But also I don't think the T&C's came into play here. This is strictly his employer (Google) told him to keep this information confidential and he didn't and instead profited from it.
> What sort of institutions would try to take on operating such a business?
Essentially anyone - other PE funds, competitors merging, the general stock market if you take it public. And they're not wrong want to buy it - there's a valuable business there - they're just bad at assessing the right price.
> And when does word get around, and the pool of suckers dry up?
One born every minute. And it's hard to even notice you're being taken for a ride as opposed to mismanaging the business you bought or just being unlucky.
Ireland isn't that much cheaper than, say, Oklahoma. And the cultural differences with Ireland are not a lot smaller than those with India or the Philippines or what have you, once you try to actually start working together.
(Yes, all the good developers from Oklahoma move out, but the same is true of Ireland)
> If they can't, then the EU should not exist - literally. It's decisive evidence that the bureaucracy can't even face an existential threat on it's own existence because it can't organize it's own legal concerns.
> "We remained lawfully committed to juducial integrity and processes ... as we were exterminated!"
If you're happy being governed without process or accountability, why not just surrender to Russia? If the EU can't maintain its principles when things get tough then what's the point in having it at all?
> That would be true if you and only you are 10x more productive than anyone else. Since everyone is now 10x more productive it just means you have to work just as much as before since you're competition can outwork you.
Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working. If we're talking about an actual productivity increase, let's just produce the same amount of stuff in 10x less time.
Because your competitor can now produce 10x more work with the same resources that your company can only produce 1x, therefore in short order your company isn't competitive and will cease to exist.
> Why? I don't need 10x more stuff. I'd far rather spend 10x less time working.
It's a free market - if you can find someone willing to hire you to work 0.5 days a week, and are happy receiving the same income you do today, you can do so.
But your living standards won't improve, while everyone else's will, and by 10x.
And the people you are competing with to buy housing, a car, consumer goods, healthcare, food, and everything else - people who want to work 5 days a week - will have 10x more money than you. Resources like housing, which are supply constrained, will seem to go up dramatically in price relative to your income, and you'll be living in a slum.
> Resources like housing, which are supply constrained, will seem to go up dramatically in price relative to your income, and you'll be living in a slum.
That sounds like a problem with that system. If we're 10x more productive why can't we make 10x as much nice housing?
> That sounds like a problem with that system. If we're 10x more productive why can't we make 10x as much nice housing?
Because the supply of land is relatively inelastic (and to some extent building materials and construction labor). There isn't suddenly 10x more land on the planet because we all start using AI. Maybe we can make more land or build taller buildings, but it gets progressively more difficult and expensive. And because of NIMBY of course.
Sure the consumer won't consume 10x more, but they're still going to reach for the better products.
And let's say that work is correlated with quality. Company A wants to spend 10x less time working, while Company B works 10x more. Company B therefore has a better product than Company A, so eventually Company A goes away. The consumer still consumed the same amount, but they switched to the better product.
If everyone had said this 100 years ago we wouldn't have the Polio vaccine, air conditioning etc.
There are lots of problems in the world and there are still a ton of incentives to fix those problems. Yes there is also greed, scams, and exploitation - but that's never going to go away
What people: I'm sure some people are watching 10-12 hours per day - in places like nursing homes or hospitals. I know a reasonable number of people who watch a film nearly every day: 2-3 hours. Most people watch something every few days - often a tuesday night movie night for the family (or something like that). There are some who never watch anything. I don't know what the statistics are on this.
My friends in day care tell me the kids hate "movie day" because movies are all the get at home and they are sick of them - they want to play all day. (but I'm not sure if this is representative of anything other than the types of people who put their kids in that particular daycare)
I've encountered plenty of people who have the TV on all the time when they are at home (and awake). That's from when they get back from work right up til when they go to sleep. So that could easily be five hours. TikTok and YouTube have eaten into that but are much the same thing.
Growing companies don't brag about their margins, they brag about their growth and revenue. Margin talk is for when you're a mature company squeezing out every bit of profitability you can - if anything it would be a negative sign to be worrying about your margins when you're supposed to still be growing and innovating.
There's no reason for engineers to be under more pressure to accept technical debt (which is what we're really talking about with the yes-or-no framing) after the end of ZIRP. Quite the opposite: right now debt is expensive and programmers are cheap, it's a good time to have high quality standards and build robust infrastructure that will position you to catch the next growth wave. It really is AI (or rather AI hype) making the difference.
the difference IMO is that now businesses have to find a product-market-fit faster. you can't spend 5 years building the perfect system. you get to spend 1 year building a system somebody will pay to use.
>Quite the opposite: right now debt is expensive and programmers are cheap, it's a good time to have high quality standards and build robust infrastructure that will position you to catch the next growth wave.
Uhm, no? You got it exactly backwards. Tech debt isn't the same as interest payments, tech debt is a future productivity decline, whereas interest payments require you to pay more than the initial money you borrowed.
If debt is expensive, then your goal is to pay it off quickly, since debt scales with the remaining principal and grows with interest. This means that you want to cut corners everywhere and incur tech debt. You do not want a long term investment in high quality standards and build robust infrastructure. Doing that will delay the payoff day. Each early payments reduce the principal, which reduces future interest payments.
In other words, it's a terrible time to have high quality standards and build robust infrastructure. There also won't be a "next growth wave", because the growth wave is now. You're about to miss it if you invest in the long term.
You pay tech debt with compounding interest at exorbitant rates.
Another way to look at it is to say that like any analogy applied to software development it is weak. It is not like normal debt at all because you must start paying back immediately one way or another. So you can't just pile hack on hack and wait for a year to pay back. You will start having to pay back for the hacks within a couple of months because of the bugs you have to fix and how hard it is to work with the messy codebase. In some cases you may even grind to a halt before you get anything substantial out to the customer. This doesn't mean that you should never hack stuff in. But in general it's cheaper to pay off the debt quickly instead of paying for the debt.
Ah indeed. As monetary debt becomes more expensive it makes tech debt relatively cheaper - fixing your code in the future is cheaper than fixing it now.
The biggest problem is that you can't abstract over them. Try to write Array#map in Java, you can't - you have to write copy-paste variants for 0, 1, 2... different types of exception until you get bored.
Yeah! I eluded to that. Exceptions aren’t fully in the type system. I’m hopeful that they’ll eventually let exceptions be some sort of union type fully. Currently, they’re unions in throws clauses and catch clauses.
Personally for me it’s not that big of a deal. The thing I want the most is having null in the type system.
Not a crime, or certainly shouldn't be.
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