bps4484

It's not "almost 100% pork funneling" and I know this because....they're there! they are at the moon! I don't like pork either, but let's not blow this out of proportion.

How much do we think that it should have cost, if everything was perfectly optimized, to get to the moon? 50b instead of 100b? so ok, 50% was pork, and that's bad, but let's not overstate it and instead allow a little joy in our lives.

also the original apollo program was about 300b in today's dollars, so seems like things have always been a little porky.

it's not that density per se drives down existing costs, but density almost always brings more housing stock to the market (unless they are simultanously tearing down housing elsewhere) and housing stock drives down the cost of housing, which is the point of the original article.

So if we take it as an assumption that density increases housing stock, there is lots of evidence that density drives down prices of existing land/home values.

I wonder if overall rainfall doesn't tell the whole story. From my experience in SF (and admittedly CA is big and people will have very different experiences) there has been an enormous amount of rainfall early in the season and then another enormous amount over the holidays, but the rest has been dry. The total may not be that much but the acute heavy storms have been pretty intense.

"Reductio Ad Roy Feldium" is the internet addage[1] that as in a hacker news discussion about a rest api grows, the probabilty someone cites roy felding's dissertation approaches 1. I'm glad this post cut right to the chase!

[1] ok it's not an internet adage. I invented it and joke with friends about it

I should first note that I'm a big fan of waymo and want autonomous to succeed generally.

I take both waymo's and lyft/uber all the time in sf and waymo's are way slower. I'd estimate it at 10-15% slower. Once the novelty of a waymo wears off you realize that they drive like a high anxiety teenager and going 15 mph on a 15 mph road, coming to gentle full stop at every stop sign, and being very tentative on turns and passing people all add up to a very slow ride.

You're right though it definitely feels safer.

They stay with you if you choose. What's kind of sentimental and nice is that the area code stays with you as marker of where you're originally from no matter where you go. It says "this is where I was from as a teenager when I was first allowed a cell phone."

I don't know if this coincided with trend of getting an area code tattoo to signify where you're from, but that also is something that is done by some.

6 figures would pay for a week for what he needs. Maybe less than a week

I'm sorry this isn't true. Your name wasn't on the line when you took the investment, and the OP pointed out with his "5 startups in 10 years" line, it's very easy for early employees to walk away. That isn't as available to founders. There is much more burden (reputational, financial, emotional) on the founders.

I've been a founder, and I've been a key early employee. It is very different.

Is this true?

That's a legitimate question I haven't done the research on this. It would seem though that usually it's a municipal employee, probably a union job, so probably paid pretty well (relative to say an uber driver). Also that cost for the driver would be double if you half the size of the bus and run them twice as much which would be a better experience for passengers. It would seem like the cost of drivers could be a real impact but this is me being handwavy I haven't crunched any numbers.

I don't think they were saying they are mediators or settle feuds. I'm sure a bunch of people at the companies are pissed at the conclusions they come to. It's moreso though that precisely because they aren't tied to any feudal relationships within the organization they're able to be more impartial with their research and cut through bureaucracy.

Certainly though if all they're doing is parroting back conclusions backed by "research" that the exec who hired them wants to hear then they aren't providing much value, other than perhaps providing air cover when some decision, any decision, is better than no decision and gridlock.

"Consultants are hired mercenaries in coporate warfare, they don't care about you, they don't care about your company or the rivalries or the squabbaling."

"They are not brought in to solve problems"

I've known people that worked for consultancies and the biggest value add they think they have brought is when the problem is the rivalries, politics, and squabbaling has led to inaction and they've needed outside support to come in who don't care about these things.

Perhaps we should hope for companies to have leadership teams where they are able to cut through this intransigence, but unfortunately all too often with old companies stuck in their ways this isn't the case.

oh it's certainly not free money (queue the seinfeld episode of kramer telling jerry to "write it off") but the discussion is about taxes or lacktherof. In no other investment that I know of are you allowed this double write-off: you can write off both the investment as it depreciates and the costs to make sure it doesn't depreciate.

"An no one will now rent, since your building has an effective value of $0 since it has become crap."

This isn't true. You will have put money into the property to keep its value up, also writing off all of those expenses, so that you can still rent it out.