Lion ponderings

 Not surprising that AI models all discredit government subsidies as the reason for inflation.  What is surprising is that no-one questions AI anymore.  The invisible paw indeed.     That time of the month again.   Lions before the last rent increase burned $43k/year.  $2300/month was rent.  $200 was electricity delivery.  $1100 was the rest.  Healthcare was day job subsidized.  Merely getting a measly 5% from investments would be a dream.  It's been closer to 2%, for the last 2 years.  The 10% of internet fame is fiction.  No-one is 100% invested in the thing which is going up 10%.      Put it all in bonds & face a high chance of rates going to 0.  Put it all in stronk & you know.   ---------------------------------------------------------------------------  After many months of headlines about the government's reliance on selling short term bonds, the twist was made of...

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6ZLOKK1_Tw   Estrin was always super positive on the value of buying pianos.  He always printed a dire headline to get the engagement & then spun it into a positive for buyers.  This time, dire situation for the manufacturers, manetainers, & resale value, but a great situation for consumers.  The mane problem, this time around, is a short term decline in Chinese spending, as the world's largest consumer of acoustic pianos.  There are only so many times you can say it's a dire situation for manufacturers, manetainers & resale value but great for consumers before consumers have to be in denial. For lions to part with $80k & have a large climate controlled room, it would now be a hobby of manetaining the instrument more than playing it.  Lions would have to take a class in tuning & regulation, buy the tools, & just do that, like manetaining an old car. It all makes it easier to imagine splu...

  Top tier compensation makes you feel small.    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VwEOyAcvJM    He has to contend with stack ranking & commuting but he's paying $400 more rent for a lot more space in Union City.     No view, but  a kitchen.      His commute is from Union City to Menlo Park, probably a long combination of BARF & company shuttle. Worth $400k by age 24, making $20k/month, because he had exceptional academics, Magna Cum Laude at UC Riverside. He front loads all his 401k contributions like everyone else but has another $70k in roth 401k benefits.  https://www.linkedin.com/in/raymondwzeng/  https://www.youtube.com/@raymondwzeng/videos He joined face/meta/ai/whatever 1 year before that video & has survived every round of layoffs since then.  Outside work, he gets the hell away from programming & sews clothing.  His expectation of retirement by age 40 with over $6M resemble...

 Lions pondered how their current day job income is much less, relative to expenses, than it was when they 1st started working 26 years ago.  Rent, food, utilities have risen 250%.  Salary has risen by roughly 210%.  It's basically an entry level salary relative to inflation.  The absolute number is much higher & investment income briefly boosted the total but today, the stonk market is flat & interest rates are negative again.  The lion kingdom savings rate in terms of absolute buying power is actually lower than it was 26 years ago.   If anything, it shows just how good lions had it when they started.  It was no pittance by today's standards.  1 question is whether it reflects an industry decline or individual movement.  Getting significantly ahead of 26 years ago would entail making the $300k level that gootubers are quoting, but that includes stonk options & bonuses, assumes they don't leave, & it entails much hi...

 The gap in compensation between top tier & lion day jobs has gotten pretty extreme over the last 5 years.  Even entry level Goog positions get over $200k total.  They're getting high 200's to high 400's in total, including a 50% 401k match, 5 figures in stonk options every year.  Most of them are now crossing $1M in net worth by 8 years.  In another 8 years, there are going to be a lot of multimillionaires hunting for houses outside Calif*, but probably not rich enough to retire anymore. It's almost enough to try applying again & deal with commuting or paying more in rent.  It would be a final hurrah.  Doubt lions would ever get considered after 50, in today's economy.  They have also had more layoffs.  The lion day job has downsized through attrition only, so far. At least some of them are allowed to pick any office for their office mandate, so there's a chance lions could take the easier commute to SF than Mountain View. There's a ...

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkKprPIDxzM  A 2nd note after https://growmane.blogspot.com/2024/09/interesting-question-was-what-if.html   The more lions hear sounds like this evoking 80's nostalgia, the more they realize those warm 80's moments probably never happened but are fabrications from many times.  Dolphin delight actually came out in 2010.  It conjures a memory of a lazy overcast vacation day in winter or a lazy evening in summer.  An overcast day or purple evening which really happened in the 80's might be getting fused with a time lions chose to tune out in the recent past. The only times lions really tuned out in the 80's were when they had headaches in the evening.  It was a negative time. The memories of the real 80's have trended darker in reality.  The old man was off & on, constantly in a panic over the sky falling, never able to be the mentor that many gootubers described as essential in their careers.  It wasn't the...

The lion kingdom rapidly approaches its next acquisition & layoff, probably before June.  It looks like another unknown struggling startup buying an unknown struggling startup.  4 years is a long stint for a lion.  The longest was 7 years & might have been too long.  Pretty sure the stonk options don't vest until 5 years so that's going to be a loss if the lion kingdom can't stay alive for another year.  The last acquisition was in Jan 2010 & the lion got axed in May 2010 after 3 years.  It might be a standard practice to vest everyone at the time of acquisition & pay out all the stonk options in cash.  We weren't allowed to keep our shares & weren't awarded any new options.  They earned dividends over the next few years which only came to some $5000 before they were dissolved.  If we were allowed to keep our shares, the last parent company was $7 in mid 2009, briefly touched $14 in 2013 after they won an emmy in 2012 ...

  https://finance.yahoo.com/news/twitter-temporarily-closing-offices-musks-154348212.html https://finance.yahoo.com/news/1-elon-musk-asks-twitter-180123355.html "Anyone who can actually write software, please report to the 10th floor at 2pm today. Before doing so, please email me a bullet point summary of what your code commits have achieved in the past 6 months" "There will be short, technical interviews that allow me to better understand the Twitter tech stack," What a dumpster fire that has become. Guess no more starship testing until next year. Starship will eventually wipe the floor with everyone else, with or without Elon. The internet once bristled with horror stories of manufacturing men taking over software shops, the difference between producing the maximum number of widgets per hour & producing the minimum number of features per hour. Most of his success is from producing the maximum number of widgets per unit time. His 2 mane software victories...