inthewoods

I dunno - I heard about tariffs in every single Harris speech. I don't get ads because of my location, but they were clearly saying it.

Many corporations pay so low that people have to be on assistance even though they are gainfully employed. Thus, corporations off-load their costs onto the American taxpayer. This is also true for some people in the US military.

Yes agreed - the internationalization of the college application process has changed everything. The other factor is that when you have such competitiveness, you start seeing a professionalization of the process - so admissions consultants, high-end tutoring.

Simple: he's crushed because he had a dream of going there - he wasn't framing it as "I'm better than everyone else." As I mentioned, it is his dream running into reality. So saying "not being in the 0.1% as a teenager is tacky" is not the right framing because he wasn't thinking about it that way - he just had a dream and now realizes how difficult (and unlikely) it is.

What I'm really curious about is how he got into Stanford, a school that famously no one gets into, given what we know about him. Not to say he's not smart or interesting - he's clearly a good writer - but I don't see what made him stand out to get into that school. I'd be interested to understand that.

I've got a freshman in high school - and he's very bright - doing AP Calc now. But he already feels like it's impossible to get into these schools so why bother. He started the conversation tonight with "I don't think I want to go to MIT anymore." Which broke my heart a little bit - not because I care whether he goes to MIT - but because it you could see his expectations being crushed by reality.

This is the system that we have built for higher education in the United States, and it's incredibly f*cked up.

If you're concerned about those things, then I get it. I'm not - I've never had an issue.

"Second, I also don't get how people trust strangers with intimate details of their thought life."

Pretty simple: legal barriers to revealing that information creates an open space for discussing those thoughts that you don't feel comfortable revealing to friends or family.

Binance, Coinbase, et al: "We'd like new rules from the SEC/CFTC to let us crime."

SEC: "No."

Binance et al: "You're stopping innovation!"

SEC: "You're going to jail."

VCs talk a game about being ethical, but let's be real - if it works they probably don't care. Uber is a great example of this - the rules can be bent to serve the purpose.

I think that if you have free/easy money, with low risk of a meaningful downside (e.g. going to jail), and there is increasing competition from other VCs with access to the same money, then you greatly increase the risks you're willing to take. It's a game of homeruns, not singles.

So to answer your question, I think this is way they think: "If this goes wrong, I don't have any real personal skin in the game, and there are a bunch of smart people at other firms that are putting their money in. I better be in because if I don't allocate this capital it goes away. And if I miss a big one, that's worse than losing."

I like the idea of there being some requirement on student spending for these educational institutions to maintain their tax-free status. Not dissimilar from requiring insurance plans to spend a set percentage (say 85%) on healthcare vs. administration. Having said that, I'd want to game it out to see how the institutions would react and what it would do to prices.

The other idea I like is that once an educational endowment reaches a certain size, all students should go for free (or it could be on a scale relative to endowment size) in order for the institution to maintain their tax-free status.

As someone who was involved in the creation of Infini-D back in the day, I can only say that this brought a smile to my face and that I've shared it with the whole original team. Thank you! Thank you!

Many of the large companies will say "we have a complex sales cycle" (and they often do) and leverage multi-touch attribution models which removes the direct ROI calculation.