Holy shit. You are, if anything, underselling the article.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.” Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.”
And like all well-run companies, it's not clear who the ceo is.
Right it's more like open defiance of a board decision that the board hasn't yet decided how to respond to. And in the meantime we don't know if the statements about him being back are official or just him going rogue.
But apparently he's booted out the admins who would be able to do anything (from the slack at least) while stating to the public everything has been resolved. This is astonishing and I would argue at least as unhinged as the activity for which the board was removing him.
Right, but choosing to troll the company you own because the board fired you for repeatedly, extremely publicly "Having a normal one", looks a lot like a mental breakdown of some sort.
The whole fucking Valley has been out of their mind on prescription amphetamines for at least a decade. The most visible people like Matt and Elon and a few others have the most visible effects but breakdowns like this are happening hourly with less fanfare.
See if you can think of any other interesting historical events that happened when the whole leadership and rank and file were on prescription amphetamines.
Well, and good old cocaine of course. Never in my life have I been so often jacked up on coke as when I got dragged into a multi-day "retreat" involving executives from multiple SV companies.
I do wonder if they are actually on the same level as was used in WW2 (which is what I'm assuming you are referring to and the routine use (by both sides but especially the Axis side/Germany)).
SV has always had it's weird outliers but they do seem more for want of a better word - manic lately and much less outliers.
There's a long tradition of amphetamine use within the British establishment, too. Most obviously, Anthony Eden's reliance on Drinamyl was responsible in large part for the spectacularly poor decision making which led to the Suez crisis.
People in power absolutely do have an incentive to over-medicate themselves, and I'd be shocked if that didn't extend to SV tech leaders.
I love that "over-medicate" language (really). I will add that to my list of "things that are classy when rich people do them".
I always forget how geeked out these folks probably are and so I appreciate the reminder here.
About two days a month of my time is spent handing out bubbles and points to folks to get them to better manage their habits (in addition to other street medicine stuff). Stimulant culture is very foreign to my own chemistry, but yeah, the idea that most of these folks are just gakd up all the time certainly lines up with my experiences debraiding hobo feet.
I'm similarly not personally familiar with ketamine, but i've been doing first aid at festivals this year and understanding that most of the folks running the stuff in the US are on some spectrum of chemical impairment has been very helpful.
I don't miss drinking, but it was helpful in understanding the mindset at least.
If folks are interested in an ivy league business education but can't afford the tuition and life changes, I suggest that they can learn much of what it's like to be around a bunch of folks with poor impulse control and who are on a bunch of stimulants by volunteering with their local street medic group. The aesthetics are different but the general decision making processes seem very similar to me.
I think the implication here is that these drugs while adding focus also alter other personality traits and can lead to dark places. Stopping amphetamines is regularly painted as a traumatic experience. Here's some examples:
- An old roommate of mine talking about the agressive mental state as side effects of her ADHD meds.
- Regular use in the military, likely providing some buffer for the remorse and trauma of taking life or losing comrades, or precluding moral objection to bombing the civilian target etc.
Well I am talking doctor proscribed doses here not abusive doses. It seems like an incredible stretch to say taking a moderate amount of Adderall is going to make you care less about bombing civilians. I have never heard of people being traumatized because they couldn’t get their adhd medicine renewed.
This whole thing seems like baseless fear-mongering against adhd meds because they are chemically similar to meth. If you can show me some actual strong evidence I would be willing to look at it. All I am seeing so far in this comment chain is some wild false equivalents between natzi’s meth use and prescription adhd meds along with vague claims of harm.
A quick search showed me Adderal reduces narcissitic traits and increases empathy (yay) and roughly the same search but for meth shows lower empathy and increases aggression. I'm sure there are vast differences in the compounds and the dosing size. There's also a gulf between science committed to "adderall is good" and science asking "why meth bad?" Maybe when cartels fund open science we'll have more balance!?!
I'd say this thread is groping for a reason C suite can trend towards being narcissistic or psychotic. I'm sure there's a lot of pressure, and having to make a decision to reduce staff, or build a technology that will make jobs across industries redundant, and the broad effects that has on people's lives could lead to a numbness to those branches of empathy. I've personally known people that moderate their state multiple times a day, stratigizing what street or pharmaceutical drug to take to help them get something done, or to chill out, or be trippy up down or sideways, and they have the bladder issues that go with some of those drug choices to boot. I've known some who take ketamine all day and make code that looks like art and runs like a dream. I don't endorse the method, but I've seen it entwined with logic and beauty!
It's multiple records per user over time. See something like posthog. One interaction with a form can generate 10-15 events. eg enter page, click link with text "settings", change input, clicked input, etc. So active users can generate 15-150 events per session, each ~1kb to 2kb in size.
The reason to store that data is to be able to build analytics and funnels you didn't anticipate and construct them retrospectively. You can of course save massive amounts of storage by building rollups and aggregating, but that prevents you from being able to eg change the funnels and see the funnel in the past.
10M users × 100 events/day × 1KB ≈ 1TB/day. A couple years gets you into PB range.
The other obvious thing is logs. Being able to have a vulnerability then go back in time and see if you were exploited is super valuable. See eg log4shell: if you kept records, you probably could go back and see if you'd been exploited.
That's it. The scammers display ads. Two scams: one is mostly or entirely artificial traffic; a second is eg low quality ad slots disguised as higher quality. For the latter, think ads in videos shown off screen with programmatic interaction to make it appear as if the legit traffic saw and interacted with the ads.
An American who interacts with health insurance can easily do that. Insurers will literally try not to pay just because some percentage of people give up.
I went to the dentist recently. They wanted to do a "deep cleaning". cost: somewhere between $0 (covered) and $5k (fully out of pocket). I asked the obvious: that's one hell of a range. "Depends on how much the insurer will pay." They weren't happy when I demanded to know that number before committing, as it takes them hours on the phone.
Not taking a side, but I remember that too and had looked later.
That said, I deliberately don't trust any google services. Fastmail is great; you all should try it. Google capriciously bans accounts, so keep your email elsewhere.
There was that father who sent some naked pictures of his kid to a nurse for a consultation. Google flagged the account for CSAM and reported him to the authorities. Even after being cleared of all charges, Google refused to reinstate his account, so he lost his digital life.
Tried to use modern technology for the health of his son and was digitally executed for it.
I'm aware. Like I said, you're foolish to trust google. That said, the claim in the reddit post: that the ban spread across the entire gsuite account and also any account that used that device, is far more aggressive.
I talked about that case with a friend who used to work at Google and, whether or not that specific case was true, he did confirm that any CSAM at all in an account can very often make account recovery completely impossible.
Spain charges you tax if you rent the property out. If you don't rent the property out, it imputes a rent and you are charged tax on the imputed rent.
The cadastral value is (finger in the air) 40% of the value of the property; you pay (non-eu resident) 24% of between 1.1% and 2% of the cadastral value.
0.2% is significantly lower than the property tax rate I pay on my house, and taxing vacant property seems like a good idea to try to disincentivize inefficient use of limited urban real estate.
In England there is a policy for "no empty house".
But tell me what happens in England if someone occupies a house. What I know is that they are kicked out and quickly.
In Spain? Just stop the electricity or water for them or look at all the laws that make them "vulnerable" and you are going to pay for them until they kick them out. Things got so bad that now people when they rent they make an insurance against this kind of intrusion. Before this was not a problem.
> seems low for the provision of roads, schools, firefighters
well, not so low if you think that for roads they get 24 billion + 16 billion from highways + car taxes (car registration and others) and the maintenance of roads is 7 billion per year and they are undermaintained.
You forgot also all the money that goes to subsidizing votes and unnecessary positions. In Spain, depending on who you ask, the "comunidades autónomas" expenses are valued between 30 billion and 90 billion per year and I can tell you a lot of it is totally unnecessary. Or the central government. One or the other. There is duplication, which equals to legal corruption. Most countries have some of this but I think the case of Spain is relatively worrying.
You can ask about the firefighters, army, police, etc. to people from Ceuta or people from Valencia (where I am from). The 5th day after the disaster a french firefighter arrived to help and he was shocked to see that no spanish firefighters had arrived yet.
There is a reason why I do not like taxes, but there is even a more reasonable reason about me not wanting to pay them in Spain when I see how they are spent. Bc I still have to pay taxes somewhere anyway...
Property tax is not only taxation model. In some systems taxes are not really earmarked ton specific purposes instead they go to general budget and are then redistributed. So you can have lower property tax but otherwise higher other taxes and still pay for the stuff.
A friend owns pizza restaurants. They leapt at the opportunity during covid to shut their bathrooms to the public, and have continued to (illegally) keep the bathrooms closed as much as possible.
People made horrific messes in them. Employees and/or owners had to clean them. They don't wish to do so. Public messes; private employees and/or owners being made to clean them is pretty much the story.
> When TechCrunch asked Mullenweg if his comments about being back as CEO were legitimate, he promised a blog post was coming. When it arrived, however, it was about him buying a houseboat. When we asked if his comments about being back were also him trolling, he replied, “I’m not a troll I’m a pirate, obviously.” Mullenweg never provided any official comment about his return, but noted on X that this was likely the fifth time he’s faced a “coup.”
And like all well-run companies, it's not clear who the ceo is.
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