This happens more often than not anyway. Overpriced office space, expensive furniture, extra layers of management because we're "structuring to scale the organization", fancy and expensive titles for people who barely do anything. I worked at one place that raised 70 million, then spent 10 renovating a rented space, only to close up barely 1 year later. I had left by that point.
How does one find these jobs where the founders are planning on lighting a pile of money on fire and not working ever again? Would love to burn some money myself.
Yes, except this was real, not fiction. I witnessed it more than once. During the dotcom days, a company I worked for raised 8 mil... then blew 25% on renovations. I still remember getting a tour of the "space", where the new logo (which probably cost 6 figures to design) was unveiled.
If they were burning $5M a month, not renovating an office for $10M would’ve bought two additional months of salary and operational costs. I assume the bulk of the other $60M went to salaries?
My company just spent $10M renovating an office but we’ve been in business for several decades and have been profitable every year for the past decade, I’m not sure about prior to that. It’s not always a bad idea to spend money on office space.
Tenant improvements (office remodels) are $75-$150/square foot these days depending on the level of finishes and FFE (furniture, fixtures, and equipment), and can go higher if you’re building out dozens of offices instead of open office space with perimeter private offices or want high end architectural lighting, aesthetic flourishes, etc. I know you can wire up a basic office with lights and receptacles for about $15/sqft if you use union labor and basic 2x4s/recessed cans for lighting.
My state allows 1 occupant per 150 gross sq ft of floor space (interior partitions, columns, and other items that occupy floor space are counted in gross square footage), so an office tower with a 22,500 sq ft floor plate allows for 150 occupants. At $100/sqft, you’re looking at $2.25M to build out a single floor of an office tower.
Depending on the market, the landlord might offer an allowance for tenant improvements or ‘pay’ for the improvements and they get paid back later over time through rent payments.
Yes, that sounds right. There were roughly 400 to 500 people near the end, if I remember, so $5M monthly burn is in the right ball park. This was over 15 years ago when salaries were much less. Usually waste in one area, like office space, means waste in other areas. So, yeah, the office space alone wouldn't buy much time. You'd need a whole change in attitude.
Oh this was 15 years ago? $10M is pretty extravagant for ~500 people, considering construction labor was nearly half the price it is now back in 2010, probably 60-65% of today’s wages.
> If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.
And maybe (just maybe) raise your voice in _actionable_ support for dismantling the complexes these money ghouls use to wage war against you and regular society.
Peaceful protests, calling your reps, voting, and donating to organizations that have lawyers in the courts and lobbyists on Washington repping your interests are all super helpful relatively low effort steps that have impact when done en masse.
> I've not seen any of these actions make a measurable difference in the last 10 years
I've literally gotten language I drafted written into state and, twice now, federal law.
If you pick a hot-button issue, no, you probably won't move your elected. But on issues they didn't even consider to be on their plate? You can get attention. (Better yet if you can convince them you have other motivated voters beside you.)
Unfortunately, my (Republican) senator doesn't seem to agree with me (a Democrat) on even the smaller issues. Yet he theoretically represents every resident of this state in the Senate, including the ones that didn't vote for him.
It does. But every single case where I got to draft legislation occurred before I made money and before I’d given anyone any money. (I never gave either of the federal electeds I worked with money.)
I called about a bill that wasn’t getting attention. The elected thought it was interesting, but their staff were overworked. (They’re always overworked.) I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work. In a minority of cases, they introduced those into the working copy of the bill, and in a minority of those cases the bill actually passed.
Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
> I suggested some edits; they appreciated the free work... Civic engagement is a power transfer from the lazy and nihilistic to the engaged. In terms of broadly-accessible power, I’d argue it’s one of the fairest.
I'd argue that time to do free work, and especially the ability to do is legal drafting, is something that the upper classes have a lot more access to than others.
Some school district and property tax measures. That’s why I vote (and just for the general principle of it). Even my state and local reps are gerrymandered into lifelong stability.
They win with 80+% margins. They don’t even bother campaigning themselves and delegate it to their staff. The party wants it this way and is actively hostile to any primary challenges.
I have better things to do with my time than charge at windmills.
Civic engagement when the deck is stacked that bad against you is just pissing your time away. We only have so much time in this earth to accomplish things.
That is an issue, but it's important to signal to those paying attention that the resistance is there and to not give up.
We've entered Civil War II and I fear it will have to get much worse before there's any chance of turning things around. Regardless we can never give up.
The invasion of the Capitol, to overturn an election that they claim was fraudulent, followed by the pardoning of the invaders, is kind of a doozy. It suggests that one side or the other (or possibly both) is rejecting democracy and willing to use violence when they don't get the result they want. Not just the individuals involved, but the tens of millions who supported pardoning them.
Or alternatively, they were in fact correct, and tens of millions on the other side subverted democracy, at least temporarily (and would surely do so again if not prevented).
Either way, it sounds like you've millions of people each convinced that millions of others are about to start a civil war. Which sounds like it makes that war practically unavoidable.
It seems sometimes that they have mapped out how things are going to play out years in advance and are ready. After all what is the American government but just a group of fellow countrymen with all the data and resources?
The military preemptively deployed to multiple US cities isn't a great sign.
Generally speaking, we don't deploy our military in peacetime. So unless there's a natural disaster in Chicago or D.C. right now, there aren't but so many conclusions to draw...
1. Trump declared a Venezuelan gang as a terrorist organization.
2. Since then, Trump has ordered the military to conduct extrajudicial killings of people suspected of being in that gang who were on boats. He is implicitly asserting that military action is allowed without Congressional approval if the target is a terrorist organization (it probably isn't legal, and he's put out no justification for it).
3. He just declared Antifa a terrorist organization. He has a history of blaming things on Antifa and has mused about declaring other leftist organizations as terrorists.
Well, the President of the Heritage Foundation (the ones behind Project 2025, which is the playbook they're following) has said: “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
People keep saying this. But the fact is it doesn’t matter.
Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district. Most people aren’t.
And then we have the Supreme Court giving the President unlimited power.
> Between gerrymandering, the electoral college, two senators per state, and lobbying, votes don’t matter unless you are in a purple state or a purple district
I’ve knocked on doors for judicial elections in Manhattan where a single tenants’ association’s turnout out swung every election on the ballot. (In another case, the judge who went to Koreatown with us after a meet and greet swung our eight top to turn out, which was more than the margin for an off-cycle mid-week judicial primary.)
There are always elections on the ballot that matter. And civic engagement isn’t limited to voting.
Local politics and civic engagement might help getting a speed bump installed in front of the town grocery store, but it doesn’t stop unaccountable, non-identifying masked ICE thugs from swooping into your neighborhood and black-bagging your friends and neighbors. National politics overrides state and local.
Or women bleeding to death because doctors are afraid to perform life saving abortion because they might get arrested.
The (Republican) governor of GA has been spending years and millions of dollars to get the Hyundai plant in GA that would bring 8500 direct jobs and no telling how many indirect jobs to GA. That was delayed an almost ruined by ICE.
It was such a bad fuckup that Trump tried to beg the Koreans to stay after being arrested by ICE. They refused.
The GA voters overwhelmingly voted for Kemp over a MAGA endorsed candidate during the primaries and even a Republican governor can’t block the federal government’s jack booted thugs
and yet the center of political power oscillates – with real consequences – every two and four years... coincidentally around the time we have elections!
And those same purple states have decided where it oscillates - like I said.
Whether you are a Republican or Democrat in California it doesn’t matter who you as individual votes for for President. If you are in Los Angeles county, it also doesn’t matter who you vote for in the general election as your representative.
The primaries matter though. California sends the same number of Senators to DC as West Virginia and half as many as North and South Dakota combined even though they don’t have nearly the population.
How long and what strike of luck will it be based on timing that you think this country will see a liberal Supreme Court? Especially since justices nominated by Democrats refuse to leave when a Democratic President is in office? But then again, we are in this mess we are in today because the Democrats were too cowardly to pressure Biden not to run sooner.
If it didn't matter they wouldn't get so upset about you doing it.
Never listen to anyone telling you that your voice doesn't matter.
Like... here's a story about me getting a kind of boring corporate law (related to limited liability companies) changed in Italy. Tons of people rolled their eyes at me and said it'd never happen, but I kept poking away at it, and it did happen:
If anything, I get upset at how naive the left is, how they think that “this isn’t who we are”, and how out of touch they are. They try to play fair - the right plays to win.
Right now, the governor of California is trying to meet Texas gerrymandering with its own. But liberals are clutching their pearls with “two wrongs don’t make a right” and arguing about things like this in their committees
The rules specify that when we have a gender-nonbinary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female, and the remaining six officers must be gender balanced.
It is the act of supporting DOGE after the dumb implementation (e.g. 1/28/2025 Fork in the Road letter) that would concern me (which I think a16z has continued to do).
In my opinion, Elon Musk approached DOGE all wrong because he is used to running companies where payroll is the #1 expense, and cutting workers is how he has always cut costs at his previous companies when they were strapped for cash (e.g. SolarCity, Tesla). He did’t realize that the US Government is mostly an insurance company, so cutting office staff is a drop in the bucket. A tragedy of his own juvenile ignorance.
What was the pitch for DOGE? I get that govt agencies are insanely bloated. I don't get how DOGE intended to fix that even at the start, and the scammy charts they kept publishing weren't giving confidence. Was looking at it optimistically too, cause Musk did debloat Twitter.
> Support for DOGE before it was implemented is not a bad thing
A reminder that before it was implemented, it was called DOGE. It was never a serious thing, and supporting it may not have been bad, but it was hopelessly naive.
Should be obvious. If you want a smaller government, you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide. Venture capital / private equity / etc. owned companies will stand in line to get those contracts.
And with deregulations, "move fast and break things" startups can move even faster.
What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd. They enjoy social freedoms which the current gov. would rather see go away...so, talk about selling their soul to the devil.
There are quite a few socially liberal VCs, perhaps even most. But there are also more libertarians, which is quite common among those who make fortunes managing money rather than building things.
Privatization of those functions results in the government paying consultants more than they would pay staff, with less institutional knowledge, and far less efficiency than if the functions were directly in the government.
Generally, the government doesn't do things that private industry could do on their own. There are specific times where this isn't true. For example, there were small commuter buses in San Francisco for a while that the existing MUNI service could not accomplish. But these are quite rare!
For example, private industry is never going to fund basic research that is the foundation of the US's wealth and strength, except through taxation. The idea is ludicrous.
We could have private highways, private roads, perhaps, but we would be handing off public decisions to a private company that is almost certainly a monopoly. There are only rare cases where roads and highways are not inherently monopolistic.
SV venture capital is not one type of person, there are both liberal and libertarians among them. The libertarian variety got suckered in by the Dark Enlightenment propaganda and thought they could be the puppetmasters controlling the world with propaganda. They should have looked to what happens to their ilk in places like Russia before backing someone who wants to turn the US into an autocracy like Russia:
> What puzzles me about the SV venture capital crowd, though, is that they're usually a somewhat socially liberal crowd
Silicon Valley has had a monarchist element for at least a decade now. I've been commenting on it for a while. It masked itself in the language of libertarianism. (Note: not all libertarians are monarchists.) But 2024 outed them (Andreessen, Musk, the All In crowd, et cetera) for the bastards that they are.
I mean it was barely masked. They dropped mentions of the dark enlightenment like name dropping Curtis yarvin/mencius moldbug pretty frequently if you listened to their talks.
Sam Harris is the only intellectual in that space that I know of who was repulsed by their actual views and pulled back but maybe there are others.
The libertarian party itself got taken over by a less sophisticated group of these guys in a Mises Caucus mask from a coup orchestrated by the overstock.com ceo in 2022
The monarchists bent wasn't masked, but the racism was. I still remember the controversy around Yarvin being removed as a speaker at Strange Loop. A lot of people could not understand why what he said was racist.
I do not think the racism was masked anymore than the monarchist bent. Monarchists are just more palatable than racists.
I have been railing against these people for over a decade.
My experience with every friend or acquaintance denying their racism pretty much came down to “no one is actually that bad, you’re being ridiculous”
Between that and the people telling me Project 2025 was a caricature of a cartoon villain and would never happen last year, I am losing my mind at all the people confiding in me hat in hand that maybe, these people might actually want to bad things
It was really obvious what these people wanted. They advertised it. They wrote entire books about their plan. But all they had to do is say “no, that’s not true” in a single interview and everyone bought it because the alternative was mentally painful
You can have members of this group straight up admit to lying[1] and yet I have people who I can show the video of them admitting to lying who then still try to claim the lie is truthful.
If you are reading this comment and had seen these actions and events and had waved them off previously, then my opinion is that you were actively ignorant to save yourself the mental anguish
I agree they were not masked for people who can see through the masks, but the abstractness of their argument style gave them a level of plausible deniability that you just don't see anymore. For example, whereas before they would express their racism by pointing to literature like "The Bell Curve", now they just say stuff like this: https://www.thenerdreich.com/curtis-yarvins-racist-slurs-hav...
>you'll need to privatize the tasks / services which government agencies used to provide
Most of what DOGE cut was stuff no one wanted or needed in the first place. Just scroll their twitter feed, cutting this stuff shouldn't be termed as "smaller government".
If you take their claims at face value then you might believe that, however, if you look into it even just a little you find that they drastically misrepresented what was cut.
This can be fixed with sane campaign finance laws. Every elected Democrat I know is willing to enact those if Citizens United is overruled. And every Democratic-appointed Justice on the Supreme Court would vote to overturn Citizens United. I know it sounds trite, but voting for Democrats again and again, flawed as they are, for generations, is the only way we're going to get out of this mess.
> Every elected Democrat I know is willing to enact those if Citizens United is overruled.
I don't want to be rude, but I don't believe you. I also have seen the polling and the country does not believe it as a whole. Democratic voters also don't believe it either. If you personally have an income >150K you are likely completely insulated from real Americans. The perception is that the Democrats care more about Israel and their donors than the country. Only 8 percent of Democrats are supportive of Israel but almost 90% of Dem senators are (I made this number up, the rest are real).
edit: the Republicans are publicly grifting, lest you think I like the Republicans. My overarching point is that ~60% of American's don't own homes and are completely uninvested in this country. They have completely given up, or are in a state of giving up. The Republicans and Democrats are extremely vile reptilian grifters who sold out this country.
I get it, your perspective is totally fair. Part of the reason Democrats care only about donors (the Israel lobby is one of those donors) is because of the influence of money in politics, which is a direct result of Citizens United. If they don't care about their donors, they lose. The incentives are pretty straightforward.
There were great campaign finance laws on the books, but Republican-appointed judges have steadily eroded those over the years, culminating in Citizens United. We have to overrule that awful case if we are to ever have working campaign finance laws in this country again. There's only one way to overrule that case, and that's with Democrat-appointed judges. Those judges typically do not answer to donors and so don't have the same incentives you've identified.
It does seem that people are fed up enough to ignore campaign spending, however. Examples are the Wisconsin supreme court race and Mamdani vs. Cuomo.
I really don't think that the Democratic establishment as we know it has much time to live. Democratic voters are not interested in the center-right. They want to go left. Candidates that move things to the left do well without expensive campaigns.
Isn't it a property of infinity? If pi goes on infinitely without repeating itself, every possible combination of numbers appears somewhere in pi.
It's sort of like the idea that if the universe is infinitely big and mass and energy are randomly distributed throughout the universe, then an exact copy of you on an exact copy of Earth is out there somewhere.
This property of infinity has always fascinated me, so I'm very curious for where the logical fallacy might be.
Not necessarily. The number 1.01001000100001000001... never repeats itself, yet most other numbers can never be found in it.
A number that contains all other numbers infinitely many times (uniformly) would be called normal, but no one has managed to prove this for pi yet. In fact, no one even managed to prove that pi doesn't contain only 0s and 1s like the above after the X-th digit.
The fact you can't encode arbitrary data in a structured-but-irrational number doesn't mean you can't encode data in a 'random' irrational number.
The question is really 'Does every series of numbers of arbitrary finite length appear in pi?' I can't answer that because I'm not a mathematician, but I also can't dismiss it, because I'm not a mathematician. It sounds like a fair question to me.
>I can't answer that because I'm not a mathematician
So what? Mathematicians can't answer it either. It is an open question and because it is an open question claiming it is or isn't true makes no sense.
>The fact you can't encode arbitrary data in a structured-but-irrational number doesn't mean you can't encode data in a 'random' irrational number.
You can not encode data in a random number. If it is random you can not encode data in it, because it is random. I am not sure what you are saying here.
I demonstrated that numbers where the digits go on forever and never repeat exist, which don't contain every single possible substring of digits. Therefore we know that pi can either be such or a number or it is not, the answer to that is not known. Definitely it is not a property of pi being infinitely long and never repeating.
That's why I put random in quotes. Pi is not a random number. You can encode data in it eg find a place that matches your data and give people the offset. That's not very helpful for most things though.
just index on the number of ones. Ex 0.10110 there are two ones in a row, so reference those two ones to be the number two. For 00, flip it and refer to the same pair of ones.
That is totally missing the point. Of course for every number there is an encoding that contains all pieces of information.
That obviously applies to 0.00... = 0 as well, it contains 0, then 00, then 000 and so on. So every number and therefore every piece of information is contained in 0 as well, given the right encoding. Obviously if you can choose the encoding after choosing the number all number "contain" all information. That is very uninteresting though and totally misses the point.
Most physicists don't believe that infinity can actually exist in the universe.
Put another way, the program which searches those works of art in the digits of pi will never finish (for a sufficiently complex work of art). And if it never finishes, does it actually exist?
That's a completely different issue. Using math to solve physics problems deals with physical models. Models are imperfect and what kinds of math they use is completely separate from asking "does infinity exist in our actual universe".
To answer that question, you would have to dismiss with experimental evidence all models people can come up with that try to explain the universe without "infinities". It's neither completely clear what that would mean, nor whether it's even in principle possible to determine experimentally (it's also most likely completely irrelevant to any practical purpose).
This is a really hard problem, and kudos to you for trying to tackle it. Time tracking narratives can be so different from practice area to practice area and also as a function of the size of the firm.
Often, it also comes down to the idiosyncrasies of the client and their org structure! I wonder if part of the solution will include using the actual invoices sent to a client to train how future invoices to that client should be prepared.
It's absolutely a tough problem. Right now we have a couple mechanisms to try and address these issues. When we onboard a firm we can ingest their historical billing data, which lets us pattern match the style of new entries. We can also ingest client guidelines for the same purpose.
I've spent a lot of time looking into this for non-profits I am involved in. Currently, I use Mailgun's Mailing List feature which is pretty good, but has a few warts and doesn't really seem to be in active development.
But I have half a mind to develop a Django-based system specifically for non-profit member management, build a postgres view on top of the Django tables and and have a postfix mail server reference that postgres view for mailing list delivery. I would use Mailgun or another SMTP relay to minimize deliverability issues.
Me! I started my solo, startup law practice almost by accident via a Hacker News comment years ago. It's now my primary source of income.
It's hard, but less hard than what startup founders do. It's nice having control of my schedule, but the flip side is that there's never a day off. Personally, I think being self-employed is great for people who naturally work really hard and want to capture the full output of their labor.
I don't think I could ever go back to full time employment for someone else. It's addicting having your own business that actually cash flows!
Notes: A notes git repo that contains mostly Markdown files, which I write via Obsidian.md.
Action items: Github issues on that notes repo. I wrote some custom code that lets me snooze actions via Github labels and sets up certain tasks to appear automatically on a recurring schedule (e.g., replace the air filter in my house every 90 days).
This works really well for me, but sadly it is bad for collaborating on projects with less technical folks such as my wife.
In most states in the United States, if someone dies without a will and without anyone ascertainable in the line of intestate succession, the assets of the decedent escheat to the state.
So, if the person lived in California when they passed, California would own the intellectual property associated with the voice. Why or whether the State of California would ever enforce or even seek to perfect those rights is a different matter.
If haphazard, cruel dismantling of state capacity bothers you, avoid raising money from venture capital firms that supported it.