Feels mostly like "if you're responding to this you're already compromised", a bit like "I take it you understand that our Family expects its favours to be returned".
I think it's pretty well established now that powerful people in and outside the Valley considered to think that Epstein was a useful contact knowing his "personal situation" rather well and sometimes explicitly referring to it. Suspect it's possible to have innocently accepted an introduction to him or even advice from him in the 2010s because he wasn't that famous at the time, but it seems like they were motivated to minimise that possibility. Even easier to add people to the list you can blackmail in future if you don't even have to arrange island visits for them
It's PG, the definition of the sort of success he advocates in the startup world is "accumulated a lot of money, influence and kudos" and those guys are outlying successes in those areas, regardless of issues in their personal life and how many people detest some of them.
Sure, there are normies with greater levels of personal happiness (as well as plenty of nice normies who also managed to fall out with significant people in their lives for one reason or another), but I don't think PG is likely to consider them higher achievers, even if they're significantly more secure and happy in their career than some of those individuals.
Dropbox is actually a great example of why this isn't likely to happen. Deeper pocketed competition with tons of cloud storage and the ability to build easy upload workflows (including directly into software with massive install base) exists, and showed an active interest in competing with them. Still doing OK
Office's moat is much bigger (and its competition already free). "New vibe coded features every week" isn't an obvious reason for Office users to switch away from the platform their financial models and all their clients rely on to a new upstart software suite
That's a hard problem to solve. Invest enough in solving that problem and you might get the ability to manufacture a radiator out of it, but you're still going to have to transport the majority of your datacenter to the moon. That probably works out more expensive than launching the whole thing to LEO
I would be a lot more convinced they had found a way to solve the unit economics if it was being used to secure billion dollar deposits from other companies rather than as the narrative for rolling a couple of Elon's loss making companies into SpaceX and IPOing...
Reminds me of the proposal to deorbit end of life satellites by puncturing their lithium batteries :)
The physics of consuming bits of old chip in an inefficient plasma thruster probably work, as do the crawling robots and crushers needed for orbital disassembly, but we're a few years away yet. And whilst on orbit chip replacement is much more mass efficient than replacing the whole spacecraft, radiators and all, it's also a nontrivial undertaking
I think my favourite in the UK is the town I grew up in, where the cheapest petrol station is 100 yards down the two lane road from a more expensive one, so you could actually see the cheaper prices from the forecourt of the more expensive one...
That's... not how markets work. The cheap petrol stations are very much aware that they're cheaper than their neighbours already. The more expensive ones may feel some downward pressure, but mostly won't.
People who are price sensitive can discover cheaper alternatives more easily; others still won't bother
mostly such tools are useful when you go very close to a few petrol stations on your regular routes anyway. I can pretty much time topups for when the cheapest station locally is en-route to my destination
A 7p per litre difference does sound like the difference between local station and motorway prices though, and they probably will have factored in that opportunity cost of time...
> A 7p per litre difference does sound like the difference between local station and motorway prices though, and they probably will have factored in that opportunity cost of time...
Only 7p?
Motorway services have shocking price markups, way more than 7p. Most people don't realise this or are just too lazy to find something that isn't quite as convenient.
Unleaded is 131.80p (UK wide) and 156.80p (Motorway Service Area).
That's nearly a 20% markup.
Last time I drove into a motorway services and saw prices ~20p/litre higher I just drove through the petrol station and found a local garage to fill up at.
Petrol in the U.K. is insanely cheap. When I passed my test I could buy 4.5 litres with an hours work at minimum wage, which would get me about 30 miles. Today an hour at minimum wage gets me 9.4 litres and takes me over 100 miles.
Spending an extra £10 once or twice a year when driving a few hundred miles and thus needing to fill up at a motorway is nothing. Chances are I’m spending that much on an overpriced coffee when I do that anyway.
It’s not a matter of “quite as convenient”, it’s a matter of figuring where you are, find a nearby town, finding a petrol station in it and getting back to the motorway. This can take well over half an hour. Time that you really need to be spending getting to your destination because there’s a good chance your trip is going to take most of the day.
Most of the "digital sovereignty" stuff is spending money on companies that intend to sell services at a profit and pay taxes on it. So they absolutely can afford to do it (and governments have more routes to getting money back than just exits) provided you back the right companies. That's probably more easily achieved in digital sovereignty than space launch though.
You mean government subsidizing the companies and taxing them in return? How is that a viable model? Also subsidizing means tax payers put on the burden and there is no guarantee that the companies subsidized by the governments would turn a profit or just burn through the subsidies and go bankrupt.
> You mean government subsidizing the companies and taxing them in return?How is that a viable model?
You're asking how it can be viable to give money to unprofitable companies in the hope that some of them will repay it by becoming very profitable in future on a website run by YC? Really?
Investing in infrastructure and economy and playing lotto with tax payers money in random companies is two different things. By your definition the government could just put all tax money into stock market and hope for the best.
Investing money in the stock market doesn't meaningfully improve the economy. Unless by economy we mean the stock market of course. Sure, if you have run out of better investment options and still have money left over that's a decent strategy (Norway's sovereign wealth fund would be a good example). But usually there are better investments available for governments. Buying goods and services from local companies is one such better investment, since it directly benefits those companies, not just their stock holders and managers
I think it's pretty well established now that powerful people in and outside the Valley considered to think that Epstein was a useful contact knowing his "personal situation" rather well and sometimes explicitly referring to it. Suspect it's possible to have innocently accepted an introduction to him or even advice from him in the 2010s because he wasn't that famous at the time, but it seems like they were motivated to minimise that possibility. Even easier to add people to the list you can blackmail in future if you don't even have to arrange island visits for them