I'm willing to expose my complete ignorance by questioning this wisdom.
I get that a startup wants a high stock price so they can raise as much money as possible while giving up as little control as possible. Of course there are other circumstances where corporations' best option for raising cash is to sell shares. So in those circumstances, this reasoning still holds.
But what about when I've gotten past funding shortages and I'm a successful company and I want to invest in myself and take back some ownership? Now I have to pay some premium because of something that has nothing to do with the value of my company?
Or what if I'm ok not taking back ownership. I'm content to just stay with 60% ownership or whatever? Why do I care what the share price is or what volume of sales is occuring on the stocks around me?
In short, high stock prices only benefit me when I'm selling. So this reasoning baffles me for anybody with an ownership mentality.
I admitted upfront that I was exposing my ignorance. I'm willing to learn from anybody who will show me a bigger picture. But I dread a bigger picture that assumes that future success at any level can only be obtained with leverage.
> Why do I care what the share price is or what volume of sales is occuring on the stocks around me?
Like it or not, your job as a manager in a company is to run that company for the people that own it, same as if you manage a local grocery store for your neighbour Jeff that owns it. Jeff will be happy if his store appreciates in value the same way the shareholders of the corporation (its owners) will be happy if it goes up in price.
So as an employee of the company (the CEO is one too), you care because your job is to care, and in the case of senior management you also have a legal duty to care and the company can be sued if you don't.
>Now I have to pay some premium because of something that has nothing to do with the value of my company?
The value of your company is decided by the market participants with supply and demand. There's the academic idea that your company can be valued by your profits and losses, but the truth is, those more less to do with with the value of your company than the potentially demand for your shares. In other words being in an ETF may be more relevant to your stock price than the debt on your balance sheet.
>* Why do I care what the share price is or what volume of sales is occuring on the stocks around me?*
You might not care, but the other 40% might. It's tempting to think the other 40% is just amorphous group of shareholders, but it's likely it includes your business partners, or employees who will want to see the stock rise so they can eventually sell. And those partners and employees, upon learning that you aren't maximizing their shares may choose to leave, ultimately damaging your business.
In other words, once you have multiple owners, as long as the green line goes up, everyone is incentivized to continue doing well.
Wouldn't the share holders care more about the profits of the company which are then being given as dividends instead of the price they can trade the share price at?
Isn't the amount of profit the company is making (and how that will change) what matters and not what its share price is?
Most companies don't pay out dividends. Google paid out its first dividend in 25 years and it's only 20 cents a share. Your wealth increases faster from the share price going up vs a dividend and it's not even close. Couple that with the fact that you don't have to sell - you can just borrow against your shares to get liquidity, most are far more incentivized to care about the stock price.
Has the author ever spoken to a resident of Palo Alto? This article is completely bizarre.
Yes if a God himself came down to Earth and gave every Palo Alto homeowner 30 million dollars, sure they would be completely irrational to take it. But if you could guarantee me that over X years, I could double my money, by simply raising a fund to pay 10x over market for every homeowner, then why is this a substack article? Go out and do it.
If you think through the logistics you would find, in our current regulatory framework, that Palo Alto homeowners are acting rationally. If you build a ton of midrise apartments in a suburb, the homeowner has to guess when to exit at the right time to sell their home. For every new apartment that goes up, the marginal cost of their home decreases. In other words that "30 million dollars" of value that is created isn't guaranteed to the marginal home owner. Some will get more, and a lot will get less.
I don't know if OP meant "trust" as in free from security errors or bugs. I often struggle with "how is this a useful tool?". Fixing bugs in someone else's code seems like more a time sink than just writing the code myself.
I assume everyone else must be working on projects/languages that have far more representation in the training set, but for me, especially working in Rust, even trying to write interfaces into C libraries, I would constantly find myself dealing with hallucinated parameters or function calls, incorrectly implemented functions or just broken code.
At the very least if I do it myself, I'll have some intuition about how the code works.
> I assume everyone else must be working on projects/languages that have far more representation in the training set,
I can't speak for anyone else, but I've used LLM's mainly for generating Java code. The generated code hasn't necessarily ever been perfect, but IME it's been "close enough" that even counting having to make some manual changes, it's still faster than writing it myself from scratch.
That said, I'm typically only using it for relatively short snippets of code, where I "know" how to do the operation in question, but want to avoid having to stop and look up fiddly details that might not be cached "top of mind" because I haven't written that code in a while.
I'm sure there are use-cases where LLM's don't save time, but I'm equally sure that there are at least some where they do.
I’m sorry - this is pretty bizarre; especially considering this is a public school like Berkeley.
Wouldn’t the school just expand their housing and own the homes - like many other schools globally? One could even argue your presence is a net negative for students. Had the housing near Berkeley not become a speculative asset, the school would likely own it and rent it at a much cheaper rate.
Also, this would just make the school the landlord. And a landlord that is renting to a "company man" as it were... because if you cause a problem, you can lose both your job (school) and housing at the same time.
Last year the California supreme court ordered them to stop construction of 1100 dormitory rooms because they insufficiently studied in their environmental impact report whether a human makes sounds. So no, in California the universities will not simply build housing.
I went to Purdue, a land-grant University in Indiana. When I was there the school had over 30,000 students and housing for about 1/3 of that. They can most certainly afford the land to build more housing, but the demand is not there[1].
Other schools have to require underclassmen to live on campus to fill their housing -- which is often more expensive than living off campus.
1: Housing was provided based on seniority; older students got first pick, yet the housing was overwhelmingly occupied by freshmen.
This is only an opinion you can hold if you view the US as exclusively a pious organization that can do no wrong. It's completely bizarre that anyone would use the treatment of the Uyghurs as the beacon of immorality for the chinese, while the US currently bombs more muslims with the efficiency that the CCP could ever dream of.
If the China is evil for suppressing all social media for the purpose of spreading propoganda, what do you call what the US is doing with TikTok. Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices? With your standard, couldn't the US also be considered a dystopia?
I view banning of TikTok as dangerous, especially considering the political climate. Is my "freedom of choice" really freedom if my only choices are thouse controlled US hegemonic powers? If it was instead China that ruled world, and Douyin, WeChat and Weibo were used world wide, would it seem that China is the "free" society, and that America in banning TikTok was the autocratic one? You could even imagine them using Trump as "proof" of dysfunction in our system.
> This is only an opinion you can hold if you view the US as exclusively a pious organization that can do no wrong.
No? I think you're engaging in very black-and-white thinking yourself. The spectrum from "utopia" to "dystopia" is very wide. I don't think the US is anywhere near the "utopia" side; but China is much further toward the "dystopia" side.
A country is an effective dystopia, to the degree that, among other things, its citizens are:
• manipulated by the state into not realizing the bad things the state does (both locally and on the world stage);
• manipulated by the state into developing a negatively-biased view of countries that oppose that country in conflicts (usually involving many entirely-false beliefs about those countries), where countries neutral to those conflicts would not support those views;
• and controlled + influenced by the state into not visiting other countries where they could "learn the truth."
China does all three of these things, in the strongest and most active sense. News companies are state-owned or coerced. Citizen journalists are arrested. Individuals sharing things they shouldn't are arrested. People have low social credit scores and can't leave the country by default, and have to earn their way out by presenting as brainwashed. Etc.
The US, meanwhile, does some of these things, but in much weaker senses:
• the US very well probably manipulates its own mainstream media; but it does nothing to prevent access to foreign news sources (where, again, Tiktok is not a foreign news source — you can't learn anything about China on Tiktok. But you can still read CCP-mouthpiece Chinese MSM outlets like https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ just fine.)
• the US suppresses virally-disseminated citizen journalism in the sense of telling social-media services to blacklist keywords in their recommendation algorithms; but they aren't arresting the people who post those things. There is no risk in the US to spreading samizdat — in fact, there is no concept in the US of samizdat, because there is no news or fact that will get you arrested by sharing it. Anyone who wants can join a group chat (even one hosted on a US-based service!) about these topics, and spread info there without a problem. People can put up posters or even run billboards calling for people to join these meetings, and the government won't go around tearing them down. (This is what your much-underappreciated right to "freedom of assembly" gets you!)
• Random US citizens have no trouble visiting other countries — even the countries the US doesn't like. You can buy a plane ticket to Beijing right this moment if you like. A US citizen can also legally visit Russia, despite the global sanctions (though you'll have to fly to a neighbouring country and come in via land.) In neither case will this get you in trouble with the US government. It won't even disrupt an application for security clearance.
(Also, if you're curious, I'm not American. I'm Canadian. Here in Canada, we have things like hate-speech laws. We believe that there is such a right as "freedom of speech", but that it can come into opposition of other rights — such as the right to one's own safety. Or the right to a fair election.)
> Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices?
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Especially when the past performance is in peacetime, and the future results are in wartime.
Which is to say: IMHO the CCP has not yet done any kind of real manipulation through Tiktok. In fact, they've likely encouraged ByteDance to be perfect little boy-scouts and build up as much social trust among Gen Z and Gen Alpha as possible. (Whereas Facebook et al likely were told by the US government to suppress certain sentiments.)
The thing the US government fears — the thing any US citizen should fear — isn't any already ongoing manipulation on Tiktok. The thing you should worry about, is what Tiktok would be able to be used as by the CCP, the moment the US starts shooting at China. Tiktok is the corporate equivalent of a sleeper agent. And anyone who believes that a war between the US and China is inevitable, wants to get that sleeper agent out of the room before they wake up.
>I don't think the US is anywhere near the "utopia" side; but China is much further toward the "dystopia" side.
I think we are going to disagree on this because you are playing geopolitics and I'm looking at this from the angle of individual freedoms. I don't think this is a bad thing - for geopolitical reasons, individuals are barred from owning nuclear weapons. This line is will be different for everyone. Personally I'm glad that there is a foreign owned media platform in the west that at the very least offered a different point of view. I don't believe the chicken littles that somehow China had come up with a magic algorithm that makes all the kids dumb (I think the DoEdu has a _far_ greater impact of the deterioration of schools in America than Xi).
My discomfort with the ban is, on its face, is that first, it's just protectionism, and second, by isolating tiktok it makes it clear that propaganda is fine, as long as were the ones doing the propaganda. I'd love to see better data protection regulation in the space - but it's clear that anything that would hinder Meta and Google's ability to vacuum up data in the rest of the world is "bad". Rules for thee and not for me.
>The thing you should worry about, is what Tiktok would be able to be used as by the CCP, the moment the US starts shooting at China. Tiktok is the corporate equivalent of a sleeper agent.
This can be used an argument for banning all media. If your threat vector is that you fear that $enemy may use $platform to spread propaganda; I posit that banning $platform isn't an affective strategy. Russia already shown they could spread propaganda on US owned media sites. If the populace either isn't educated or, IMO, is primed to eat propaganda, that's a problem of local regulation.
On the other hand, I consider it a very scary thing that the US state department is just going to ban any media platform that cannot be effectively controlled. We might as well just admit that China was right to ban Google/Meta.
> This can be used an argument for banning all media.
No, because to be clear, the worry is that people (mostly: young teens) don't have any conception of Tiktok being a CCP mouthpiece.
Anyone reading China Daily is going to realize it's a Chinese news source. And, as far as the American government is concerned, that is adequate to inform a citizen's decision-making with regards to how they interpret content from that source. People in the US don't tend to read China Daily — and it's not because the US government prevents them from doing so, or even tells them not to.
But there's nothing about Tiktok that looks Chinese. The content isn't Chinese; the UI isn't Chinese; it doesn't run sponsored ads from Chinese companies; even the PR announcements and interviews are usually done by Caucasian, ethnically-American "figurehead" employees. The whole company wants to portray itself as if it was an arms'-length American subsidiary of a foreign company, rather than a plain-old foreign company. There is no level of "media literacy" that you can apply to interacting with Tiktok itself, that would enable you to realize that Tiktok might slipstream CCP propaganda into your feed at some point. To realize that, you have to research the app "out of band" — which is research that the average citizen (but esp. a teenager) has no motivation to do.
To put this another way: the US government would likely be perfectly fine with Douyin being exposed to Western audiences; or with Tiktok and Douyin being merged together, such that logging into Tiktok shows both Tiktok and Douyin content (but presumably doesn't allow American comments to filter back up to Chinese posters, for CCP reasons.) Americans would sign up for this app, and immediately be barraged by the majority-Chinese content already on the platform — and so would quickly realize that this is a Chinese app, with all that that implies.
This is how, for example, WeChat is. Its design and messaging makes it clear that it's the international version of a Chinese app. The default phone country code on signup is +86, even for the release of the app published in the US App Store. When you see signs saying "we accept WeChat Pay", those signs are usually printed once in English and then again in Chinese, even in countries without much of a Chinese population. Etc. Nobody thinks that WeChat is an American company. And so the US government has never considered banning WeChat — and likely never would, even in wartime. They'd trust US citizens to avoid it of their own volition.
> On the other hand, I consider it a very scary thing that the US state department is just going to ban any media platform that cannot be effectively controlled.
Not "that cannot be controlled"; specifically "can and likely will be controlled for malicious purposes, by a state actor who the US is planning to go to war with quite soon, and who has proven to have competent propaganda and cyberwar arms."
The US would never ban a media platform hosted in e.g. the UAE — no matter how much of a propaganda mouthpiece it might be for non-aligned interests — because the US has no plans to go to war with the UAE; and so the US has no reason to predict that the UAE itself would coerce a platform run by one of their own private companies, into doing psy-ops on Americans.
Likewise, the US has no strong desire to ban entirely-uncontrollable-by-anybody media platforms, like certain anonymous p2p chat clients. If there's no central lever that anyone can pull to turn the platform systematically toward being a psy-op machine (with nobody noticing), then it's not the concern of the US DHS to defend people from it.
> We might as well just admit that China was right to ban Google/Meta.
China was right to ban Google/Meta, precisely insofar as China also believes war with the US is imminent. In the event of a war, these US-owned platforms would almost certainly be used by the US to manipulate Chinese citizens, in exactly the same way Tiktok would be used against US citizens. There's no reason not to use this tactic as part of a war, if you have the know-how. Both the US and China have the know-how.
(I hope people the world over wake up one day and realize that they the only "safe" social media platform, is one hosted in — and with legal ownership by a company headquartered in — a neutral country like Switzerland or Austria, that explicitly intends to never make war with anybody, and so has no need for a foreign propaganda arm!)
> individual freedoms
I would note that it won't be illegal to access Tiktok. Tiktok would still exist in every country other than the US. So the ban on Tiktok would be more like an EPA-mandated "hazard zone" fence around a site, than like an FDA scheduling of a controlled substance.
A hazard-zone declaration stops any business in the zone from operating there (illegal to make your employees work in a hazard zone); and also disincentivizes unknowing individuals from entering the zone by mistake. But you can just, like, climb the fence. You're not going to be arrested; a hazard zone is not inherently private property, so you are not trespassing by entering it. You're just (likely) being an idiot, and voiding any insurance claims you'll make. But maybe you have some very specific reason to go there. Maybe you're filming a documentary. You can still do that.
Likewise, it won't be illegal to download a VPN, set it to (any country other than the US), switch to that same region of the App Store, download Tiktok, and sign up / log into it. You're jumping the hazard-zone fence, but there's no crime inherent in that. As an individual, you're free to do so. It's just a fence, to keep out the people who don't have a motivation to be there that exceeds the motivation to ignore some scary warnings and climb a fence.
(Compare and contrast: quarantined subreddits, which are basically the self-policing version of this at a sub-platform level.)
I'm not sure what the alternative is or what you are advocating. Antirez stopped working on Redis 4 years ago. We were lucky someone created Redis "for the love of the game". Now before you there are a couple options
1. Antirez2 pops up and works on Redis because they love working on Redis
2. Someone is incentivized, with money, to work on Redis.
(1) didn't happen, so we must go with (2), and with (2) comes the problem of the actual business model that will be used to sustain (2).
A. Donations/Support contracts
B. Open "Core" aka I'm the only one allowed to sell this as SaaS.
Method (A) has shown to be an abject failure while AWS takes your revenue. Companies have successfully chosen method (B). Either you have a method (C) in mind, or you just aren't being reasonable in asking people to work on OSS for free. You can be mad about the "rugpull", but between the choice of "rugpull" and abandon the project, I don't see how "rugpull" is the worse option
There's plenty of people / groups willing to work on Redis without direct monetary compensation, as the plethora of forks have shown. They don't need to be 'asked'.
The only problem is that the people who bought the copyright now want an ROI.
How did you discover Amapiano? I ask because Tyla has become massively popular in the last year and I'm wondering if the discovery was truly coincidental or undercover marketing?
>I haven't seen anything from TikTok that wouldn't fly on discord or reddit, for example.
You only need to compare TikTok to it's US rival Reels. A majority of the pro-palestine is suppressed on Reels. The loss of TikTok is the destruction of Americans to access content that isn't filtered through US hegemony.
> The loss of TikTok is the destruction of Americans to access content that isn't filtered through US hegemony.
Meta's arcane moderation decisions apply to other platforms than their own? Go to reddit, to youtube, or to twitter, and you can find the most vile, unfiltered opinions on Israel and Palestine known to man.
Americans aren't missing out on any content at all. The only thing that will be destroyed is China's fast lane to American eyes.
Since the "alt-right pipeline" days and subsequent adpocalypse, YouTube has become an incredibly milquetoast platform. Twitter is no different than Meta when it comes to moderation, however instead of being "liberal american media", its just "conservative american media". While Meta censors you for being too far right, Twitter censors you for being too far left.
That said, my point isn't that "I can't watch pro-palestine content". TikTok presents the first major news platform used by Americans that wasn't created for Americans. For all the whining about how $social_media_platform doesn't offer diverse view points, that goes out the window when the owner isn't American.
I don't believe that China is better than America. I personally don't think it's a good thing that the US can just decide ban any content platform that isn't controlled by a US interest. I don't think it's good for the country and I think the security issues are overblown - any realistic security issue you can have with foreign interference, Meta has already committed and any legislation that does not address this just means the legislation doesn't really give a shit about security.
I don't think any Chinese viewpoint is inherently good, but the fact that millions of Americans cannot view content from a diversity of platforms is a problem.
The Israel/Palestine conflict is routinely at the top of massive subs like /r/news and /r/worldnews, two subreddits with diametrically opposed views on the conflict.
So what you're saying is those who control the feed algo have all the power and you want China to control the feed algo for a popular US app. Sounds smart /s
US wants to control the feed algo. TikTok said no. US wants TikTok sold to someone who will.
So far, China doesn’t control the feed algo. They control what content is uploaded. Imagine putting work into a video yet it never seeing the light because it was shadow banned. Now imagine it not allowed to be seen. The former is the western world. The latter is china.
Please, for the love of God, can people please stop making me pry their point from their hands? What about astroturfing makes reddit, a platform where you can build your own walled garden, a platform where you cannot find content that isn't filtered through US hegemony?
Saying the word "cis" is enough to catch a ban on Twitter. Somehow in America, uncensored only means that far right white supremacists can say n**er freely.
>I've watched people end up radicalized by content on TikTok - in ways that twitter, facebook, youtube, et al doesn't seem to do.
QAnon, birthed in 4chan and largely disseminated to Boomers through Facebook isolated people and convinced a large number of people to stage a coup on the US government. I can't tell if you missed the QAnon craze, or you are intentionally being ignorant. I can't think of a single TikTok trend that comes close to the level of radicalization of QAnon.
QAnon was massive on TikTok in 2019/2020, to the point that TikTok took measures to address it, blocking hashtags and banning accounts.
There seems to still be a large conspiratorial rabbit hole on TikTok that still leads to QAnon influencers (using more generalized hashtags and catch all conspiracies).
QAnon related topics were banned in July/Aug 2020 and became community guidelines violations. Facebook did nothing about QAnon until post-January 6th.
Given the demographics of those most heavily influenced by QAnon, it's ridiculous to imply that Tiktok had even a 10th of the influence of Facebook wrt to QAnon.
So what you're saying is TikTok actually took action against the most dangerous conspiracy movement the country has seen in our lifetimes while other American companies left it alone? And I'm supposed to be pissed at TikTok and support them being banned?
Any ETF that a company is a part of increases demand for the stock which will increase the share price.
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