William DeRaad

@lifeof_jer The framing is a bit questionable, might want to try a blameless postmortem to get to the root cause before deflecting to 3rd party providers… 5 whys might help, here’s the first to get you started- Why is it possible to drop our production DB from an engineers local env?

@ElliottEHolland The desktop app? No way their cloud product is running 5 9s

I flew to Dallas to look at a $600K SDE security business. Hadn't even made it up the steps of the Starbucks where we were meeting and the seller hits me with: "Man, you won't believe this. Our QuickBooks has been down all morning." At the time, my day job was at a software company. I know how uptime works. QuickBooks promises 99.999% uptime. If it had actually been down all morning, it would've been on CNN. I knew immediately he was lying. But I didn't leave. I wanted to see how far he'd take it. It was worse than I thought. We go to his office. QuickBooks is "still down." He's showing me paper records, spreadsheets, nothing auditable. The office manager was in on it. I was going to fly home that night. But the seller convinced me to stay for employee meetings the next day. "They're expecting you, it'll disrupt the business if you cancel." So I sat through 4 hours of meetings the next morning. Every single employee had been coached to act like they worked at a profitable company. The business was losing money. They all knew it. The seller didn't just lie. He recruited his entire staff to lie with him. I share this because too many people want to give sellers the benefit of the doubt. "Messy financials." "Honest mistakes." "They didn't know." This guy knew. And he got everyone around him to help cover it up. This is not a game, folks.

@BillDA Is that a bad outcome over the long term? I don’t necessarily agree with the policy, but the alternative implies that it’s better we keep encouraging the bottom 50% (typically less financially savvy) to keep subsidizing reward benefits for the top 50%.

That is the sound of the bottom 50% of borrowers having their credit cards involuntarily closed because they’re not worth the credit risk at 10% Dumb dumb dumb

@BitcoinNewsCom Green = Treasuries. Dry powder to hold the STRC peg, good politics for an eventual U.S. stake.

What do you think a 🟢 Green dot would signify?

@hardingwealth Based on the profile it’s likely not a basket weaving master so keep the debt, put the majority of the cash in hard assets/S&P to outgrow the debt. HELOC is the emergency fund which also is a forcing function to earn more if you actually need to tap it. Don’t hold melting ice.

Just wrapped a conversation with a random guy who's feeling paralyzed by a financial decision he needs to make. 46. Married. 3 kids. Household income about $180k. No debt other than mortgage and student loans. The reason for our chat? He doesn't know what to do about his $60k in student loans from a masters program he's about to finish. Specifically, he wants to know if he should pay them off in full with cash on hand (he has $95k total), leaving his cash position/emergency fund fairly low. To help him with this, I started by asking some questions about how much cash is reasonable as an emergency fund. Questions like, "Do you expect to need a new car, A/C unit, roof, etc. anytime soon?" Then I asked about their monthly budget under his current income (he expects a raise upon completing his masters, but we're not factoring that in)... They're able to save a bit right now, but not a ton. Lastly, I asked if he and his wife were participating in their workplace retirement plans. They were -- 13% contribution rate for her, 11% for him. Both contributing well over the company match. Fitting this all together, here's what I told him: "Thanks for the details, Random Guy In This Coffee Shop. You clearly need to make sure the $60k debt is taken care of quickly, but I realize how hard it can be to see your $95k emergency fund go down to $35k. This is what I'd do if I were in your shoes. Step 1: Dial back your retirement account contributions to what the company will match. We want your take home paychecks to be bigger while you're handling this but we still want the free money provided by a match. Step 2: Throw some chunk of your current savings at the debt right now. At least $30k but probably $45k. This will bring your emergency fun down to $50k, which is likely going to be fine. Emergency funds are just guesses anyways. You'd probably be fine paying off the entire thing, but I just want you to know your debt payoff strategy is not a choice between paying $0 or $60k today. It's a spectrum. Step 3: Use your higher paychecks to escalate the remaining debt payoff and to replenish your emergency fund. Step 4: Once the emergency fund is replenished dial back up your investment account contributions. When I meet someone in this kind of position I know they're going to end up being fine. Notably, no car loans, no credit cards, and trying to make smart decisions.

@ts_hodl Folks are getting margin called

What's going on with STRC?

@Polymarket Max disconnected/terminally online take… rounding error on how many ppl in reality know what polymarket is, even less build their reality based on it. Maybe in the future but we ain’t there yet.

Hi Bill, This New York mayoral race drew the highest voter turnout since 1969.

@JDVance 💀😂

@carlinpenner 😭 I chose the worst time to get orange pilled, I can’t unsee it now. But wish I had stayed in the blissful ignorance of tech + gold a little longer and just now started getting the bug. Hindsight’s 2020 and it’ll all work out over the long term but it’s been a painful YTD.

Are you ready for max pain?

@teslanaire21 @RealJimChanos He seemed to do pretty good this year shorting crypto treasury companies, not sure if he’s exited and taken profits.

“80% of ($TSLA’s) value will come from Optimus.”

@shwoopies @RealJimChanos Yup, it’s a brutal sport.

@willderaad @RealJimChanos Lessons Learned: Chanos lost all his money shorting Tesla

He’s setting external expectations to drive his teams forward at break neck speed. Most every other company does the opposite; set external quarterly expectations they’re confident they’ll hit, and then higher internal goals that aren’t shared with the board. The cost is short term volatility, but the long term results are outstanding. It’s also not a very repeatable strategy outside of a hand full of established founders. Over promising and under delivering isn’t generally a recipe for success.

Elon Musk - not a superforecaster

@robinhanson Call me old school but nothing about this seems natural. Also seem to remember something about random mutation, but alas it’s outside my lane.

That's natural selection, the process that built everything you rely on, and everything you love, including the concepts you use to love them with. You really want to be against that?

@obeyguy Find some purpose my man. Financial independence != retirement. You still got a lot of value to give to the world and you’ll be better for it.

Being retired at 28 is weird Other than dating, gym and hanging out with employed people on weekends What else do you do?

@unusual_whales One of these is not like the rest. Hardware moats >>> software moats. The people need a SpaceX ticker.

World's most valuable private companies, per MB: 1. OpenAI: $500 billion 2. SpaceX: $400 billion 3. ByteDance: $330 billion 4. Anthropic: $183 billion 5. xAI: $113 billion 6. Databricks: $100 billion 7. Stripe: $92 billion 8. Revolut: $75 billion 9. Shein: $66 billion

@ubiquitousnewt I feel the opposite is true, I find it harder to take mid-life folks serious who haven’t had kids…. Until you become a parent, you’ve only ever been a child.

You can run this thought experiment yourself. Close your eyes and picture the coolest thing you can imagine; the object of envy, the thing that says you’ve made it. Think of what makes people stare, what wins admiration, what marks arrival. It’s sleek. It’s desirable. It sets you apart. Do you picture a baby? Do you see yourself sleep-deprived, smelling of sour breast milk, holding a small wailing creature not yet grown into the world? I doubt it. Though the hormones are flowing, the arrival of a baby is the catalyst for status loss. The mother’s prestige capital, everything she worked so hard to build "to feel seen", begins to disintegrate like her mucus plug.

@Lormif1 @mattyglesias 🤷‍♂️ - appreciate the exchange, I do agree these are “regulations” just not meaningful (original argument, reiterated throughout)

@willderaad @mattyglesias That is not relevant to the original claim or the topic, you are attempting to change the argument completely, wile ignoring that these are regulations.

It’s not, the point I’m trying to get across is that you can take all the inputs to make a house, measure inflation over time and you’ll still find that housing prices have increased at dramatically higher rates. Meaningful change comes from de-regulation + de-monetizing housing anything else is just splitting hairs.

@willderaad @mattyglesias That is a fairly misleading response. First they are not uniformly commoditized goods. Secondly even if the costs of cabinets have changed more slowly compared to other inputs it does not make them not meaningful, especially if you double their costs.

@Lormif1 @mattyglesias That’s fair the hope was that folks could extrapolate. Now express cabinets/vanities as a percentage of overall build cost over time. So sure an increase may get passed to the consumer, but it’s all commoditized goods (i.e. not meaningful inputs to structural housing inflation)

@willderaad @mattyglesias When you say "this is a strawman" you must have been talking about your own post. You focused only on furniture, and not the other things like cabinets and vanities that can run well over 6% of the cost to build a home.