tldr; "One common approach we see is for bootstrapping teams that have a basic understanding of customer needs to start by offering a service. Once they get uptake on their service offers, they start to take advantage of existing solutions prospects are using to create a "system integration" or extension offering. For example, if your goal is to replace Excel where it's being used for a particular purpose, first offer an Excel template. This is more compatible with current practice, easier for prospects to trial, and easier to iterate on than a fully coded solution. Once they get uptake on the system integration offer, they can start to offer a product. "
A critique of the NRDC in light of research on the impact of fossil fuel plants on human health. Key paragraphs:
"Akrasia is weakness of will. You know you shouldn’t eat the cake; you eat the cake anyway. Temptation overwhelms correct reasoning in the moment. This is not what’s happening at the NRDC (assets ~$300M, Yale Law pipeline, board stocked with people who have read every document I’m about to cite). Akrasia would require that the people setting obstruction strategy haven’t connected the climate math to their own filings. At staff quality and funding levels that high, that’s not credible.
What’s actually happening is correct calculation with externalized cost. The NRDC’s litigation revenue model and donor base cannot survive a pivot to pro-nuclear. The fundraising enemy has to remain the enemy. The obstruction is the product. So obstruction continues, the costs land on people who will never attend a Rockefeller Brothers Fund board meeting, and everyone who filed the intervener petition goes home with their career intact."
"An American consumer wants a German duvet cover, 130x200 cm. They go to Amazon. They get four pages of Chinese-manufactured polyester comforters keyword-stuffed with every bed size ever conceived by humanity. The sponsored listings at the top are for products that share no meaningful attributes with what was searched. The organic results, if you scroll far enough to find them, are identical in kind if not in degree.
This is not a search failure. Amazon’s search works exactly as intended. The intent is not to return what you asked for. The intent is to return what someone paid to show you.
Every subsequent problem in Amazon’s retail business is downstream of that choice, and the choice was rational at every level of the org chart."
The threat: "The threat to Amazon’s retail search isn’t a startup. It’s Grainger. W.W. Grainger sells industrial and MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations) supplies to corporate and institutional buyers. Roughly 1.7 million products. Catalog search that returns what you searched for, because the customer is a procurement manager with a part number who will immediately go elsewhere if the results are wrong. Grainger doesn’t sell sponsored placements above the right answer. Grainger’s business model depends on the right answer appearing first. They have existing distribution relationships, existing shipping infrastructure, existing corporate account relationships, and a search product that works because their incentive structure requires it to work."
After a long and detailed analysis, the bottom line on what Amazon businesses survive:
"Prime Video survives. Content lock-in is real. The subscriber base that stays for The Boys and doesn’t care about retail benefits is real, and it’s underrepresented in how people analyze Amazon’s decline narrative.
What doesn’t survive at current scale: the everything-store growth story, the AWS infrastructure dominance thesis, the 33% cloud market share trajectory, the Bedrock-as-AI-moat narrative, the $2 trillion valuation multiple."
Articulate exchange between Emmanuel Saez and Josh Rauh. Saez fundamentally believes the billionaires won't leave and presents the tax as a five year experiment. Rauh believes it will lead to the disintegration of Silicon Valley.
Richard Grenier captured the truth for civil society: "As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." (h/t https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/)
All we have of freedom, all we use or know –
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.
Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw—
Leave to live by no man's leave, underneath the Law.
Rudyard Kipling, The Old Issue, 1899
https://www.fourmilab.ch/etexts/www/kipling/old_issue/
An opinion that formed after the war, but not actually anchored in reality. None of the elite really wanted a war, some levels of the military did. Nicolas II raged against his generals that he did not want to mobilize and send men to their deaths. The German leadership didn't want a war, they thought it was inevitable but that they'd lose. The Austro-Hungarians definitely didn't want a war with Russia but did want to give the Serbs a black eye for the assassination in Sarajevo, and made a number of bad decisions. The British tried to stop the war and a number of politicians there wrote about the potential consequences before it happened.
In a way it's sadder than other conflicts: none of the participants entered the war for power or control, they all thought they were defending themselves. Plenty of people knew the human cost would be high. Events and fear and lack of fast communication just took over. And it set up the conditions for WW2 and probably the cold war.
Key quote: "People misunderstand what built Silicon Valley. It wasn’t just intelligence. It was the stamina to endure embarrassment, the courage to diverge from the 'ideal path,' and the sheer will to keep going."
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