>This is a fumble not seen since skype fell asleep and did nothing during 2021 while google and zoom came and took their entire market.
Wouldn't a start-up competitor need to enter (and then grow) the space in order for this to be a failure like that?
If it's such a potentially lucrative product, then why have the myriad of VC-funded challengers languished?
I think in reality, Mint.com is a classic niche product where a small set of competent users (the kind you see on HN) love it, but most people just don't see a need for it.
The "trick" here is that he is likely speaking of operational cashflows (i.e. the 'correct' metric for low CAPEX companies).
The rub, of course, is that most of the cost for something like Starlink is designing, building, and launching the satellites, which shows up in investing cashflows.
Put differently, if the company was actually generating more cash than it consumes on all levels, start the IPO right now and SpaceX will be a $1tn+ company (instead of a $100bn+ company that people expect will one day generate cash and then be a $1tn+ company).
SpaceX will never have an IPO because being publicly traded means ceding a certain degree of control. The founders' goal is to make life multiplanetary, and the typical goal of rando shareholders is to pump up the stock price. They don't want to have to deal with the latter.
They may at some point spin off Starlink and IPO that, but not until it's fully deployed and not heavily dependent on frequent, super cheap, low bureaucratic friction launch services from SpaceX.
They already have shareholders? And as you point out, if the founder really wanted to, he could have self-funded most of SpaceX (instead of buying X for example).
He's a public company CEO already - he has no qualms about taking SpaceX public.
Interesting product - compared to competitors like SecondMeasure, what differentiates your panel/data cleaning approach vs. everyone else (since I assume the data is sourced from the same place as you competitors)?
I am a big admirer of what Second Measure built before their acquisition.
- Different data sources
- More accurate (though this is of course debateable, our plan is to publish benchmarks, accuracy, transparency, etc.) but this will always be debateable
- Focus on data scientists & Snowflake users (rather than a SaaS platform)
Obviously, this is a very early product. The key is to join types of datasets together, while maintaining accuracy (see vision outlined here: https://magis.substack.com/p/datanomics)
>investing with and growing with the American economy as a whole.
A very important nuance (not disagreeing with you, just sharing my pet thing), is that the stock market outgrows GDP because you aren't investing in the economy as a whole. You are investing in the good parts of the economy that people are excited about (i.e. When you invest in Amazon, you assume that they will continue to take share from mom and pop retailers, even in a flat-GDP scenario). You are also generally assuming that US-HQ companies will gain share globally, not just in the US.
That's why the Internet has been so positively impactful to the S&P 500 - it has really accelerated share shift to large companies (even if it hasn't accelerated GDP) and it has increased the global share of US-based companies.
on the downside, those billionaires are leveraging that value to make your overall tax burden higher and quality of life lower along with ignorant externalities which will wipe it all out if you have any number of health issues or hurricanes.
so, you know, might need to longer term forecast here.
That wasn’t the billionaires. That was straight out of the conservatives playbook.
Trump didn’t get bankrolled by billionaires. Trump won because both parties and the media ignored the needs of mostly the White working class and “evangelical conservatives” always vote Republicans.
People have bought into the idea that certain jobs are just bad and therefore only bad workers take them. They then like to imagine that the jobs are OK, as long as they are done by children who will go on to better things.
Never mind the fact that these people rely on those workers to feed them even during the school day (and the jobs are usually bad because one is forced to deal with people who look down on you).
It’s a round about way to counteract the obvious question that comes after these kinds of articles (Isn’t even $20/hr only $40k/year full-time?)
Yeah - honestly the hardest part about having a discourse on homelessness here (or anywhere else).
People just need to believe that homeless people are inherently bad in some way. It makes it really hard to discuss solutions, since they’re all “drug addicts who should be in jail.”
The Supreme Court is itself the sole arbiter of this exception, so in practice they can cite it whenever they want to. The Federalist Papers are cited in a number of supreme court rulings. While one could argue that they are equally relevant to the Declaration, it would be hard to argue that they are less relevant.
That's why I specifically mentioned it's not binding, and I agree that if it were directly cited as a source in a court case, that would probably be bad.
That said, I think it's perfectly useful to demonstrate the possible intent of the founders. Even if you can't directly cite a law out of it, it can still be useful as a tool to figure out what the founders were going for.
To note, it's actually used several times in the past in order to clarify components of the Constitution and other laws.
Disclaimer: Not a legal expert.
Ex: Mathews v. Lucas, 427 U.S. 495 (1976)
The Plaintiffs argued that they were denied Social Security benefits because they were "illegitimate" children of their father even though the plaintiffs were able to prove that they were related.
The court held that among other reasons, because as defined in the Declaration of Independence that "all men are created equal", that there was no differentiation between a "legitimate" child and an "illegitimate" child in the eyes of the government.
There's a few other cases, but that's one that I've studied the most.
Yes, but as you rightly point out, it's used to decide what the founders were going for specifically as it relates to interpretations of The Constitution.
The first 7 words of The Constitution are “We the People of The United States.” Later in the same paragraph they specifically state that they are doing that for “ourselves and our posterity”
There is no ambiguity that the framers were creating rights and laws for “People of the United States”
Yes, but what the founders were going for specifically as it relates to interpretations of The Constitution
The first 7 words of The Constitution are “We the People of The United States.” Later in the same paragraph they specifically state that they are doing that for “ourselves and our posterity”
There is no ambiguity that the framers were creating rights and laws for “People of the United States”
Would a $1,000 raise at your job have been as devastating?
Surely you're not implying $12k/year in Los Angeles (a county with c. $3k/month median rent) is going to create a class of willfully unemployed former foster-kids with no drive?
Should we also ban parents sending their kids money for the same reason? Or are foster kids uniquely prone to laziness?
>Go give 1k to a homeless guy...he'll still be homeless, and probably dead thanks to what you enabled.
I'm sorry for the double reply, but I really ma horrified.
It's amazing how we live in a country where shelter prices have increased by 50% since 2009 (vs. c.40% for all other items), and yet we still desperately hold onto this idea that homeless people are universally immoral drug addicts.
Beyond that point, we are talking about foster kids here. Everyone immediately jumped to homelessness for whatever reason (they seem to be the social scapegoat du jour).
I think it is completely reasonable for the government to fight inequality by giving people who we know are not receiving any support from their parents a boost in their critical career forming years.
Honestly, $1k/ month could be the difference between going to school part time vs. working full-time. Why does nobody's mind go to this? Why is the assumption that foster kids would never make that choice?
>Go give 1k to a homeless guy...he'll still be homeless, and probably dead thanks to what you enabled.
Why do people assume that every homeless person is both an idiot and an addict? Especially in cities in which real estate is as expensive as Los Angeles, the overwhelming majority of homeless people aren't there because of addiction issues. All the numbers I have seen suggest that only a quarter of LA's homeless population has addiction issues and even still the causal relationship isn't clear. When you live on the streets, the momentary escape of drugs is pretty alluring, but probably not as alluring as getting off the streets.
Yes, the definitions are part of my point if you read between the lines of my comment.
The definition of homeless I am using is literally "a person without a home". The person I responded to is using an incorrect definition.
That leaves two options. They knew this and they don't actually care about the problem of people not having homes. Or they didn't know that the "visibly homeless" are only a minority of all "homeless" in which case they can learn from this conversation.
>those who literally are living on the streets absolutely do have some sort of addiction or mental illness.
I don't know how you can say this as definitively as you are.
Surely the difference between a $1,000/month raise at your job and a government stipend of $1,000 is that to continue to receive the extra $1k from your employer you cannot drink and smoke yourself into oblivion? While with the government stipend you can, which I believe is what the commenter you are replying to was getting at.
I'm surprised you and so many others are coming at this from such a negative point of view.
Why are you so certain foster kids are just going to drink themselves to death? What about not having a parent makes someone immediately at risk for that?
