Adafruit is basically the best but their whole reside-in-NYC philosophy makes zero sense. The contention that they can hire better people in NYC holds no water because over 50% of what they pay their employees goes to 3 layers of governments with no meaningful benefit AND their people pay NYC rents.
They could literally halve their prices or double their pay if they moved to Jacksonville or similar. And their employees would get daily sunshine and own a house, instead of inhaling 100 year old dust in the subway everyday, commuting from their tiny 1BR apartment. It boggles the mind.
not everyone who works at adafruit works in our industry city, brooklyn factory. we've been doing remote before it was a thing, you can check out our shows or ask before assuming the worst, but whatevers, you made up your mind and want us to move to florida.
I would love to use Adafruit boards in my production, but I have to resort to custom Chinese PCB stuff to be competitive. I don't want anything, but taxes and CoL is basic business logic.
SparkFun is in Colorado, which isn't a low tax state but their cost of living is still lower. So all else equals, they are going to earn maybe 5-10% more profit on the sale of a commodity item like a Teensy. You have better products than they do, all else equals you could earn 25%+ more than them, by simply moving to greener pastures, whether that be NC, TN, NV, or FL.
>simply moving to greener pastures, whether that be NC, TN, NV, or FL
Yeah, but then they’d be in NC, TN, NV, or FL which, frankly, sounds absolutely miserable. They made the right choice by being in NYC.
Adafruit seems to be doing very well where they are. Why would they want to suffer in such junk states like those with worthless governments when they could continue to be where they are and are happy? They’d also be scraping the bottom of the barrel in those places for talent for the necessary in-person positions. The stars up mentioned sure are cheaper, and they still cost more than they are worth.
As a long time internet user and consumer of products from both Adafruit and Sparkfun, I don't think your participation in this thread is doing you any favors. Like others here, I advise de-engaging with this debacle for now.
Agreed. I will say that Renesas does have one thing going for them, being Japanese it has the lowest supply chain/geopolitical risk right now of anybody other than TI.
And the Microchip/Atmel low end stuff is so overpriced/outdated, that you're be better off stockpiling reels of the 8 cent Puya chips or going with the the TI MSPM0.
The Teensy is so 2020 anyways. You want to skate where the puck is going.
You will want boards of the Kendryte K230 or SpacemitK3 (best value RISC-V chips) or Puya PY32 (best cheapest MCU, takes 5V!), and a STM32P1 linux board for good measure.
"the control the US is able to exert over their companies"
You have that relationship inverted. The US gov't is a mere shell at this point, having outsourced all its core functions to private companies. There is no "medicare" budget or "defense" budget, there is only the capital allocated to and embezzled by the medical & military industrial complex.
And rest assured they do their own set of overt disappearances, notably the Boeing whistleblower and Epstein. There is an obvious playbook they follow in such cases, first they bribe, blackmail, or discredit - before being indiscreet.
Every monopoly that exists (and has ever existed) does so because of some combination of government granted monopoly rights. Mineral rights, patents, intellectual property, and all other regulatory barriers to entry.
There is no "natural" culmination into monopoly, monopoly is THE ANTITHETICAL END of the market. Where monopoly exists there is no longer a competitive market floating prices. The state itself in then in control of all production or in affiliation with a stagnant racket that controls all production. There is no market anymore, because the state (a monopoly of its own) has ceased to enforce a market. It is a choice for the state to make. The contrast between the choice between a market and monopoly is as stark as the contrast between South Korea vs North Korea, or Norway vs Venezuela.
This isn't it, he was never part of the class in the first place and he does not share its insular self-serving worldview.
He didn't go to Harvard, he went to Illinois. He built his own tech firm when taking that path wasn't even a thing for people to do, he did not inherit banking interests.
> he was never part of the class in the first place and he does not share its insular self-serving worldview
I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over his 4,800-square-foot Tuscan-style Atherton mansion and 13-structure Malibu compound [1].
I went to public university. I then made money. Where you come from doesn't determine who you end up as. But it can leave chips on your shoulders if you never revisit your own past critically. I genuinely have no problem with Andreessen’s lifestyle. But his conspiratorial worldview is in lockstep with the class.
It's ironic he talks about markets yet Netscape came from Mosaic, developed at a public university (Urbana-Champaign in Illinois) without market forces. HTML and HTTP developed at CERN, another public institution.
In the usual pattern, there's something mysterious and totally unexplainable happening where all the systems have broken down somewhere between when Person X was a beneficiary of the system and when Person X is expected to be a benefactor to the system.
Don't you find it strange that nearly every country in the world is pursuing the same currency objective at the same time. You know the one, I just don't want to spell it out to trigger the filter.
How can every supposedly independent CB pursue the exact same goal if they are not under the direction of one nexus?
Elections indeed swing, but do the outcomes matter if the key national politicians are operating under duress? Food for thought.
Today's story is just another day of, "Eastasia has always been at war with Oceania."
What's unconvincing is the vagueness of that statement. Lets' get more specific then.
Explain, for example, how both the Fed and ECB implemented Basel III. Why do these two "independent" organizations adhere so closely to the policy recommendations of some unelected NGO?
So you're telling me that a few stuffy bureaucrats earning a salary of few hundred thousand a year are the ones who decide what happens to the money of billions? Think again.
I'll give you a big hint, both the first and second presidents of the ECB previously were part of the same small and obscure NGO concerned with the history of banking.
> a few stuffy bureaucrats earning a salary of few hundred thousand a year are the ones who decide what happens to the money of billions
You’re describing the leaders of the G-10, their central banks’ governors and the world’s most powerful legislatures, who pass the Basel Accords into law, as “stuffy bureaucrats.”
If you’re looking for conspiracy theories, the FOMC is far less elected, and arguably far more powerful, than the committees passing non-binding regulations on capital requirements and leverage limits.
Didn't you see Marc Andreesen's tweet that " 'Conspiracy theory" is code for "will be obvious in a year.' "
You only need a few first principles to see absolutely everything, like seeing the matrix code:
1) The world society is entirely made up of individual people, 8B pairs of feet on the ground. Abstractions like 'the government' or "China" are red herrings.
2) Power is relational. Vito tells Tom what to do, and it behooves Tom to carefully follow orders.
3) There are no regulations and human laws in the state of nature, only in the social reality. You alone on Mars would be free to do whatever you wanted, but here on Earth you must file with the IRS, or else.
"They" are in a dilemma, they either go total global control or they lose control. And it's clear they are going with the former.
This is just one more law that makes no practical sense even if the intentions were noble. The WHO treaty, CBDCs, and digital IDs are all in the pipeline doing much the same.
With the real-time, global, instant communication network that is the internet, "their" ONLY hope to retain control at scale is to use AI/Software and essentially force everyone to obey a computer.
They will fail, that's the good news. Mostly because of entropy - that is to say, it is far cheaper and easier to disable a structure than build it up. A $2B data center can be disabled by a fire or a virus. A "too-big-to-fail-bank" can disappear overnight when customers close their accounts.
The reason those don't happen normally is because people are mostly good, happy, and trusting. Once the trust is gone, there is anger, and self-interest trumps good-intentions - that's when the entropy and "Black Swan" events really kick in. I recommend Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies for how such processes have repeatedly taken place throughout history.
The bad news is that they are going to try and force total control through anyways, so get ready. Nobody can predict how its going to unfold.
If anything, it shows it's possible for you to arbitrage this and in doing so help "smooth out the cycle."