unabridged

As a spiritual predecessor I would recommend the movie The Long Goodbye (1973)

The strategy they are describing (selling covered calls) is actually less risky than holding the underlying. They make more than just holding the underlying when it drops or stays flat, and in exchange they make less when the underlying goes up a lot.

Options are just a tool that lets you dial in the amount of risk you want, they can be set up to be more conservative or more risky than the underlying. The latter is what makes the news.

Nontech companies are only using spreadsheets, forms, and storage. But they spend their technical manpower on implementing business logic in closed source locked-in expensive software. I don't think its much more work just to implement the business logic in excel/google sheets and serverless functions, and end up with something much much cheaper and much more portable.

It may be my pure naivety about management software, but I assume it just consists of spreadsheets, forms, secure login, data storage, and simple queries. I cannot imagine anything with this combination that couldn't be implemented in Google Sheets (and workspaces, and a handful of other google cloud apis) for at most $20 a month per user.

Enterprise software is such a mystery to me. I can't imagine any company ran by <40 yr olds ever paying $100k+ a year to VMWare, Symantec, Oracle, ...

To me it just looks like older companies paying to keep from having to deal with Linux directly

I don't think regulation is the answer. The US government should just create app.gov with a 1% fee or something and out compete them.

Hardware. If Firefox had a phone to compete with Android, even if was $1000+ it would gain ground. Also selling laptops to compete against Chromebooks.

The hardware has to be top of the line and work perfectly with the OS. Work with every major linux distro to make sure they are compatible with no fuss. Only make one or two models total. Rally the entire opensource openhardware community around a single high end model. No companies working on their own lines, but allow any manufacturer to release a phone or sell parts that match spec.

You are missing the most important point C) the outgoing president refuses to leave

The rioters wouldn't have ended democracy, but if they caused enough commotion to prevent certification there was a significant risk Trump would have taken advantage of the situation.

If they used and published a fair algorithm for matching, they wouldn't really be involved in the matching they would just be providing a venue. Similar to a city providing public space for people to meet, like a fair.

Do you think the FBI, NSA, etc doesn't already have access to photos posted on dating sites in the US?

Instead of regulation, I'd like to see the government offer a free service. A digital commons. In this case the public library version of Tinder, with strict rules of who can be banned and where everyone is treated equally.

>bullish on blockchain technology (which I see as basically git with trust/consensus features built in)

Blockchain and smart contracts are the perfect technology for managing a company's assets and voting rights, especially for startups. Imagine how much lower the risk for investors would be if the terms of share creation and dilution where completely spelled out in code. Option grants and lockup periods could be completely visible. Trading/hedging/derivatives could be available for even the smallest companies. Very tiny minimum investments could be taken with almost no overhead.

ICOs have the right idea, but they are just 99% scam illegal security offerings. An SEC sanctioned version of an ICO that is tied to real shares in a company would be a game changer.

I would be surprised if Cisco went bankrupt overnight, but to me their future looks quite bleak. Every day less companies need to buy their hardware as more move to the cloud. The biggest tech companies can build their own hardware. And the hardware isn't extremely technically advanced enough to prevent commodity competitors.

So one day if the revenue begins shrinking and they double down by going into debt to expand, then yes they could be facing bankruptcy just like Nortel.

The first response to this should be "oh, so you are making me a partner". Family = shared ownership.

I've always wanted to see soccer played with two balls on the field. I think it would be many times more interesting.