But slow organic growth is not a hyperscaling unicorn. Who wants to invest money for a mere 50% return? We need to x100 or x1000 it for it to even be worth to invest.
Not a situation that happened to me per se. More of a mix of situations that have happened to me and I've seen happen to people close to me aggregated into a single metaphor.
If someone has the answer I'd like to know as well. I think the most important question to ask yourself is: Where did the story go sideways? At what point what character could have prevented the disaster?
For me there is no right answer. Maybe the engineer should have been more pushy with what things not to add. Maybe the founder entrepreneur should have been realistic. Maybe sales should have not had to promise things that were not developed yet. But to each of those there is a counter-argument of why that needed to be done in that moment.
I've been experimenting with writing longer-form content. I do agree the main point could be condensed a lot and I'm not the a great writer by far. This is kind of a rant and really cathartic for me to write after working more than 5 years on startups. Just wanted to share it.
Without fractional banking the bank needs to be way more cautious when appraising an asset and be more conservative with the future gains estimation. Decreasing speculation and inflation of value.
It all comes back to fractional reserve banking. It is the root of all evil in our financial system. If Rothbard could only see the current state of affairs...
> If someone threatened me with death or offered a hefty ransom, I would be able to check their mails, sensitive documents or just browser history. And I am happy to never have been in that situation.
That sounds like a pretty sensible reason to not trust someone no? Politicians don't make the most sensible decisions at a time, but the ones were if they were to not work wouldn't be blamed on them.
Let's say there is an attack on Google or [insert random engineer name working for belgian goverment] and thousands of emails from politicians were leaked. The public outcry would be wildly different. In the case of google they would talk about how can a company hold so much sensitive data and power blah blah blah. In the case of random engineer much of the blame would be on the politician on why did they rely on a random person having access to all emails and sensitive information instead of a reliable company like google.
Sometimes the most popular answer is the best one because if you are wrong then everyone is wrong too.
I love your work on bun. How do you feel about all the constant concerns being raised about the quality of the project lately? I understand some of them might just be typical twitter hate but some of them are real. And I think people are right to question why you are adding image processing or web views inside a javascript runtime when there are bugs affecting production that sit unaddressed. For example on of our biggest blockers right now is https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/issues/6608 which was reported in 2023, still affecting us 3 years later.
As a rule of thumb inference offered by the model labs are closer to the "true implementation" compared to third parties. They have other problems though.
> Also there's the, often, I suppose, intentional confusion of terms. The free market of the economic theory is not an unregulated market, it's a market of infinitesimal agents with infinitesimal influence of each individual agent upon the whole market, with no out-of-market mechanisms and not even in-market interaction between agents on the same side.
Just to expand on this really interesting topic. That's where the common pitfall on planned economy begins. Because to some degree a free market can withstand some amount of regulation; after all, external agents trying to manipulate the market are just that, agents in the market. As long as there are other autonomous agents intervening the market will keep functioning as it was. So the bureaucrat has both the incentive and the justification to expand the intervention. In other words, his economical plan didn't work because it was not intervened enough and just if they intervene in this extra thing it will work for sure. That loop continues until the market is 100% intervened, and at that point it requires such a enormous structure of power and control that makes it difficult to fight it (clientelist networks, repressive states, etc).
It is not carrying a lot of weight. Macroeconomics are different from microeconomics. On a micro scale agents have enough weight on the system where a specific action might break a model. On a macro scale each individual agent's action carries less weight and therefore the system becomes predictable.
On a micro scale it is possible, and sometimes favorable, to intervene. On a macro scale to intervene economically becomes impossible due to the economic calculation problem. It is widely accepted in modern economics that the unit of maximum extent where economical intervention is possible is a business/company/enterprise. Or in sociological terms the maximum unit is the family. Anything broader than that and the compound effect of the economic calculation problem becomes apparent and inefficiencies accumulate. Autonomous decentralized mechanisms (like a free market) are the only solution to it, but not the most optimal.
I don't know if you are being sarcastic. But no, it's not an "utopia" by any means and the free market still has many pitfalls and problems that I described. However, is the best system we have to coordinate the production, distribution and purchasing of services and goods on a mass scale.
Mises never claimed that the free market produced the most optimal solutions at a given moment. In fact Mises explicitly stated many times that the free market does indeed incur in semi-frequent self-corrections, speculations and manipulations by the agents.
What Mises proposition was - in essence - is that an autonomous market with enough agents participating in it will reach an optimal Nash equilibrium where both offer and demand are balanced. Only an external disruption (interventionism, new technologies, production methods, influx or efflux of agents in the market) can break the Nash equilibrium momentarily and that leads to either the offer or the demand being favored.