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It's always funny when HN users comment that there are no more opportunities for startups and it's too hard to compete against large, wealthy corporations. The reality is that most of them are so badly managed that competing against them is easy if you're actually competent.

> The reality is that most of them are so badly managed that competing against them is easy if you're actually competent.

The world is a graveyard littered with startups that thought this way. One of the consequences of wealth concentration and monopolies is that it is insufficient to be better than your competitors because your customers are also incompetent. To find product-market fit you not only have to be better, you have to be noticed by someone that cares that you're better and upon reflection confirms you solve a valuable problem.

By way of analogy, it's not enough to realize that MouseCorp makes shitty mousetraps and the local village spends $1M/yr on them. You can make a better mousetrap thinking its worth $1M/yr, or do the deeper look and realize the local village doesn't have a mouse problem but rather has a problem with too many feral cats, and has no interest in buying better mousetraps and once their attention is gained simply stops buying mousetraps altogether. Both parties lacked competence, but that didn't mean there was a market.


> The world is a graveyard littered with startups that thought this way. One of the consequences of wealth concentration and monopolies is that it is insufficient to be better than your competitors because your customers are also incompetent.

It's less that and more that governments and bureaucrats are corrupted to create barriers tot the market and to turn a blind eye to anti competitive behavior and outright illegal practices. For example huge banking corporations have been caught laundering money for drug cartels and got away with fines -- if your fintech startup tried that on, you would never see the outside of a prison cell.


> For example huge banking corporations have been caught laundering money for drug cartels and got away with fines -- if your fintech startup tried that on, you would never see the outside of a prison cell.

German bank N26 was embroiled in money laundering, scams and other issues stemming from bad KYC for years, and all they got was a slap on the wrist from regulators.


Right, so don't waste time trying to sell low-margin products to local governments. As the saying goes: it's like trying to shear a pig, too much squealing and not enough wool.

From a legal perspective, journal article authors can implement this by following the official HHS guidance for de-identification. This applies to any use of protected health information (PHI), not just case reports.

https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/special-topics/d...

The IRB for a particular organization can impose additional restrictions.


We don't have a surplus of carriers. We have a shortage, at least relative to their current tasking. They're overstretched and behind on maintenance. This is unsustainable so the civilian leadership will have to either cut back on missions or build more.

There’s always an argument for more equipment, but you need to start building them long before they enter service and need to set budgets long before any specific crisis.

Funding for Nimitz was authorized in 1967 they started construction the next year and it was in service in 2025. The US has a very large and very expensive carrier fleet today because people decided it was worth having X boats a long time ago and they calculated X under the assumption that a significant number would be spending time docked / on the other side of the planet from where the conflict is.

Obviously, part of that equation was based around warfare and the likelihood of losing some / extending deployments etc, but what we want today has no barring on what we actually built as all those decisions happened a long time ago.

TLDR; Having more than strictly needed for normal operations = having a surplus when something abnormal occurs.


There is literally no surplus. There hasn't been a surplus for 15+ years when funding priorities shifted to sustain the GWOT. There haven't been enough carriers to meet requirements for the combatant commands during normal operations, let alone when something abnormal occurs. So they try to make do with other platforms but the cracks are really showing.

Your “requirements” aren’t actual requirements here.

That is a good reason to focus what you have on Iran since Iran is causing a lot of that demand for power projection. If you fix it at its source there will be much less demand for them in the future.

In pretty much any software startup acquisition by a much larger company, even if they do technical due diligence up front they have to assume that all the code will need to be rewritten within a couple years. It's good to keep a few key technical resources around during the transition period but otherwise a high attrition level is acceptable.

What sort of evidence are you looking for? The current general system of free-market capitalism and multiparty democracy has created an unprecedented era of prosperity for those of us lucky enough to live in (relatively) civilized countries. There are lots of problems that we need to fix but on average by almost any objective metric the situation is better than ever.

China's system seems to be fairly rapidly delivering prosperity for their citizens too (from lots of accounts?). Neither free market nor democracy.

Insane surveillance and indoctrination aside...but still prosperity?


The part of China's system that's delivering those gains is the capitalist part, though. It's not the SOEs and government that are creating good jobs.

The thing about people in comfort is that they literally do not understand the concept of one too many on a fundamental level. One dollar is not enough. Similar, one person that goes without, that’s not enough either. You need millions to go without before the wrinkles even show up on some people’s faces.

“One too many” ills shatters the benchmark of “life is good”. Not good enough (that much … you may actually understand).

We have been deficient, through and through.


> free-market capitalism and multiparty democracy has created an unprecedented era of prosperity

can you prove that it's free-market capitalism and multiparty democracy? because i see this opinion espoused a lot online.


Can you prove it's not? At this point if anyone wants to propose an alternative then the burden of proof is on them. So far everything else that we've tried has failed disastrously.

How could everything else have failed?

You entrench yourself and don't want to move when you need to


Fortunately we don't need to move.

I'm not making a judgement either way. You're saying that it's capitalism and multiparty democracy(i would question whether there's a difference between both the parties in the US, does it even count as multiparty?). China's the second largest economy in the world and there's no multi party democracy there.

You've got that backwards. Liquidation preferences typically go to early stage investors who receive special share classes. Those arrangements are fully disclosed to later stage investors. They knew what they were getting into and it's their own fault for making a sucker bet.

Not true (newer investors generally get seniority), but more importantly this is about common shareholders (generally employees and even founders) who never have the opportunity to get liq pref.

More importantly, employees with options are generally not sophisticated enough to realise liquidation preferences may exist and may dramatically devalue the common stock options they have, and even if they are sophisticated enough, they will often have no means to find out what liquidation preferences exist. (They theoretically have information rights that probably entitle them to that info, but companies simply find spurious excuses to refuse books and records requests, knowing no options holder is going to drop six figures on a lawsuit to exercise those information rights.)

New funding round investors generally get seniority over old

But new money may allow buyouts of existing at that time so early team or investors can cash out a bit early

And common doesn't cash out till IPO or private market equivalent, or yes, gets screwed


> About 200,000 people put money into the scheme, which offered a stake in the company, discounts and perks.

Hopefully they took advantage of the discounted beer.


I agree. In the long term we need to reduce fossil fuel usage but in the short term, restricting pipeline construction means that more petroleum products are transported by rail cars which is a lot dirtier and more dangerous. We have to take a pragmatic harm minimization approach rather than being idealistic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Union_Pacific_oil_train_f...


You're probably right, but when I look around the Front Range at the landscape blighted by drought, the mountains naked of snow, the skyline hazed by smog and the smoke from forest fires, I feel like this is where pragmatism has gotten us.

Jury trials for defamation have been a thing since forever and haven't caused a catastrophe yet. Jury trials occasionally get things wrong as a matter of law, which is why we have an appeals process.

Meanwhile in Mexico the cartels are building their own private cell phone networks.

https://www.npr.org/2011/12/09/143442365/mexico-busts-drug-c...


Setting up a new Samsung device is just as easy. Everything transfers over in a few minutes.

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