Alex Danco

It's just hilarious that there's one dude who is the lightning rod for right-wing hatred. Like, it's one dude! It's so unclear what he does that is so menacing to the right: there's seemingly a fact free desperation to have some big bad rich guy on the left's side doing so much.

Because the right has 99% of the big bad evil dudes. Manhattan Institute is one of dozens of identical (ok not every pit has a king cobra FedSoc Leonard Leo) billionaire funded pits of world burning vipers. The E1 Global Elite class aka the barbarians (https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/22/the-michael-scott-theory-of-social-class/) are not the richest people by being liberal or nice or progressive. They're where they are because they are right wing people who (in right wing style) don't give half a fig about anyone else or much besides their bottom line and power.

I find it so beyond pathetic that George Soros is parroted around as some incredible omni-present mastermind of the left. But the right's favorite tactic is projection, is the classic "Accuse your enemy of what you are doing, as you are doing it" "Paint one's self as being the defender of the very thing you are aiming to destroy." Neither of these has any respect for reality or facts: they are what the right radically embraces: flooding the zone with shit. Not respecting reality. Sowing confusion. It's just so pathetic that such a mild mannered decent dude as Soros is the best cope ya'll could come up with for a boogeyman: quaking in your…

This is similar to a previous HN thread [1] about a post about paper called the "information theory of individuality" [2] that talked about life as the ability to "cohere information forward in time."

There is another related idea I stumbled on called the "constructal law," [3] which seems related.

Where I think they are related to the question of what life can be defined as is that you could express this constructal force in terms of that information theory idea by summarizing it with a slight extension - as a bounded system is living based on its ability to dynamically cohere information forward in time. The limits of this constructal theory will be defined in using information theory terms.

When we discover stuff in the universe and ask, "is/was this life?" there might be some criteria in these ideas in terms of asking, does this thing take feedback from its environment and produce coherent information? Or, is this thing a source of neg-entropy in its environment? If we look at life as a temporary, dynamic whorl of neg-entropy, it might yield some useful criteria. Half-baked, but measuring information-in, information-out could tell us whether something other than classical physics is processing it. It suggests we could figure out whether something was created by life as well, since the internet is not "alive," but it is evidence of life. Sorting things based on whether it is evidence of life, seems testable.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22825048
[2]…

> We pitched various "traditional" VCs. The overwhelming feedback we got was that nobody doubted our team, the product, or the model. The problem was that the returns weren't big enough.

Sahil @ Gumroad has talked about this in good detail. The VC idea that "yes, your business/idea is/will be profitable but you shouldn't waste your time making money when you could be working on changing the world"

The "changing the world" business will also hopefully be profitable and make money down the road but they are looking for outsized returns from a market disrupting unicorn.

--

Regarding the "new VCs" concept. Alex Danco and others have discussed this and the funding model ceases to be VC when it is low-risk, medium-reward.

It's possible that many areas of tech are maturing to a point where VC will no longer be the optimal funding model, outside of high innovation specialties. As the industry matures, there are many businesses that might provide stable returns and have a risk profile that is different from that of the unicorn VC-startup. These businesses might be better served by debt funding and a debt-based investment vehicle/product might attract more investors and allow for greater de-centralization of tech funding.

Linking Alex's blog post below instead of rambling in this comment.

https://alexdanco.com/2020/02/07/debt-is-coming/

Europe undervalues their engineers - and it seems like it's some sort of cultural thing that favors management. Their tax structure isn't great either, there's a reason zero billion dollar companies were founded in Europe (with the possible exception of Spotify). There's also the cultural pessimism and ambition being 'uncool' - there's a similar thing in Australia/New Zealand (at least I've heard from immigrant friends that moved from there). The 'tallest poppy gets chopped down' basically the opposite of the American idiom 'the squeaky wheel gets the grease'.

Even outside of Europe places like Toronto don't operate with the right investment mindset to actually create wealth: https://alexdanco.com/2021/01/11/why-the-canadian-tech-scene-doesnt-work/

American optimism and ambition, really valuing engineers, generous equity and culture are a big part of this. Companies outside of America have been losing talent because they've been fucking this up, I expect things to get worse for them as geography is even less of an issue for working for American companies than it already is.

Devon is basically making this point, but the title is confusing. It's not the US companies that will lose the monopoly on talent, it's the US geography. The US companies will increase their monopoly.

+1. I've also wondered about this for a long time, especially as someone who wears a lot of fleece products. This blog post (https://alexdanco.com/2019/12/17/ten-predictions-for-the-2020s/) describes it well. Quoting:

> At some point in the 2020s ... we're going to learn that some sort of chemical or microscopic thing that’s inside everything, all around us, actually has some horrible health effect we never knew about before. My pick for what it’ll be? Microplastics – particularly the microplastics inside clothing, like athleisure.

> I have no idea what kind of health hazard it’ll pose, but it’ll be one that takes a long time to develop, and where childhood exposure gets linked in a study to some awful condition that happens to you later. It could be that all these cheap, fast-fashion clothes are secretly off-gassing some volatile organic compound that we breathe in and gives us cancer later, or maybe it could be something like physical micro plastic particles getting on our hands, and then into our stomach when we eat, and then it gets linked to some digestive disorder or intolerance, or maybe it kills our gut bacteria, or I dunno.

Couldn't agree more. (The rest of his 10 Predictions for 2020 missed the most important one...)

> User profiles including bio, location, photo avatar, and chronological post listings

Please (and this goes to anyone trying to do similar work in the "social" space[1]): make sure that users have the ability to turn off post indexing if they desire (at least for people they haven't approved to "follow" them). The ability to pore over and leer at every other comment that any given person has made that day (let alone for the last N years) is _not_ something you are given in any ordinary "kitchen-table discussion". It's also not how old-style communication used to work on the Internet (e.g. mailing lists, before everything turned into the show business[2] of self-promotion). For some reason, though, "social" has come to be synonymous with the design trope of here's everything I've said, ordered reverse chronologically for pretty much anyone's perusal, regardless of their relationship with me. I'm convinced that this shift to actor-based indexing rather than the original concern for topic-based indexing has contributed greatly to the toxicity of online discussion.

1. this includes anyone doing anything in the "social coding" space

2. https://alexdanco.com/2020/10/08/making-is-show-business-now/