125K bimonthly payroll, and many small businesses that use SVB but are not venture-backed are not counted in this.
SVB purportedly services 50% of all startups per their advertising. From a survey of my VC and startup friends, it seems reasonable to assume that 25% of that are extremely dependent on SVB (e.g. payroll, no cash sitting elsewhere, and incoming customer payments aren't going to cover anything).
If these assumptions hold, we're looking at around 10% of the entire startup ecosystem laying off effectively everyone in March (e.g. either by going under, or reducing headcount so drastically that they're cashflow positive... which for most startups would be extremely painful). Another large batch will effectively go under in April (e.g. they have one months' payroll at another bank but that's it).
So in the short term we're talking about somewhere on the order of tens of thousands of jobs. A lot of future value creation is lost. Sure, some of these startups are the Juiceros or latest crypto scam, but others are meaningful companies that provide meaningful services. The latter group typically doesn't get as much press because they're optimizing for value rather than hype.
In the medium term, if you're a business that requires having an account with a >$250K balance, why would you now use any bank other than JPM? Sure you can do "diligence" on your bank, but SVB had an A rating from Moody's and a "buy" rating from JPM. Now obviously those are bullshit but for anyone claiming that this collapse was obvious -- please share a screenshot of your brokerage account where you made tons of $ shorting SVB.
So the default will be to go with JPM, rendering most small and medium-sized banks uncompetitive.
At the end of the day, SVB's shareholders will (and deserve to) get wiped out. Their bond creditors and such will mostly (and deserve to) get wiped out. I am not for bailouts of either of those parties. And maybe how we think about the banking system where depositors are creditors should be re-interrogated, because who the fuck is wanting to risk all their money for like a 0.5% interest rate? But I do NOT think startups and small businesses deserve to be randomly decimated.
was
1yr ago
I used to look at the declining number of Christians in the U.S. to conclude that people were becoming more rational.
Now I realize that religiosity has just transferred -- slavery was the Original Sin, racism is the Devil, and we are all guilty unless we Repent (become anti-racist) and Jesus (black people) alone can forgive us.
It's so tiring.
was
1yr ago
One cause of the IQ-denier (and extending beyond that, denial of racial differences in IQ distribution) fallacy / fantasy is assortative socializing.
Lots of top-tier VCs don't subjectively think IQ is a strong selector because -- by the time a founder gets to Series B, they've been pre-selected for high IQ (1).
Lots of CEOs don't subjectively think IQ is a strong selector because -- by the time they interview someone for an executive position, that person has already been successful and thus has been pre-selected for high IQ.
You don't even have to be that high up. If you're an engineer at Google, your friend group and work group are probably all people who are fairly high performing individuals. So you might notice that there are fewer black people in that group, but the black people that you do interact with probably feel about as smart as everyone else (2)
Conversely, in my experience, if one talks to ER doctors, cops, public school teachers, or other people who are exposed to relatively large and relatively random slice of society, and one is really careful not to use the words IQ and wait until they've had a couple drinks, each of them will readily attest that some people are just plain smart and some people are just plain dumb.
1 - Or at least high enough to come off as quite smart in a superficial conversation not in one's domain.
2 - Not really true when I talk to non-woke people, but for the woke, at least smart enough that it's easy for them to dismiss any differences as those of education or environment, etc.
was
1yr ago
I will admit this isn't an effortpost:
As is common knowledge and more deeply discussed elsewhere in this very comment section (e.g. https://www.themotte.org/post/349/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/62270?context=8#context), Google got "scooped" by ChatGPT not because they were beat on the technology side, but because they were beat on the productization side. Some are comparing this to Xerox PARC, where Xerox invented or incubated many elements of modern computer technology -- the GUI, the mouse, etc. -- but, being blind to their actual utility, got "scooped" by Apple and others and subsequently lost out on trillions of dollars of market value.
What's deeply, deeply hilarious to me is: during this entire time, Google management were so busy posturing, and their internal A.I. safety teams were so busy noisily complaining sexism / racism / phobias of various sorts (not so much human extinction), and they developed such a reputation for being a place to coast, that despite 130,000 elite-educated, overpaid people sitting around ostensibly unleash their brilliance, they're now in a position where Microsoft has a puncher's chance (realistically, maybe 5 - 10%) of catching up and even surpassing Google's decades-long search dominance. Even better, competing with Microsoft now means that Google might have to cannibalize a $100B / yr line of business, whereas Microsoft cannibalizing Bing means it sacrifices maybe a ham sandwich / year line of business.
I have to admit, I don't care about other people as a general rule.
I care about some people: my wife and kids, my parents and siblings, close friends, social circle, coworkers (in descending order). Outside of that I care about people based on the value they bring. That can be direct value, e.g. the mailman who delivers packages, or indirect value, e.g. the people working at USPS's sorting center.
But I don't care at all about the people who bring negative net value. The homeless guy drugged out of his mind? If he died tomorrow I literally wouldn't feel sad at all. The single mother welfare-leech churning out 4 kids? Nope. Sam Bankman-Fried and his mother (who I consider her the upper-class equivalent of a welfare-leech)? Gone. Just fucking Thanos snap hordes of inner-city gangs and Women's Studies majors away.
I not only don't care about them, I fundamentally don't understand why people do. Does human life have intrinsic value? Yeah, some. But surely we all agree -- not that much right? Or else you would take all the money out of your bank account, go to one of the slums in India, and start saving lives left right and center at maybe $100 a pop? And at least that little kid in the slum has the potential to be the next Srinivasa Ramanujan, whereas the 65 year old homeless drunk who shows up to the ER every two weeks has no chance?
(Obviously this is not to say that I want those people removed -- that sets a dangerous precedent because who decides?)
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