moonraker

That's a multi-decade phenomenon based on historical precedents (in the best case scenario). Ultimately, whether that "best case" manifests is dependent on whether SF residents want it badly enough. It's a matter of political will -- residents' Progressive values have to actually align with how they vote and act (over the long-term)

Stripe's a $90bn+ company because it builds & sells tools that make it easy for software engineers to programmatically move and manipulate money. This is a no brainer for them (regardless of how mainstream stablecoins/cryptocurrencies/blockchain eventually become)

I really identified with that part too. I also really liked what you said about the idea of solving a problem vs making a problem go away. Tell me if you think I'm wrong, but I've always believed that the 4 things those two different philosophies/approaches have in common is that they both require:

1.) elevating others' needs (the problem you're solving) above your own

2.) Sensitivity to others' needs

3.) Earnestness

4.) A world/psychology/personal belief system that's positive sum and collaborative in a global sense (outside of context-dependent contests and competition that are limited in scope).

Do you have a link to the WHO's shortlist you mentioned?

I'd like to see if they comment on the potential for AI or other kinds of software being used to design/optimize/enhance Disease X

I wish more people were open to being aware of/discussing this.

It's a hard truth that most people under the age of 50-55 will experience another global pandemic in their lifetimes (as an early 30-something I think, "next pandemics" is more accurate).

It's perfectly understandable that no one wants to talk about what the next pandemic will look like and that's why it's so important to.

In case of paywall: https://archive.ph/OwNLT

It's impossible to know but I imagine a press leak (and further coverage by cable news and other traditional print media outlets) is the only way that members of Congress would actually care enough to hold members of the military and Department of Defense accountable so that they'll eventually find a way to resolve the issue.

Whether that'll take the form of a software engineering solution or a "social engineering" solution - in the form of Congressional hearings and the like - remains to be seen.

Nice call on the tax deduction part too btw! Benioff was a big proponent of taxing big business in here SF a while back

I'm shocked they're trying the carrot (in the most wishy-washy sense of the term) vs. the stick.

The amount of pressure they're under to improve the entire company's performance from 5 separate activist investors is insane. It's unheard of in enterprise software and I can't recall that number of activists twisting the screws on a single company in any industry.

I was skimming through their latest quarterly earnings call to see if there was any mention of Heroku... no dice but they were very proud of how they're now making sure that their salespeople are accountable for hitting their sales quotas.

Let that sink in for a bit: Salesforce's salespeople didn't have to perform at the bare minimum standard to keep their jobs until a figurative gun was held to the head of their CEO. I can't imagine a $10 donation will make people want to come in to the office (and be accountable) without hardcore peer/middle manager pressure

I just want to add 2 things to kemiller's helpful comment:

1.) Just talking to a therapist who you feel heard and understood by (whatever their method: CBT or any of the others below) will be a massive help - you'll feel less alone and the challenges and mindsets you wrote about will begin to feel less all encompassing. The world will be a less frightening place.

2.) I think Deutscher's post is one of the most courageous personal posts I've ever seen on a message board/social forum (certainly the most courageous in 2022). One of the hardest things for anyone to do is to admit their life hasn't/isn't going the way they expected and instead of lying to themselves, they do the incredibly brave thing of admitting they need help.

Anyways, I just wanted to commend Deutscher for that (hopefully before my comment gets buried hours after the original post)

The most shocking thing about this story (imho) is that we're all shocked.

It's obvious that Stripe is becoming a huge company in terms of valuation, company size and impact. At a high level, all of us should be pretty excited about this. They've done an incredible job building things that developers want and love to use.

Unfortunately, that also means we shouldn't be shocked when some of the people/processes for hiring don't align with the same values and dedication to high quality work that we've come expect.

One of the dirty, little secrets of tech (particularly enterprise tech startups) is that some of the most culturally toxic and mediocre employees (from a quality of work and/or ability perspective) are in HR.

Hopefully the fact that this story is getting so much traction here and elsewhere will motivate the founders and leadership at Stripe to get into the weeds about how teams in charge of hiring are seriously jeopardising the key to the company's success: The people they employ.

On a semi-related note, this entire thread and the all of the adjacent coverage of this story should be a huge cautionary tale (and opportunity) for current and future founders: The most important thing our companies will do is hiring. That means the processes, culture, and work ethic of the teams doing the hiring deserve an ungodly amount of scrutiny.

This kind of crap happens all the time in this industry. We should be all be honest about that before shitting on Stripe, John, Patrick, etc. If they can become complacent, it can happen to any of us as well.

As a side note, HR employees (especially at low or entry level) who don't fit this stereotype should compensated, praised and recognized internally. In my experience, most companies with toxic HR teams tend to reward those who are very good at kissing ass and/or mirroring back what VPs' and Directors' won't shut about at all-hands, LinkedIn, etc.

I think the argument for Cloudflare successfully "disrupting" AWS is wrong.

I'd imagine that Cloudflare's master plan isn't to render Big Cloud obsolete (in a Christiansen/MBA case study sense) . They want to become the edge compute equivalent of Big Cloud (AWS/MSFT/GCP).

They've already invested in the physical prescence to do so (similar to the massive fixed cost that it takes to build hyperscale data centers around the world), in a manner that's most valuable to their customers (low latency compute, storage and egress).

This isn't disruption: it's new market creation. It just won't be obvious that's the case for another 10-15 years...

It's worth noting that MongoDB made the same change to their licensing due to a similar move by AWS 2 years ago... it made them a stronger business though (and enabled them to create even more value for their current/future customers).

More info at the link below

https://stratechery.com/2019/aws-mongodb-and-the-economic-re...

Typically the standard for trademark cases is whether or not customers will confuse the two competing names/products/brands.

It's quite possible that because both companies target developers, architects, etc who're more than able to distinguish between the two companies' offerings... that Elastic's lawsuits didn't go anywhere

For anyone super interested in this topic (and the potential ramifications for Big Tech and society), Tim Hwang (former global public policy lead for artificial intelligence and machine learning at Google) wrote a wonderfully in-depth book about this. See the link below: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374538651

As someone who’s worked with the Marketing Dept. a lot in my prior role, the reason e-commerce sites (and possibly Reddit) do the things you mentioned is because they’re overly focused on new user/customer acquisition vs keeping current customers/users who know the the products’ value happy.

There’s almost always a bit of political drama behind the decision too: Marketing gets to say that they’re acquiring new users in short term (thereby increasing their budget and clout in the Org) while destroying customer value in the long run

Cheatsheet source:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_factor_productivity#cite...

For the adventurous/curious:

https://www.bls.gov/dpr/faqs.htm

http://www.helsinki.fi/iehc2006/papers2/Warr.pdf [PDF]

https://assets.cambridge.org/97811070/36161/frontmatter/9781... [PDF]

Earth's resources are strained, yes. However, taxing billionaires as you propose wouldn't necessarily pay for all the entitlement spending that the elderly require.

A solution to both of these problems is increasing total factor productivity (aka doing more with less). The big rise in living standards during the post-war boom was largely a result of a huge increase in total factor productivity.

This has petered out since the 1970s and a lot of the 'zero-sum' mentality/nostalgia for a 'Great America'/fighting over a fixed economic pie in the US today is because we haven't been increasing productivity (i.e. there hasn't been enough technological innovation and disruption) at a fast enough rate.

Ironically (given our current Zeitgeist) by the time we start to feel the effects of the these demographic trends, we'll need more automation to keep up productivity (and therefore long-term GDP growth)... especially when one considers the entitlement spending that will be needed to care for the elderly).

I'd imagine that by then, there will be more individuals advocating for increased automation and (hopefully) society will become increasingly 'techno-optimist' as a result