This Wired article is an interesting read, well worth the time.

I wish we could see into the head of Stockton Rush a little bit more. The job of all entrepreneurs is to a large degree knowing who to listen to and who to ignore, as well as figuring out which rules you can break. Usually the lives of passengers and yourself is not on the line, though and that’s why so many of the highly competent engineers left his team.

A lot of his decision making seemed money driven. He got quotations for testing services but declined because of the cost. Salvaging the old titanium rings from the old busted hull to use on the new hull was a risky choice but new ones were surely very expensive. Perhaps a much larger budget would have led to a more committed team of experts and the resources to test things to a higher degree of confidence.

As this article points out, OceanGate just never came up with a design that was good enough for the job at hand.

But what can you say. The ocean floor is littered with countless dreams.

Of all the billionaires who do exist Bill and Melinda would probably agree with you. Bill has been pretty clear that he always played the game to win but he’s also stated he intends to give it all away and he’s openly recruiting other billionaires to give it all away as well.

I suppose evil billionaires could give it away to make the world a worse plCe, say by developing something like sharks with lasers on their heads, But again in these guys case they’re giving it away to help eliminate malaria around the world.

If all billionaires were like Bill and the Melinda I suppose the world would be a significantly better place.

These old stodgy dudes have two things going for them that young guys don’t (yet) have - a lifetime of building a support network of donors and mastery at playing “the game”.

They should retire at 60 and pass along their donors and skills to a few proteges, but recently they cling until the very last breath.

If you deposit your money at a bank, or PayPal, or some online digital bank transfer service,** you do not have your money anymore.** They have your money.

Now you have some kind of contract that says they’ll give you your money on demand. But sometimes they won’t give it to you when you want it. If any judge or cop wants to see every person or business I’ve ever transacted with the bank will happily give it over.

On the other hand, cash is cash. If I possess it, then I have it. And nobody gets to know how much, or how suspicious, or with whom I’m transacting.

The strategy makes a lot of business sense too. It’s why piracy controls in Microsoft Windows were so weak for so long.

Steve Ballmer said something along the lines of if the Chinese are going to pirate software, I want it to be Microsoft software.

I’m not sure if this game has an online mode but generally speaking the network effect of online means more people playing equals a better online experience. If half those people didn’t pay, the ones who did pay still get a better online experience right?

I think the rules are typically negotiable in advance, especially when it’s down to just 2 contenders.

Debates have the potential to show more than eloquence or intelligence, they also show soft skills like whether the candidate can control the conversation, control under pressure, how easily they succumb when bullied, and give the audience an opportunity to read their body language, which may develop (or remove) trust.

Biden famously told Trump in a debate: “would you shut up, man?” And in that moment quite a few Americans were swayed to select him believing he’s not susceptible to getting run over by trump mouth diarrhea attack like so many other politicians are.

I ran a single line BBS system in the Seattle area in my early teens which was early '90s. At the peak we were averaging about 20 calls a day and I kept the whole thing running for a few years. I had a four drive CD-ROM tower system loaded up with shareware CD archives and a connection to fidonet, so you could exchange email with anyone else who had a fidonet address around the world. It was freaking cool and the skills I learned building that prepared me to jump into IT during the .com boom which was a pretty lucky career break for a teen in Seattle.

That era was the tail end of the golden days of BBS systems because Prodigy and CompuServe followed quickly and what they had was professional content creators and some of the first integrations for buying airline tickets, stocks, reading the news, and functional email that reached a wider audience. At that time, you have to remember there was no other way to access those services in real time. Your only other source for this would have been TV or newspapers, or picking up the phone and calling a travel agent.

A lot of these services’ business model was selling hours of access. So you might pay 30 bucks a month for 50 hours, and if you stayed online longer you’d pay more. Those numbers were fine because after you finished whatever you wanted to do, there was nothing left to look at so it was easy to log back off. Very few people were leaving anything resembling an instant messenger logged in all the time.

Those services were constantly updating so every time you logged in you’d see new games, photo libraries, user-generated content in their forums. But in the end they were essentially overgrown BBS’s with funding.

All of them, including AOL, tried to stay relevant by adding the internet as soon as it became a little more mainstream to talk about. But within a fairly short period of time, maybe about a year, the content available on the wider internet from major sources outpaced whatever Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL could produce on their own, so most people logged in just to bypass and get to the internet.

The next generation of getting online after that was subscribing directly to a local ISP for a dial-up account.

As I think back to this, we knew the future was coming fast, but nobody seemed to really understand what that would entail. Absolutely nobody was envisioning services to come like cloud storage, social media, non-stop connectivity from your pocket etc. That was basically sci-fi movie stuff. Connectivity was simply too slow, and we didn’t even have high-res pics or videos stored on our computers at the time. Photos were still taken on film, and video was stored on magnetic tape. It was still very analog and very few people could afford the hardware to digitize it. Early scanners were crappy, only black and white, and expensive.

The most incredible services to launch at the beginning were the chat systems and forums, and online shopping. Clicking on a picture of a cool thing, Entering a credit card number, and it showing up at your door a few days later was pretty cool, and I can distinctively remember the first Christmas where I did all of my shopping online and then bragged about not having to go to the mall. A pretty glorious experience for somebody who never really liked the mall.

Mail order systems existed but you had to call to place your order on the phone (during business hours), or physically mail your order slip with a handwritten credit card number or a check.

I think one of the most fascinating components of this that struck people was how fast you could communicate with people on the other side of the earth. A lot of people would exclaim “I just talked to a guy in Australia!” as the most eye-opening first experience. That’s a real tell on how isolated we used to be.

In the early '90s, there was a very real sense that most people around you had not ever been online before. So if you started talking about your experiences most people would look at you like you’re an alien, or at least some kind of super nerd. There was a period of time where it was decidedly uncool.

My best friend to this day is a guy I met in middle school and we quickly discovered that we both knew about BBS systems. By the time I graduated there were maybe only four or five guys in our BBS group of friends at our high school of 600 people.

Anyways, sorry for the essay. Having been born into the analog era and grown up as it became digital was a wild experience that those before and those after might not totally relate to.

I think we’ll improve this a lot. Now it’s a race to be first, later it will be a race to be profitable and keep costs low.

Plus the sun outputs a lot more energy than earth can ever consume so we just need to get better at collecting it without creating waste on the side.

Interesting concept. Like if you could upvote/downvoted the SERP and it actually mattered and wasn’t easy to manipulate.

The floor has a wave to it, so you can stand on a more level surface despite the angle of the team car. Well worth the ride if you visit Hong Kong.

Tribes, man. Fucking tribes.

I don’t know much about the internal politics of Taiwan but I think playing the diplomatic game strategically is pretty crucial here. If the world has to take sides, I’m afraid for Taiwan.

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Oh, nvm, sorry

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The bible is not univocal. So saying “pick up a bible” to understand his views perhaps includes killing those who wear mixed fabrics and giving women instructions for abortions. Maybe it also includes killing his firstborn son whenever the voices say he should. Or maybe he doesn’t think those parts mean what they say, but other parts do?

Apologetics is an amazing thing! You’ll never guess how that one thing doesn’t mean what you think it means, and I’m the sole authority to tell you why!

I’m sure a lot of the problems are regulation related. For example I don’t think you can drive golf carts on most city streets.

Some preplanned communities have separate road systems for smaller vehicles. But if it’s not baked in from the start, it’s probably tough to add later.

Unfortunately, I think the auto lobby is largely responsible for much of this, and will fight hard to keep it this way.

This is dumb. Americans are being ripped off by car prices and manufacturers who aren’t investing in this cheaper tech.

The Chinese cars are cheap because they’re going back to basics. Compared to any US DOT approved vehicle, they’re slow, they’re light, they don’t have any bells and whistles. Four wheels, a motor, some simple electronics, and a battery.

Ultimately, that’s all you need to get from one place to the next if you don’t need highway speeds or crash ratings…

Will high tariffs cause local manufacturers to develop their own version of cheap electric vehicles? Doubtful.

I’ve heard a lot of people having this problem. Airbnb is next to useless, even with their guarantee.

Prices goes up, other hotels are booked solid, there are fewer options and travelers are left in the cold.

A big brand would be less likely to risk their reputation over $50 or $100/night difference if there’s some new big event in the area

There are a few things humans (and thus a healthy society) require for survival. Water, food, shelter.

When we start to point unadulterated VC backed capitalism at those resources, I think we give up something in our society and culture that we don’t actually want to give away.

I travel a lot worldwide and have used Airbnb quite a few times. However I’m now on the side of “Airbnb is evil”.

A couple years ago had a horrific experience in a villa and Airbnb customer support didn’t give a rats ass. Fortunately, my bank did and my credit card chargeback for $4,000 was successful. While I was going through that experience I came across a multitude of communities of travelers who have had equally horrific, oftentimes more horrific experiences with Airbnb where they’ve failed to step in and assist in any way.

Random dudes who own houses are on average unqualified in the hospitality business and not incentivized by maintaining a brand reputation. There are so many issues caused by shitty Airbnb hosts that hotels - real hotels - just don’t suffer from.

So now we have this situation where a lot of spaces are allocated to hotel businesses, more space is allocated to residential housing, And any random dude who can qualify for a mortgage can take a house off the market, fill it for 10 or 15 days out of the month, and keep both a domicile unused for a resident and a hotel room empty.

This is one of the few areas where I think hotel regulations are smart.

Will be interesting to read the arguments and hear what experts have to say.

There is some precedence that corporations do have first amendment rights.

A hypothetical argument from TikTok is they think they are allowed constitutional rights, in this case to publish whatever they want, in the act of doing a commercial activity and that the law which was passed to force a sale to a local owner is a violation of their right to speak freely.

I suspect TikTok operates in the USA under an American registered entity that is wholly owned by a foreign entity. Whether that grants or removes any such constitutional rights seems unclear.

Next, it doesn’t seem like the law intends to block TikTok’s “speech”, rather it specifically allows the executive branch to block this particular type of foreign entity from doing business on American soil on the grounds of security, enforced most likely by blocking it from doing business with the app stores. This also has precedence - a lot of it, in fact - when it comes to security. The US blocks all kinds of foreign businesses from trading with American businesses. Like arms dealers and drug dealers.

So TikTok will need to defeat the idea that even as a foreign businesses they don’t need to be subject to the whims of the executive branches power to block foreign businesses AND that even congress doesn’t have the power to write a law that gives the executive branch this power (because, ya know, they just DID write that law).

And then TikTok will need to win on the idea that somehow their rights have been suppressed.

Seems like a long shot to me and the precedence that would be established by making it difficult for Congress to write laws that give the executive power to block foreign entities because it risks their unlikely right to speech in the US seems a bit whack.