dotBen

Elise Stefanik can go fuck herself for all the reasons listed elsewhere, lets get that on the table.

BUT we should be thoughtful, if not worried, about DJI. Here's a couple of reasons:

1) When the original Mavic Pro was released I showed mine to someone who had worked in US intelligence. His jaw dropped and said that based on other stuff he'd heard in his circles and now marrying it up with the product in his hands, it was clear IP that had been stolen from US DOD contractors and the government itself was in this device.

2) We know that the CCP has influence over all Chinese companies. I worked for Uber when we were operating in China and saw first hand the influence and access Chinese government had over operations and data. ANYONE who claims otherwise hasn't had first hand experience or is a shill (there's a lot of those around - there's more Chinese intelligence activity in Silicon Valley than in DC. I encountered that at Uber too.)

3) The amount of tracking that DJI can do and send home to China is concerning. Sensors, GPS and of course camera footage. When we worry about companies like Huawei intruding into our infrastructure, it's still at the data layer. DJI represents exposure into the kinetic layer which opens up all kinds of further vectors of concern.

4) These are being used for war, for now for the most part "on our side" (Ukraine) but DJI is already trying to disable some of that and is picking sides. Next time it might not be our side that wins the advantage.

5) You can't legislate "for the bad stuff" that could happen, which a few other commenters have suggested. The "bad stuff" would be happening on Chinese servers in China. It's out of jurisdiction. You buy a Chinese product like this, you're agreeing to the terms of engagement occurring outside of your friendly US/European jurisdictions. When this happens the only thing a country can do is ban the import, and here we are...

I have not bought the more recent versions of the DJI drones as I'm very conflicted on using DJI products based on what I know and what I can see up the road. I would love to pay 20-50% more for similar products from a US/Western company. I'm fine with them being manufactured in China but I want the company and the servers and the software operated in friendly countries (just like Apple).

(also, the voting on this comment is fascinating - lots of upvote and then suddenly a ton of downvotes. There's either lot of pro-Chinese brigading here or something else going on. If you disagree with my points please reply instead)

Open sourcing as a strategy works when there is a lot of developer interest and (usually) a developer is the beneficiary of the software (that doesn't mean the developer is the end user, but take WordPress, even if it's used by a lot of marketers for websites, it is developers who are the ones using it to produce those websites).

If your product is CRM/ERP, is there a lot of developer involvement in the provision of the software? And if not, what is the enabling factor for your beneficiaries to be able to take a FOSS package and begin to realize value? Don't confuse positive feedback of "this is cool" etc with positive feedback from buyers and beneficiaries.

FOSS B2B software communities work when there is value in not using the commercial version. Why would anyone who needs a CRM/ERP want to use a FOSS product when they would have budget to buy a commercial version and gain commercial support. I would assert that all users of CRM/ERP software have budget - unfortunately they just don't want to spend it on your product and so why would they then want to take the same product for free instead?

I think you need to have a clear reassessment of why your business is where it is (where it isn't) and what would change that. Not sure that open sourcing solves that. Good luck.

Er, there's people who worked on it at Bell Labs in the 70's who would like to have a word. It's taken 50 years for Unix to become an overnight success for you normies to become interested...

"Kids" is a very broad term - I don't think tracking older teenagers is appropriate but tracking a toddler (prob too young for this) through to teens is perfectly reasonable. Many people track their partners, family, etc via Apple and Google sharing locations.

It's not that kids need less tech, it's that they need less screen time. Arguably this watch isn't screen time.

The worry with physically destroying satellites is the amount of debris created could rapidly realize the Kessler Syndrome which in turn could prohibit humanity from launching into space.

It does depend how you physically destroy the satellite, but slamming something into the target satellite to destroy it is the easiest thing to do than latching on and deorbiting the target. A kinetic destruction approach is probably repeatable whereas deorbiting probably destroys the aggressor satellite as well.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

From a funding perspective things are very different than when CF started.

Have you ever had to reverse around a corner, since you did the test?

You're not wrong about London (I never owned a car when I lived there and that was a decade before Uber) but your worldview is skewed. If you look at American history from the last century, in cities like Los Angeles the car companies actually bought public transport railways and dismantled them in order to promote a car culture. And this is what we have.

Even here in San Francisco you need a car to get around efficiently (or use Uber which comes to a point where you might as well pay for a car), plus it's impossible to fully enjoy the natural beauty further afield without a car.

(I would however separate out unique applications with the RPI Zero given the form factor)

In 2005 Google wanted to do a nice gesture and offer free wifi across SF. The Board of Supervisors literally asked Google how much they were intending to pay the city in order to offer free wifi... SMH.

It of course never happened.

I would like to think you are right. The problem is that we already have a comparable with heroin and methadone. And people still want to take the heroin and not the methadone.

(You can get into somewhat conspiracy theory that methadone is designed to either help someone off heroin quickly or otherwise kill the addict more quickly - either way solving the problem. An addicts of wised up to that and avoid it.)

Internet is no longer just 5% of retail.

That $100m rebuild of the Tanforan mall is already being exited and will be converted to a biotech and life sciences hub.

The rest of the general impact to retail, I'm sure everyone is aware of.

In this case, wouldn't his new management consultant TN be tied to his (now former) employer, so would such revenues from his side projects need to flow through the TN sponsoring company in order not to step outside of the terms of his TN?

Side question: what are the risks of a TN holder operating what looks like commercial side projects whether they generate revenue or not (eg publishing a mobile game or running a successful website unrelated to the TN they hold - is it still commercial activity, is it still seen as removing a job from the US labor pool, etc?)

I think this serves as a good reminder that folks should be aware of common tick procedures like checking at the end of a walk if you have any and knowing how to remove them carefully (you don't just pull them, you have to get the mouthpiece out - tweezers are recommended).

I've already had a tick bite this year from a walk in Marin county which is quite early. Fortunately, I felt it bite me and was able to remove it quickly.

It's also worth noting you can get ticks tested for Lyme disease but it's about $40.

1) TikTok is indirectly owned and therefore controlled by Chinese Communist party.

2) Given the footprint and influence that TikTok has in the US, the platform has the ability to editorially control what people see and therefore influence perceptions of things such as elections and other hot button issues.

3) The widespread installation of an app indirectly controlled by the CCP creates fundamental risk. Eg a number of popular TikTok influencers were actually members of the armed forces who were recording videos in their residences on military properties. Gps and potentially camera access provides information such as troop movements and troop readiness to a potential adversary. At a wider scale, there are similar risks with mass location information of members of the public.

The reality is that US companies are not leaned on by the US government for this kind of information about foreign users.

Until we acknowledge that this is not a normal situation, it seems moot to debate TikTok under normal trade custom and practice.

I've never used tiktok, I've never created an account and I've certainly never installed the app.

I was a senior product manager at Uber for a number of years where I witnessed both the encroachment of the Chinese government into our operations and also the significant responsibility of having a GPS enabled app installed on a vast majority of the populations phones while holding all sorts of sensitive demographic information such as the places you visit, your social graph via your contact address book, etc.

I assume this is going on routinely already.

I assume the smart bet here for the government is to spend opex just on the things that are important to them and assume that some of the overhead costs of running a space station are covered by whatever independent commercialization opportunities the private company can realize. Thereby lowering the cost to the government as it doesn't have to pay the total cost of ownership.

My worry is that important strategic aspects that have no commercial opportunity end up being completely borne by the US government (and therefore the taxpayer) with a profit margin included and what looks clever on paper to move from a capex to an opex model simply becomes a more expensive overall. With added risk that there will only be a handful of companies who can execute any of these strategies and they may not wish to pursue the government's mandate in preference for their own commercial program.

Sometimes renting isn't better than buying.

The margins on these devices are already pretty high because they're enterprise and business focused - I "buy once cry once"'d when I bought my <vendor>* drive for the home. I would have bought a different vendor if I was forced to pay an additional premium for a render capable CPU.

(* - I'm probably tin foil hating here, but realized from a security posture perspective I don't want to publicly state the vendors I use in my network.)

But my point is, why would I do that? In both of these examples I can only assume one writes out an opinion because it's close to the one they hold themselves. I don't go around advocating opinions I don't actually hold myself.

You know, philosophically speaking, not every company has to do that. And before someone steps in and quotes 'fiduciary responsibility for shareholder returns', I'm a VC and I run a VC fund so I'm acutely aware.

Now, if you take venture funding then that's a different story. But there are countless businesses - from small mom+pop to larger ones like Bob's Red Mills - which are operating for higher purposes than just shareholder returns. See B Corps generally. And the world is better place for it. I tuck into a bowl of Bob's oatmeal every morning and I'll be fucked if I'm buying Great Mills or PepsiCo (Quaker Oats) big company shit.

"he committed the cardinal sin of making the employees owners instead of fully capturing the excess capital of his means of production and offshoring production entirely to focus on branding"

Many would say this was anything but a cardinal sin. Try reading fewer Ayn Rand books.

At scale, on demand grocery delivery introduces significant efficiency which probably offsets whatever the reliance on impulse buys.

Obviously, Boeing and Airbus represent a duopoly. When you factor in one of them is US-based and is relied upon to deliver on certain national security projects, defense etc no politician is going to let the commercial arm fail and risk the national security arm failing too.

Also there is a lag in the system around failure. The market could decide that Boeing planes are poorly constructed, but how many accidents and deaths would have to happen in order for customer (airlines) to decide to no longer put in orders. That's not really feasible.

"Too big to fail"

I also really loved my Air 11". A lot of tech friends who were on call would carry them in large jacket pockets. I remember someone pulling one out at a restaurant in Valencia St in SF because pager duty went off.

MacBook 12 was a worthy upgrade on size to get the retina screen. Air 13" is just a laptop at this point.

I've never been able to convert over to iPad + keyboard for the same writing and hyper-productive working.