A16Z seems to do a little more 'investor branding' than other firms and this is part of that strategy. I would call this piece more of a backstop to explain their donations to the Trump campaign more than anything else. Their existing portfolio contains companies that have high private market valuations but are sort of getting big enough to be noticed by regulators.
It shouldn't be surprising that anyone would play with all of the levers and dials they have at their disposal and they're wealthy enough to play the "don't
like the rules: change them" game. All that being said, the piece is sort of tone deaf and just written poorly, but I cannot say I can argue with a VC firm going to bat for its portfolio companies, little tech or otherwise.
Its so wild to me that the business models of newspapers and journalism in general just dont translate well to the web. Like I get that people expect content online to be free and the alternative sources of information are freely available but its just so tragic. There are so few journalists who do investigative journalism in countries that are smaller because the ad revenue just isnt there.
For example, there are a few youtubers who do a great job but their appeal is global - or at least the entire english speaking population. The scope of focus is “interesting conspiracies that are true” or “some product everyone wants”. Not a serious investigation into the misallocated funds in the local county.
The business model is journalism was advertising and it translated fine to the web. The problem is, it turned out that advertising didn't need journalism. Google ate the newspapers' lunch.
It was relevant, timely, legitimate geographically targeted advertising for most newspapers. The subscriptions fed the advertising, which fed the subscriptions, but subscription revenue was usually a tenth what advertising revenue was. Information for subscribers was collectively subsidized by businesses because they were in competition with each other and subscribers weren't.
Newspapers didn't understand that their own business model wasn't two separate modes of "journalism" and "advertising" until it was too late. They were always in the relevant information (both news and advertising) business, so Google SUPER ate their lunch. Many news organizations died and some limp along not knowing this, but the industry as a whole was fat and complacent. There was a lot of money in newspapers, especially before it was legal to own multiple news sources. Local newspapers being able to fly reporters to major national events type of money (in private jets for the larger ones).
I spent a few years at one of the larger surviving independent statewide papers in the US as part of a team specifically hired to "fix" the subscriber and advertiser losses. They told us the scope was business-wide, but in reality all leadership wanted was someone to tell them that they're smart, special people who just need to use manipulative tactics harder. Nonprofit and community focused papers are springing up, and doing well, but some old timers are holding out for something around the corner that will magically return them to 1000%+ profit margins instead of learning how to be a normal business since they missed their chance to be Google.
The business model was dual revenue streams: subscription (or a la carte day-by-day or month-by-month) + ad revenue, with a few exceptions like broadcast TV (where the coverage tended to be more shallow and lowest-common-denominator compared to the early days of cable TV news).
The online advertising merchants realized they could "curate" and "summarize" the articles, resulting in far fewer ad impressions than if someone had to find things purely through the publication newspaper, and bring the ads forward to their portal instead of solely on the content itself.
AND they capitalized on an early reluctance to charge for things online to push the "ew, who wants to pay" mindset globally.
(1) The web offers a plethora of choices, and one subscription doesn't cover that. Like, pre-internet if you wanted National Geographic-type info, you could only get that with a hard copy of National Geographic.
(2) People psychologically struggle with paying for something non tangible.
Is it surprising that the audience for "serious investigation into misallocated funds in local county" is extremely small? Is it really wild that you don't see this is a niche, that most people don't care enough to pay for someone to do that work?
It's not the web. It's democratization. And unfortunately, people would rather watch dancing cats then pay someone to tell them what their local county is doing. That's called consumer choice and fighting it is like fighting nature.
> Like I get that people expect content online to be free and the alternative sources of information are freely available but its just so tragic.
There is more to it than wanting free stuff. At least for some of us.
I have never subscribed to newspapers. If I wanted one, I would go to the convenience store or find a newspaper box. Why? Newspapers sold subscriber lists. I realized early on that online news sites would do the same, only they would have far more valuable data: they would know what interested me from what I read. So instead of being the target of advertising, I would be the target of targeted advertising.
(It also doesn't make sense from a convenience perspective. Newspaper subscriptions offered convenience through home delivery. News sites offer the, admittedly minor, inconvenience of managing accounts.)
It is a hard problem to solve for sure. But its definitely possible.
Like why not lay the smack down to all the illegal shit exposed by the panama papers, and put the money toward real investigative journalism outfits? Oh right because there are no consequences, and if there were they would never put the money in the right place.
First off which country youre in determines what you can do and how much it will cost you. If you don’t already have HR staff who are well versed in local laws and regulations then you should engage some outside help.
Secondly, while your process might be biased or “broken” this is a situation where someone got through when they shouldnt have. Some people are slow to ramp up but others just wont ever do it. Ive hired former Google engineers who ended up being in this exact same situation. It cracked my brain to have to do it, but letting them go was better for everyone.
1. The team already knows theyre underperforming. If they know the titles and that salaries are banded to titles then they’ll easily infer they’re getting less than this person.
2. Values around personal development, motivation are noble but you can improve from all sorts of starting conditions. I believe in a growth minded environment but also that its not everyones job to invest in people. Some people just dont have it.
3. You can rescue it by thoughtfully letting them go. By adjusting your hiring process to avoid false positives (at the expense of some false negatives) and by talking to the team if it’s required.
It sucks. Its never easy but its the kindest thing to do for you, for them, and for the team.
This seems pretty incredible but Im mostly surprised Google is dipping their toes into this domain at all. Feels fairly outside the Google wheelhouse. I could understand Alphabet having another company provide this kind of functionality but it just seems out of place.
They have a strong OR team who has been building an excellent open source solver (OR-tools) for more than a decade. It makes sense to start trying to commercialise this work. It's interesting seeing them do it through problem specific APIs though.
I wouldn't think of this as a full-fledged business yet, but as a way for the Operations Research team to get their work tried out in the real world.
If they're really improving the state-of-the-art, to the degree that real money is saved, and the industries are big enough, these APIs will probably get used a lot and moved out of research or licensed.
Its weird the types of sacrifices we expect kids to make with regards to survival. Like when a school shooting happens we wouldnt event consider banning assault rifles. Those kids dont survive. But if having a tracker on your kid marginally increases their chance for survival in the rarest of circumstances it’s totally out of the question to not have it.
This is absolutely not the case unless you believe what happened in China, Russia and Cambodia in the 20th century, governments murdering hundreds of millions of their own people, somehow magically cannot happen again. Orders of magnitudes more people have been killed by their own government when they lacked any means to defend themselves than have been killed by school shooters or armed criminals.
1. We're not talking about those places in those times that you reference. We're talking about today, presumably in the US, since we're talking about a "stupid law thought of 200 years ago" aka the 2nd amendment to the US constitution.
2. It is hilarious that some people believe that owning a gun is going to protect them in any meaningful way from organized, sanctioned government violence toward them. Maybe that was a reasonable thing to believe 200 years ago, but not today.
Regular people have zero need for assault/military-style firearms. This is the clearest of clear cases of something that does so much more harm than good that it's absurd that half the country has been propagandized into believing this is some sort of "freedom issue". It's sickening.
What is a military style firearm in this context? Because of the NFA, Americans already cannot own pretty much any fully automatic weapon the military employs.
It's weird to think as a society that we can build a walled garden around human nature. Mentally unwell people who attack schools will use other weapons if you somehow take all the "assault" rifles away and we've seen this in other countries who have tried it. When a school shooting happens we don't talk about psychiatric medication or prescribing practices for them.
The #3 cause of death is "accidental self inflicted injury." I'm not sure tracking children is the answer. You're just shifting the burden for risky behavior from the child to the parent through a radio with _zero_ redundancy. There's probably more useful ways to achieve this outcome.
> It's weird to think as a society that we can build a walled garden around human nature.
We literally can. We built lane assistance and airbags and cars that sometimes self drive because humans naturally are bad drivers.
We created fire alarms and automatic sprinklers because sometimes people forget about the thing in the oven.
We invented medication for mental illness and obesity. We invented padded rooms and rehab and all sorts of stuff.
Hell, we invented locks on our front doors.
Guns are one of the most dangerous things a person can own. You can kill someone by pointing a metal tube and pressing a button. It’s very hard to stop once that button is pressed. Almost any other weapon is a lot easier to stop and a lot harder to kill with. That’s why other places don’t have the same death rates as America.
> Guns are one of the most dangerous things a person can own
Actually it's an extension ladder.
> any other weapon is a lot easier to stop and a lot harder to kill with.
Where's your can do spirit now? We literally invented metal detectors and have dogs that can smell guns and explosives because sometimes mentally unwell people have weapons.
> That’s why other places don’t have the same death rates as America.
That's one possible explanation. It's very thin and there's much contrary evidence. You'd have to make a stronger case.
>> Guns are one of the most dangerous things a person can own
> Actually it's an extension ladder.
Fair point, but I think it's more useful to consider that an extension ladder is a tool designed for non-violent uses, and deaths involving extension ladders are (nearly?) all due to accidents.
Guns are tools designed to inflict injury and death. While many gun deaths are accidental, the guns in those instances are performing to purpose.
> We literally invented metal detectors and have dogs that can smell guns and explosives because sometimes mentally unwell people have weapons.
I don't particularly want to live in a world where we have to have metal detectors and dogs present at the entrance to any decent-sized building. That sounds pretty dystopian.
Do you know what an 'assault' rifle is? I only heard that term used by people who want them banned, who usually think this means automatic weapons, like the other commonly misused term machine gun.
The correct term that 'assault' has become an umbrella for is semi-automatic. That means 1 bullet shot for every 1 time the trigger is pulled. There are technically other guns, like pump-action, that require literal pumping of bullets into the chamber between each shot, or even powder guns which are extremely dangerous due to their inaccuracy and jamming (read jamming as: higher probability to explode during use)
'Assault' is used to try to demonify 'bad' guns but really at that point you might as well ban all guns, because the few remaining are useless.
Just be anti-gun instead of anti 'assault' rifle so you aren't pretending to support 'good' guns
Not the person you're replying to, but I fully support repealing the 2nd amendment and strictly regulating gun ownership, up to and including total bans on certain classes of firearms, magazines, and ammunition. I would also personally have no problem with a total ban on any kind of firearm ownership, but I don't think the evidence supports that a total ban would make us meaningfully safer than more targeted restrictions and regulations. But for the guns we might allow in my fantasy of a US with sane gun laws, every gun owner should be required to take both a safety course and general training course, and complete a practical skills exam before being licensed (yes, licensed) to own a firearm. That training should have to be repeated (perhaps an abbreviated version) at some reasonable interval, such as every year or two.
Regarding your nitpicking of what "assault" means, that's irrelevant. But to discuss it anyway: "assault weapon" has not become an umbrella for any semi-auto weapon. Semi-auto pistols, for example, are not what people are talking about when they want "assault" weapons banned. For people who don't really know much about guns, "assault weapon" means "a type of gun that someone in the military on a TV show or movie might have slung across their chest". An imprecise definition, to be sure, but in general I'd agree that no random civilian has any need for such a weapon. And any civilian who believes they have an actual need for such a weapon probably should not be trusted with one.
I do know people who own some of these types of guns. They're responsible, train, and treat the weapons with the respect and care they are due. But I still don't think they should have them.
Assault rifles are rifles designed for killing humans (as opposed to hunting rifles). Sniper rifles require training. Shot guns have limited range and take long to reload. Handguns are hard to aim and not that lethal. Assault rifles are unique in that they allow an untrained teenager to shoot accurately and kill a lot of people very quickly. That’s why people want to restrict access to AR-15 type rifles.
I hesitate to wade into these kinds of conversations but a lot of what you wrote is inaccurate.
Shotguns have a limited range compared to rifles but it’s still at least 50 yards so it isn’t going to matter. People hunt deer with them, they aren’t like shotguns in video games. They can also use removable magazines and be as easy to reload as any other semi automatic firearm.
There is not a single difference between a “sniper rifle” and a hunting rifle.
Handguns are not meaningfully less lethal than rifles against unarmed targets at close range. The mass shooting at Virginia tech was one of the worst and was done with handguns.
> Assault rifles are rifles designed for killing humans (as opposed to hunting rifles)
Every type of firearm was designed for killing people. Today’s “hunting rifle” was the standard issue infantry weapon in WWI and WWII. Russia is still arming some soldiers with what you would call a hunting rifle in Ukraine right now.
Getting shot by a handgun is not like getting shot by AR-15. Even at the same caliber the muzzle velocity of a modern rifle makes the bullet that much deadlier.
Prime Minister Robert Fico got shot three (?) times with a handgun and it now looks like he'll survive. Of course he got the best medical care, but still, it serves to illustrate my point.
With an AK-47 I cannot hit anything at 50 yards. The combination of kickback, terrible sight, rough trigger make it pretty hard to use effectively. It's one of the most popular weapons in war zones (doesn't jam, easy to repair, etc) but in my hands it's useless.
I understand we're dealing with shades of gray here. It's about making a policy tradeoff between how many legitimate uses a weapon type has (for example home defense, farm use, hunting) and how many victims it claims.
> Getting shot by a handgun is not like getting shot by AR-15. Even at the same caliber the muzzle velocity of a modern rifle makes the bullet that much deadlier.
Yeah I should have been more clear about my thoughts on this, my apologies.
Rifle rounds are unquestionably more deadly from a ballistic standpoint but at close range (25 yards or less, just for the sake of hypotheticals), before handgun round velocity falls off enough that they are ineffective, shot placement and how fast you can stop any bleeding matter much more than ballistics.
There aren’t many mass shooting events I can think off where it would have made a big difference if a pistol caliber had been used instead of a rifle caliber - it definitely would in cases like the Las Vegas concert though. That wasn’t an untrained teenager though so it might be outside of the scope of discussion anyways.
> I understand we're dealing with shades of gray here. It's about making a policy tradeoff between how many legitimate uses a weapon type has (for example home defense, farm use, hunting) and how many victims it claims.
Agreed and thank you for your very reasonable response.
Im reading between the lines here but it seems like the traffic amount, the saas subscription tier, and the actions required to remidiate some issue were all unaligned.
1. Its quite possible thar CF having this site on some multi-tenant infrastructure could be threatening. Not unreasonable at least to ask them to have their own IP block.
2. If thats the issue then a clear explanation should have been provided. Routing to sales is inexcusable. Someone isnt being transparent.
3. If it’s a pure cost / revenue issue then say that, set a deadline and negotiate. This is bad karma and even though CF is clearly the market leader, what they do isnt rocket surgery. Not worth it.
My thoughts here are also all speculation, but when you mentioned multi-tenant issues my mind immediately went to a situation I've seen all too many times before:
- a companies ops team identifies a tenant that is too heavy/burdensome for multi-tenant infra and is causing issues. These issues can cost a serious amount of money if you factor in dev/ops times to resolve, other customers impacted, etc. Certainly more than what a hypothetical single multi-tenant customer could be paying
- they escalated internally and need the tenant moved to enterprise asap to resolve
- the only reason the tenant was on multi was because sales sold them the wrong thing, so now it's on sales to explain how to fix this
- improper handling internally results in this landing only on sales, with no backup, and with their task being to get them to take enterprise
- when the customer refuses enterprise they go "we've tried nothing and we're all out of ideas"
Again, this is totally speculation and I'd hope CF has more mature practices than this but this is a scenario I've seen before in much smaller orgs.
What stands out as odd to me is that CF seems to be pushing away a $10k/month customer. No business can reasonably be expected to accept sudden price changes like that, even if they'd paid, they would've moved away within a year.
Given that the article is an online casino that seems to be using potentially ToS violating domain rotation, and that they pay so little per month for apparently millions of users, I for one will not form an opinion on CF based on this article before CF has a chance to defend itself.
If these systems have enough thermal mass then maybe you could even power them with solar or daily offset cheaper power in another storage mechanism.
Between this and the newer co2 reduction technologies in kilns we might be close to finding ways to build combined steel and cement factories that have massively reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
If you want to do that you'd be better off using parabolic mirrors to heat regular fire bricks directly.
These are unique it seems because they're durable electric heating elements that can hit industrial process temperatures and might be cheaper then alternatives?
Well like you said the resistive heating is what sets it apart, and still makes it potentially useful as a thermal ESS because of the classic duck curve even if it's not the primary use case. Soak up excess elec during midday as heat in batteries, use TPV to convert IR back to elec during evening peak or outages. Antora (eg) does this with carbon blocks in shipping container sized units. Would be more desirable/flexible to do a setup like that where the TESS is just another prosumer on the electrical grid rather than using parabolic mirrors+firebricks which can't be used for time delaying supply. Can't speak to the pros/cons of this vs carbon block thermal batteries but still a potential avenue.
It requires full sun to hit steal melting temperatures which is unreliable in many industrial areas. So you need a backup.
You can also easily move electrical power long distances but parabolic mirrors are hard to integrate into existing industrial processes and locations. PV electricity is competitive with fossil fuels even if you ultimately just want heat.
Solar thermal is far more viable for low grade heat. Especially as energy storage is fairly trivial.
How exactly are you going to CHEAPLY collect and store energy for a 1400+C process using solar thermal?
It seems like an huge advantage to use an 80% thermal setup vs a 22% efficient panel, but we gave up on solar power towers for a bunch of reasons. With PV things are a lot more straightforward because you can reach nearly any temperature at equal efficiency.
The goal isn’t thermal storage the goal is to do something that needs extreme temperature.
You can’t melt steel at 500C, you can melt it in bricks at 1500C that then cool to 1400C. Use electricity to heat a brick to 1500C and you get 100C worth of energy storage. Use solar thermal to get to 1400C and you get zero energy storage.
I think that is kinda my point. These comments are all in reference to the idea of using these bricks for electrical storage, as an alternative of offset to other technologies like molten salts, batteries, or pumped hydro.
Im skeptical that they would be improvement on other forms of grid power storage.
This is independent of the question if they are good for melting steel.
I guess I dont understand the point you are advocating for.
The energy never gets turned back to electricity. It’s electricity > melting iron for steel (or whatever) and we’re inserting an energy storage in the middle because it’s effectively free.
The total energy storage is also unlikely to be huge so it’s more like load management not really grid storage. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_management IE: Because we have energy storage and other users don’t we can cut demand when prices spike. Utilities will cut special rates for companies that allow the utility to load shed them first.
The same basic concept is common in other areas. Get enough storage for ~free such as with an EV and you can simply wait until prices get cheap before charging.
Higher temperaure = more energy stored in the same material. Simple as that. When you have a process requiring 400C for reasonable effiency, your storage actually starts to count from above 400C, so if you have 500C storage, you only have effectively 100C of usable tmperature difference stored in your bricks.
If it is cheaper to store at 1400 than 500, then that is an argument for doing so. Higher temperature is not a justification in its own right, absent economic benefit. It is also the case that conduction losses are proportional to heat, and it brings many other challenges as well.
The parent correctly notes that you can't use solar thermal directly for industrial processes because it won't get hot enough and that it's easier to retrofit electric infrastructure than a bunch of mirrors and optics.
Grandparent:
> These are unique it seems because they're durable electric heating elements that can hit industrial process temperatures and might be cheaper then alternatives?
Storage usually makes less sense, but depends on capital cost per kW-hr right? No idea on the economics of that, but an electric heater can get hotter than solar thermal and use much less space at the point of use.
They are durable electric heating elements that can get hotter than solar thermal and hit industrial temperatures without using fossil fuels to heat locally with fire.
> IF you just want to go electricity>heat>electricity
I think the idea here is to go electricity->heat-storage->heat-usage, using the heat storage to take advantage of cheap renewables that might be otherwise curtailed and to buffer the heat to provide reliability for whatever process it is used for.
Almost any form of energy storage other than heat (i.e. batteries, hydrogen, gravity) would be far more expensive in that use case. By comparison, bricks are an incredibly cheap way to store heat.
If packaged correctly this could also be useful for uses like ovens at industrial bakeries, which have highly predictable energy use patterns.
> I'm sure there are some applications for pre-heating to time shift demand, but I do think it is limited.
Another example of a big application for time-shifted heating is domestic hot water heating with heat pump water heaters (or even resistance water heaters if the electricity is cheap enough). At least one company (https://www.harvest-thermal.com/) is taking this further to also provide space heating by time-shifting heat, again using water as the energy storage technology.
Solar thermal requires lots of pipes that you pump molten salt and/or steam through, it's far more expensive than PV. The efficiency doesn't matter as much as the cost, unless you're limited by land to build grid PV on.
There are no moving parts in PV or these bricks, which means they'll have near-zero maintenance costs.
Also I'm pretty sure solar thermal can't heat steel - it relies on steel pipes throughout the entire system.
They don’t even necessarily need to be cheaper than all existing methods. They only need to be cheaper than (IMO inevitable) carbon tax penalties plus the cost of these bricks compared to current methods, which is a rapidly falling curve.
>They only need to be cheaper than (IMO inevitable) carbon tax penalties plus the cost of these bricks compared to current methods, which is a rapidly falling curve.
this clearly indicates OP suggests they will become de facto cheaper once the traditionally externalized costs of environmental impact are accounted for.
The alternatives are also carbon free, which is the point of the parent post.
The comparison is between this and carbon free solar-thermal for energy storage. Saying it doesnt have to be cheaper than solar-thermal simply isnt true.
Fair fair. Unlike traditional solar thermal though, this can just function as regular node on the electric grid (or even a prosumer) so it is decoupled from the attendant variability. As such they are not quite comparable IMO.
Woodstock 99 was my very first concert. Ever. I was 17 and quite anxious but I would have done anything for my high school crush so off we went. Weeks of working in a grocery store to pay for this event I had absolutely no expectations around, beyond maybe being able to see some great bands.
This all happened in a time of my life before I was “awake” due to other life circumstances, but what a slap to the face. Our tent was trampled. Everyone was filthy. The limp bizkit show caused absolute chaos. There wasnt enough food or water but I barely noticed because I couldnt afford anything. They had minimal security. No cell phones. Friends fully separated. Total and absolute madness. I dont even remember leaving or getting home. Must have fully disassociated by that point.
My parents would have been angry but I got home in one piece and I think their relief overrode any negative feelings. Pretty sure I spent a solid month inside on my computer after that.
>Our tent was trampled. Everyone was filthy. The limp bizkit show caused absolute chaos. There wasnt enough food or water but I barely noticed because I couldnt afford anything. They had minimal security. No cell phones. Friends fully separated. Total and absolute madness.
All of the above sound as intended part of the fun for a rock festival, and would have been seeked and cherished back in the day! I know I and friends did.
Including the: "I dont even remember leaving or getting home." which people who try to achieve on purpose by getting drunk/stoned/high (and even be proud of it, like the saying: "If you can remember Woodstock, you weren't there!").
I cannot speak to the above comments intent, but felt their words deeply. I assume they meant living with self-awareness. Consciousness of one’s own place in the world contextual beyond oneself. Becoming suddenly and irrevocably aware of one’s own inevitable mortality, rather than continued enjoyment of adolescent bliss. Evolving beyond liminal, secondhand awareness of suffering and injustice to an instant and innate understanding of the brutality and brevity of life itself.
I suspect the 6 story and shorter buildings will end up having an alternative design where the stairwell and possibly certain walls are concrete, poured around the same time as the foundation, but the remaining structure is engineered timber.
The challenge is going to be convincing fire departments and insurance agencies that theyre safe enough to not prevent.
I was just thinking of bolts. I mean we're talking about the staircase right, not the part of the building that actually holds up the entire structure. But I might be vastly overestimating this.
My previous appartment was in a 3-story building, and my impression was that the entire staircase was bolted together (and it was on the outside of the building).
It's less that stairwells need to support the structure than that stairwells need to survive the destruction of the structure, something concrete does remarkably well.
Not turning into an oven is another feature. Heat conductivity of concrete is far lower than that of steel.
That’s a cool looking building, but I have to imagine that amount of glass must mean very high heating and cooling bills. Hope they at least installed efficient heat pumps.
