"No one can really come up with any stories about his life that don't make him sound like a total dick so they cut the testimonial part short" killed me.
I enjoyed this article a lot too. Another funny line:
"The summer before I turned 13, my father got pretty gnarly brain cancer and told me and my sister to fuck off, though he used the Christian phrasing. And then he survived brain cancer and lived another 19 years. So that was awkward."
And a poignant one:
"I was in utero when my mother left my father. Her one great moment of bravery was defying the Baptist church and walking out on her abusive husband with a two-year-old and a half-done bun in the oven. I think she relied so heavily on her backbone in that moment that she was never able to stand up for herself again."
This is a good read. https://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Popular-Delusions-Charl.... Market participants often do know there's a bubble. However, if your neighbor keeps making more and more money selling tulips (that was a thing), then you will be tempted to buy some tulips yourself, knowing full well that you are commanding an absurd price.
Bubbles can be more "musical chairs" than rational pricing.
Besides introducing systematic risk, the sale of this software by Goldman smells fishy. Despite the Blankfein quote about maybe selling for $5 billion back in the day, if the software is what they purport it to be, wouldn't selling it be akin to Amazon licensing their product distribution to Walmart?
I've wondered what these million dollar per month programmers do on Wall Street. This really puts it in perspective.
On that note, it's completely depressing to see many of the best minds of our time working on shit software that adds nothing to society. Another swath of them are working on getting people to click on ads for Facebook and Google.
> Another swath of them are working on getting people to click on ads for Facebook and Google.
Which finances Google's driverless car efforts and an untold other amount of businesses (like gmail). Plus the salaries of thousands of developers and the myriad of other people who work for Google, and the subindustries it supports (bus drivers, chefs, real estate, etc). Just because their specific job isn't world-changing doesn't mean it has no positive effect on the world.
Silicon Valley has benefited greatly from the ad industry which is why the popularity of this type of complaint bothers me.
Same with Goldman. They do contribute to the world by facilitating commerce. Although they likely contribute far less to the world than SV developers since they siphon so much off the top for ultimately marginal longterm ROI. They also ultimately wouldn't make so much money unless they did provide some value to the economy beyond exploitation of byzantine financial systems.
I grant that Google is more of a social good than Facebook.
Your claim that Goldman has contributed is a debated topic. Paul Krugman favorably mentioned a study that purports to demonstrate that Wall Street's endeavors are largely unproductive. I can't find it now unfortunately.
Please see my last comment, this is a debated topic.
However, I've read Mike Milken and, despite his warts, I believe he did radically improve capital allocation. So it certainly has happened over the years.
-- edit: I meant about Mike Milken
The US experiment with alcohol prohibition is an ominous precedent to the war on drugs. Prohibition caused organized crime in the US to flourish. When Prohibition was repealed, the machinery was in place, so it refocused on drugs, gambling, and extortion. So the war on drugs is a second wave effect, and we are responding in exactly the same way.
Clarence Darrow, in his autobiography, discusses his defense for Loeb and Leopold. L&L were wealthy Chicago teenagers who read Nietzsche and decided they were Ubermensch. They murdered a random boy to prove they could get away with it. Darrow argued that L&L would not consider murder again, and that their crime was something that would happen only once in 1,000 years.
I found this repugnant. Who more deserves prison than those two? But with reflection my views have softened. At least one of the two seems to have wanted to be good. He lived out his life in prison quietly, spending his time writing an ornithology book. I can no longer honestly say I believe that society as a whole was better served by jailing them. Perhaps they should have been given the chance to redeem themselves by becoming productive citizens, and the chance to earn back a measure of dignity. (Certainly repeat offenders should be deemed a menace and incarcerated for the public good.)
I feel the same confusion about Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who raped a woman behind a dumpster. There was a lot of outrage at his early release, but again I'm not sure the greater good is served by keeping him behind bars. I hope he will live in infamy for the rest of his days, as is just. But should he have stayed behind bars for longer, at the public expense? I can't give a really cogent reason why he should (I am not comparing his sentence to that of other rapists, or to that of other convicts by the way).
Mobster Whitey Bulger of the Winter Hill Gang did in fact do this in Massachusetts in the early nineties. The papers reported it at face value, I guess for fear of libel suits.
"In 2002, at an event held to celebrate the Times's 20th anniversary, Moon said: 'The Washington Times is responsible to let the American people know about God' and 'The Washington Times will become the instrument in spreading the truth about God to the world.'" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times]
The Washington Times is indeed not at all a trustworthy news outlet. It is incredibly politically biased, to the point of overt absurdity. Due to the name, however, some continue to confuse it with the Washington Post and assume it has legitimate content.
I found this article disappointing because there's no advancement of a thesis or journalistic investigation. The author could have tracked down any number of illuminating statistics: number of wing suits sold over time; BASE/wing suit deaths over time; number of live videos posted over time. As the piece lacks either of these, it's almost pointless and thus the author attempts to tie it together with a question, just as you often see in college essays. There's no honest attempt to answer the question. So it's neither an essay nor investigative journalism. It's Reader's Digest. The article cashes in on prurient interest in death without paying anything back.
(To be clear this is an interesting topic to me. I followed Dean Potter for years, back from when he first made his name for slacklining and climbing.)
"Driving at 70 MPH versus biking at 12 MPH is a ludicrous point of comparison. If you're traveling at 70 MPH, you're almost certainly driving somewhere that you couldn't realistically bike. Driving 4 hours to a family gathering is reasonable in a way that biking 20 hours on the highway is not. ... The risk numbers are only appealing because of this absurd conflation."
I am not sure that I disagree with you overall, but I believe you are too dismissive here. Obviously, implicit in the piece is the notion that you must arrange your life to a degree to make bicycling possible, as the car is vastly more flexible. I think the better question is, having done so, how to compare the risk? It's not an easy question. MMM's answer is admittedly somewhat glib, but you're not allowing room for a fair comparison either.
I'm not sure I am. Cycling safety is a legitimate question if you arrange your life to accommodate it, but what upset me is that this isn't implicit in MMM's piece, as I read it. The piece insists that biking is safer per-mile, and that readers would benefit from a simple, minimal-accommodation switch to bicycling.
There is a real question to be answered here, and I didn't attempt to address it. But what offended me is the use of "per mile" and "best case" values that pretended there wasn't a harder question to address.
Motorists must also "arrange" their lives to support their transportation mode as much as cyclists do. Admittedly these arrangements have been made by others in most cases, but they're still present.
Simply being able to park a car at origin and destination, for example, costs money, and a lot of it, in terms of infrastructure and urban planning (even if there's no meter or explicit parking fee).
This is inevitable as venture capital assumes a larger portion of the economy. However, I have never seen such a focus on reputation as I have in the startup/venture capital world.
A good portion of what you might call 'blue chip' VC's value reputation highly. I may have the details wrong here, but between stints at Twitter Jack Dorsey tried his hand at another startup, failed, and felt so bad about it he repaid his VC's out of personal funds. Ron Conway made an offer on the spot to fund his next venture, whatever it might be.
My perception is that YCombinator is like that as well, and that word will get around quickly if you act like a jerk.
Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek talks at some length about avoiding jerks even if they are productive programmers.
Investment has always, always attracted jerks, so there is nothing surprising here. It's unfortunate that the article does not mention the rare rejection of apparatchik-ism and the self-serving and jerks in general that does happen in VC.
