These folks just put up a long post trying to weigh the risk v reward at various startup stages.
Mostly summarized into: "Joining at Series C may give you an ideal combination of risk and reward. Series C startups had the highest weighted growth in our analysis, followed by Series B and A."
There are 2 problems with the analysis in the article:
1. They choose startups from 2014-2015. Valuations were (a) more reasonable then and (b) we've just been through one of the biggest bull markets of tech stocks in the past decades.
2. That taking the "Mean Valuation Growth" over that time period is meaningless if (a) there hasn't been a liquidity event and (b) if the mean is weighted by outliers (which it always is).
Portfolio / VC strategy is a bet on power laws. We, as employees, don't have that opportunity. That means we've got to be deliberate about who we join to try to hit a power law outcome.
Is this really what is passing as journalism these days?
Anyone who spends even a modest amount of time looking at incidents of justified use of lethal force can quickly determine that an officer having a reasonable fear of great bodily harm to themselves or others is enough to justify the force.
Often times this reasonable fear is justified by actions that take place in under a second. A furtive movement towards a waistband in the right context will almost always qualify.
Articles like this that push an unfounded narrative are simply pandering for clicks/views while failing to even attempting to understand/explain the motivations for such a tool are worse than intellectually lazy. I think they quite likely result in needless excess deaths.
It really isn't rocket science to imagine a lethal robot like this being deployed in a situation which results in deescalation, where the robot operator doesn't have to take a shot where an officer would have been forced to. And to suggest that an officer is somehow going to feel more inclined to shoot someone because its pushing a button vs pulling a trigger just shows a truly impressive amount of bias.
I'd much, much rather send in a lethal robot than an officer to a situation where a use of force is likely, and I really can't fathom any logical argument that putting an officer in there is somehow going to result in less use of force. Unless your world view is that every officer is just trying to execute as many people as they possibly can.
Just watch the 10 seconds here. Guy has stolen a car, walking away from officers, yells "shoot me" and "fuck you fuck you!", digging in his pockets, then quickly points at the officer in a drawing motion. If this was a robot POV instead of an officer, zero chance anyone pushes the button to shoot the guy. Why would you and deal with risking your entire career/life? You're still on the hook for all the consequences of unjustified use of force, and you have the time to wait and verify if the suspect has a gun, so you do. The officer on the other hand is put in an impossible situation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SeiCU55e3s&t=104s
I'd much rather have a lethal robot be put in that above situation than an officer, and I'd love to hear anyone explain otherwise.
(Also, I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be "casual", not "causal": `“legal precedence justifying the causal use of weapons”`, but I ain't no english major)
I figured it was unlikely google would make such a mistake, so I looked at the docs. They use public key cryptography to generate a private shared secret that is hashed alongside the message. This prevents the brute force hash attack.
Awesome! Thanks for looking this up, instead of just speculating.
Btw, in some sense this is exactly the same stuff you'd have to do to make committing to a single-bit work. Or encrypting a short message, in a way that's not easy to crack.
For posterity, they updated the post on Mar 7 and will be emailing anyone affected.
"Update March 7, 2022: We appreciate the feedback from the community and our customers, and will be emailing users as part of this disclosure. We apologize for not doing that at the same time as the post/disclosure on Friday, March 4, 2022."
I could see this being really useful for the team I'm on, specifically for doing docker builds of rust binaries. The build always has to start from scratch, and being able to easily used a remote high power machine could really speed this up. Thanks for sharing!
Builds don't "have" to start from scratch. If you're building in a docker context you can mount a volume containing build artifacts (target directory). Or `sccache` if you want those artifacts stored in a remote store such as S3. I'm sure there's other solutions as well, but not clearing build artifacts in between builds would be a simpler win over maintaining separate, shared infrastructure.
Sometimes the only winning move is not to play :-)
At some point it becomes irrational to keep holding USTs. I'm well aware it seems right now there aren't any other good options, but that can definitely change quickly.
I am not saying there are no other good options, there are literally no options.
You understand that having $1trn isn't like your TD Ameritrade account. Thought experiment: they put the money into Japanese banks. First, the JPY starts trading at 50 against the USD. Japanese industry is over. Second, Japanese banks literally cannot pay the interest on these deposits because they can't find enough people to lend to.
There aren't enough European govt bonds. They aren't enough corporate bonds (and they aren't liquid enough). Literally, there is no asset class in the world large enough for them. The only other asset class that was large enough was MBS...which some people feel skittish about since 2008 (but which Japan and China do own large amounts of...again, because there is nothing else).
Just as an example: in the 1970s the oil crisis caused a huge boom in earnings for Middle Eastern nations. Most govts there weren't financially sophisticated, they had no idea what to do with all this money so they started depositing it in US banks. These banks had no idea what to do with it either. They couldn't find enough borrowers (rates were pretty high then) so they started lending to govts in emerging markets. This trigged a decade-and-a-half long financial crisis from 1980 when these borrowers started defaulting (in 1980, Citibank was effectively bankrupt because of these loans). Again, this isn't like your Ameritrade account...when you have a lot of money, you start changing how financial markets fundamentally work. So you have to be very very careful.
I'm aware of the impracticability of everyone divesting out of USTs right now. Your points are entirely valid and are the reason the system is still being held together.
My point is there exists some set of circumstances in which that assumption changes.
As an example, at some fed balance sheet level + inflation level, your options are either:
1) Do nothing and end up with nothing
2) Do something and end up with more than nothing
I've lost count of total fed pledges at this point, something on the order of $8T? Say things drag on and that goes to $12T+? And say inflation takes off, is the fed really going to fight inflation? It can't.
You start seeing high double digit inflation while the fed is printing money and keeping rates at zero, and at some point you have to move your USTs into something. If you don't, you'll be left with nothing.
I realize this is incredibly hard to imagine given the current system, but things that can't go on forever wont'.
The level is when we switch to a food, guns, and ammo economy. USTs are so deeply interwoven into the very fabric of the world economic systems the only way to get out of it is for the whole system to fall apart.
When you say it like that, it makes U.S. Treasuries sound like the S3 of the financial world. Simple, reliable, and comparatively inexhaustible. malloc() for the financial web.
They're in a good position as a net creditor nation. While they have a large national debt and have been undergoing QE, they have a steady income stream from treasury bills.
The income stream is unlikely to be steady; the real value of the fixed stream of dollars is (probably) going to drop.
It isn't really conceivable at this point that the US reduces their debt:GDP load without a currency crisis. Their period of service as the reserve currency is probably also drawing to a close; based on the poor fundamentals that the article mentions.
