It's a fine idea if good candidates for conversion can be found, but shouldn't they fix up their dilapidated public transit system before inviting more density into their urban core?
Just today, one of their rail cars caught fire at an elevated station, and their broken fire suppression system did nothing but flood the ground floor when the firefighters tried to use it.
Wu's push for more housing density along the city's functioning arteries feels more realistic. Maybe they're realizing that plan could also suck a lot of property taxes out of the urban center.
I absolutely agree we need to discuss the topic of their dilapidated public transit system. But shouldn't we first solve the problem of how to deal with Richard Stallman's oversized influence on the FSF?
Until we have a truly well-funded FSF filled with both successful projects and sustainable outreach programs that can reach a more diverse set of participants, I'm afraid that the topic of software freedom will continue to be relegated to the sidelines as some kind of fringe religious zeal.
Until we do that, we'd just be replacing one unethically-proprietary fire suppression system with another unethically-proprietary fire suppression system. And riders will just be commuting back and forth between abodes wired with automation systems which do not respect the wishes of the users within them.
I believe that part of the issue is the MBTA is a state level organization not city level. Wu doesn't have the power to fix the T. I agree that adding more load to an already crumbling system doesn't seem like a great idea but empty office buildings create their own problems by leaving "Dead" blocks or areas which can invite crime and decay.
There's a new general manager, Phillip Eng, who's actually a transit enthusiast rather than some random bureaucrat... if he can't fix the issues plaguing the MBTA no general manager can. This is a long problem though, they're trying to fix decades of unaddressed maintenance issues.
Feels more like a sensible compromise between a bailout for commercial real estate holders and helping the city to continue growing. In theory at least.
The T definitely needs some help. But if you're living downtown, it's a very walkable city fwiw.
If you're going to hold solving the housing crisis hostage to having proper public transit infrastructure, we're never going to solve the housing crisis.
Yeah. I realize there are tax breaks in her bill but in theory getting more people living in these dense areas will raise ridership on the subway a lot and raise taxes as a whole - which would pay for things like repairs which the OP complains about.
No amount of ridership or city tax revenue would make the MBTA solvent. It's a sinking ship that is beyond rescue without massive federal intervention. Nobody in MA wants to say that though, because it's an admission of failure.
why is MBTA's solvency relevant to anything? Nobody expects the DOT, or any of the roads and highways they build and maintain to be solvent, or for the police department, or the firefighters to be a profit center for the city.
But as soon as we start talking about public transit, everyone's counting coppers and wringing their hands about the system's solvency.
Suppose that I have an idea for a widget which market research indicates could sell for $20/, but probably not $50/.
I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house.
Or I can make it in volume for less than $10/, but I need a large minimum order, space, equipment, logistics. Now we're looking at 7-8 figures.
If you aren't independently wealthy, neither option is really feasible, and the former option will almost certainly end in tears if you try to stretch and bootstrap with your own money.
> I can hit the $50/ target with small contract runs, which would cost about as much as a down payment on a house.
I wasn't thinking of this from the perspective of a hardware startup but a software startup which doesn't require either of those things. I should qualify my original post with that. You don't need to be independently wealthy to launch a software business on your own provided you have the ability to build it yourself.
Kind reminder that starting a software business still requires you to, you know, live and stuff :)
Even if you can build it all by yourself, for most people runway is limited by savings. And that means that with a few exceptions, it's hard to stretch beyond a couple of months (or maybe one-two years) before you need to think about shutting down.
If you can get to profit before that, awesome, your business might be a good idea. (You'll still have depleted a good chunk of your savings, and it's not like the world comes with profit guarantees)
Investment buys runway, opex, and scale. Some businesses need that, some don't. Software work reduces the opex load (for many attempts), but scale and runway might still be necessary.
You can often found it as you go from a primary job and or a spouse's job. I have a friend who drops about 100K into his startup a year hoping for a big exit. Pretty much all startups or small businesses involve risk. Your other putting in time or money or both. The Only Exception is if you find deep pocket feces that are willing to pay you a good salary to work on your own project, which is especially rare
Sure, but that's still usually limited runway compared to getting funding. Yes, there are cases of spouses supporting a decade of work to get something off the ground. Yes, some people make enough to afford dumping it all into a startup (and a good chunk into a lawyer making sure they don't violate constraints from the existing job). But all these are several std.devs outside the normal "start a business" crowd.
Either way, the risk you can take without VC is limited by your wealth. Large bets without VC require independent wealth. We can quibble about what amount constitutes "independent wealth", but the fact doesn't change - VC allows you to dream bigger. (And I say that as a fierce critic of VC culture, but that is the upside of it)
That depends on what you mean by "having it to drop" . That's less than a median income in San Francisco. If you put 100% of your income into a startup, are you out of touch or do you just have skin in the game?
I don't think it's particularly in touch to dismiss someone who works 50 hours a week to make an income and then Works another 50 hours a week on a startup that spends that income
> That's less than a median income in San Francisco. If you put 100% of your income into a startup, are you out of touch or do you just have skin in the game?
If your trust fund pays for rent and living expenses in San Francisco, and you don't even think of it as abnormal that your ENTIRE INCOME can be allocated to business bets, then yes -- you are indeed wildly out of touch.
If you put 100% of income—remaining after paying life costs (how much is that? I hope you do not rent!)—into work, it means you: do not travel, do not go to any events that cost money, do not dine out much, do not have any other hobbies that cost money (sports? music? photography? LEGO? DIY?), do not date, do not need to support a family, do not have emergencies for which you pay out of pocket, etc.
Are there people who just do not need any of those things? Maybe, but I would question it. (Too often what you think you need could be different from what you actually need.) Personally, even as someone who enjoys software engineering and would do it as a hobby, I think I would be quite miserable.
Here is what I think is reasonable: Someone would have an idea that is attractive for YC et al., raise money, and be able to comfortably afford all those things while working on a company. That is, I think, the promise of the leading quote in TFA. Unfortunately, the quote is phrased as if they are out there to help people start companies, while in reality it is about starting businesses with specific potential for explosive growth that are attractive to VC.
I agree that there is a market for both, your do or die founder and your comfort focused founder with a good idea. the markets are just different and unequal.
They are out there to help people start companies, just not all people and ideas in equal measure.
> Are there people who just do not need any of those things?
Yes. That would have described me very well at one point in my life. Coincidentally, it was at the time I was running my first (unsuccessful) business.
Did you at least still participated in social media and such, or it was literally just work?
If it was just work, do you now think it was a good idea to ignore everything in life except work?
I.e., you thought you didn’t need those things and you actually didn’t need those things, vs. you needed them but you thought you didn’t and it caught up with you eventually.
Video Games industry survivor here, chuckling at the low number ;)
Yes, people do. It carries potentially huge personal costs, but if people are passionate enough, they absolutely will risk that. (Mind, I'm not saying this is a good idea, at all, but merely that it happens)
At least in the cases I did, it was usually a 9 month gruelling sprint at the end of a ~2.5-3.5 year project. Followed by people lollygagging about for ~3 months before they could do any reasonable work again. We sure got a lot of Age of Empires in during that time, though ;)
Which is maybe acceptable if it is your main job, but a bigger problem if you burn out from a side project and then can’t do much on your day job for some mysterious (to management) reason…
I agree it's not very sustainable, at least for your typical person in Western Society, but it's not unheard of either.
I've worked hundred hour weeks and also supervised crews of Hispanic Americans that will work 100 hour weeks.
On the other end of the spectrum, I've known m&a lawyers that do the same to close deals at the end of the fiscal year.
100 hour week is roughly 14 hour days with no weekend break. 6:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. is pretty common for agricultural work during harvest season for big cash crops. You start while it's dark and you end while it's dark.
It is not sustained/sustainable. I worked 100 hour weeks too, but then it took like a month to recover and during that time I could not properly work even 50 hours on my main job.
Agriculture is historically seasonal: you work a lot during some times, but the rest of the time you do completely nothing on the agriculture front. Not a luxury at most modern workplaces.
I do not know what you mean. What I described with regards to agriculture is how it worked historically with communities growing stuff for themselves or to sell at a local market. I encountered leftovers of that personally growing up. People could work hard in planting/harvest times during summer and in winter do mostly nothing except maintenance and such. I am not talking about commercial industries which may well be working people to the bone unsustainably (and illegally, if it was a developed country) with 12+ hour shifts. Barely a worthy example.
It's not all rare for certain workers to to spend 14+ hour days, 7 days a week, for multiple weeks straight, without any breaks. And they do this every year, year after year. And they can still live to their 80s.
The claim that a long period of rest is always necessary in-between 100 hour work weeks is simply not true.
I've met at least 1 person capable of doing 'creative innovative mental work' on a similar basis. Making categorical claims over billions of adults is simply incorrect.
If you're really sure, you do that first run and lose money, then show a bank/investor the explosive popularity and get money for manufacturing at scale. Relatively speaking it's close to the easiest type of funding you can get.
Abrahamic religions in general - Jesus was also not a fan.
>Jesus went into the temple courtyard and threw out everyone who was buying and selling there. He overturned the moneychangers’ tables and the chairs of those who sold pigeons. He told them, “Scripture says, ‘My house will be called a house of prayer,’ but you’re turning it into a gathering place for thieves!”
- Matthew 21:12-13
>If you lend money to my people—to any poor person among you—never act like a moneylender. Charge no interest.
- Exodus 22:25
KJV used the word "usurer", but it's the same idea.
"Digital electronics" communicate using discrete values, 1s and 0s.
"Analog electronics" communicate using voltage/current/temperature/etc levels.
One of the simplest examples is a voltage divider: if you put two resistors across a DC voltage source, like this:
V+-[R1]-¢-[R2]-GND
The voltage at the ¢ point will be:
V+ * (R2 / (R1 + R2))
There are infinite possible values for that voltage, depending on the voltage source and the two resistors. It cannot necessarily be expressed exactly in a digital circuit, and it will fluctuate over time as the environment changes in temperature, humidity, EM noise, and so on.
I usually recommend The Art of Electronics as a well-written, beginner-friendly textbook which covers the basic concepts.
They may have access to backdoors in the baseband firmwares.
The baseband is an opaque binary blob that operates outside of the phone's main OS, and its contents are usually considered a trade secret by the manufacturer since it handles low-level hardware interactions with the main radios/etc.
Personally, I would be surprised if those systems weren't compromised by agreement. It's already common to see criminals and dissidents get busted because they think that turning a phone off stops it from reporting location data.
> It's already common to see criminals and dissidents get busted because they think that turning a phone off stops it from reporting location data.
That’s an incredible claim to make with no source. It seems unreasonable to suspect Apple and google would allow some chips they don’t access to battery even when powered off.
Well if you can make claims without a source and say the tech is secret..you can claim literally anything? I have a startup that builds a machine that can complete medical tests from a single drop of blood. The tech is a secret though.
Do the cameras/microphones need to be controlled by the baseband? Naively they seem like they should be at a slightly higher level than the main radios, and should be controlled exclusively by the OS. I'm guessing from your comment there's some reason that's not the case though?
In addition to the basebandy RF stuff that you expect the baseband to do, it also does real-time voice modulation and call quality things like echo and noise cancellation… things that high level OS would do too slowly.
In 2023 I suspect this is less and less necessary- apple silicon is very fast and a lot of voice comms goes through an app (FaceTime?) anyway but … I’m sure those capabilities are still in the baseband processor …
There is this [0] thread from a few years ago. According to the linked article, "unless an IOMMU is used, the baseband has full access to main memory, and can compromise it arbitrarily." No idea how true this statement is.
Does it? The OS must be able to send audio to the phone modem (bluetooth, homepod, etc), so it seems reasonable to me that it wouldn't have direct access to the microphone and that would go via OS also.
Just today, one of their rail cars caught fire at an elevated station, and their broken fire suppression system did nothing but flood the ground floor when the firefighters tried to use it.
Wu's push for more housing density along the city's functioning arteries feels more realistic. Maybe they're realizing that plan could also suck a lot of property taxes out of the urban center.