the_watcher

Matt Lakeman's "Notes on $PLACE" have become my favorite random email update to get. They're all excellent. If anyone knows more about him (does he write anywhere else?), would love to learn more about his background and travel experiences.

I have literally walked in to the one in Redwood City and ordered from someone sitting at a folding desk.

I like WFH for a lot of reasons, but the "I'm more productive" part of my claim is entirely related to the torture chamber that is the open floor plan office. If I had a private office, I'd no longer be able to honestly claim that I simply cannot be as effective in the office as at home.

If there are no substitutes, a high price is extremely justified.

The markup is because I can go to apple.com, pick the RAM and storage I want, and not really have to figure out anything about flavors or distros, knowing that it comes with the best chip on the market. This is leaving out that it just works with my phone and tablet.

It would very obviously be useful for work if you can actually get high res, effectively unlimited monitor space. Maybe not for everyone, but people already spend $3500+ on monitor setups somewhat regularly (and employers definitely do this). Apple themselves sell a single monitor that costs $2300 when fully spec'd out (5k, but the point is that they know what people spend on monitors). I can't figure out why that wasn't the highlight of the demo, since that's just very clearly the easiest way to sell a $3500 device with this specific set of features.

The recording video of a kid's birthday was one of the most ridiculous thing's I've ever seen. I'd maybe record my kid with something like this every once in a while, but I certainly wouldn't be wearing ski goggles while he blows out candles.

Maybe, but that's basically asking him to develop the opposite of the personality type that makes him abnormally good at forecasting.

FiveThirtyEight had about a 1/3 chance of Trump winning, far higher than anyone else was modeling. And he was one of the few pundits openly talking about how it wasn't some insane longshot. I have no idea where this meme came from, but it's annoyingly persistent.

Does he mention this somewhere? Last time I spoke to him, he was working on Stripe Press, his interest in fraud and spam prevention long predates his work at Stripe.

Going from 0 to 1 internet providers is likely to have an extremely high conversion rate assuming affordable pricing and quality. While it's anecdotal, I have personal experience with this. My family is from rural eastern WA and spends the summer in the mountains up there. Until 2020, the only internet service option was HughesNet, which was extremely expensive and very low quality, as it's a notoriously rugged region that's difficult to serve (it's still ineligible for Starlink). In 2020, a local was able to get a 5G tower installed (way cheaper and way higher quality). When I had him set us up, he told me he'd already installed it for 60% of the cabins on the chain of lakes our house is on. He expected it to be 100% by 2022.

All that said, my experience does remind me that many of the people up there turn it off for the winter, when they aren't there. My assumption is that there'd be some amount of desire to do that, which would also reduce returns.

Including the installation fee and $30/mo subsidy (I am assuming this means the price he receives is $30 higher than the one customers pay), my quick math shows it would take a bit over 71 months (almost 6 years) to hit $2.6M in total revenue. However, that assumes literally every customer chooses the $55/month plan, if everyone chose the $79/mo plan, it would take almost 51 months, or a bit over 4 years (obviously the number will be somewhere in between that).

Also, this math assumes no growth whatsoever in homes served or other revenue lines. I assume adding another home will be far cheaper than building out the core network, and the article itself notes other lines of business. To be honest, this doesn't seem like a terrible investment to me. There are certainly better ones in a pure ROI point of view, but for government investments? More of these please!

The Diff is easily one of the best value’s I get despite being >$200/year. I’m not sure how I’d rank it relative to Stratechery, I personally enjoy The Diff more but Stratechery is more relevant to my work and is also excellent. Byrne churns out an all-timer like this every other month or so, and his average posts still consistently include the best sentences I read of the day. It’s one of the only newsletters that, if I get behind on reading it, I make sure I catch up on every missed issue.

I agree that salary is not what dictates my level of satisfaction with my work. However, plenty of people make the (perfectly reasonable) tradeoff of work satisfaction in exchange for money. I'm not dogmatic about this - I am aware that plenty of people are deeply satisfied with both their work and salary, and that others are deeply satisfied with their work and are perfectly willing to trade salary for that. That is great! I am very happy for those people. But it's _also_ a perfectly reasonably decision to prioritize salary to enable your preferred non-work life, and it's entirely possible to still do excellent work if you're in that bucket.

This doesn't even touch on people who _have_ to prioritize salary.