What’s crazy is how Oracle’s free cash flows have gone from “money-printing machine” to deep in the red due to their data center investments. My guess is that some of those cuts are to try to balance that?
At the risk of sounding overly negative, these things are pretty much always vanity projects. Someone wanted a really cool boat and managed to get some investors onboard. It’s more about an aesthetic than a business case.
We’re talking here about a fairly large crew that will transport a small amount of cargo while taking a really long time. On top of that, these aren’t container ship so loading/unloading will take a long time. There is no economic case here.
The only way you can make this somewhat work is by selling the aesthetic/story. E.g.: this coffee was shipped by sailboat. But even then, notice how every company linked in the article of another commenter aren’t actually operating anymore…
Echoing the article, anyone who has experienced both will agree: it’s far easier to work with an under engineered code base than an over engineered one.
It's a luxury tax that only affects people wealthy enough to have a second home in NYC. These people, by virtue of not living there, aren't paying income tax and thus don't contribute as much as someone who is.
I think some of it is due to the lay off, some of it due to the supply situation not being as bad as SF (though construction has slowed recently), and a lot of it due to interest rates making "effective prices" much higher.
I don't think that's true. I remember the very early days of Stack Overflow and it felt much more fun and friendly than it did 6-7 years later. I have so many 15+ years question/answer that somehow get revisited by a "moderator" that decides that maybe we should close this.
But was that the cause of Stack Overflow's demise? I agree that it most likely isn't. It's most definitely because of LLMs.
I'd also argue there are financial advantages (on top of the psychological ones) to the price stability as you don't have to hedge against your housing cost shooting up as much.
HOAs can be a big variable cost, yes, especially in the case of underfunded condos associations with a lot of delayed maintenance. Insurance can vary a lot, but is usually a much smaller amount than your mortgage payment (though I only have experience with the PNW).
But yeah, for a single family home in a not-too-flood-prone area it'll be very predictable.
Unlike a startup that pays with illiquid RSUs, Meta paid its people extremely well for its bets though. I dont think Zuck is a great leader at all, but he’s definitely willing to pay for talent.
To add to this, I would assume that advertisers are more diverse and numerous than donors are, therefore reducing the influence any single one of them can have.
Calling it "just a speculative research project" is severely underestimating how big of an effort Fuschia was. At its peak it had a couple hundred eng IIRC.
I’ll never forget how when I was at Google, every email with subject line “An update on X” meant X was getting axed. Like, just say so in the subject line…
Wow, exempting people over 60 from property tax is such a fiscal self-own... The way to do it is to provide a deferral with interest which becomes a lien on your property. This way you can still live in your house, take advantage of your asset appreciating and the county still gets its taxes in the end (and can better handle the delayed cash flows). King County in WA does this for example.