The issue is moreso that they exclusively control their brand, and by letting someone else - who doesn't work for them and need not listen to them - control part of that, they are indirectly loosening control of their brand and narrative. They probably do not want the additional headache of buying this product, onboarding it, managing it, etc. The easiest but unfortunate solution here, to limit risk and liability, is to shut it down.
I think that, on the contrary, government contracts will increase. There will be increased privatization of government services. These services cannot cease, but they will cease to be performed by the government. I imagine government contractors like Palantir will actually do quite well. A smaller government is good for business due to privatization, but perhaps more often bad for people subject to those businesses with less government oversight.
Can we nevertheless extract causality from correlation?
I would argue that, theoretically, we cannot. Practically speaking, however, we frequently settle for “very, very convincing correlations” as indicative of causation. A correlation may be persuasively described as causation if three conditions are met:
Completeness: The association itself (R²) is 100%. When we observe X, we always observe Y.
No bias: The association between X and Y is not affected by a third, omitted variable, Z.
I feel like you have this backwards. In the assignment Y:=2X, each unit of Y is caused by half a unit of X. In the game where we flip a coin at fair odds, if you have increased your wealth by 8× in 3 tosses, that was caused by you getting heads every toss. Theoretically establishing causality is trivial.
The problem comes when we try to do so practically, because reality is full of surprising detail.
> No bias: The association between X and Y is not affected by a third, omitted variable, Z.
This is, practically speaking, the difficult condition. I'm not so convinced the others are necessary (practically speaking, anyway) but you should read Pearl if you're into this!
You probably also need at least:
- Y does not appear when X does not
- We need an overwhelming sample size containing examples of both X and not X
- The experiment and data collection and trivially repeatable (so that we don't need to rely on trust)
- The experiment, data collection and analysis must be easy to understand and sensible in every way without leaving room for error
And as another commenter already pointed out: You can't really eradicate the existence of an unknown Z
In general you assume DAGs, i.e. non-cyclical causality. Cyclical relations must be resolved through distinct temporal steps, i.e. u_t0 causes v_t1 and v_t1 causes u_t2. When your measurement precision only captures simultaneous effects of both u on v and v on u you have a problem.
I find this nicely captures the difference between "rationality" and "reasonableness". A system can be rational but rest on unreasonable assumptions; a system may not be entirely rational but at least can have reasonable assumptions.
Do this metaphors really help anyone? To me it only obfuscates the situation. It doesn't give me any clarity. Honestly "technical debt" doesn't mean much to me and I've seen the words mostly being used as a shielding mechanism by developers who want to avoid discussing difficult topics.
> Do this metaphors really help anyone? To me it only obfuscates the situation. It doesn't give me any clarity.
To be fair, leaving aside how fitting or unfitting it is, the metaphor is too kind to cause any reaction at all.
If you say "we can take a bit of technical debt to get more work done today, we can always pay it off later", people would nod and move on. The reaction you get would be, at most, on the same level as someone watching TV news about a tragedy on a different continent ("Oh no. Anyway...").
But if you say "we can cook today's meals without washing any pots/pans/spatulas/etc and save time and money that way, we can just keep doing it every day until the first roaches appear", even though the message probably gets across way more clearly, you'd get a warning to watch your language and keep it appropriate, and how dare you compare the company to such a nasty restaurant.
"Our technical debt is starting to become too much" doesn't ring the same as "there's too many roaches and they are actually starting to get in the way of our cooking".
You're right, "technical debt" doesn't raise any sense of urgency. What people actually mean by technical debt is that there is a trade-off to be made: short-term gains at the expense of long-term costs. Your kitchen metaphor works beter because it conveys that message. But still metaphors usually end up in discussions about the metaphor and not the actual topic itself. It doesn't propel the discussion forward. I'd much rather prefer to discuss specifics instead of metaphors.
It can go wrong too, though. Like if the other party focuses too much on "human uses dirty pan" and interprets it as "dev uses bad IDE" because both pan and IDE are tools humans use, missing the point.
The metaphor was kinda improvised so I'm sure it has other bad parts. The way I thought about it was with the kitchen being the service or codebase, and the utensils being utils/functions/modules/etc. Nothing more. So I bet there's more ways this metaphor can break.
Seems like a similar thought to "Programming as Theory Building"[1].
The paper is well worth reading, but the TL;DR if you don't wanna: the "theory" of a program (how does it fit together? What extensions/modifications would work well, how should it evolve to handle new cases, etc.) is contained only in the mind of the coder; documentation, spoken explanations, etc. are attempts at describing that theory, but they are necessarily a lossy encoding of it. Certainly attrishing everyone who knows something about a codebase would be extremely foolish under Naur's argument.
Debt, I guess to me, is code deviating from a known better theory for it to follow.
The "attrishing" in your comment made me go looking, and Wiktionary [0] says the verb form "attrit(e)" exists and is likely a quite old backformation that has fallen out of common use.
I wouldn't quite say attrite has fallen out of common use, though it is by its nature rarely encountered. I certainly use it, and it's fairly common in certain fields (e.g. discussions of language attrition, ironically).
Most of the Trump-sphere's donations and organization came from Andressen (the A in A16Z), David Sacks (especially during his fundraiser last year that was a who's who of YC and VCs), and Thiel.
They are all in support of Lina Khan's position on anti-trust, as it aligns closely with the vision of LTSE (YC S17) plus their grudge/annoyance at the fact that late stage acquisitions don't benefit early stage investors as much as an IPO or SPAC, plus their annoyance at how early stage investors can't take advantage of the IPO "Pop".
This has been a major fissure in the tech industry for almost a decade at this point.
To be fair, Horowitz (the Z in A16Z) donated to Harris's campaign to lobby for the same thing as well.
One of the biggest donor yes, but not enough to move the needle.
Also, the presidency is not enough to move the needle - you need down ballot support from both houses of Congress as well, which is a relationship Musk did not build unlike other donors.
One donor, thanked at length by name in the president's acceptance speech, and immediately appointed over a brand new office about "efficiency" after yelling incessantly about deleting entire government departments.
Elon has a huge amount of influence over khan's future and the ftc's ability to continue in its recent push to actually protect the American consumers.
DOGE is a presidential task force. They are impotent like any other task force.
If you want something to worry about with the new administration, worry about the shitshow that Senate confirmation will be for much of 2025 as Senate Leadership and the Executive will clash
> the ftc's ability
The Khan style vision of antitrust (which I strongly oppose as well btw) will continue under Trump as it did under Biden.
It has bipartisan support because of bipartisan donor relations.
Oren Cass, Lina Khan, Matt Stoller, and Rohit Chopra are all cut from the same cloth.
> Can they just get people on the Acting title and not worry about senate confirmation?
No.
The people who get "Acting" titles only have a lifespan of a couple months AND they need to be existing members of the bureaucracy who are 1 level below the senate appointed role.
The US is not a parliamentary system like India, UK, Canada, or Australia where the executive has power over cabinet nomination.
The US's system was explicitly built so that the president is hemmed in this manner.
”To move the needle” usually means to have a measurable/noticeable effect. It feels a bit weird to say that the presidency of the United States doesn’t have any effect on who the chair of the FTC is
> late stage acquisitions don't benefit early stage investors as much as an IPO or SPAC
I've heard this repeated multiple times, but I wonder how the FTC's policies can influence this?
> how early stage investors can't take advantage of the IPO "Pop".
Could you explain this? By IPO pop do you mean the difference between what the bank underwrites and what the initial . By early vs late stage investors do you mean seed vs series G, or pre-IPO vs post-IPO? I've thought that seed vs series G investors get the same class of stock? Or is there some restriction encoded into the paperwork associated with the investment?
By de-incentivizing M&A, and checking larger competitors to VC darlings by hanging the Damcoles sword of antitrust.
A decade ago Marc Andressen was lobbying Obama to work on this [0][1]
In Andressen's and much of his peer's eyes, most mid-late stage startups should be IPOing sooner than they actually are. And to a certain extent he isn't wrong.
Personally, I don't buy Andressen's argument - there is a reason we added added checks and balances in the IPO process.
> Could you explain this
To go public (just like any other fundraising stage), early stage ownership stakes tend to be diluted in order to attract later investors.
IPOs are a fundraising technique like any other, but the benefits tends to bias towards funds that target late stage or roadshow investors at the expense of early investors.
In the eyes of Andressen and his peers the IPO process needs to be simplified in order to make it easier for mid-stage startups to go public AND the incentive structures need to be changed so early stage investors (read VCs like A16Z) get outsized benefit.
For most funds, this really doesn't matter, but for the mega funds like A16Z, YC, Founders Fund, etc this is a make-or-break policy as most of their portfolio are mid-late stage startups that have been pushing off IPOs because they are too small for the current market, and taking acquisitions at what a number of early stage investors view as a suboptimal price - doesn't matter to the founder because they have cash, but it does to large early stage investors.
A direct listing or SPAC would be the ideal "IPO" method envisioned, but that has been cracked down on as well (and rightfully so tbh)
Do you have any references for Thiel supporting Lina Khan's position on antitrust? Thiel does not appear to love Google and sees them as somewhat of a formidable opposing force, and that sometimes shows, so I can see he would enjoy his popcorn when Google is attacked by FTC, but it does not appear he would be aligned with Khan in principle.
She will be gone for symbolism if nothing else. Some of the policies attacking big tech (read: Google) may remain, but hardline acquisition ban will get relaxed for sure.
Maybe we should also cling to hope because JD said some nice things about her too but let's be real: the billionaires want her gone. Elon has already tweeted that she will be fired. There's no way she will be able to stay on.
You really should check your facts on that first statement my friend. Frankly you are dead wrong and should not be spreading this kind of false info, it’s dangerous to minors. Only 24 states have age of consent below 18, and a number of those have restrictions on age gaps between participants. And of those 24 states that don’t come close to covering “the majority” of the population of the United States.
As I said this is close to a majority of states by count, but far from a majority by population. Read better. I guess you don’t think we should be mindful of false information about sex with minors being written as fact on the Internet and should go uncorrected. Check! Me, I don’t feel that way, I’ll correct it.
Which states "As of April 2021, of the total fifty U.S. states, approximately thirty have an age of consent of 16 (with this being the most common age of consent in the country), a handful set the age of consent at 17, and in about eleven states the age is 18."
Which clearly seems like a majority to me.
I think you're confusing "Unrestricted" with "Restricted by Authority." You'll note that the "Restricted by Authority" age is often younger than the "Unrestricted" age. Which accounts for our different tallies. [1]
