January 13 2024
- Friedberg shooting hoops
- US and allies attack Houthis
- Fired rockets
- Conflict in the middle east escalating - will result in war with Iran 😟
- Big alliance - so Iran will be careful if they want to escalate
- China being affected or not - their ships are not being attacked, but their containers are on other ships that are being attacked
- This affects Europe and also China
- What is the need for the US to really get involved
- Wag the Dog reference - you start a war for the political benefits instead of necessity
- Are they deflecting from domestic struggles (non-Biden candidates doing well like Dean Phillips, some Republicans, etc)?
- American people might be exhausted by wars but media propagandizes for wars and rams it down people’s throats
- This might make the administration look good
- But they are so incompetent that they apparently couldn’t even find the Secretary of Defense - Lloyd Austin (having some health issues)
- Market data is mixed
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Inflation might be going up again?
- Car inflation is going up
- Typically lags other inflation indicators (rate increases get approved over a longer period of time)
- Car inflation is going up
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So many jobs being lost with crazy layoffs (Citigroup, Google, Amazon, Discord, Cloudflare, etc)
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Not sure how rate cuts will happen if oil prices go up
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Strategic Petroleum Reserve is a historically low levels
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Middle East crisis points of attack
- Israel-Gaza
- Hezbollah Rockets
- Syria and Iraq US bases getting hit
- Yemen crisis
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- Carta issue
- SAFE - Simple Agreement for Future Equity (invented by Y Combinator) - and others do it also now
- Carta grew well because of network effects
- Got into trust issues with controversy that was aired on social media
- Chamath started 8090 to build SaaS competitors cheaper
- Zoho is a good example of a small set of tools that work well together
- New open source protocol will come to standardize
- Private company founders are not happy about secondary markets for their shares - they don’t want random people on their cap table
- Carta exited the secondary markets business - wasn’t doing well compared to original SaaS business
- Slack exit was a very good deal
- 37Signals is also going after this
- Solve signal to noise problem
- Combine feed and targeted chat
- Sacks is starting Glue.ai
- Disney ruining Star Wars
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Ironically Star Wars itself is an oppressor-oppressed dynamic story
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Hollywood is imposing DEI standards for Oscar nominations (not sure how it will lead to good creative outcomes)
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Similar to how people were criticizing Dunkirk for not having diverse cast (it was based on history)
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Have to do an accounting of what parts of society skills matter the MOST
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How can you force diversity when its illegal to discriminate on the basis of race, gender, etc?
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If for example air crashes happen, lawsuits will target DEI policies
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DEI’s fundamental dishonesty - they will preach what they want to do which is to force proportional representation - when that results in discrimination, they will deny that that’s what they were doing
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DEI grift
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UMich has 500 people in DEI program spending $30M on payroll and benefits
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DEI movement is like a Motte and Bailey strategy
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Need to focus on how to help kids from the start
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Better schooling models
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Encourage family system
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