tomhoward

Sure, but the issue of discussion is whether company directors are required/expected to serve the interests of shareholders at the exclusion of all other considerations.

They are not. They are expected to serve the interests of the company, as distinct from the interests of shareholders, and matters like employee welfare/satisfaction and company reputation relating to externalities are very relevant to the interests of the company.

That some companies ignore these matters is separate from the principle: it’s not inconsistent with capitalism for companies to care about issues other than profits and shareholder returns. Though it’s obviously related, company welfare is distinct from shareholder benefit.

Not really. The law is clear that the duty is to the company. I know "shareholder primacy" is a talking point around Milton Friedman's philosophy, but as contemporary tech companies demonstrate, it's a false argument. Almost all the major tech companies of the past 20+ years have focused on long-term growth, not short-term profits/returns to shareholders. Amazon doesn't record profits and ploughs all surpluses back into the company for long-term growth. Steve Jobs ignored profits/shareholder returns for many years in order to focus on long-term health/growth of Apple. Reputation/welfare issues for employees (and now "ESG", for better or worse) has been a huge issue that all the top companies have had to make a priority (though as this article demonstrates, there are areas where the issue of employee welfare/fairness has not been heeded).

There's plenty of scope for further discussion about these points, but the key point remains: shareholder primacy is not law and not the focus of company directors' fiduciary duty, regardless of what people claim in self-serving arguments from various points of the ideological spectrum.

Indeed. The actual fiduciary duty of company directors is to serve the interests of the company, not shareholders/profits.

This allows plenty of scope to make considerations like long-term reputation and employee satisfaction/loyalty/welfare high priorities, even at the expense of profits.

There's some truth in this comment, and his reaction to the diver in Thailand was obviously not great, but at least on that topic there's a less scathing interpretation:

In a desperate scenario in which it was considered highly likely that all those kids would be unable to be rescued alive from the cave by any means at all, Musk said something to the effect of I have engineering and production resources, we can try and come up with something in case it may be useful, and quickly built and delivered a device after close consultation with members of the rescue team on the ground, and also supplied various other forms of equipment and expertise.

Luckily the kids were rescued and the capsule wasn't needed.

That diver then said in a TV interview that Musk should 'stick his submarine where it hurts' - for absolutely no good reason.

As I said, Musk's reaction was inappropriate and he's paid a big price for it, but it was hardly without provocation.

On "highly dissatisfactory": many early users have left, or barely post anymore, and many/most users across the spectrum have found discussion to be toxic for years; thus it's not a great platform for a lot of advertisers given the tone of the content, and Twitter hasn't built many (any?) innovative features to improve ad targeting or engagement.

More broadly, the company has been a disappointment from what investors would have hoped for when it listed in 2013, and has been stagnant at best in recent years with no signs of having any idea of how to reinvigorate itself. Yes it may have had cash in the bank and stable usage and advertising revenue, but a company in its position needs to have a clear mission and path of improvement and growth, which it has not had for a long time, if ever since its first few years, really. That cash would start running out with the losses it's been recording lately, and in an increasingly hostile marketplace, raising new funds would have become difficult without solid signs of a bright future.

We can all have our opinions about the merits of what Musk is doing now, but it's all just conjecture and holds little weight until things have played out over a few months and years.

For what it's worth, I'm not any kind of Musk devotee (see other recent comments of mine for more about this); I'm just interested to see how it plays out, and skeptical of people claiming to make long-term predictions based on short-term drama and emotive reporting of it by people who know nothing about building companies.

One point that's much overlooked is that Twitter has been very dissatisfactory for many users and advertisers (both active and prospective) for a long time, usage and revenue has been flat/poor, and the company was making heavy losses.

So it's largely pointless to hand-wring about what has been lost for users and advertisers in the past few weeks, as it wasn't working anyway. A dramatic change had to come someday, somehow; whether it be the company going insolvent and being acquired or someone coming in to attempt a dramatic turnaround.

So the latter has happened, and Elon is determined to make it much better for users and advertisers over the long term. Will he succeed? Nobody knows! But the drama of the past few weeks is not any indication either way; it's just inevitable upheaval when a turnaround effort begins.

Almost all of the barbecues you can buy now at Bunnings or Barbecues Galore (probably the two biggest Australian retailers for barbecues by far), have lids/hoods.

https://www.bunnings.com.au/products/outdoor-living/barbecue

https://www.barbequesgalore.com.au/barbeques/free-standing/

I'm good friends with one of the founders of Skitch. He effectively got less than nothing for that sale. It was an acqui-hire with vesting stock valued in the several $million, but when he couldn't handle working in the big corporate environment at Evernote, he had to leave, and lost his stock with zero remuneration. He couldn't even pay off the debts he'd incurred over the years building Skitch. Terrible outcome for him, as well as the product. So sad.

It’s a very different scenario.

Just selling to other early-stage startups doesn’t generate much growth/revenue or make you look like a solid business to a sophisticated investor. SaaS/B2B companies that make it big do so because they get huge numbers of small-medium businesses using their platform, not just startups - E.g., Slack, Stripe, Square, Shopify, Canva, Zendesk, Zapier, Segment.

Having other startups using your product is a good early source of product feedback and a strong signal to very early-stage investors, but that alone doesn’t give you the huge growth you need for bigger funding rounds.

It’s very different to the scenario PG was describing in the late 90s; in those days, a startup would be founded, quickly IPO to raise several $million from unsophisticated retail investors, then spend much of it on advertising on Yahoo to drive traffic and artificially push the share price up. Hence when the music stopped in 2000 all that ad spend dried up and Yahoo’s share price crashed.

All those companies I mentioned above are going fine; slowed growth, sure, but they have real businesses with broad customer bases well beyond the startup ecosystem, so they’re all able to continue operating and keep doing OK.

It always takes years to properly evaluate how well a company/manager is performing, and the right course of action at any moment in time is never obvious, not even to the people on the inside making the decisions, let alone outside observers. If the "right thing to do" was obvious, then every sideline observer could just go ahead and start a company doing all the "obvious" things and be wildly successful. Obviously this isn't the case.

I'm content to reserve judgement and see what happens over the long term. Others are completely free to judge based on day-to-day drama, of course. But for their own sake I hope they keep a note of their assessments and predictions now, and check back in a few years to see how well they did.

The emotionally charged words and false/baseless assertions of my position and motivations in your comment indicate a strong attachment to a position.

I didn't say and don't think "this was his plan all along". I've done nothing to make excuses for him and I don't pretend he is infallible (indeed I once wrote an op-ed in a national daily newspaper examining his flaws [1][2]).

Occam’s razor requires us to believe what all the evidence indicates and nothing more: He was originally willing to buy it at the price offered in the prevailing market conditions in April, then the market crashed and suddenly the price he offered was too high, so he tried to negotiate/force a lower price (and we must assume his investors/financiers were demanding this as any professional investor/financier would), and when this failed he just went ahead with the purchase, which he always said he was committed to.

The only thing there is evidence for is that he wanted to reduce the price, just as anyone would after such a market decline. To believe anything else requires mind-reading, which you seem to be trying to do not only of Musk but also of me.

So, please, stop trying to read people's minds and just look at the evidence before us!

[1] https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/technology/the-bes...

[2] https://medium.com/moonshot-labs-blog/ego-what-startup-found...

There’s no evidence he wanted to walk away altogether - he just wanted to get the fairest price, and surely his investors/financiers would have been demanding he negotiate the best price he legally could.

A business I'm building makes data monitoring hardware and software to help farmers/growers reduce water/fertiliser usage and prevent externalities like pesticide spray drift and grass fires. If I create "wealth" for myself from this company, it will only be because I've succeeded at helping large numbers of growers achieve the above outcomes.

I'm unaware of anyone whose money or opportunity is being reduced through this, perhaps apart from some minor reductions in turnover for fertiliser and pesticide companies.

It was originally from Australian demographer/writer Bernard Salt, a boomer, and it was intended to be mocking of himself and his generation [1]. But people missed the joke and got upset about it. It was Gurner who later promoted it as a serious thing as part of his real estate business marketing.

[1] https://www.pedestrian.tv/news/bernard-salt-says-his-smashed...

One of the worst combinations of these falsehoods:

- Everyone has a usable phone number, a residential address that conforms to your validation criteria and can receive SMS - when transiting through an international airport and attempting to use the Wi-Fi.

It's not nonsense, it's an obviously-tautological statement, made with the full awareness that it's not helpful advice, but used to explain the point. It's one sentence out of a long essay. Later in the essay he provides recipes for coming up with startup ideas, even though he warns that that approach is suboptimal. What more could be asked of him?

The problem with the OP's criticism and yours is that it starts from the assumption that PG has set out to "sell" the reader faux-actionable insights.

What he's really doing is answering the question "how can I come up with startup ideas?", which has always been asked of him and the other YC partners frequently.

And his answer is: you shouldn't try to come up with startup ideas; that's not how it works. Instead you should just notice if/when they appear before you.

He's clearly not claiming to be doing what the author is accusing him of trying to do. He's just explaining something he'd noticed after (at that time) 7 years of funding/advising some of the most successful startups.

(That said, later in the essay he goes on to offer actionable recipes for formulating startup ideas anyway).

In answer to your question: you can take his advice, or not, to stop trying to confect startup ideas, and instead just pay attention to the opportunities you notice from your own experience.

There's a great story [1] of how established Australian independent bookstore Readings survived the entrance of Borders into the market in the early 2000s.

Borders opened a huge store directly over the street from Readings' flagship store and tried to wage a price war, whilst Readings kept its prices up and redoubled its efforts at providing a great experience to customers.

Since Borders shut down in Australia in 2011, Readings has continued to expand and thrive, now operating seven stores in key locations around Melbourne, but still retaining its small-business, community-focused charm, and still just selling good books to book lovers, as it did when it first opened in the late 1960s.

[1] https://rosshoneywill.com/articles/how-mark-rubbo-killed-bor...

Well sure, but as I said, this topic very quickly gets stuck in the weeds over definitions and “what do you mean by ...?” questions, as the above couple of comments illustrate.

I’d regard the augmentations you list in your last paragraph as remedies to help restore capabilities that are present in other humans of normal health/ability, prior to aging or injury. Other augmentations that are commonplace are tools that make us more efficient at doing things we can already do; I.e, computers enable us to do much larger calculations, data operations or information archivals/retrievals. But they don’t fundamentally change our evolved nature, so it’s hard to see how the prefix “trans” applies.

Despite many claims of breakthroughs, we’ve yet to see any technology that profoundly alters human genetics, cognition or mortality away from its state of natural evolution a few decades or centuries ago, and it’s not clear that anyone has serious answers for how such transitions will happen, nor how they could happen without a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that underpin them.

No one person had to understand everything about feudal society for the next stage to emerge. It just emerged, as always happens in an evolutionary process.

To try again with a more complete answer to your initial question:

Why is transhuman-ness or posthuman-ness a special exception for the to the general rule that surpassing (or at least passing) something does not in fact require understanding it?

In all the examples you’ve given, organic life is the common denominator. Each is a case of the natural progression of life, either the natural life cycles that have existed for billions of years, or of the culture that has emerged out of that.

If by “transhumanism” we mean a transition of human “life” (i.e, consciousness and culture) off our evolved biological platform onto some other recently or newly-created technology platform, someone would have to understand what human life actually is in order to make it happen or recognize that it has happened.

If we mean something else then people need to explain what they mean, but that’s really why we get stuck in the weeds on this topic; we don’t have a simple, agreed understanding of what it is we’re transitioning from/to and what is doing the transitioning.

But the simple answer to your central question is that the key difference here from the rule you’re positing is that we’re talking about a departure from the natural biological and cultural evolution that has brought us to this point.

You didn’t have to create a new technology that enabled you to transition to post-adolescent.

I think your parent commenter meant “_we_ would have to understand”, as a species, rather than all or any of us individually.

In practice just the people creating the technology. But it’s a big leap.

Once again you choose to attack me instead of confronting the issue I’m raising. I’m not being a decider of anything, I’m asking for an answer to a very simple question.

The question is: how can spread of this virus be completely prevented, so that nobody gets infected? This is clearly what the root commenter and the XKCD cartoon they shared are asserting should be happening.

Methods that just slow the inevitable are clearly sidestepping the point. And methods that make society into a dystopian nightmare may be technically argument-winning but not practical and thus make lame contributions to the discussion.

Testing, ventilation, supported isolation are fine; we’ve had and still have some of those measures in Australia, and I agree it’s helpful to slow spread and protect those most vulnerable for a while. I’ve been fine with that happening here. But that’s not the primary topic of this discussion.

Please stop with the ad-homs and side-stepping and address the point.

So, to re-cap on this discussion...

- I ask a parent commenter who has asserted that society should still be preventing transmission of a highly infectious virus if they know of a system that could actually achieve that;

- A few commenters invoke China's approach (whilst conceding it was excessively draconian), others insist that it's not about preventing transmission, just slowing it, conveniently avoiding confronting the fact that the original point was about prevention, and even if it wasn't, slowing spread still means infection is inevitable;

- Nobody suggests an approach that would have been effective or palatable;

- Many hours later, a new commenter slides in to point out that it really is literally possible to keep kicking a can down a road forever, as if this is either true in practice, consistent with the rhetorical point of that metaphor, or relevant to the point at hand.

I'll ask the central question again: can anyone describe a system that would have (a) been effective at preventing spread of the virus, and (b) resulted in a society that anyone wanted to continue living in, or that could even function at all?

The whole point of the phrase "kicking the can down the road" is that it's not something you should do forever.

As difficult as it was to live through, I'm supportive of what was done here in Melbourne to suppress the virus in 2020-21 when the variants were more severe and the vaccines weren't around. It's what enabled our fatality rate to be kept to one of the lowest in the world.

It doesn't make sense to keep doing it now, and doing so could make the problem worse. In a complex system these issues aren't without tradeoffs.

Luckily our health officials agree so we're all good.

(Btw saying “if you read my comment” is poor conduct here as I’m sure you know.)

> Reducing the spread is preventing it

No, it's kicking the can down the road.

The virus is highly infectious, always was. There's no prevention, just delaying the inevitable, and possibly waiting for a variant that is more severe (to someone without any prior exposure), and not having any protection other than vaccines that are based on much earlier/different strains. I'm a little worried about this for my parents, for what it's worth.

I'm not going to let you get away with pretending that this discussion is about the lab leak theory and some weird conspiracy theory about special knowledge China has, rather than your suggestion that a smug-but-vacuous XKCD cartoon is making an important point.

Yeah, as the sibling comment said, "couldn't go to Wendy’s" is a pretty flippant way to describe what was imposed on Shanghai residents this year.

I'm in Melbourne, Australia, which locked down hard to suppress the virus in 2020, then for several more months attempting to suppress it again in 2021.

Since everyone had had the chance to be vaccinated by Nov last year, restrictions have been lifted and the virus has been allowed to spread, and almost everyone is much happier living with the virus than continuing to be locked down.

What is China going to do? Keep locking everyone down every few months forever?

For myself, having a young child at daycare means getting exposed to infections and being sick with something different almost every week, which is of course annoying but it's a part of life. I had covid for the second time last week (must have been BA.5 as it's dominant here), and it was no big deal; I felt a bit off for under 48 hours. It certainly felt like my body knew what to do with it having first encountered an earlier omicron variant in Feb.

How is shutting down all of society for weeks/months at a time preferable to that?

It's a nice idea but I haven't heard anyone describe an infection control approach that could have prevented the spread of this virus, short of isolating every single person in the world in their homes including all medical and food production workers, which is obviously impossible.

What's the system you know about?

People started knowing about Paul Graham (pg) in the early-mid 2000s via his essays - http://paulgraham.com/articles.html.

Most people found them and discussed them on Slashdot, I think - certainly I first read How to Start a Startup (http://paulgraham.com/start.html) after my friend/co-founder found it on Slashdot.

A few months after How to Start a Startup was published, the first batch of Y Combinator was convened - http://paulgraham.com/sfp.html

It went so well that they ran it again that winter, then kept running it twice a year.

One of the startups in that first batch was Reddit.

There's some story about pg wanting the Reddit founders to make a subreddit for talking about startups/tech to be a community for people interested in YC, but for some reason it didn't happen the way he wanted so he decided to build his own forum, initially called Startup News (https://news.ycombinator.com/announcingnews.html), then soon after became Hacker News - https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html.

The objective of Startup News/Hacker News was twofold - as real-world use-case for the Arc programming language he was creating, and to be a place where people interested in startups/tech could come to read interesting articles and discuss interesting topics, and then maybe eventually become interested enough in startups to apply to Y Combinator.

Some more detail here:

https://techcrunch.com/2013/05/18/the-evolution-of-hacker-ne...

I understand and sympathise with the compassionate aspects of the issue, but "giving notice" need only mean paying out a few weeks' time, rather than allowing/requiring the employee to keep coming in.