They are both called mixed use, but are very different in terms of implementation.
In Japan, you can start and run your own business in your your own house (like your garage), within certain limits. This is why there are businesses in Japan like tiny cafes and shops that are nonviable anywhere else.
Where you and I live, the commercial section is a completely separate unit which is usually quite large, must be rented separately, and comes with a lot of regulations.
Adams had a normal range of beliefs. Postulating that they arose from some extrinsic and extra-personal source is a condemnation of your own limited views. People get older and begin to care less about conformity, including keeping controversial thoughts to themselves, as society loosens its reins as your needs are met (to make money, to find a partner, to have a family, etc.)
The law of attraction / master persuader/ I can hypnotize large audiences stuff isn't that normal, I think?
If you want an explanation for why he would try ivermectin for cancer treatment he had a lot of beliefs in that vein for a long time. I consider that tragic for him.
He was into NLP (the hypnosis theory) from way back.
James Hoffman, the coffee YouTuber, had an interesting comment on how he tried to use that in one of his 90s barista competitions, but seemed skeptical of it now. Scott remained a believer.
It's a communications skill, like, say, making powerpoint slides. If you get good at it, you will swear by it. But if can't gain skill, it's easy to think it's bogus. If you're deeply interested I can go into detail as to what it's about and not about. Or you can buy some books, get a trainer, or take a class.
Tl; dr: it's about adding a second layer to your communication which attends to the subconscious, not unlike art. It was originally for therapy, but unfortunately a lot of businessdorks in the 90s got into it and perverted it.
I've pondered awhile on what hypnosis is. My current model is it's like prompting LLMs, the hypnotic commands are just stuff in the context window but not currently being talked about.
I went to a sceptics talk by a stage hypnotist a while back that I found very interesting.
He said after many years he wasn’t sure what hypnotism was exactly, or even if it was an identifiable thing at all, and that in a lot of ways he was just giving people license and cover to do stuff they probably wanted to do anyway. You can’t hypnotise people to do something they don’t want to, apparently.
So if he says “Come up on stage and cluck around like a chicken, make a real show of yourself in front of the crowd”, then quite a few people will go and do it and come away saying “That wasn’t me, the hypnotist made me do it, but what laugh eh?”.
He was less sure how this might apply to (for example) hypnotic pain control, but it was an interesting take.
The cluck like a chicken thing reminded me that with small kids the teachers would have us run around and then say 'be a tree' or whatever. I guess a combination of kids liking doing that kind of thing and the authority figure telling them to.
He got into a heated debate with his audience about COVID vaccines and ivermectin (he was pro vaccine and said they were idiots). Later he admitted he was wrong, when more evidence came out.
A lot of the people who comment here are techie provincials who literally have no understanding that the things they believe, or at least the things they recite as their beliefs, are ideas that might be analyzed and judged against reality.
Most people in the industrialized world zealously believe what they are told to believe, even if it goes against what's in front of their own eyes. So making things true just by saying or writing them is not that odd.
I think the commentor was talking about Adams's support for Trump. While maybe not normal on Reddit, HN or San Francisco, it's normal enough that more than half the voters agreed with Scott Adams.
You’re probably thinking of politics. You may not have read some of his more philosophical and metaphysical works, which were downright kooky. For example he thought that the universe was the dust of a god that had killed itself.
uh I don't know, try asking almost any person who was born pre-1960? Doubt they all had brain damage. Not that it was necessarily a good thing, but it was certainly 'normal' in many eras throughout time.
This will help out home prices in a lot of lower priced markets, but do little in higher priced markets. In the Bay Area, many houses are bought up by non-occupying internationals. I've been in a couple of such houses. It's bizarre walking into a $5M+ hilltop mansion that's completely bare inside except for a token "student" living out of one room.
"From" other countries is overly broad and I assume not what you intended. I am actually interested though in the idea of legislating how frequently home owners have to actually be within range of the home, for example. A friend has had a hell of a time with a landlord in Malaysia who's never seen the property.
They do it by citizenship, and you might be surprised how many investment properties are vacant homes, but I’m not necessarily advocating for this in any case. The real cure would just be right to build laws.
The problem is, you can’t do that at the federal level, and the people who vote at the local level are the homeowners who benefit from housing restrictions.
The federal government has a very difficult task. They want to make home prices basically stay flat for a long time, and they have limited tools with which to do it since they can’t do the one thing every economist agrees would solve the problem.
Could homeowners be convinced with truckloads of money? As in, yes if you increase density beyond demand the value of each individual home decreases, but the value of the land dramatically increases if suddenly your single family home with a lawn could be converted to a 9 story tower renting out units to 20+ households with infrastructure spending diverted to your area to improve it. Are landowners unaware or just do not care about the profit potential?
I just don’t think it works that way. The developers don’t buy existing homes, they buy farms and golf courses and large vacant tracts. They don’t frequently just like buy 4 homes and put 20 where they had been.
Most people have most of their money tied up in their home equity and would lose an amount that hurts
Many countries prohibit non-citizens from owning any real estate or businesses at all, even if they have a long-term resident status. Thailand is one example. Ownership is limited to 49%, a local partner must own at least 51%.
does that work out in their favor in the end? seems like that would really deter investment in the country. I'm not familiar with any large thai corporations.
Do the math of what it costs a city per resident - napkin math it, total tax intake divided by population. Now compare that to the additional taxes and money that person (who is wealthy) is not injecting into your city.
So out of touch to think the net spend of a gov directly on an individual would be worth sacrificing all of that additional capital injected to your other neighbors and their businesses.
It's the same in Southern California. When I sold my first starter home it was bought by internationals to rent. There were already multiple homes on the block owned by foreign interests.
And at the new home I moved into, the house next door is owned by foreign interests and rented out to the highest bidder. It makes it extremely difficult to get anything done that involves shared areas (like common fence or overhanging trees) because the owner is essentially unavailable and doesn't speak english. Not to mention that every year or so we have to deal with renters who are minimally vetted. We've had a group of 5 college kids turn the place into a frat house once. There is also a property management company involved, but they can't get in contact with the owner either.
In my experience, this seems to be a bigger issue than wall street investors.
It’s happening a lot with me at work. I am a programmer working largely with a hardware team and now they’re contributing large changes that I’m supposed to just roll with the punches. Management loves it
This behavior is extremely damaging to the startup scene. Who would join a startup these days unless it’s run by a close friend or relative? At least in that case, the scorned junior employees would have social recourse.
It's not like larger companies don't also screw over their employees in various ways. After having to leave AWS due to my fully distributed team that was formed during WFH being forced to "return" to an office that most of ever never lived near, I've preferred working for smaller companies not because I care about equity (I'm in the fortunate position that I can survive comfortably and save for retirement on my salary rather than needing to rely on the value from options/RSUs), but because my confidence in my ability to predict where things are headed goes down increasingly with each additional level of management between me and whoever has the power to arbitrarily decide to upend my employment on a whim. In the long run, I'll probably be fine if my employer doesn't make me rich, so as long as my projected retirement age isn't actively getting pushed back based on my current income and spending, I'd rather optimize for minimizing the likelihood I suddenly find myself unemployed due to untenable working conditions or getting unexpectedly laid off. My experience at startups has been that it's a lot easier to tell when things might start to get dicey several months down the line and start to prepare for if I need to find another gig. With a large company, I've seen that happen much more suddenly for people who had no reason to suspect they might need to in advance.
My health insurance from AWS was about the same coverage/cost that I got from a startup I worked at that had 10 employees for a year or so afterwards, but the insurance from the startup had much better humans for me to talk to when there were issues. As for the extra money, my point was that I've found my quality of life is higher working for companies where I know where I stand in the medium-to-long term.
I definitely don't have any illusions that this is based on a number of personal factors (e.g. my overall financial situation making any additional income not likely to drastically change my quality of life and the somewhat unorthodox medical needs of someone in my family causing me to need to talk to the insurance company a few times a year to sort things out). The comment at the beginning of this thread was asking " Who would join a startup these days?" though, so my answer is basically "someone like me". I don't pretend to have any idea how many others like me there are, only that the tradeoffs for larger companies don't really make much sense for me.
I don't think this makes it much worse because that's hard to do, it's already terrible. Getting screwed by startup founders has been the status quo for at least 15 or 20 years now.
If you're just a worker then demand fair market wages, work healthy hours, and treat your useless class of shares as already used and discarded scratch off lottery tickets.
If you join a startup, and have equity that isn’t special in some way (defending against liquidation preference or dilution), you’re the sucker. You’re just going to grind for someone else’s payday when a deal is made in a room you’re not in. You’ll only be made rich if someone with the power to drive the decision thinks you should be. As always, it’s who you know and being likable.
I’ve thought about this comment, and am replying to it to amend it (as the edit window has passed). I made this comment based on observations I’ve seen during this AI investment bubble and before it. Most times, common shareholders get the short end of the stick. But I will add, there are some “less than the majority” situations where I have seen employee shareholders treated with dignity and respect, and provided access to liquidity accordingly, and I would be remiss if I did not call that out. It will be challenging to know ahead of time, but there are decent people out there who won’t take advantage or use their power against you economically (imho). “Be lucky” is unfortunately not actionable.
If you get an offer from a startup you'll need to pay a great lawyer to negotiate an iron-clad contract, so much so that any post-1st round startup would rescind the offer.
It is definitely time to stop looking at equity as part of pay at a startup. The trend is extremely clear, startups aren't paying out to employees but the C suite gets internal raises and IPO is pushed to infinity. It is nice to have some paper laying around but that is all it is, paper. Go to a startup for a year. Get the experience, move and get a 20-50% pay increase and keep doing that every year and you will be way happier and financially healthier.
This is always the case. Negotiate equity, but assume it’s worth zero. It’s not liquid and highly speculative. It’s a nice to have.
edit: which doesn’t mean join companies you don’t believe in! Please do. But don’t expect it to be there, don’t include it in life plans, don’t pay attention to valuations, etc.
It has always been the case, but each year there’s a fresh crop of new, bright-eyed 20-year-olds who haven’t learned it yet. The entire startup ecosystem essentially depends on the fact that some people haven’t yet internalized that options are worthless and working 80+-hour weeks if you’re employee #3 or higher never pays off, because even in the slim chance your company has a successful exit you’ll get fucked over by antics like this.
The best we can do is try and make “options have an EV of 0, startups aren’t worth it, join a FAANG” a widely-known meme in places like HN to keep as many people as possible from having to lean this the hard way. We’ll never save everyone, but at least it’s more widely-known than it used to be.
It hasn't actually always been the case and the real issue is the false advertising that you actually have equity. If my equity of 1% was real then I would get value as the company grew but the reality is that options/shares without some sort of exit is worth 0. Founders and the C suite often (always now?) get 'internal' raises meaning when a new round of funding hits they get to sell but nobody else does. This, to me, completely destroys the concept that equity is an incentive to build the company and means it should -never- be used as part of a hiring pitch since the people pitching it, founders and the upper management, obviously don't believe in it themselves. If you really want to see if the leadership believes in the junk they are telling you then ask them to put in writing that internal raises are available to all at the same percentages or they are available to nobody.
Honestly the dilution thing never made much sense. It's penny pinching your most important employees.
If you don't want your employees holding shares, then tell them to sell their shares during the seed rounds where you will give them a chance to liquidate and renegotiate the shares allocation. Your employees now have a strong incentive to make it to the next seed round and the bigger the round the better.
The current system appears to be suboptimal for both parties. Employees receive options as replacement for a lower salary, but the founders don't actually want to give up control over the company. This means you now have the worst of both worlds. The employees know they will get shafted and value the options at zero, which kills the productivity incentive. The founders have given away options for nothing and now need to engineer a situation where the options are as valuable as the employees think they are.
The problem imo is when you actively lie to me. I won't go into specifics, but I was lied to , said F em, went the legal route and got smacked down.
It's not even worth a name and shame. Just sip a shot of whiskey and try to move on. This is why I like contract jobs. Ain't no equity. It's much more honest.
If you need a job for things like food and housing a startup is cool.
I fully expect to be lied to repeatedly though about my own pay, our prospects, etc. I had to learn the hard way that these lies are defacto legal because employees won't realistically be able to sue.
In that case working at a startup would be a thing someone would only do as a last resort, and the talent pool would consequently be extremely low quality. Sounds damaging to the scene to me.
I was talking with a great-sounding few-person early startup (nice people, non-evil business, interesting work, etc.), and they wanted me to fill a highly-skilled role... in-office in a VHCOLA, for $110K and "0.5%" in usual option schedule. (Presumably also with the usual barriers to options ever being exercised or liquidated equitably.)
Even fresh grads with no experience take home more in this town.
I live to work, and I'd be willing to spend a few more years in student-apartment quality of life, and to work like a strategic asset to make the startup successful. But I've learned that deal should include a FIRE lottery ticket, not a condo downpayment lottery ticket.
If your early startup doesn't want to share significant equity, https://levels.fyi/ provides TC numbers of what established companies are paying, even for people who wouldn't be good for a startup.
Maybe it's the recent years of what VC culture has devolved to. ("Why is your cap table cutting in early key hires significantly? Do you have a leadership problem, bro?") Maybe this is just another facet of the "mask-off" or "late-stage capitalism" that people have started calling out in other facets of society.
Absolutely, downvote down calls for founding engineers paid to get meaningful equity.
We wouldn't want someone accepting a small fraction of their market salary to get even 1% pre-dilution of an early startup (even in dark-pattern options), because that might align them with company success, or even be fair.
Oh FFS 0.1% of this acquisition is $20M. 0.5% is $100M. Junior to senior equity lies in this range. They'll be more than fine. They'll be 1%ers to 0.1%ers after taxes, yeesh. It's never ever enough. is it?
Series E was just 3 months ago. $2M for 3 months work seems fantastic to me. Series B equity was anytime through early 2021. This is a fantastic outcome for everyone in Groq.
What I'm reading here is 100% envy and resentment of their success. But that only works if you're already rich or president, preferably both for best results.
Why are you assuming the employees’ equity participates in this licensing deal at all? They just have ownership in the leftover dying company as far as I can tell. How will they make that worth something, and get liquidity?
And you don't think they'd be squealing like stuck pigs in the blogosphere if that were the case? There isn't even anything like that on Blind currently, but there sure are a lot of people with no skin in this deal whining about it to high heaven. This is not a winning attitude. $20B for Groq just normalized $1B for AI startups in general. Maybe less concern trolling here and more building something is in order?
My assumption is employees are mostly out on holidays since the deal was known widely only on Christmas, and so they’re busy with their personal lives, quietly discussing this issue with trusted coworkers, and if there are serious problems, they are coordinating a lawsuit instead of saying something they shouldn’t in public.
You should be asking why no one has dispelled the criticisms of how employee equity is treated in this deal - neither Nvidia nor Groq’s founders nor regular employees. Lots of people have raised this concern. Should be simple to answer, right?
As for people with no skin in this deal “whining” - why wouldn’t people raise concerns? It’s a disturbing trend. These are highly unusual deals made to circumvent the law and break norms, on antitrust and employee compensation. They’re suspicious and prior examples have stolen from employees. So distrust and scrutiny by default is completely justified.
So your belief is that the FTC should not only have control over corporate acquisitions but also over where people work and what they can be paid, got it. We are all at will employees in tech and you and only you are responsible for where you choose to work. Most startups fail. This one didn't. Good on them.
"all groq employees got cashed out, no one is getting screwed here. windsurf is different."
But wait, wait, don't tell me... How do we KNOW this REALLY is a groq EMPLOYEE? It COULD be a PAID shill blah blah blah WINDSURF! WINDSURF! You can't hide the TRUTH forever!
Well it’s an anonymous account - could just be the founder or someone who got special treatment. The rest of the comments are skeptical and for good reason, which is that there is no official disclosure of how employees got their due based on the ownership implied by their options. “Got cashed out” may just mean they got $100 each. Why are you hostile to seeking the truth here or creating pressure on founders and investors to come clean?
Great work making this available for sale. NI and Keysight are the only two traditional vendors of this kind of thing and they’re priced close to $1k these days. There are tons of knock-offs on Ebay that won’t last more than a few months if they ever work.
Even worse, the windows drivers know they're knock offs and let you use them for a bit and then error out. It's the perfect lesson. They give you that high of "yes, I got one over on the big guys, we're cruising now" and then "I don't know boss it's just all of a sudden not working anymore. Yes I know we're in a production crunch. Yes we should've just bought the real one". On Linux though, no issues for me
FWIW, You can buy legit used 82357s for quite a bit less than 1k. Anecdotally, I've never had one fail in 20 years. Probably bought a dozen over that time frame. All used daily.
There’s a fairly large second-hand market for old electronics test equipment. A lot of that stuff only had GPIB ports, even well into the 90s. Cheap Chinese entrants (Rigol, Siglent, etc.) only within the last decade started making an impact
Blogs are almost 30 years old at this point, but yes, I do associate a nearly compulsive need to show off one's work in meticulously-crafted blog posts with younger people.
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