oldjokes

Dude. A bunch of billionaires just got away with completely tanking the economy and getting bailed out for it. Zero people ever even talked about the possibility of anyone going to jail. Everyone got their bonuses. Nobody suffered any consequences. Literally nobody.

If you think anyone cares about any conflict of interest among the investing class you're beyond naive, you're just delusional.

I have worked at two startups now where we made the fatal mistake of being profitable. If you make this mistake then the investors will swoop in and demand you spend more on marketing and AWS infrastructure, because we're scaling up to 5 billion users of course.

Of course we started spending all the money on new people and AWS, and soon there was no money.

At one point we were dumping like $15K a month on AWS for a dozen unnecessary over-engineered toys that nobody was using. This is the real cost of AWS.

I'd love to see Amazon's data on money invested vs actual user traffic for small startups, that's got to be some of the most interesting and valuable data on earth. Forget companies, I'll bet Jeff is sitting around predicting when entire industries rise and fall weeks before anyone else based just on this data.

One does not follow from the other. Many countries are vastly reducing carbon while not investing in nuclear at all. We're already at the point where the carbon impact of energy production is negligible in many areas, there are much bigger fish to fry if you're truly concerned about carbon.

Replace "cities" with "any organization that is not tech first" and you'll still find hundreds of win 7/vista/xp machines that have never been patched, and ad-hoc network closet/cloud hybrid rigged solutions for everything.

There is literally no way to fix all this dumb fragile infrastructure without a massive government program that accepts responsibility for doing so. You need thousands of smart people going through every machine, all the software, all the systems. These people are never going to work for Baltimore or for Maersk, not in a million years.

Instead let's create a new government agency or pivot the NSA from it's dumb paranoid reactionary posture to more of a proactive NIST-style advisory role on best practices, have them hack everything domestically and start fixing things as their core mission. Make sure nobody at state or DHS or justice can subvert this new agency, they need to stand on equal footing with any company or agency.

Then hopefully pillage all the miserable smart people who are currently working at mega corps and agencies who actually want to do positive, meaningful work for a change.

Problem solved someone hire me to advise on their political campaign.

Anything short of admitting "we fundamentally screwed up, and are rethinking the poor decision to pair this engine with this airframe" as well as "we are reviewing all our design processes and how the FAA oversees every step of the process" is unacceptable. MCAS is just the horrific bloody bandage that is peeling away, it's not actually the problem here.

This probably won't happen of course, all they seem to want to do is fix as little as possible as quickly as possible while denying they ever knew anything.

If I were someone powerful like a pilot union leader I would start throwing conniption fits in public and refuse to let my people fly on Max's at all.

They are truly innovative in the sense that they finally exposed the fact that much of tech startup funding is just a ponzi scheme by pushing it all the way to the IPO with no plan to ever make money. That's a new thing, usually only microcap companies were able to pull off that scam in the past.

Get out between series A/B if you want maximum return, the only losers in these phony companies that never make money are the last round of investors who get left holding the bag.

And if you're an employee looking at stock options in a startup just say no. Stop surrendering real money for fictional money. Get a higher base salary instead. Employees with equity plans are always at the bottom of the list to get paid out.

I hope after the utter trainwreck that is Foxconn in Wisconsin every local government is being more skeptical of these corporate welfare deals.

I'm really tired of seeing fancy corporate lawyers outfox local politicians over and over again, somehow always getting a new record-breaking welfare incentive plan while structuring the contracts such that they have a hundred loopholes and never have to actually do anything for the money. This keeps happening at small and large scales all over the country, and it needs to stop.

I wonder how severe the backlash is going to be, not just for Google but all the tech giants. Our anti-trust laws were mostly written around monopolies abusing pricing power to rip off consumers, but with the intersection of data and hosting and analytics and everything else the potential to abuse people is far greater than just raising prices. And they have expanded their ability to profile and experiment on individuals worldwide, regardless of whether you create a Google account.

It's just getting scary at this point.

I wonder what "use" means here. Is it now illegal for them to log your traffic at all? I think that would be the ideal way to phrase the law, you can't even write to a logfile/dbms much less do anything with that data unless the user opts in.

We could slice 10% (maybe less) off the military budget and pay for college for everyone, forever. This "who pays" nonsense is just that: nonsense.

I'm sure the Navy would find a way to make do with a mere nine aircraft carriers.

If you're worried about freeloaders getting welfare they don't deserve then slashing the insanely corrupt grifting that goes on every day in DHS/Defense should be your top priority.

Absolutely. I am excited by the prospect of hospitals shutting down and doctors being unable to find a job, it's long overdue for them to finally come back down to earth. I can't imagine a quicker way to reform healthcare than that. It's probably our best case scenario right now with a non-functional government.

Student loans are a bit more complicated, but yes absolutely I expect to see massive defaults hurting the federal balance sheet and for schools who failed their students to start shutting down. This isn't a bad thing, it's healthy.

This is a totally valid move in my opinion, as well as just circumventing the trainwreck of a healthcare system to seek treatment overseas.

If congress continues to be negligent in its duties then this is really the only viable path forward for many people. If a large enough percentage of people bail on their student loans/medical debt then eventually dozens of predatory banks and "medical billing" companies will go out of business and then we can actually start to change things.